, Publications of the Modern
Language
Association of America, vol.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v05
Moreover, the chorus hold up
'worthy dames, such as Penelope and Lucrece, as 'a mirrour
and a glasse to womankinde,' and exhort their hearers to resist
Cupid's assaults and be content with a moderate and virtuous
affection (choruses II, III, IV). An epilogue (of the kind which, no
Ah pleasant harborrow of my hartës thought.
Ah swete delight, joy, comfort of my life.
Ah cursed be his crueltie that wrought
thee this despite, and unto me such grefe,
to make me to behold thus with these eyes
thy woefull hart, and force me here to see
this dolefull sight. Alas, did not suffise
that with my hartes eyen continually
I did behold the same?
(Act V, sc. 2, 25—33. )
## p. 74 (#98) ##############################################
74
Early English Tragedy
doubt, would have been recited by 'sweet bully Bottom') assures
the ladies in the audience that such inordinate passions are
unknown in Britain land':
Nor Pluto heareth English ghostes complaine
our dames disteined lyves. Therfore ye may
be free from fere. Suffiseth to mainteine
the vertues which we honor in yow all :
80 as our Britain ghostes, when life is past,
may praise in heven, not plaine in Plutoes hall
oor dames, but hold them vertuous and chast,
worthy to live where furie never came,
where Love can see, and beares no deadly bowe.
In this way, the interests of morality and the authors' reputa-
tions were saved, but at the sacrifice of much that was valuable
in the original story, which the dramatists supplemented from
other sources. Their thoughts, naturally, would be directed to
classical examples of unhappy passion-Phaedra and Dido. The
latter had been made the subject of a tragedy by Dolce (1547),
and to this, undoubtedly, our authors had recourse. At the
opening of their play, Cupid comes down from heaven and speaks
the following lines:
:
Loe I, in shape that seme unto your sight
a naked boy, not clothed but with wing,
am that great god of love that with my might
do rule the world, and everie living thing.
This one hand beares vain hope, short joyfull state,
with faire semblance the lover to allure:
this other holdes repentance all to late,
warr, fiër, blood, and paines without recure.
On swete ambrosia is not my foode,
nor nectar is my drink, as to the rest
of all the Goddes. I drink the lovers blood,
and eate the living bart within his brest.
Cupid, likewise, opens Dolce's Didone, and the lines quoted above
are merely a translation and re-arrangement of the Italian
original :
Io, che dimostro in viso,
A la statura, e à i panni,
D'esser picciol fanciullo,
Si come voi mortale:
Son quel gran Dio, che'l mondo chiama Amore.
Quel, che pò in cielo, e in terra,
Et nel bollente Averno;
Contra di cui non vale
Forza, ne human consiglio:
Ne d'ambrosia mi pasco,
Si come gli altri Dei,
## p. 75 (#99) ##############################################
Gismond
of Salerne
75
Ma di sangue, e di pianto.
Ne l'una mano io porto
Dubbia speme, fallace, e breve gioia ;
Ne l'altra affanno, e noia,
Pene, sospiri, e morti.
There are other parallels of less importance, but, as the play
proceeded, the divergence in the development of the plot of
Didone made it less suitable to the purpose of our authors, and
they supplied their lack of invention with commonplaces taken
direct from Seneca. As Dolce had done the same, it is hard to
say whether a great deal of act i is taken from the Italian's
borrowings or from the Latin original, but there are Senecan
reminiscences, at first or second hand, from Phaedra, Medea,
Thyestes, Oedipus, Agamemnon, Hercules Furens, Hercules
Oetacus and Octavia. The chorus of act I was, no doubt,
suggested by Octavia 298–312 and 689–695. Act III lays
Octavia and Phaedra under extensive contribution. The opening
of act iv, by Megaera, is taken direct from Thyestes, and the
invocation of Jove's thunder at the beginning of scene 2 may have
been suggested by the same play or by Phaedra, 679—690. This
stock device (which may be traced back to Sophocles : Electra,
823—6) had already been used in Gorboduc (end of act III,
sc. 1); and the original passage in Phaedra is misquoted in Titus
Andronicus, act iv, sc. 1, 81–82. But it is in act v of Gismond
of Salerne that Seneca is most openly plundered Lines 1-2,
21-38, 40–42, 45–68, 149—167, 182—188 and 207–208 are
merely translations of Seneca, chiefly from Thyestes.
When due deductions are made for what the authors borrowed
from Boccaccio, Dolce and Seneca, not much remains to be
credited to their own originality. Of the characters neither found
nor implied in Boccaccio's novel, Cupid is taken from Dolce;
Renuchio, Megaera and the chorus from Seneca ; Lucrece and
Claudia are the conventional confidantes of classical tragedy.
The order of events, in the main, is that of the novel, though a
noteworthy change is made in that, after the discovery, Tancred
sends for his daughter before he meets her lover-with this
disadvantage, that, at the time of the interview, Gismond is not
made aware of Guiscard's imprisonment and impending fate.
The one important addition made by the English dramatists to
Boccaccio's story is the death of Tancred, and this is only
announced as an intention in the action, though we are informed
parenthetically in the epilogue that he ‘now himself hath slayen. '
## p. 76 (#100) #############################################
76
Early English Tragedy
In the later version of the tragedy which Wilmot prepared for
publication, Tancred plucks out his eyes after the example of
Oedipus and kills himself on the stage. The same elaboration
of the horrible is to be noted in the dumb-show introducing the
fifth act in the edition of 1591.
Before this act was a dead march played, during which entered on the
stage Renuchio, Captain of the Guard, attended upon by the guard. They
took up Guiscard from under the stage; then after Guiscard had kindly
taken leave of them all, a strangling-cord was fastened about his neck, and
he haled forth by them. Renuchio bewaileth it; and then, entering in,
bringeth forth a standing cup of gold, with a bloody heart reeking hot in it,
and then saith, ut sequitur.
These dumb - shows are realistic rather than allegorical in
character, and set forth the action of the drama without words,
as in the play within the play in Hamlet. In the earlier version,
there are no dumb-shows, properly so called. Cupid opens the
first and third acts, but this device of a prologue was taken, as we
have seen, from Dolce, who also introduces Cupid and the shade
of Sichaeus at the beginning of act II of Didone, in obvious
imitation of the fury Megaera and the shade of Tantalus at the
opening of Seneca's Thyestes. The English dramatists' Megaera
(act iv) might be suggested by this passage in Didone, in which
.
she is mentioned by name, but, more probably, was taken from
Seneca direct. The choruses are recited by four gentlemen of
Salerne; and the versification turns back from the blank verse
of Gorboduc and Jocasta to the older rimed measures—a re-
trogression which Wilmot, in the later version, was at some pains
to correct. Cupid comes down from heaven, and Megaera up
from hell, marking a slight advance in stage machinery; and it
appears from the last line of the revised edition that curtains
were used. The scene is restricted to the court of Tancred's
palace and the chamber of Gismond lying immediately behind
it-the chamber within,' which was afterwards to become a
habitual resource of the popular stage—but there is no attempt
to observe the unity of time. The treatment of the plot, though
poorly contrived, is episodical, and this is an important point,
for it is characteristic of English tragedy that it aims at presenting
the whole course of the action, in its inception, development and
consequences, rather than a particular situation or crisis, as was
the custom in Senecan tragedy, and its Italian and French
imitations. The one merit of Gismond of Salerne is that it
endeavours to present a romantic subject with something of the
## p. 77 (#101) #############################################
>
The Misfortunes of Arthur
77
gravity and dignity of classical tragedy. From the latter point of
view, its superiority to its immediate predecessors, Damon and
Pithias and Horestes, is abundantly manifest; and, in both
interest of theme and manner of treatment, it surpasses the
earlier and more academic models. Gorboduc is overweighted
.
with political reflections, and the plot loses itself in abstrac-
tions. Jocasta has the double disadvantage of a time-worn
theme and frigid manner of presentation. Gismond of Salerne
struck out a new path, in which later dramatists followed with
infinitely greater art. It seems a far cry from Gismond and
Guiscard to the ‘pair of star-cross'd lovers' of Shakespeare's first
Italian tragedy ; but the Gentlemen of the Inner Temple at least
attempted what he achieved—to present the problem of human
passion sub specie eternitatis.
The most elaborate effort of its kind that has come down to
us was the Gray's inn entertainment presented to the queen in
1588, of which The Misfortunes of Arthur, by Thomas Hughes,
was the principal feature. The dumb-shows were more complex
in their apparatus and allegorical significance than ever before,
and, evidently, were regarded as of primary importance, for the
title of the pamphlet contemporaneously published reads: Certaine
devises and shewes presented to her Majestie by the Gentlemen of
Grayes-Inne at her Highnesse Court in Greenewich, the twenty
eighth day of Februarie in the thirtieth yeare of her Majesties
most happy Raigne, making no mention of the tragedy. "The
dumbe showes,' we are finally informed,
were partly devised by Maister Christopher Yelverton, Maister Frauncis
Bacon, Maister John Lancaster and others, partly by the saide Maister
Flower, who with Maister Penroodocke and the said Maister Lancaster
directed these proceedings at Court.
Alternative introductory and final speeches for Gorlois, and two
alternative choruses, were provided by Flower, and the whole
entertainment was prefaced by an elaborate introduction penned
by Nicholas Trotte; in this, five gentlemen students were
presented to her majesty as captives by one of the muses, who
assured the queen that
since your sacred Majestie
In gratious hands the regall Scepter held
All Tragedies are fled from State, to stadge.
As this was in the interval between the execution of Mary queen
of Scots and the coming of the Armada, the compliment was
extravagant enough to satisfy even Elizabeth's inordinate appetite
## p. 78 (#102) #############################################
78 Early English Tragedy
M
-
1
for flattery; and, all things considered, it is no wonder that, a few
years later', the queen said that Gray's inn was 'an House she
was much beholden unto, for that it did always study for some
sports to present unto her. The study undertaken by Thomas
Hughes and his collaborators in 1587—8 was no light one.
Following the example of Sackville and Norton, Hughes found
a subject in ancient British legend and chose the same main
authority-Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae.
This is proved” by the adoption of the main outlines of the story
as they are found in Geoffrey and of his forms of proper names-
Gorlois, Igerna, Anne (Arthur's sister), Cador, Gillamor, Cheldrich,
Aschillus, Hoel, Angharad, Conan. But Hughes had recourse to
other versions of the story as well—probably Malory's Morte
d'Arthur-for we have also such forms as Guenevora, Mordred,
Gawin, not found in Geoffrey. The incestuous birth of Mordred,
and the slaughter of Arthur and Mordred by each other's hands,
are in Malory and not in Geoffrey, who describes Mordred as
Arthur's nephew. These additional horrors, doubtless, were
selected by Hughes in order to bring his theme up to the level
of Senecan sensationalism. In this, he was following the classical
tradition of the time, and, no doubt, pleasing the queen, whose
blank verse translation from the Hercules Oetaeus is still pre-
served in the Bodleian library, though, according to Warton, it
has ‘no other recommendation but its royalty. ' Hughes chose as
his first model the most horrible of Seneca's tragedies, Thyestes.
The ghost of Gorlois, who comes up from hell to recite the first
scene, is merely the Tantali umbra of Thyestes in another guise,
and lines 22—28 are translated literally from this source. In the
next scene, between Guenevora and Fronia, Thyestes proved in-
adequate to the demands made upon it, and the words of the
injured or erring wives of Agamemnon, Hercules Oetaeus and
Medea are reproduced; how extensive the borrowing is may
be judged from the fact that in Guenevora's longest speech
(19—47) there is only one original line (20), and that is a common-
place, quite in Seneca's manner. In the third scene, the general
relation of Guenevora to Angharad is that of Phaedra to her
nurse, but Hercules Furens, Medea, Thebais and Oedipus are
also put under contribution, Guenevora's longest speech (43—54)
being again taken entirely from Seneca. The conversation between
Mordred and Guenevora in scene 4 is modelled on that of
1 At the Gesta Grayorum, 1594. Nichols's Progresses, vol. III, p. 319.
? In the edition of the play by Grumbine, H. C.
## p. 79 (#103) #############################################
The Misfortunes of Arthur
79
Aegisthus and Clytemnestra in Agamemnon; Conan, in the latter
part of the scene, introduces some of the sententious precepts put
into the mouth of Seneca in Octavia. Then the chorus, four in
number according to established tradition, recite, each in turn, a
six lined stanza: this division of the chorus, which occurs again in
the dialogue of the fifth act, is the one innovation Hughes has
introduced.
It is hardly worth while to follow the dramatist in his
borrowings through act II (where they are almost as extensive)
and through the rest of the play to the last lines of the
epilogue, which still echo Seneca ; but one feature which affected
Elizabethan tragedy throughout its history may be noted. The
earlier dramatists had attempted, without much success, to imitate
Seneca's stichomythia. Hughes copied this staccato style of
antithetical and epigrammatic dialogue very closely. The following
lines, of which only the first is taken from Thyestes, may serve as
an example:
CADOR. To rule is much. ARTHUR Small if we covet naught.
CA. Who covets not a Crowne ? AR. He that discernes
The swoord aloft. Ca. That hangeth fast. AR. But by
A haire. Ca. Right holdes it up. AR. Wrong puls it downe.
CA. The Commons helpe the King. AR. They sometimes hurt.
This device is of frequent occurrence in later tragedy, and is
sometimes very effectively used by Shakespeare, e. g. in the opening
scenes of Richard III and of Hamlet.
The characters of The Misfortunes of Arthur not only indulge
freely in Senecan aphorisms, but are cast in the regular Senecan
moulds. Mordred is the typical usurper, Guenevora the faithless
.
wife, and the messengers, counsellors and confidants show few
gleams of personality; but an exception must be made in the
case of Arthur, who, perhaps, is the first well-conceived character
of English academic tragedy. Of course, he utters many Senecan
commonplaces, but he is not a merely conventional type. His
inclination to deal gently with his son is finely contrasted with his
vigorous address to his troops when he is roused to action by
Mordred's insolent message ; and his lament over his son's body
has been justly admired, in spite of a touch here and there of
Senecan rhetoric. His last words breathe a dignity and mystery
.
not unworthy of the situation :
Yea: though I Conquerour die, and full of Fame:
Yet let my death and parture rest obscure.
No grave I neede (0 Fates) nor buriall rights,
Nor stately hearce, nor tombe with haughty toppe:
## p. 80 (#104) #############################################
80 Early English Tragedy
But let my Carkasse lurk: yea, let my death
Be ay unknowen, so that in every Coast
I still be feard, and lookt for every houre.
The blank verse of Hughes, though it is still monotonous, has
more power and life than that of his predecessors; and it seems
reasonable to regret that he did not rely more on his own efforts.
If he had left himself free to develop his theme according to
his own ideas, he would probably have filled a larger place in
the history of English tragedy, though, no doubt, the Senecan
patchwork he produced was more in accordance with the expecta-
tions of his audience.
It seems unnecessary to pursue the fortunes of the academic
drama further here; it had given to the stage standards of regularity
and dignity of which that stage was sorely in need, and it had
bestowed upon tragedy the blank verse which was to become its re-
cognised means of expression. We must now turn our attention to
those players of 'common Interludes in the Englishe tongue' who
were continually harried by the London civic authorities, and
alternately repressed and encouraged by the queen. The organi-
sation of strolling players and noblemen's servants into regular
companies, and the building of the first theatres, gave the drama
the standing of a profession, and attracted to it university wits,
who were soon to raise it to the dignity of an art. Whatever might
be the amount of their Latin, popular dramatists were not without
respect, according to their lights, for the authority of Seneca ;
they probably studied the tragedies at school, and were, perhaps,
taught as Hoole, one of the masters at Rotherham, recommended,
“how and wherein they may imitate them, and borrow something
out of them. The translation of Tenne Tragedies published
in 1581 gave even those devoid of classical lore the chance of
making themselves acquainted with some, at least, of Seneca's
characteristics. Troas had appeared as early as 1559, and all the
other plays except Thebais by 1566. Some, at any rate, of the
versions were intended, as Nevyle says of Oedipus, for 'tragicall
and pompous showe upon stage, but it is not known whether
they were ever acted. In any case, their influence upon writers
for the popular stage is beyond doubt. It was not against the
dramatists of the inns of court (they were university men and
went to the original Latin, as their versions show) that Thomas
Nashe, in the prefatory epistle to Greene's Menaphon (1589),
directed his jibe, Seneca let bloud line by line and page by page,
at length must needes die to our stage': it was against 'a sort of
## p. 81 (#105) #############################################
The Tenne Tragedies of Seneca 81
shifting companions . . . that could scarcelie latinize their necke-
verse if they should have neede. ' To these
English Seneca read by candle light yeeldes manie good sentences, as Bloud
is a begger, and so foorth: and if you intreate him faire in a frostie morning,
he will affoord you whole Hamlets, I should say handfulls of tragical
speaches.
It is not easy to give chapter and verse in support of Nashe's
accusation-he was too reckless a controversialist to be able
always to prove his statements by detailed evidence-but the
general inference to be made from his attack upon contemporary
dramatists is beyond question. Kyd, Marlowe and Marston saved
their credit as scholars by quoting Seneca in the original, but the
first-named—and he is probably the particular object of Nashe's
invective-also copied from Seneca without acknowledgment.
All three were indebted to him for the type of sensational and
rhetorical tragedy which they made popular, and smaller men, whose
work has now perished, would be no less affected. Elizabethan
tragedy adopted not only Seneca's five acts, and occasionally his
choruses, his stock characters-especially the prologuising ghost?
-and his philosophical commonplaces, but his exaggerated
passions, his crude horrors and his exuberant rhetoric. In the
induction to A warning for Faire Women (1599)—a play which,
itself, is an example of the faults it condemns—the typical
Elizabethan tragedy is described as telling
How some damn'd tyrant to obtain a crown
Stabs, hangs, impoisons, smothers, cutteth throats:
And then a Chorus, too, comes howling in
And tells us of the worrying of a cat:
Then, too, a filthy whining ghost,
Lapt in some foul sheet, or a leather pilch,
Comes screaming like a pig half stick',
And cries, Vindicta! -Revenge, Revenge!
Fortunately, more wholesome influences were brought to bear
on the popular stage by the renewed interest in English history
which followed the national triumph over the Armada, and which
the publication of chronicles enabled dramatists to gratify.
Thomas Legge's Richardus Tertius, acted at St John's college,
Cambridge, in 1573, 1579 and 1582 (if all the dates in the MSS are
1 See Boas, F. 8. , The Works of Thomas Kyd, introduction, pp. xvii, xxiv, xxxii,
XXXIV–XXXV, xlv; Otto, M. , Der Stil in Thomas Kyds Originaldramen (Berlin, 1905);
MacCallum, M. W. , •The Authorship of the Early Hamlet,' an English Miscellany
presented to Dr Furnivall (1901).
2 See Moorman, F. W. , The Pre-Shaksperean Ghost,' The Modern Language
Rerier, vol. I, p. 85 (Jan. 1906).
6
>
6
E. L. V.
CH, IV
## p. 82 (#106) #############################################
82
Early English Tragedy
>
correct), is a remarkable early example of the treatment, after the
Senecan manner, of a subject taken from comparatively recent
national history. This, in itself, distinguishes it from earlier Latin
plays, such as Buchanan's Jephthes and Johannes Baptistes and
Grimoald's Archipropheta, which treated scriptural subjects after
the classical model, and from later tragedies, such as Gager's,
which were classical both in matter and form? But, in spite of the
numerous manuscripts in which Richardus Tertius has come down
to us, and the references to it by Harington, Nashe and Meres,
Churchill, in his excellent treatise on the subject, seems to imply
too much when he says that 'to Legge was due the turning of the
drama in England in an entirely new direction. The character of
the earliest surviving history plays in the vernacular suggests that
the impulse to their composition was not academic but popular,
and their models not classical tragedy, at first or second hand,
but miracle-plays, the methods of which they apply to national
history, as had been done in France more than a century
before. The Famous Victories of Henry the fifth (printed 1598
and acted before 1588), by common consent the earliest example,
though, doubtless, it is later in date than Richardus Tertius,
departs as widely as possible from classical standards in its
utter formlessness, its lack not only of choruses but of acts, its
combination of comic and serious interests, its mixture of prose
with indifferent verse. The Troublesome Raigne of King John
(printed 1591), considered by A. W. Ward 'the best example of the
chronicle history pure and simple,' has nothing classical about
it, except a few scraps of Latin, mainly introduced for comic
effect. It appeals, with a good deal more art than the preceding
play, though there is still much to seek on this score, to the
national spirit, which had hitherto found dramatic expression
only in the folk-play. In the address "To the gentlemen readers'
(given in the edition of 1591, but omitted in that of 1611 reprinted
by Nichols), the dramatist frankly makes this patriotic interest
his first claim for attention :
You that with friendly grace of smoothed brow
Have entertained the Scythian Tamburlaine,
And given applause unto an Infidel:
Vouchsafe to welcome (with like curtesie)
A warlike Christian and your Countreyman.
1 See Churchill, G. B. and Keller, W. , "Die lateinischen Universitäts-Dramen
Englands in der Zeit der Königin Elizabeth,' Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare
Gesellschaft, vol. XXXIV (1898).
2 Richard the Third up to Shakespeare,' Palaestra, vol. 2 (1900).
6
## p. 83 (#107) #############################################
The True Chronicle History of King Leir 83
But the real hero of the play, as of that which Shakespeare
founded on it, is the bastard Fawconbridge, who is given due
prominence in the title, and whose character is developed with a
good deal of spirit and skill? . On the whole, however, the artistic
merits of the play have been exaggerated by recent critics ; blank
verse, rime and prose are used with the same careless facility,
and the scenes follow one another without any attempt at dramatic
construction. But in it, as in the earlier play, we catch the first
tones of the voice of Elizabethan England to which Shakespeare
gave fuller and nobler expression in the historical dramas founded
on these first rude attempts :
Let England live but true within it selfe,
And all the world can never wrong her State.
*
If Englands Peeres and people joyne in one,
Nor Pope, nor Fraunce, nor Spaine can doo them wrong.
Apart from the use made of it by Shakespeare, The True
Chronicle History of King Leir, and his three daughters,
Gonorill, Ragan, and Cordella (printed 1605 and probably acted
15943) has an interest of its own, though few will be found to
subscribe to the opinion* that 'the whole of this old drama is
incomparably and in every respect superior to Shakespeare's
adaptation. ' But it may be freely admitted that the old play
is well contrived, and written in a light, easy style which is not
unpleasing. In spite of its absurd disguises and coincidences, it
is an organic whole, and not a mere succession of events taken
haphazard from the chronicle, its main sources being, indeed,
Warner, Mirror for Magistrates and The Faerie Queene. The
contrast between the bearing of Cordella and her sisters is made
more natural by the fact that they have an advantage over her
in being informed beforehand that they will lose nothing by com-
pliance with their father's test of affection ; and the characters
!
1 The most striking episode, at the opening of the play, was apparently adapted by
the dramatist, with additions of his own, from a story told by Hall and Stow of the
bastard Dunois of Orleans. See Boswell-Stone, W. G. , Shakespeare's Holinshed,
pp. 48–50.
2 The same comment might be made on the pre-Shakespearean Richard II, printed
in Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 1899 (vol. xxxv), and commended by Boas in Fortnightly
Review, vol. LXXVII (1902), pp. 391-404, for its breadth of canvass, its insight into
popular feeling, and its abundant comic relief. '
* On this point see Perrett, W. , 'The Story of King Lear,' Palaestra, vol. xxxv,
and Law, R. A.
, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. xxI,
pp. 462–477 (1906).
* Leo Tolstoi, in Fortnightly Review, Jan. 1907, vol. LXXXVII, p. 66.
6-2
## p. 84 (#108) #############################################
84
Early English Tragedy
are clearly, though not deeply, conceived. There is a solitary
Senecan aphorism (“For fear of death is worse than death itself');
but the play is free, alike from the tedious commonplaces of
academic tragedy, and from the extravagant rhetoric which
Tamburlaine had brought into vogue. This is partly due to
the dramatist's vein of humour, not always duly restrained, but
seasoned with salt enough to withstand the changes of time.
Occasionally, he seems to criticise the absurdity of his own
dramatic expedients. There is more point than was, perhaps,
apparent to the author in Mumford's comment upon the disguised
king's extraordinary speed in the wooing of Cordella ;
Have Palmers weeds such power to win fayre Ladies?
Fayth, then I hope the next that falles is myne:
Upon condition I no worse might speed,
I would for ever weare a Palmers weed.
I like an honest and playne dealing wench,
That sweares (without exceptions) I will have yon.
These soppets, that know not whether to love a man or no,
except they first go aske their mothers leave, by this hand, I
hate them ten tymes worse then poyson.
KING.
What resteth then our happinesse to procure ?
MUMFORD.
Fayth, go to Church, to make the matter sure.
KING.
It shall be so, because the world shall say,
King Leirs three daughters were wedded in one day:
The celebration of this happy chaunce,
We will deferre, untill we come to Fraunce.
MUMFORD.
I like the wooing, that's not long a doing.
Well, for her sake, I know what I know:
Ile never marry whilest I live,
Except I have one of these Brittish Ladyes,
My humour is alienated from the mayds of Fraunce.
The Lamentable Tragedie of Locrine (Newly set foorth,
overseene and corrected. By W. S. 1595) is a play of unusual
interest, not only because of the questions of authorship it raises,
but because of its combination of the diverse streams of influence
to which the drama was by this time subject. It adopts the dumb-
shows of academic tragedy, with Até as chorus; it has two ghosts
and a duplicated revenge motive; the opening scene is imitated
## p. 85 (#109) #############################################
Locrine and Selimus
85
.
from Gorboduc; and there are numerous transcripts from Seneca'.
But it has also a large and lively comic element and a good
deal of stage fighting, and it borrows freely from Kyd, Marlowe,
Greene, Peele and Lodge, and from Spenser's Complaints (entered
in the Stationers' register 29 December 1590, and containing, in
The Ruines of Time, a reference to the death of Sir Francis
Walsingham, 6 April 1590). The dramatist has been accused
of borrowing from another play, very similar in style, The First
part of the Tragicall raigne of Selimus (printed 1594); but, in this
case, the obligation seems to be the other way. The contributions
to this interesting controversy have been numerous and varied.
Tieck marked a number of parallels between Locrine and
Spenser's Complaints in his copy of the fourth folio of Shake-
speare; but these were first published, with a few additions by
R. Brotanek, in 19002 P. A. Daniel had already drawn attention
to the almost identical passages in Locrine and Selimus. Charles
Crawford, who had undertaken the same investigation at the
instigation of Grosart, charged the author of Locrine with
wholesale 'cribbing' from Selimus, supporting the accusation with
an elaborate array of parallel passages". Emil Koeppel's attention
was called to Crawford's articles by a summary of them published
in the Shakespeare Jahrbuch; and, after an examination of the
text, he arrived at an exactly opposite conclusion, viz. that
Selimus borrowed from Locrine5. The same conclusion had
been reached independently by F. G. Hubbard of the university
of Wisconsin, and has since been supported by him with further
evidence in a paper to which he kindly gave the present writer
access before its publication. It is pointed out that the comic
scene in Locrines, which is paralleled in Selimus, stands alone
in the latter play, while, in Locrine, there is much other low
humour of the same kind in connection with the same characters.
Hubbard adds to this argument in favour of the priority of
Locrine some important considerations with reference to the lines
Cf. the passage in the second scene beginning (11. 68—9)
But what so ere the fates determind have,
It lieth not in us to disannull,
with Oedipus 1001—16 : Fatis agimur : cedite fatis.
? Beiblatt zur Anglia, vol. xi, pp. 202—7.
3 In a letter to The Athenæum of 16 April 1898, p. 512.
* In a series of papers contributed to Notes and Queries in 1901 (Ser. Ix, vol. vir).
- Koeppel's paper was published in Jahrbuch for 1905 (vol. XLI, pp. 193—200). See,
also, Churton Collins, J. , The Plays and Poems of Robert Greene, vol. I, pp. 61–67;
Tucker Brooke, C. F. , The Shakespeare Apocrypha, pp. xvi—xx; Malone Society Col-
lections (1908), part 11, pp. 108–110. As to Locrine, cf. post, chap. x, and as to Selimus,
chap. VI.
8 Act iv, so. 2.
## p. 86 (#110) #############################################
86 Early English Tragedy
in both plays taken from Spenser's Complaints. Locrine has
many such lines not found in Selimus, but (with the possible
exception of a single line) Selimus has nothing from the Com-
plaints not found in Locrine. Moreover, one of these borrowed
lines in Selimus is followed by five other lines not found in
the Complaints, but found in Locrine. A consideration of the
whole passage in Locrine and its relation to the parallel lines
in Selimus and the Complaints bears out the contention that the
borrowings from the Complaints in Selimus were made through
Locrine? . The following parallels in the two plays show that the
The Ruines of Rome, 149—160 :
Then gan that Nation, th' earths new giant brood,
*To dart abroad the thunder bolts of warre,
*And, beating downe these walls with furious mood
Into her mothers bosome, all did marre ;
To th' end that none, all were it Jove his sire,
Should boast himselfe of the Romane Empire.
Like as whilome the children of the earth
*Heapt hils on hils to scale the starrie skie,
And fight against the gods of heavenly berth,
Whiles Jove at them his thunderbolts let fie;
All suddenly with lightning overthrowne,
*The furious squadrons downe to ground did fall.
(The lines copied are marked with an asterisk. )
Locrine, 800–811:
How bravely this yoong Brittain Albanact
+Darteth abroad the thunderbolts of warre,
Beating downe millions with his furious moode;
And in his glorie triumphs over all,
+ Mo[w]ing the massie squadrants of the ground;
+Heape hills on hills, to scale the starrie skie,
+ When Briareus armed with an hundreth hands
+Floong forth an hundreth mountains at great Jove,
tAnd when the monstrous giant Monichus
+Hurld mount Olimpus at great Mars his targe,
+And shot huge cædars at Minervas shield.
(The lines copied in Selimus are marked with a dagger. )
Selimus, 415, 416 :
Ide dart abroad the thunderbolts of warre,
And mow their hartlesse squadrons to the ground.
Selimus, 2423–9:
As those old earth-bred brethren, which once
Heape hill on hill to scale the starrie skie,
When Briareus arm'd with a hundreth hands,
Flung forth a hundreth mountaines at great Jove,
And when the monstrous giant Monichus
Hurld mount Olimpus at great Mars his targe,
And darted cedars at Minervas shield.
## p. 87 (#111) #############################################
Locrine and Selimus
87
author of the later drama outheroded Herod in the current
practice of plagiarism :
Locrine, 1303–6:
Where I may damne, condemne and ban my fill,
The heavens, the hell, the earth, the aire, the fire,
And utter curses to the concave skie,
Which may infect the aiery regions.
Selimus, 1803–5:
Now Bajazet will ban another while,
And utter curses to the concave skie,
Which may infect the regions of the ayre.
Locrine, 793–6:
And but thou better use thy bragging blade,
Then thou doest rule thy overflowing toong,
Superbious Brittaine, thou shalt know too soone
The force of Humber and his Scithians.
Selimus, 245760:
But thou canst better use thy bragging blade,
Then thou canst rule thy, overflowing tongue,
Soone shalt thou know that Selims mightie arme
Is able to overthrow poore Tonombey.
All this does not help us much as to the authorship of the
two plays, except negatively. It seems fairly certain that they
were not written by the same man, for it is unlikely that even
an Elizabethan dramatist would repeat himself to the extent
indicated above, and, as Crawford pointed out, Selimus has
numerous borrowings from The Faerie Queene, while Locrine has
none. The light thrown on the respective dates of the two plays
is more significant. Locrine, in its present shape, cannot have
been completed before 1591, when Spenser's Complaints was
published. Subsidiary proof of this is found by Hubbard in the
line near the end of act v, 'One mischief follows on another's
neck,' apparently copied from Tancred and Gismund (pub. 1591,
with prefatory letter dated 8 August 1591)-'One mischief
brings another on his neck'-a line not given in the earlier MS
version of the play. Selimus was later than Locrine, from which
it copied, and, as Greene died on 3 September 1592, this brings the
issue of his authorship of the play within narrow limits. The dates
also disprove Crawford's theory that Selimus was Marlowe's first
play.
It is remarkable that, at this late date, when new and potent
6
## p. 88 (#112) #############################################
88 Early English Tragedy
influences had begun to work upon English tragedy, a writer for
the popular stage should retain characteristic features of the type
of tragedy which the dramatists of the inns of court had founded
upon
the model of Seneca and his Italian imitators. Some of these
features——the ghost and the revenge motive, sensational horrors
and rhetorical exaggerations, philosophical reflections and highly
polished lyrical or descriptive passages-became permanent char-
acteristics, for good or ill, of Elizabethan tragedy. Other elements
were taken from other sources ; and, no doubt, it is well to keep
in mind that, after the establishment of public theatres, writers
of tragedies and historical plays gave their main attention to
popular taste and national tradition, not to the classical authori-
ties held in esteem in the universities and the inns of court, from
which English tragedy had received its first bent. But, in theory,
at any rate, the playwrights still honoured classical precepts and
example; and their practice, though it departed widely from
classical models, was not so lawless as it would have been without
this restraining force. The valuable part of the Elizabethan
inheritance from the classics in tragedy was, indeed, not that which
lies on the surface-such mechanical devices as the use of the
chorus and the division into five acts, the ghost and other exag-
gerated horrors; it was something more subtle and difficult to
trace—the conception of a real, though not a formal, unity of
interest, dignity of persons and decorum of style.
## p. 89 (#113) #############################################
CHAPTER V
EARLY ENGLISH COMEDY
ONE of the leading notes of medieval literature in all its forms
is its impersonality. Its most characteristic products of romance
or saga or song bear the impress, not of an individual writer's art,
but of the collective genius of a nation or an epoch. This is
equally true of medieval drama, both of those scriptural and
allegorical plays by which the church sought at once to entertain
and edify all classes, and of the farces which, in continental
countries, were a still more spontaneous product of the popular
instinct for the theatre. Thus, it is a sign of the passing of the
old order, when the historian of the English stage is for the first
time confronted, not by the shadowy and elusive forms of the
writers to whom we owe the miracles and earlier morality plays,
but by the authentic figure of a dramatist the record of whose
career is still in part extant in letters, legal documents and state
archives.
John Heywood was born towards the close of the fifteenth
century, in 1497 or 1498. In a letter to Burghley from Malines
(18 April 1575), he speaks of himself as seventy-eight years of age.
E. P. Droeshout, a Jesuit father, in a manuscript Histoire de la
Compagnie de Jésus à Anvers, speaks of him in April 1578 as
a 'vieillard octogénaire. ' J. Pitseus says that he was born in
London; and, as Pitseus was well acquainted with Heywood's
younger son, Jasper, the statement may be accepted as correct.
At an early age? , Heywood entered the royal service, probably as a
chorister. On 6 January 1514—15, he is set down in the Book of
Payments of Henry VIII as receiving 'wages 8d. per day,' and, in
1519, he appears as a 'singer. ' In 1526, he received, as a 'player
1 See Bang, W. , •Acta Anglo-Lovaniensia : John Heywood und sein Kreis,'
Englische Studien, vol. XXXVIII, pp. 234—250. From manuscript and documentary
sources Bang has thrown valuable new light upon Heywood's relationships, and upon
his later years in the Netherlands.
? [See addenda. )
2
## p. 90 (#114) #############################################
90
Early English Comedy
>
3
6
of the virginals,' the quarterly wage of £6. 138. 4d. , and, between
1538 and 1542, he is mentioned frequently in the same capacity at
a much lower salary. But, evidently, he was also engaged in other
ways. In January 1536/7, his servant was paid 20d. for bringing
princess Mary's 'regalles' (hand-organ) from London to Green-
wich; and, in March of the following year, 40s. were paid him for
playing an interlude with his 'children’ before the princess. These
children’ probably belonged to the song-school of St Paul's
cathedral.
Heywood is said to have been introduced to the princess by
Sir Thomas More. He belonged to More's circle by virtue of
his marriage with Eliza Rastell, though the details of the relation-
ship are often incorrectly given. More's sister, Elizabeth, married
John Rastell, lawyer and printer. Their daughter Eliza became
Heywood's wife, and their elder son, William, was the printer of
two or more of his comedies! . In his combination of orthodoxy
with love of letters and with zeal for practical reform, and of exu-
berant gaiety of spirit with the constancy of martyrdom to his faith,
Heywood was a true kinsman, in spirit as well as in fact, of the
author of Utopia. His religious convictions brought him into
serious danger more than once in the later years of Henry VIII and
under Edward VI; but with the accession of Mary his fortunes rose
to their highest point. At her coronation, he sat in a pageant
under a vine against the school in St Paul's churchyard. In 1553,
he presented a play of children at court. In 1558, Mary granted
him a lease of the manor of Bolmer and other lands in Yorkshire;
but her death, later in the year, drove him and others of his circle
to the continent, where he settled at Malines. The state papers
of the ensuing period contain a number of references to him in
his exile; his letter to Burghley of April 1575, in which he thanks
him for ordering the arrears from his land at Romney to be paid
him, has already been mentioned. In the following year, as has
recently been shown from manuscript sources? , he was brought by
his eldest son, Elizaeus, to the Jesuit college at Antwerp, where
he remained till May 1578. At Whitsuntide, the college was
attacked by a mob. Its members, including the two Heywoods,
were expelled and, after perilous experiences, found refuge at
Louvain. Here, presumably, he remained till his death; but there
is no further record till 1587, when he is spoken of by Thomas
Newton as dead and gone. '
1 See post, p. 92.
See Englische Studien, vol. XXXVIII, pp. 236, 237.
a
## p. 91 (#115) #############################################
John Heywood's Interludes
91
Thus, in actual span of years, Heywood's diversified career
lasted to the eve of, and may possibly have extended into, the
decade when Shakespeare's chief predecessors were in full dramatic
activity. But his extant plays all belong to the reign of Henry VIII,
and four of these (including two assigned to him on general
internal evidence) were printed in 1533. Thus, they date from a
period when the morality was still a popular dramatic form,
though often with a theological, political, or educational trend.
It is Heywood's distinctive achievement that in his plays he
dispenses with allegorical machinery and didactic aim, and gives
a realistic representation of contemporary citizen types. His
'new and very mery enterludes,' as they are designated on the title-
pages, therefore bring us far on the road towards fully developed
comedy, though action and individual characterisation are still,
for the most part, lacking; and it becomes a problem of firstrate
interest for the historian of the drama whether Heywood's de-
cisive innovation in theatrical methods was or was not due to
foreign influences. The traditional view has been that he was the
lineal successor of the writers of moralities; that, whereas some
of them had introduced low life scenes under a transparent disguise
of allegory, Heywood had taken the further step of dispensing
with disguise entirely. According to this theory, the native
English drama developed by an inner organic impulse from the
Biblical to the allegorical phase, and thence to the human
comedy' of Heywood.
But recent investigations indicate that Heywood's novel type
of play was influenced by foreign models; that his stimulus came,
not mainly from the realistic elements in the moralities, but from
the soties or farces which had long been popular in France!
If similar productions existed to any wide extent in medieval
England, of which there is no proof, they have left only one
survival, the fragmentary Interludium de Clerico et Puella? . In any
case, he could not have had any difficulty in familiarising himself
with part of the repertory of the contemporary French stage.
During the earlier Tudor reigns, there was active intercourse
between the courts on both sides of the Channel. There is
official record of visits of 'Frenche Pleyers' in 1494 and 1495,
and of '6 Mynstrells of France' about fourteen years later. No
documentary evidence of similar visits in Henry VIII's reign has
7
1 See, especially, Young, K. , “Influence of French Farce upon Jobn Heywood,'
Modern Philology, vol. II, pp. 97-124.
2 Cf. ante, chaps. II and III.
## p. 92 (#116) #############################################
92 Early English Comedy
6
yet been found, but they probably took place, and the story of
Maistre Pierre Patelin had found its way into English at least as
early as 1535. And between three plays traditionally assigned to
Heywood and three French works, as is shown more fully below,
the parallelism in design and treatment cannot be accidental.
While the fact of the relationship between Heywood's inter-
ludes and Gallic farce may, therefore, be taken as generally proved,
definite statements on details are hazardous, partly because of the
uncertainty of dates, and partly because the canon of Heywood's
plays cannot be fixed beyond dispute. Two interludes, The Play
of the wether and A play of love, were first printed by William
Rastell in 1533 and 15341 respectively, and have Heywood's name
on the title-page. The Play called the foure P. P. , is assigned to
him in the three editions issued by W. Myddleton, W. Copland
and J. Allde, of which only the last (1569) is dated. A Dialogue
concerning Witty and Witless is preserved in a British Museum
manuscript ending ‘Amen qd John Heywood. ' In addition to
qa
these four unquestionably authentic plays, two others were printed
by William Rastell: A mery Play betwene the pardoner and the
frere, the curate and neybour Pratte, in 1533, and A mery play
betwene Johan the husbande Johan Tyb his wyfe & syr Jhān the
preest in 1533/4. A. W. Pollard was the first to lay stress on
the fact that these pieces, though always attributed to Heywood,
do not bear his name? . They may, however, be assigned to him
with reasonable certainty, as it is highly improbable that there
were two dramatists at work, closely akin in style and technique,
and both issuing plays simultaneously through Rastell's press? .
'worthy dames, such as Penelope and Lucrece, as 'a mirrour
and a glasse to womankinde,' and exhort their hearers to resist
Cupid's assaults and be content with a moderate and virtuous
affection (choruses II, III, IV). An epilogue (of the kind which, no
Ah pleasant harborrow of my hartës thought.
Ah swete delight, joy, comfort of my life.
Ah cursed be his crueltie that wrought
thee this despite, and unto me such grefe,
to make me to behold thus with these eyes
thy woefull hart, and force me here to see
this dolefull sight. Alas, did not suffise
that with my hartes eyen continually
I did behold the same?
(Act V, sc. 2, 25—33. )
## p. 74 (#98) ##############################################
74
Early English Tragedy
doubt, would have been recited by 'sweet bully Bottom') assures
the ladies in the audience that such inordinate passions are
unknown in Britain land':
Nor Pluto heareth English ghostes complaine
our dames disteined lyves. Therfore ye may
be free from fere. Suffiseth to mainteine
the vertues which we honor in yow all :
80 as our Britain ghostes, when life is past,
may praise in heven, not plaine in Plutoes hall
oor dames, but hold them vertuous and chast,
worthy to live where furie never came,
where Love can see, and beares no deadly bowe.
In this way, the interests of morality and the authors' reputa-
tions were saved, but at the sacrifice of much that was valuable
in the original story, which the dramatists supplemented from
other sources. Their thoughts, naturally, would be directed to
classical examples of unhappy passion-Phaedra and Dido. The
latter had been made the subject of a tragedy by Dolce (1547),
and to this, undoubtedly, our authors had recourse. At the
opening of their play, Cupid comes down from heaven and speaks
the following lines:
:
Loe I, in shape that seme unto your sight
a naked boy, not clothed but with wing,
am that great god of love that with my might
do rule the world, and everie living thing.
This one hand beares vain hope, short joyfull state,
with faire semblance the lover to allure:
this other holdes repentance all to late,
warr, fiër, blood, and paines without recure.
On swete ambrosia is not my foode,
nor nectar is my drink, as to the rest
of all the Goddes. I drink the lovers blood,
and eate the living bart within his brest.
Cupid, likewise, opens Dolce's Didone, and the lines quoted above
are merely a translation and re-arrangement of the Italian
original :
Io, che dimostro in viso,
A la statura, e à i panni,
D'esser picciol fanciullo,
Si come voi mortale:
Son quel gran Dio, che'l mondo chiama Amore.
Quel, che pò in cielo, e in terra,
Et nel bollente Averno;
Contra di cui non vale
Forza, ne human consiglio:
Ne d'ambrosia mi pasco,
Si come gli altri Dei,
## p. 75 (#99) ##############################################
Gismond
of Salerne
75
Ma di sangue, e di pianto.
Ne l'una mano io porto
Dubbia speme, fallace, e breve gioia ;
Ne l'altra affanno, e noia,
Pene, sospiri, e morti.
There are other parallels of less importance, but, as the play
proceeded, the divergence in the development of the plot of
Didone made it less suitable to the purpose of our authors, and
they supplied their lack of invention with commonplaces taken
direct from Seneca. As Dolce had done the same, it is hard to
say whether a great deal of act i is taken from the Italian's
borrowings or from the Latin original, but there are Senecan
reminiscences, at first or second hand, from Phaedra, Medea,
Thyestes, Oedipus, Agamemnon, Hercules Furens, Hercules
Oetacus and Octavia. The chorus of act I was, no doubt,
suggested by Octavia 298–312 and 689–695. Act III lays
Octavia and Phaedra under extensive contribution. The opening
of act iv, by Megaera, is taken direct from Thyestes, and the
invocation of Jove's thunder at the beginning of scene 2 may have
been suggested by the same play or by Phaedra, 679—690. This
stock device (which may be traced back to Sophocles : Electra,
823—6) had already been used in Gorboduc (end of act III,
sc. 1); and the original passage in Phaedra is misquoted in Titus
Andronicus, act iv, sc. 1, 81–82. But it is in act v of Gismond
of Salerne that Seneca is most openly plundered Lines 1-2,
21-38, 40–42, 45–68, 149—167, 182—188 and 207–208 are
merely translations of Seneca, chiefly from Thyestes.
When due deductions are made for what the authors borrowed
from Boccaccio, Dolce and Seneca, not much remains to be
credited to their own originality. Of the characters neither found
nor implied in Boccaccio's novel, Cupid is taken from Dolce;
Renuchio, Megaera and the chorus from Seneca ; Lucrece and
Claudia are the conventional confidantes of classical tragedy.
The order of events, in the main, is that of the novel, though a
noteworthy change is made in that, after the discovery, Tancred
sends for his daughter before he meets her lover-with this
disadvantage, that, at the time of the interview, Gismond is not
made aware of Guiscard's imprisonment and impending fate.
The one important addition made by the English dramatists to
Boccaccio's story is the death of Tancred, and this is only
announced as an intention in the action, though we are informed
parenthetically in the epilogue that he ‘now himself hath slayen. '
## p. 76 (#100) #############################################
76
Early English Tragedy
In the later version of the tragedy which Wilmot prepared for
publication, Tancred plucks out his eyes after the example of
Oedipus and kills himself on the stage. The same elaboration
of the horrible is to be noted in the dumb-show introducing the
fifth act in the edition of 1591.
Before this act was a dead march played, during which entered on the
stage Renuchio, Captain of the Guard, attended upon by the guard. They
took up Guiscard from under the stage; then after Guiscard had kindly
taken leave of them all, a strangling-cord was fastened about his neck, and
he haled forth by them. Renuchio bewaileth it; and then, entering in,
bringeth forth a standing cup of gold, with a bloody heart reeking hot in it,
and then saith, ut sequitur.
These dumb - shows are realistic rather than allegorical in
character, and set forth the action of the drama without words,
as in the play within the play in Hamlet. In the earlier version,
there are no dumb-shows, properly so called. Cupid opens the
first and third acts, but this device of a prologue was taken, as we
have seen, from Dolce, who also introduces Cupid and the shade
of Sichaeus at the beginning of act II of Didone, in obvious
imitation of the fury Megaera and the shade of Tantalus at the
opening of Seneca's Thyestes. The English dramatists' Megaera
(act iv) might be suggested by this passage in Didone, in which
.
she is mentioned by name, but, more probably, was taken from
Seneca direct. The choruses are recited by four gentlemen of
Salerne; and the versification turns back from the blank verse
of Gorboduc and Jocasta to the older rimed measures—a re-
trogression which Wilmot, in the later version, was at some pains
to correct. Cupid comes down from heaven, and Megaera up
from hell, marking a slight advance in stage machinery; and it
appears from the last line of the revised edition that curtains
were used. The scene is restricted to the court of Tancred's
palace and the chamber of Gismond lying immediately behind
it-the chamber within,' which was afterwards to become a
habitual resource of the popular stage—but there is no attempt
to observe the unity of time. The treatment of the plot, though
poorly contrived, is episodical, and this is an important point,
for it is characteristic of English tragedy that it aims at presenting
the whole course of the action, in its inception, development and
consequences, rather than a particular situation or crisis, as was
the custom in Senecan tragedy, and its Italian and French
imitations. The one merit of Gismond of Salerne is that it
endeavours to present a romantic subject with something of the
## p. 77 (#101) #############################################
>
The Misfortunes of Arthur
77
gravity and dignity of classical tragedy. From the latter point of
view, its superiority to its immediate predecessors, Damon and
Pithias and Horestes, is abundantly manifest; and, in both
interest of theme and manner of treatment, it surpasses the
earlier and more academic models. Gorboduc is overweighted
.
with political reflections, and the plot loses itself in abstrac-
tions. Jocasta has the double disadvantage of a time-worn
theme and frigid manner of presentation. Gismond of Salerne
struck out a new path, in which later dramatists followed with
infinitely greater art. It seems a far cry from Gismond and
Guiscard to the ‘pair of star-cross'd lovers' of Shakespeare's first
Italian tragedy ; but the Gentlemen of the Inner Temple at least
attempted what he achieved—to present the problem of human
passion sub specie eternitatis.
The most elaborate effort of its kind that has come down to
us was the Gray's inn entertainment presented to the queen in
1588, of which The Misfortunes of Arthur, by Thomas Hughes,
was the principal feature. The dumb-shows were more complex
in their apparatus and allegorical significance than ever before,
and, evidently, were regarded as of primary importance, for the
title of the pamphlet contemporaneously published reads: Certaine
devises and shewes presented to her Majestie by the Gentlemen of
Grayes-Inne at her Highnesse Court in Greenewich, the twenty
eighth day of Februarie in the thirtieth yeare of her Majesties
most happy Raigne, making no mention of the tragedy. "The
dumbe showes,' we are finally informed,
were partly devised by Maister Christopher Yelverton, Maister Frauncis
Bacon, Maister John Lancaster and others, partly by the saide Maister
Flower, who with Maister Penroodocke and the said Maister Lancaster
directed these proceedings at Court.
Alternative introductory and final speeches for Gorlois, and two
alternative choruses, were provided by Flower, and the whole
entertainment was prefaced by an elaborate introduction penned
by Nicholas Trotte; in this, five gentlemen students were
presented to her majesty as captives by one of the muses, who
assured the queen that
since your sacred Majestie
In gratious hands the regall Scepter held
All Tragedies are fled from State, to stadge.
As this was in the interval between the execution of Mary queen
of Scots and the coming of the Armada, the compliment was
extravagant enough to satisfy even Elizabeth's inordinate appetite
## p. 78 (#102) #############################################
78 Early English Tragedy
M
-
1
for flattery; and, all things considered, it is no wonder that, a few
years later', the queen said that Gray's inn was 'an House she
was much beholden unto, for that it did always study for some
sports to present unto her. The study undertaken by Thomas
Hughes and his collaborators in 1587—8 was no light one.
Following the example of Sackville and Norton, Hughes found
a subject in ancient British legend and chose the same main
authority-Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae.
This is proved” by the adoption of the main outlines of the story
as they are found in Geoffrey and of his forms of proper names-
Gorlois, Igerna, Anne (Arthur's sister), Cador, Gillamor, Cheldrich,
Aschillus, Hoel, Angharad, Conan. But Hughes had recourse to
other versions of the story as well—probably Malory's Morte
d'Arthur-for we have also such forms as Guenevora, Mordred,
Gawin, not found in Geoffrey. The incestuous birth of Mordred,
and the slaughter of Arthur and Mordred by each other's hands,
are in Malory and not in Geoffrey, who describes Mordred as
Arthur's nephew. These additional horrors, doubtless, were
selected by Hughes in order to bring his theme up to the level
of Senecan sensationalism. In this, he was following the classical
tradition of the time, and, no doubt, pleasing the queen, whose
blank verse translation from the Hercules Oetaeus is still pre-
served in the Bodleian library, though, according to Warton, it
has ‘no other recommendation but its royalty. ' Hughes chose as
his first model the most horrible of Seneca's tragedies, Thyestes.
The ghost of Gorlois, who comes up from hell to recite the first
scene, is merely the Tantali umbra of Thyestes in another guise,
and lines 22—28 are translated literally from this source. In the
next scene, between Guenevora and Fronia, Thyestes proved in-
adequate to the demands made upon it, and the words of the
injured or erring wives of Agamemnon, Hercules Oetaeus and
Medea are reproduced; how extensive the borrowing is may
be judged from the fact that in Guenevora's longest speech
(19—47) there is only one original line (20), and that is a common-
place, quite in Seneca's manner. In the third scene, the general
relation of Guenevora to Angharad is that of Phaedra to her
nurse, but Hercules Furens, Medea, Thebais and Oedipus are
also put under contribution, Guenevora's longest speech (43—54)
being again taken entirely from Seneca. The conversation between
Mordred and Guenevora in scene 4 is modelled on that of
1 At the Gesta Grayorum, 1594. Nichols's Progresses, vol. III, p. 319.
? In the edition of the play by Grumbine, H. C.
## p. 79 (#103) #############################################
The Misfortunes of Arthur
79
Aegisthus and Clytemnestra in Agamemnon; Conan, in the latter
part of the scene, introduces some of the sententious precepts put
into the mouth of Seneca in Octavia. Then the chorus, four in
number according to established tradition, recite, each in turn, a
six lined stanza: this division of the chorus, which occurs again in
the dialogue of the fifth act, is the one innovation Hughes has
introduced.
It is hardly worth while to follow the dramatist in his
borrowings through act II (where they are almost as extensive)
and through the rest of the play to the last lines of the
epilogue, which still echo Seneca ; but one feature which affected
Elizabethan tragedy throughout its history may be noted. The
earlier dramatists had attempted, without much success, to imitate
Seneca's stichomythia. Hughes copied this staccato style of
antithetical and epigrammatic dialogue very closely. The following
lines, of which only the first is taken from Thyestes, may serve as
an example:
CADOR. To rule is much. ARTHUR Small if we covet naught.
CA. Who covets not a Crowne ? AR. He that discernes
The swoord aloft. Ca. That hangeth fast. AR. But by
A haire. Ca. Right holdes it up. AR. Wrong puls it downe.
CA. The Commons helpe the King. AR. They sometimes hurt.
This device is of frequent occurrence in later tragedy, and is
sometimes very effectively used by Shakespeare, e. g. in the opening
scenes of Richard III and of Hamlet.
The characters of The Misfortunes of Arthur not only indulge
freely in Senecan aphorisms, but are cast in the regular Senecan
moulds. Mordred is the typical usurper, Guenevora the faithless
.
wife, and the messengers, counsellors and confidants show few
gleams of personality; but an exception must be made in the
case of Arthur, who, perhaps, is the first well-conceived character
of English academic tragedy. Of course, he utters many Senecan
commonplaces, but he is not a merely conventional type. His
inclination to deal gently with his son is finely contrasted with his
vigorous address to his troops when he is roused to action by
Mordred's insolent message ; and his lament over his son's body
has been justly admired, in spite of a touch here and there of
Senecan rhetoric. His last words breathe a dignity and mystery
.
not unworthy of the situation :
Yea: though I Conquerour die, and full of Fame:
Yet let my death and parture rest obscure.
No grave I neede (0 Fates) nor buriall rights,
Nor stately hearce, nor tombe with haughty toppe:
## p. 80 (#104) #############################################
80 Early English Tragedy
But let my Carkasse lurk: yea, let my death
Be ay unknowen, so that in every Coast
I still be feard, and lookt for every houre.
The blank verse of Hughes, though it is still monotonous, has
more power and life than that of his predecessors; and it seems
reasonable to regret that he did not rely more on his own efforts.
If he had left himself free to develop his theme according to
his own ideas, he would probably have filled a larger place in
the history of English tragedy, though, no doubt, the Senecan
patchwork he produced was more in accordance with the expecta-
tions of his audience.
It seems unnecessary to pursue the fortunes of the academic
drama further here; it had given to the stage standards of regularity
and dignity of which that stage was sorely in need, and it had
bestowed upon tragedy the blank verse which was to become its re-
cognised means of expression. We must now turn our attention to
those players of 'common Interludes in the Englishe tongue' who
were continually harried by the London civic authorities, and
alternately repressed and encouraged by the queen. The organi-
sation of strolling players and noblemen's servants into regular
companies, and the building of the first theatres, gave the drama
the standing of a profession, and attracted to it university wits,
who were soon to raise it to the dignity of an art. Whatever might
be the amount of their Latin, popular dramatists were not without
respect, according to their lights, for the authority of Seneca ;
they probably studied the tragedies at school, and were, perhaps,
taught as Hoole, one of the masters at Rotherham, recommended,
“how and wherein they may imitate them, and borrow something
out of them. The translation of Tenne Tragedies published
in 1581 gave even those devoid of classical lore the chance of
making themselves acquainted with some, at least, of Seneca's
characteristics. Troas had appeared as early as 1559, and all the
other plays except Thebais by 1566. Some, at any rate, of the
versions were intended, as Nevyle says of Oedipus, for 'tragicall
and pompous showe upon stage, but it is not known whether
they were ever acted. In any case, their influence upon writers
for the popular stage is beyond doubt. It was not against the
dramatists of the inns of court (they were university men and
went to the original Latin, as their versions show) that Thomas
Nashe, in the prefatory epistle to Greene's Menaphon (1589),
directed his jibe, Seneca let bloud line by line and page by page,
at length must needes die to our stage': it was against 'a sort of
## p. 81 (#105) #############################################
The Tenne Tragedies of Seneca 81
shifting companions . . . that could scarcelie latinize their necke-
verse if they should have neede. ' To these
English Seneca read by candle light yeeldes manie good sentences, as Bloud
is a begger, and so foorth: and if you intreate him faire in a frostie morning,
he will affoord you whole Hamlets, I should say handfulls of tragical
speaches.
It is not easy to give chapter and verse in support of Nashe's
accusation-he was too reckless a controversialist to be able
always to prove his statements by detailed evidence-but the
general inference to be made from his attack upon contemporary
dramatists is beyond question. Kyd, Marlowe and Marston saved
their credit as scholars by quoting Seneca in the original, but the
first-named—and he is probably the particular object of Nashe's
invective-also copied from Seneca without acknowledgment.
All three were indebted to him for the type of sensational and
rhetorical tragedy which they made popular, and smaller men, whose
work has now perished, would be no less affected. Elizabethan
tragedy adopted not only Seneca's five acts, and occasionally his
choruses, his stock characters-especially the prologuising ghost?
-and his philosophical commonplaces, but his exaggerated
passions, his crude horrors and his exuberant rhetoric. In the
induction to A warning for Faire Women (1599)—a play which,
itself, is an example of the faults it condemns—the typical
Elizabethan tragedy is described as telling
How some damn'd tyrant to obtain a crown
Stabs, hangs, impoisons, smothers, cutteth throats:
And then a Chorus, too, comes howling in
And tells us of the worrying of a cat:
Then, too, a filthy whining ghost,
Lapt in some foul sheet, or a leather pilch,
Comes screaming like a pig half stick',
And cries, Vindicta! -Revenge, Revenge!
Fortunately, more wholesome influences were brought to bear
on the popular stage by the renewed interest in English history
which followed the national triumph over the Armada, and which
the publication of chronicles enabled dramatists to gratify.
Thomas Legge's Richardus Tertius, acted at St John's college,
Cambridge, in 1573, 1579 and 1582 (if all the dates in the MSS are
1 See Boas, F. 8. , The Works of Thomas Kyd, introduction, pp. xvii, xxiv, xxxii,
XXXIV–XXXV, xlv; Otto, M. , Der Stil in Thomas Kyds Originaldramen (Berlin, 1905);
MacCallum, M. W. , •The Authorship of the Early Hamlet,' an English Miscellany
presented to Dr Furnivall (1901).
2 See Moorman, F. W. , The Pre-Shaksperean Ghost,' The Modern Language
Rerier, vol. I, p. 85 (Jan. 1906).
6
>
6
E. L. V.
CH, IV
## p. 82 (#106) #############################################
82
Early English Tragedy
>
correct), is a remarkable early example of the treatment, after the
Senecan manner, of a subject taken from comparatively recent
national history. This, in itself, distinguishes it from earlier Latin
plays, such as Buchanan's Jephthes and Johannes Baptistes and
Grimoald's Archipropheta, which treated scriptural subjects after
the classical model, and from later tragedies, such as Gager's,
which were classical both in matter and form? But, in spite of the
numerous manuscripts in which Richardus Tertius has come down
to us, and the references to it by Harington, Nashe and Meres,
Churchill, in his excellent treatise on the subject, seems to imply
too much when he says that 'to Legge was due the turning of the
drama in England in an entirely new direction. The character of
the earliest surviving history plays in the vernacular suggests that
the impulse to their composition was not academic but popular,
and their models not classical tragedy, at first or second hand,
but miracle-plays, the methods of which they apply to national
history, as had been done in France more than a century
before. The Famous Victories of Henry the fifth (printed 1598
and acted before 1588), by common consent the earliest example,
though, doubtless, it is later in date than Richardus Tertius,
departs as widely as possible from classical standards in its
utter formlessness, its lack not only of choruses but of acts, its
combination of comic and serious interests, its mixture of prose
with indifferent verse. The Troublesome Raigne of King John
(printed 1591), considered by A. W. Ward 'the best example of the
chronicle history pure and simple,' has nothing classical about
it, except a few scraps of Latin, mainly introduced for comic
effect. It appeals, with a good deal more art than the preceding
play, though there is still much to seek on this score, to the
national spirit, which had hitherto found dramatic expression
only in the folk-play. In the address "To the gentlemen readers'
(given in the edition of 1591, but omitted in that of 1611 reprinted
by Nichols), the dramatist frankly makes this patriotic interest
his first claim for attention :
You that with friendly grace of smoothed brow
Have entertained the Scythian Tamburlaine,
And given applause unto an Infidel:
Vouchsafe to welcome (with like curtesie)
A warlike Christian and your Countreyman.
1 See Churchill, G. B. and Keller, W. , "Die lateinischen Universitäts-Dramen
Englands in der Zeit der Königin Elizabeth,' Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare
Gesellschaft, vol. XXXIV (1898).
2 Richard the Third up to Shakespeare,' Palaestra, vol. 2 (1900).
6
## p. 83 (#107) #############################################
The True Chronicle History of King Leir 83
But the real hero of the play, as of that which Shakespeare
founded on it, is the bastard Fawconbridge, who is given due
prominence in the title, and whose character is developed with a
good deal of spirit and skill? . On the whole, however, the artistic
merits of the play have been exaggerated by recent critics ; blank
verse, rime and prose are used with the same careless facility,
and the scenes follow one another without any attempt at dramatic
construction. But in it, as in the earlier play, we catch the first
tones of the voice of Elizabethan England to which Shakespeare
gave fuller and nobler expression in the historical dramas founded
on these first rude attempts :
Let England live but true within it selfe,
And all the world can never wrong her State.
*
If Englands Peeres and people joyne in one,
Nor Pope, nor Fraunce, nor Spaine can doo them wrong.
Apart from the use made of it by Shakespeare, The True
Chronicle History of King Leir, and his three daughters,
Gonorill, Ragan, and Cordella (printed 1605 and probably acted
15943) has an interest of its own, though few will be found to
subscribe to the opinion* that 'the whole of this old drama is
incomparably and in every respect superior to Shakespeare's
adaptation. ' But it may be freely admitted that the old play
is well contrived, and written in a light, easy style which is not
unpleasing. In spite of its absurd disguises and coincidences, it
is an organic whole, and not a mere succession of events taken
haphazard from the chronicle, its main sources being, indeed,
Warner, Mirror for Magistrates and The Faerie Queene. The
contrast between the bearing of Cordella and her sisters is made
more natural by the fact that they have an advantage over her
in being informed beforehand that they will lose nothing by com-
pliance with their father's test of affection ; and the characters
!
1 The most striking episode, at the opening of the play, was apparently adapted by
the dramatist, with additions of his own, from a story told by Hall and Stow of the
bastard Dunois of Orleans. See Boswell-Stone, W. G. , Shakespeare's Holinshed,
pp. 48–50.
2 The same comment might be made on the pre-Shakespearean Richard II, printed
in Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 1899 (vol. xxxv), and commended by Boas in Fortnightly
Review, vol. LXXVII (1902), pp. 391-404, for its breadth of canvass, its insight into
popular feeling, and its abundant comic relief. '
* On this point see Perrett, W. , 'The Story of King Lear,' Palaestra, vol. xxxv,
and Law, R. A.
, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. xxI,
pp. 462–477 (1906).
* Leo Tolstoi, in Fortnightly Review, Jan. 1907, vol. LXXXVII, p. 66.
6-2
## p. 84 (#108) #############################################
84
Early English Tragedy
are clearly, though not deeply, conceived. There is a solitary
Senecan aphorism (“For fear of death is worse than death itself');
but the play is free, alike from the tedious commonplaces of
academic tragedy, and from the extravagant rhetoric which
Tamburlaine had brought into vogue. This is partly due to
the dramatist's vein of humour, not always duly restrained, but
seasoned with salt enough to withstand the changes of time.
Occasionally, he seems to criticise the absurdity of his own
dramatic expedients. There is more point than was, perhaps,
apparent to the author in Mumford's comment upon the disguised
king's extraordinary speed in the wooing of Cordella ;
Have Palmers weeds such power to win fayre Ladies?
Fayth, then I hope the next that falles is myne:
Upon condition I no worse might speed,
I would for ever weare a Palmers weed.
I like an honest and playne dealing wench,
That sweares (without exceptions) I will have yon.
These soppets, that know not whether to love a man or no,
except they first go aske their mothers leave, by this hand, I
hate them ten tymes worse then poyson.
KING.
What resteth then our happinesse to procure ?
MUMFORD.
Fayth, go to Church, to make the matter sure.
KING.
It shall be so, because the world shall say,
King Leirs three daughters were wedded in one day:
The celebration of this happy chaunce,
We will deferre, untill we come to Fraunce.
MUMFORD.
I like the wooing, that's not long a doing.
Well, for her sake, I know what I know:
Ile never marry whilest I live,
Except I have one of these Brittish Ladyes,
My humour is alienated from the mayds of Fraunce.
The Lamentable Tragedie of Locrine (Newly set foorth,
overseene and corrected. By W. S. 1595) is a play of unusual
interest, not only because of the questions of authorship it raises,
but because of its combination of the diverse streams of influence
to which the drama was by this time subject. It adopts the dumb-
shows of academic tragedy, with Até as chorus; it has two ghosts
and a duplicated revenge motive; the opening scene is imitated
## p. 85 (#109) #############################################
Locrine and Selimus
85
.
from Gorboduc; and there are numerous transcripts from Seneca'.
But it has also a large and lively comic element and a good
deal of stage fighting, and it borrows freely from Kyd, Marlowe,
Greene, Peele and Lodge, and from Spenser's Complaints (entered
in the Stationers' register 29 December 1590, and containing, in
The Ruines of Time, a reference to the death of Sir Francis
Walsingham, 6 April 1590). The dramatist has been accused
of borrowing from another play, very similar in style, The First
part of the Tragicall raigne of Selimus (printed 1594); but, in this
case, the obligation seems to be the other way. The contributions
to this interesting controversy have been numerous and varied.
Tieck marked a number of parallels between Locrine and
Spenser's Complaints in his copy of the fourth folio of Shake-
speare; but these were first published, with a few additions by
R. Brotanek, in 19002 P. A. Daniel had already drawn attention
to the almost identical passages in Locrine and Selimus. Charles
Crawford, who had undertaken the same investigation at the
instigation of Grosart, charged the author of Locrine with
wholesale 'cribbing' from Selimus, supporting the accusation with
an elaborate array of parallel passages". Emil Koeppel's attention
was called to Crawford's articles by a summary of them published
in the Shakespeare Jahrbuch; and, after an examination of the
text, he arrived at an exactly opposite conclusion, viz. that
Selimus borrowed from Locrine5. The same conclusion had
been reached independently by F. G. Hubbard of the university
of Wisconsin, and has since been supported by him with further
evidence in a paper to which he kindly gave the present writer
access before its publication. It is pointed out that the comic
scene in Locrines, which is paralleled in Selimus, stands alone
in the latter play, while, in Locrine, there is much other low
humour of the same kind in connection with the same characters.
Hubbard adds to this argument in favour of the priority of
Locrine some important considerations with reference to the lines
Cf. the passage in the second scene beginning (11. 68—9)
But what so ere the fates determind have,
It lieth not in us to disannull,
with Oedipus 1001—16 : Fatis agimur : cedite fatis.
? Beiblatt zur Anglia, vol. xi, pp. 202—7.
3 In a letter to The Athenæum of 16 April 1898, p. 512.
* In a series of papers contributed to Notes and Queries in 1901 (Ser. Ix, vol. vir).
- Koeppel's paper was published in Jahrbuch for 1905 (vol. XLI, pp. 193—200). See,
also, Churton Collins, J. , The Plays and Poems of Robert Greene, vol. I, pp. 61–67;
Tucker Brooke, C. F. , The Shakespeare Apocrypha, pp. xvi—xx; Malone Society Col-
lections (1908), part 11, pp. 108–110. As to Locrine, cf. post, chap. x, and as to Selimus,
chap. VI.
8 Act iv, so. 2.
## p. 86 (#110) #############################################
86 Early English Tragedy
in both plays taken from Spenser's Complaints. Locrine has
many such lines not found in Selimus, but (with the possible
exception of a single line) Selimus has nothing from the Com-
plaints not found in Locrine. Moreover, one of these borrowed
lines in Selimus is followed by five other lines not found in
the Complaints, but found in Locrine. A consideration of the
whole passage in Locrine and its relation to the parallel lines
in Selimus and the Complaints bears out the contention that the
borrowings from the Complaints in Selimus were made through
Locrine? . The following parallels in the two plays show that the
The Ruines of Rome, 149—160 :
Then gan that Nation, th' earths new giant brood,
*To dart abroad the thunder bolts of warre,
*And, beating downe these walls with furious mood
Into her mothers bosome, all did marre ;
To th' end that none, all were it Jove his sire,
Should boast himselfe of the Romane Empire.
Like as whilome the children of the earth
*Heapt hils on hils to scale the starrie skie,
And fight against the gods of heavenly berth,
Whiles Jove at them his thunderbolts let fie;
All suddenly with lightning overthrowne,
*The furious squadrons downe to ground did fall.
(The lines copied are marked with an asterisk. )
Locrine, 800–811:
How bravely this yoong Brittain Albanact
+Darteth abroad the thunderbolts of warre,
Beating downe millions with his furious moode;
And in his glorie triumphs over all,
+ Mo[w]ing the massie squadrants of the ground;
+Heape hills on hills, to scale the starrie skie,
+ When Briareus armed with an hundreth hands
+Floong forth an hundreth mountains at great Jove,
tAnd when the monstrous giant Monichus
+Hurld mount Olimpus at great Mars his targe,
+And shot huge cædars at Minervas shield.
(The lines copied in Selimus are marked with a dagger. )
Selimus, 415, 416 :
Ide dart abroad the thunderbolts of warre,
And mow their hartlesse squadrons to the ground.
Selimus, 2423–9:
As those old earth-bred brethren, which once
Heape hill on hill to scale the starrie skie,
When Briareus arm'd with a hundreth hands,
Flung forth a hundreth mountaines at great Jove,
And when the monstrous giant Monichus
Hurld mount Olimpus at great Mars his targe,
And darted cedars at Minervas shield.
## p. 87 (#111) #############################################
Locrine and Selimus
87
author of the later drama outheroded Herod in the current
practice of plagiarism :
Locrine, 1303–6:
Where I may damne, condemne and ban my fill,
The heavens, the hell, the earth, the aire, the fire,
And utter curses to the concave skie,
Which may infect the aiery regions.
Selimus, 1803–5:
Now Bajazet will ban another while,
And utter curses to the concave skie,
Which may infect the regions of the ayre.
Locrine, 793–6:
And but thou better use thy bragging blade,
Then thou doest rule thy overflowing toong,
Superbious Brittaine, thou shalt know too soone
The force of Humber and his Scithians.
Selimus, 245760:
But thou canst better use thy bragging blade,
Then thou canst rule thy, overflowing tongue,
Soone shalt thou know that Selims mightie arme
Is able to overthrow poore Tonombey.
All this does not help us much as to the authorship of the
two plays, except negatively. It seems fairly certain that they
were not written by the same man, for it is unlikely that even
an Elizabethan dramatist would repeat himself to the extent
indicated above, and, as Crawford pointed out, Selimus has
numerous borrowings from The Faerie Queene, while Locrine has
none. The light thrown on the respective dates of the two plays
is more significant. Locrine, in its present shape, cannot have
been completed before 1591, when Spenser's Complaints was
published. Subsidiary proof of this is found by Hubbard in the
line near the end of act v, 'One mischief follows on another's
neck,' apparently copied from Tancred and Gismund (pub. 1591,
with prefatory letter dated 8 August 1591)-'One mischief
brings another on his neck'-a line not given in the earlier MS
version of the play. Selimus was later than Locrine, from which
it copied, and, as Greene died on 3 September 1592, this brings the
issue of his authorship of the play within narrow limits. The dates
also disprove Crawford's theory that Selimus was Marlowe's first
play.
It is remarkable that, at this late date, when new and potent
6
## p. 88 (#112) #############################################
88 Early English Tragedy
influences had begun to work upon English tragedy, a writer for
the popular stage should retain characteristic features of the type
of tragedy which the dramatists of the inns of court had founded
upon
the model of Seneca and his Italian imitators. Some of these
features——the ghost and the revenge motive, sensational horrors
and rhetorical exaggerations, philosophical reflections and highly
polished lyrical or descriptive passages-became permanent char-
acteristics, for good or ill, of Elizabethan tragedy. Other elements
were taken from other sources ; and, no doubt, it is well to keep
in mind that, after the establishment of public theatres, writers
of tragedies and historical plays gave their main attention to
popular taste and national tradition, not to the classical authori-
ties held in esteem in the universities and the inns of court, from
which English tragedy had received its first bent. But, in theory,
at any rate, the playwrights still honoured classical precepts and
example; and their practice, though it departed widely from
classical models, was not so lawless as it would have been without
this restraining force. The valuable part of the Elizabethan
inheritance from the classics in tragedy was, indeed, not that which
lies on the surface-such mechanical devices as the use of the
chorus and the division into five acts, the ghost and other exag-
gerated horrors; it was something more subtle and difficult to
trace—the conception of a real, though not a formal, unity of
interest, dignity of persons and decorum of style.
## p. 89 (#113) #############################################
CHAPTER V
EARLY ENGLISH COMEDY
ONE of the leading notes of medieval literature in all its forms
is its impersonality. Its most characteristic products of romance
or saga or song bear the impress, not of an individual writer's art,
but of the collective genius of a nation or an epoch. This is
equally true of medieval drama, both of those scriptural and
allegorical plays by which the church sought at once to entertain
and edify all classes, and of the farces which, in continental
countries, were a still more spontaneous product of the popular
instinct for the theatre. Thus, it is a sign of the passing of the
old order, when the historian of the English stage is for the first
time confronted, not by the shadowy and elusive forms of the
writers to whom we owe the miracles and earlier morality plays,
but by the authentic figure of a dramatist the record of whose
career is still in part extant in letters, legal documents and state
archives.
John Heywood was born towards the close of the fifteenth
century, in 1497 or 1498. In a letter to Burghley from Malines
(18 April 1575), he speaks of himself as seventy-eight years of age.
E. P. Droeshout, a Jesuit father, in a manuscript Histoire de la
Compagnie de Jésus à Anvers, speaks of him in April 1578 as
a 'vieillard octogénaire. ' J. Pitseus says that he was born in
London; and, as Pitseus was well acquainted with Heywood's
younger son, Jasper, the statement may be accepted as correct.
At an early age? , Heywood entered the royal service, probably as a
chorister. On 6 January 1514—15, he is set down in the Book of
Payments of Henry VIII as receiving 'wages 8d. per day,' and, in
1519, he appears as a 'singer. ' In 1526, he received, as a 'player
1 See Bang, W. , •Acta Anglo-Lovaniensia : John Heywood und sein Kreis,'
Englische Studien, vol. XXXVIII, pp. 234—250. From manuscript and documentary
sources Bang has thrown valuable new light upon Heywood's relationships, and upon
his later years in the Netherlands.
? [See addenda. )
2
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90
Early English Comedy
>
3
6
of the virginals,' the quarterly wage of £6. 138. 4d. , and, between
1538 and 1542, he is mentioned frequently in the same capacity at
a much lower salary. But, evidently, he was also engaged in other
ways. In January 1536/7, his servant was paid 20d. for bringing
princess Mary's 'regalles' (hand-organ) from London to Green-
wich; and, in March of the following year, 40s. were paid him for
playing an interlude with his 'children’ before the princess. These
children’ probably belonged to the song-school of St Paul's
cathedral.
Heywood is said to have been introduced to the princess by
Sir Thomas More. He belonged to More's circle by virtue of
his marriage with Eliza Rastell, though the details of the relation-
ship are often incorrectly given. More's sister, Elizabeth, married
John Rastell, lawyer and printer. Their daughter Eliza became
Heywood's wife, and their elder son, William, was the printer of
two or more of his comedies! . In his combination of orthodoxy
with love of letters and with zeal for practical reform, and of exu-
berant gaiety of spirit with the constancy of martyrdom to his faith,
Heywood was a true kinsman, in spirit as well as in fact, of the
author of Utopia. His religious convictions brought him into
serious danger more than once in the later years of Henry VIII and
under Edward VI; but with the accession of Mary his fortunes rose
to their highest point. At her coronation, he sat in a pageant
under a vine against the school in St Paul's churchyard. In 1553,
he presented a play of children at court. In 1558, Mary granted
him a lease of the manor of Bolmer and other lands in Yorkshire;
but her death, later in the year, drove him and others of his circle
to the continent, where he settled at Malines. The state papers
of the ensuing period contain a number of references to him in
his exile; his letter to Burghley of April 1575, in which he thanks
him for ordering the arrears from his land at Romney to be paid
him, has already been mentioned. In the following year, as has
recently been shown from manuscript sources? , he was brought by
his eldest son, Elizaeus, to the Jesuit college at Antwerp, where
he remained till May 1578. At Whitsuntide, the college was
attacked by a mob. Its members, including the two Heywoods,
were expelled and, after perilous experiences, found refuge at
Louvain. Here, presumably, he remained till his death; but there
is no further record till 1587, when he is spoken of by Thomas
Newton as dead and gone. '
1 See post, p. 92.
See Englische Studien, vol. XXXVIII, pp. 236, 237.
a
## p. 91 (#115) #############################################
John Heywood's Interludes
91
Thus, in actual span of years, Heywood's diversified career
lasted to the eve of, and may possibly have extended into, the
decade when Shakespeare's chief predecessors were in full dramatic
activity. But his extant plays all belong to the reign of Henry VIII,
and four of these (including two assigned to him on general
internal evidence) were printed in 1533. Thus, they date from a
period when the morality was still a popular dramatic form,
though often with a theological, political, or educational trend.
It is Heywood's distinctive achievement that in his plays he
dispenses with allegorical machinery and didactic aim, and gives
a realistic representation of contemporary citizen types. His
'new and very mery enterludes,' as they are designated on the title-
pages, therefore bring us far on the road towards fully developed
comedy, though action and individual characterisation are still,
for the most part, lacking; and it becomes a problem of firstrate
interest for the historian of the drama whether Heywood's de-
cisive innovation in theatrical methods was or was not due to
foreign influences. The traditional view has been that he was the
lineal successor of the writers of moralities; that, whereas some
of them had introduced low life scenes under a transparent disguise
of allegory, Heywood had taken the further step of dispensing
with disguise entirely. According to this theory, the native
English drama developed by an inner organic impulse from the
Biblical to the allegorical phase, and thence to the human
comedy' of Heywood.
But recent investigations indicate that Heywood's novel type
of play was influenced by foreign models; that his stimulus came,
not mainly from the realistic elements in the moralities, but from
the soties or farces which had long been popular in France!
If similar productions existed to any wide extent in medieval
England, of which there is no proof, they have left only one
survival, the fragmentary Interludium de Clerico et Puella? . In any
case, he could not have had any difficulty in familiarising himself
with part of the repertory of the contemporary French stage.
During the earlier Tudor reigns, there was active intercourse
between the courts on both sides of the Channel. There is
official record of visits of 'Frenche Pleyers' in 1494 and 1495,
and of '6 Mynstrells of France' about fourteen years later. No
documentary evidence of similar visits in Henry VIII's reign has
7
1 See, especially, Young, K. , “Influence of French Farce upon Jobn Heywood,'
Modern Philology, vol. II, pp. 97-124.
2 Cf. ante, chaps. II and III.
## p. 92 (#116) #############################################
92 Early English Comedy
6
yet been found, but they probably took place, and the story of
Maistre Pierre Patelin had found its way into English at least as
early as 1535. And between three plays traditionally assigned to
Heywood and three French works, as is shown more fully below,
the parallelism in design and treatment cannot be accidental.
While the fact of the relationship between Heywood's inter-
ludes and Gallic farce may, therefore, be taken as generally proved,
definite statements on details are hazardous, partly because of the
uncertainty of dates, and partly because the canon of Heywood's
plays cannot be fixed beyond dispute. Two interludes, The Play
of the wether and A play of love, were first printed by William
Rastell in 1533 and 15341 respectively, and have Heywood's name
on the title-page. The Play called the foure P. P. , is assigned to
him in the three editions issued by W. Myddleton, W. Copland
and J. Allde, of which only the last (1569) is dated. A Dialogue
concerning Witty and Witless is preserved in a British Museum
manuscript ending ‘Amen qd John Heywood. ' In addition to
qa
these four unquestionably authentic plays, two others were printed
by William Rastell: A mery Play betwene the pardoner and the
frere, the curate and neybour Pratte, in 1533, and A mery play
betwene Johan the husbande Johan Tyb his wyfe & syr Jhān the
preest in 1533/4. A. W. Pollard was the first to lay stress on
the fact that these pieces, though always attributed to Heywood,
do not bear his name? . They may, however, be assigned to him
with reasonable certainty, as it is highly improbable that there
were two dramatists at work, closely akin in style and technique,
and both issuing plays simultaneously through Rastell's press? .
