from Medieval Academy News

Review of videotape, The Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell
by Joyce Coleman

The box of this videotape shows Linda Marie Zaerr in front of a Stonehenge-like slab of rock, suited up in a natty blue velvet tunic, wearing a gilt crown, and pulling mightily at a longbow. In case it’s not obvious, she’s King Arthur, chasing the stag that will lead her/him into the clutches of Sir Gromer Somer Jour.

Within the box is Zaerr’s performance, in Middle English, of the complete text of The Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell for Helpyng of Kyng Arthoure, a fifteenth-century analogue of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale. Zaerr, who also produced the video, performs every role, employing a variety of costumes and locales that, like the camera-work by videographer Rod Cashin, are basic but effective.

In our relatively unemphatic American culture, still more among academics, the breakout into performance can be an embarrassing moment. Seeing a well-published colleague in Medieval Fayre get-ups, declaiming Arthuriana, comes as a shock at first, and the impulse is to giggle. But Zaerr carries it off, impressing this viewer with the seriousness she brings to the enterprise and with the ease and naturalness with which she recites the text.

This impression was shared by the students in the undergraduate class on medieval Arthurian literature that I taught this past year at Brown University. Having read Dame Ragnell and the Wife of Bath’s Tale, they greeted the video with initial laughter. As they settled down, however, they found themselves charmed with Zaerr’s warm performance style and proud of themselves for being able to follow her clearly enunciated Middle English. Now they were laughing with the comedy of the piece and exclaiming as each new plot development (and costume) appeared. Students evaluated the video as “very interesting, funny”; “it helped me visualize,” said one. Zaerr’s gestures and acting ability helped them follow as the tale unfolded, while the harp accompaniment provided by Zaerr’s sister, Laura Zaerr, eased the transition into the alternate reality of medieval romance.

Linda Marie Zaerr’s performance also became a useful focus for class discussion of the text. In comparing the gender roles on offer in Chaucer and Dame Ragnell, for example, students pointed to the softened voice and gestures Zaerr adopts in portraying the beautiful, transformed wife. Why should youth and desirability be equated with deferential tones and attitudes, they asked.

If Zaerr’s performance supports certain insights into the text, it also, of course, forestalls others. The notes to our class copy of Dame Ragnell, in the Norton Middle English Romances edited by Stephen Shepherd, portray it as a satire of kingship, with a cowardly Arthur fumbling, lying, and manipulating the hapless Sir Gawain. Zaerr, by contrast, gives a rather wide-eyed, innocent quality to the text, emphasizing the softer emotional values and leaving us with a noble king worthy of the sacrifices Gawain undertakes for him. I don’t know if this is the way Zaerr imagines a medieval performer would have presented the text, or if she feels the difficulties of the language are enough without adding, or imposing, complexities of interpretation. Rather than being a drawback, however, this simplified approach can itself become a point of class discussion and ammunition for the argument that the same texts can differ radically in performance.

Finally, I should note that the one thing this video does not present (and does not purport to present) is a re-enacted medieval performance. It is unlikely that any medieval reciter or reader called upon to perform Dame Ragnell would have acted it out with props and costumes as Zaerr does. But her video is geared to appeal to modern students, who are growing increasingly medieval in the one sense of preferring texts enlivened by performance to perusal of the silent page.

The video, with a running time of forty-five minutes, has been published by the Chaucer Studio for TEAMS (the Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages), with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Boise State University. It retails for a mercifully reasonable $20 (for ordering information, go to http://www.calvin.edu/engl/ks/teams/ragnell.htm).