Artemisia Gentileschi Speaks to the Twenty-First Century
14. Writing, Acting, and the Notion of Truth in Biofiction About Early
Modern Women Authors
James Fitzmaurice
Abstract
This essay explores the notion of truth in biofictional accounts of early modern women authors as that notion applies to dialogue (what is “on the nose” and what not) and to plot as well as character development (what is
“jumping the shark” and what not). The essay first focuses on a series of professional solo performances of Love Arm’d written by Karen Eterovich about the seventeenth-century author Aphra Behn. It then goes on to consider in the same way a filmed student performance of my play that imagines a meeting of Margaret Cavendish and Virginia Woolf, Margaret Cavendish, Virginia Woolf, and the Cypriot Goddess Natura.
Keywords: Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, early modern women, biofiction, truth.
The assertion is often made that a particular stage play or film is character-ized by truthfulness or is lacking therein. So, too, related assertions about honesty and authenticity, but I will focus on truth within the context of writing and acting. Glowing claims of truth found in publicity blurbs, of course, are generally to be taken with a grain of salt, but in other circum-stances and, particularly where biofiction is concerned, a look at the topic can be useful. Such is very much the case when the application is to early modern women authors.
It is quite reasonable to say that dialogue either “rings true” or does not.
The phrase in the TV and film industries for success is “on the nose.” Can we imagine the poet Veronica Franco actually saying the words spoken
Fitzmaurice, J., N.J. Miller, S.J. Steen (eds.), Authorizing Early Modern European Women. From Biography to Biofiction. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022
doi 10.5117/9789463727143_ch14
by Catherine McCormack in the 1998 film Dangerous Beauty? If so, then a feeling of truthfulness is achieved. Otherwise, we may have the impres-sion that the character is saying something a little too far away from our understanding of our own world or our sense of sixteenth-century Italy.
Accusations of outright dishonesty can involve elements of plot or character that are known by the viewer to be either distorted or omitted. Distortion is a consideration when a screenwriter hopes to attract the viewer’s attention with, say, with an element of plot or character that is highly unlikely. In TV and film such an attempt is referred to as “jumping the shark.”
All of this said, it seems to me that it is sometimes good to produce dialogue that is a little off – that is not quite on the nose – or to jump the shark in this or that way. A perfectly “truthful” biographical drama or screenplay may not be as desirable as one that is just a bit slant. Scripts and performances are, after all, indebted to the imagination.
I
A great many plays written by early modern women have been staged in the last 25 or 30 years, but there have been only a few plays and screenplays in which the lives of these women figure prominently. An interesting exception to what seems a general rule is the solo-performed Love Arm’d, which focuses on the relationship between the writer Aphra Behn and a bisexual lawyer named John Hoyle. Solo shows can be long-running and economically robust, as with Hal Holbrook’s Mark Twain Tonight, which continued for some 2,000 performances. Solo performance is not necessarily a minor genre.
I will closely examine Karen Eterovich’s solo performance in Love Arm’d for several reasons. First, I am familiar with Aphra Behn’s life and use of language. Second, I am fortunate in that Eterovich, who wrote, acted in, and was producer for the play, has allowed me access to her script and given me a large amount of detail about its various performances. Finally, I taught much of the material that Eterovich includes in her show and know what my own audience of students appreciated and what worked less well for them.
My students not only discussed Behn’s letters but read them aloud. It was clear what rang true for the classes, and I listened as the students wondered if parts of certain of Behn’s letters to Hoyle involved plot manipulation.
We also asked, “Were these letters strictly private or composed with the thought that they would find their way into print?” If the letters were intended to be read by the general public, then, might it be that Behn was asking her readers to understand them as a sort of auto-biofiction? As
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regards the plot lines of some letters, my students were effectively asking if Behn was guilty of jumping the shark in a bad way. But, perhaps, Behn was merely engaging in a comic routine by being intentionally outlandish.
Eterovich structures her play, which I viewed in a video recording, as a one-sided dialogue between Aphra Behn, who speaks, and John Hoyle, who is imagined to be listening off-stage. As the play begins, Behn, wrapped in a sheet, emerges onto the stage having just finished making love with Hoyle.
It is a dramatic opening visually, and Eterovich hurls many of her lines at the
Figure 14.1. karen Eterovich as Aphra Behn in Love Arm’d (2002). photo by rob Ferguson. By kind permission of karen Eterovich.
imagined Hoyle, cursing him in a way that my students found wonderfully funny in reading the letters. Eterovich’s technique is “true” in the sense that her viewers could imagine a person wanting to deliver such a curse, even if it never happened. Eterovich writes a portion of the curse as follows:
You [Hoyle] will never, from this night forward, be able to get me or my life out of your thoughts. Thou haunt’st my inconvenient hours and I shall haunt you! May your women and your many men, be all ugly, ill-natured, ill-dressed, and unconversable and may every moment of your time be taken up with thoughts of me!
In my view, Behn wrote fully aware that her letter might find its way into print and, indeed, she easily could have sold or tried to have sold the set of eight letters among which this one is found to a printer of scandalous material, a printer of the sort later made famous by Edmund Curll. The letters were printed posthumously in 1696 in Histories and Novels of the Late Ingenious Mrs Behn, and some doubt has been cast on their attribution, but my sense of Behn as a writer is that these letters are very much in her style and carry her tone. If they are fakes, then whoever composed them knew how to evoke Behn as a writer. They also ring true in the context of the time, for they are witty and arch in the manner of a Restoration comedy.
Eterovich does not simply cut and paste from the letters, however. Rather, she makes a point of adding in the phrase “your many men” so as to point up John Hoyle’s bisexuality. Her approach rings true, I would say, “is on the nose” as biofiction. The added phrase fits nicely with well-known poems of the time, especially Rochester’s “Song: Love a Woman,” which concludes with the lines, “There’s a sweet, soft Page of mine, / Do’s the Trick worth Forty Wenches.” At the same time, Eterovich leaves out of the curse “ill-fashioned”
along with “for your greater disappointment,” probably just to shorten the speech in which it is contained, thus making it easier to understand for her modern audiences.
When creating dialogue in the style of the seventeenth century, as Eterovich has done, it is necessary to give the flavor of and to not burden the listener unduly with period grammar and diction. Sentences of the time were often long and difficult, so much so that most students these days need to work to get through a play by Behn. I edited Behn’s comedy The Rover, modernizing spelling and punctuation so as to reduce strain on an upper division student reader, but the writing style remained difficult.
The task for Eterovich, however, was more difficult as she needed to keep her audience with her: they could not go back and reread a passage.
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Eterovich reports that Love Arm’d went down well with the midshipmen at the Naval Academy, though she suggests that that they were perhaps mostly impressed with her costume and delivery. Her performance at the Western Society for Eighteenth Century Studies brought a greater appreciation by an audience for the connection between the life of Behn and its depiction in biofiction.
II
In the autumn of 2016, I wrote Margaret Cavendish, Virginia Woolf, and the Cypriot Goddess Natura. In the story line of this play, there is an imaginary meeting between Margaret Cavendish and Virginia Woolf, a pair of authors whose serio-comic exchange of words is facilitated by time travel. In The Common Reader and Room of One’s Own, Woolf pronounced on the subject of Cavendish in quips that have been much quoted to demonstrate a sort of bemused contempt. My hope was to surprise modern audiences by suggesting, instead, a friendly rivalry between the two women across time. I found a director among lecturers in Performance at Sheffield Hallam University and obtained travel funding to stage the play in Cyprus using student actors from Hallam and the University of Sheffield. In Nicosia in the spring of 2017, these students put on the show for an audience made up of delegates to the Othello’s Island Conference and local CVAR Museum supporters. The conference contains the Early Modern Women Writers Colloquium, so there was a portion of the audience well acquainted with what from Woolf was in print about Cavendish. Quite coincidentally, I followed the same model used by Eterovich in staging a play at an academic meeting and was rewarded, as was she, with a sympathetic audience.
Three student actors stood out in the dress rehearsal, which was filmed and is available gratis on Vimeo. Two of the three actors jumped the shark, one in choice of accent and the other in a visual routine. The third actor was absolutely “on the nose” in his delivery of lines. The actor who took the part of Virginia Woolf presented me with a problem of vocal interpretation. In the audition, she was far ahead of her many competitors in having thoroughly read the script. She knew how she wanted to present the part and had chosen a passage to read aloud. She had decided that Woolf was to be a posh, grand literary lady. I had no real knowledge of the dialect that Woolf used, but imagined that, given her parents, Woolf would be more upper-middle class in accent, perhaps in an Oxbridge sort of way.
Did I attempt to guide the actor towards what I thought was most accurate for accent? No. I chose to let her follow her own inclinations, and jump the shark in her character. My reasons were three in number. First, she had the posh accent down very well and we did not have much time to change it.
Second, inaccurate as it might have been, it increased the self-importance in the character, which is what I wanted. Third, the director, who was not at this particular audition, let the dialect choice stand. Thus the accent stayed posh and the shark was jumped, in the process producing a truth for biofiction, if not for biography. Fortunately, our costume for Woolf fit exactly with the posh accent, as the dress was slinky and blue in a flapper style and was accompanied by a crushed blue hat. The show’s Woolf could have walked into Downton Abbey as mistress of the house. Finally, this student actor also took the part of a waitress in a cafe in which the time travel took place, a waitress who was not the least bit posh. The contrast was dramatically striking: sullen, pouty girl becomes grand literary lady.
Although we were short of male actors and a female was drafted in to play John Evelyn, our one male played Constantijn Huygens exactly as I wished, which was as a louche older man. Huygens was indeed a ladies’
man in real life, and someone (either actor or director) decided to change a brief phrase, “Thank you,” into the Greek word “Parakalo.” Many of the CVAR Museum supporters were Greek Cypriots or knew Greek sufficiently to be surprised. The actor was absolutely on the nose in being thoroughly louche as he delivered the word. He contributed to the truth of the biofiction.
The third student actor jumped the shark in a way that was completely visual and much in keeping with the episode in the TV sit-com Happy Days, from which the term derives its name: a water-skiing Fonzie literally jumps a shark in a scene without much connection to the plot of the episode. In the play, the actor portraying Cavendish’s waiting lady, Elizabeth Chaplain, jumped the shark in what was a essentially a visual joke. Chaplain entered while Cavendish was describing the beauty of young ice-skaters on a frozen canal in Antwerp. It is a touching winter scene worthy of Brueghel. The actor asked if she could cross the stage on her toes using ballet toe shoes, literally gliding as if she were on ice. The director and I agreed that the effect would be startling to good effect. Such was the case when the shark was jumped, perhaps with more connection to the plot than was true with Fonzie.
Dangerous Beauty, the film on the life of the poet Veronica Franco men-tioned earlier in this chapter, was costly to make and a financial failure.
Only a few other big-budget films about the lives of early modern women writers have been produced, perhaps because the topic does not draw large paying audiences. Be that as it may, it is clear that solo performance and
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student productions do not require large financial commitments. And so, writers and actors are freer to explore the notion of truth in biofiction without the worries that accompany the enormous productions of, say, West End theater and Hollywood film.
Works Cited
Behn, Aphra. Histories and Novels of the Late Ingenious Mrs Behn. London: Printed for S. Briscoe, 1696.
Dangerous Beauty. A film directed by Marshall Herskovitz and based on the biography The Honest Courtesan by Margaret Rosenthal. Produced by Regency Enterprises and Bedford Falls Production Company, 1998.
Eterovich, Karen. Love Arm’d: Aphra Behn and Her Pen. Love Arm’d Productions.
Copyright 1997 and 2000.
Fitzmaurice, James. Margaret Cavendish, Virginia Woolf, and the Cypriot Goddess Natura. Performed at the CVAR Museum in Nicosia, Cyprus, on 7 April 2017.
Woolf, Virginia. The Common Reader. London: Hogarth. 1925.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: Hogarth. 1929.
Figure 14.2. Emilie philpott Jumping the shark at the dress rehearsal of Cavendish, Woolf, and the Cypriot Goddess Natura. nicosia, cyprus, 7 April 2017. photo credit / permission: James Fitzmaurice.
About the Author
James Fitzmaurice is emeritus professor of English at Northern Arizona University and honorary research fellow at the University of Sheffield. He has published a great deal on Margaret Cavendish and his screenplays have been selected for or won prizes at many film festivals.