Learning royal quirks and medieval gender dynamics: actors and actresses get into character at the RenFest
By WP BrandStudio
Queen Katherine of Aragon refused to give her philandering husband the annulment he demanded, and in doing so, she became an unlikely example of women’s empowerment.
Stephanie Phelan, who plays the 16th-century monarch at the Maryland Renaissance Festival this season, hopes to convey that legacy with her upcoming performances.
“I want to show that Katherine is not just some poor, thrown-off, helpless woman who has no strength of character,” said Phelan. “I want to show just how powerful and influential a woman she was.”
Along with Fred Nelson, as King Henry VIII, and Heather Howard O’Shaughnessy, as Anne Boleyn, Phelan is helping depict a dramatic love triangle that is central to this season’s featured storyline in the festival’s Royal Court. A unique aspect of the Maryland Renaissance Festival is its recreation of a specific year in the Tudor reign each season; this year, the festival is set in 1529, and it will spotlight the trial in which Henry VIII tried to have his marriage to Katherine annulled, in part so that he could marry Anne Boleyn. This year also brings the downfall of Cardinal Wolsey, an important advisor to the king, who failed to secure the annulment.
The start of the trial, and what it reveals about the king, inspired festival artistic director Carolyn Spedden.
“It becomes clear that the spoiled king is not going to get what he wants,” Spedden said, and as a result, “heads are going to roll.”
Held in Crownsville, Md., on weekends from Aug. 25 to Oct. 21, the Maryland Renaissance Festival is the second-largest of its kind in the country. It features a 3,000-seat jousting arena, shops selling handcrafted wares, and numerous food stalls and taverns amidst the 27-acre fictional village of Revel Grove in Oxfordshire, England. In addition to Royal Court shows, there is a wide variety of entertainment on 10 different stages that includes music, comedy, variety acts and period plays. A Shakespearean drama with a section about the annulment trial will be a highlight. “Shakespeare had an agenda when he wrote this and his interpretations of these characters are wildly different from the way we portray them in the [village] streets,” said Spedden.
For the actors, portraying their characters as realistically as possible requires intensive preparation. Nelson, Howard O’Shaughnessy, and Phelan are all repeat-performers at the Maryland Renaissance Festival, where scouring historical documents and practicing with and without scripts is all in a day’s work.
Becoming Henry VIII
Because performers stay in character while mingling with patrons in the village, they must “be able to talk about pretty much any aspect of [a character’s] life at the drop of a hat,” Fred Nelson said. Actors research extensively and rehearse throughout the summer; they might perform a Shakespearean play one day and focus on improv the next.
“If you work for the Maryland Renaissance Festival, you can expect to be trained to the nth degree in everything, including the history, before they put you out on the street and let you fly without a net,” said Nelson.
In addition to acting year-round and working in television production, Nelson has played Henry VIII since 2002, and he is well versed in the monarch’s stormy life and six marriages. The king became convinced that his first wife, Katherine, would never produce a male heir and he had also fallen in love with Anne Boleyn. He eventually ended the marriage to Katherine without papal approval, ushering in the English Reformation.
But beyond those well-known details, Nelson has uncovered—and integrated into his performance—unlikely insights into the king’s personality. Henry was groomed for the priesthood as a child, for example, and later wrote music and enjoyed cartography, hobbies that clash with the impulsive, erratic persona he displayed in 1529. “He’s been this overgrown kid, and this is a year where he’s kind of being dragged into adulthood, and [he is] potentially grumpy about it,” said Nelson. “The party is over for Henry, realistically.”
A defiant queen
This year is Stephanie Phelan’s ninth year at the festival; previously, she played a singing barmaid in the village and Queen Katherine in a short play before being asked to play Katherine in the Royal Court.
“It was when I was cast in the part of Katherine that I started to do a lot more research,” she said. She learned more about Anne Boleyn, too, who kept Henry at bay for years despite his overtures. “Anne was a very, very powerful woman,” said Phelan.
Katherine was powerful, as well; as the daughter of King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella of Spain, Katherine was a princess with formidable resources when she married Henry. When Henry demanded an annulment due to Katherine’s inability to produce a male heir, Katherine fought back by leveraging her connection to the Holy Roman emperor — her nephew, Charles V — who held sway over the pope in the aftermath of the Sack of Rome in 1527. Without the approval of the pope or Katherine, it would take seven years and a break with the Catholic Church before Henry got what he wanted.
Some historians have questioned Katherine’s defensive posture and efforts to gain England’s sympathy, but, Phelan said, “it’s a lot of fun to look into all the different historical opinions on Katherine and then create her as accurately as I can based on how I interpret all those points of view.”
And Phelan has enjoyed learning about the role that women played in King Henry’s problems— — which, as it turns out, was fairly significant.
“That’s part of what’s so fascinating; you have a society that doesn’t really respect the power of women and here are two incredibly powerful women on either side of the situation,” Phelan said.
Interpreting the wives
Despite being an iconic historical figure, not much is known about Anne Boleyn, said O’Shaughnessy, who has played the role for three years. It’s known that Boleyn was initially a maid of honor to Katherine, before becoming King Henry’s second wife. She gave birth to a daughter, but failed to produce a male heir — just like Katherine — which Henry used as an excuse for his affairs during their marriage. Again he sought an annulment, then had Boleyn executed on false charges including adultery and conspiracy, despite her articulate denial of the charges against her.
There is otherwise little primary source material on Boleyn and her birthday and early life in France are murky. Even her portraits are copies “because Henry likely burned the originals,” O’Shaughnessy said.
Still, her research has turned up intriguing facts, such as Boleyn’s gambling habit. It also helps that Howard O’Shaughnessy, a social worker with a background in classical theater and Shakespeare, is fascinated by the Renaissance. “If you do have an interest in this period in history, you can almost read the wives like a Myers-Briggs test,” she said. “Everyone has one that they identify with more than the others and I’m very lucky that I ended up getting cast in the one that I’ve always felt an affinity for. Sort of the bad girl of the wives.”
Ultimately, although its characters were unique, the Tudor reign was fraught with timeless human concerns. “Even if you don’t know the history, you can understand ‘the other woman,’ and you can understand ‘I want a divorce,’” said Spedden. “It’s something that’s a matter of state, but it’s also very personal.”
That might entice patrons, but keeping them engaged requires that actors balance high emotion and period-specific smarts “with the more immediate reality of performing for a modern audience,” said Nelson. In doing so, actors draw on what’s happening around them and throughout the grounds. Everything from the joust to the blacksmith to the food people buy “might inspire dialogue or a scene relevant to what we put together during rehearsals as important in the lives of our characters,” Phelan said. She might knight a child for sharing their turkey leg, for example, or break into a Spanish dance when music pours from a pub. “The part that is a lot of fun is the camaraderie we create among the characters, the way we play with patrons together as a team, the comedy we create in the streets that lightens everyone’s spirits,” she said.