New Perspectives
In the opening scene of Polly Pen and Peggy Harmon’s musical theatre adaptation of “Goblin Market,” two mature sisters dressed in Victorian mourning garments enter a now-unused room that was once their childhood nursery where they “relive the haunting memories of their youth” (Pen and Harmon, back cover). The drama that follows is based on Rossetti’s narrative, but these events are not treated as literal or real; instead, Rossetti’s goblins and their tempting fruits are now presented as entirely generated by the sisters themselves and from their own “imaginations and remembrances” (Pen and Harmon, “Authors’ Notes”): “the play is a dazzling journey through the psyches of the two sisters as they struggle to regain the present and to reconcile the fervent, erotic yearnings of their adolescence with the matter-of-fact world that they now inhabit” (Pen and Harmon, back cover). Furthermore, the actresses who portray Lizzie and Laura also in turn dramatize the goblins. In this way, the poem becomes very clearly a psychodrama: its drama and dangers are not really in the outside world but in the emotional and psychological states of Lizzie and Laura.
retrospective framing
The sisters begin by playing a childhood memory game based on the list of goblin fruits, and both are gradually drawn into the past and the recollection of their “early prime, / Those pleasant days long gone / Of not-returning time . . .” (Pen, Harmon, and Rossetti, p. 13). With some trepidation, together Lizzie and Laura begin to remember and to re-enact their imagined childhood encounters with the “wicked, quaint fruit-merchantmen” (Pen, Harmon, and Rossetti, p. 14). In locating the play’s perspective in the now-adult sisters, Pen and Harmon’s adaptation gives an updated and post-Freudian interpretation of the poem, and the authors themselves explain that the “narrative sections should strengthen our sense of two mature women who are not ‘playing’ at being children but reliving a childhood experience from the adult perspective” (Pen and Harmon, “Authors’ Notes”).
Sources:
Pen, Polly and Peggy Harmon. “Authors’ Notes.” Goblin Market: By Polly Pen and Peggy Harmon; Music by Polly Pen; Adapted from the poem by Christina Rossetti. Dramatists Play Service, 1985, p. 5. [score]
Pen, Polly, Peggy Harmon and Christina Rossetti. Goblin Market: By Polly Pen and Peggy Harmon; Music by Polly Pen; Adapted from the poem by Christina Rossetti. Dramatists Play Service, 1987. [libretto]