Robert Kemp adapted The Three Estates into the hit of the 1948 Edinburgh Festival
A new podcast series - 'A History of Scottish Drama in Six Plays' - was launched yesterday at the Traverse
To the Traverse last night to a launch event for a podcast series called ‘A History of Scottish Drama in Six Plays’. The first play - of course - is ‘A Satire of the Three Estates’ the play by Sir David Lindsay of the Mount that was first performed in 1540 at the court of King James V. The new series, written and presented by Fergus Morgan, discusses the context of the work, which was born in the window between the English and Scottish Reformations.
It is a short canter through the period and does not find room for a mention of my grandfather Robert Kemp, who played an important role in reviving the Three Estates and bringing it back to the stage.
Kemp was the playwright and Scots scholar who adapted the text, then known only to academics, for the performance at the Edinburgh Festival of 1948, the first in 400 years. It was a moment when the Scottish theatre came together to create what became a huge hit, under the directorship of Tyrone Guthrie.
A reviewer in 1948 described the production as: “ A drop of real ‘Scotch’ - a radiant piece of comic pageantry from another age, an excellent joke in any tongue”.
In the Scottish Daily Mail, playwright Alexander Reid wrote: “The play is in two parts, in part one King Humanitie is encouraged by his courtiers Wantoness, Placebo and Solace to take Sensualitie as his paramour. That fall from grace accomplished, Flatterie, Deceit and Falsehood easily pass themselves off as wise counsellors and obtain places at court, while Good Council, a good old man but decidedly tedious is thrown downstairs and Dames Veritie and Chastitie put in the stocks as public nuisances.
“Everyone is now being thoroughly wicked and thoroughly enjoying it as far as the evidence goes when Divine Correction puts in an appearance, persuades the King - rather too easily I thought - to cast out Sensualitie and her accomplices, to release Veritie and Chastitie and to give Good Council the attention he merits.”
In part two, Reid continues: “an entirely new element emerges with the appearance of John the Commonweal, a sort of people’s champion who arraigns nobility, merchants and the Churchmen - but particularly Churchmen for their insatiable greed and for the tyranny with which they treat the common people.”
This view was not shared by every reviewer. In an article in the Tablet in 1949, George Scott-Moncrief - a friend of Robert’s known as Scomo - wrote:
“It is not so easy to sum up The Three Estates: in fact for a Scottish Catholic it is distinctly difficult. Aesthetically it is a delightful experience. (French visitors have, incidentally, declared that they found the clearly articulated broad Scots easier to follow than stage English). But the Scottish Catholic cannot entirely forget the repercussions, ancient and modern, of this morality play written by Sir David Lindsay just before the Reformation. Scottish Protestants are reluctant to accept the plain conclusion that the Reformation was the triumph of intolerance—an intolerance so great, indeed, that even Lindsay's play, falling under the general ban, had to wait four hundred years before it was performed again.
“Actually there are some very interesting comparisons to be drawn between Lindsay's "Voice of the Common Man" and that same voice which, crying for justice, heralded instead the "liberation" and the "peoples' courts" of the East European countries of the Neo-Reform. It is an infinitely pitiable voice because, knowing the injustices against which it is raised, we also know, what Lindsay could not know, the far fiercer tyranny that it called down upon the people of Scotland.”
In his memoir Sentimental Tourist (available as an ebook on Amazon), Robert’s son (and my father) Arnold wrote:
The Three Estates was known to my father, as to other lovers of Scottish literature, though its existence seemed to be a closely guarded secret at a time when Scottish universities paid scant attention to Scottish history and culture. (It is an irony that since the expansion of the universities after the war, and the substantial process of Anglicisation that has resulted, the universities have devoted far more time to Scottish studies). Dad could see that certain sections of it were powerfully dramatic. It predated Elizabethan comedy by more than 20 years and was still rooted in the morality play. It also contained savage satire. Eloquent and forceful speech was put into the mouth of the common man and Sir David wrote with an informed knowledge of contemporary European thought. It is another curiosity that this single dramatic masterpiece in the Scottish canon should, through its powerful assault on ecclesiastical corruption, have helped to bring on the Reformation, the eventual result of which was that the theatre in Scotland entered a prolonged period of darkness.
My father had gone to Glasgow to meet Bridie. They went for a drink to a club and Bridie walked with him to Queen Street Station, where he was catching the train back to Edinburgh. Just at the moment of parting he asked him if he knew of The Three Estates, adding: ‘I should look at it again, Robert, if I were you’. What Dad did not then know was that Bridie had been pressing the claims of a Scottish play upon the festival programme committee, and had sent three plays to Guthrie, who was to produce. Apart from The Three Estates, the plays were Allan Ramsay’s The Gentle Shepherd and Douglas, John Home’s pretentious and empty play which had wrung the ludicrous comment from an over-enthusiastic spectator when it was first performed in Edinburgh in 1756 of ‘Where’s yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?’
My father had only heard of Tyrone Guthrie, in a delightful but very vague way, from his friends of the Scottish National Players. Their stories generally began by describing some crisis at rehearsal and ended with ‘Then Tony said – ‘ and gusts of laughter. All meetings with Guthrie tended to have the memorable quality of first meetings, and so Dad could not swear that the hour he spent with him and Bridie at the Caledonian Hotel in Edinburgh was the first occasion on which he shook his hand and observed his curious and fascinating mind:
We met in Glasgow and attended a performance of The Cherry Orchard together. Next morning we caught the nine o’clock train together and talked till six o’clock that evening. I can remember after he left the house suddenly feeling as tired as if I had spent a day walking over the hills, and falling fast asleep. It was on this day, I think, that he made the first rough sketch of the Assembly Hall stage.
In the adaptation of the enormous text, which ran for 13 hours when first performed at Linlithgow Palace (later burned down by Cromwell) in 1540, my father strove to remain faithful to the original and ensure that his interpolations, where they were inevitable, could not be detected. He had a kind of reward when a very scholarly lady in a letter to the Scotsman quoted three of the lines that he had written under the impression they were Lindsay’s:
From the first rehearsal Guthrie ‘transformed this hazardous undertaking into a joyous adventure in which we all lived with a new zest’. Even when the prophets of doom intoned and advance booking were nil they ‘never wilted’. The composer Cedric Thorpe Davie was engaged to write and conduct the plangent and thrilling music. Molly MacEwen worked out the rich harmony of the costumes. As rehearsals advanced Guthrie would bring out of the hat some wonderful conceptions, like the entrance of Divine Correction:
I had always felt that this entry must defeat him. To achieve its greatest force, it had to have surprise, of the kind which I could imagine easily enough on a proscenium stage, but not on an open stage. But what did he do? There entered a mighty procession of men-at-arms carrying banners. Concealed among them was Divine Correction. They formed a circle and dipped their banners. Still in the centre, at the tips of their grounded poles, stood the eternal figure and (again the paradox) not apparelled in golden armour with angel’s wings but grey, unarmed, austere. I still look back upon it as one of the most majestic moments the stage has offered.
The play was a sensation. The London critics were dazzled by the colour and energy of the spectacle, its rich language, its broad comedy, the force of its satire, the stunning moment when the clergy remove their dark robes to reveal their scarlet undergarments. Guthrie had restored the apron stage to the theatre. The actors processed or bounded in along the aisles, and this brought cast and audience into an intimacy of a kind long lost in conventional theatre with its lighted tableaux.
Guthrie explained how this had evolved. He had once taken the Old Vic to perform Hamlet in the courtyard of the Castle at Elsinore. Rain came and, in the ordinary circumstances, would have stopped play. But the King of Denmark was present, and so the Old Vic performed the piece in the ballroom with the spectators seated on chairs to near the players that they could touch them. The Three Estates, written as it had been for the royal banqueting hall, clearly demanded a similar relationship between the audience and actors. My father recalled:
Guthrie used to remind the players constantly at rehearsal that they were not assisted by an illusion. I know from personal contact that the players found this new experience of acting in the round very satisfying. Many of them went back with some reluctance to the proscenium stage where only one front is exposed to the audience.
To me it was a wonderful sight, seeing so many of the things I had theorised about, and even tried to put into practice in one or two plays, given splendid demonstration in this recreation of a Scottish classic. What was left with the audience was, I have no doubt, an impression of virility, colour, roundness, and of participation quite unlike the usual one derived from a visit to an orthodox modern theatre or to a cinema.
The experience of The Three Estates demonstrated another truth about theatre which, my father believed, was not always grasped by intellectual commentators – that it was not simply text-driven, though textual richness was indispensable, but was organic, arising from the interaction of all the elements in it – writers, actors, directors musicians, ballet-masters, and so on.
For Scots, no less than the critics, the play was also a revelation. Scots is daunting on the page even to Scots – a factor which had contributed to Walter Scott’s loss of popularity in his own country. My father said:
All reading taught in the schools is in English. When we read we do not spell out every word. We recognise them by their shape, length, and appearance. It is only a new or strange word that pulls us up and even there it will not hold us up for long if it follows the English usages in spelling.
But when we come to read Scots the aspect of the words is strange, even when they are words with which we are perfectly familiar and may even use ourselves. So instead of skating lightly across the page on a smooth film of familiar shapes, we are constantly striking those snags in the ice. They present absolutely no real difficulty but the modern reader is the laziest of mortals and he doesn’t like to have the even tenor of his ways disturbed. Therefore there is, even in Scotland, a deep prejudice against reading Scots.
To their great delight, the Scottish audience found that it could easily understand the language of the play and glory in it. It is not every day that you find your own little country has been harbouring a masterpiece.
When that amazing opening night took place, I was nine. I have a clear but incomplete memory of it. Just before the lights dimmed, I looked round and caught a glimpse of my father at the back. His face had lost its mask of relaxed good humour and I realised suddenly how enormously nervous he was. Duncan Macrae, too, I remember, in his comic glory, costumed like a gorgeous bird. But that may be from later years, for the play was revived in following years and intermittently ever since.
In the introduction to the playscript, Robert Kemp wrote:
When the Festival Committee announced that Scottish drama was to be represented by a four hundred-year-old morality play, which had not held the stage in the interval, even the most patriotic seemed to feel that here was boldness to the point of recklessness. The remainder were prompt to assume that attitude of doleful but dignified resignation with which it is thought proper to salute a native work of art. Many threw up their hands and declared that they wouldn’t be able to understand a word of it. It was useless to point out that the language of Sir David Lindsay closely resembles that still spoken by the majority of Edinburgh’s citizens, however it may differ from the English of Charlotte Square, or that similar considerations did not seem to keep anyone away from the Italian opera or the French comedy.
Sir David Lindsay was born in 1486 and died in 1555. He may well have been born at the Mount, the estate in Fife of which he later became the laird. It is possible that he studied at St. Andrews and certain that he served as a page at the brilliant court of King James the Fourth. There he took part in the masques which were arranged for the diversion of the king and his nobles. He does not seem to have been present at Flodden, although he stood near the king in St. Michael’s Kirk, Linlithgow, when the “apparition” warned him against the fatal campaign. Perhaps because of his experience of dramatic illusions, Sir David has been suspected of having a hand in that prophetic manifestation. However that may be, he survived the disaster and became usher to the young King James the Fifth, whose infancy he recalls in some of the tenderest and most intimate lines of “The Dream.”
In those days the herald fulfilled many of the duties of the diplomat of today. Alliances were contracted by marriages between members of the reigning houses. Sir David was often entrusted with matrimonial bargaining on behalf of his king,
In the power politics of the day the three most important figures were the Emperor Charles V, Francois I of France and Henry VIII of England. James was courted by all three and his choice of friends, particularly between the kings of France and England, had a daily bearing upon the survival of Scotland. Matrimonial missions madę Sir David thoroughly acquainted with the court of Charles V at Brussels, and of Francois I in Paris and other towns of France. He visited Henry VIII of England and nearer the end of his life was an envoy to Denmark. David Beaton brought Marie de Lorraine home as the second French queen of James, but Lindsay had the welcoming of her at St. Andrews after she had landed at Crail.
He clearly led a life close to the centre of Scotland’s affairs. He has also left us a fairly large body of poetry, which has for some time been neglected even by those who know their Dunbar and Henryson.
It was not always so. The Scottish Text Society editor gives it as his opinion that Sir David was “the one Scottish poet before Burns who reached all classes, and reached them in a long series of editions unequalled by any poet before the close of the eighteenth century.”
His greatest work is without doubt the Satire, which was first performed at Linlithgow Palace, probably in the Banqueting Hall, on Epiphany, 1540, before King James the Fifth and his Queen, Marie de Lorraine. A long and suggestive account of this occasion was sent to London by the English ambassador, but both the existing texts are identified with later performances.
Sir David Lindsay’s times seem remote from ours only at the first superficial glance. There was trouble in the east for the capture of Constantinople by the Turks was at one one stage a threat to Christendom as grave as any of the present time. Religious orthodoxy and accepted notions of every kind felt daily those hammer blows which we think peculiar to our own century. In astronomy, the revolutionary notions of Copernicus were not only opening the way for navigation but were dislodging heaven and hell from their accepted positions in the universe. In the last decade of the fifteenth century came the wave of discoveries —of North America, of Brazil, of the sea route to India—of which the consequences are still being worked out. Italy was alive with the great impulses of the Renaissance, and Machiavelli was clarifying those principles of which, misapplied perhaps, the twentieth century had such a painful experience. Caxton’s printing press at Westminster was ten years older than Sir David.
How far the author of the Satire was aware of some of these currents cannot be determined. He was much caught up in the greatest upheaval of all, the Reformation. Martin Luther was his elder by three years. In 1478 the Inquisition was established in Spain; in 1498 Savonarola was put to death in Florence. John Calvin and John Knox were both younger men than Lindsay, and though he probably met Knox at St. Andrews in 1547, neither can have influenced him as Luther clearly did. Rome was sacked by the mercenaries of Charles V in 1527; in 1534 Henry VIII of England rejected the supremacy of the Pope and dissolved the monasteries. The Society of Jesus [The Jesuits] was founded in the following year.
The Satire, then, is propaganda for the Reformation. Its preoccupations are the corruption of the clergy and their exactions from the poor. There is frequent reference to the New Testament in English, then circulating clandestinely in Scotland. It is beyond my ability to determine exactly where Sir David stood in relation to the religious conflict of his day. It is not denied, I think, that there was widespread alarm within the Roman Church—witness the remark of Cardinal Julian—and a body of opinion in favour of reform within the existing structure. Sir David may have been of that party, particularly if there is anything in the supposition that the Edinburgh performance took place at the request of Marie de Lorraine. It is reported that James V made the Linlithgow performance the occasion for lecturing some of the Scottish bishops about their ways. Although Sir David calls for far-reaching changes, he nowhere disowns the Pope. On the other hand, it seems hard to believe that the lengths to which he carried his attack can have been pleasing to Marie, as they most certainly were not to the clergy, who ordered the burning of the Satire. Sir David was probably prepared to consider some more fundamental solution, although whether of the kind that came five years after his death, when Knox became supreme, no one can tell although each may guess according to his inclination.
The worldly prelate, high-living monk and fraudulent friar were already familiar to Chaucer’s audience. Lindsay depicts them much more savagely, although at times with high-spirited humour, and without the gentler and more affectionate touches of the English poet. Only the Nun compelled by her “friends’ greediness” to take vows is allowed to become human and worthy of sympathy.
In Scotland, where David, the “sair saint for the croun,” had bestowed much crown land in the endowment of abbeys, it may be that a high number of men without religious vocation had entered the service of the Church. The jealousy which these lands excited in the no less cupidinous Scottish nobles played its part in the struggle of the day. Yet one of the greatest mysteries of the Satire lies in the fact that its performance was allowed, in an age that saw the burnings of Patrick Hamilton and George Wishart. Some have sought to find the reason in Lindsay’s position near the King, but the two known open-air performances occurred during the regency of Marie.
“The Satire of the Three Estates” is a compound of morality play and political satire. The first half concerns the redemption of King Humanity from Sensualitie and the Vices which come in her train by the sombre but majestic Divine Correction; in the second half the blemishes of the body politic and particularly ecclesiastic are exposed and “John the Commonweal,” a representative figure of the people, is elevated to a place in the government of the kingdom. Here the reader may care to remember the similarity of Lindsay’s views on kingship to those expressed in the Declaration of Arbroath. In this part comprehensive charges—of simony, plurality, oppression of the poor, illiteracy, lack of chastity—are preferred against the clergy. In the end, they are stripped of their fine vestments and driven off.
In the original performances, they were shown to have fools’ motley under their cassocks. This stripping is presumably symbolic of the removal of their possessions and privileges.
My problems in making the modern acting version were all of a practical nature. As someone wittily put it, I had to cut where the Satire was too long and too broad.
There is a strong thread of action and argument running through the Satire. My guiding principle was to prune down to that action so that there should always be something happening on the stage.
Perhaps I may note in passing that one result of my cutting was to reduce perhaps not the force of the attack on the Church, for that was part of the structure of the play, but certainly the extent of it.
My aim was to let Lindsay be heard and to write nothing at all myself. In cutting I aimed also at preserving the structure of Lindsay’s verse—that is to say stanzas and couplets were removed whole but the pattern remained. It was possible on all but a very few occasions to observe both those rules.
Two songs are called for in the Satire, but there is no record of words or tune. For these I introduced stanzas from the poets Scott and Montgomerie, both of the sixteenth century.
My rule in modernising words was that I should do it only when an archaic word befogged the sense of a whole passage. Where the context carried the unusual word, I let it remain. From the beginning, anyone could see that very many of Lindsay’s difficulties would vanish as soon as he was written out again in a more modern, less whimsical notation. It may interest some to know that in transcribing the Satire I followed so far as I could the suggestions for a standard spelling of Scots worked out by a committee over which Mr Albert Mackie presided. The plural -es shows an extra syllable which must be sounded. Elsewhere, particularly in words of French origin, stresses fall on different syllables than those to which we give weight.
There was memorable pleasure in working under Mr Guthrie on an old Scots play I admired on behalf of the city where I live. To know that among the actors and actresses there were many old friends, with whom I had often discussed some such occasion without really dreaming that we should live to see it come true—that was a reward which comes to few.
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Yes, I saw one of the many revivals (must be a long time ago because an elderly Andrew Cruikshank was in it) and it really really worked.
Fascinating. Thank you.