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California Freemason: The Performance Issue

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Big Feelings

Sentimentality isn't just a hallmark of the Masonic ritual, theater scholar Pannill Camp says. It's the key to its longevity.

By Ian A. Stewart

The lights are dimmed, and the players take their places. The props are all laid out. The central character of the night’s drama enters, stage left. The action begins.

If that sounds a lot like a stage production, well, it should. But of course this Masonic drama is a degree conferral. As anyone who’s participated in it knows, the initiation ritual shares many of the qualities of the theater. In fact, the connection runs even deeper, argues Pannill Camp, a professor of performing arts at Washington University in St. Louis and an expert in the history of theater and dramaturgy. From its earliest days, he says, the Masonic ritual borrowed from the conventions of the stage. And in turn, it helped to influence the development and direction of Western theater.

Here, Camp, who is currently working on a book entitled Arts of Brotherhood: Eighteenth-Century French Freemasonry in Performance, explains how the rom-coms of the 1700s made their way into lodge, and how the Masonic ritual blurred the line between performance and spectacle and gave rise to a new Masonic drama.

Why did you feel drawn to studying the theatricality of the Masonic ritual?

Theater scholar Pennill Camp.
Theater scholar Pannill Camp.

Historians largely agree that the importance of Freemasonry was that it cultivated certain kinds of sociability—ways of relating to each other in an egalitarian way among men of different social classes. But that idea has become so ubiquitous that I think historians have stopped asking themselves what really went on in those rooms, and why the behaviors and the rituals and the performances were so structured, so detailed. And I think one of the answers to those questions has to do with theater and the way that theatrical performance was self-consciously oriented toward the cultivation of sentiment. 

In the documents I’ve seen, you get a sense for the way Masons were meant to feel toward each other as brothers—that this wasn’t simply a formal or artificial brotherhood, but was meant to draw you into an emotional relationship. So I imagine that people in those lodge settings indulged in some real feelings.

You’ve written that the emotion and sentiment in the Masonic ritual would have been very appealing to early initiates. Why is that?

Certainly, the theatricality of the ritual must have had appeal to the public. You can imagine a version of the ritual that’s much more procedural, like getting your high school diploma, where you dress up a little bit, and people congratulate you and say some words to signal you’ve reached a new stage. 

But in Masonry you get the display of significant objects, the symbols, the management of light and what’s visible to people at different times—not to mention stepping into different roles and performing as different people. That would seem to be a significant part of the experience. So, to me, that’s a sign that there’s a lot of thought and management of the way initiates experience this. 

The period I study—the 18th century in France—was a period of experimentation in different hybrid genres of theater, things like comédie larmoyante, or tearful, sentimental comedy. It’s meant to pluck the heartstrings. That type of theater, with these big, dramatic payoffs, was common at that time, and it’s something you see in the Masonic ritual, and particularly in the death of Hiram Abiff. So this kind of performance would seem to hold a real appeal for that audience.

It’s amazing to think that 300 years later, the Masonic ritual is largely unchanged, while that type of theater is such a relic of the past.

You can see in the thousands of Masonic documents I was able to study that while there’s a fair amount of conformity to the language of the ritual, there’s also variation from lodge to lodge in the ways they’d carry out the degrees. Not in terms of what’s spoken, but in the dressing of the building, the quality of the costumes, the extent to which people would consider the spectacle.

So the influence of theatrical trends would certainly have been felt in the degrees. At the moment when Hiram is discovered [in the 18th century French ritual], you have Masons all dab their eyes with handkerchiefs—it’s tantalizing to think about where people might have taken it.

How much of that exchange between Masonry and the theater moved in the other direction? Did Masonry have an influence on the stage?

Freemasonry was a really substantial phenomenon in 18th-century France, with close philosophical and cultural links to the French Revolution and Enlightenment France. Performance was a big part of that. And it’s not just the French theater-history part of this that’s significant, but also in English drama. For instance, there’s a play from 1730 called The London Merchant that had all these Masonic themes in it. It was produced by George Lillo, who people have speculated was a Mason. I won’t go into all the details, but one of The London Merchant’s most dramatic moments is this tearful departure between two friends. It’s a real elevation of the friendship between these two men.

The play ended up being translated into French by people known to be Masons in 1740s. That really was a significant chapter in the development of Western theater, so you could say Masonry contributed to the history of modern drama in that way.

Yet there seems to be some distinction between Masonic ritual performance and actual theater, right? Where’s the line?

That’s sort of the question that’s defined my academic discipline for the past 50 years. Starting in the 1970s, theater scholars have been making the argument that theater as we understand it, with scripts and roles, should be understood as a component of a broader thing called “performance,” which should include other cultural activities like religious ceremonies and ritual behavior. So there’s been a movement to think of theater and ritual alongside each other. Masonic ritual blurs the lines of some of the formal attributes of theater, like the separation of spectators and actors. That’s something that’s generally part of the tradition of drama going back to ancient Greece.

There’s also the idea of fictive representation, or the adoption of a role, where you’re speaking or appearing as another person. That’s something not all rituals have, but that’s a fundamental element of theater. It gives you an opportunity to put yourself in someone else’s situation. That’s what actors do.

Photo courtesy of:
Bibliothéque Nationale de France

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