Zounds, Milady!
At the Renaissance Faire, all the world’s a stage.
Illustration by Mike Norton
When you visit a Renaissance Faire, people like to tell you how long
they’ve been coming, how many fairs and festivals they visit in a year,
what their job was when they worked here, what the after-parties are
like. Nobody says the words authentic, historical, or—despite the lute and tabor processions led by jesters—medieval.
People love working on outfits, seeing friends, the
leather/paper/metal-crafts. Also the fighting knights, the weapons,
gnawing on turkey legs, the bodices. The big cat shows and the falcons
with gobbets of meat. Checking out the elves. Being someone else.
You’ll see ecstasy (Man, what an awesome lance!), wariness (Is this the right time to say “Zounds, milady”?), and intoxication.
But what you’ll never see is the expression you see all around you if
you go to a play, museum, college classroom, or even to a
Plymouth-style “living history” exhibition: blank performance boredom.
The expression of someone watching a sitcom on her iPad or, alas for me,
listening to a lecture on Victorian novels. Nobody is looking at me,
that face says, and I’m gazing at something that might as well be in a
different universe.
Renaissance Faires never produce that expression because they are too
engrossing and annoying, at once exhilarating and nerve-racking. On my
visit one recent October Saturday to King Richard’s Faire, I
drank zero mead, bussed zero wenches, donned zero codpieces, waved zero
swords in the air. About all I managed in the way of participation was
one pillow fight (sorry, duel) on a wooden log. My loss (to an
anthropologist I know: She was there dressed as a wood fairy) reminded
me of Daffy Duck going up against Bugs Bunny in “Robin Hood Daffy.” It was humiliating, sure—but a bit exciting as well.
One of the earliest Faire mottos, I learned in Rachel Lee Rubin’s careful, informative, and thought-provoking Well Met: Renaissance Faires and the American Counterculture,
was “all the faire’s a stage.” That does not mean the faire is filled,
like Colonial Williamsburg, with stages filled with actors ready to
educate you about the distant past. It means that at the faire, everyone
is always onstage. Including you. So you had better be prepared to
act—which doesn’t mean to recite lines someone else wrote for you but to
start performing whatever role you’ve come prepared, or half-prepared,
to play.
Renn Faire began 50 years ago in drama teacher Phyllis Patterson’s
backyard outside Los Angeles—a goofy countercultural complement to the
English folk music revival that spawned Fairport Convention and such
prog-rock heroes as Jethro Tull. Well Met is packed with welcome detours into fascinating historical byways: I loved learning that the Los Angeles Free Press, the original radical ’60s underground newspaper, started as the Faire Free Press, distributed by Art Kunkin in a Robin Hood outfit that you would swear had been ripped straight from the pages of The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins.
And despite Rubin’s evident distaste for the faire’s recent (and
probably inevitable) commercialization and standardization, her
interviews give lots of local insights about what first lured various
Rennies in and (since it takes repeat custom to constitute a subculture)
what keeps them going back so loyally.
Still, the big Why looms, and Rubin never quite answers it.
Of all the phenomena to survive the ’60s, who would ever have bet on
Renn Faires? We live in an era with a burgeoning virtual world of
(massively multiple) online gaming that can be played quite nicely from
your sofa, gazing at a 72-inch screen An era when the “counterculture”
tends to be vegan rather than turkey-leg-gnawing, iPhone-toting, and
forward-looking rather than nostalgically pastoral. So what makes faire
the most robust descendant of that long-ago moment when Pete Seeger
wannabes, young blacksmiths, and psychedelic babes all came together on
the village green to practice Morris dancing?
I think the faire’s enduring success is all about its resistance to
that slack-jawed “I’m just watching” expression. Faire is the one
holdover from the ’60s that retains that “be here now” feeling that
hippies and lefties alike thought might be the necessary first step to
radical political change. Sure, that sense of the living moment takes
utterly mundane forms at the Renaissance faire: You keep a sharp eye on
people because they may be about to diss your codpiece, or unstring your
bodice, or worse. Still, the overall effect, not unlike those ’60’s
“be-ins,” is to ensure that you have some skin in the game.
Here’s one comparison: Every year my kids spend a week of summer camp at Old Sturbridge Village,
a thoughtful and incredibly sober reconstruction of real village life
in southern New England in or about 1831. Happy as clams, they card
wool, weed cornfields, and care for bullocks, surrounded by employees
who do their level best to read what Emerson would have read, wear what
he would have worn, pee where he would have peed.
Author Rachel Lee Rubin.
But if you spend the day peering at wooden clocks or hearing
flax-cultivation explained, there’s something dry and cool about Old
Sturbridge that may make you yearn, perhaps apologetically, for a bit of
King Richard’s raunch. By serving up its history straight, untainted by
theatricality, Old Sturbridge presents itself as what the historian
Pierre Nora calls a “crystallized ... place of memory.” But the smoother
and the more regular those memory crystals become, the more likely they
are to make your eyes glaze over, which will never happen in places
like Renn Faire, places Nora calls “living milieus of memory.” I love
Old Sturbridge, and I’m incredibly glad it’s there. But, like the
medieval theologian who said that a rock and an angel are better than
two angels, I enjoy Old Sturbridge more knowing that Renn Faire exists
as well.
The difference between Old Sturbridge and King Richard’s Faire is like the difference between Downton Abbey and the British reality show Manor House, in which 15 Brits signed up for a six-month stint, chamber pots and all, living as Edwardian masters and servants. Downton Abbey is all smiles, tears, and smooth narrative arcs. Manor House,
though, was freaky and unsettling. Both lords and underlings awkwardly
learned their roles and then amazingly quickly came to assume all the
petty tyranny and bitter resentment that the roles entail.
“Playtrons,” in Rubin’s word, come to a Renaissance faire to
experience a slippery spectacle that unfolds before and around them,
showing off in front of them but also requiring them to take part. You
don’t judge a Renaissance faire from the outside; you enter into it, and
respond accordingly.
There’s very little in a Renaissance faire that is historically
plausible or authentic—right down to the name, which never concealed the
fair’s medieval inspiration: Just how “Renaissance” is a mud pit,
exactly? But maybe it’s that very indifference to history that makes the
place enticing. It doesn’t want to educate you; it wants to suck you in
and make you act like someone else for a few hours. That has the
somewhat paradoxical effect of making a faire surprisingly like the
bumpy, embarrassing, role-reversing bawdiness that played (if I have my
history right) such a huge part in medieval carnivals. The Renaissance
faire’s resistance to educating you becomes, almost accidentally,
educational. So the instant the Renaissance faire started trying to be
accurate instead of ridiculous, it would stop being both. Long live the
pillow duel.
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Well Met: Renaissance Faires and the American Counterculture by Rachel Lee Rubin. NYU Press.
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