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Michael Davidow
Salisbury Plain
Salisbury Plain
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Traditional histories record that a man named Arthur fought twelve successful battles against the Saxon invaders of Roman Britain. He was not a king, but a cavalry officer.
In the centuries after that Saxon invasion succeeded, however, that general's brief but successful career gained its owner increasing fame, and other local legends became attached to his-- a process that went on for centuries, eventually including French sources as well. Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, appearing in the 1400’s, was the first attempt to consolidate these tales into one volume, and in imposing a narrative structure on this cycle, Malory traced the arc of a classic tragedy, one that Sophocles himself would have recognized: a war-making king both gains and loses his throne because of mortal sin. And though Malory was a great artist, tales of Arthur eventually became so commonplace that serious writers felt him unworthy of attention; local acting troupes did Arthurian plays to amuse themselves in Shakespeare's time. In Henry IV, Part 2, Shallow even brags to his friends, “I remember at Mile-End Green, when I lay at Clement’s Inn-- I was then Sir Dagonet in Arthur’s show.”
SALISBURY PLAIN is a re-imagining of what Shallow’s play could have been. It takes its political context from the earliest source of Arthur’s world, the Roman history underlying the “real” King Arthur; it borrows the brutal and tragic structure pioneered by Malory to make sense of things; and finally, it aims for the brusqueness and immediacy of the early Elizabethian theater.
In the centuries after that Saxon invasion succeeded, however, that general's brief but successful career gained its owner increasing fame, and other local legends became attached to his-- a process that went on for centuries, eventually including French sources as well. Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, appearing in the 1400’s, was the first attempt to consolidate these tales into one volume, and in imposing a narrative structure on this cycle, Malory traced the arc of a classic tragedy, one that Sophocles himself would have recognized: a war-making king both gains and loses his throne because of mortal sin. And though Malory was a great artist, tales of Arthur eventually became so commonplace that serious writers felt him unworthy of attention; local acting troupes did Arthurian plays to amuse themselves in Shakespeare's time. In Henry IV, Part 2, Shallow even brags to his friends, “I remember at Mile-End Green, when I lay at Clement’s Inn-- I was then Sir Dagonet in Arthur’s show.”
SALISBURY PLAIN is a re-imagining of what Shallow’s play could have been. It takes its political context from the earliest source of Arthur’s world, the Roman history underlying the “real” King Arthur; it borrows the brutal and tragic structure pioneered by Malory to make sense of things; and finally, it aims for the brusqueness and immediacy of the early Elizabethian theater.
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