Tom Tyler and his Wife dir. by Emma Whipday (review)

The earliest surviving printed copy of Tom Tyler and His Wifedates from 1661 and frames the play as an historical curiosity from early Elizabethan England: "An excellent old play … Printed and Acted about a hundred Years ago." Thanks to Dana Kovarik, Emma Whipday, and the UCL Centre for Early Modern Exchanges, that stage history has been reset to the twenty-first century. This UCL event was preceded by introductory talks by Whipday and Kovarik and was invested, like the quarto, in Tom Tyler's historicity; it was equally a demonstration of the text's dramatic qualities. Whipday's staged reading proved, to this spectator at least, how an apparently obscure Tudor interlude could be fast-paced, funny, and tonally complex when performed. Tom Tylerannounces itself as a "play set out by pretty boys," filled with "merry sport" and "toys." This event captured the merriness of the text and the richness of the wider performance experience, but also drew out the tonal dissonance and uncomfortable scenes of violence and abuse that are at the center of Tom Tyler's domestic disharmony.

The play, which probably dates to around 1560–61, is a short hybrid-morality-cum-interlude in which Tom Tyler (Freyja Cox-Jensen) is scolded and beaten by his wife, Strife (Elspeth North). Seeking to take control of his marriage, Tom Tyler talks to his friend and not-quite-namesake Tom Taylor (Oscar Cox-Jensen). Taylor proceeds to disguise himself as Tyler and physically assault and so "tame" Strife. In the ensuing action, Strife emerges wounded and emotionally distressed; when she declares that she could not possibly love her husband ever again, Tom Tyler is prompted to admit it was not he who beat her but his friend in disguise. Indignantly, Strife returns to scolding Tom and resumes her violent behavior. The public and domestic scenes that form the play are set in motion by the allegorical figures of Desire (Alexander Samson) and Destiny (Kovarik); the abstract and the concrete intersect in the final moments with the calm intervention of Patience (Whipday).

Introductions by Whipday and Kovarik described the play's context, date, and its patchy afterlife (which includes a mention in John Fletcher's The Tamer Tamed, first performed in 1611 and published in 1647). Whipday also explained the process behind the staged reading: it was conducted in the style of a Read Not Dead performance (staged readings of rarely performed plays that are run at Shakespeare's Globe), in which the actors have only one day to rehearse and then perform script-in-hand. These actors had the added difficulty of working from cue-scripts (in which the actors are given only their own lines with a few words from their "cue" line). Part of Whipday's intention was to get away from a Stanislavskian approach to early modern roles and explore the nature of character in the early Elizabethan period, an issue especially pertinent to a play in which conventional allegorical characters merge with figures from contemporary life—personified abstractions appearing alongside exemplary human characters.

The wider event itself was in many respects a part of the performance—a move to get closer, in a vaguely modern sense, to the nature of Tudor "interluding." Walking through the door at Nunn Hall, attendees were greeted with a generous array of drinks and snacks (including mead), designed to recreate the conviviality surrounding hall or house performances of such interludes in Elizabethan England. Similarly, the lights remained on throughout, again staying true to the universal lighting of early performance but also adding to the relaxed atmosphere and to a sense of fun and recreation that scholarly readings of early plays do not always provide.

The "tavern" vibe in the room complemented Tom Tyler's alehouse atmosphere and its intersection of social engagement, public space, and private quarrels. Much of the women's discussion in the play surrounds activities in the alehouse, which unfolded here in comic vignettes that moved...