A "Quid Pro Quo"

You may have heard this phrase before (if you've ever listened to Hamilton.) "Quid pro quo" is still commonly used today, though it is a Latin phrase meaning "this for that" and is most common in political circles. Ironically, "Quid" is also a well-known nickname for the pound, and so the phrase has also become a play on words, when used in common speech. What does this have to do with Mill on the Floss? Why, it's money, of course!

Money does not seem to be as big of a deal to us when we look back on history. Someone can say to us "back then, they had to pay $35, which was a small fortune!" And we say, in response, "so what?" But in order to understand the Tullivers' wealth and sacrifices monetarily, and then the subsequent loss of this monetary stature, we should explain a few details of the value of money at that time.

The pound sterling is the world's oldest currency still in use and has been in continuous use since its inception. The British pound has its origins in continental Europe under the Roman era, as early as 775 AD. Its name derives from the Latin word "poundus" meaning "weight". The £ symbol comes from an ornate L in Libra. The pound sterling was equivalent to 1 pound weight of silver. This was a vast fortune in the 8th century. In 928, Athelstan, one of the first kings of England, adopted sterling as the first national currency. The Bank of England was founded in 1694, followed by the Bank of Scotland a year later. Both began to issue paper money. Silver remained the legal basis for sterling until 1816. The official gold standard was established when Germany adopted it, encouraging mass -international trade for the first time. The idea was that a nation must back its money in circulation with the equivalent in gold reserves. This rendered silver coins as a "token" issue (i.e. not containing their value in precious metal). In 1817, the sovereign was introduced, valued at 20 shillings. The average annual income circa 1800 was less than £20.

In the Victorian era, the common coinage and amounts are as follows (note: each coin is valued by how many units it would take to make a pound. Thereby, a pound is equal to one): Sovereign (Pound): 1 Five pound note: 1⁄5 Two pound note: 1⁄2 Crown: 4 Half-crown: 8 Florin: 10 Shilling: 20 Sixpence: 40 Groat: 60 Threepence: 80 Penny: 240 Halfpenny: 480 Farthing: 960 Half Farthing: 1920 Third Farthing: 2880 Quarter Farthing: 3840 In 1800, £1 would equal approximately around £100 today. Most people never saw a pound: their money came in farthings, halfpennies, pennies, and tokens. British government sources suggest that prices have risen over 61-fold since 1914, so a medieval sterling silver penny might have had purchasing power equivalent to £4.50 today, and a farthing (a quarter penny) would have the value of slightly more than today's pound (about £1.125).

Around 1800 the average weekly wage was around 6-10 shillings and many people earned far less. The British pound experienced an average inflation rate of 2.03% per year between 1800 and 2017. £100 in the year 1800 is worth roughly £7,891 in 2017, a 7791.5% increase in prices. Since the average income in this period (1800-1825) was less than £20 a year, most people went through life without ever coming into contact with banknotes.

In essence, when you hear these monetary phrases tossed around onstage, you should be aware that these are no idle sums. Think about the status that the Tullivers have at the beginning of the play, and how that is changed as the play progresses. How are their daily lives affected when they don't have the money that they once did?

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by Makenna Johnston, dramaturg In a ‘special projects’ theatre class held between January and March of 2020, four students and their professor began devising a show. Their devising team? David Morgan (professor), Clara Wright, Mikah Vaclaw, Sten Shearer, and Dylan Wright. Their source text? The Turn of the Screw, a novel by Henry James. Though the team’s original devising process was cut short due to the Covid-19 pandemic, aspects of their invaluable contributions to the production live on. Each student deviser's unique perspective about the story and devising process are explored below. Clara Wright Our professor David Morgan had the idea to create a devised piece of theatre to take to the Edinburgh fringe festival with a group of students. He was drawn to the script of the Turn of the Screw, but wanted to do his own take on it, so he decided to create a new adaptation of the original book with a group of students. He was drawn to the eerie nature of the piece, the elements of horror, and the slow descent into madness of the governess. I joined Dave's class to write and devise this script because, first of all, working with Dave has always been a pleasure, but the story was intriguing to me as well. I loved the idea of studying and understanding a layered female character. I don't think there are enough interesting female characters out there at the moment. The governess was affected greatly by societal pressures and a deep, depressing history that drove her to madness when she arrived at Bly. The story was mesmerizing. I was also excited to work the muscle of creating a new piece of theatre. I am not confident in my writing abilities, but it was exciting to take a piece of literature that already existed and make something new and interesting out of it, using visual elements that you can't get from reading a book. We not only wrote dialogue, but we also wrote out ways we could use movement, sound, lighting, puppetry, and more to tell the story in the most effective way possible. The devising process was a blast! Dave would tell us what scene he wanted us to write and we would each go home and write out our own interpretation of the story. The next class, we would get together and go over which elements of people's scenes we liked best, which moments were the most clear, and which lines we for sure wanted to keep in the final script. Sometimes our interpretations were so different and unique that it was difficult to choose which direction the piece needed to go. Ultimately, Dave would piece together each of our scenes into a cohesive script. Other moments I enjoyed were when we would put scenes on their feet and act them out to see how they translated to the stage. The introduction especially benefited from this exercise. The last exciting part of the devising process that I'll talk about is writing the music. I hadn't written original music like this before so it was such a cool experience creating sound like this for the first time. I didn't ever think about what scene I was writing for, but Dave told me what tone he was looking for in a piece of music and then I experimented until I found something I liked by layering on different sounds I could make on my violin. It was an overall thrilling experience! Turn of the Screw example music Turn of the Screw example music 2 Mikah Vaclaw Because of COVID, we didn’t get to fully get the script up on its feet, so we focused a lot on writing. First, we all read the book over Christmas break, and when we had our first meetings as a group, we talked about what stood out to us in the story and what we wanted our retelling of the story to be. Something we really wanted to explore was the idea that the ghosts were actually things born out of trauma the governess had experienced in her youth, and how she was the only one that could see them/was affected by them. We also wanted to explore jealousy between Mrs. Grose and the Governess. Once we had fleshed out what was important to us, we started writing. Dave would tell us what scene he wanted us to write for homework, and we’d all come back with our different written versions of that scene. Then, in class, we would read them aloud together and talk about what we thought worked, and what didn’t. Dave would then take all of our scripts and compile them together into one cohesive scene. We were able to start toying with the introduction to the play, and Clara wrote some really cool violin music for it. Sten Shearer The process of devising the script was the five of us (David Morgan, Clara and Dylan Wright, Mikah Vaclaw, and myself) would get together a couple times a week. Initially, David gave us some conceptual ideas he had for the show (like using movable screens that could utilize shadow work). Then we all read the original story. At each meeting, we would assign a chunk of the original story as our writing assignment. Using that chunk of the story as inspiration, the four students would go home and write a scene that translated that section of the original story into a play scene. Through that process, we collaboratively came to an understanding of the themes that we wanted the play to explore as well as theatrical devices and ideas that we thought would work well in putting the play on its feet. Simultaneously to writing these scenes, we were also using our class time to experiment with staging and blocking using the earlier scenes that we had written. So for instance, when we were about halfway through writing the script, we were also staging what the early scenes would look like to help test if the script we were writing worked in practice as well as on paper. Dylan Wright We chose this project because we obviously needed something in the public domain that we wouldn't need to pay royalties for, but aside from that this story really highlights the mental turmoil of a young governess as she grapples with her duties as a woman and her place in the world religiously as well. We took this story to an extremely dark place-- it has since been edited for this particular production-- that orbited around this idea of religious toxicity, something all too familiar in Utah. We felt that it was important to excavate and expose the uncomfortable and truly ugly parts of religion and the toll it can take on us. I wanted to work on this project because Mikah, Sten, Clara, and Dave are some of my favorite people and artists. The driving force really, as mentioned earlier, is that we wanted to create. We were all itching to create something. None of us needed this class credits-wise so the idea of coming together to tell a ghost story that echoes modern themes in a bare-bones, devised manner was extremely appealing. Unfortunately we were never able to perform this production because of COVID. But the devising process was an invaluable gem. We would each read the same chapter of The Turn of the Screw and then come to class with our own interpretation of this chapter in scene-form, creating dialogue and stage directions. Dave would then pull the pieces from each that rendered a clearer, more specific story and then we would go from there. When we would arrive in class we would also read each other's scenes out loud to get a feel for them. It was a marvelous process.

A "Quid Pro Quo"

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