how we do it

How we do it

A Renaissance Identity Crisis

Character creation and 16th century identity

At some point in every guide to creating a character for the renaissance faire, a statement is made to the effect of “…now decide what role your character plays in the village and do the research to bring it to life.” This simple statement is at the core of the main problem with most renaissance performances: most people just don’t have time to do the kind of research it takes to do this well. The same can be said for choosing names, origins, religious affiliations, and so on.

It has been assumed all along that actors would find the time to go out on their own and research characters and roles, finding creative characters to embody and ways to bring them to life. If we were the SCA this might be true (might be). But the number of actors who – when asked their role by a patron – say “Wench” or “Peasant” proves that people either don’t have time or simply don’t know how to do that kind of in-depth character research.

There is a tendency to blame the actor for this, after all, with the Internet, everyone has a research library at their fingertips, right? And while that seems logical to the point of truism, I would respectfully disagree. In the hands of a researcher who is skilled enough to separate the wheat from the chaff, the Internet is a powerful tool. It is also, unfortunately, a powerful weapon for the ignorant or ill informed to spread their mistakes and false assumptions to the masses. Not every website devoted to the reenactment community is created equally. There are also a number of websites devoted to the various pseudo-medieval fantasy roleplaying games that aren’t always obvious in their intent and contain some truly questionable materials (from our standpoint).

Additionally, starting your research from scratch is time-consuming. Going back to the question of choosing a trade or role, you first have to come up with an accurate list of such trades. In an attempt to measure how difficult this is, I recently found a list of so-called “medieval trades” that included archeologists and optometrists! While there were certainly people in our period who took care of such tasks as eyewear, as professions, these are largely 18th and 19th century inventions. If you came to faire as an archeologist, there would be some giggling at your expense. (The OED tells us the word “Archeology” did not even first appear in print until 1837) Since this specific trade isn’t generally acceptable even in fantasy role-playing circles, the intent of the list is not clear. This is but one example of the amount of misinformation possible from an innocent Internet search.

Compounding the problem is the fact that many if not most of our actors have “real” lives, that is to say they are busy with family, job and the other distractions of the 21st century world we are escaping from by going to faire. In lieu of direction from “on high” (in the form of casting specific roles within the village) most actors tend to find themselves a few leagues down the path of least resistance. This is how we find ourselves with people identifying themselves by sex (q.v. “Wench”) or social class (q.v. “Peasant”) rather than by their trade. Obviously, the latter is not only more historically accurate, but also more appropriate to creating the effect we are trying to achieve in a 16th century village milieu.

In the appendix at the back of this book you will find a character creation worksheet. In this chapter, we will take you through the creation of a “realistic” 16th century villager. Before you continue with this chapter, please take the time to copy that worksheet so that you can follow along and begin brainstorming the ideas for your faire character. You might find that you end up going off on a tangent half way through the creation process, inspired by something that occurred to you either from reading the name lists or the descriptions of the trades. That is fine. The worksheet is intended to spark your creativity, to give you a framework in which to start your brainstorming toward creating a unique role for faire. This is especially helpful for those of you too busy (or simply disinclined) to undertake serious study of the period in order to create a workable character.

Always check with the guild (or - for those of you viewing this who are not one our guildmembers - with the faire if you are not in a guild system at your faire) before making character decisions. Some faires and guilds have specific rules regarding the available choices of roles and names appropriate to their faire. Also if your faire takes place outside of the British Isles, your choice of names will be notably different, and the trades available to portray might be slightly different.

Step the First:

Give yourself a first name.

This can be as easy or difficult as you decide to make it, but keep in mind, at this point, only a first name – or what in period was known as your “Christian name” (the name given you at your christening) – is necessary at the moment. Your last name, or “surname” will be derived later either from your origin or your profession (or the origin or profession of your forebears).

Here is one place where we tend to fall off the tightrope of period-perfect authenticity. For the most part, this is because true period names were boring. In fact, according to one study of brass funerary etchings dating from between 1107 and 1600, 80% of all Elizabethan Englishwomen were named Elizabeth, Joan, Margaret, Anne, Alice, Agnes, Isabel, Mary, Jane, Katherine, Margery, Dorothy, Eleanor, or Ellen. It gets worse, because almost 30% of all Englishmen bore the handle John! And better than 85% of all the fellows were John, Thomas, William, Richard, or Robert, Henry, Nicholas, Edward, Walter, Roger, George, Edmund, or Ralph!(1) (That’s right, I said “Ralph”, pronounced “Rayff“ as in the actor Ralph Feinnes)

You could do much, much worse than choosing one of these names and moving on to step two. It would, in fact, fend off the impending headache as you paw through the treasure trove of names listed on the internet or in any of the resource books listed in the “Suggested Reading” section. It is easy to drown in that amount of information and come out of it named “Zelda” just because your son was playing Nintendo in the next room and you had a headache and didn’t want to read any more namelists. So please, do yourself a favor and choose one of those common names for yourself.

If you’re still reading, odds are, you didn’t want one of those names. That is because of two important considerations to be made in the interest of dramatic license.

1.) There are an almost alarming number of people already bearing one of these very monikers, as most of these ancient names have not lost much of their popularity. This creates many problems not the least of which is the number of patrons and actors who will turn around if you yell “John!” across the green (not necessarily including the intended actor using the name merely for their character) as opposed to shouting “Angus!” in the same crowd.

2.) The names above are exactly what the statistics quoted say: they are common. Extremely common. Actors, by our very nature, are of the uncommon sort. In short, we tend to be a little non-conformist and the common names in the list above tend to taste a bit too mundane no matter how accurate they are.

Creative license is commonly taken with the naming of characters in movies, books and at renaissance faires. Fret not, however, making these decisions based on personal esthetics rather than population statistics has a long and glorious history. Look no further than William Shakespeare to see this choice in action. While William used Richards and Henrys aplenty (mostly because you can’t change the name of a historical character, especially when it’s a king) there are very few Johns or Alices in Shakespeare’s plays. His reasoning is much the same as ours, a dramatic choice used to differentiate his actors from the audience and to make them seem unique rather than workaday.

If you are one of the benighted souls who insist on being less common with your choice of names, there are three choices that I am going to discuss here.

You can create a unique one out of whole cloth.

You can randomly point to a page in the phonebook and find a likely moniker that suits you.

You can choose an appropriate name from a book of names, a website listing names or any one of a thousand sources. This is usually the part that causes headaches due to the embarrassment of riches available to you. It is easy to get buried in too much information when researching this topic.

Making up a name:

This is less difficult than it sounds as long as you stick to reality and don’t make your name too far-fetched or impossible to pronounce. If you create a name that requires a four year degree in a dead language to pronounce properly, you can expect your faire friends to assign you a more pronounceable nickname which you may or may not like.

The best way to do this is to take a name derived from a place, or to take a botanical name like “Rose”. Another good source for names is a dictionary. A green-eyed actress of my acquaintance once took on the name Urail, which is derived from a Gaellic word for “green”. Once again, be mindful of pronunciation issues and if it’s too long you can expect it to be shortened whether you desire it or not (art reflects life, I daresay).

Choosing a name:

This is difficult if you don’t manage to keep your head on straight. The embarrassment of riches when it comes to sources for good names (beyond the few that I list) I mentioned earlier is enough to turn the head of the most experienced playwright. How do you think Shakespeare ended up naming one of his heroines “Hero”? (Much Ado About Nothing) It is my firm belief that he hit a wall trying to come up with a name and defaulted to a description instead. It is not all that uncommon for someone to dig into a name dictionary and end with a long list of names they favor and can’t choose between. While this isn’t a bad thing, it is time consuming.

If you have the time to devote to it, this can prove to be very rewarding. Of course, most of us don’t have the time to devote, which is why fiction writers keep files of names and renaissance faire actors should too.

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(1) Lovelace, Janell K. [aka Julian Goodwin] “English Names from Pre-1600 English Brass Inscriptions” edited by Josh Mittleman [aka Arval Benicoeur] 2nd (web) edition from 1997 Known World Heraldic proceedings, 10 July 1997. Cited March 27 2006 [WWW.] available in total from http://www.s-gabriel.org/names/arval/brasses

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