THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 12, 1996 TAG: 9605100077
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY STEPHEN HARRIMAN, TRAVEL EDITOR
LENGTH: Long : 198 lines
I like this place, and would willingly waste my time in it.
- William Shakespeare/ As You Like It
WITH ALL THE POMP and ceremony and tomfoolery that a make-believe bit of 16th century England could muster, the Virginia Renaissance Faire was officially opened last weekend by Queen Elizabeth I herself - or a reasonable facsimile of her regal majesty - in a village called Sherwood Forest in Staffordshire.
With colorful banners flying, drums beating, knights in shining armor clanking and minstrels singing; with an assorted foppery of let's-pretend nobles and officials being officious and fools being fools (not necessarily the same thing); with a lot of ``huzzahs'' and even a few ``hip, hip, huzzahs'' interspersed with a fortuitous small amount of speechifying; with an early smattering of very English drizzle finally giving way to large amounts of spring sunshine - ah, at last - a royal purple-and-gold ribbon was cut, the gates swung opened and the crowds poured in.
Six months ago there was nothing here, a few miles east of Fredericksburg, except beautiful Stafford County farmland. Now, a renaissance.
Today the village, a complex of about 75 reasonably authentic and permanent ``Olde England'' structures and entertainment sites on 15 acres surrounded by a fence of rough-hewn paled boards, is the dream-come-true of Gene Bailey, director of Stafford County's economic development, and Miles Silverman, president of the California-based Renaissance Entertainment Corp.
Silverman's organization already has similar sites in San Bernardino and Marin counties, Calif.; Kenosha, Wis.; and Tuxedo, N.Y. This site, a little more than an hour from both Washington and Richmond and about three from Hampton Roads, seemed ideal.
The Virginia Renaissance Faire is open Saturdays and Sundays plus Memorial Day Monday from now through June 16, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., rain or shine.
``We think there is a weather window,'' Silverman said, explaining the limited duration of the show that takes visitors back to an England of 400 years ago that was slowly emerging from the Dark Ages. ``It's not unlike a modern-day circus. If we run too long, we might lose the excitement.''
The Renaissance Faire will reopen next spring, and officials expect the village to expand.
Yes, but . . . how is a place like this going to compete for the entertainment dollar with Kings Dominion and Busch Gardens and Water Country U.S.A., not to mention the beach? Judging from the opening-day crowd, I'd say pretty well. It's novel, it's interactive and it's very participatory - the sort of place where you might even learn something if you're so inclined.
Consider this: How are you going to keep the kids interested in rollercoasters and other lunch-blowing rides, how are you going to keep them staring like zombies at virtural reality video games once they've listened to storytellers and troubadors, once they've been awed by magicians and falconers, once they've watched gallant knights on horseback do wonderous things with their lances as they ride at full tilt, once they've shot longbows and thrown axes or knives - yes, you get to do that - and PARTICULARLY once they've donned helmets with face masks and padded body protectors and actually fought with real swords?
``Learn how to swordfight,'' shouted the hawker at the Fencing Ring and School of Combat d'Armes. ``Cut off somebody's head.'' Then, toning down the pitch, ``Nothing to bruise but pride.''
The line was forming. The price - $2 per person or three bouts for $5 per person - seems but a pittance for a chance to cut off somebody's head. Just kidding. About the head cutting off, not the price.
I watch as two boys, neither more than 10 years old, go at it in the sawdust ring festooned with ribbons, pennants and wooden shields until they were so exhausted neither could raise his sword arm . . . then run off laughing to their next great adventure.
One more thing - maybe my favorite thing. How are you going to ever do anything about your kids' table manners (or your own) once you've both seen grown men actually EAT MUD? More about this, fairly billed as the Greatest Show in Earth, discreetly hidden elsewhere in this section (Page E3). It gets gross.
If you're still thinking that this all seems pretty tame and mundane, the fact is, it is.
The honest-to-goodness MOST favorite form of entertainment during England's Elizabethan Era was public executions. If for no other reason than there was every bit as much variety, and they occurred more often than marketplace faires.
There were hundreds of capital offenses and thousands of offenders. Simple hangings dispatched ordinary folks to a (probably) better world. For the more henious crimes, hanging (strangulation, rather than the neck-snapping variety) was followed - while the victim was still slightly alive - by disembowelment and decapitation and then the chopping up of the body into quarters. Then the whole mess was burned.
But that sort of show just doesn't play well these days.
There's another aspect of this Renaissance thing that is strangely appealing. Lots of people like to dress up in funny clothes and play let's pretend. There's a part of us that never grows up. If you've ever been to a Civil War re-enactment, you know what I mean.
We like to play like we're doing things just exactly like they did in the ``olden days'' . . . just as long as we can get in our cars and go home and take a nice hot shower when it's all over. That's sort of what this is all about.
Many of the people at the Faire on opening day, I discovered, were not character actors or performers but ordinary visitors on a time-travel trip. This may be the best of all places for retro dressing to the max.
I saw a ``priest'' in long, black hooded cloak carrying a great carved wooden staff topped with fur and horns. He said the staff was oak from Montana, the deer antlers were from New Mexico and the fur was from Wyoming. None the less, he looked, for all the world, like Friar Tuck.
The most authentic Renaissance retros carry their own drinking vessel tied up around their waists. Some even attach a wooden spoon and bowl.
There were women in heavy long dresses and bulging bodices and guys with big swords wearing tights. Some guys look OK in tights, I suppose, but those who don't seldom realize it.
I also saw two young women in big, thigh-high boots wearing swords. One carried a long leather whip as well. They made me wonder if they might be sort of musketeer-ettes without muskets, but my interest in reporting ALL the facts stops somewhat short of asking a woman with a sword and a whip just what she's up to.
It's all a day in the life of Elizabethan England, this Virginia Renaissance Faire. The year is 1558. The queen, young Queen Bess, only 25 and if nothing else a survivor, has just succeeded her half-sister Mary, Bloody Mary. It is the first of a 45-year reign that will come to be known as the Elizabethan Era, an age when the Renaissance, a time of rebirth and enlightenment, reached full flower on the British Isles.
I followed the ersatz queen and her train in her ``progress'' around the village. She, like the woman she protrays, is slim and erect with copper red hair, more striking than conventionally beautiful. She is splendidly turned out in a long dress of gold - I am going to take a wild stab at fashion writing here and guess - brocade, heavily bejeweled, with a matching porkpie type hat and tiara. She had strangely acccessorized this lovely outfit with a pair of red leather gloves.
She's also rather imperious. ``You're just standing there,'' she says in mild rebuke to a befuddled ``subject.''
``You can do that anywhere. Move about. Enjoy.''
These costumed character actors talk funny, too, with a lot of Elizabethan English expressions. Funny is probably not the right word, though. If you ever tried to make sense of Shakespeake when you were in school, you know that wasn't very funny. Difficult is what I would call it.
Her majesty is accompanied, to shouts of ``God Save the Queen,'' by various noble sycophants who obviously know what's good for them. Some of them you may have heard of if you're a student of the period.
There is, for instance, Capt. Sir Walter Ralegh (that the way he spelled his name, most of the time), the Devonshire adventurer who would found a colony in what is now North Carolina in 1587 and name the place Virginia in honor of his virgin queen.
And there's young Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton and patron of that Warwickshire playwright called Shakespeare, carrying the sword of state.
Wait a minute. What is wrong with this picture? You scholars know, of course. If this is really 1558 and the queen is still young and appealing, Ralegh is only 6 and Wriothesley isn't even born yet. Neither is Shakespeare.
So what you've got is English Renaissance in composite and compressed form. The alternative is portraying the queen as an aging and heavily painted shrew with all these young fellows groveling about. That's would be authentic, but it's not a pretty sight. If you want to research a term paper, go to the library; if you want fun, come here.
There are several other departures from authenticity for which we can be thankful. This ``queen'' has good teeth and she is much more tanned than the notoriously pale original model. Also, there is no pomander hung around her waist. The real Elizabeth would have had one and would have sniffed it frequently to combat the ever-present and overpowering stench.
This place is unlike an Elizabethan town or city in that respect. There is no smell of wood fires, no pall of smoke, no filth, no squalor. It's a compromise of authenticity we can live with. Literally. Modern health and sanitary regulations are part of the reason we don't have the Bubonic Plague killing every third one of us in a very nasty way and why our life expectancy is about twice that of the Elizabethans.
There's good food here, lots of variety; not the gruel and other slop you'd be likely to find if this were, indeed, 1558. And there is an abundance of discreetly disguised privies that are, in fact, modern trailers and porta-potties, complete with running water.
It's perhaps worth noting that the water closet - WC, as they still say in Britain - came into being in the 16th century, two centuries or so before its wide acceptance. Sir John Harrington, a cousin of the queen, was the inventor. He built two, one for himself and the other for Elizabeth at Hatfield House.
Most everyone else had to make do with the chamber pot, the contents of which were often thrown out of the upstairs with - for those caring enough to do so - the warning shout ``gardy-loo'' from the French ``gardez l'eau.'' That, like Thomas Crapper's improved toilet later, brought a new word into the English language.
This is the only place I know of where you can buy a gargoyle for your cathedral or your castle or whatever. Maybe your lawn? It is arguably better than a pink flamingo or an automobile tire painted white. Here you can get a little nasty gargoyle for $35 and a big nasty one for $150. A skull with a rat crawling on it goes for $30. A sign says the shop doth accept MasterCard, Visa and Discovery plastic
This may be the only place where you gan get an authentic, hand-crafted lute - or a psaltery, zither, dulcimer, harp or lyre - from an actual luthier, Ken Rogers of Fredericksburg. Lessons are extra.
There also is a gift shop where you can buy things such as the ``Elizabethan Language Book'' and learn to talk like you were 400 years old and ``The Cultural Atlas of Renaissance Elizabethan Costuming'' so you can dress the part. They also offer ``The Complete Woodcuts of Albrecht Durer'' and ``Michelangelo's Life Drawings'' along with caps, T-shirts, tapes, CDs, glass, pottery, jewelry, film and sunblock, and - I almost forgot - bars of ``Yearly Bath Soap.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
STEPHEN HARRIMAN
LEFT: Minstrels entertain at the Virginia Renaissance Faire. RIGHT:
The ersatz Queen Elizabeth and a courtier greet visitors.
by CNB