On
the first evening, a pastoral play Alba was presented.
the first evening, a pastoral play Alba was presented.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v06
Doubtless,
personal satire, in some form, was a feature of Terminus et non
terminus, acted at St John's in or soon after 1586, and written by
Nashe and another member of the college. For, according to
Harvey (Trimming of Thomas Nashe), the latter was expelled for
his share in it; why Nashe, who appears to have played the part
of “Varlet of Clubs' in the show, was more leniently dealt with,
does not appear.
For attacks on academic personages like the Harveys, Latin
was the suitable instrument; but, when college playwrights took
a hand in the chronic feud between university and town, as
represented by the civic authorities, they naturally fell back upon
the vernacular. A remarkable episode in this connection is
chronicled by Fuller in his History of the University of Cam-
bridge, under date 1597—8.
The young scholars . . . having gotten a discovery of some town privacies
from Miles Goldsborough (one of their own corporation) composed a merry
(but abusive) comedy (which they called Club-Law) in English, as calculated
for the capacities of such whom they intended spectators thereof. Clare-
Hall was the place wherein it was acted, and the mayor, with his brethren
and their wives were invited to behold it, or rather themselves abused therein.
A convenient place was assigned to the townsfolk (riveted in with scholars
on all sides) where they might see and be seen. Here they did behold them-
selves in their own best clothes (which the scholars had borrowed). . . lively
personated, their habits, gestures, language, lieger-jests, and expressions.
So incensed were the civic dignitaries at the insult, that they com-
plained to the privy council, which, however, made little of the
matter, merely sending some slight and private check to the
principal actors. '
Fuller's narrative is scarcely to be accepted as authentic in all
its details, and it is noticeable that no mention of the incident is
found in the register of the privy council. But the play to which
9
1 In his introduction to Club Law, Smith, G. C. Moore argued that the date of the
production was 1599—1600, and that the mayor of Cambridge, satirised as Niphle, was
John Yaxley. Since then, he has found confirmation of his conjecture in a Jesus
college MS, ascribed to Fuller himself, which mentions the production in 1599—1600
at Clare ball of Club Law fabula festivissima. See The Modern Language Review,
vol. iv, no. 2, pp. 2689.
20-2
## p. 308 (#326) ############################################
308
University Plays
he alludes, and which was thought to be no longer extant, has
recently been rediscovered in manuscript in the library of St John's
college, Cambridge, by G. C. Moore Smith. The manuscript is im-
perfect, lacking the title and the first three scenes of act i and
scene 3 and parts of scenes 2 and 4 of act iv. But that the play
is the Club Law acted at Clare is proved by the constant introduc-
tion of the phrase, and by the general character of the comedy.
In an unconventional dramatic framework, wherein 'Commike
rules,' as confessed in the epilogue, are not observed, the play-
wright gives an animated though bitterly partisan picture of the
relations between university and town in the closing years of the
sixteenth century. The chronic hostility between them arose from
the peculiar privileges granted to the university by a series of
royal charters and by parliamentary enactment. These privileges
included powers of interference with the trade of the town, of
searching the houses of citizens and of punishing them in the
university courts. Every mayor on his accession to office had to
take an oath to preserve the privileges of the university-an
obligation which aroused the keenest resentment.
Of all these circumstances, the Clare hall dramatist makes
skilful use. Two graduates of Athens (Cambridge), Musonius and
Philenius, egged on by a waggish younger scholar, Cricket,
determine to make the 'muddy slaves,' the rebellious citizens,
'feele our stripes for their disobedience and renewe the ancient
Club-lawe. ' At the same time, the newly chosen burgomaster
(mayor) Niphle announces to the electors that he'will rout out the
whole generation' of academicians, 'they shall not nestle with
us in our streets, nor out brave us in our owne dunghills. ' And he
afterwards arranges a plan of campaign against them, including
the retaliation of their owne Clublawe. ' There are traitors, how-
ever, in the citizens' camp; Mrs Niphle and Mrs Colby, wife of a
leading 'headsman,' to win the good graces of Musonius and
Philenius, reveal the plot, and give the scholars directions for
appropriating the clubs which were to be used against them.
Meanwhile, the burgomaster has been caught out in a midnight
visit to a courtesan at the house of his sergeant, the Welshman
Tavie; and Colby has been detected in the act of carrying away
corn in sacks supposed to contain coal. Both are sent to jail by
virtue of the rector's (vice-chancellor's) authority, and bills of
discommoning' are issued, prohibiting scholars from having any
dealings with prominent members of the corporation. It is this
measure, whereby their means of livelihood are cut off, that brings
## p. 309 (#327) ############################################
The Parnassus Trilogy
309
the citizens to their knees, even more than their rout in a street
skirmish by the 'gentle Athenians' armed with the purloined clubs.
A deputation headed by Niphle, who has been released from jail,
comes to proffer submission to Musonius and Philenius.
Wee crave pardon, and craving pardon we tender our supplication, that it
may please you to letts live by you, and recover our old estats, that is, to
reape what benefits we may by you, which if it please you to grant, I being
the month of the rest doe promise for the rest hereafter to be obedient to
you in any reasonable demand.
But it is not till the promise is confirmed by an oath that the
scholars hold out to the suppliants a prospect of the renewal of
their former privileges. The play hangs loosely together, and the
satire is so acid and unrelieved throughout that it goes beyond the
limits of dramatic plausibility. The author's knock-down blows
are themselves a species of 'club law. ' But he has a remarkable
command of idiomatic and racy vocabulary, which gives pungency
to the dialogue. The broken English of Tavie, the Welshman, and
of Mounsier Grand Combatant, a French braggadocio, and the
north-country dialect of Rumford, one of the corporation, give
further evidence of the writer's quick ear for characteristic modes
of speech.
Broadly contemporary with Club Law is the Parnassus trilogy,
which, in originality and breadth of execution, and in complex
relationship to the academic, literary, theatrical and social life
of the period, ranks supreme among the extant memorials of the
university stage. Both the first and second parts of the trilogy
remained in manuscript till 1886, when they were published by
W. D. Macray. The third part had appeared in quarto in 1606,
with the title The Returne from Pernassus : Or the Scourge of
Simony: Publiquely acted by the Students in Saint Johns
Colledge in Cambridge. Internal evidence proves that this third
part must have been written before the death of Elizabeth, and
indicates Christmas 1602 as the probable date of the performance.
On similar evidence, The Pilgrimage to Parnassus, and Part I of
The Returne from Parnassus (as the recovered plays have been
named), may be assigned, respectively, to 1598 and 1601. The
writer of the trilogy is unknown, for, though he throws out tan-
talising clues in the prologue to Part I of The Returne, they are
not sufficient to identify him. The ingenious argument in support
of the authorship of John Day is open to serious chronological
and other objections. But, whoever he may have been, the St
John's playwright was a man of singularly penetrating intelligence,
## p. 310 (#328) ############################################
310
University Plays
acute observation and wide reading. His mordant wit disdained to
flow in the conventional academic channel of Italianate comedy,
where a 'lisping gallant' and his 'wench,' or a 'sire' acknowledging
‘his lost son,' were the stock figures. He struck out on a path of
his own, with increased vigour and boldness at each stage.
The Pilgrimage is an allegory, in dramatic framework, of the
difficulties and temptations that beset the scholar in his pursuit
of learning. Two cousins and fellow students, Philomusus and
Studiosus, are plodding to Parnassus by the well worn track of
the trivium. In Logic land, ‘muche like Wales, full of craggie
mountains and thornie vallies,' they encounter Madido, a votary of
the winecup, who tells them that ‘Parnassus and Hellicon are but
the fables of the poets: there is no true Parnassus but the third
lofte in a wine taverne, no true Hellicon but a cup of browne bas-
tard. ' Thence they pass to the 'pleasant land of Rhetorique,' where
‘shrille Don Cicero' sings sweetly, and where they are overtaken by
Stupido. He is a type of the narrowest puritanism, who declaims
against the 'vaine arts of Rhetorique, Poetrie and Philosophie;
there is noe sounde edifying knowledg in them. Why they are
more vaine than a paire of organs or a morrice daunce. ' But the
fiercest trial is in the land of Poetry, where Amoretto, a volup-
tuary, who perverts the muse into an agent of sensual passion,
bids them ‘crop the joys of youth,' and allures them for a time
from their path. But, before it is too late, they realise that
wantonness is ‘sourelie sweete,' and they press on to the land of
Philosophy. Here they meet an old schoolfellow, Ingenioso, who
is hurrying away 'in a chafe,' and who cries to the pilgrims 'What!
I travell to Parnassus ? why I have burnt my bookes, splitted my
pen, rent my papers, and curst the cooseninge harts that brought
mee up to noe better fortune. ' These words, and others that
follow, are taken, with some modification, from Nashe's pamphlet
Pierce Penilesse (1592), in which he bewailed the miseries of the
life of a man of letters. The bitter cry of so gifted a member of
the college must have come home to the St John's audience, some
of whom may have been present at the performance of Terminus
et non terminus in the previous decade. But the pilgrims turn a
deaf ear and fare blithely on to the ‘laurell mounte,' where, for a
time, they lie with ‘Phoebus by the muse's springes. '
In Part I of The Returne, the playwright is in more sombre
mood, and his satire is more incisive. He drops almost entirely
the allegorical scheme, and, in a series of realistic genre pictures,
portrays the miserable shifts to which scholars, when their course
## p. 311 (#329) ############################################
The Returne from Parnassus, Part I 311
a
is completed, are reduced to earn a living. Philomusus goes
through pitiful experiences as a parish clerk and sexton till he
is dismissed for incompetency. Studiosus, who tries to find consola-
tion in the moral commonplaces of Senecan tragedy, leads a dog's
life as tutor to an idle and unruly ‘dandipratt' in a vulgar house-
hold. But he is sent packing, because he will not yield precedence
to a servant at table, and the two friends, as a last hope, resolve to
seek their fortunes under another sky, at ‘Rome or Rheims. Here,
however, they fare as ill as at home and they hurry back, feeling
That it's as good to starve mongst English swine
As in a forraine land to beg and pine.
But the adventures of Philomusus and Studiosus furnish only
one of the themes in this part of the trilogy. Another is found in
the relations of Ingenioso to Gullio, a vainglorious pseudo-patron
of letters, modelled in part on Nashe's portrait of 'an upstart' in
his Pierce Penilesse. Gullio, who is maintaining' Ingenioso in
most niggardly fashion, bids him personate his mistress, Lesbia,
that he may rehearse amorous speeches afterwards to be ad-
dressed to her. These speeches are mainly variations on lines
in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and Romeo and Juliet.
Gullio afterwards commissions Ingenioso to write specimen verses
for his lady ‘in two or three divers vayns, in Chaucer's, Gower's,
and Spenser's and M Shakspeare's. ' He quotes the opening
'
lines of Venus and Adonis as the preferable model, and cries
sentimentally:
O sweet M Shakespeare! I'le have his picture in my study at the courte.
When Ingenioso submits his poetical exercises for approval, the
lines in 'M' Shakspeare's vayne' are instantly preferred:
Ey marry, sir, these have some life in them! Let this duncified worlde
esteeme of Spencer and Chaucer, I'le worshipp sweet M' Shakespeare and
to honour him will lay his Venus and Adonis under my pillowe.
But the lines, accompanied by a Latin epistle of Gullio's own
composition, fail to move Lesbia, and Ingenioso is dismissed by
his indignant patron.
It is certainly not with complimentary intent that the author
makes Shakespeare the favourite poet of the shallow and affected
courtier. Further light is thrown on his attitude in act i sc. 2
of Part II of The Returne. In this famous scene, the Cambridge
dramatist, under the thin disguise of Judicio, reviews the merits of
a number of the contemporary poets from whom selections had been
## p. 312 (#330) ############################################
312
University Plays
included in Bodenham's Belvedere, an anthology issued in 1600.
Shakespeare is briefly dealt with :
Who loves not Adons love, or Lucrece rape ?
His sweeter verse contaynes hart throbbing line,
Could but a graver subject him content
Without loves foolish lazy languishment.
The critic, while recognising the beauty of language and versifica-
tion in Shakespeare's two early poems, evidently considered that
he was misusing his talents in producing luscious studies of amorous
passion, though they might move Gullio and his kind to senti-
mental raptures. His qualified tribute to the actor-poet contrasts
with his panegyric on Spenser and his generous praise of Drayton,
Nashe and other writers of the day.
In a later scene of Part II of The Returne, the St John's writer
again deals with Shakespeare, not as a poet, but as a dramatist
and an actor. The references, doubtless, are inspired by re-
miniscences of a recent visit of the lord chamberlain's company to
Cambridge. Owing to the competition of the boy actors at the
Blackfriars theatre, Shakespeare and his fellows had had to go on
tour, probably in 1601. That they visited Oxford and Cambridge,
we know from the title-page of the first quarto of Hamlet (1603),
where the play is said to have been acted in the two Universities. '
With its scholar-hero, and semi-academic atmosphere, the surmise
is plausible that it was adapted from Kyd's earlier play with a
special view to its being acted in the university towns. It was a
fresh mortification to the St John's dramatist, embittered by the
woes of scholars, to see low-born actors from the capital make
a triumphal entry into Cambridge.
England affords those glorious vagabonds
That carried earst their fardels on their backes,
Coursers to ride on through the gazing streetes,
Sooping it in their glaring Satten sutes,
And Pages to attend their Maisterships:
With mouthing words that better wits have framed,
They purchase lands, and now Esquiers are namde.
It is thus in a spirit of fierce mockery that he represents Philo-
musus and Studiosus, by way of a last resource, becoming can-
didates for the professional stage, and being tested by Burbage and
Kempe, who make merry over the deficiencies of scholars both as
actors and as dramatists.
KEMPE. The slaves are somewhat proud, and besides it is a good sport
in a part to see them never speake in their walke, but at the end of the
## p. 313 (#331) ############################################
The Returne from Pernassus, Part II 313
stage, just as though in walking with a fellow we should never speake but
at a stile, a gate, or a ditch, where a man can go no further. . . .
BUR. A little teaching will mend these faults, and it may bee besides they
will be able to pen a part.
KEMPE. Few of the University[men] plaies well, they smell too much of
that writer Ovid, and that writer Metamorphosis, and talke too much of
Proserpina and Juppiter. Why heres our fellow Shakespeare puts them all
downe, I and Ben Jonson too. O that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow, he
brought up Horace giving the poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath
given him a purge that made him bewray his credit.
The whole purport of this well known passage is misunderstood
unless it be recognised that it is written in a vein of the bitterest
irony. The gownsman is holding up to scorn before an academic
audience the judgment of illiterate boors who think that Meta-
morphosis is a writer, and that their fellow Shakespeare puts to
shame the university playwrights, and has had the upper hand in
a duel with Ben Jonson, the protagonist of classical orthodoxy in
dramatic art. With the relations of Shakespeare and Jonson in
the war of the theatres' we are not here concerned; but it is pro-
foundly significant that the anonymous author of the Parnassus
trilogy, perhaps the ablest of all the academic dramatists, should
have singled out Shakespeare in his mid-career for his satiric
shafts. The foremost representatives of the academic and the
professional stage stand revealed in this brief illuminating flash,
sundered by an impassable gulf of class prejudice and divergent
ideals of art. Nor could the scholar-playwright have been ex-
pected to see that the supreme master of irony, Time, would turn
back his ridicule with crushing effect upon himself. .
In other scenes of Part II of The Returne, which account for the
sub-title, The Scourge of Simony, the feud between town and gown
finds as bitter expression as in Club Law. But the satire is now
particularly directed against Francis Brackyn, deputy recorder of
Cambridge, who had taken a leading part in asserting the claims
of the burgesses against the university. The feeling against
Brackyn was intensified by the fact that he stood for common law,
while the academic jurists, at this time, were striving to revive the
influence and authority of civil law. Under the name of the Re-
corder, Brackyn figures in the play as one of a confederacy who
out of greed and spite, bestow the cure of souls on moneyed block-
heads instead of on poor but deserving scholars. The other mem-
bers of the gang are Sir Frederick, a dissolute and rapacious
patron of livings, and his son Amoretto, an affected braggart.
Academico, who has been a college contemporary of Amoretto
and used his talents on his behalf, asks him for his good offices
## p. 314 (#332) ############################################
314
University Plays
with his father. But Immerito, the boorish son of a country
bumpkin, is preferred to the benefice because his father can give
one hundred 'thanks' in current coin. The Recorder approves
the patron's choice, and seizes the occasion for a malignant out-
burst against the scholars and their colleges :
But had the world no wiser men than I,
Weede pen the prating parates in a cage;
Knights, Lords, and lawyers should be logʻd and dwel
Within those over stately heapes of stone
Which doting syres in old age did erect.
But, later, the scholars prove themselves the Recorder's match in
vituperation, and we get a foretaste of the yet more overwhelm-
ing ridicule of Brackyn in Ignoramus.
To us, the Parnassus trilogy is without an equal among
academic plays in the combined intimacy and breadth of its
appeal. But contemporary taste seems to have been hit more
successfully by another Cambridge drama, Lingua, or The
Combat of the Tongue and the five Senses for Superiority. This
comedy, first printed in 1607, went through six editions before
the Restoration. Its date is uncertain, though it must be later
than 1602, which is mentioned in one of the scenes. Its author,
as we learn from a memorandum by Sir John Harington, a
high authority on the university plays of his day, was Thomas
Tomkis of Trinity college, who graduated in 1600—1, and whose
name appears on the title-page of Albumazar, acted before James I
at Trinity in 1615. Lingua falls in with the contemporary
fashion of personifying or allegorising the parts and faculties of
man, which finds its chief expression in Phineas Fletcher's Purple
Island. The scene ‘is Microcosmus in a Grove,' and the plot
is concerned with the attempt of Lingua, the tongue, to vindi-
cate her claim to be a sixth sense. To breed strife among the
five recognised senses, she leaves in their path a crown and a royal
robe with the inscription:
He of the five that proves himself the best,
Shall have his temples with this coronet blest.
Tactus first finds the royal emblems, and invests his 'brows and body'
with them. Thereupon, the other senses dispute his sovereignty,
and make preparation for deadly combat. But Communis Sensus,
the vicegerent of queen Psyche, undertakes 'to umpire the con-
tention' and orders them their arms dismissed to appear before
him, charging everyone to bring, as it were in a shew, their proper
>
1
1
## p. 315 (#333) ############################################
a
Lingua
315
objects, that by them he may determine of their several excel-
lencies. ' Visus's show includes Lumen, Coelum, Terra and Colour,
whom he marshaleth about the stage, and presents before the
bench. ' Auditus afterwards leads in Tragedus and Comedus,
whose likeness and unlikeness are delineated in words of admir-
able critical insight. Olofactus presents “the mighty emperor
Tobacco, king of Trinidado, that, in being conquered, conquered
all Europe, in making them pay tribute for their smoke. Gustus
has in his train Bacchus and Ceres; but Tactus has to appear alone,
because his show was to have included a nice gentlewoman,' and
in five hours a dozen maids have not had time to attire a boy for
the part. Finally, Communis Sensus delivers judgment. On not
very cogent grounds, he assigns the crown to Visus and the robe to
Tactus, while the three other senses are consoled with appoint-
ments to high offices under queen Psyche. Lingua's claim to be a
sense is rejected—with a significant reservation:
The number of the Senses in this little world is answerable to the first
bodies in the great world: now, since there be but five in the universe, the
four elements and the pure substance of the heavens, therefore there can be
but five senses in our Microcosm correspondent to those . . . wherefore we
judge you to be no sense simply: only this much we from henceforth pro-
nounce, that all women for your sake shall have six Senses, that is, seeing,
hearing, tasting, smelling, touching, and the last and feminine sense, the
sense of speaking.
Lingua, enraged at being proclaimed 'half a sense,' revenges
herself by making the senses drink a drugged wine at a supper to
which Gustus invites them. Their wits become deranged, and strife
threatens to be renewed among them; but Somnus charms them,
and the mischief-maker Lingua, into sleep. In her sleep, Lingua
confesses her trickery', and is punished by being committed
'to close prisin, in Gustus's house . . . under the custody of two
strong dons, and. . . well guarded with thirty tall watchmen, with-
out whose licence she shall by no means wag abroad. '
It is not, however, in the plot, ingeniously worked out as it is,
that the chief attraction of the play lies. Its distinguishing ex-
cellence is the style, or variety of styles, in which it is written.
In the prose scenes, Tomkis proves himself a master of polished
and flexible dialogue, which has often a curiously modern note.
The wit is sparkling and unforced, but lacks the Aristophanic
pungency of Club Law and the Parnassus plays. In the few
In The Modern Language Review, vol. iv, no. 4, pp. 518—520, the present writer
has suggested that this episode is probably a parody of the sleep-walking scene in
Macbeth.
•
## p. 316 (#334) ############################################
316
University Plays
verse passages where the author aims at a serious effect, he writes
with scholarly grace. But most of the metrical speeches are in a
vein of burlesque, or are parodies of lines in plays of the day.
Thus, there are intentionally ludicrous imitations of famous
speeches in Kyd's Spanish Tragedie, besides what appear to be
caricatures of phrases or situations in several Shakespearean
dramas. A hundred and one incidental allusions show the width
of the author's reading, and the remarkably detailed stage direc-
tions prove his interest in matters of costume and heraldry. The
statement made in 1657, and elaborated by later tradition, that
Oliver Cromwell acted in the play, is, probably, a bookseller's
figment, but might, conceivably, be true if a revival took place
about 1617, when the third edition of the work appeared.
The last decade of Elizabeth's reign, which was very fruitful in
Cambridge plays, has left few memorials of dramatic activity at
Oxford, which seems to have been more dependent on the external
stimulus of royal visits. But, at St John's college, which, from
the beginning of the seventeenth century, rivals Christ Church
as a centre of academic stagecraft, there was produced in 1602/3
the 'twelfe night merriment,' Narcissus. The prologue declares
that 'the play wee play is Ovid's own Narcissus,' and it is true at
the plot is taken from book III of the Metamorphoses. But the
story is considerably expanded and treated throughout in a bur-
lesque vein.
Thus, Tiresias, 'the not seeing prophet,' adorned
‘in byshoppes rochett,' is introduced to tell the fortune of the
beautiful youth from the table' of his hand; and the trickery of
.
the mischievous nymph Echo leads to mock tragedy. Throughout,
the author shows a remarkable command of out-of-the-way phrases
and grotesque rimes, and, in its farcical treatment of a classical
legend, Narcissus is curiously akin to the interlude of Pyramus
and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Two and a half years later, in the summer of 1605, St John's
took part with Christ Church in the series of entertainments pro-
vided for king James on his first visit to Oxford. The king, ac-
companied by the queen and Henry, prince of Wales, made his
entry on 27 August. Special preparations had been made for the
festivities. In Christ Church, where the king and queen lodged,
a stage had been
built close to the upper end of the Hall, as it seemed at the first sight. But
indeed it was but a false wall fair painted, and adorned with stately pillars,
which pillars would turn about, by reason whereof, with the help of other
painted clothes, their stage did vary three times in the acting of one
Tragedy.
<
6
## p. 317 (#335) ############################################
-
James I at Oxford, 1605 317
That the actors in the various plays might be suitably apparelled,
a number of costumes and properties were supplied by the office
of the revels. Lists of these are preserved in the university archives.
The success of the performances seems, however, to have been
scarcely on a level with the magnitude of the preparations.
On
the first evening, a pastoral play Alba was presented. “In the
acting thereof they brought in five or six men almost naked which
were much disliked by the Queen and Ladies. ' It needed the
entreaties of the chancellors of both universities to prevent the
king leaving before half the comedy had been ended. ' On the
following night, James saw Ajax Flagellifer. James would have
done well to imitate his predecessor in countermanding', as he
'was very weary before he came thither, but much more wearied
by it, and spoke many words of dislike. ' Nor did matters fare
.
much better on the third evening, when Vertumnus sive Annus
Recurrens, by Matthew Gwinne of St John's, was performed on
the Christ Church stage. Though it was well acted by a company
consisting chiefly of St John's men, the king fell asleep in the
middle. But the play produced on the following evening ‘made
amends for all. ' It was The Queenes Arcadia of Samuel Daniel,
'
memorable as the first English pastoral drama written for the
academic stage? Guarini's Il Pastor Fido had been acted a short
time previously at King's college, Cambridge, in a Latin version,
Pastor Fidus. Parthenia, a similar version of Luigi Groto's Pen-
timento Amoroso, preserved in manuscript at Emmanuel college,
Cambridge, is of uncertain date. Daniel, as was natural, followed
the general lines of Italian pastoral drama; but the statement of
a contemporary Cambridge visitor to Oxford, that it was drawn
out of Pastor Fidus,' is misleading. So far as Daniel's play owes
a direct debt to a foreign original, it is to Tasso's Aminta rather
than to Guarini's work, while the conception of the plot, though
not of a number of episodes, must be put down to the English
poet's own credit. It deals with the entanglements and evils
produced in Arcadia by the machinations of sophisticated re-
presentatives of the outer world. Chief among these are Colax,
'a corrupted traveller,' and Techne, a subtle wench of Corinth,
who, by their nefarious schemes, delude the shepherd Amyntas
into the belief that Cloris, whom he wooes in vain, is a wanton.
In despair, he tries to take his own life, but, in an episode imitated
1 Cf. ante, p. 298.
For a brief sketch of the progress of the pastoral drama in England see the fol.
lowing chapter (XIII).
## p. 318 (#336) ############################################
318
University Plays
from Aminta, is rescued by Cloris, whose heart has, at last, been
touched by love. The arch evildoers, after plotting not only
against the hero and heroine but against other Arcadian lovers,
are banished for ever. Subordinate, but more amusing, mischief-
makers are Lincus, a pettifogging lawyer, and Alcon, a quack
doctor, into whose mouth is put a description of tobacco as
a certaine herbe wrapt up in rowles
From th’ Island of Nicosia where it growes:
And this he said a wondrous vertue had,
To purge the head, and cure the great catarre.
This, of course, was intended to tickle the ears of the author of
A Counterblaste to Tobacco. But the permanent attraction of
Daniel's play lies not in its topical references or even in its
plot and characterisation, but in the lyrical sweetness of its
verse and the limpid grace of its diction and imagery. Its pro-
duction at Christ Church is amongst the most memorable records
of the Oxford stage. Probably, however, none of the Christ Church
plays gratified the king so much as a more informal open-air inter-
lude which took place in front of St John's college on the day of his
entry into Oxford. Three young scholars, dressed as nymphs,
suddenly appeared in his path. They announced that they were
the sibyls who had formerly foretold to Banquo the rule of his
descendants, and that they had come again to prophesy all hap-
piness to James, and the perpetuity of Banquo's stock upon the
British throne. They then saluted the king in turn with a triple
salve, and greeted similarly the queen and prince Henry. James
'did very much applaude' the conceipt,' which was devised by
Matthew Gwinne, and it is possible that some account of it reached
the ears of Shakespeare and suggested the writing of Macbeth in
the following year.
The stimulus of the royal visit to theatrical activity at Oxford,
especially at St John's college, seems to have lasted for some time
afterwards. To this, we have remarkable testimony in a unique
memorial of the academic stage preserved in the St John's library.
It is a manuscript written by Griffin Higgs, a member of the college,
who successively became fellow of Merton and chaplain to Eliza-
beth of Bohemia, and entitled A true and faithfull relation of
the risinge and fall of Thomas Tucker, Prince of Alba Fortunata,
Lord St Johns &c. , with all the occurrents which happened through-
out his whole domination. No extant document, not even Gager's
6
## p. 319 (#337) ############################################
Plays at St John's, Oxford, 160748 319
letter to Rainolds, lets us so completely behind the scenes of the
collegiate theatre, or brings home to us so intimately the hopes
and fears, the labours and difficulties, connected with the per-
formances. The manuscript is an account of a series of festivities
which lasted from All Saints' eve (31 October) 1607 till the first
Sunday in the following Lent? On All Saints' eve, Thomas
Tucker, a bachelor of arts (later, a fellow of the college and
canon of Bristol) was elected 'Christmas Lord or Prince of the
Revells. . . to appoint & moderate all such games and pastimes
as should come. ' Two bills' were, therefore, sent out to the
masters craving allegiance to his authority and 'money & main-
tenance. Among those who contributed were Laud and Juxon,
each assessed at ten shillings. But, in order to raise an adequate
sum, Tucker (like a true Stewart ruler) had to levy a further
requisition on ex-fellows and commoners and on college tenants.
Sufficient provision thus made, he was publicly installed on
St Andrew's day by means of a Latin "devise,' Ara Fortunae.
In this, the prince, with his leading councillors, visits the temple
of Fortune and is assured by her priestess of the favour of the
goddess. He accordingly announces that he no longer reigns by
popular favour but by divine right, and that he is preparing ‘pomps
and triumphs' for the entertainment of his faithful subjects.
On Christmas day, the prince sat at high table in the vice-
president's place, and a boar's head was carried in as 'the first
messe' by the 'tallest and lustiest' of his guards, to the accom-
paniment of a brisk carol. In the evening, a short Latin interlude,
Saturnalia, was performed, introducing a Dominus and a Servus
in the inverted relation peculiar to the Roman festival, and after-
wards Hercules, who, by interpreting aright an equivocal Delphic
oracle, shows that waxen lights and not human sacrifices are the
offerings enjoined at this anniversary. As the season of the
Saturnalia coincided approximately with Christmastide, these
waxen lights, it is hinted, are the source of Christmas candles;
and, in a prose epilogue, an ingenious parallel and contrast are
drawn between the pagan and the Christian festival.
The same sense of classical and Biblical analogies dictated the
choice of a play for Innocents' day. A Senecan tragedy on the story
of Philomela was written for the occasion, as it was thought that the
1 The narrative part of the manuscript and one play The Seven Dayes of the
Weeke were printed in 1816, with the title The Christmas Prince. The present writer
has been given facilities for consulting the manuscript, and the account of the other
plays is here printed for the first time.
## p. 320 (#338) ############################################
320
University Plays
subject 'well fitted the day, by reason of the murder of Innocent
Itis. ' But the performance had to be postponed for a day because
the carpenters were 'no way ready wth the stage. ' Then a further
mishap occurred. “The Prince himself who was to play Tereus had
gott such an exceeding cold that it was impossible for him to
speake, or speaking to be heard. ' However, with the unnamed
author of the tragedy in reserve as an understudy should he be
'constrained to leave,' the resourceful Tucker got through his
part with credit. The whole play was wel acted and wel liked,
a more favourable verdict than had been pronounced on Calf-
hill's tragedy on the same story acted before Elizabeth at Christ
Church in 1566.
It is characteristic of the academic taste of the time, that
Philomela was much more appreciated than an English play
Time's Complaint, acted on New Year's day as part of the
princes triumphs. ' The failure of this piece, which received only
'two or three cold plaudites,' was partly due to the blunders of
amateur actors, of which Higgs gives amusing details, and to the
overcrowding on the stage. But, doubtless, the fault also lay
largely in the plot, which combines awkwardly a semi-allegorical
tale of Time's attempt to recover his daughter Veritas, kept in
thraldom by Opinion and Error, and a farcical series of mistakes
and entanglements arising out of the theft of goodwife Spigott's
goods by a drunken cobbler, Swallow. Yet, Time's Complaint is
far from being without interest. It contains genre pictures of
characteristic Elizabethan types, such as the dispossessed country-
man, the cashiered soldier and the professional beggar. It intro-
duces, also, in Studioso, the poor and embittered scholar, and in
Philonices, the grasping, pompous lawyer and justice, two figures
akin to those in the Parnassus plays.
The spirits of the St John's actors, which had been grievously
depressed by the cold reception of Time's Complaint, were revived
by the success of an amusing show, The Seven Dayes of the Weeke,
acted at the president's lodging on Sunday, 10 January, and re-
peated by special request before the vice-chancellor and other
dignitaries a week later. Equally successful was a Latin comedy
Philomathes, mingling abstractions with Plautine characters.
After its performance 'the stage & scaffold were pul'd downe
wch had stood from Cristmas'; but they were set up again on
Shrove Tuesday for the prince's resignation. This, like his public
installation, was solemnised in the form of a play, Ira seu Tumulus
Fortunae. The goddess has now grown angry with the prince
## p. 321 (#339) ############################################
Riots at Performances
321
because he has not paid her sufficiently constant homage. His
ministers resign their symbols of office and desert him. In vain
he visits again the altar of Fortune, and seeks to placate her
wrath. He, therefore, strips himself of the emblems of sove-
reignty, and lays them in a sepulchre in her temple, dedicating
himself henceforth to the service of Minerva.
Thus ended the memorable reign of Thomas Tucker; but, as the
stage and scaffolds had been re-erected, and, as an English tragedy
on the story of Periander, tyrant of Corinth, had been prepared,
it was decided to perform this on the following Saturday. It at-
tracted such a concourse that hundreds could not find room in the
hall. They ‘made such an hideous noice, and raised such a tumult
with breaking of windows all about the colledge, throwinge of stones
into the hall, and such like ryott' that the officers of the college
had to rush forth, 'wth about a dozen whiflers well armed and
swords drawne. ' The rioters then ran away, but some of the
ringleaders were arrested, and imprisoned in the porter's lodge
till the play was over.
Curiously enough, about a week later, on 20 February, there
was a similar riot at Cambridge, when there was 'foul & great
disorder committed at the time of a comedy in King's College,'
probably a lost play by Phineas Fletcher. In the same month,
four years later, there was a yet more serious disturbance at Cam-
bridge, when the St John's men, angry at being excluded from a
comedy acted at Trinity college, began an affray outside the Great
Gate, which led to proceedings in the vice-chancellor's court. In
sharp contrast to these tumultuous proceedings was the scene in
the hall of Trinity on 2 March 1613, when prince Charles and
Frederick, the elector palatine, saw Samuel Brooke's comedy
called Adelphe, and when the elector slept during the greater part
of the performance, which lasted from seven in the evening till
one. On the following evening, the princes were again provided
with solid entertainment by the performance of Scyros, a Latin
version by Brooke of Bonarelli's pastoral drama, Filli di Sciro.
On 7 March 1615, James himself, with prince Charles, came to
Cambridge, and stayed at Trinity for four nights. As the sovereign
had not visited the university since Elizabeth's 'progress' in 1564,
elaborate preparations were made to celebrate the event. The
days were devoted to learned disputations and the evenings to
plays. The first piece, Aemilia, a Latin comedy written by Ed-
ward Cecil of St John's, was not very successful; but ample
amends were made on the following evening when, in the hall
21
E. L. VI.
CH, XII.
## p. 322 (#340) ############################################
322
University Plays
of Trinity, Ignoramus was launched on its triumphant career.
Its author was George Ruggle, fellow of Clare hall, who had
formerly been a scholar of Trinity, and the actors were chosen
from various colleges, difficulty being found in filling suitably the
female parts. On one side, Ignoramus is linked with the group of
Latin adaptations of Italian comedies mentioned above, for it is
founded on G. della Porta's Trappolaria. But Ruggle transformed
his original by extensive additions, and by a fundamental change in
the central character, converting him out of a soldier into the
lawyer who gives his name to the play. Thus metamorphosed,
the typically southern comedy became the climax of Aristophanic
attacks by gownsmen upon the town and its officials. The title
part is a merciless caricature of the detested recorder, Brackyn,
who had already been ridiculed in The Returne from Pernassus,
Part II. The animus against him as a common lawyer had
been intensified by public events. The law dictionary The Inter-
preter, published in 1607 by John Cowell, regius professor of
civil law, had been suppressed on the demand of the House of
Commons, because its tendency was to exalt the royal prerogative
at the expense of common law. The civilians of the university
and the king himself were, therefore, delighted when Ruggle
brought upon the stage a burlesque figure talking a barbarous
jargon of bastard Latin and the technical terms of common law.
It is the novelty of this conception and the gusto with which it is
developed that give the play its unique character. In the course
of its intricate plot, Ignoramus goes through a variety of humiliating
and painful experiences. On a visit to Bordeaux, he falls in love
with the heroine, Rosabella, and engages to pay 600 pieces of gold
for her hand. But, through the stratagems of Antonius, the
favoured suitor of the girl, Ignoramus obtains possession instead
of the heavy-handed virago, Polla, who belabours him soundly,
Amazed at his incomprehensible outcries, she thinks he is be
witched and goes to fetch her husband and a monk, who, in a
scene of richly farcical humour, exorcise the evil spirits out of
him and carry him off, shrieking, to a monastery for his final cure.
Rosabella, of course, is finally united to Antonius, and a mystery
attaching to her birth is cleared up.
Ignoramus, with its mixture of learning and horseplay, was
exactly suited for captivating James. The play presented on the
following night, Albumazar, though adapted by Tomkis, author
of Lingua, from another comedy of della Porta, L'Astrologo,
was less successful. But it contains two amusing characters in
## p. 323 (#341) ############################################
6
James I at Cambridge, 1615 323
Albumazar, the rascally astronomer, and Trincalo, the rustic whom
Albumazar 'transforms' into his absent master, Antonio, with lu-
dicrous consequences when the latter unexpectedly returns home. .
In its printed form, the play was fortunate enough to attract both
Dryden and Garrick, both of whom revived it on the London stage.
But, on its production, it seems, from a contemporary account,
to have been less appreciated not only than its predecessor,
Ignoramus, but than its successor on the following evening, Me-
lanthe, a Latin pastoral drama from the pen of Samuel Brooke,
whose Adelphe and Scyros have been mentioned above. The king
could not stay to see the last play prepared for his entertainment,
Sicelides, by Phineas Fletcher ; but it was acted a few days later.
He thus missed seeing the first English 'piscatory' on the stage,
as he had already seen at Oxford, in 1605, the first English pastoral
drama. The main plot of Sicelides, dealing with the romantic
love stories of Perindus and Glaucilla and Thalander and Olinda,
is, apparently, original, though episodes and motives are derived
from classical and Italian sources. One underplot centres round
Cosma, the typical 'light nymph' of 'Messena,' and the other
round Cancrone and Scrocca, low-comedy fishermen whose talk is
largely a farrago of 'malapropisms' and topical allusions. The
machinery of the play is unduly intricate and perplexing, and the
characterisation is not vivid. But the work has real charm in its
delicate delineation of emotions, in the graceful imagery of its
descriptive passages and in the lyric sweetness of its choruses.
James was so delighted with Ignoramus that he revisited Cam-
bridge in May to see it a second time. Its triumph marks the
close of the most vital period of the university drama. Hence-
forward, no new type was evolved, and the distinctively academic
element dwindles. Allegorical plays became increasingly popular
with college dramatists, though Lingua remained unrivalled for
wit and verve. Thus, in February 1618, Technogamia or The
Marriage of the Arts, by Barten Holiday, was acted at Christ
Church ‘with no great applause'; but it was repeated before the
king at Woodstock in August 1621. Though James seems to have
found the piece very dull, it is not without merit. The action
shows how some of the arts and sciences endeavour to enter into
unnatural unions. Thus, Poeta seeks to win the hand of Astronomia,
but is finally allied to Historia and promises that his love shall
follow her ‘more inseparably than the Hexameter the Pentameter. '
Closely related to Lingua, to which it contains direct references, is
Pathomachia or The Battell of Affections, published by 'a Friend
of the deceassed Author,' in 1630, and 'written some years since. '
6
21-2
## p. 324 (#342) ############################################
324
University Plays
6
It deals with the revolt of the Affections against Love and Hatred,
‘whom heretofore they counted their King and Queene' Love
and Hatred are aided by the Virtues, headed by Justice, while the
rebels have the support of the Vices disguised as Affections or
Virtues, and commanded by Pride. Justice, however, unmasks
them, and sends them to confinement, whereupon the Affections
tender their submission and are pardoned. The work is in prose
throughout, and contains interesting passages and many allusions
to recent events, but lacks dramatic movement and vivacity.
Religious satire is another predominant element in the later
university playsa foretaste of the dread conflict that was fast
approaching. Loiola, by John Hacket, acted at Trinity before
the university on 28 February' and before James on a third visit
to Cambridge on 12 March 1623, is an entertaining Latin comedy,
which attacks impartially Roman Catholics and Calvinists, the
former in the person of Loiola, 'an unscrupulous Jesuit,' the latter
in that of Martinus, a canting elder of Amsterdam, where the scene
is laid. To the same year belongs the semi-allegorical Fucus
Histriomastix, wherein the title role, that of a hypocritical puritan
minister, was played by Robert Ward of Queens' college, who was
probably the author of the piece. Fucus, who hates all plays and
amusements, seeks to prevent the marriage of Philomathes and
Comoedia, otherwise, the production of an academic comedy. The
arguments he uses are the same as those of Rainolds in his con-
troversy with Gager, and seem derived from his book. But his
intrigues are foiled, and he also comes off badly in a feud with the
merry-making countryman, Villanus, who is in love with Ballada,
an illegitimate sister of Comoedia'.
Another actor in Fucus was Peter Hausted, afterwards fellow
of Queens', who, when Charles and Henrietta Maria visited
Cambridge in March 1632, wrote in their honour the singular play
The Rival Friends. This is linked to the comedies satirising
religious hypocrisy by its caustic portraiture of the wooers of the
deformed and foolish Mistress Ursely, whose hand carries with it
an 'impropriate parsonage. ' More realistically humorous person-
ages are Stipes, the shepherd of the simoniacal patron, and his wife
and daughter, all genuinely rustic figures without the customary
pastoral veneer. From Hausted's preface to the play when it
was published, it is evident that his low-life portraiture had been
adversely criticised as unbefitting the royal presence. But to
1 See Fucus Histriomastix, edited by Smith, G. C. Moore (1909), introduction and
notes, pp. 98—9. The editor suggests that the play may have been partly inspired by
an attempt, recorded by Chamberlain, to suppress the performance of Loiola.
## p. 325 (#343) ############################################
Hausted.
Randolph
325
modern taste this appeals much more strongly than does the
pseudo-romantic main plot. The two friends, Lucius and Neander,
rivals for the love of Pandora, vie in their readiness to abdicate
in each other's favour, and carry their altruism so far that the lady
gives her affections, at first in pretence, afterwards in reality, to a
third wooer. The popularity, however, of such fantastic themes
was evidenced by the successful production at Trinity, during
the same royal visit, of Thomas Randolph's The Jealous Lovers.
Randolph, a distinguished alumnus of Westminster and Trinity,
had already written two short academic 'shows,' Aristippus or
The Joviall Philosopher and The Conceited Pedler. The Jealous
Lovers was his first complete play, and the rapturous welcome
accorded to it does little credit to either the university or the
court. Randolph's inventiveness and rhetorical fluency cannot
redeem the essential falsity of the main plot. Tyndarus is insanely
suspicious of the faithfulness of his beloved Evadne, and Techmessa
similarly mistrusts her devoted Pamphilus. The two jealous
lovers' go through a mock funeral (which gives occasion for an
imitation of the gravedigger's scene in Hamlet) as a final test of
the constancy of the seemingly bereft pair. But, after this ordeal
has proved their loyalty unswerving, Hymen forbids the proposed
unions, and it transpires that Tyndarus is the brother of Evadne, and
Techmessa the sister of Pamphilus. Interwoven with these pseudo-
romantic episodes is an underplot of gross humour.
The royal pair, accompanied by their nephews, the palatine
princes, paid a second visit to Oxford in August 1636, when
the last important series of academic plays was produced in
their honour. William Strode, public orator, welcomed the
king to Christ Church with a speech, and with an allegorical
drama, The Floating Island, which was staged with great elabora-
tion, and furnished with music by Henry Lawes. The title and
general conception of the work, in which the island represents the
human mind afloat on the sea of the passions, was, doubtless, sug-
gested by Phineas Fletcher's The Purple Island or The Isle of
Man, published at Cambridge in 1633. But Strode develops the
theme on lines of his own, and with the added spice of political
and religious satire. A conspiracy is formed by Audax, Irato and
others against the rule of king Prudentius and his counsellor,
Intellectus Agens. Prudentius resigns his crown, and Fancy is
proclaimed queen, her only law being 'that each man use his
proper humour, be it vice or virtue. ' Discord and tumult are the
result, and Prudentius is finally implored to resume the crown, after
each of the plotters has declined it in turn. The implied lesson
## p. 326 (#344) ############################################
326
University Plays
on the evil results of rebellion, and the castigation of Prynne,
in the person of Melancholico, a play-hating puritan, helped
to recommend the play to the royal favour. Equally successful
were the two dramas produced on the following day. One of these,
Love's Hospitall, by George Wilde, fellow of St John's, was per-
formed in the afternoon at that college at the expense of Laud,
who, as chancellor of the university, was present to welcome the
king and queen. The piece is an entertaining comedy of humours,
in almost farcical vein, and is in no way characteristically academic.
This is also true of William Cartwright's The Royall Slave', acted
in the evening at Christ Church. An Ephesian captive, Cratander,
in accordance with an old custom among the Persians, is granted
for three days before his execution the full insignia and privileges
of kingship. During this period, he displays such nobility of soul
that heaven intervenes in his favour, and he is spared to become
the wearer of a real crown. This theme is handled by Cart-
wright with genuine rhetorical effectiveness, and his drama was
furnished with special scenic effects by Inigo Jones and incidental
music by Lawes. So delighted was the queen with the perform-
ance that she afterwards borrowed the costumes and scenery for
a repetition of the play by her own company at Hampton court.
The academic stage was to number yet one more illustrious recruit
in Cowley, whose Naufragium Joculare, based on classical sources,
was acted at Trinity college, Cambridge, in 1638, and was followed
in 1642 by his satirical comedy The Guardian, remodelled after
the Restoration into Cutter of Coleman Street. But the royal
visit to Oxford in 1636 marks the close of these elaborate univer-
sity displays, which had begun with Elizabeth's coming to Cam-
bridge in 1564. Even in the traditionally loyal community on the
banks of the Isis, there were ominous symptoms of the rapidly
growing resentment against the autocratic rule of Charles and Laud.
As the king and queen rode away from Christ Church, the streets,
according to custom, were lined with 'Scholers of all degrees,' but
'neither they nor the citizens made any expression of joy, nor
uttered, as the manner is, Vivat Rex. ' When Oxford, some seven
years later, again opened its gates to Charles, it was not to enter-
tain him with ‘masques and triumphs,' but to afford him shelter
in his stern conflict with his parliamentary foes.
The civil war and the commonwealth mark a period of deep
cleavage in English stage history. With the Restoration, came
new men and new methods, and a forgetfulness of all but
the greatest dramatists of the former age. It was virtually
· See, as to Cartwright's plays, ante, chap. ix.
6
## p. 327 (#345) ############################################
Concluding Survey
327
the work of the nineteenth century to rediscover the lesser
Elizabethan writers for the popular stage. The university drama,
bilingual in utterance, and with its memorials not easy of
access, has had to wait for yet tardier recognition. It had, of
course, patent faults. It produced much that was artificial,
amateurish and unduly imitative, and its moral standard was
as unexacting as that of the London theatre of the day. But it
had behind it truly formative influences, in the renascence ardour
for classical lore and delight in pageantry, in the gownsmen's
haughty resentment of the buffets of fortune to which they were
exposed, and in the traditional hostility between scholars and
townsmen by Isis and by Cam. Hence sprang that special type of
Aristophanic comedy, unique in this period of the drama, repre-
sented by Pedantius and Ignoramus, Club Law and the Parnassus
trilogy. And, in addition to these distinctively topical university
plays, we owe to the academic stage a number of dramas moulded
and coloured by the peculiar conditions of their origin. Such are
the semi-Senecan plays on religious, historical and mythological
subjects, like Archipropheta, Richardus Tertius and Ulysses
Redux; comedies like Laelia and Hymenaeus; allegorical pieces
like Lingua, Fucus and The Floating Island; pastorals like The
Queenes Arcadia and Sicelides. In these and kindred productions,
noted in this chapter or merely recorded as 'comedy' or 'tragedy’
in college account-books, the university humanists preserved ele-
ments of classic and neo-classic culture which would otherwise
have been almost entirely lost to the stage. From Oxford and
Cambridge, these influences permeated to the capital. For, sharp
as in general was the division, social and intellectual, between
academic and professional playwrights, the latter and larger class
was constantly being recruited from graduates who had gained
their earliest dramatic experience as spectators, actors, or, in some
cases, authors, of college 'shows. The royal visits to the uni-
versities helped further to extend the range of influence of the
amateur stage.
personal satire, in some form, was a feature of Terminus et non
terminus, acted at St John's in or soon after 1586, and written by
Nashe and another member of the college. For, according to
Harvey (Trimming of Thomas Nashe), the latter was expelled for
his share in it; why Nashe, who appears to have played the part
of “Varlet of Clubs' in the show, was more leniently dealt with,
does not appear.
For attacks on academic personages like the Harveys, Latin
was the suitable instrument; but, when college playwrights took
a hand in the chronic feud between university and town, as
represented by the civic authorities, they naturally fell back upon
the vernacular. A remarkable episode in this connection is
chronicled by Fuller in his History of the University of Cam-
bridge, under date 1597—8.
The young scholars . . . having gotten a discovery of some town privacies
from Miles Goldsborough (one of their own corporation) composed a merry
(but abusive) comedy (which they called Club-Law) in English, as calculated
for the capacities of such whom they intended spectators thereof. Clare-
Hall was the place wherein it was acted, and the mayor, with his brethren
and their wives were invited to behold it, or rather themselves abused therein.
A convenient place was assigned to the townsfolk (riveted in with scholars
on all sides) where they might see and be seen. Here they did behold them-
selves in their own best clothes (which the scholars had borrowed). . . lively
personated, their habits, gestures, language, lieger-jests, and expressions.
So incensed were the civic dignitaries at the insult, that they com-
plained to the privy council, which, however, made little of the
matter, merely sending some slight and private check to the
principal actors. '
Fuller's narrative is scarcely to be accepted as authentic in all
its details, and it is noticeable that no mention of the incident is
found in the register of the privy council. But the play to which
9
1 In his introduction to Club Law, Smith, G. C. Moore argued that the date of the
production was 1599—1600, and that the mayor of Cambridge, satirised as Niphle, was
John Yaxley. Since then, he has found confirmation of his conjecture in a Jesus
college MS, ascribed to Fuller himself, which mentions the production in 1599—1600
at Clare ball of Club Law fabula festivissima. See The Modern Language Review,
vol. iv, no. 2, pp. 2689.
20-2
## p. 308 (#326) ############################################
308
University Plays
he alludes, and which was thought to be no longer extant, has
recently been rediscovered in manuscript in the library of St John's
college, Cambridge, by G. C. Moore Smith. The manuscript is im-
perfect, lacking the title and the first three scenes of act i and
scene 3 and parts of scenes 2 and 4 of act iv. But that the play
is the Club Law acted at Clare is proved by the constant introduc-
tion of the phrase, and by the general character of the comedy.
In an unconventional dramatic framework, wherein 'Commike
rules,' as confessed in the epilogue, are not observed, the play-
wright gives an animated though bitterly partisan picture of the
relations between university and town in the closing years of the
sixteenth century. The chronic hostility between them arose from
the peculiar privileges granted to the university by a series of
royal charters and by parliamentary enactment. These privileges
included powers of interference with the trade of the town, of
searching the houses of citizens and of punishing them in the
university courts. Every mayor on his accession to office had to
take an oath to preserve the privileges of the university-an
obligation which aroused the keenest resentment.
Of all these circumstances, the Clare hall dramatist makes
skilful use. Two graduates of Athens (Cambridge), Musonius and
Philenius, egged on by a waggish younger scholar, Cricket,
determine to make the 'muddy slaves,' the rebellious citizens,
'feele our stripes for their disobedience and renewe the ancient
Club-lawe. ' At the same time, the newly chosen burgomaster
(mayor) Niphle announces to the electors that he'will rout out the
whole generation' of academicians, 'they shall not nestle with
us in our streets, nor out brave us in our owne dunghills. ' And he
afterwards arranges a plan of campaign against them, including
the retaliation of their owne Clublawe. ' There are traitors, how-
ever, in the citizens' camp; Mrs Niphle and Mrs Colby, wife of a
leading 'headsman,' to win the good graces of Musonius and
Philenius, reveal the plot, and give the scholars directions for
appropriating the clubs which were to be used against them.
Meanwhile, the burgomaster has been caught out in a midnight
visit to a courtesan at the house of his sergeant, the Welshman
Tavie; and Colby has been detected in the act of carrying away
corn in sacks supposed to contain coal. Both are sent to jail by
virtue of the rector's (vice-chancellor's) authority, and bills of
discommoning' are issued, prohibiting scholars from having any
dealings with prominent members of the corporation. It is this
measure, whereby their means of livelihood are cut off, that brings
## p. 309 (#327) ############################################
The Parnassus Trilogy
309
the citizens to their knees, even more than their rout in a street
skirmish by the 'gentle Athenians' armed with the purloined clubs.
A deputation headed by Niphle, who has been released from jail,
comes to proffer submission to Musonius and Philenius.
Wee crave pardon, and craving pardon we tender our supplication, that it
may please you to letts live by you, and recover our old estats, that is, to
reape what benefits we may by you, which if it please you to grant, I being
the month of the rest doe promise for the rest hereafter to be obedient to
you in any reasonable demand.
But it is not till the promise is confirmed by an oath that the
scholars hold out to the suppliants a prospect of the renewal of
their former privileges. The play hangs loosely together, and the
satire is so acid and unrelieved throughout that it goes beyond the
limits of dramatic plausibility. The author's knock-down blows
are themselves a species of 'club law. ' But he has a remarkable
command of idiomatic and racy vocabulary, which gives pungency
to the dialogue. The broken English of Tavie, the Welshman, and
of Mounsier Grand Combatant, a French braggadocio, and the
north-country dialect of Rumford, one of the corporation, give
further evidence of the writer's quick ear for characteristic modes
of speech.
Broadly contemporary with Club Law is the Parnassus trilogy,
which, in originality and breadth of execution, and in complex
relationship to the academic, literary, theatrical and social life
of the period, ranks supreme among the extant memorials of the
university stage. Both the first and second parts of the trilogy
remained in manuscript till 1886, when they were published by
W. D. Macray. The third part had appeared in quarto in 1606,
with the title The Returne from Pernassus : Or the Scourge of
Simony: Publiquely acted by the Students in Saint Johns
Colledge in Cambridge. Internal evidence proves that this third
part must have been written before the death of Elizabeth, and
indicates Christmas 1602 as the probable date of the performance.
On similar evidence, The Pilgrimage to Parnassus, and Part I of
The Returne from Parnassus (as the recovered plays have been
named), may be assigned, respectively, to 1598 and 1601. The
writer of the trilogy is unknown, for, though he throws out tan-
talising clues in the prologue to Part I of The Returne, they are
not sufficient to identify him. The ingenious argument in support
of the authorship of John Day is open to serious chronological
and other objections. But, whoever he may have been, the St
John's playwright was a man of singularly penetrating intelligence,
## p. 310 (#328) ############################################
310
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acute observation and wide reading. His mordant wit disdained to
flow in the conventional academic channel of Italianate comedy,
where a 'lisping gallant' and his 'wench,' or a 'sire' acknowledging
‘his lost son,' were the stock figures. He struck out on a path of
his own, with increased vigour and boldness at each stage.
The Pilgrimage is an allegory, in dramatic framework, of the
difficulties and temptations that beset the scholar in his pursuit
of learning. Two cousins and fellow students, Philomusus and
Studiosus, are plodding to Parnassus by the well worn track of
the trivium. In Logic land, ‘muche like Wales, full of craggie
mountains and thornie vallies,' they encounter Madido, a votary of
the winecup, who tells them that ‘Parnassus and Hellicon are but
the fables of the poets: there is no true Parnassus but the third
lofte in a wine taverne, no true Hellicon but a cup of browne bas-
tard. ' Thence they pass to the 'pleasant land of Rhetorique,' where
‘shrille Don Cicero' sings sweetly, and where they are overtaken by
Stupido. He is a type of the narrowest puritanism, who declaims
against the 'vaine arts of Rhetorique, Poetrie and Philosophie;
there is noe sounde edifying knowledg in them. Why they are
more vaine than a paire of organs or a morrice daunce. ' But the
fiercest trial is in the land of Poetry, where Amoretto, a volup-
tuary, who perverts the muse into an agent of sensual passion,
bids them ‘crop the joys of youth,' and allures them for a time
from their path. But, before it is too late, they realise that
wantonness is ‘sourelie sweete,' and they press on to the land of
Philosophy. Here they meet an old schoolfellow, Ingenioso, who
is hurrying away 'in a chafe,' and who cries to the pilgrims 'What!
I travell to Parnassus ? why I have burnt my bookes, splitted my
pen, rent my papers, and curst the cooseninge harts that brought
mee up to noe better fortune. ' These words, and others that
follow, are taken, with some modification, from Nashe's pamphlet
Pierce Penilesse (1592), in which he bewailed the miseries of the
life of a man of letters. The bitter cry of so gifted a member of
the college must have come home to the St John's audience, some
of whom may have been present at the performance of Terminus
et non terminus in the previous decade. But the pilgrims turn a
deaf ear and fare blithely on to the ‘laurell mounte,' where, for a
time, they lie with ‘Phoebus by the muse's springes. '
In Part I of The Returne, the playwright is in more sombre
mood, and his satire is more incisive. He drops almost entirely
the allegorical scheme, and, in a series of realistic genre pictures,
portrays the miserable shifts to which scholars, when their course
## p. 311 (#329) ############################################
The Returne from Parnassus, Part I 311
a
is completed, are reduced to earn a living. Philomusus goes
through pitiful experiences as a parish clerk and sexton till he
is dismissed for incompetency. Studiosus, who tries to find consola-
tion in the moral commonplaces of Senecan tragedy, leads a dog's
life as tutor to an idle and unruly ‘dandipratt' in a vulgar house-
hold. But he is sent packing, because he will not yield precedence
to a servant at table, and the two friends, as a last hope, resolve to
seek their fortunes under another sky, at ‘Rome or Rheims. Here,
however, they fare as ill as at home and they hurry back, feeling
That it's as good to starve mongst English swine
As in a forraine land to beg and pine.
But the adventures of Philomusus and Studiosus furnish only
one of the themes in this part of the trilogy. Another is found in
the relations of Ingenioso to Gullio, a vainglorious pseudo-patron
of letters, modelled in part on Nashe's portrait of 'an upstart' in
his Pierce Penilesse. Gullio, who is maintaining' Ingenioso in
most niggardly fashion, bids him personate his mistress, Lesbia,
that he may rehearse amorous speeches afterwards to be ad-
dressed to her. These speeches are mainly variations on lines
in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and Romeo and Juliet.
Gullio afterwards commissions Ingenioso to write specimen verses
for his lady ‘in two or three divers vayns, in Chaucer's, Gower's,
and Spenser's and M Shakspeare's. ' He quotes the opening
'
lines of Venus and Adonis as the preferable model, and cries
sentimentally:
O sweet M Shakespeare! I'le have his picture in my study at the courte.
When Ingenioso submits his poetical exercises for approval, the
lines in 'M' Shakspeare's vayne' are instantly preferred:
Ey marry, sir, these have some life in them! Let this duncified worlde
esteeme of Spencer and Chaucer, I'le worshipp sweet M' Shakespeare and
to honour him will lay his Venus and Adonis under my pillowe.
But the lines, accompanied by a Latin epistle of Gullio's own
composition, fail to move Lesbia, and Ingenioso is dismissed by
his indignant patron.
It is certainly not with complimentary intent that the author
makes Shakespeare the favourite poet of the shallow and affected
courtier. Further light is thrown on his attitude in act i sc. 2
of Part II of The Returne. In this famous scene, the Cambridge
dramatist, under the thin disguise of Judicio, reviews the merits of
a number of the contemporary poets from whom selections had been
## p. 312 (#330) ############################################
312
University Plays
included in Bodenham's Belvedere, an anthology issued in 1600.
Shakespeare is briefly dealt with :
Who loves not Adons love, or Lucrece rape ?
His sweeter verse contaynes hart throbbing line,
Could but a graver subject him content
Without loves foolish lazy languishment.
The critic, while recognising the beauty of language and versifica-
tion in Shakespeare's two early poems, evidently considered that
he was misusing his talents in producing luscious studies of amorous
passion, though they might move Gullio and his kind to senti-
mental raptures. His qualified tribute to the actor-poet contrasts
with his panegyric on Spenser and his generous praise of Drayton,
Nashe and other writers of the day.
In a later scene of Part II of The Returne, the St John's writer
again deals with Shakespeare, not as a poet, but as a dramatist
and an actor. The references, doubtless, are inspired by re-
miniscences of a recent visit of the lord chamberlain's company to
Cambridge. Owing to the competition of the boy actors at the
Blackfriars theatre, Shakespeare and his fellows had had to go on
tour, probably in 1601. That they visited Oxford and Cambridge,
we know from the title-page of the first quarto of Hamlet (1603),
where the play is said to have been acted in the two Universities. '
With its scholar-hero, and semi-academic atmosphere, the surmise
is plausible that it was adapted from Kyd's earlier play with a
special view to its being acted in the university towns. It was a
fresh mortification to the St John's dramatist, embittered by the
woes of scholars, to see low-born actors from the capital make
a triumphal entry into Cambridge.
England affords those glorious vagabonds
That carried earst their fardels on their backes,
Coursers to ride on through the gazing streetes,
Sooping it in their glaring Satten sutes,
And Pages to attend their Maisterships:
With mouthing words that better wits have framed,
They purchase lands, and now Esquiers are namde.
It is thus in a spirit of fierce mockery that he represents Philo-
musus and Studiosus, by way of a last resource, becoming can-
didates for the professional stage, and being tested by Burbage and
Kempe, who make merry over the deficiencies of scholars both as
actors and as dramatists.
KEMPE. The slaves are somewhat proud, and besides it is a good sport
in a part to see them never speake in their walke, but at the end of the
## p. 313 (#331) ############################################
The Returne from Pernassus, Part II 313
stage, just as though in walking with a fellow we should never speake but
at a stile, a gate, or a ditch, where a man can go no further. . . .
BUR. A little teaching will mend these faults, and it may bee besides they
will be able to pen a part.
KEMPE. Few of the University[men] plaies well, they smell too much of
that writer Ovid, and that writer Metamorphosis, and talke too much of
Proserpina and Juppiter. Why heres our fellow Shakespeare puts them all
downe, I and Ben Jonson too. O that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow, he
brought up Horace giving the poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath
given him a purge that made him bewray his credit.
The whole purport of this well known passage is misunderstood
unless it be recognised that it is written in a vein of the bitterest
irony. The gownsman is holding up to scorn before an academic
audience the judgment of illiterate boors who think that Meta-
morphosis is a writer, and that their fellow Shakespeare puts to
shame the university playwrights, and has had the upper hand in
a duel with Ben Jonson, the protagonist of classical orthodoxy in
dramatic art. With the relations of Shakespeare and Jonson in
the war of the theatres' we are not here concerned; but it is pro-
foundly significant that the anonymous author of the Parnassus
trilogy, perhaps the ablest of all the academic dramatists, should
have singled out Shakespeare in his mid-career for his satiric
shafts. The foremost representatives of the academic and the
professional stage stand revealed in this brief illuminating flash,
sundered by an impassable gulf of class prejudice and divergent
ideals of art. Nor could the scholar-playwright have been ex-
pected to see that the supreme master of irony, Time, would turn
back his ridicule with crushing effect upon himself. .
In other scenes of Part II of The Returne, which account for the
sub-title, The Scourge of Simony, the feud between town and gown
finds as bitter expression as in Club Law. But the satire is now
particularly directed against Francis Brackyn, deputy recorder of
Cambridge, who had taken a leading part in asserting the claims
of the burgesses against the university. The feeling against
Brackyn was intensified by the fact that he stood for common law,
while the academic jurists, at this time, were striving to revive the
influence and authority of civil law. Under the name of the Re-
corder, Brackyn figures in the play as one of a confederacy who
out of greed and spite, bestow the cure of souls on moneyed block-
heads instead of on poor but deserving scholars. The other mem-
bers of the gang are Sir Frederick, a dissolute and rapacious
patron of livings, and his son Amoretto, an affected braggart.
Academico, who has been a college contemporary of Amoretto
and used his talents on his behalf, asks him for his good offices
## p. 314 (#332) ############################################
314
University Plays
with his father. But Immerito, the boorish son of a country
bumpkin, is preferred to the benefice because his father can give
one hundred 'thanks' in current coin. The Recorder approves
the patron's choice, and seizes the occasion for a malignant out-
burst against the scholars and their colleges :
But had the world no wiser men than I,
Weede pen the prating parates in a cage;
Knights, Lords, and lawyers should be logʻd and dwel
Within those over stately heapes of stone
Which doting syres in old age did erect.
But, later, the scholars prove themselves the Recorder's match in
vituperation, and we get a foretaste of the yet more overwhelm-
ing ridicule of Brackyn in Ignoramus.
To us, the Parnassus trilogy is without an equal among
academic plays in the combined intimacy and breadth of its
appeal. But contemporary taste seems to have been hit more
successfully by another Cambridge drama, Lingua, or The
Combat of the Tongue and the five Senses for Superiority. This
comedy, first printed in 1607, went through six editions before
the Restoration. Its date is uncertain, though it must be later
than 1602, which is mentioned in one of the scenes. Its author,
as we learn from a memorandum by Sir John Harington, a
high authority on the university plays of his day, was Thomas
Tomkis of Trinity college, who graduated in 1600—1, and whose
name appears on the title-page of Albumazar, acted before James I
at Trinity in 1615. Lingua falls in with the contemporary
fashion of personifying or allegorising the parts and faculties of
man, which finds its chief expression in Phineas Fletcher's Purple
Island. The scene ‘is Microcosmus in a Grove,' and the plot
is concerned with the attempt of Lingua, the tongue, to vindi-
cate her claim to be a sixth sense. To breed strife among the
five recognised senses, she leaves in their path a crown and a royal
robe with the inscription:
He of the five that proves himself the best,
Shall have his temples with this coronet blest.
Tactus first finds the royal emblems, and invests his 'brows and body'
with them. Thereupon, the other senses dispute his sovereignty,
and make preparation for deadly combat. But Communis Sensus,
the vicegerent of queen Psyche, undertakes 'to umpire the con-
tention' and orders them their arms dismissed to appear before
him, charging everyone to bring, as it were in a shew, their proper
>
1
1
## p. 315 (#333) ############################################
a
Lingua
315
objects, that by them he may determine of their several excel-
lencies. ' Visus's show includes Lumen, Coelum, Terra and Colour,
whom he marshaleth about the stage, and presents before the
bench. ' Auditus afterwards leads in Tragedus and Comedus,
whose likeness and unlikeness are delineated in words of admir-
able critical insight. Olofactus presents “the mighty emperor
Tobacco, king of Trinidado, that, in being conquered, conquered
all Europe, in making them pay tribute for their smoke. Gustus
has in his train Bacchus and Ceres; but Tactus has to appear alone,
because his show was to have included a nice gentlewoman,' and
in five hours a dozen maids have not had time to attire a boy for
the part. Finally, Communis Sensus delivers judgment. On not
very cogent grounds, he assigns the crown to Visus and the robe to
Tactus, while the three other senses are consoled with appoint-
ments to high offices under queen Psyche. Lingua's claim to be a
sense is rejected—with a significant reservation:
The number of the Senses in this little world is answerable to the first
bodies in the great world: now, since there be but five in the universe, the
four elements and the pure substance of the heavens, therefore there can be
but five senses in our Microcosm correspondent to those . . . wherefore we
judge you to be no sense simply: only this much we from henceforth pro-
nounce, that all women for your sake shall have six Senses, that is, seeing,
hearing, tasting, smelling, touching, and the last and feminine sense, the
sense of speaking.
Lingua, enraged at being proclaimed 'half a sense,' revenges
herself by making the senses drink a drugged wine at a supper to
which Gustus invites them. Their wits become deranged, and strife
threatens to be renewed among them; but Somnus charms them,
and the mischief-maker Lingua, into sleep. In her sleep, Lingua
confesses her trickery', and is punished by being committed
'to close prisin, in Gustus's house . . . under the custody of two
strong dons, and. . . well guarded with thirty tall watchmen, with-
out whose licence she shall by no means wag abroad. '
It is not, however, in the plot, ingeniously worked out as it is,
that the chief attraction of the play lies. Its distinguishing ex-
cellence is the style, or variety of styles, in which it is written.
In the prose scenes, Tomkis proves himself a master of polished
and flexible dialogue, which has often a curiously modern note.
The wit is sparkling and unforced, but lacks the Aristophanic
pungency of Club Law and the Parnassus plays. In the few
In The Modern Language Review, vol. iv, no. 4, pp. 518—520, the present writer
has suggested that this episode is probably a parody of the sleep-walking scene in
Macbeth.
•
## p. 316 (#334) ############################################
316
University Plays
verse passages where the author aims at a serious effect, he writes
with scholarly grace. But most of the metrical speeches are in a
vein of burlesque, or are parodies of lines in plays of the day.
Thus, there are intentionally ludicrous imitations of famous
speeches in Kyd's Spanish Tragedie, besides what appear to be
caricatures of phrases or situations in several Shakespearean
dramas. A hundred and one incidental allusions show the width
of the author's reading, and the remarkably detailed stage direc-
tions prove his interest in matters of costume and heraldry. The
statement made in 1657, and elaborated by later tradition, that
Oliver Cromwell acted in the play, is, probably, a bookseller's
figment, but might, conceivably, be true if a revival took place
about 1617, when the third edition of the work appeared.
The last decade of Elizabeth's reign, which was very fruitful in
Cambridge plays, has left few memorials of dramatic activity at
Oxford, which seems to have been more dependent on the external
stimulus of royal visits. But, at St John's college, which, from
the beginning of the seventeenth century, rivals Christ Church
as a centre of academic stagecraft, there was produced in 1602/3
the 'twelfe night merriment,' Narcissus. The prologue declares
that 'the play wee play is Ovid's own Narcissus,' and it is true at
the plot is taken from book III of the Metamorphoses. But the
story is considerably expanded and treated throughout in a bur-
lesque vein.
Thus, Tiresias, 'the not seeing prophet,' adorned
‘in byshoppes rochett,' is introduced to tell the fortune of the
beautiful youth from the table' of his hand; and the trickery of
.
the mischievous nymph Echo leads to mock tragedy. Throughout,
the author shows a remarkable command of out-of-the-way phrases
and grotesque rimes, and, in its farcical treatment of a classical
legend, Narcissus is curiously akin to the interlude of Pyramus
and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Two and a half years later, in the summer of 1605, St John's
took part with Christ Church in the series of entertainments pro-
vided for king James on his first visit to Oxford. The king, ac-
companied by the queen and Henry, prince of Wales, made his
entry on 27 August. Special preparations had been made for the
festivities. In Christ Church, where the king and queen lodged,
a stage had been
built close to the upper end of the Hall, as it seemed at the first sight. But
indeed it was but a false wall fair painted, and adorned with stately pillars,
which pillars would turn about, by reason whereof, with the help of other
painted clothes, their stage did vary three times in the acting of one
Tragedy.
<
6
## p. 317 (#335) ############################################
-
James I at Oxford, 1605 317
That the actors in the various plays might be suitably apparelled,
a number of costumes and properties were supplied by the office
of the revels. Lists of these are preserved in the university archives.
The success of the performances seems, however, to have been
scarcely on a level with the magnitude of the preparations.
On
the first evening, a pastoral play Alba was presented. “In the
acting thereof they brought in five or six men almost naked which
were much disliked by the Queen and Ladies. ' It needed the
entreaties of the chancellors of both universities to prevent the
king leaving before half the comedy had been ended. ' On the
following night, James saw Ajax Flagellifer. James would have
done well to imitate his predecessor in countermanding', as he
'was very weary before he came thither, but much more wearied
by it, and spoke many words of dislike. ' Nor did matters fare
.
much better on the third evening, when Vertumnus sive Annus
Recurrens, by Matthew Gwinne of St John's, was performed on
the Christ Church stage. Though it was well acted by a company
consisting chiefly of St John's men, the king fell asleep in the
middle. But the play produced on the following evening ‘made
amends for all. ' It was The Queenes Arcadia of Samuel Daniel,
'
memorable as the first English pastoral drama written for the
academic stage? Guarini's Il Pastor Fido had been acted a short
time previously at King's college, Cambridge, in a Latin version,
Pastor Fidus. Parthenia, a similar version of Luigi Groto's Pen-
timento Amoroso, preserved in manuscript at Emmanuel college,
Cambridge, is of uncertain date. Daniel, as was natural, followed
the general lines of Italian pastoral drama; but the statement of
a contemporary Cambridge visitor to Oxford, that it was drawn
out of Pastor Fidus,' is misleading. So far as Daniel's play owes
a direct debt to a foreign original, it is to Tasso's Aminta rather
than to Guarini's work, while the conception of the plot, though
not of a number of episodes, must be put down to the English
poet's own credit. It deals with the entanglements and evils
produced in Arcadia by the machinations of sophisticated re-
presentatives of the outer world. Chief among these are Colax,
'a corrupted traveller,' and Techne, a subtle wench of Corinth,
who, by their nefarious schemes, delude the shepherd Amyntas
into the belief that Cloris, whom he wooes in vain, is a wanton.
In despair, he tries to take his own life, but, in an episode imitated
1 Cf. ante, p. 298.
For a brief sketch of the progress of the pastoral drama in England see the fol.
lowing chapter (XIII).
## p. 318 (#336) ############################################
318
University Plays
from Aminta, is rescued by Cloris, whose heart has, at last, been
touched by love. The arch evildoers, after plotting not only
against the hero and heroine but against other Arcadian lovers,
are banished for ever. Subordinate, but more amusing, mischief-
makers are Lincus, a pettifogging lawyer, and Alcon, a quack
doctor, into whose mouth is put a description of tobacco as
a certaine herbe wrapt up in rowles
From th’ Island of Nicosia where it growes:
And this he said a wondrous vertue had,
To purge the head, and cure the great catarre.
This, of course, was intended to tickle the ears of the author of
A Counterblaste to Tobacco. But the permanent attraction of
Daniel's play lies not in its topical references or even in its
plot and characterisation, but in the lyrical sweetness of its
verse and the limpid grace of its diction and imagery. Its pro-
duction at Christ Church is amongst the most memorable records
of the Oxford stage. Probably, however, none of the Christ Church
plays gratified the king so much as a more informal open-air inter-
lude which took place in front of St John's college on the day of his
entry into Oxford. Three young scholars, dressed as nymphs,
suddenly appeared in his path. They announced that they were
the sibyls who had formerly foretold to Banquo the rule of his
descendants, and that they had come again to prophesy all hap-
piness to James, and the perpetuity of Banquo's stock upon the
British throne. They then saluted the king in turn with a triple
salve, and greeted similarly the queen and prince Henry. James
'did very much applaude' the conceipt,' which was devised by
Matthew Gwinne, and it is possible that some account of it reached
the ears of Shakespeare and suggested the writing of Macbeth in
the following year.
The stimulus of the royal visit to theatrical activity at Oxford,
especially at St John's college, seems to have lasted for some time
afterwards. To this, we have remarkable testimony in a unique
memorial of the academic stage preserved in the St John's library.
It is a manuscript written by Griffin Higgs, a member of the college,
who successively became fellow of Merton and chaplain to Eliza-
beth of Bohemia, and entitled A true and faithfull relation of
the risinge and fall of Thomas Tucker, Prince of Alba Fortunata,
Lord St Johns &c. , with all the occurrents which happened through-
out his whole domination. No extant document, not even Gager's
6
## p. 319 (#337) ############################################
Plays at St John's, Oxford, 160748 319
letter to Rainolds, lets us so completely behind the scenes of the
collegiate theatre, or brings home to us so intimately the hopes
and fears, the labours and difficulties, connected with the per-
formances. The manuscript is an account of a series of festivities
which lasted from All Saints' eve (31 October) 1607 till the first
Sunday in the following Lent? On All Saints' eve, Thomas
Tucker, a bachelor of arts (later, a fellow of the college and
canon of Bristol) was elected 'Christmas Lord or Prince of the
Revells. . . to appoint & moderate all such games and pastimes
as should come. ' Two bills' were, therefore, sent out to the
masters craving allegiance to his authority and 'money & main-
tenance. Among those who contributed were Laud and Juxon,
each assessed at ten shillings. But, in order to raise an adequate
sum, Tucker (like a true Stewart ruler) had to levy a further
requisition on ex-fellows and commoners and on college tenants.
Sufficient provision thus made, he was publicly installed on
St Andrew's day by means of a Latin "devise,' Ara Fortunae.
In this, the prince, with his leading councillors, visits the temple
of Fortune and is assured by her priestess of the favour of the
goddess. He accordingly announces that he no longer reigns by
popular favour but by divine right, and that he is preparing ‘pomps
and triumphs' for the entertainment of his faithful subjects.
On Christmas day, the prince sat at high table in the vice-
president's place, and a boar's head was carried in as 'the first
messe' by the 'tallest and lustiest' of his guards, to the accom-
paniment of a brisk carol. In the evening, a short Latin interlude,
Saturnalia, was performed, introducing a Dominus and a Servus
in the inverted relation peculiar to the Roman festival, and after-
wards Hercules, who, by interpreting aright an equivocal Delphic
oracle, shows that waxen lights and not human sacrifices are the
offerings enjoined at this anniversary. As the season of the
Saturnalia coincided approximately with Christmastide, these
waxen lights, it is hinted, are the source of Christmas candles;
and, in a prose epilogue, an ingenious parallel and contrast are
drawn between the pagan and the Christian festival.
The same sense of classical and Biblical analogies dictated the
choice of a play for Innocents' day. A Senecan tragedy on the story
of Philomela was written for the occasion, as it was thought that the
1 The narrative part of the manuscript and one play The Seven Dayes of the
Weeke were printed in 1816, with the title The Christmas Prince. The present writer
has been given facilities for consulting the manuscript, and the account of the other
plays is here printed for the first time.
## p. 320 (#338) ############################################
320
University Plays
subject 'well fitted the day, by reason of the murder of Innocent
Itis. ' But the performance had to be postponed for a day because
the carpenters were 'no way ready wth the stage. ' Then a further
mishap occurred. “The Prince himself who was to play Tereus had
gott such an exceeding cold that it was impossible for him to
speake, or speaking to be heard. ' However, with the unnamed
author of the tragedy in reserve as an understudy should he be
'constrained to leave,' the resourceful Tucker got through his
part with credit. The whole play was wel acted and wel liked,
a more favourable verdict than had been pronounced on Calf-
hill's tragedy on the same story acted before Elizabeth at Christ
Church in 1566.
It is characteristic of the academic taste of the time, that
Philomela was much more appreciated than an English play
Time's Complaint, acted on New Year's day as part of the
princes triumphs. ' The failure of this piece, which received only
'two or three cold plaudites,' was partly due to the blunders of
amateur actors, of which Higgs gives amusing details, and to the
overcrowding on the stage. But, doubtless, the fault also lay
largely in the plot, which combines awkwardly a semi-allegorical
tale of Time's attempt to recover his daughter Veritas, kept in
thraldom by Opinion and Error, and a farcical series of mistakes
and entanglements arising out of the theft of goodwife Spigott's
goods by a drunken cobbler, Swallow. Yet, Time's Complaint is
far from being without interest. It contains genre pictures of
characteristic Elizabethan types, such as the dispossessed country-
man, the cashiered soldier and the professional beggar. It intro-
duces, also, in Studioso, the poor and embittered scholar, and in
Philonices, the grasping, pompous lawyer and justice, two figures
akin to those in the Parnassus plays.
The spirits of the St John's actors, which had been grievously
depressed by the cold reception of Time's Complaint, were revived
by the success of an amusing show, The Seven Dayes of the Weeke,
acted at the president's lodging on Sunday, 10 January, and re-
peated by special request before the vice-chancellor and other
dignitaries a week later. Equally successful was a Latin comedy
Philomathes, mingling abstractions with Plautine characters.
After its performance 'the stage & scaffold were pul'd downe
wch had stood from Cristmas'; but they were set up again on
Shrove Tuesday for the prince's resignation. This, like his public
installation, was solemnised in the form of a play, Ira seu Tumulus
Fortunae. The goddess has now grown angry with the prince
## p. 321 (#339) ############################################
Riots at Performances
321
because he has not paid her sufficiently constant homage. His
ministers resign their symbols of office and desert him. In vain
he visits again the altar of Fortune, and seeks to placate her
wrath. He, therefore, strips himself of the emblems of sove-
reignty, and lays them in a sepulchre in her temple, dedicating
himself henceforth to the service of Minerva.
Thus ended the memorable reign of Thomas Tucker; but, as the
stage and scaffolds had been re-erected, and, as an English tragedy
on the story of Periander, tyrant of Corinth, had been prepared,
it was decided to perform this on the following Saturday. It at-
tracted such a concourse that hundreds could not find room in the
hall. They ‘made such an hideous noice, and raised such a tumult
with breaking of windows all about the colledge, throwinge of stones
into the hall, and such like ryott' that the officers of the college
had to rush forth, 'wth about a dozen whiflers well armed and
swords drawne. ' The rioters then ran away, but some of the
ringleaders were arrested, and imprisoned in the porter's lodge
till the play was over.
Curiously enough, about a week later, on 20 February, there
was a similar riot at Cambridge, when there was 'foul & great
disorder committed at the time of a comedy in King's College,'
probably a lost play by Phineas Fletcher. In the same month,
four years later, there was a yet more serious disturbance at Cam-
bridge, when the St John's men, angry at being excluded from a
comedy acted at Trinity college, began an affray outside the Great
Gate, which led to proceedings in the vice-chancellor's court. In
sharp contrast to these tumultuous proceedings was the scene in
the hall of Trinity on 2 March 1613, when prince Charles and
Frederick, the elector palatine, saw Samuel Brooke's comedy
called Adelphe, and when the elector slept during the greater part
of the performance, which lasted from seven in the evening till
one. On the following evening, the princes were again provided
with solid entertainment by the performance of Scyros, a Latin
version by Brooke of Bonarelli's pastoral drama, Filli di Sciro.
On 7 March 1615, James himself, with prince Charles, came to
Cambridge, and stayed at Trinity for four nights. As the sovereign
had not visited the university since Elizabeth's 'progress' in 1564,
elaborate preparations were made to celebrate the event. The
days were devoted to learned disputations and the evenings to
plays. The first piece, Aemilia, a Latin comedy written by Ed-
ward Cecil of St John's, was not very successful; but ample
amends were made on the following evening when, in the hall
21
E. L. VI.
CH, XII.
## p. 322 (#340) ############################################
322
University Plays
of Trinity, Ignoramus was launched on its triumphant career.
Its author was George Ruggle, fellow of Clare hall, who had
formerly been a scholar of Trinity, and the actors were chosen
from various colleges, difficulty being found in filling suitably the
female parts. On one side, Ignoramus is linked with the group of
Latin adaptations of Italian comedies mentioned above, for it is
founded on G. della Porta's Trappolaria. But Ruggle transformed
his original by extensive additions, and by a fundamental change in
the central character, converting him out of a soldier into the
lawyer who gives his name to the play. Thus metamorphosed,
the typically southern comedy became the climax of Aristophanic
attacks by gownsmen upon the town and its officials. The title
part is a merciless caricature of the detested recorder, Brackyn,
who had already been ridiculed in The Returne from Pernassus,
Part II. The animus against him as a common lawyer had
been intensified by public events. The law dictionary The Inter-
preter, published in 1607 by John Cowell, regius professor of
civil law, had been suppressed on the demand of the House of
Commons, because its tendency was to exalt the royal prerogative
at the expense of common law. The civilians of the university
and the king himself were, therefore, delighted when Ruggle
brought upon the stage a burlesque figure talking a barbarous
jargon of bastard Latin and the technical terms of common law.
It is the novelty of this conception and the gusto with which it is
developed that give the play its unique character. In the course
of its intricate plot, Ignoramus goes through a variety of humiliating
and painful experiences. On a visit to Bordeaux, he falls in love
with the heroine, Rosabella, and engages to pay 600 pieces of gold
for her hand. But, through the stratagems of Antonius, the
favoured suitor of the girl, Ignoramus obtains possession instead
of the heavy-handed virago, Polla, who belabours him soundly,
Amazed at his incomprehensible outcries, she thinks he is be
witched and goes to fetch her husband and a monk, who, in a
scene of richly farcical humour, exorcise the evil spirits out of
him and carry him off, shrieking, to a monastery for his final cure.
Rosabella, of course, is finally united to Antonius, and a mystery
attaching to her birth is cleared up.
Ignoramus, with its mixture of learning and horseplay, was
exactly suited for captivating James. The play presented on the
following night, Albumazar, though adapted by Tomkis, author
of Lingua, from another comedy of della Porta, L'Astrologo,
was less successful. But it contains two amusing characters in
## p. 323 (#341) ############################################
6
James I at Cambridge, 1615 323
Albumazar, the rascally astronomer, and Trincalo, the rustic whom
Albumazar 'transforms' into his absent master, Antonio, with lu-
dicrous consequences when the latter unexpectedly returns home. .
In its printed form, the play was fortunate enough to attract both
Dryden and Garrick, both of whom revived it on the London stage.
But, on its production, it seems, from a contemporary account,
to have been less appreciated not only than its predecessor,
Ignoramus, but than its successor on the following evening, Me-
lanthe, a Latin pastoral drama from the pen of Samuel Brooke,
whose Adelphe and Scyros have been mentioned above. The king
could not stay to see the last play prepared for his entertainment,
Sicelides, by Phineas Fletcher ; but it was acted a few days later.
He thus missed seeing the first English 'piscatory' on the stage,
as he had already seen at Oxford, in 1605, the first English pastoral
drama. The main plot of Sicelides, dealing with the romantic
love stories of Perindus and Glaucilla and Thalander and Olinda,
is, apparently, original, though episodes and motives are derived
from classical and Italian sources. One underplot centres round
Cosma, the typical 'light nymph' of 'Messena,' and the other
round Cancrone and Scrocca, low-comedy fishermen whose talk is
largely a farrago of 'malapropisms' and topical allusions. The
machinery of the play is unduly intricate and perplexing, and the
characterisation is not vivid. But the work has real charm in its
delicate delineation of emotions, in the graceful imagery of its
descriptive passages and in the lyric sweetness of its choruses.
James was so delighted with Ignoramus that he revisited Cam-
bridge in May to see it a second time. Its triumph marks the
close of the most vital period of the university drama. Hence-
forward, no new type was evolved, and the distinctively academic
element dwindles. Allegorical plays became increasingly popular
with college dramatists, though Lingua remained unrivalled for
wit and verve. Thus, in February 1618, Technogamia or The
Marriage of the Arts, by Barten Holiday, was acted at Christ
Church ‘with no great applause'; but it was repeated before the
king at Woodstock in August 1621. Though James seems to have
found the piece very dull, it is not without merit. The action
shows how some of the arts and sciences endeavour to enter into
unnatural unions. Thus, Poeta seeks to win the hand of Astronomia,
but is finally allied to Historia and promises that his love shall
follow her ‘more inseparably than the Hexameter the Pentameter. '
Closely related to Lingua, to which it contains direct references, is
Pathomachia or The Battell of Affections, published by 'a Friend
of the deceassed Author,' in 1630, and 'written some years since. '
6
21-2
## p. 324 (#342) ############################################
324
University Plays
6
It deals with the revolt of the Affections against Love and Hatred,
‘whom heretofore they counted their King and Queene' Love
and Hatred are aided by the Virtues, headed by Justice, while the
rebels have the support of the Vices disguised as Affections or
Virtues, and commanded by Pride. Justice, however, unmasks
them, and sends them to confinement, whereupon the Affections
tender their submission and are pardoned. The work is in prose
throughout, and contains interesting passages and many allusions
to recent events, but lacks dramatic movement and vivacity.
Religious satire is another predominant element in the later
university playsa foretaste of the dread conflict that was fast
approaching. Loiola, by John Hacket, acted at Trinity before
the university on 28 February' and before James on a third visit
to Cambridge on 12 March 1623, is an entertaining Latin comedy,
which attacks impartially Roman Catholics and Calvinists, the
former in the person of Loiola, 'an unscrupulous Jesuit,' the latter
in that of Martinus, a canting elder of Amsterdam, where the scene
is laid. To the same year belongs the semi-allegorical Fucus
Histriomastix, wherein the title role, that of a hypocritical puritan
minister, was played by Robert Ward of Queens' college, who was
probably the author of the piece. Fucus, who hates all plays and
amusements, seeks to prevent the marriage of Philomathes and
Comoedia, otherwise, the production of an academic comedy. The
arguments he uses are the same as those of Rainolds in his con-
troversy with Gager, and seem derived from his book. But his
intrigues are foiled, and he also comes off badly in a feud with the
merry-making countryman, Villanus, who is in love with Ballada,
an illegitimate sister of Comoedia'.
Another actor in Fucus was Peter Hausted, afterwards fellow
of Queens', who, when Charles and Henrietta Maria visited
Cambridge in March 1632, wrote in their honour the singular play
The Rival Friends. This is linked to the comedies satirising
religious hypocrisy by its caustic portraiture of the wooers of the
deformed and foolish Mistress Ursely, whose hand carries with it
an 'impropriate parsonage. ' More realistically humorous person-
ages are Stipes, the shepherd of the simoniacal patron, and his wife
and daughter, all genuinely rustic figures without the customary
pastoral veneer. From Hausted's preface to the play when it
was published, it is evident that his low-life portraiture had been
adversely criticised as unbefitting the royal presence. But to
1 See Fucus Histriomastix, edited by Smith, G. C. Moore (1909), introduction and
notes, pp. 98—9. The editor suggests that the play may have been partly inspired by
an attempt, recorded by Chamberlain, to suppress the performance of Loiola.
## p. 325 (#343) ############################################
Hausted.
Randolph
325
modern taste this appeals much more strongly than does the
pseudo-romantic main plot. The two friends, Lucius and Neander,
rivals for the love of Pandora, vie in their readiness to abdicate
in each other's favour, and carry their altruism so far that the lady
gives her affections, at first in pretence, afterwards in reality, to a
third wooer. The popularity, however, of such fantastic themes
was evidenced by the successful production at Trinity, during
the same royal visit, of Thomas Randolph's The Jealous Lovers.
Randolph, a distinguished alumnus of Westminster and Trinity,
had already written two short academic 'shows,' Aristippus or
The Joviall Philosopher and The Conceited Pedler. The Jealous
Lovers was his first complete play, and the rapturous welcome
accorded to it does little credit to either the university or the
court. Randolph's inventiveness and rhetorical fluency cannot
redeem the essential falsity of the main plot. Tyndarus is insanely
suspicious of the faithfulness of his beloved Evadne, and Techmessa
similarly mistrusts her devoted Pamphilus. The two jealous
lovers' go through a mock funeral (which gives occasion for an
imitation of the gravedigger's scene in Hamlet) as a final test of
the constancy of the seemingly bereft pair. But, after this ordeal
has proved their loyalty unswerving, Hymen forbids the proposed
unions, and it transpires that Tyndarus is the brother of Evadne, and
Techmessa the sister of Pamphilus. Interwoven with these pseudo-
romantic episodes is an underplot of gross humour.
The royal pair, accompanied by their nephews, the palatine
princes, paid a second visit to Oxford in August 1636, when
the last important series of academic plays was produced in
their honour. William Strode, public orator, welcomed the
king to Christ Church with a speech, and with an allegorical
drama, The Floating Island, which was staged with great elabora-
tion, and furnished with music by Henry Lawes. The title and
general conception of the work, in which the island represents the
human mind afloat on the sea of the passions, was, doubtless, sug-
gested by Phineas Fletcher's The Purple Island or The Isle of
Man, published at Cambridge in 1633. But Strode develops the
theme on lines of his own, and with the added spice of political
and religious satire. A conspiracy is formed by Audax, Irato and
others against the rule of king Prudentius and his counsellor,
Intellectus Agens. Prudentius resigns his crown, and Fancy is
proclaimed queen, her only law being 'that each man use his
proper humour, be it vice or virtue. ' Discord and tumult are the
result, and Prudentius is finally implored to resume the crown, after
each of the plotters has declined it in turn. The implied lesson
## p. 326 (#344) ############################################
326
University Plays
on the evil results of rebellion, and the castigation of Prynne,
in the person of Melancholico, a play-hating puritan, helped
to recommend the play to the royal favour. Equally successful
were the two dramas produced on the following day. One of these,
Love's Hospitall, by George Wilde, fellow of St John's, was per-
formed in the afternoon at that college at the expense of Laud,
who, as chancellor of the university, was present to welcome the
king and queen. The piece is an entertaining comedy of humours,
in almost farcical vein, and is in no way characteristically academic.
This is also true of William Cartwright's The Royall Slave', acted
in the evening at Christ Church. An Ephesian captive, Cratander,
in accordance with an old custom among the Persians, is granted
for three days before his execution the full insignia and privileges
of kingship. During this period, he displays such nobility of soul
that heaven intervenes in his favour, and he is spared to become
the wearer of a real crown. This theme is handled by Cart-
wright with genuine rhetorical effectiveness, and his drama was
furnished with special scenic effects by Inigo Jones and incidental
music by Lawes. So delighted was the queen with the perform-
ance that she afterwards borrowed the costumes and scenery for
a repetition of the play by her own company at Hampton court.
The academic stage was to number yet one more illustrious recruit
in Cowley, whose Naufragium Joculare, based on classical sources,
was acted at Trinity college, Cambridge, in 1638, and was followed
in 1642 by his satirical comedy The Guardian, remodelled after
the Restoration into Cutter of Coleman Street. But the royal
visit to Oxford in 1636 marks the close of these elaborate univer-
sity displays, which had begun with Elizabeth's coming to Cam-
bridge in 1564. Even in the traditionally loyal community on the
banks of the Isis, there were ominous symptoms of the rapidly
growing resentment against the autocratic rule of Charles and Laud.
As the king and queen rode away from Christ Church, the streets,
according to custom, were lined with 'Scholers of all degrees,' but
'neither they nor the citizens made any expression of joy, nor
uttered, as the manner is, Vivat Rex. ' When Oxford, some seven
years later, again opened its gates to Charles, it was not to enter-
tain him with ‘masques and triumphs,' but to afford him shelter
in his stern conflict with his parliamentary foes.
The civil war and the commonwealth mark a period of deep
cleavage in English stage history. With the Restoration, came
new men and new methods, and a forgetfulness of all but
the greatest dramatists of the former age. It was virtually
· See, as to Cartwright's plays, ante, chap. ix.
6
## p. 327 (#345) ############################################
Concluding Survey
327
the work of the nineteenth century to rediscover the lesser
Elizabethan writers for the popular stage. The university drama,
bilingual in utterance, and with its memorials not easy of
access, has had to wait for yet tardier recognition. It had, of
course, patent faults. It produced much that was artificial,
amateurish and unduly imitative, and its moral standard was
as unexacting as that of the London theatre of the day. But it
had behind it truly formative influences, in the renascence ardour
for classical lore and delight in pageantry, in the gownsmen's
haughty resentment of the buffets of fortune to which they were
exposed, and in the traditional hostility between scholars and
townsmen by Isis and by Cam. Hence sprang that special type of
Aristophanic comedy, unique in this period of the drama, repre-
sented by Pedantius and Ignoramus, Club Law and the Parnassus
trilogy. And, in addition to these distinctively topical university
plays, we owe to the academic stage a number of dramas moulded
and coloured by the peculiar conditions of their origin. Such are
the semi-Senecan plays on religious, historical and mythological
subjects, like Archipropheta, Richardus Tertius and Ulysses
Redux; comedies like Laelia and Hymenaeus; allegorical pieces
like Lingua, Fucus and The Floating Island; pastorals like The
Queenes Arcadia and Sicelides. In these and kindred productions,
noted in this chapter or merely recorded as 'comedy' or 'tragedy’
in college account-books, the university humanists preserved ele-
ments of classic and neo-classic culture which would otherwise
have been almost entirely lost to the stage. From Oxford and
Cambridge, these influences permeated to the capital. For, sharp
as in general was the division, social and intellectual, between
academic and professional playwrights, the latter and larger class
was constantly being recruited from graduates who had gained
their earliest dramatic experience as spectators, actors, or, in some
cases, authors, of college 'shows. The royal visits to the uni-
versities helped further to extend the range of influence of the
amateur stage.
