serjeant musgrave's dance

There is no definitive version of the Wooing Ceremony, just as there is no standard Sword Play or Hero Combat; what we have is simply a number of individual plays which, although they often vary considerably, can be recognized as constituting a distinctive group. Serjeant Musgrave demands absolute loyalty from his fellow soldiers. During the recruiting party, everyone but Musgrave sings and dances. Unlike the soldiers, Annie gets a chance to excise Hicks’ ghost during the rally at the end of the play. In an apparently casual remark in the Introduction to the play, Arden himself has hinted at this significance of his Serjeant: “he could well have served under Cromwell” is his concluding comment on Musgrave. In Arden's introductory note to the text, he describes it as "a realistic, but not a naturalistic" play. When Musgrave refuses, this marks a shift in their relationship. He confides to Annie the real reason they are in town and tries to convince her to run away with him. Many critics maintain that Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance promotes pacifism. PLOT SUMMARY From its first production, Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance has been controversial. One of the moral lessons of Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance is that loyalty can be abused and should have its limits. . One of the colliers attacks the Constable. I know words, and I know deeds, and I know how to be strong. You will not stand between them and their strength! This Macduff does for Scotland....”. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. There had been a trend towards nationalization of major industries, like printing, that had begun in the immediate postwar period. They believe that. Their rule, Arden emphasizes, can be only sterile, divisive, and destructive. Othello (1604) has often bee…, GEORGE BERNARD SHAW 1914 Focus on the impact of labor strikes. Friedman-Abeles (Firm) More Details Cite This Item Image ID 5025011. Sparky begs Annie to come to bed with him that night. The soldiers beg Musgrave to change the plan because of Sparky’s death, but he will not. The situation is the same; Brutus has explained that Caesar’s ambition constituted a threat to the citizens’ liberties and that death was the only solution; so Musgrave has tried to convince the colliers that British ambition, greed and callousness were the causes of the rebellion in the distant protectorate and consequently that the Mayor, the Parson and the Constable are guilty of Billy’s death as well as of the natives’ sufferings at the hands of Her Majesty’s soldiers; on both occasions the orator at first carries the conviction of his listeners (though a modern audience demands nuances and Arden’s earnest collier, Walsh, provides the necessary dissenting voice). If Musgrave and Hurst had begun firing, many of those gathered would have fought them. Annie is apprehensive of the soldier’s presence. Both the pub and the marketplace are places where different kinds of people come together, from town officials to common colliers. Actually the words His blood’s on my tongue spring from the same rhetorical trick of introducing the blood and wounds as orators and the speaker as a mere mouthpiece for a dead friend; though Antony’s cultivated mind may resort to more elaborate language and prompt the revolt that the forlorn barmaid cannot even wish for, consciously or unconsciously: there exists a great similarity in the technique of the two characters as well as in the end result. Once this has been done, it also becomes apparent that Arden has taken the liberty of giving the Mummers’ Play a personal but highly significant twist which I believe to be central to the overall message of the play. The rally at the marketplace utterly fails to prove their point. One of the problems with the play is that Arden does not take sides; he merely presents the humanity of a series of contradictory points of view on the same issue. Between the 1960s and 1980s, Arden and his play were closely scrutinized by scholars. Pacifism loses in Musgrave, and while the audience could walk away believing that pacifism should triumph, Arden does not do much to give hope that it will. 4 Apr. Obsessed with the brutality and inhumanity of a colonial war, Musgrave sees himself as an instrument of God sent to punish sinners. Source: Fernand Lagarde, “Shakespearian Reminiscences in Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance,” in Cahiers Elisabethains, Vol. He is the leader of the group of four soldiers; it is his plan they are implementing. Attercliffe is repulsed by Musgrave’s words—this had not been part of the original plan. He was her lover and the father of her baby. To fund his plan, Musgrave stole money from the army. CRITICAL OVERVIEW Motivated by the self-interest symbolized by the Bargee, workers and managers meet in conflict, so that “war” is presented as a basic fact of the human condition. This amounts to a violation of the pattern of the Wooing Ceremony and, indeed, of the Mummers’ Play as a whole. For the balletic quality of the play is lost here in a debate during which the audience cannot see the woods for the trees. At the end of the play, the ghost still haunts Musgrave and Attercliffe. If all these similitudes and analogies are accepted, Annie’s ‘song-ballad’ to describe Musgrave’s parentage: The North Wind in a pair of millstonesWas your father and your motherThey got you in a cold grinding (SMD, 1.3.32). The inclusion of the Recruiting Sergeant in the Wooing Ceremony in the first place is a good illustration of that capacity for adaptation and expansion which has been one of the conditions for the survival of the Mummers’ Play into the present century, and Arden has shrewdly exploited this capacity by turning his Recruiting Sergeant into a member of Cromwell’s New Model Army. Serjeant Musgrave is a lifetime soldier, a man who believes in strict adherence to the rule book. The reasons for this collapse are brought into focus by the inversions of the traditional pattern. She tells him about Hicks and their baby. The women, of course, indict the tragic domestic results of war and poverty. As Arden explains, black is for death and the coal mines. You can wipe “em as often as you want on a bit o” yellow hair, but it still comes blood the next time so why bother, he’d say (SMD, II.3.67), which must remind everyone of Lady Macbeth’s obsession with the damned spot on her hand (Macbeth, V. 1.34), rather than of Macbeth’s horror earlier in the play (Macbeth, II. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, British society was in transition. Mrs. Hitchcock describes Hicks as this: “Not what you’d call a bad young feller, you know—but he weren’t no good either.” Who is to say he would not have had problems if he had stayed at home—perhaps he would have died in a colliers’ strike. . As Arden points out in his introduction to the Evergreen edition of the play, “The Bargee is something of a grotesque, a hunchback. Characters. In the case of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the combination of two sections from the medieval Cycle Plays provides a distinctive form for the tragedy and adds a significant moral dimension to the story of the Scottish usurper. Sparky dies the moment he considers disloyalty. Moreover, during their abortive attempt to murder the men in office, the conspirators and liberators, Musgrave and Hurst, quarrel, not unlike Brutus and Cassius after Caesar’s death, because they disagree on their deeper motives. (April 4, 2021). It is a sort of Victorian clock-tower-cum-lamppost-cum-market-cross, and stands on a raised plinth. The Army is the basis of the power of the local magistrates. The week from the 5th to 9th November I took part in the next… In the marketplace, a small crowd gathers to hear the speeches. Arden implies that wars are continuous, though not always with men in bright uniforms or on foreign soil. Musgrave tells Annie to leave his men alone. Violence is one of the only ways they can express themselves. At the centre of the action in the Mummers’ Play is a symbolic killing followed by a revival. This device simply restates in symbolic dramatic terms Musgrave’s point that “their riots and our war are the same one corruption.” And it makes clear that Musgrave’s motive is to work the guilt for the slaughter of particular people back to the individual at home. Michael Billington @billicritic. The fate of the Fool in Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance illustrates the joint consequences of all that for which the Serjeant and the local magistrates stand. Ian McKellen in the role of Private Sparky. the Renaissance. Photographs. . Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance is set in a northern British mining town in 1880, but it draws from several contemporary sources for inspiration. Arden, John. Serjeant Musgrave's Dance, An Un-historical Parable [1] is a play by English playwright John Arden, written in 1959 and premiered at the Royal Court Theatre on October 22 of that year. "Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance They included his first truly successful play, Armstrong’s Last Goodnight (1964), as well as The Hero Rises Up: A Romantic Melodrama (1969), and The Island of the Might (1972). There is a threefold wooing, with the Fool being the final and successful suitor, and as in the Wooing Ceremony, the Fool is killed after an exchange of challenges. You can’t cure the pox by further whoring. A bayonet is a raven’s beak. Yet no one realizes how mentally ill he is until he reveals his true plan: killing twenty-five townspeople. More violence seems to be his answer for everything. Musgrave’s treatment of the Lady in the Mummers’ Play adds up to a deliberate suppression of the ancient fertility ritual with its inherent power of revitalizing the community. There can be no pacifists in this war, because both sides have too much to lose. ." Though Eden’s taint seems in the background of the apple orchard song at the end of the play, Arden’s intention is unclear. He’s dead. Though Hurst follows most of Musgrave’s orders, he is full of doubt about their mission. Sparky is the youngest and most volatile of the soldiers. Musgrave has led the soldiers to this coal-mining town in order to show the citizens how war has negatively impacted one of their own citizens—Billy Hicks. Written by John Arden . Sergeant Musgrave's Dance Summary. Significantly, a number of Wooing Ceremonies involve a Recruiting Sergeant as a principal figure. BBC One London, 16 November 1965 14.05. In the following essay, Lagarde discusses similarities between Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance and various plays by Shakespeare, notably Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet. Read 8 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. Wickham begins his analysis with a detailed examination of the familiar Porter scene, often so strangely out of place to a modern audience, but to the Elizabethan theatre-goer, a well-nigh unmistakable reference to the Harrowing of Hell. • Musgrave and his men leave to explore the town. Häftad, 1982. It seems that pacifism does not get one very far. The humour of the songs, as well as that of Sparky and the Bargee, extends the scope of the play and cushions its action. Their leader, Serjeant Musgrave, plans to hold the town at gunpoint … Act I opens on a North England wharf in 1880. Set against a background of nineteenth-century imperialist conflict, Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance is acknowledged as one of the most important works to explore the futility of ever-escalating revenge cycles and the dehumanisation of war. Sean Holmes directs this excellent production from the Oxford Stage Company which is on at Greenwich Theatre and then on tour nationally. The Mummers’ Play is, by definition, an expression of the life of the community. Musgrave and his men may be rebellious deserters, but nevertheless it is Army men who finally return the community to law and order. Ghosts. The ghost of Billy Hicks haunts many of the characters of Serjeant Musgrave's Dance. . Winter. I mean, d” you tramp around the streets drumming, or set on your fannies in a pub—or what?” The image of the men tramping around the streets drumming clearly conjures up the Mummers’ Play. When Musgrave prays, “keep my mind clear so I can weigh Judgement against the Mercy and Judgement against the Blood, and make this Dance as terrible as You have put it into my brain,” the Bargee undercuts the Serjeant’s petition as he “parodies his attitude behind his back” and at the end “gives a sanctimonious smirk and breathes ‘Amen’.”. What starts as a comic send-up of the stern Serjeant and his men ends as a condensed and almost over-explicit illustration of what Arden regards as the inevitable consequences of the presence of an army: the Bargee’s mock soldiers pick a quarrel among themselves and start fighting each other. by the which your love [i.e. Toward the end of the play, Serjeant Musgrave exclaims "There used to be my duty: now there's a disease". Photographer. John Arden, Columbia University Press, 1973,48 p. A critical overview of Arden’s work, including Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance. Through his use of the folk songs and the choric function of Annie and Mrs. Hitchcock, Arden makes clear that the women condemn violence as a means of social protest or political change. 1965 am Royal Court Theatre und 1981 am National Theatre in London wieder aufgeführt. Serjeant Musgrave's Dance. A cross-grained poetry emerges from his work. Although Musgrave has deserted the British Army, he still adheres to some of its values. Later, the Bargee’s ballad, Hark hark the drums do bark (SMD, III. In Arden's introductory note to the text, he describes it as "a realistic, but not a naturalistic" play. Page, Malcolm. In the climactic scene of Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance, the audience becomes part of the drama. Fighting Fire with Fire: Unavoidable Violence in John Arden’s Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance John Arden is one of the pioneers of epic theatre in England. To that end, they try to identify troublemakers for the soldiers to recruit. Musgrave assures them that they are not. . Dragoons kill Hurst. 24 September 1963 - 5 October 1963 . Though Arden is certainly criticizing the methods of British imperialism, the colour imagery of the play generates meaning beyond simple indictment of war in general or the British colonial Raj in particular. As Attercliffe hysterically cries to him in Act Two, scene one, “We’ve come to stop it, not to start it. Set against a background of nineteenth-century imperialist conflict, Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance is acknowledged as one of the most important works to explore the futility of ever-escalating revenge cycles and the dehumanisation of war. . “Journey Into a North Wind,” in Saturday Review, March 26, 1966, p. 45. The Christian Soldiers, confused and launched on a vendetta to clear mind and conscience, have ended lost in a trackless wood. Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. A central sequence of the ritual is thus presented as taking place by mistake, an impression which is reinforced by Musgrave’s reaction: “Desertion. Serjeant Musgrave's dance. The final hecatomb in Shakespeare’s tragedy is ushered in by the apparition of Lady Macbeth sleepwalking in her nightgown; Mrs Hitchcock, in her nightgown also, heralds the many deaths, the first of which, that of Sparky, is concomitant with her visit; no matter if it is the woman who is wide awake and the man a near somnambulist here, the resemblance forces itself upon the minds of the audience, all the more easily as Arden stresses, thanks to the two distinct acting areas, downstage and upstage, the incongruity of the bar-owner’s proffered comfort for the serjeant’s metaphysical anxiety, the two characters living then on as surely different planes as Lady Macbeth and her husband in the last act of the tragedy—Musgrave (now shouting in his sleep) (SMD, II.3.70) being reminiscent of the night-shriek in Dunsinane. No one is sure about Musgrave’s message except Annie, who reveals the circumstances of Sparky’s death. While Macbeth is a prey to his fears and hallucinations, the two grooms of the chamber snore away the time, exactly as Attercliffe and Hurst snore during the greatest part of Musgrave’s nerve-racking nightmares; for like Macbeth the serjeant hath murdered sleep, the innocent sleep. On October 26, 1930, Arden was born in Barnsley, Yorkshire, England. The Constable is the chief law enforcer in the town. I know it is Your Logic, and You will provide-”. Much of the action takes place in a public house (pub) in a small mining town torn apart because of a miner’s strike. With the Constable being a feeble and helpless man, the implicit comparison would seem to add to the disrespectful irony of the Bargee’s words, but it can also be taken as a more direct indication of the true power which the Constable is ultimately seen to represent. Hunt sees Arden’s work as belonging, not to the naturalistic theatre of illusion, but to a broader and more ancient tradition which he exemplifies with theatre as different as British pantomime and the dramas of Shakespeare and Brecht. The soldiers assume that the rally will be a peaceful display of Hicks’s skeleton and an explanation of the horrors of army life—but Musgrave has other ideas. BBC One London, 9 November 1965 14.05. Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance, no doubt, may be considered first and foremost as a twentieth century reworking of The Recruiting Officer, inspired or influenced by Brecht’s vision of Farquhar’s comedy, the 1955 Berlin repertoire production of Pauken und Trompeten, with a few touches from Brecht’s own Mutter Courage. Believing they represent the same man be my duty: now there 's a ''! Satisfied... ”, many of the soldier ’ s birth realistic drama set in a small town! To take twenty-five innocent lives as revenge for Hicks ’ s strike pick serjeant musgrave's dance! 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