Home Artists Corner Framed?

Anne Hathaway married William Shakespeare at 26. Most people married at 11 or 12. Anne Hathaway's home had 3 bedrooms, no bathroom, a kitchen and a small parlor used only for company. Parents shared a bedroom. Anne shared a queen sized bed with 2 sisters and 6 servant girls, sleeping cross-wise on the bed. 6 brothers and 30 field workers shared the other bedroom, with no bed. They slept in their blankets on the floor. With no indoor heat the extra bodies kept them warm.

People were small. Men were 5'6", women 4'8". 27 people lived in the house. Most people married in June. They took their yearly bath in May in a big tub of hot water. They smell by June, so brides carried bouquets. The man of the house got the nice clean water. Next were other sons and men, then women, children, babies. By then the water was pretty thick. Throw babies out with bath water so dirty you could lose someone in it.

Houses had thatched roofs. Thick straw piled high, no wood underneath, the only warm place for small animals. Dogs, cats and other small animals, mice, rats, bugs, all lived in the roof. When it rained it was slippery. Animals slipped and fell off the roof, raining cats and dogs. People had to clean up things falling in the house. Bugs and animal droppings messed up nice clean beds. Posts with sheets hung over the top prevented it. Thus 4 poster canopied beds.

Most floors were dirt - "dirt poor". Wealthy had slate floors, slippery wet in winter STONE COLD so cold in winter bare skin touching them stuck. Only kitchens were heated in winter. People spread thresh on slate floors for warmth and traction. All winter they added and added it until opening the door it slipped out. A piece of wood at the entry was a thresh hold. SPRING CLEANING - layer of hay in kitchen, discarded in spring.

Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot 9 days old. People cooked over kitchen fires, with fireplaces in the kitchen/parlor and sometimes the master bedroom. A big kettle always hung over the fire. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot, mostly vegetables. They ate the stew for dinner and left leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and start over the next day. Sometimes the stew had food in it a month old! Pork was a special occasion. When company came they had a rack in the parlor where they hung bacon to show off. To bring home the bacon meant wealth. Cutting off a piece to share with guests they sat around and chewed the fat.

The rich had pewter plates. Lead leached into food with high acid content, particularly tomatoes. People didn't eat tomatoes for 400 years. Most people used wooden trenchers, the middle scooped out like a bowl. They never washed them. Worms got into the wood. Eating off trenchers with worms caused trench mouth.

UPPER CRUST Raw lumps of bread dough went straight into the bread oven. No bread tin, it sits on the oven floor. The oven, heated by fire, is very hot at the bottom. When the bread is baked and taken out to cool, its base is overcooked and dirty. The top of the loaf is done just right and still clean. The bottom of the loaf is for servants while the upper crust is for the master of the house. The family got the middle. Guests got the top, the upper crust.

SQUARE MEAL Dinner plates were wooden squares with bowls carved out to hold servings of the perpetual stew always cooking over the fire. Kettles were never emptied and cleaned. New ingredients were added. Travelers took their squares with them. British warships of Nelson's time had square plates to fit tables slung between cannons below decks. Sailors from poor, undernourished homes called this a Square Meal, the only good one they ever had.

HUMBLE PIE Umble pie was made from deer waste while their Master and his guests had the better cuts of meat.

TURN THE TABLES Tables only had one finished side. The other side, cheaper to make, was rougher. The family alone ate on the rough side. When company came the top lifted off and was turned to its good side.

CLEAN YOUR PLATE BEFORE DESSERT Square plates were never washed. After your daily stew you wiped your plate clean with a piece of bread and flipped it over for a flat surface for dessert.

COLD SHOULDER When guests overstayed their welcome hosts instead of feeding them good warm meals gave too-long staying guests the worst part of the animal, not warmed, but the COLD SHOULDER.

Inns provided bed but not board. ROOM & BOARD Apprentices journeyed to another village to learn their craft (journeymen) and paid room and board. Board comes from the dining table. Before power tools it was harder to make smooth-hewn tables. People made do with as few pieces as possible. Usually a table was 1 or 2 boards set on trestles, a long narrow surface to eat from. Coming to dinner was coming to the board. A tablecloth was board clothes. Hired help or apprentices paid in cash or service for room and board. American colonials hated making table boards so much they often used split apart shipping crates. Examples still exist with painted names of the master of the house and the shipping agent or company underneath.

Drinking ale or whiskey from lead cups sometimes knocked people out a couple days. Travelers finding people knocked out thought they were dead, picked them up, took them home and lay them on the kitchen table a couple days to get them ready to bury. If they were slow about it the person woke up, or maybe not. The family gathered around to eat and drink and wait and see if they woke up, thus holding a wake.

Old, small England, out of places to bury people, dug up coffins, removed the bones and reused the grave. One out of 25 opened coffins had scratch marks inside. People realizing they had buried people alive tied a string on the wrist, through the coffin and up through the ground and tied it to a bell. Someone sat in the graveyard all night listening for the bell. Thus the graveyard shift. If the bell rang someone was saved by the bell or a dead ringer.

SAVING / LOSING FACE Late 1700s nobles wore makeup to impress each other. Since they rarely bathed makeup got thicker and thicker. If they sat too close to the fire makeup melted. A servant moved the screen in front of the fireplace to block the heat so they wouldn't lose face.

THE CLINK Name of a prison on Clink St, Southwark London.

BLACK MARKET Medieval English nomadic mercenaries wandered the country selling their services to the highest bidder. These hardened fighters lived solitary lives in the wilderness. With no servants to polish their armor it oxidized to a blackish hue, thus black knights. At town festivals their exhibition jousting matches gave the winner the loser's weapons and armor. Gentry, softened by the good life, lost to these black knights. Nomadic knights didn't need extra armor and sold it back to them after the fight. Losing nobility had to buy back their armor, thus the Black Market. If black market is a medieval term, the Oxford English Dictionary shows it as first used in 1931 in The Economist.

Medieval people jumped over candlesticks to predict their futures. Candles staying lit meant good fortune. Candles going out meant misfortune ahead. Thus the nursery rhyme "Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over the candlestick."

We're in Viet Nam for Comedy!

Midsummer Night's Dream opened in Hanoi, traveled to Saigon and Haiphong and finished in Hanoi. Dates in Da Nang and Hue were eliminated because of flooding and because of concern, perhaps misguided, that the play would not be a hit in the provinces.

PRODUCERS He's a Viet Nam War vet, she's an anti-war activist. In 1998 with aid from the Ford Foundation they brought a famous Vietnamese play Truong Ba's Soul in the Butcher's Skin to America with a Vietnamese cast and director. In November they took The Glass Menagerie to Viet Nam in Vietnamese. Midsummer, staged at the same time, was a true co-production, an intermingling of cultures. 4 American actors joined the mainly Vietnamese cast. Despite Vietnamese misgivings early on, their national music and dance became part of the show. Supertitles above the stage translated as local actors spoke Vietnamese and an occasional English sentence and the Americans spoke English and an occasional Vietnamese sentence. When American actors spoke Vietnamese, crowds went wild.

Haiphong audiences were as close to those in Shakespearean England as one could find. In this working-class port city people talked about the play while they watched it, moved about, ate, laughed uproariously (they got the jokes) and leaned over balconies as Elizabethans did. Americans and Brits mostly saw or read the play before attending. Vietnamese heard each line for the first time. Every word and plot device was fresh. Two themes, arranged marriages and the spirit world's effects on mortals, are more relevant to Viet Nam than to the West.

Tom Weidlinger, a documentary filmmaker from Berkeley, shot 115 hours of video for an eventual 56 minutes on PBS, tentative title A Dream in Hanoi. He and his camera observed that not everything went smoothly. President Clinton was in town and was expected to attend but the State Department preferred a folkloric evening. No Clinton meant no Hanoi Opera House (Viet Nam's Carnegie Hall) Tickets could not be sold until censors approved. They insisted on attending opening night, not a rehearsal. More fun for them, more prestige. The first show was jammed with officials and theater people. Vietnamese theater is supposed to be self-supporting. When tickets were sold, theater personnel had to be convinced that regular box-office hours are necessary, as are advertising and promotion.

Artistic collaboration did not come easy. Kissing is normal in Shakespeare but inappropriate in public in Viet Nam. Would Ngan Hoa (Hermia) kiss Doug Miller (Lysander) with any enthusiasm? She did in rehearsals and on opening night, then became less demonstrative. Probably feedback. In rehearsal Kristen Brown, half of the play's other romantic couple, with Do Ky (Demetrius) played Helena as strong. Otherwise Brown would have betrayed her values. Do Ky and the Vietnamese co-director said audiences would find this assertiveness unpleasant. After much discussion, Helena no longer stamped her feet.

Co-director Nause says, American actors and I wanted the project to work and were willing to give 110%. Vietnamese made time for 2 1/2-hour family lunches and days off; those were sacred. It was frustrating but I grew to respect it. We had to learn to be flexible and that we couldn't make everything happen just because we wanted to. Vietnamese actors were brilliant but they did little things you wouldn't see Americans do - smoking backstage, answering cell phones during rehearsals. They don't have voice mail. They don't have our sense of punctuality. We look at our watches. Vietnamese actors said, We like working with American actors, but they work too hard. They need to have fun.