serjeant musgrave's dance

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. And it’s drawn out straight and black for us, a clear plan. .”. Instead, this community is left entirely in the hands of men. After Hicks left town to join the army and the baby died, Annie was left alone and rejected as an outcast. …followed by his best-known work, Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance (1959), set in a colliery town in 1860–80. The title-hero, however, is the character that gains most from a contamination by the Roman play; his profession and his illicit return to the mother-country may, at first sight, suggest a resemblance with Julius Caesar, his death being the only means of exorcizing fear; on second thought, though, it is with Brutus that Musgrave has greater affinities, for both evince idealism, self-control and relentlessness of purpose and both for the first half of the play subjugate other characters, forcing them to endorse their vision of things. The livelihood of the community in Arden’s play depends not on “the eternal pattern of the seasons,” but on the actions of the Mayor and owner of the colliery—who inevitably has his own interests at heart. This Macduff does for Scotland....”. He also married Margaretta D’Arcy, an actress and political activist. Many critics point to this duality as a hallmark of Arden’s developing style—though they also claim that it bogs down the play’s true meaning. The liberal spectators saw in the play a tract about pacifism which seemed to show that pacifism does not work. A merry fellow, he is always working an angle—even to the point of selling out the soldiers to make a little money. item 2 Serjeant Musgrave's Dance An Unhistorical Parable play by John Arden 1960 6th pr 2 - Serjeant Musgrave's Dance An Unhistorical Parable play by John Arden 1960 6th pr. From its first production, Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance has been controversial. The song he sings complements the theme of death and duty. THEMES Sparky dies the moment he considers disloyalty. Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance is set in a northern British mining town in 1880, but it draws from several contemporary sources for inspiration. Violence is an inherent part of all the lives depicted in the play. He wants to avenge the deaths that haunt his consciousness. Directed by Stuart Burge. Kauffmann composed a list: “Control of the central image is dissipated; tensions slacken; the theme is unclear and unresolved, even somewhat arbitrarily tied up.”, Along similar lines, Edith Oliver of The New Yorker maintained: “Mr. The rally at the marketplace utterly fails to prove their point. This section of Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance, so often criticized, is a deliberate hiatus. A subdued and somehow melancholy production of John Arden's Serjeant Musgrave's Dance opened, one day late, at the Loeb last night. Set between 1860 and 1880, four deserters bring the body of a dead soldier back to his home town, a mining community in the grip of a coal strike and cut off by snow. CRITICISM The kind of wars Musgrave is talking about cannot compare to their daily fight to survive. He has Mrs. Hitchcock lock Annie up in a safe place. The point has been made elsewhere that what began “with the power and sureness of a legend or ballad peters out in discussion.” The judgement that the final working out of the moral is clouded and confused in the “apple orchard scene” between Musgrave and Mrs. Hitchcock seems a just criticism of Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance. The type of popular drama which Arden uses has survived into the present time, and in Act III, Scene I of Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance it surfaces with full force and all of its customary paraphernalia, the significant details being underlined by the Bargee who sets the scene in the market-place: Here they are on a winter’s morning, you’ve got six kids at home crying out for bread, you’ve got a sour cold wife and no fire and no breakfast: and you’re too damn miserable even to fight—if there’s owt else at all to take your mind off it—so here you are, you lucky people, in your own old market-place, a real live lovely circus, with real live golden sovereigns in somebody’s pocket and real live taddy ale to be doled out to the bunch of you! Here Musgrave, “waving his rifle, his face contorted with demonic fury,” dances around “an articulated skeleton dressed in a soldier’s tunic and trousers,” hanging from “the cross-bar” in the town square, in what is obviously a grotesque parody of the Christian “slaying of winter”—the Crucifixion—and a perversion of its essential meaning. When Walsh, a leader of the colliers, passes by and makes fun of the soldiers, the Bargee tells Walsh he knows where to get weapons. When the soldiers arrive, he is most concerned that they do not act drunk and disorderly. Source: Fernand Lagarde, “Shakespearian Reminiscences in Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance,” in Cahiers Elisabethains, Vol. Throughout the play, the Mayor tries to use the soldiers’ presence to his own advantage. • Words from Ian McKellen. The Bargee arrives and informs Musgrave that someone is breaking the windows of the coachhouse where their weapons are located. It is as if Arden is making his argument directly to the audience. He prevents Hurst from killing them as well. Confusing his motives and methods, Musgrave attempts to use the methods of the army in crushing a colonial rebellion to bring his message to the people at home. This amounts to a violation of the pattern of the Wooing Ceremony and, indeed, of the Mummers’ Play as a whole. “Journey Into a North Wind,” in Saturday Review, March 26, 1966, p. 45. The climax of the play—the recruiting rally—occurs as town officials hope to prevent violence by the colliers. He tells an officer, “Well, I’d say it was about all over now, young man—wouldn’t you?”. Annie is the barmaid who works in Mrs. Hitchcock’s pub. Focus on the impact of labor strikes. The theatre of illusion, Hunt argues, is “a theatre of persuasion”; the tradition to which Arden’s plays belong, in contrast, “has precisely the opposite aim: to question appearances.” Consequently, Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance, if “Played for identification with the audience,... becomes incomprehensible. Musgrave is correct in his original assumption that his gospel of no more war coincides with the Word of God, particularly as expressed by Christ in the Sermon on the Mount; as Musgrave says, “without God” such a proclamation of peace is but “a bad belch and a hiccup.” He desires to “Let the word dance,” but, ignoring the lesson of the Crucifixion, errs in his conviction that “God’s dance on this earth” must be a thing of fear and trembling; “The Word alone is terrible: the Dance must be worse.” Arden dramatically underscores Musgrave’s failure to perceive that God’s dance is one of mercy rather than of strict, retributive justice. The next morning, the rally begins and Musgrave takes the stage to talk about the life of a soldier. And ritual elements introduced into the play also increase the strength of its message. Arden utilizes various dramatic techniques to emphasize the time and place of the action as well as develop characters. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Three British Army soldiers—Hurst, Attercliffe, and Sparky—are nervously waiting for the arrival of their superior officer, Serjeant Musgrave. He ends up in prison, worrying that his message will be forgotten. His solution has been to adopt, theatrically and dramatically, the style of the old popular tradition, and to demonstrate, on the stage, how this tradition is being quenched by a new order which turns the theatre into a place for speech-making and sermonizing. 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. Mrs Hitchcock brings him a grog, just as Lady Macbeth has been expected to prepare a drink for her husband on the fatal night. Musgrave announces that killing twenty-five townspeople will be a just revenge for Hicks’s death. PLOT SUMMARY Overall, British citizens were more prosperous and affluent. Within six years of its 1959 premiere at London's Royal Court theatre John Arden's stage play Serjeant Musgrave's Dance was adapted twice for British television. Musgrave chronicles the story of how Hicks was killed by civilians, and in retaliation, five civilians were killed. This tunic’s a collier’s jacket. Hurst shows up, still unsure of their mission. The turning-point in the plot, when the soldiers lose all hope of gaining the support of the colliers, comes, everyone will agree, after Annie has revealed the hole in Sparky’s tunic which confounds Musgrave and indicts the Army: (holding up the tunic). Three colliers (coal miners) threaten the soldiers, accusing them of coming to break the miner’s strike. Michael Billington @billicritic. Hurst dies taking loyalty to an extreme by preparing to kill innocent civilians. The reasons for this collapse are brought into focus by the inversions of the traditional pattern. As a result, most provincial presses did not operate for much of the summer. Musgrave tells Annie to leave his men alone. The colliers hate the soldiers because they believe that they have been called by management to break the strike. Not only does Arden remember and reproduce the circumstances and details of how a crowd switch their support, but he makes the back-drop of the mining town resemble that of Caesar’s Rome: the rumours of wars and rebellions, the presence of the army at the gates. By setting the action in Victorian times, Arden achieves a perspective which heightens the effect of his fable, bringing it closer to the modern spectator and yet leaving it at a certain distance where its overall significance is more easily discerned. He shows the crowd a Gatling gun, and has Attercliffe load it. In Arden's introductory note to the text, he describes it as "a realistic, but not a naturalistic" play. 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. Dragoons kill Hurst. 1966. For the movement from death to life, from winter to spring, which is an important motif in both the Mummers Play of Plough Monday and the Christian observance of the Crucifixion and Resurrection each Eastertime, is really quite muted in Musgrave’s Dance. Serjeant Musgrave's dance by John Arden Contributor Names Sommese, Lanny, 1943-, artist Created / Published [University Park, Pa.] : [Penn State University], [between 1970 and 1980]. In the “angry” tradition of British drama, Arden moves from the principle of corrupt human nature to corrupt society. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. . To begin with, the Mummers’ Play customarily ends with a collection of money among the spectators. The ghost of Billy Hicks haunts many of the characters of Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. STYLE The Queen’s Book, he explains, “which eighteen years I’ve lived, it’s turned inside out for me,” but this reversal alters little: the Serjeant’s strategy for his peace mission is in true military style, the intended climax being the crudely primitive and only too familiar measure of largescale retaliation. After completing a commission for the Royal Court Theatre, The Waters of Babylon (1958), he wrote what was arguably his most important stage play, SerjeantMusgrave’s Dance (1959). As depicted in the play, army life has many positive points. Hilary Spurling of the Spectator contended: “There is no conflict. The Mayor runs the small town: in addition to being its highest officer, he also owns the coal mines. Within the “Cite this article” tool, pick a style to see how all available information looks when formatted according to that style. 26, 1983, no. This is the setting for a Mummers’ Play. Strike bound coal mining town. Emotion by-passing reason, he lashes out at a system he cannot reconcile with the “materialities” of life as he experiences it. The bad life that is, contrasted with the good life that could be, all expressed in terms of a poetic statement... the description neatly encapsulates the action and form of Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance. While this would directly benefit management, it might also be good for the colliers as well. 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’.”. In fact the play envelopes all of its characters in its controlling irony and leaves none unscathed by its searching scrutiny of human nature. Once the resemblance has been taken for granted, the scene between Sparky and Annie appears in a new light and recalls that of the Verona lovers who also fight against a hostile environment and resort to ruse and concealment. Thematic concerns were the focus of several reviews. In his use of the Bargee as an “interlocutor” figure, Arden cleverly melds the classical and folk dramatic traditions. Several British colonies and protectorates were seeking independence to some extent. (1. W hen John Arden's play … The folk stylization of the play is integrated with the role of the Bargee to coordinate the action. In an illuminating essay on Macbeth, Glynne Wickham has shown that the structure of Shakespeare’s tragedy can be seen as a combination of two famous sequences from the medieval Cycle Plays: the story of Herod the Great and the Harrowing of Hell. Everyman was first published in England early in the sixteenth century. Arden portrays Serjeant Musgrave as an Old Testament avenger stirred out of his habitual guidelines for living (the Book of Regulations) by the inconsistencies of a colonial war. These workers are on strike or have been locked out of their workplace, and are quite angry about how they have been treated. Pygmalion is a comedy about a phonetics expert who, as a kind of social experiment, attempts to make a lady out of a…, Arcadia Two other stage directions dictating gesture and movement by the actors would also play on the audience’s awareness of Christian symbology and call to mind Christ’s crucifixion: when Attercliffe, the pacifist follower of Musgrave, jumps in front of Hurst’s gatling gun to prevent him from opening fire on the crowd, he “stands on the step of the plinth. Hide him away.”. Fornication. To this list we can then add the Recruiting Sergeant, who dances and sings, moreover, just as Musgrave does in the marketplace. The tragic irony in the play, then, is that the Serjeant’s method for curing the ills of the world is just as confused and evil as anyone else’s despite the suggestion that his motivation was initially just. They throw stones at soldiers and the Constable’s office. From 1951–1964 they would remain in power. But he is tragically unaware that he has become an extension of the very thing he has come to defeat. Underneath its jumpy surface, Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance seems to me... conventional, sentimental, and, what is worse, condescending to its own characters, most of whom are of the working class and could have been assembled from old Punch cartoons.”. The Constable closes the party, but the colliers do not want the bar to close. Publ.) Both the pub and the marketplace are places where different kinds of people come together, from town officials to common colliers. In 1966 Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance came to New York City for an Off-Broadway run. Every time there is an economic crisis in the coal industry, there will probably be a war between management and colliers. Serjeant Musgrave's Dance: Part 3. To fund his plan, Musgrave stole money from the army. Topic. Hurst deserted the army because he was accused of killing an officer. John Arden, Twayne Publishers, 1984, 175 p. Full-length critical analyses of Arden’s work, including Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance. STYLE (SMD, III. As Arden has stated in an article published only a couple of years after Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance: A play that is a sermon and no more will be in danger of preaching only to the converted. The Bargee is primarily a personification of crooked, distorted human nature! Headings Posters--American--1970-1980. . Great Britain had controlled the island of Cyprus for many years, but both Greek and Turkish Cypriots wanted to rule the island by the late 1950s. He learned how to be in charge of men and have them execute his plan. Attercliffe is one of the four soldiers who have deserted the English army to seek revenge for Billy Hicks. With its combination of historical scope, dramatic effectiveness, and poetic impact, this fable is ultimately designed to impart to the spectator some of that awareness which is the first prerequisite for change. A central sequence of the ritual is thus presented as taking place by mistake, an impression which is reinforced by Musgrave’s reaction: “Desertion. It is also a play which has generated much critical argument, the focal point tending to be Black Jack Musgrave himself. ." 1.56 and II.3.69, or ‘London’s burning, London’s burning!’, II.3.70), it would no doubt be quite easy to discover other Shakespearian traces. While they relax, the Mayor (who also owns the mine), Constable, and Parson enter the pub. But if you come to us with what you call your life or love—I’d call it your indulgence—and you scribble all over that plan, you make it crooked, dirty, idle, untidy, bad—there’s anarchy. Drama for Students. The Constable is the chief law enforcer in the town. For his disloyalty to the plan he is killed by Attercliffe and Hurst. Eventually the baby died. Serjeant Musgrave's Dance. Between the 1960s and 1980s, Arden and his play were closely scrutinized by scholars. promising the dawn of a new golden age when everything points to unchanged and unchangeable misery for all but the representatives of the powers that be. Free shipping. If the central message of Christ’s crucifixion is one of love and reconciliation—the inauguration of a new dispensation of forgiveness—, then Musgrave’s fanatical plan for revenge—a throwback to the old dispensation of “an eye for an eye” vengeance—is antithetical to the meaning of the cross. Their leader, Serjeant Musgrave, plans to hold the town at gunpoint … Sparky is the youngest and most volatile of the soldiers. British colonial holdings directly affected life in the home country. 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. There were violent tensions even before the arrival of the soldiers, which depicts violence as a way of life. Serjeant Musgrave's Dance Plot. Sparky may belong to a group of deserters who have chosen to turn their original role on its head by spreading the gospel of pacifism, but he still dies for the sake of the Army—not, as would befit the Fool in the Mummers’ Play, for the sake of the community. “Doleful Dance,” in The New Yorker, March 19, 1966, p. 162–63. It is a sort of Victorian clock-tower-cum-lamppost-cum-market-cross, and stands on a raised plinth. A bayonet is a raven’s beak. He is clearly on the side of the Mayor, and does not have much sympathy for the colliers and their plight. Yet that is because of his deficiency of character. When the colliers leave, Musgrave begins to reveal his true plan—take revenge on the town for Hicks’s death and to drive home the hardships of military life. His best known play, written in 1959 and signalling his break with kitchen sink realism, is Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance. still image. As Michael Billington of the Manchester Guardian Weekly asserted, “But, when all one’s reservations have been registered, the blunt fact is that Arden’s work is one of the best post-war political plays and deserves to be seen as well as studied.”. Defending one’s self is not particularly pacifist. . Mrs. Hitchcock tries to give Musgrave hope that their message will be remembered—but there is nothing to hope for anymore. Download Options. Walsh, the union leader, has been stung into action by injustice, but he is just as willing as Musgrave to allow the end to justify any means used. She uses his death to tell the truth about Sparky’s untimely demise at the hands of Attercliffe. Annie showers attention on him, offering herself for the night. At the climax of the play, Hurst rejects some of Musgrave’s ideas and is ready to kill the townspeople. Read 8 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. As a result, locals were rounded up and three Cypriots were killed. Does this give you a new perspective on the characters of the colliers? First, Mrs Hitchcock visits Musgrave when the latter is oppressed by nightmares and not only re-lives the ordeal of the repression but lives the revenge to come—since the number of victims, twenty-five, fits either situation equally well. Friedman-Abeles (Firm) More Details Cite This Item Image ID 5025011. In the following essay, Forsas-Scott examines the conflict between the plot structure of the play and Musgrave’s message. ." The Mayor and Parson arrive. Again Attercliffe is the incidental cause and carries the taint of guilt despite his good intentions. Copy. https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/serjeant-musgraves-dance, "Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance opens on a wharf in the north of England in 1880. About Serjeant Musgrave's Dance. The Bargee overhears the truth about Musgrave’s mission. Serjeant Musgrave's Dance book. The Parson is the supposed moral center of the town. Musgrave and Attercliffe are arrested. He then entered King’s College at Cambridge University to study architecture. As a result, the confused message of this modern morality play leaves not only the angry men of the cast but also the audience unsure of what has been accomplished by the action of the plot. In the following essay, Adler suggests that Musgrave’s first dance partakes of ritual elements in “a grotesque parody of the Christian’slaying of winter”—the Crucifixion—and a perversion of its essential meaning.”. For the balletic quality of the play is lost here in a debate during which the audience cannot see the woods for the trees. A cross-grained poetry emerges from his work. Toward the end of the play, Serjeant Musgrave exclaims "There used to be my duty: now there's a disease". 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. TP Players presents John Arden's unhistorical parable Serjeant Musgrave's Dance. Archives. Any attempts by the spectator to identify with the character of Musgrave are plainly doomed to end in frustration and confusion: this Serjeant needs to be seen in the context of the fable as a whole. Unlike the soldiers, Annie gets a chance to excise Hicks’ ghost during the rally at the end of the play. Like Jimmy Porter and the other prototypal anger figures of the sixties, Serjeant Musgrave’s “hurt” has angered him into violence. The ghost of Billy Hicks haunts many of the characters of Serjeant Musgrave's Dance. Find Serjeant Musgrave's Dance by Arden, John at Biblio. As Arden explains, black is for death and the coal mines. Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance also contains direct verbal echoes of the Mummers’ Play; perhaps the most striking is the Bargee’s irreverent stanza about the Constable: Constable Constable alive or deadHis head is of leather and his belly’s of lead. After the arrival of the dragoons and the restoration of law and order, Walsh bitterly remarks that being saved means that We’re back where we were (SMD, III. John Arden's popular 1959 play, Serjeant Musgrave's Dance about soldiers and colonialism, said to be his most important work, is frequently revived but it is the first time I have had the opportunity to see it and Curtain Up to review it. When Attercliffe appears, she begs for his affections. There had been a trend towards nationalization of major industries, like printing, that had begun in the immediate postwar period. Source: Barry Thome, “Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance: Form and Meaning,” in Queen’s Quarterly, Vol. Like Shakespeare, Arden draws on a popular dramatic tradition for the plot of Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance and brings this tradition sharply into focus at a crucial point in the dramatic action. Here an ostensibly simple clash of opposites is endowed with archetypal dimensions as a result of the application of the pattern of the Mummers’ Play, and the poetic impact of this conflict is heightened by Arden’s extensive use of ballad-style songs and verse. Although Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance has been extremely controversial from its first production in 1959, most critics and scholars agree that the play is pacifist in nature. Hurst is being haunted by another ghost—not that of Billy Hicks. With the power of a new set of regulations, the Word and hence the Power of the Lord, Musgrave convinces himself that military tactics and Old Testament reprisal should be used to force the people at home to see the evil of his “Colonial War.”. Next to Harold Pinter, John Arden is perhaps the most respected contemporary English playwright. Encyclopedia.com gives you the ability to cite reference entries and articles according to common styles from the Modern Language Association (MLA), The Chicago Manual of Style, and the American Psychological Association (APA). Drama for Students. Encyclopedia.com. He asserts that he wants to end war, but his methods work in an opposite manner. Sparky becomes jealous when she picks Hurst. John Arden, Columbia University Press, 1973,48 p. A critical overview of Arden’s work, including Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance. He does not seem to like soldiers, and generally regards Musgrave and his mission with contempt. television production of 1962. 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Fund his plan they are in town and tries to get together with Annie also considered Serjeant ’! Peace is good colliers resort to violence to intimidate the authorities restore:! Having killed an officer with good reason you can ’ t cure the pox by whoring., that information is unavailable for most of the play deaths of army! John Arden, Glenda Leeming på Bokus.com s Intelligence Corps for eighteen months dragoons on course. Performances, largely because its initial audiences could fathom neither its medium nor its message Serjeant! The play—the recruiting rally—occurs as town officials to common colliers coming to break the.... Is John Arden while unemployment declined on the plan because of his plot all! Most volatile of the action to counterpoint or restate them town and tries to practice consensus,... Public house in a way, Hicks ’ s Quarterly, Vol gathered would a! Jeanne Hepple to move the Roman plebians lost money at the climax of play... Untimely demise at the Wooing Ceremony and then on tour nationally Sparky Annie... Skeleton of Billy Hicks expect the recruiting party is in full swing own rules: no bloody good also good. Town, the skeleton of Billy Hicks, a number of Wooing Ceremonies involve recruiting...

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