Defense of Poesy

I've always admired the poetry of Sir Philip Sidney, though his great work of literary and dramatic criticism, The Defense of Poesy, still makes him sound to me like a bit of a wet blanket.

Sidney wrote the essay around 1579, so it was before most of the great works of the Elizabethan era had been composed. Shakespeare's plays were still a good ten years off at the time, and even Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd hadn't begun to pen dramas.

The one English play Sidney singles out as worthy is Gorboduc by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville. That play, which was first performed in 1561 and later published in 1565, bears remarkable resemblances to the later King Lear by Shakespeare. Both involve the division of the Kingdom of Britain by an elderly monarch amongst his children, and both feature a Duke of Albany and a Duke of Cornwall.

What Norton and Sackville did that was truly innovative was introduce the use of blank verse to English drama. By writing the play in unrhymed iambic pentameter, they set a precedent used by most later Elizabethan dramas. Sidney called Gorboduc "full of stately speeches and well-sounding phrases, climbing to the height of Seneca's style." Still, he claimed it was "faulty both in place and time" since "the stage should always represent but one place" and "but one day" at the most.

Sidney's railings against improbability seem to be answered with a Bronx cheer from Shakespeare's play The Winter's Tale. Sidney objects to plays "where you shall have Asia of the one side, and Afric of the other, and so many other under-kingdoms, that the player, when he cometh in, must ever begin with telling where he is." The Winter's Tale begins with two lords discussing the kingdoms of Bohemia and Sicilia, and when the action moves from Sicilia to the sea coast of (the notoriously landlocked) Bohemia, Antigonus declares "Thou art perfect, then, our ship hath touched upon / The deserts of Bohemia?"

Offending against the unity of time is an even worse offense for Sidney. He complains how in English plays "ordinary it is that two young princes fall in love; after many traverses she is got with child, delivered of a fair boy, he is lost, groweth a man, falleth in love, and is ready to get another child,--and all this in two hours' space." Well, yes, that sounds like The Winter's Tale, too! The child born in Act II is shown getting engaged to be married in Act IV. As if to thumb his nose at critics like Sidney, Shakespeare has the character of Time come forth as a chorus at the beginning of Act IV to beg, "Impute it not a crime / To me or my swift passage that I slide / O'er sixteen years."

Sidney did consider that a crime, but fortunately Shakespeare did not. And if you want to see how his very un-Sidneyan play turned out, you're in luck. Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey will be performing The Winter's Tale beginning next week!

Much Ado About Tragedy

I recently acquired the DVD to Kenneth Branagh's film version of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. I was rather taken aback by a quote from Roger Ebert on the case: "CHEERFUL FROM BEGINNING TO END."

Really? Cheerful? The false accusations of infidelity? The father wishing his only child was dead? The nearly averted duel between two friends? Cheerful?

One of the things that interests me about the play is how it constantly borrows the characters, plot devices, and even language of tragedy and turns them into comedy. Don John, for instance, seems a forerunner of Iago and Edmund in his motiveless villainy. The friar's idea of pretending a young woman is dead comes right out of Romeo and Juliet. Over and over again, the devices of tragedy are used for comedy.

This is seen in the Prince's line (much played upon in the piece) where he says: "In time the savage bull doth bear the yoke." The phrase became proverbial, but originally it came from a poem by Thomas Watson. The first few lines (themselves including a rough translation from a sonnet by Seraphine) run like this:

                              In time the Bull is brought to wear the yoke;

                              In time all haggard Hawks will stoop the Lures;

                              In time small wedge will cleave the sturdiest Oak;

                              In time the Marble wears with weakest showers:
   
                              More fierce is my sweet love, more hard withal,
   
                              Than Beast, or Bird, than Tree or Stony wall.

Shakespeare likely didn't get the line from Watson, though. He didn't need to. It was already much more famous from Thomas Kyd's use of it in The Spanish Tragedy. The villain Lorenzo says at the beginning of Act II:

                              My lord, though Bel-imperia seem thus coy, 
                              Let reason hold you in your wonted joy: 
                              In time the savage bull sustains the yoke, 
                              In time all haggard hawks will stoop to lure, 
                              In time small wedges cleave the hardest oak,
                              In time the flint is pierced with softest shower; 
                              And she in time will fall from her disdain,
                              And rue the sufferance of your friendly pain.

Basically, he's telling Balthazar, son of the Viceroy of Portugal, that if the lady Bel-imperia is not moved by friendly courtship, they can force her to do their will. For Shakespeare's audience, the Prince's lines might have carried some dark overtones, and they almost certainly would have reminded people of Kyd's bloody play.

The villains in The Spanish Tragedy ultimately make good on their threats and kill Bel-imperia's lover, Horatio. The murder scene, memorialized on the frontispiece for the published edition of the play, ends like this:

                              BEL-IMPERIA: O, save his life, and let me die for him! 
                              O, save him, brother! save him, Balthazar!
                              I loved Horatio, but he loved not me. 

                              BALTHAZAR: But Balthazar loves Bel-imperia. 

                              LORENZO: Although his life were still ambitious, proud, 
                              Yet is he at the highest now he is dead. 

                              BEL-IMPERIA: Murder! murder! help! Hieronimo, help! 

                              LORENZO: Come, stop her mouth! away with her!

Here's the image that appeared in the published script:

Notice the villain on the right is speaking the famous last line "stop her mouth!" Does that line sound familiar? It should. 

At the end of Much Ado About Nothing, a character says of Beatrice: "Peace! I will stop your mouth." Now the character attributions in the play are notoriously problematic. (At one point, Dogberry is referred to as Kemp, the name of the actor who played him.) Here, the original text lists Leonato as the speaker, but most editors agree that the line belongs to Benedick, and the traditional stage direction there is that he kisses her.

So what is Shakespeare doing? He's taking a line famous for its use in tragedy and reworking it into a confirmation of romantic happiness that resolves a comedy. Gutsy, innovative, but hardly cheerful from beginning to end.

Marlowe's Mighty Line

Yesterday, I promised a blog post about Christopher Marlowe, the first truly great playwright of the Elizabethan stage.

Marlowe was born in the town of Canterbury, and in spite of his humble origins, he was allowed to attend Canterbury's King's School as a boy, learning Latin and Greek. Marlowe did so well in his studies, he received a scholarship to attend Corpus Christi College of Cambridge University. While there, he might have written Dido, Queen of Carthage, a rather academic play mingling mortals and humans on stage, containing plenty of literary allusions but not much plot.

As a student, Marlowe seems to have gotten caught up in the cloak-and-dagger world of Queen Elizabeth's secret police, headed by Sir Francis Walsingham. He stopped attending classes, and Cambridge University was going to refuse him a degree until the Queen's own Privy Council intervened, assuring university officials Marlowe had done "good service" to the government during his absence.

Marlowe moved to London, where in 1587 he took the theatre world by storm with his play Tamburlaine the Great. The play features a seemingly unstoppable conqueror who--like Marlowe--came from humble origins and rose to great heights. Similar to Gorboduc and The Spanish Tragedy, Marlowe's play was written in blank verse, but the poetry had a raw power the London stage had never before seen. The actor Edward Alleyne performed the title role and rocketed to fame along with the playwright. Marlowe then provided his star actor with a sequel (Tamburlaine the Great, Part II), which proved just as popular as the original. Later poets would praise the dramatist's hard-driving iambic pentameter as "Marlowe's mighty line."

Alleyne also starred in Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, which likewise has powerful and frequently shocking poetry. Marlowe continued to develop as a playwright with Edward II, a history play with a tightly constructed plot and somewhat more subtle characters than those of his earlier works. He turned to recent events with The Massacre at Paris about the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572.

Marlowe's most enduring play, Doctor Faustus, dramatizes a German legend about a scholar who makes a deal with the devil. The play's blending of comedy and tragedy in a grand struggle for the soul of mankind hearkens back to medieval morality plays, but in the new Protestant environment, Doctor Faustus drew attacks from religious zealots opposed to the theatre. One, William Prynne, claimed real devils had appeared on stage during a performance of the play.

Though details remain murky, sometime in 1593 Marlowe fell out of favor with Walsingham and his secret police. Marlowe had once lodged with fellow dramatist Thomas Kyd, and under torture Kyd claimed that some blasphemous writings found in his possession actually belonged to Marlowe. A warrant was issued for his arrest, but when Marlowe tried to turn himself in to authorities, he was told to come back when the Privy Council was meeting. Days later, he died in a tavern brawl, allegedly in a dispute over the bill. A coroner's report found he was stabbed above his right eye, killing him instantly.

What really happened, we may never know. What is clear is that Marlowe left a legacy of great plays that continue to be performed today.

Early Tudor Drama

As the middle ages in England came to a close, the Plantagenet dynasty split into two factions: the House of Lancaster and the House of York. The two sides repeatedly clashed in the long conflict known as the Wars of the Roses, with the young Henry Tudor ultimately triumphing and establishing a new Tudor Dynasty.

Though drama under Henry VII still maintained a medieval sensibility, times were changing. The printing press had already been introduced, and Renaissance ideas that had flourished in Italy were finally reaching England. Under the reign of the king's son, Henry VIII, secular drama gained considerable ground, with the gifted English playwright John Heywood providing such interludes as The Play of the Weather and The Four P's.

Another important playwright from Henry's reign was John Bale. His play King Johan tells the story (from a decidedly Protestant standpoint) of a notorious medieval monarch's conflict with the Pope. King Johan is notable both for its unique verse structure and its mixing together of historical and allegorical figures. The play exists in multiple versions, and a reference in one to "our late kynge Henrye" could indicate it was performed during the reign of Edward VI as well. Bale was highly regarded under Edward, and the young king appointed him as a bishop.

Sometime around the end of Edward's reign, the schoolmaster Nicholas Udall wrote the comedy Ralph Roister Doister. The play focuses on the dramatic descendant of the Miles Gloriosus character in Plautus, depicting a braggart who tries to woo a virtuous widow but ends up running away from her maids. The play appears to have been intended for performance by Udall's students, though it may have been performed before Mary I as well. By the time Elizabeth I took the throne, there was already a healthy tradition of secular plays in England.

That proved to be fortunate, as Elizabeth set about banning all religious drama. The mystery, miracle, and morality plays of the middle ages advocated a Catholic theology, and Elizabeth's legitimacy depended on Henry VIII's ability as head of the church to obtain an annulment without the consent of the Pope. As Elizabeth began the long, slow process of repressing religious plays, more and more writers turned to secular themes. Two men, Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, collaborated on a play in 1561 called Gorboduc. The tragedy is the first drama in English written in unrhymed iambic pentameter, or blank verse, which subsequently became the standard verse form for Elizabethan plays.

Elizabethan drama did not truly come into its own, however, until the 1580s. One of the first plays to capture the imaginations of mass audiences was The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd. The play, about a father who must avenge the murder of his son, established the popularity of revenge tragedy. Kyd provided ghosts, mad scenes, a play-within-a-play, and a final bloody slaughter. All of these became staples of later Elizabethan revenge tragedies, and Kyd might even have written an early version of the most popular of revenge tragedies: William Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Kyd was overshadowed in 1587, though, with the appearance of a young playwright from Cambridge University named Christopher Marlowe. That is a post, however, for another day.

The stage is hung with black

It is commonly accepted that in Elizabethan theatres black curtains indicated the playing of tragedies. One line in the anonymous play A Warning for Fair Women famously proclaims:

The stage is hung with black: and I perceive
The auditors prepared for tragedy.

But as Mariko Ichikawa pointed out in a recent article in Theatre Notebook, Elizabethan theatres possessed other curtains as well, sometimes with elaborate pictures on them. An inventory of the Lord Admiral's Men done in 1598 listed "a cloth of Sun & Moon" as well as a "Tasso picture" among the company's possessions. Since Torquato Tasso had introduced pastoral themes to the Italian stage with his 1573 play Aminta, this latter curtain probably depicted a scene of the countryside.

Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy has the hero Hieronimo hang up a curtain for a play-within-the-play at the end of the piece. This curtain, presumably black since Hieronimo is introducing a tragedy, might have replaced a curtain of a different sort that had been hanging earlier. Ichikawa argues convincingly that non-black curtains could have been hanging in the middle of tragedies, with the black curtains only prominent at the beginning and ending of plays. For tragicomedies, companies might have avoided black curtains at the beginning in order to keep the audience in suspense about the play's finale.

And other colors were certainly available. A lawsuit in the 1530s over the possessions used by a theatrical company listed two curtains of green and yellow. Though the Elizabethan stage could be hung with black, it could be hung in a variety of other hues as well.

Elizabethan Death

One of those things that will make teenagers giggle when they learn about Shakespeare is the common use of the term "die" in Elizabethan English to refer to having an orgasm. Someone I generally respect recently questioned whether this meaning was actually legitimate. Could it be the whole thing was just an urban legend? Or was my friend simply displaying his own ignorance?

I decided to consult Eric Partridge's classic work Shakespeare's Bawdy. He notes that "die" can indeed mean "to experience a sexual orgasm." As evidence he cites two quotes. The first is Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing saying, "I will live in thy heart, die in thy lap, and be buried in thy eyes" (Act V, scene ii). The second comes from King Lear: "I will die bravely, like a smug bridegroom" (Act IV, scene vi).

It seems to me possible (though not likely) that the first one could be innocent of the double entendre, but it's hard to see how "I will die bravely, like a smug bridegroom" could be interpreted in any other way.

What about other Elizabethan authors? Shakespeare's contemporaries frequently use "die" in what seems to be a punning sense. In the second part of Tamburlaine by Christopher Marlowe, Zenocrate proclaims: "let me die with kissing of my lord" (Act II, scene iv). Far from conclusive, but the evidence is mounting. (No pun intended.)

There's also this exchange between the lovers Bel-Imperia and Horatio in Act II, scene iv of Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy:

     BEL-IMPERIA
     O let me go, for in my troubled eyes
     Now may'st thou read that life in passion dies.

     HORATIO:
     O stay a while and I will die with thee,
     So shalt thou yield and yet have conquered me.

The dramatic tension here is heightened by the fact that the lovers are about to be attacked and Horatio really will die, but they don't know this. Bel-Imperia might have a premonition of her lover's death, but they're meeting in an arbor where they have already decided they will consummate their passion. How much sense, then, does Horatio's line have without the double entendre?

Then there's the poetry of John Donne. Consider this passage from "The Canonization":

     The phoenix riddle hath more wit 
     By us; we two being one, are it;
     So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit. 
     We die and rise the same, and prove 
     Mysterious by this love.

Donne can be obscure at times, but this sexual wordplay does not strike me as obscure.

The same can be said about this passage from "The Prohibition":

     Yet love and hate me too;
     So these extremes shall ne'er their office do;
     Love me, that I may die the gentler way;
     Hate me, because thy love's too great for me;

The "gentler way" to "die" might mean something other than orgasm, but I kind of doubt it. Sorry, but the conventional wisdom holds up in this case.