Why do we feel the need to create a past that never was? What does the Renaissance Faire do for us that tabletop games and online forums can’t?
Growing up, my parents sold pottery at craft fairs throughout the Chicagoland area. One of these was the Bristol Renaissance Faire in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Every summer Saturday and Sunday at sunrise, we would load our silver minivan with boxes of pottery wrapped in newspaper. The drive was an hour or so, past the city and through the suburbs to the part of Illinois that is just corn. Dipping over the Illinois-Wisconsin border, we would turn off into the grassy expanse that served as parking for the faire.
At our booth, we would set up my parents' pottery and put on our stupid little bonnets or hair nets or whatever head covering we were required, for some reason, to wear that year. The gates would open on the other side of the grounds and patrons would begin trickling in.
Why do we feel the need to create a past that never was?
It’s hard to put into words the sensory experience that is a day at the Fairegrounds. From our booth, you could always hear the tinny ring of the dulcimer and sellers hawking their wares in questionable accents. You could see the glass blower across from us giving demonstrations. You could smell the savory turkey legs and fried mozzarella balls being carried by patrons and incense wafting from several booths down—and beneath these, the acrid smells of sweat, beer, and bug repellant. The smell of Deep Woods Off still propels me back there.
People who participate in Faire are not nostalgic for widespread disease or starvation—that’s clear from the titanic turkey legs alone. They’re nostalgic for a more embodied milieu. As ethnographer Staci Newmahr writes, “Faire transgresses somatic boundaries, and Fairegoers make different, carnally enjoyable, senses of these transgressions in the bracketed space of the Faire.”
Roleplay and physicality are central to Faire’s collective fantasy. Polite society does not foreground the body, and safely bracketed, somatically blurry spaces like the faire are increasingly few and far between. From this perspective, the faire isn’t about escaping, but about being together in a way that urban space once provided for but now precludes. What keeps people coming back summer after summer is the paradoxical promise of an ephemeral but embodied space.
As a kid, Faire was just my parents’ job, and days felt long and boring. Once I was old enough, I would wander around and around the rambling loop of the Fairegrounds. I would thoughtfully consider Robin Hood and his band of merry men as they popped up to perform their skits at the same locations again and again. I would watch the joust, where the same people won again and again.
Everything at Bristol, as at most Faires, happens again and again. This is because, as stated on the Bristol Renaissance Faire’s website, “Once you enter the portal gates, you travel back in time to the year 1574, and you’ve walked right into an exciting village festival day. […] Queen Elizabeth, Herself, is visiting Bristol! It’s time to eat, drink and be merry!” An exciting village festival day, every Saturday and Sunday, nine weekends a year.
Sometimes, I would catch a show from Moonie, a comic-acrobat act. Every show, he would ask a pretty woman from the crowd to come up to the stage. He’d do some tricks and then ask her to kiss him on the cheek. At the last second, he would whip his head around and kiss her on the lips to raucous cheers. Every time I watched Moonie kiss a pretty and unsuspecting woman on the lips, I felt anxious for the day I looked old enough to be pulled on stage. I probably had nothing to worry about, because—at least in my experience—rennies don’t really pull rennies onto stage. Still, my anxiety was not entirely misplaced.
What keeps people coming back summer after summer is the paradoxical promise of an ephemeral but embodied space.
My mom stopped doing the Faire when I was nine and my parents divorced. I still went up on the weekends that my dad had custody of me and my brother, though. One weekend we brought my cousin. We were fourteen or fifteen and had started smoking cigarettes.
“When you ask them, don’t say you’re eighteen—they won’t believe you,” my cousin, a year older than me, instructed while we schemed to bum cigarettes from the patrons. “Just say you’re seventeen. Then they’ll believe you, but they’ll be like, whatever, what’s the difference.”
We walked down to the swampy pond where me and my brother had found, and several years later released, our painted turtle Swimmy. There was a couple smoking.
“Excuse me,” I said, my low voice jumping up an octave in a misled attempt at good manners. “Can me and my friend have a cigarette?” My cousin smiled encouragingly.
“How old are you, honey,” said the unsympathetic woman.
“Seventeen?” She rolled her eyes and shook her head.
“Aw, come on, Hellen,” her husband said, gesturing from my covered head to my period-appropriate leather slippers. I folded my arms to make my breasts appear as large as possible in my mom’s old bodice, which she’d given me to wear after deciding she never wanted to go back to the Faire. “Look at ‘em—they’re old enough.”
Back in my day, the slogan for the Bristol Renaissance Faire emblazoned on rural billboards approaching the grounds or newspaper ads in the city was “where fantasy rules.” When we rehash what the hell happened, my mom often adds, “...but whose fantasy?” to the end of this line. According to a Houston Chronical article published earlier this year, there have been 19 reports of sexual assault on the Texas Renaissance Festival Fairegrounds since 2013, ten of which appear to involve minors. There have also been multiple murders on the surrounding campgrounds. The fantasy, I would argue, has not been properly pruned.
Faire is wacky, and it’s tempting to dismiss it as nothing more than that. But the instinct that draws people to its carnivalesque nostalgia for a past that never was is fundamentally human, and we should consider what it tells us about ourselves in relation to each other and urban space. What can the past that never was tell us about the present that is?