"Look not big, nor stamp, nor stare": Acting Up in The Taming of the Shrew and the Coventry Herod Plays

Comparative Drama, Winter, 2000 by Jonathan Gil Harris

Unfortunately, the Shearmen and Taylors' records of payment have not survived, so it is impossible to know with certainty whether their Herod the Great was as spectacular as the Smiths' Herod Antipas. When Queen Elizabeth visited Coventry in 1567, the Smiths' pageant was performed for her at Little Park Street's End, but not the Shearmen and Taylors'; perhaps the latter was deemed to be less entertaining, although a more likely explanation is that the prominence of the Virgin Mary in their pageant made it potentially too Catholic an entertainment for the Protestant queen. (23) In any case, it is hard not to conclude that Herod the Great had acquired an equally spectacular appearance in the Shearmen and Taylors' pageant. In the playscript, Herod asks the audience to behold "my contenance and my colur,/ Bryghtur then the sun in the meddis of the dey" (507-8), which suggests he sported a gilded crest identical to that of the Smiths' Herod; he refers also to "my fawcun and my fassion, with my gorgis araye" (511), indicating that he possessed not only the same distinctive accessories but also a similarly sumptuous costume. There may, moreover, have even been small-scale collaboration between the two guilds. A record of payment in 1579, the last year that the Coventry cycle was performed, notes that the Smiths paid 10d--quite possibly a rental fee--"for a gowne to the tayllers & sheremen." This record suggests that the Smiths replenished or supplemented their stock with the Shearmen and Taylors' Herod's theatrical hand-me-downs. The gown would almost certainly have been a high-quality, eye-catching garment designed to publicize its makers' artisanal skill; the Coventry Herod in both his incarnations, in other words, may have functioned as something of a late-medieval fashion model. (24)

What the Smiths' records of payment cannot communicate, however, is the extent to which Herod's theatrical impact did not derive from his spectacular visual dimensions alone. As early as Chaucer's Miller's Tale, Herod had become synonymous with a thunderous mode of delivery; hence the obvious irony in the Miller's well-known description of Absolon's theatrical pastimes: "Sumtyme to shew his lightnesse and maistrye/He pleyeth Herodes upon a scaffold hye" (25) The decibel level required of the actor who played the Shearmen and Taylor's Herod is hinted at by the line "I stampe! I stare! I looke all abowte!" whose verbs contain a sequence of increasingly strong phonemes: the sixth most powerful phoneme the human voice can make in English, [al, is followed by the third most intense phoneme, [a:], which win a particularly good example of what Bruce R. Smith has termed the "O-Factor" in early English theatrical acoustics yields to two instances of [0:], the loudest in the language. (26) But it was more than the noisiness of his delivery that made Herod's speech so arresting. His theatrical impact depended equally on the distinctive syntax and rhythm of his speech, both of which appear to have underpinned a highly gestural mode of bodily comportment. Despite the differences between the various versions of Herod in the surviving mystery cycles, there are certain syntactical and rhythmic features they share, all of which testify to a powerful collective impression of not only his character's traits, but also how these should be realized in performance. (27)