115: Spoilers: The Life and Death of Jack Straw (Act 3, Scene 3)

Beyond Shakespeare

Spoilers: The Life and Death of Jack Straw (Act 3, Scene 3)
Note: The precise scene division of Act Three is debatable, this episode goes from the general re-entrance of the king and the rebels after the mini scene with the Queen Mother.
Jack Straw is not a long play, but that won't stop us going into ridiculous amounts of detail about it. This is the beginning of the end. Farewell Jack... this parley does not go well. And there's some business with a sword... which we need to sit down and think about for a bit. And the Lord Mayor goes... off message. The scenes are illustrated via a rough cut of our soon to be released full cast audio adaptation - which languishes in the edit as we post this.
The rough cut of Act 3 scene 3 to The Life and Death of Jack Straw is performed by Pollie Hall as Jack Straw, Leigh McDonald as Wat Tyler, Rob Myson as Parson Ball, Hugh Weller Poley as Tom Miller, Heydn McCabe as Sir John Newton, Simon Nader as the Lord Mayor, and Nemonee Stone as Richard II. With your host Robert Crighton.

BE WARNED - If you just want to listen to the play as a play, don't listen to the spoilers episodes. Come back later, or don't listen. However, if you find early drama hard to follow, then you will get a good grounding in the action here - especially as we may make changes or cuts for our final version! The plain text version is rough in hew, it will change and we produce it in part to hunt out errors.

You can follow the text online - though some texts are better than others. There are, to our current knowledge, only two modern editions - the print on demand acting edition published by Groundling Press which can be found at their website http://www.groundlingpress.com/, and the almost impossible to get edition edited by Stephen Longstaffe (Mellen Critical Editions, 2002).

Online versions exist - there is a copy of a fascimile at archive.org, which serves as a foundation https://archive.org/details/cu31924013324540/page/n9
Other online versions can and should be searched for.

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