| z, THE COLLEGE NEWS Page Five Court. Not Important In May Day Until 1928 Theresa Helburn, ’05, is Second Alumna Noted Theatrically To be Queen , > COURTIERS CERTIFIED Although the early planners of a Bryn Mawr May Day wanted particu- larly to make the pageant typical of ’ the rural festivals of sixteenth ¢en- tury England, ‘they decided, to have Queen Elizabeth and her ladies pres- ent, if not actively participating. The plays and dances were not to be of the formal court tradition, but they ‘were to be presented for the entertain- ment of the queen. There was -evi- dence that Elizabeth really had wit- nessed at least one “county” May Day during her reign, in the year 1559; and itis recorded that her favorite country dance was the popu- lar Sellinger’s Round. Nevertheless, interest in that first pageant, when all the Greene was taken care of by freshmen, was not centered in the court. It did not become the im- portant feature that it is today until 1928, when Mrs. Chadwick-Collins conceived the idea of a procession built about the dais of the queen. The Fortnightly Philistine, which printed a short general write-up of the 1900 celebration, described Queen Elizabeth as sitting “aloft” with her maidens who were scattering rosebuds on the crowd. In 1906, ’10 and ’14, the queen and her court wandered around campus-watching the different plays and dances, but they were not regarded as important enough to have their names in the program. In 1920, after an interval of six years, the queen’s court was revived along with May Day, and included five ladies of the faculty as ladies-in- waiting, six men as courtiers and five children as pages. Acting Dean Hilda W. Smith played the part of Eliza- beth. In the 1924 May Day, a senior, Miss Martha Cook, was given the role. Her court consisted of four ladies, two courtiers, three guards (all played by students), and two children as guards. Her dais was borne by four stalwart men of the faculty, and the 1924 class book reported that although “Good Queen Bess was most impres- sive. - more admiration fell: on hcr princely bearers.” A member of the audience was heard to congratu- late one of the latter for looking so much like a man. The bigger and better court of the queen planned by Mrs. Chadwick-Col- lins in 1928, was presided over by an alumna of the college, Mrs. Alfred B. Maclay (Louise Fleischman, ’06). Her splendid retinue included ten ladies, nine courtiers (played by faculty members), six heralds and two pages (which were portrayed for the first time by students), a Queen’s Cham- pion and a Rider of the Cock Horse. ' The ’32 May Day is regarded as having started another tradition which will add to the prestige of the court group in May Days yet to come; for it was then that the part of Elizabeth was played by an alumna _ distin- guished as an actress, Cornelia Otis Skinner (ex-’22). Moreover, the court was even larger than before; eleven courtiers followed the throne, and be- sides two foot pages, the queen was also attended by two mounted pages. Mr. Frank Markoe, who reviewed the 1932 May Day for the College News admired the progress of the queen, but remarked that the court costumes were “obviously from the costumers” and looked drab in the afternoon sun. He noticed also that they were more in the style of the reign of Henry VIII than that of Elizabeth. The committee for the 1936 May Day is ready to yield no such points to erudite revieWers. Not only are the costumes as authentic as possible, but the names of the members of the court were chosen after much careful research in the Library. It was thought essential ‘that the lords and ladies represented by the faculty members be those who, in reality, were all alive and in good favor at the same time, so that it would be at least probable that they should have attended Elizabeth at some fete in the country. The Great Britain Calender of State Pa- pers and the Progresses of Queen Elizabeth by Nichols were consulted, and Miss Terrien did some research > oon Ene ae by fone on Nae Mrs. Huger Elliot Creates N ew Drawings Of Figures, Motifs to Decorate Program That this year’s May Day program is more authentic and more attractive than ever before, is due in large part to the excellent work of Mrs. Huger Elliott, a well-known illustrator. Her husband, who is the director of-.edu- cational work at the Metropolitan Mu- seum of Art in New York, is also an architect and ‘helps her with, that part of her work which involves land- scaping, such as the sketch in the program showing the whole campus and the location of each play. From 1902 until 1925, when” it ceased to be an illustrated magazine, Mrs. Elliott did the romantic and ‘cos- tume drawings for Harper’s. In 1922 she illustrated an edition of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, edited by David McKay. She uses the black and white line particularly in her work. She has been connected with Bryn Mawr since 1901, when she and Jessie Wilcox Smith illustrated.a calendar, published to raise money for building purposes. In the next year ‘this was repeated; and in 1903 Mrs. Elliott, alone, illustrated a songbook, the cover of which—two heralds blowing trumpets and holding a scroll between them—has since become traditional and has been used on all May Day posters and leaflets. From the 1924 May Day to the present she has illus- trated the programs. Every decoration and drawing in the program is new, with the exception of certain heraldic devices and insignia of Queen Elizabeth, which of necessity are used again. There are many more drawings this year, because the program has been changed to include a small drawing accompanying each character in the order of the pageant. These figures are so arranged on the page that they appear to be moving from left to right in a long procession. This arrange- ment is much more attractive than that of the last May Day program, in which a single picture of the main character only headed the cast of each play; but it involves much more work. Each figure is as authentic in detail as possible. Mrs. Elliott is an author- ity on the costumes of the period, and in making these drawings she has consulted many originial sources. For the figure of the faleoner she used a seventeenth century book on falconry for the detail of the apparatus on which the birds were carried. The standard on the cover is upheld by the lion and the dragon, since the uni- corn used on former programs did not exist in Elizabeth’s day, but was added to the royal coat of arms on the ac- cession of James I. In the printing this program comes closer than any of the preceding ones to the Elizabethan type, of which an exact reproduction is neither attain- able nor desirable. The type used at that time was very large and black, with irregular and fairly illegible let- ters. A very good copy of this can be obtained if a hand-blocked type is used; but as this is extremely expen- sive, the best reproduction from the printer’s font was used: Baskerville, which, when translated for the lay- in the subject of the holders of the office of Lord Steward from 1559 to 1580. Not only is the Queen followed by some twenty-one certified lords and ladies, but she also is attended by six heralds, three mounted pages, five foot pages and numerous archers and beef- eaters. Two new additions to the retinue are the Chief Herald and the Queen’s Fool. Theresa Helburn, of the Class of 1908, will play Queen Elizabeth. She is the second of the May Day Queens who is an alumna distinguished in the theatre; she is Executive Director of the Theatre Guild in New York, and Casting Director and a member of the Board of Managers, as well as an executive of Columbia Pictures Cor- poration. In college she was Editor- in-Chief and Managing Editor of Tipyn O’Bob, an editor and contribu- tor to the Lantern. She was a gradu- ate studefit at Radcliffe and the Sor- bonne in Paris (1908-09, 1913-14). She received her present position with the Theatre Guild in 1920,-and in ad- dition to her responsibilities there, she has found time to write plays, verse and magazine articles, and to lecture on drama and poetry. man, means large ‘black letters. . A. certain amount of red. is combined with the black ‘in the program, and the color is remarkably close to the an- tique red used at the time. The fact that Gammer Gurton’s Needle and both of the wagon plays are performed in three different places during the course of the afternoon, presented a problem in making a sketch of the campus to show where each play is given. This difficulty was solved by lettering the three different places and then putting a key at the t| bottom of the sketch, giving the time opposite the letters. ‘WITCHES ARE REPUTED . TO SAIL IN EGGSHELLS The one Bryn Mawr witch in the pageant has a long history of magic powers and superstition behind her, and her craft is one about which many books have been written and _ into! which many investigations have been made. During the Elizabethan period witches were classified into three types: ,black witches, white witches and grey witches. White witches cured the sick and helped find lost ‘property, but the black witches were given wholly to evil, and it was they who, high in their profession, made wax images of those they planned to harm, which they burned or stuck with | Pins. The grey witches were rather a indeterminate, doing good or evil as it chanced. — The two most common means of witch transportation were sieves and eggshells., There is an ancient story of a French farmer who picked up a | sieve in his cornfield, was immediately confrontéd by a young girl who sud- denly appeared from nowhere, cry- ing, “My poor mother in England!” In his surprise, the farmer dropped : |the sieve, whereupon both it and the girl disappeared with astonishing rapidity. From the belief that witches sailed in eggshells arose the habit of breaking | empty eggshells so_ that neither fairies nor witches could make use of them. 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