Collection Connections: 'Edith Holler' by Edward Carey

Theaters are enchanted places. With talent and some trickery, theater folk transport audiences to distant lands or eerie events. In Edward Carey’s Edith Holler (2023), we join the cloistered backstage world of Holler’s Theatre in Norwich, Norfolk where the titular character cannot leave for fear of losing both the theater and herself. 

Throughout the book, we travel with Edith through the hidden spaces of the theater–a realm typically reserved for its magic-makers. Georg Emanuel Opitz brings the backstage world to life for us in his drawing “Backstage scene for the preparations of a performance of Hamlet” (ART Box O61 no.2).

Here we see actors warm up, eat, don costumes and makeup, make merry, live, and work alongside their backstage colleagues. Opitz’s drawing pulls back the curtain on the regular lives of theater folk, much like the world Edith Holler inhabits before her father’s unfortunate marriage to Margaret Unthank.

Bookending Edith Holler’s life are two bloody bodily explosions of truly theatrical proportions. The use of blood effects onstage hovers in the background of the novel as we receive frequent updates on the status of the blood barrels. Something truly is wrong at Holler’s Theatre when the blood in those barrels becomes solid. Staged blood effects in early modern theater did not change much over the course of theater history, as we see with staging severed heads. The effect of spontaneous bleeding of mortal wounds onstage happened enough that it prompted at least two different authors to write tracts to dispel the notion that practical effects on the stage, including the release of blood and severed body parts, were not supernatural phenomena, but were simply tricks by “jugglers” and performers.

In the 1584 tract, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (STC 21864 copy 1), Reginald Scot demystifies one popular method for simulating beheading, as you can see in this image of a head on a platter. A wax body on the table allows the living actor to put his head through a yoke while seated on a stool to craft the special effect. In one notable play depicting the life of St. George, a wax effigy of the actor was placed onstage filled with animal entrails to enhance the reenactment of his martyrdom. Severed heads most commonly served as stage props, rather than pulling this live-action trick, to enhance the drama surrounding the end of an evil figure’s life, and to allow the live actor to possibly double in another role. 

To make prop severed heads even more lifelike, the neck would have been stuffed with a sheep’s bladder filled with blood, called a squib, which would have been punctured just before entering the stage so that it gave the effect of a freshly completed beheading. Actors also were able to wear prosthetic wax appendages, such as an arm or an ear, which when “cut off” would bleed in a lifelike manner due to the wax being punctured.

Three hundred years later, it is evident that these effects continued to thrill even though the “execution” had not changed much during that time.

We know the world of the theater is very small–punctuated for readers of this novel by intermittent toy theater drawings. Edith performs in the small front window of Holler’s Theatre and owns a beloved toy theater of her own. Perhaps it looks something like this Pollock’s Toy Theatre, or maybe her whole story transpires on a much smaller stage like this…