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Reviewed by:
  • Fair Em
  • Sarah Neville
Fair EmPresented by The Steam Industry at the Union Theatre, Southwark, UK. 01 8–02 9, 2013. Directed and adapted by Phil Willmott. Designed by Philip Lindley. Lighting by Jason Meininger. Music by Nick Morrell. Costumes by Anna Sorensen Sargent. With Rebecca Louise Bradley (Eliner), Robert Donald (Trotter/Citizen), David Ellis (Manville), Tom Gordon-Gill (Lubeck), Madeline Gould (Blanch), Caroline Haines (Em), James Horne (Goddard), Tom McCarron (Mountney), Alys Metcalf (Mariana), Nicholas Stafford (Rocillio), Jack Taylor (William the Conqueror), Robert Welling (Valingford), Gordon Winter (Denmark) and others.

Phil Willmott’s adaptation of Fair Em the Miller’s daughter of Manchester, with the love of William the Conqueror(STC 7675) offered a rare taste of the cheerful Elizabethan equivalent to the situation comedy. This opportunity would likely not have arisen if the play had not been marketable to modern audiences as “a comedy sometimes attributed to William Shakespeare.” The case for Fair Emas a piece of Shakespeare [End Page 535]Apocrypha is slight even by the standards of this notorious genre: the play was published anonymously around 1591 and went through two quarto editions, the second of which made it into a volume in the library of Charles I where it was bound with a handful of other plays under the heading “Shakespeare Vol. 1.” (The production’s promotional materials share in the widespread misapprehension that the royal in question was Charles II, but Peter Kirwan convincingly establishes otherwise in “The First Collected “Shakespeare Apocrypha,” Shakespeare Quarterly62.4 (2011): 594–601.) Fair Emcontinues director Willmott’s mandate of familiarizing theatergoers with the canonical peripheries—earlier productions at the Union of what Willmott calls “the dark and doubtful corners of the Bard’s back catalogue” include Double Falsehoodand The Troublesome Reign of King John.

The light comedy of Fair Emis considerably sunnier than Shakespeare’s early histories or later problem plays, but the work nonetheless touches on themes of disability, class and gender that will be of interest to Renaissance scholars and that suggest it is worthy of greater critical attention. (Willmott’s adaptation is published with Samuel French; an open access scholarly edition of Fair Emwill also soon be available as part of the Digital Renaissance Editions.) The play opens with Sir Thomas Goddard (played with dignified pomp by James Horne), the knightly father of the eponymous heroine, disguising himself as a miller to save both his daughter and his estate from the predations of their Norman invaders. Alas, Em’s base disguise serves to mask only her status and not her beauty, which quickly attracts the attentions of Norman lords Manville, Valingford and Mountney. The former, characterized in Willmott’s adaptation as Em’s “true love,” isn’t pleased with his beloved’s standing, bemoaning a familiar Elizabethan trope (“Bad world, where riches is esteemed . . . / In whose base eyes nought else is bountiful!”) before resolving that Em’s fidelity will serve a sufficient dowry on its own. Unfortunately, the fickle Manville’s security is short-lived: he overhears Valingford and Mountney’s plans to woo Em and promptly accuses his would-be lady of insufficient dissuasion. For audience members familiar with the easy defamations of Hermione and Desdemona, Em’s plucky response suggests that we are in for a very different sort of play: “May not a maid look upon a man / Without suspicious judgment of the world?” When Manville leaves in a rage (“If sight do move offense, it is the better not to see”), Em resolves to feign deafness and blindness to ward off her two extra suitors. Em’s performance succeeds in repelling Mountney but unluckily also manages to turn off Manville, leaving only the determined Valingford to seek [End Page 536]her hand. As the titular heroine, Caroline Haines offered a clever and compelling Em whose feigned disabilities managed to mask her genuine feelings for her unworthy lover.

In a parallel plot, William the Conqueror, played with appropriately ham-fisted bluster by a boisterous Jack Taylor, is struck by a likeness, carried on a follower’s shield, of Princess Blanch of Denmark. After the Conqueror vows to seek her hand, the follower, the...

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