It started thirty years ago, near Symphony Woods at Columbia’s Merriweather Post Pavilion. It wasn’t a huge event, just a makeshift stage, a few artisans demonstrating traditional crafts, and a handful of people wandering around in outfits that hadn’t been popular for five hundred years. The day’s entertainment was provided by performers—New Vaudevillians, they came to be called—men and women who practiced the ancient arts of comedy, song, and, more often than not, a combination of the two. (Penn and Teller were among the earliest entertainers at the Maryland Festival, though, they didn’t perform together.) Today, the Maryland Renaissance Festival draws more than 300,000 people—and performers—from around the world to Revel Grove, a permanent village in Crownsville, Md., which springs to life every September and October. There are kings and queens, of course. And knights and wenches and magicians. And more than a handful of common folk walking around in elaborate costumes, drinking mead from pewter mugs, bowing and scraping to the royals passing by. Each year has its own storyline from the thirty-year reign of Henry VIII. Actors research the roles they’re playing and begin rehearsals eight weeks before the festival begins. (This year’s fair depicts Henry’s life in 1539, one of just a few years when the king wasn’t married to one of his six wives.)
To help celebrate the festival’s thirtieth anniversary, CL went behind the scenes and returned with this series of portraits—and a strange hankering for a cup of grog and a fat turkey leg.
King Henry VIII
Fred Nelson, Odenton, Md.
“When I first got the role, I knew what any standard schoolboy knows about Henry: He was a famous English king, he was a big fat guy, and he walked around with a turkey leg all day. Each year, we act out a different year in the history of Henry VIII. And because his history is so rich, there is something going on every year that our writers can work with.
We’re trained every year on the language that we use, RenSpeak. It’s basically a British accent peppered with words and phrases that were commonly used in 1530s England. It takes a while to get back in the habit of speaking that way, and it’s just as difficult to break it when the season is over.
There are certain fans we lovingly call Playtrons. They’re patrons who come to play. They come dressed in costumes and love it when the king and court walk by. They bow and scrape along with everybody else. I was out with a friend a couple of weeks ago in a small town. We passed a college student, who was sitting on a stoop, and he stood at attention and hollered, ‘My liege!’ I went up to him and said, ‘Stop that! Not for another couple of months!’
Sometimes the Playtrons will show up in costumes other than period clothing. There was the day that a guy came dressed as a giant penguin and walked around scaring everybody. The best was the three or four fully costumed Klingons. I went up to them and said, ‘Qapla.’ They completely loved the fact that Henry VIII spoke Klingon. It’s the only Klingon word I could remember. It seemed to work, because they got real animated, and I had my pictures taken with them: Henry and the Klingons.
At the end of the day, when we disappear backstage, cast members will invariably scream out the phrase, ‘The beer is in the pickup truck!’ We’ve discovered it’s the one phrase that’s absolutely impossible to say with a British accent. We say that to break ourselves of the habit of speaking in a mock British accent all day. It’s a big, huge, wildly wacky family.”—Anne Howard
Sir Nicholas, Jouster
Roy Cox, Westmoreland, Tenn.
“I’ve been working at the festival since 1983 and have been a pro- fessional jouster for twenty-seven years. I’m named after King Henry VIII’s champion jouster.
I’m in charge of the entire jousting company: fourteen horses, twelve jousters, and twelve ground crew. We do four hour-and-a-half shows per day. A circus performer taught me how to joust twenty-one years ago, and a retired cavalry officer taught me how to ride when I was six. I teach two jousting camps at my sixty-six-acre training facility in Tennessee in the off-season. My wife and I are on the road ten months out of the year traveling to festivals; I joust, and she makes and sells chain-mail jewelry.
It’s about twenty degrees hotter inside the armor than it is outside. It’s physically demanding to wear it; I work out a lot. And it’s very difficult to see out of the helmet. If you want to know what it’s like, take your hands and put them three inches from your face. Then separate your middle and ring finger about 5/16 of an inch and jump up and down.
I make my own armor and also make it for other professional jousters. It takes me about two to three months to make a suit. I do more jousting in a year than the knights did in a lifetime; they’d maybe do it about a hundred times.
Bumps, bruises, cuts, and minor breaks do not count as injuries when you joust, because you need to keep going. I’ve broken all but seven bones in my body: three in each ear and the one in the larynx. I broke my neck the same day that Christopher Reeve broke his. The only reason I didn’t get badly hurt was because I had on my gorget, a metal neck collar. Unbeknownst to most people, jousting has been around in some form or other since the sixth century. I’m sure that in a previous life I was jousting.”—KESSLER BURNETT
Emrys Fleet, Ratcatcher
Jim Greene, Dryden, N.Y.
“The ratcatcher is kind of a nasty lowlife. I have a green booger coming out of my nose, blood coming out of my ear. I’m dirty, nasty; my teeth are blacked out.
Emrys is the Welsh word for light. Emrys Fleet is the double meaning of lighthearted and quick of wit. And as a ratcatcher, you need to be light on your feet to keep up with the rats. I’m in a comedy stage show, but I also really love the improvisational part, walking through the lanes and interacting with people. I started working at Renaissance fairs in 1980 in Florida and discovered that you could make a living doing that. I was hired by Disney to perform at Epcot. I worked for ten years in the Indiana Jones stunt show as comic relief. I performed five shows a day, 2,500 people per show. That means over the course of a year, I entertained 6 million people. When your job is to make people laugh, that’s a nice thing to do in the world.
I use props in the show. I have Pesky—he’s my little rat, and he does tricks. I also keep an old mink that I got at a thrift store, and he’s Wilbur, the Dancing Weasel. I like to think I’m clever, too. It’s worked for so many years, something must be right. My kids grew up knowing sword-swallowers and jugglers and real creative and interesting people. I like to think my kids are proud of me. When they go to school on what’s-your-dad-do-for-work-day, they probably mumble, ‘Ratcatcher.’ My kids had rats as pets. Rats actually make delightful pets. They’re smart, fun, and they sit on your shoulder—and they’re clean. I don’t choose to use live animals in my show.
Whenever you have a group of intelligent, crazy people, things get a little wacky. But after twenty-six years and ten bazillion shows, things kind of blend together. Every day, every moment, is a joy. To me, if I’m not laughing, something’s wrong.”—A.H.
Mrs. Pugh, Village Laundress
Debs Szymkowiak, Annapolis
“Playing an ugly character is oddly satisfying. Men will flirt outrageously with Mrs. Pugh. There’s sort of a delighted horror in interacting with this woman, because she’s so yucky, but, at the same time, she’s really quite appealing, because she’s very friendly. She’s outgoing, and she’s got a sense of humor.
All I have to do is walk up, announce my name, and say that I’m a laundress and the audience gets the giggles just looking at me, and I don’t have to say another word. They’re gone, puddles of giggles, thinking about this thing being a laundress. Little children go, ‘Mommy, that lady’s got bugs on her!’ I came up with a sweet backstory in my own head, so now Mrs. Pugh talks about her husband, Hugh Pugh, [in a Cockney accent]: She ‘loves him from the warts on his head to the muck on his boots.’
The year when Anne Boleyn was crowned, we had a big coronation. Now what is Mrs. Pugh going to give a queen? So I got a little tiny bottle and I filled it with what was, theoretically, horse urine (old-fashioned bleach). I really used cider vinegar, but it looked good. Of course Mrs. Pugh is illiterate, but still gave a very flowery presentation: ‘…I hereby bequeath unto you a small vial of my very best bleach—collected this morning from the Viscount’s valiant white stallion.’ The queen’s eyebrows raised, and she said, ‘Oh, yes, it is a very fine bleach indeed. As a matter of fact, it is the only bottle of horse urine I’ve been given this coronation ceremony, and I shall value it the more highly.’”—A.H
Stupina Michele Schultz
Glen Burnie, Md.
“My character, Stupina, is a part of the tradition of Commedia dell’Arte,an Italian style of theater started during the Renaissance. They were the people who would do the pre-show before the medicine salesmen would do their pitches to get you to buy their—cough, cough—‘medicine,’ which was usually booze in a bottle. They’d often perform in masks and most of the shows were improvised. It was kind of like ‘Punch and Judy.’
When I play Stupina, she’s somewhat like a puppy dog and a three-year-old. She’s very, very affectionate. She’s sort of stupefied or amazed by everything. She sings a lot. She’s been known to sit in the dirt and sing about sitting in the dirt at the top of her lungs. She’s got that playful energy that a three-year-old has.
You will either get people so fascinated by her and understand the concept right away, or people look at the scary face and run screaming.
I’m always amused because the other character I play is in a corset with lots of cleavage, and I’ll walk by and people will flirt with me. And then I’ll walk by as Stupina, and they’ll say to me, ‘Wow, you’re really ugly.’ It’s an interesting psychology, because I’ll look at them and say, ‘I just learned something about you. And the pretty character is never going to speak to you again.’”—Joe Sugarman
Lady Kytson, Village Noble
Paula Peterka, Crownsville, Md.
“I’m a ham. I’ve been on stage since I was three, but I started with the California Renaissance festival the summer after college. Four years later, at another festival, I met Larry, my husband, who was also a performer. I’ve been here since 1992. We play nobles in the village, the well-dressed ones that usually surround the king on the reviewing stand at the jousts (we’re filthy rich, and sponsor one of the jousters).
I also do different living history shows, like “Dress for Excess.” I start out in my Renaissance “underwear,” then I proceed to dress, explaining about each piece of clothing, what it’s called, how it’s made, and why it’s worn.
I also do a cooking show—Julia Child meets the Renaissance—with other members of my household. Besides working in the computer department for the IRS, I’m also a Mary Kay consultant. It’s not that much different teaching people about make-up than it is to teach them about sixteenth-century cooking.
When we stroll around the village, people stop and ask about our daily lives. The number one question I get asked is ‘Where’s the privy?’ and number two is ‘Are you hot in that?’ My answer is ‘I shall be hot were I naked as I were born, so I might as well be fashionable.’
I think of what we’re doing as education through entertainment.
If I get people to laugh, they remember more. It’s kind of an awesome responsibility. People have come to see you; you’re the attraction. We don’t have roller-coasters.
One of the very first years I was performing, I was sitting down and resting my face on my hand and someone took a photo. And I thought, ‘Oh, my goodness, I’m someone’s vacation.’‘—McLean Robbins
