Summis desiderantes

: On Monstrous Regiment and Malleus Maleficarum

On the afternoon of August 14, 1975, a bizarre storm swept over a small district in North London. For three hours, rain came down in sheets. As the underground flooded, hundreds of people lost their homes, and lifeboats and oared boats were rescuing those stranded in Gospel Oak. The afternoon of August 14 was also the day when a handful of disgruntled, jaded actresses and musicians were to meet, thinking they might try forming a music theatre troupe. The meeting was scheduled to take place in Gospel Oak. The water level kept rising, and the one or two people who arrived before the storm fully hit had no choice but to unblock a clogged drain in the garden to keep the rainwater pouring in through the back door at bay, so it seemed the meeting would be cancelled. But it was not. Between late afternoon and early evening, one by one, they appeared, drenched and bedraggled in muddy water. They were greeted with cheers, and it was taken as unmistakably auspicious. It took another eight months for the troupe to become self-supporting. Before the first production began, some of the original members left and others joined, but in the troupe’s mythology that stormy afternoon was always the beginning of Monstrous Regiment.

In 1991, the actor and translator Gillian Hanna—who co-founded the touring company Monstrous Regiment in 1975 and ran it for fifteen years—published Monstrous Regiment: Four Plays and Collective Celebrations. The passage above is a short diary entry included in the book under the title “An Afternoon of Storm,” recalling the day those who fought through the storm first came together to form the company.

Among the many alternative theatre groups of the period, Monstrous Regiment maintained an uncompromising socialist-feminist line. Its name was taken from the title of a pamphlet published in the sixteenth century by the Scottish theologian John Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. Knox likened the regime of Mary, Queen of Scots—who had married the Dauphin of France, a Catholic country—to a “monster,” and wrote as follows:

According to the rules and ordinances illuminated by the wisdom of those authors who have been held in the highest esteem within the Church of God, it is made manifest that the rule of women is not only contrary to nature, but plainly repugnant to the will and ordinance of God. (…) That a woman should take upon her the government of a realm and empire, and bear rule over men, or become sovereign of any state, dominion, province, city, or town, cannot be done without doing violence to the order which God has established. (…) Therefore let all men now take heed that the trumpet has once blown.

With Knox’s four-hundred-year-old injunction at its back, Monstrous Regiment went on, over eighteen years, to devise and stage more than thirty productions, until the British Academy withdrew its support in 1993. Rather than reproducing the conventional production hierarchy—playwright, actor, director—Monstrous Regiment adopted a mode of collective creation. For example, during rehearsals of a playwright’s draft, performers could request that particular staging choices be altered, added, or removed.

Caryl Churchill was also a member of Joint Stock, a company founded one year before Monstrous Regiment. Joint Stock likewise practiced collective creation in the making and staging of its work. In this way, the series of alternative theatre companies that began to form in the early to mid-1970s opposed the conservative chauvinism of the decade, which, in the socio-cultural context of post-1968 Europe and under Margaret Thatcher’s ascent, sought to reconstruct “Britishness” while excluding people of color from former colonial territories.

In 1975, collaborating with Monstrous Regiment on Vinegar Tom, Churchill began to experiment in earnest with the form of music theatre. In the final section of Vinegar Tom, she reconstructs an imagined dialogue that might have taken place between Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, the two authors of the medieval text commonly known as the “witch’s hammer,” Malleus Maleficarum. Through this device, Churchill shows that the concept of the “witch,” in which the two theologians believe without doubt, and what it purports to designate, is a paradigmatic instance of entrenched misogyny—an instrument for maintaining patriarchal male privilege through prejudice against women as a sex. To Those Who Pursue the Supreme is the title of the papal bull that formally recognized the contents of Malleus Maleficarum as authoritative. / 2016.11