The Maid’s Metamorphosis

The Maid’s Metamorphosis
Professor Margreta de Grazia (Emerita), University of Pennsylvania

On the performance by the King Edward’s Boys of The Maid’s Metamorphosis, written anonymously, first performed in 1600 by the boy actors known as the Children of St. Pauls.  At the Winterflood Theatre, City of London School, on 23 March 2024.

How often is a play put on that has not been staged for over four hundred years, acted much as it was then by a troupe of boys, in the vicinity of St. Paul’s, where in 1600 it was first performed and printed?

The anonymous The Maid’s Metamorphosis fell into obscurity shortly after its writing.  So, too, did the boys’ acting company for which it had been written. The Edward’s Boys’ revival of the play in March 2024 was thus an event of historical importance.  It was also superb theatre.  This is not because of anything remarkable in the play’s plot, familiar to us from Shakespearean comedy and tragedy:  two lovers torn apart by parental authority struggle against all obstacles to reunite.  (Think, for example, of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet.) Nor is there anything exceptional about the main characters, more stock figures than individuals: courteous courtiers, a demure maiden, a passionate lover and his witty page, a vatic hermit, lusty rustics and their saucy boys.

What distinguishes the play is its setting in the shape-shifting world of Ovid’s mythical poem, The Metamorphoses, an Elizabethan favourite that tells of “forms transformed to bodies new and strange”.  The play’s very title aligns it with the most famous Ovidian maiden to undergo metamorphosis: Daphne who, to escape Apollo’s rapacious clutches, is turned into a laurel tree.  In The Maid’s Metamorphosis, Eurymine is also transformed to avoid rape by Apollo, yet the play’s Ovidian inspiration does not end there.  Its setting provides the stage with innumerable opportunities to ring the changes on change.  This is the genius of Perry Mills’ production:  it joyously exploits the compatibility of the Ovidian imagination with the resources of the theatre.  “All is in flux”, Ovid tells us, and the Edward’s Boys’ production of The Maid’s Metamorphosis never holds still (except once).

From the start, one thing flows into another:  the opening scene shifts from the edge of court life where two courtiers engage in high-minded ethical debate to the heart of the countryside, where two rustics contend over whether it is better to tend sheep or game.   Once in the wood, change proliferates. In this production, the wood itself is constantly altering.  As noted in the programme’s dramatis personae, “The Wood” is played by the members of “The Company”.  At one point or another, as many as twenty-three boys impersonate the forest, their trunks and limbs becoming those of the trees. Their clusters serve as mobile stage sets as well as statue-still tableaux.  But they are also quite serviceable, providing a log for an old blind hermit to sit on, for example, and apples for a hungry page to snatch.  In true Ovidian fashion, the trees morph in and out of human forms.  A character steps out from the arboreal thicket, performs his part, and then returns to it.  Charlie Hutton, for example, after playing the courtier Orestes, joins a thicket of trees until he is needed as a shepherd after which he morphs back into a bower to emerge again as one of the Muses attending Apollo. The boundary between the human and the botanical is anything but fixed.

 

The Wood does away with scenery but also with the need for offstage wings when the characters enter and exit from the onstage tree formations.  This quickens the pace and makes for a constantly shifting visual field, as the boys (under the expert movement direction of Struan Leslie) disperse and reassemble.  Even the play’s main prop is a by-product of the Wood. Wooden poles serve as staffs, weapons, a makeshift cottage entrance, and heavy percussion when pounded on the stage floor. Appropriately in a play in which action is driven largely by male desire, the poles also supply handy priapic extensions; the shepherd and forester draw not straws but aptly placed poles – “’Tis mine”, boasts the shepherd Gremulo (the indomitable Cameron Spruce).

Also animating the production’s Wood are sounds of hunting horns, braying sheep, bird song.  Most affecting are its plaintive echoes, particularly of Eurymine’s name.  Her lover Ascanio (played with taut intensity by Thomas Griffin) is loath to shout her name for fear she be subjected to the fate of one of Ovid’s maidens. The nymph Echo can speak only to repeat the last word she hears until she finally becomes herself nothing more than a disembodied echo.  Desperate to find his love, Ascanio hollers out questions to the Wood, ‘O tell me quickly where?’  and it answers back, ‘Where?’.

There are other sounds, too.  Dialogue frequently stops to make way for song– solos, duets, choruses – in different styles (laments, drinking songs, rounds), often accompanied by instruments (cello, guitar, saxophone).  The songs generally register shifts of mood like melancholy, despair, longing, and fellowship.  But they also, it must be said, vary the play’s only constant:  the dialogue’s unremitting rhymed couplets.

It is into this visually and acoustically animate Wood that the hapless maiden Eurymine wends her solitary way, facing one threat after another, the first when she happens upon a shepherd and a forester, who each want her to come live with him and be his love.  Their two boys do their fumbling best to advance their master’s respective suits.  Indeed, virtually all the play’s males are in pursuit of the “fair Eurymine”, though as played by Adriel Vipen, she is no siren.  Fully covered by a shapeless full-length frock and thick white socks, her hair cropped short, with no glamorizing cosmetics or jewellery, her femininity seems deliberately understated.  Yet only her lover Ascanio’s sidekick Joculo (the energetic Enrique Burchell) is indifferent to her allure.  His appetite lies elsewhere, in his stomach; he would prefer “a tart”, intending a pastry, not a loose woman.

Once in the wood, the lovers are, as in Ovid, caught up in the gods’ affairs.  An imperious Juno (Tom Wood [sic!]) resolves to cross her old rival Venus, by directing the course of the lovers.  She summons her messenger Iris (Charlie Harwood) who spectacularly cartwheels down from the heavens, in kaleidoscopic top and hot pink shorts, to perform a literally show-stopping acro-balletic dance.  Iris’s task is to rouse the deeply somnolent Somnus (the contagiously yawning Archie Mathers) who in turn must rouse his son Morpheus, the god who assumes all shapes, to appear to Ascanio in a dream as Eurymine. Here as so often, metamorphosis challenges the representational powers of the theatre. How to stage Morpheus’ visionary impersonation of Eurymine?  Here an old technology does the trick:  Eurymine’s silhouette is backlit onto a white sheet.  As her lover longingly reaches for her, she vanishes like a dream.

Ascanio will lose Eurymine again through divine interference. Apollo (the sulky Joe McCormack) no sooner eyes Eurymine than he is seized with the desire to take her.  He stops short, however, when Eurymine, to preserve her maidenhead, begs the god to transform her into a male.  Another problem of representation arises: how to stage the violence of an attempted sexual assault?  The text of the play gives no indication.  As always in this play without recorded precedent, the solutions are the director’s.  Here Apollo doesn’t lay a hand on Eurymine.  Instead the trees of the Wood huddle in a menacing bower over her, fondling and groping her as she struggles to break free.  There is also the challenge posed by the play’s titular event: the maiden’s metamorphosis.  How to represent the change from female to male? The audience, in another of Mills’s brilliant coups, sees nothing of this climactic moment. Eurymine emerges unchanged from the arboreal aggression, wearing the same unrevealing frock and socks.  For it is not her garments but the body beneath them that has been altered.  Only the assailant trees have been privy to that. They fall back in horror at her transformation, all passion spent.  Apollo nonchalantly turns away, resolving to choose a more fitting paramour next time.  This is not without irony for an audience familiar with the god’s past homoerotic liaisons, one of which Apollo himself has just recalled, with the Olympian athlete Hyacinth, who in Ovid was transformed to the flower now bearing his name.

Ascanio reacts quite differently when he finally catches up with Eurymine, now dressed to conform with her altered sex in sporty T-shirt, trousers and trainers. This is the one encounter that brings action to a still point.  For the first time, the stage clears, as if to give the lovers privacy.  In a scene both touching and disturbing, they stand several feet apart, she wishing to flee, ashamed of her transformation, he as ardent as ever (maybe more so), insisting that the change in no way alters his love.  The impasse allows for the play’s most philosophically charged dialogue as the two lovers struggle with the conundrum of the metamorphosed Eurymine, a male maiden, or in the language of Shakespeare’s sonnet 20, a “master mistress”.

Their only hope is to appeal to the god who transformed her.  To strengthen their plea, three muses are enlisted, reminding us that Apollo is the god of poetry, music and dance – the very arts that make up the play itself.  At their entreaty, solicitous for his fame, Apollo agrees to ‘retransform’ Eurymine by fiat, “She is a maid again”, and with his guitar (a modern lyre) leads the prenuptial celebration in a vigorous roundelay.   As his parting gesture, Apollo presents the restored maid with a sprig of everlasting laurel so that his glory be remembered forever.

But if anyone deserves that sprig of laurel it is the director, Perry Mills.  For it is he who rose to the challenge of reviving the play for the stage after four centuries of dormancy, despite its relentless rhyme scheme, dense wordplay, classical allusions, not to mention its risky climactic scene.   It is he who recognized in the play the opportunity to showcase the protean virtuosity of the Boys, their ability to change from one being to innumerable others.  In their versatility lies the thrill of their theatre. With this production (now available online) and the attendant modern edition forthcoming from Manchester University Press, The Maid’s Metamorphosis is likely to make its way into the canon of early modern drama.

Professor Margreta de Grazia (Emerita)
University of Pennsylvania