SOURCE: Ribner, Irving. “The Emergence of a Dramatic Genre.” In The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare, pp. 30-64. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965.

[In this essay, Ribner traces the roots of the Renaissance chronicle plays back to medieval morality plays and the classical tradition of Senecan drama.]

To trace the history play to its ultimate source would be, from one point of view, to go back to the very origins of drama itself. For drama is a narrative art, and the earliest subjects for narrative in every civilization have been the heroic achievements of peoples, the exploits of popular heroes, those events which a nation seeks to perpetuate for its own glory. This is true of Homeric legend, of Old Testament narrative, of Germanic heldenlied. The folk legendry of a people is based ultimately upon events which at some time occurred, and many of our most primitive folk practices spring from an attempt to celebrate great historical deeds.

Since one of the beginnings of drama is in such folk celebrations¹ we find a relation between history and drama at the very birth of drama. Some of those elements which were to characterize the mature Elizabethan history play are already present in such primitive progenitors of the drama as the Shetland Sword Dance, where we have a celebration of St George of England and a vaunting of British national pride. There is an historical element in the St George plays and certainly in the Robin Hood plays where the hero is a symbol of the yeoman ideal of England, and where we have traditional national heroes presented to an audience by means of action and dialogue. Schelling has shown the significance of this early folk drama in the development of the history play, and he has pointed to the Coventry Hock Tuesday Play as ‘the earliest dramatic production fulfilling, if rudely, the conditions of a national historical drama’ (p. 16).

Unfortunately, we know little about this play, since there is no extant copy, but we do know that it was acted once a year at Coventry and that on Queen Elizabeth's visit to Kenilworth in 1575, it was presented before her. Both George Gascoigne and Robert Lanham have left accounts of this performance.² We know that it involved a battle and that it commemorated either the death of Hardicanute in 1042 or the massacre of the Danes by King Ethelred on St Brice's night in 1002. It was a serious performance to the people of Coventry who apparently saw in it a celebration of a great historical event. How many other such plays there were, we have no means of knowing, but there is certainly no reason to suppose that the Hock Tuesday Play was unique. It gives us reason to suppose, in fact, that there may have been a tradition of historical pageantry which existed alongside of the religious pageantry about which we know so much more.

We shall probably never be able to evaluate the total role which the folk drama played in the evolution either of the history play or of the Tudor drama as a whole. The records of it are too inadequately preserved. It is clear, however, that the historical elements in the folk play could never, by themselves, have developed into the history play as we know it. Other elements were needed which the folk drama could not supply. Although the folk play depicted historical event by means of action and dialogue, and while it contained some of the patriotic element which was to continue to mark later history plays, it was incapable of attaining the didactic, philosophical and political scope which marks the mature historical drama. The elements which enabled drama to fulfill what Elizabethans considered the valid objectives of history came from the medieval religious plays. From the slowly evolving miracle and morality drama emerged both a capacity for philosophic content and the outlines of an appropriate dramatic form.³

The story has often been told of the slow progression from the Quem Quaeritis tropes, through the Latin Easter and Christmas plays, the Corpus Christi cycles, the early moralities like The Pride of Life and The Castle of Perseverance, through the later moralities which continued to be staged right through the reign of Elizabeth, and there is no need to retell it here. It is only necessary to distinguish the point in that long progression at which the history play begins to take some discernible form. This point occurs when, under the stimulus of the Renaissance and the Reformation, the form of religious polemic is applied to political polemic, when the devices used to portray one limited set of doctrines are extended to serve the needs of new doctrines which the expanding intellectual horizons of the Renaissance have made equally significant in men's minds.

That the shift from religious questions to political questions should have been one of the first new movements in the morality play is natural, for in early sixteenth-century England religion and politics were closely intertwined. The Tudor doctrines of absolutism and passive obedience had strong religious foundations.⁴ Religious interests under the Reformation, moreover, found their manifestations in partisan political interests to such an extent that the two at times became almost undistinguishable. The framework of the morality play was perfectly adapted to these new interests: ‘The old allegory of man's duty towards God, within his Catholic and universal church,’ as A. P. Rossiter has aptly put it, ‘was narrowed toward the allegory of men's duties as subjects under a God-representing king.’⁵

In John Skelton's sole surviving play Magnyfycence (1519) we find the first clear application of the morality play form to problems of secular politics; with this play an account of the history play in England must thus begin. It is a thinly disguised vindication of the policies of Skelton's patron, Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, and the old nobility against the policies of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Skelton's bitter life-time enemy. Not only do the principal morality abstractions in Magnyfycence stand for actual historical figures, but the play sets out to accomplish purposes which we have noted as the distinguishing features of the mature Elizabethan history play. It portrays an actual historical situation and uses that situation to teach secular political theory which bears particularly upon immediate political problems.⁶ It is only a step away from naming the hero King Henry instead of Magnyfycence, his evil counsellor Wolsey instead of Foly, and his good counsellor Norfolk instead of Perseueraunce.

There were other plays in the manner of Magnyfycence, although most are no longer extant and we know little about them. One which has survived, although only in part, is the anonymous Albion Knight, most likely written in 1537 or 1538 and probably based upon the Pilgrimage of Grace Rebellions which occurred in the north of England from October 1536 until March 1537.⁷ Here again we have a play designed to teach political lessons, to apply those lessons to an immediate political situation, and using for that purpose particular historical figures and particular historical events, although they are disguised under the familiar morality play personifications. But Albion Knight makes little advance towards the history play beyond that already reached by Magnyfycence. Nor is Sir David Lyndsay's Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaites significant in this respect.⁸

For further progress we must turn to John Bale and particularly to his Kynge Johan, originally written before 1536, revised in 1538 and again some time during the reign of Edward VI, and finally rewritten in 1561 for presentation before Elizabeth upon her visit to Ipswich in that year.⁹ This play, written by an antiquarian clergyman, who in his library at Ossory gathered together probably the largest collection of early English chronicle material in the British Isles,¹⁰ contains only one character who is not a morality abstraction for at least part of the time, and that is the titular hero, King John.

The play deals with the struggle of John against the lords of the church in an attempt to serve the Widowe Yngelond, and with his eventual death in that struggle. In form, we have the typical morality struggle between the vices and virtues, and although John dies, the virtues are ultimately triumphant with the coming of Elizabeth. All of the morality vices whom John opposes represent actual historical figures, and during the course of the action they take the names of those figures. Thus, Sedition becomes Stephen Langton; Usurped Power becomes the Pope; Private Wealth becomes Cardinal Pandulphus; Dissimulation becomes the Monk, Simon of Swynsett. Throughout the play virulent abuse is heaped upon the Catholics, and in important speeches throughout we have enunciated the orthodox Tudor doctrines as to the rights and duties of kingship.

In Kynge Johan we can see the history play emerging from the morality, for in it the two exist side by side. Kynge Johan is actually two plays at the same time, with the central titular figure holding the two together. On the one hand we have a political morality play in the manner of Magnyfycence or Albion Knight, with Yngelond as the central figure. Simultaneously, however, we have a history play with King John as the central figure. On the one hand the play uses conventional morality abstractions to present abstract ideas; on the other it presents an actual historical plot, the struggle between King John and the papacy, and in the manner of the mature Elizabethan history play it relates that struggle to the problems of contemporary England.

It is true, of course, that Bale's King John bears little similarity to the King John of actual history, but we know this today more surely than Bale and his contemporaries knew it, and the fact is of more significance to us than it would have been to Renaissance Englishmen with their quite different conceptions of the purposes of history. To the Tudors, King John was the one British ruler before Henry VIII who had attempted to oppose the papacy, and thus he was a national hero. As one who had died in the attempt, he was a royal martyr as well. King John was sympathetically treated in Protestant writings of the sixteenth century. Bale's account, which makes of him an unblemished Christian martyr defeated by the Antichrist he vainly tries to oppose, was taken seriously by later Protestant historians. Holinshed's account is influenced by it, as are the accounts both in The Troublesome Reign of John and in Shakespeare's King John, which was almost certainly based upon the earlier play.¹¹

Polydore Vergil, writing from a strongly pro-Catholic viewpoint, had been particularly harsh in his treatment of King John. Bale, as has been pointed out,¹² was deliberately attempting to contradict Vergil, to tell the story of King John from a Protestant point of view, and thus, as he saw it, to tell it correctly. It is clear from the text of the play that Bale used the British chronicles extensively.¹³ Bale's own awareness of his historical function appears with particular clarity in the speech of the Interpreter at the end of the first part of the play, where the author reviews the historical content of his drama. For Renaissance analogies to Bale's warping of history to fit doctrine, we need only look at Niccolò Machiavelli's Florentine History or Life of Castruccio Castracani, where history is just as surely warped to serve the purposes of doctrine. William Tyndale had praised King John as an opponent of the papacy, and he had indicated that perhaps the Catholic chroniclers had left an unfair portrait of him:

Consider the story of King John, where I doubt not but they have put the best and fairest for themselves, and the worst of King John: for I suppose they make the chronicles themselves.¹⁴

From this passage Bale may have taken the idea for his play.¹⁵

Kynge Johan is our first history play because it deliberately uses chronicle material in order to accomplish several legitimate historical purposes. It is, in the first place, a nationalist work dedicated to the greater glory of England. One need only examine King John's patriotic speech in a vein which foreshadows Shakespeare's closing lines in his own King John as well as Gaunt's great speech in Richard II:

For the love of God, look to the state of England!
Let none enemy hold her in miserable bond;
See you defend her as it becometh Nobility;
See you instruct her according to your degree;
Furnish her you with a civil honesty:
Thus shall she flourish in honour and great plenty.
With godly wisdom your matters so convey
That the commonalty the powers may obey;
And ever beware of that false thief, Sedition,
Which poisoneth all realms and bring them to perdition.(16)

Secondly, the play attempts, as has been indicated, to reinterpret history in the light of doctrine which it holds to be true and to use history, in turn, as support for that doctrine. Thirdly, in typical Renaissance fashion, it uses an historical event of the past to throw light upon a political problem of the present and to offer a guide for its solution. This, as we shall see, is precisely what was done in the mature history play of the age of Elizabeth, when in Woodstock, Richard II, and the Henry IV plays the period from Richard II to Henry V was explored for the direct parallels it offered to the problems of Elizabeth's own reign. Bale treated the reign of King John because it provided an analogy to the most pressing of all contemporary problems: the struggle for supremacy between King Henry VIII and Pope Clement VII, the role of England in relation to the church of Rome, a problem which was still much alive when the play underwent its final revision for performance before Queen Elizabeth. Bale holds up King John as a model for Henry—and later for Elizabeth—to emulate; they too must resist the power of Rome and assert the independence of England.

Of other historical moralities, only one needs mention: Respublica, written in 1553, probably by Nicholas Udall.¹⁷ It is significant chiefly as an example of Catholic partisanship, as evidence that political invective was not confined to the Protestant factions. As partisan invective it is mild, however, when compared with Kynge Johan, and in so far as the history play is concerned it is of little real significance, for it makes no advance past that accomplished by Albion Knight. Whereas Kynge Johan is our first history play, Respublica never rises above the morality level, in spite of the fact that some of its morality abstractions may stand for actual historical figures.

The political morality plays represent a stage of evolution through which the history play had to pass. For the morality drama contained elements admirably suited to the dramatic presentation of history in such a way that the didactic ends of Tudor historiography might be served. There was first a sense of form by which the elements of history could be related to one another and made to constitute a meaningful whole. The stock morality device of Humanum Genus torn between good and evil angels, for instance, could easily be translated into terms of a king torn between good and evil counsellors, as we have so clearly illustrated in Woodstock and Richard II. The dramatic pattern of the morality play became a part of the greatest history plays of the age of Elizabeth, where it is perhaps most strikingly evidenced in Henry IV. There were, secondly, elements of symbol and allegory by means of which the matter of history could be both identified with contemporary political situations and made to teach general political lessons. Thus the drama could be used to fulfil what the Renaissance considered primary historical functions.

For further progress to be made, the level of morality abstraction had to be abandoned entirely, and in one of the several lines of influence which proceed from Bale this is what was done. This movement appears first in the academic drama of the Inns of Court where, fortuitously enough, the historical potentialities of the native English drama as it had developed through John Bale were fused with similar potentialities of Senecan drama which now began to influence the course of the English theatre. This fusion of native and classical elements we find for the first time in what has long been called our first tragedy, but which is also our first history play entirely free from morality abstractions: Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex, written by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, first performed before the lawyers of the Inner Temple at a Christmas celebration in 1561, and then repeated before Queen Elizabeth at Whitehall on January 18, 1561/2. The play was surreptitiously printed by William Griffith in 1565. In 1570, John Day issued an authorized quarto, and in 1590, the quarto of 1565 was reprinted by Edward Allde.¹⁸

The extent of Senecan influence upon Elizabethan drama has been a long and ardently debated subject. In general, the discussion has tended to go to extremes as in the pioneer studies of H. Schmidt and J. W. Cunliffe¹⁹ where perhaps too much importance is attributed to Seneca, and in that of Howard Baker,²⁰ where the importance of Seneca is somewhat underestimated. Certainly the tragedies of Seneca were widely read in Elizabethan England, both in Latin and in the English versions. The evidence is overwhelming that they were deliberately imitated by Elizabethan dramatists, and that such imitation left definite marks upon the course of English drama. But it is a mistake to assume that at any time a great surge of Senecan imitation swept the native English drama from the stage. As Cunliffe himself recognizes,²¹ one of the dominant characteristics of Elizabethan drama was that it had place for many traditions, all of which could grow and develop side by side. The Senecan influence, moreover, did not clash with the native tradition, as it seems to have done in Italy and in France; it fused with the native tradition. Even in the most deliberate and avowed imitations of Seneca, such as Thomas Hughes' Misfortunes of Arthur, elements of native English drama are still evident. Perhaps the best summary of Senecan influence in Gorboduc has been presented by Marvin T. Herrick who concludes that ‘the predominant classical influence in Gorboduc is Senecan’, but that Seneca was not the only classical influence and that there were many other influences upon the play besides the classical. These include, ‘the morality plays, the chronicles, Lydgate, Chaucer, and the Mirror for Magistrates.' The play is a typical fusion of the many cultural traditions which make up the Elizabethan era, but among these, the shaping force of Senecan drama must nevertheless not be underestimated.²²

Cunliffe has held that Senecan imitation gave to English drama a ‘regularity of structure—which, from all appearances, it would have taken centuries for the medieval drama to attain without the stimulus and authority of classical example.’²³ This is only partly true, for the medieval morality play, in spite of its crudeness and at times seeming indirection, had an underlying regularity of structure: the Christian scheme of salvation, with a hero torn between good and evil, falling into error and then undergoing penance and winning final redemption. It is true, however, that as the morality play grew, and more and more acquired an accretion of extraneous horseplay, this pattern, which in Mankind is still clear in spite of irrelevant nonsense and buffoonery, became less and less clear until in late interludes like Like Will to Like (1568) it has virtually disappeared. Senecan models did lend a precision and form to what had become a rambling and often incoherent drama. They created a neat five-act structure, with deliberate balance and movement from act to act, although it is important to note that Bale's Kynge Johan had already been divided into five acts. Thus in Gorboduc each act is divided into two scenes; each act begins with a dumb show which illustrates the moral of the act and ends with a chorus which neatly sums the moral up. The dumb show is not a Senecan device; it probably had its origin in the pageantry of the medieval miracle drama, although it may also have been influenced by the intermetti traditionally placed between the acts of Italian tragedy.²⁴ The chorus, of course, was Senecan, and it served the didactic functions of Elizabethan drama perhaps more pointedly and effectively than could the cruder devices of the morality play.

The characteristics of Senecan drama have been sufficiently commented upon: the act and scene division, the chorus, the sententious rhetorical lines in verse, the stichomythic dialogue, the ghosts, the sensationalism of theme, the concern with revenge as a tragic motif, the atmosphere of horror, and among the most important, the deliberate moral purpose. Seneca's closet dramas were highly didactic works, and in this, it must be emphasized, they shared the purpose of English morality drama. Senecan drama, moreover, had chosen for its subject matter the quasi-historical legendry of Greece, with the exception of the Octavia, based upon Roman history. The matter of chronicle history could easily be adapted to the Senecan form, and it is significant that the earliest imitators of Seneca in Italy and France as well as in England drew their material, not from Greek legendry but from actual history, both of their own countries and of Rome. The Ecerinus of Albertino Mussato, written in Italy some time before 1315, the earliest known attempt at Senecan imitation, was based on the career of Ezzelino III, the tyrant of Padua, although that career was freely embellished with horrors in an attempt at Senecan sensationalism. Galeotto del Caretto drew the material for his Sofonisba (1502) directly out of Livy. Probably the most influential of French Senecan imitations was Jodelle's Cléopâtre Captive (1552). In 1561, Grévin wrote his Jules César, and among the Senecan plays of Robert Garnier, so highly esteemed by the Countess of Pembroke and her circle in England, we have Cornélie (1574) and Marc-Antoine (1578), both drawn from Roman history.

That Norton and Sackville should have cast into Senecan form an episode from British history should thus occasion no surprise, for they had ample precedent. In using an episode from history to illustrate a political lesson, they were following in the tradition of John Bale. That the authors of Gorboduc were moved by a political purpose has long been recognized. The play was written specifically to warn Elizabeth of the dangers of civil war which accompany an uncertain line of succession and to urge her to designate an heir at once, lest the nation be reduced to chaos upon her death. It thus reinforced the petition for such limitation of the succession which had been presented to Elizabeth by her House of Commons just one year before the performance of Gorboduc. Both Norton and Sackville were members of this first parliament, and there is good reason to suspect that Norton himself was the author of the petition. A constantly repeated motif in the play,²⁵ is the need for a ruler to follow the advice of wise and experienced statesmen.

Howard Baker, who has offered good evidence that we cannot accept without question the traditional ascription of the first three acts to Norton and the last two to Sackville, recorded on the title-page of the 1565 quarto, has argued that there are two somewhat divergent political philosophies in the play, the one Norton's and the other Sackville's²⁶ and that the parts of the play written by each author may be ascertained from where the distinctive philosophies occur. Baker (p. 29) concludes that the first scene of the play is by Sackville and the last by Norton. Otherwise the ascriptions of the 1565 quarto are correct.

On the one hand we have, coming from Sackville, a warning that when a king is influenced by flatterers and leaves his succession uncertain, civil strife inevitably follows. In spite of that, however, no subject may question the acts of his king, and there is a strong affirmation of the Tudor doctrine of non-resistance:

Though kings forget to govern as they ought,
Yet subjects must obey as they are bound.

(V, i, 42-43)

These two lines, moreover, are preceded in the unauthorized quarto of 1565 by eight lines which even more strongly affirm the doctrine:

That no cause serves, whereby the Subject may
Call to accompt the doings of his Prince,
Much less in blood by sword to work revenge,
No more than may the hand cut off the head,
In act nor speech, no; not in secret thought
The Subject may rebel against his Lord,
Or judge of him that sits in Caesar's seat,
With grudging mind [to] damn those he mislikes.

Sackville framed this characteristically Tudor doctrine as a principal political message of the play. Why these eight lines, however, should have been deleted from the authorized quarto of 1570 has been much commented upon. Probably the best explanation is that the lines were deleted by Norton, who prepared the 1570 quarto for John Day, because they differed from his own less orthodox views.

Thomas Norton was a strong Puritan, so strong in fact that in later life he joined in the Puritan attack upon the stage in spite of his own earlier share in Gorboduc. It must be remembered that the two sources of opposition to Tudor absolutism and passive obedience were the Catholic and the extreme Puritan factions.²⁷ In Norton's own translation of Calvin's Institutes, completed probably in the same year in which he collaborated on Gorboduc, we have a statement of Calvin's position in opposition to Tudor political orthodoxy:

For though the correcting of unbridled government be the revengement of the Lord, let us not by and by think that it is committed to us, to whom there is given no other commandment but to obey and suffer. I speak alway of private men. For if there be at this time any Magistrates for the behalf of the people … I do not forbid them according to their office to withstand the outraging licentiousness of kings, that I affirm that if they wink at kings willfully raging over and treading down the poor communalty, their dissembling is not without wicked breach of faith, because they deceitfully betray the liberty of the people, whereof they know themselves to be appointed protectors by the ordinance of God.²⁸

This is precisely the doctrine contained in the notorious Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos (1579) attributed variously to the French Huguenots Hubert Languet and Philip Du Plessis Mornay.²⁹

Thus, Norton would be inclined to support the Puritan and Huguenot position that when the king does not rule well, it is the duty of the magistrates—or, in England, the members of parliament—to restrain the ruler and look after the welfare of the people. Norton's political message in Gorboduc is that since civil strife inevitably follows an uncertain succession, if the queen does not name a successor herself, it is the duty of parliament to do so for her:

No, no: then Parliament should have been holden,
And certain heirs appointed to the crown,
To stay the title of established right,
And in the people plant obedience,
While yet the prince did live, whose name and power
By lawful summons and authority
Might make a Parliament to be of force,
And might have set the state in quiet stay.

(V, ii, 264-71)

This is a significant modification of Sackville's principle, and it is in accord with the Puritan position which we know from his other writings that Norton espoused throughout his career. Sara R. Watson has held, further, that Norton followed closely the arguments of the Puritan Christopher Goodman in his How Superior Powers Oght to be Obeyd (1558) to the effect that when kings do not rule for the welfare of the people as they are enjoined by God to do, they no longer need be obeyed, and they may even be removed forcibly from office.³⁰ Norton may be particularly pleading for the nomination of Lady Katherine Grey, who had been so named to succeed Elizabeth in the contested will of King Henry VIII and who, because of her strongly Protestant family, was the favoured candidate of the Puritan factions. Norton was also opposed to Elizabeth's possible marriage to a foreign prince, another strong point among the Puritans:

In Parliament the regal diadem
Be set in certain place of governance,
In which your Parliament and in your choice,
Prefer the right (my lords) without respect
Of strength or friends, or whatsoever cause
That may set forward any other's part.
For right will last, and wrong can not endure.
Right mean I his or hers, upon whose name
The people rest by mean of native line,
Or by the virtue of some former law,
Such one (my lords) let be your chosen king,
Already made their title to advance.
Such one so born within your native land,
Such one prefer, and in no wise admit
The heavy yoke of foreign governance,
Let foreign titles yield to public wealth.
And with that heart wherewith ye now prepare
Thus to withstand the proud invading foe,
With that same heart (my lords) keep out also
Unnatural thraldom of stranger's reign,
Ne suffer you against the rules of kind
Your mother land to serve a foreign prince.

(V, ii, 158-79)

It has been suggested that the ‘her’ in line 165 refers to Lady Katherine Grey, whose claim rested upon ‘native line’. The ‘virtue of some former law’ of line 167 refers probably to the will of Henry VIII and the Act of Succession which had confirmed it. Both of the passages quoted are from the long homiletic final scene which Baker holds, with I believe good reason, to have been written by Norton.

As a vehicle for their political lesson, the authors chose the story of King Gorboduc, which they might have found in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, although the story was well known and could have been read in many medieval and Renaissance versions based upon Geoffrey. It is likely that the authors accepted the historicity of the Gorboduc story. The legend of the Trojan Brute, descended from Aeneas, who had founded Troynovant, or London, and who had been the first of a long line of glorious British kings, was deliberately cultivated by the Tudors, who, perhaps because of their own uncertain title, claimed direct descent from King Arthur himself, the most illustrious of the line of Brute. The choice of the story we may attribute to Sackville whose historical interests are well known and who probably came across the account of Gorboduc while gathering material for A Mirror for Magistrates, to which he contributed the famous Induction and Complaint of Buckingham.

Old King Gorboduc, like his descendant Lear, divides the kingdom of Britain between his two sons, Ferrex and Porrex. Discord immediately arises between the two, and Porrex, the younger, kills Ferrex. Gorboduc's queen, Videna, in revenge kills Porrex, and great chaos falls upon the land. The enraged people rise in rebellion and slay both Gorboduc and Videna, leaving the kingdom rulerless and in confusion. All of this occupies the first four acts. The fifth act is composed of discussion among the nobles of the realm, and in the course of long homiletic speeches, the various political lessons of the play are emphasized. In the first scene of this act, Fergus, Duke of Albany, resolves to take advantage of the state of civil discord and to seize the crown for himself. In the second scene the loyal nobles of the realm decide to band together to thwart the designs of the Duke of Albany, and there is reaffirmation of the principle that the kingdom must never be allowed to fall into the hands of either a foreign prince or one of illegal claim, that the lords in parliament must assure the succession to a rightful native heir.

From the standpoint of form, there is only one justification for this fifth act which, in Senecan terms, would be a gross violation of dramatic unity, particularly since all of the principal characters are already dead. That justification, as Willard Farnham has pointed out,³¹ is in that the authors conceived of the kingdom as having a ‘sort of dramatic entity’, as being, in fact, the central character of the play. This Howard Baker has also recognized (pp. 39-40) in his claim that Norton and Sackville have made Commonwealth the protagonist, and that in this Gorboduc is ‘probably closer to the moral play Respublica (1553) than to any other play’.

Although the play reveals much of the formal structure of Senecan drama, upon closer examination it becomes clear that it shares in other dramatic traditions which are at least of equal importance. In theme and purpose, and indeed in much of its structure, Gorboduc harks back to the native English morality drama. Among its predecessors, it bears as close an affinity to John Bale's Kynge Johan as it does to any of the plays of Seneca. In the evolution of the English history play, Gorboduc continues the line of Kynge Johan; it uses Senecan devices to give to moral history a greater precision of form, and by the rhetorical devices of classical drama it raises the history play to a more formal literary level, but beneath it all we may still discover John Bale Senecanized and only slightly altered.³²Gorboduc further extends the dramatic mode of Kynge Johan in that like Bale's play it is concerned with the isolation and fall of an essentially virtuous hero. In Kynge Johan we have an unsullied martyr who stands in opposition to Antichrist. In Gorboduc we have a good king who has long ruled well and virtuously but who in his old age, out of excessive love of his sons and trust of them, commits an error which runs counter to the order of the universe; he sins not out of evil but out of tragic misunderstanding. The two plays are thus pivotal in the development of tragedy as well as historical drama, and it has been suggested³³ that the very doctrinal purposes of their authors forced them to conceive of tragedy in this new mode, for Johan as analogous to King Henry VIII and Gorboduc as analogous to Queen Elizabeth could not be portrayed either as subjects of a capricious Fortune or as evil kings suffering just retribution for their sins, the two conventional explanations of human misfortune which we find in earlier and much contemporary tragic story.

In Gorboduc the level of morality abstraction and the level of historical reality are combined and completely fused, whereas in Kynge Johan they were separate. King Gorboduc corresponds both to King John and to the Widow Yngelond. He is an actual historical character, and at the same time he is the symbol of England. After the man Gorboduc is dead, England still remains as the central character of the final act. Just as in the traditional morality play, each principal character is accompanied by a good counsellor and an evil counsellor who pull him in opposite directions. Thus Gorboduc must choose between the sound advice of Eubulus and the flattering counsel of Arostus who seeks to please his king by uttering what he knows the ruler wishes to hear. Ferrex is offered good advice by Dordon and bad by Hermon, and Porrex must choose between the good counsel of Philander and the bad of Tyndar. The counsellors are real figures, but they are morality abstractions as well. This is implicit in their very names, which the learned audience at the Inner Temple might easily translate: Eubulus means ‘good counsellor’ and Philander means ‘the friend of man’. The evil counsellors, on the other hand, resemble closely the traditional Vices of the morality plays, and an Elizabethan audience would easily recognize them as such. In typical morality fashion, each character chooses the wrong advice and is destroyed because of his choice. Only at the end do the good forces reassert themselves and offer the promise of better things for the future. The level of morality abstraction is as clear in Gorboduc as in Kynge Johan; the only difference is that it has been subsumed in and made a part of the actual historical content.

An interesting link with Respublica appears in the speech of Videna at the end of the first scene:

And so I pray the Gods requite it them,
And so they will, for so is wont to be.
When lords, and trusted rulers under kings,
To please the present fancy of the prince,
With wrong transpose the course of governance,
Murders, mischief, or a just revenge,
When right succeeding line returns again,
By Jove's just judgment and deserved wrath,
Brings them to cruel and reproachful death,
And roots their names and kindreds from the earth.

(I, i, 57-67)

The lines recall the final speech of Nemesis at the end of Respublica, in which the vengeance of the new reign of Queen Mary is promised to those who had supposedly corrupted the Commonwealth during the years of Protestant supremacy. Here also there is the promise that those statesmen who have corrupted the realm by evil counsel to their king will be punished.

As tragedy Gorboduc belongs in a world in which suffering and evil are brought into play by the responsible acts of men. Good and virtuous a king as Gorboduc long has been—and being cast in analogy to Queen Elizabeth, he could scarcely be otherwise—he commits in his folly an act which runs counter to the order of nature and society, and thus he must suffer and die, although there is an element of tragic reconciliation in that the England for which he stands also will at last be restored to order. In this we have a change both from medieval de casibus story, where the fall of man was the result of an arbitrary and capricious fate, and from the early morality play, where the fallen hero always realized his error before it was too late and, after a period of penance, was restored to felicity and salvation. We have thus in Gorboduc one of the first complete expressions of a mature Elizabethan mode of tragedy, a mode which had been prepared for in John Bale's Kynge Johan.

In the play's philosophy of history we have an affirmation of the goodness of God and the perfection of the divine plan of the universe. History demonstrates the existence of a benevolent natural order, and only when this order is disturbed will human disaster result. When Gorboduc divides his kingdom, he perverts—as Lear does later in Shakespeare—the natural order of

… the Gods, who have the sovereign care
For kings, for kingdoms, and for common weales.

(I, ii, 47-48)

This order enjoins him to rule his kingdom until his death. Eubulus predicts the ruin which must follow when natural order is perverted:

Only I mean to show by certain rules,
Which kind hath graft within the mind of man,
That nature hath her order and her course,
Which (being broken) doth corrupt the state
Of minds and things, even in the best of all.

(I, ii, 218-22)

Once Gorboduc commits his sin, other sins must follow. Brother must kill brother, mother must kill son, and the people must rebel against their sovereigns. In Videna's speech cited above there is the prediction that such inversions of the natural order will be avenged by God. The play affirms, moreover, that when evil has worked itself out the natural order of God must inevitably be restored:

Of justice, yet must God in fine restore
This noble crown unto the lawful heirs:
For right will always live, and rise at length,
But wrong can never take deep root to last.

(V, ii, 276-80)

These are the concluding lines of the play. They assert the ultimate goodness of God's providence, and they make it clear that the authors of Gorboduc saw history, in the medieval manner, as the record on earth of God's ruling of human affairs, his rewarding of the good and his punishment of the wicked. One of the purposes of history, for them, was to affirm this concept.

Other historical purposes are obvious. The patriotic nationalistic tone of the play is evident throughout. As in Kynge Johan, an episode from the past is used for its likeness to a contemporary situation and thus as a guide to action in the present. Thus there is implicit in the play the notion that by acting otherwise Gorboduc might have averted his tragedy, and that by acting wisely Elizabeth may avoid hers. There is here something of the idea that man may by his own wisdom and judgment control his own fate, although the control must be exercised according to natural law within a well-ordered Christian universe. This is not the medieval notion of the inevitable fall of all who rise to the top of the wheel of fortune. It is well to note also that in Gorboduc history is used, as it was not in the medieval chronicles, to demonstrate secular political theory, in this instance the necessity for parliamentary rule. In its philosophy of history, Gorboduc presents the fusion of medieval and humanist elements so characteristic of the Elizabethan age.³⁴

During the Christmas season previous to that which saw the first performance of Gorboduc in the Inner Temple, Thomas Preston's play, Cambises may have been performed before Elizabeth at court.³⁴ We cannot date Cambises with greater certainty than that it was written and performed some time in the 1560s but it is interesting to speculate that it and Gorboduc may have had their first performances within so short a time of one another. For Cambises is also a history play, but aside from an appeal to the authority of Agathon, Cicero, and Seneca in the prologue,³⁵ there is no trace of classical influence in either the form or the content of the play. This even Cunliffe, whose zeal for the discovery of Senecan parallels has probably never been equalled, was forced to admit.³⁶

In Cambises we have a historical morality play in the manner of John Bale's Kynge Johan, one that continues the tradition of Kynge Johan without the addition of Senecan form. A classical story, going back ultimately to Herodotus, is told in order to illustrate principles of political theory, and morality abstractions mingle upon the stage with real historical characters. Thus the morality level and the historical level are separately preserved. This is true also of Apius and Virginia by R. B. (probably Richard Bower), entered in the Stationers' Register in 1567 and first printed in 1575. Here we have a tale from Livy used primarily to illustrate a moral rather than a political lesson, although a secondary lesson in the play is nevertheless political. Still another such play is John Pickering's Horestes, printed in 1567, where a classical legend is cast into morality form, with morality and real-life characters together on the stage. Although the interest of this play is not primarily political, it does end with a series of political lessons: Truth and Duty discuss the qualities of the ideal state.³⁷ These three plays are significant because they show the techniques of Kynge Johan applied to other areas of history and pseudo-history. They offer a significant contrast to Gorboduc, in that they show the path on which the history play might have continued were it not for the classical precision and literary consciousness which Norton and Sackville introduced. The ultimate significance of Horestes lies in the development of revenge tragedy; as such it lies outside the scope of this study. Apius and Virginia is actually our first Roman history play, and Cambises was so popular and so affected stage tradition that it could be meaningfully burlesqued by Shakespeare in 1 Henry IV more than a quarter of a century later.

The plot of Cambises may be divided roughly into two parts. At the beginning of the play we see Cambises as a young king who has just succeeded his illustrious father, Cyrus, and who is anxious to win renown both by conquest of Egypt and by good government. He then commits the one virtuous act of his life which is to heed the pleas of Commons Cry and Commons Complaint and destroy the wicked judge, Sisamnes, who has been oppressing the people by taking bribes. Cambises has him killed in a most horrible manner, causing him to be flayed in the presence of his son, Otian.³⁸ Cambises appoints Otian the new judge, cautioning him to remember the fate of his father and to rule justly.

The rest of the play shows us a ranting tyrant, corrupted by drunkenness and led on by the morality Vice, Ambidexter, going from one excess to another. Because his minister, Praxaspes, cautions him against drunkenness, he shoots an arrow through the heart of Praxaspes' young son. He murders his virtuous younger brother, Smirdnis. He forces his cousin into an incestuous marriage with him, and when she weeps for the murder of his brother, Smirdnis, he has her murdered as well. Finally, he appears on the stage with a sword stuck in his side, dying because of his crimes:

Thus, gasping, here on ground I lie; for nothing I do care.
A just reward for my misdeeds my death doth plain declare.

(1171-2)

And one of his lords echoes the moral of the play:

A just reward for his misdeeds the God above hath wrought,
For certainly the life he led was to be counted nought.

(1193-4)

We thus see two seemingly contradictory aspects of Cambises in the play. On the one hand we have the just ruler punishing a wicked magistrate; on the other we have a cruel tyrant destroyed by God because of his crimes. These two aspects go back to two separate accounts of Cambises in the Histories of Herodotus.³⁹ In Book III of Herodotus, we have an account of the crimes of Cambises which the historian attributes to madness, passion, and drunkenness.⁴⁰ In Book V of Herodotus we have an account of Cambises as the punisher of Sisamnes for his corruption in high office.⁴¹ The story of Cambises was widely told in the Middle Ages, and use was made of both the exempla deriving from Herodotus:⁴² Cambises served as a warning to evil kings of the punishment of God and as a warning to bribe-taking judges. Among others, Hoccleve in his Regement of Princes⁴³ told the story of the fate of Sisamnes as a lesson for King Henry V.

Thomas Preston did not go directly to Herodotus for his material.⁴⁴ The evidence is overwhelming that he used Richard Taverner's The Garden of Wysedom, a collection of moral anecdotes published in 1539. Taverner, in turn, had drawn his account of Cambises from a pocket history of the world by Johan Carion, originally published in German at Wittenberg in 1532, soon translated into Latin by Herman Bonnus and published at Halle in 1537, and re-issued in various forms, including the Chronicorum Libri Tres, published at Frankfort in 1550 which could have been available to Preston. Gwalter Lynne's English translation appeared also in 1550, and five French editions were published between 1553 and 1595.⁴⁵

Carion's work was popular throughout Europe, perhaps because, more than anything else, it was a convenient handbook of political and moral instruction in which stories from history were used to teach present-day kings and princes how to rule virtuously and to avoid the dangers of vice. The moral purpose of history was stressed throughout, and in the Latin editions attention was called in marginal notations to particular men in high place to whom the stories might be applicable. Carion's book could thus be used as a quarry by writers like Taverner seeking episodes from the past in order to illustrate moral precepts of immediate concern to them. It is important that Preston's Cambises, which derives through Taverner from Carion's work, be seen as a part of this popular tradition of moralistic adaptation of historical anecdote.

Carion, Taverner, and Preston all depart from Herodotus in interpreting the death of Cambises as an example of God's punishment of wicked rulers. In this we may perceive one of the principal political doctrines in the play: the traditional Elizabethan notion that wicked rulers will inevitably be punished by God. No matter how evil a king may be, his subjects must submit to him willingly, as Praxaspes does in surrendering his child to certain death, for the power of vengeance belongs only to God. The oppressed subject, however, may feel certain that God will always exercise his power of vengeance. As Armstrong wrote in an earlier study:

The terrible fate of tyrants is a pre-eminent example of the computative justice which so many Protestant moralists of the Renascence believed to operate in human affairs. The punishment of evil kings illustrated for them the Judaic principle of Talio, according to which wicked deeds were requited in kind. To these moralists, poetic justice was not a matter of chance, but the inevitable and consistent results of the operation of God's will upon the terrestrial stuff of existence.⁴⁶

A king must rule according to law—justly, honestly, and for the good of his people—or else he will suffer destruction at the hands of God. To illustrate this had been Taverner's purpose in telling the story:

I think it here good to report certain his notorious crimes and his end, to the intent all rulers, whatsoever they be, may take example at him, to fear God, to preserve the common weale, to execute justice and judgement, to use their subjects as men and not as beasts.⁴⁷

And this moral purpose, Preston repeats in his prologue:

The sage and witty Seneca his words thereto did frame:
‘The honest exercise of kings, men will ensue the same;
But, contrariwise, if that a king abuse his kingly seat,
His ignomy and bitter shame in fine shall be more great.’

(11-14)

A cardinal element of Preston's concept of history is thus the familiar concept of God's providence as the ruling force in human affairs; the historian's duty for him is clearly to make God's providence evident. In this, Cambises does not differ from Gorboduc. There is, moreover, a particular aspect of this providential view of history which Thomas Preston wishes to enunciate in his play. It is a principle which we find also in Taverner and which serves to reconcile the two divergent aspects of the Cambises legend as it came down from the ancient Greek. It is the doctrine that no matter how evil a king may be, God, who always looks after the welfare of man, will sometimes intervene directly in human affairs and cause the wicked ruler to perform a virtuous act. Taverner put it thus:

Yet there is no prince of so desperate an hope & of so naughty a life, but that at the least way otherwise doth some honest act. For god's property is to garnish & exornate the office of the magistrate & rulers, & he causeth, that for the conservation of civil governance in the common weale, sometime excellent and profitable works be of necessity done of them that bear rule.⁴⁸

Thus is explained the one act of good government in the otherwise totally evil career of King Cambises.

In spite of its crudeness, its bombastic verse in fourteeners and the customary extraneous scenes of coarse slapstick comedy, in which the vice, Ambidexter, sports first with the cowardly ruffians, Huf, Snuf and Ruf, and then with the country bumpkins, Hob and Lob, Cambises serves what Elizabethan considered a serious historical purpose. It uses past history to teach a serious political lesson, and although we can note no specific parallel between the episode it chooses and anything in contemporary England (although the taking of bribes was a constant source of trouble in Elizabethan courts), it ends with a prayer and a caution in the Epilogue for Queen Elizabeth to rule well, an appendage which, as A. P. Rossiter points out, still survived in the Dancer's prayer for the Queen at the end of Shakespeare's 2 Henry IV.⁴⁹

In form, Cambises continues in the tradition of the native English drama. Although morality abstractions mingle upon the stage with real-life characters, these abstractions do not clearly represent moral forces which compete for the soul of the hero. The traditional morality pattern in which the hero must choose between good and evil is not emphasized in the play, although it is possible to conceive of Praxaspes as a good force attempting to win Cambises away from the evil force represented by Ambidexter. Cambises performs one virtuous act and then begins his steady downfall. The morality struggle between good and evil which is preserved in the political moralities from Magnyfycence through Gorboduc is obscured in Cambises, and with it goes the relationship between scenes which was part of the morality pattern. The morality abstractions are, for the most part, what would be minor characters in the later drama. Thus Preparation, who prepares a feast for Cambises, would probably be called simply First Servant by Shakespeare. Cruelty and Murder would probably be labelled First Murderer and Second Murderer, and Execution might be called simply Executioner.

Cambises is full of the coarse buffoonery and horseplay of the later morality play, and Ambidexter represents that late stage in the evolution of the morality Vice in which he has ceased to be a mere symbol of evil forces. While he performs this function, he has become an independent character of many aspects and of great virtuosity, as his name implies.⁵⁰ He is a comic buffoon and a trickster, much of his trickery being devoted to pure farce with no relation to the moral concerns of the play, and he is also the moral commentator upon the action, underscoring for the audience the significance of all that occurs and the moral lessons implicit in it. He is comic Vice who has absorbed many of the functions of the clever servant and the parasite of classical comedy and who by his constantly changing roles ties the parts of the play together. Cambises was written for the public stage, and the conventional role of the Vice has been almost absorbed by the stock character in whose antics the popular audience has come to delight with little regard for the Vice's original thematic functions.

In structure Cambises is actually closer to miracle than to the older morality drama. The play is a series of episodes with little overall integrating structure and little principle of relationship other than the chronological. Farnham has attributed the episodic structure of the play to Preston's too faithful following of his source.⁵¹ That may well be so, but such episodic arrangement had ample precedent in English dramatic tradition, where we can find it in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament or the Digby Mary Magdalene. Gorboduc and Cambises reflect two different principles of structure, the one allied to the morality and the other more closely to the miracle play. Both trends were to be continued, but the greatest potentialities of historical drama were ultimately to be realized in the morality tradition. It is significant, however, that the earliest plays on British history, particularly The Famous Victories of Henry V, carry on the unintegrated episodic structure of the miracle drama and Cambises.⁵²

The traditional morality structure, however, is preserved in Apius and Virginia, where the conflict between good and evil is manifest, and where the hero does not submit to evil without a struggle. Judge Apius who, like the later Angelo of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, is tempted from virtue by his lust for Virginia, realizes the enormity of the crime he contemplates. While the vice, Haphazard, urges him on to evil, the virtues, Conscience and Justice, urge him to resist temptation.⁵³ Apius argues with the virtues before he finally succumbs to evil and resolves to obtain Virginia by fraud. We have thus the traditional morality struggle for man's soul, with man deliberately choosing evil. These traditional elements survive in spite of a new tone in Apius and Virginia which owes something to Seneca. Christian references, although present, are not many, and the morality of the play, in accord with its subject matter, is more one of classical Roman virtue than of Christian piety.⁵⁴

When Virginia, at her own request, has been killed on the stage by her father, Virginius, rather than lose her chastity, Virginius arouses the populace against Apius, and the wicked judge is removed from office and placed in prison where he commits suicide. As the tragedy of Apius, the play has moved a long way towards Shakespeare, for here we see full-grown what has been developing steadily from Magnyfycence through Gorboduc and Cambises: the concept of tragedy as retribution to man for crimes which spring from his own defect of character, his own deliberate choice of evil. So far as Virginia is concerned, there is no real tragedy, for she is assured for her act the reward of everlasting fame, and the principal moral lesson of the play, emphasized in the prologue, is that women must prefer death to loss of chastity. All women are counselled to follow the example of Virginia.

As history, the play is of relatively minor value, although it is our first extant example of Roman history in drama. There is little likelihood that the author went directly to Livy; his source was almost certainly Chaucer's Physician's Tale. Although it is likely that he accepted the historical truth of his tale, there is little in the play of what Elizabethans would consider historical purpose. The primary intention is to illustrate a moral lesson regarding chastity. The one political principle in the play is one which we have noted in Cambises: that tyranny must inevitably come to destruction. To illustrate this principle, however, is not the chief purpose of the play, as it is in Cambises, and in keeping with its classical tone no emphasis is laid in Apius and Virginia upon the role of providence in such matters.

By the time that Apius and Virginia was written a real native historical drama had begun to take shape in England. If we take Gorboduc and Cambises as two clear facets of that development, we can discern two parallel trends which in the following years were to continue and grow alongside of one another. Both trends continue the line of Kynge Johan. On the one hand, we have in Cambises, as in Kynge Johan, an historical plot used to teach a political lesson and presented with the traditional morality abstractions on the stage along with real figures from history. The abstractions, however, are somewhat vestigial. The traditional morality struggle between vices and virtues is almost abandoned, and instead of the integrated pattern which such struggle had created in the early morality drama, we have an episodic non-integrated structure which harks back to the miracle play tradition.

On the other hand, we have in Gorboduc and Apius and Virginia the traditional morality pattern continued. In Apius and Virginia morality figures continue to appear alongside of historical ones, and although the vogue of Senecan imitation has left some mark upon the play it has done more to condition its mood and tone than to affect its dramatic structure. In Gorboduc the morality abstractions have disappeared, although their roles have not; they simply have been taken over by characters who are given real-life names. And we have also in Gorboduc, combined with the morality play tradition, many of the regularizing influences of Senecan drama which merge easily with the native English tradition and give it a greater precision and regularity and perhaps a greater effectiveness in the expression of political didacticism. Senecan elements were to continue in the growth of the history play, where we can find them markedly in such later plays as the anonymous Locrine and Shakespeare's Richard III. By 1570 the matter both of legendary British and of Roman history has become accepted as material for the drama. It is not to be long before what we recognize as actual British history is also to appear upon the stage.

Although the main roots of the Elizabethan drama lie in the miracle and morality plays of the Middle Ages, there was always in England a strain of secular undidactic drama as well. We have noted its beginnings in the primitive folk pageantry of medieval times, although it is true that this may have had its own roots in religious practices older than the Christian. But in the Robin Hood plays we already have a species of drama which is completely secular, which is devoted entirely to the glorification of a local folk hero, and which has no purpose other than the gratification of a people's natural love of romantic adventure. Popular interest in the traditional heroes of romance persisted throughout the Elizabethan era. We have extant a voluminous literature of sixteenth-century prose romance in which the exploits of legendary heroes are extolled, and there are scores of romance ballads.⁵⁵

That plays were written about folk heroes we know from the many titles which have come down to us, although only a few such plays are themselves extant, probably because most were not considered worthy the dignity of print. They were regarded by the sophisticated as strictly the fare of the lower classes, and George Peele effectively burlesqued the dramatic type in his Old Wives Tale. One such play which has survived is Sir Clyamon And Sir Clamydes, printed in 1599 but probably written in 1570,⁵⁶ and long attributed, for no good reason, to George Peele. It is a perfect example of Elizabethan dramatization of romance material, with two knights wandering about the world and encountering in their travels just about every adventure known to fantastic romance. Such a play also is the confused and interminable Common Conditions, entered in the Stationers' Register in 1576, which although named after the Vice, is actually the story of the strange adventures encountered by Sedmond and Clarissa as they wander through the world hunting for their father, Galiarbus, Duke of Arabia.⁵⁷

These crude and ridiculous plays have in themselves little relation to the serious history play. They are significant, however, in that they indicate a continuous popular interest in a form of drama which glorified a romantic figure, attributed to him fantastic and sensational exploits, and as its justification claimed merely the interest inherent in the events themselves. The names of many such plays have come down to us. Chinon of England, Godfrey of Bouloigne, Richard Whittington, Robin Hood and Little John—all unfortunately lost—seem from their titles to have catered to just such a taste. This kind of drama, moreover, placed its total dramatic emphasis upon a central hero and followed him through a series of unrelated events, each of which served to affirm the hero's greatness, but among which there was little dramatic relation. We thus tend to have in this heroic drama the same episodic structure, so characteristic of the miracle play, which we have noted also in Cambises. It was almost inevitable that this popular heroic drama should eventually tend to replace Guy of Warwick and his fellows with romantic figures drawn from actual history, figures for instance like the glamorous idol, King Henry V. When that occurs we have a merging of the tradition of romantic heroic drama with that of the didactic moral history play.

The first clear treatment of an actual historical figure within the form of the heroic play occurs in Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine, written in late 1587 or early 1588, entered in the Stationers' Register for Richard Jones on August 14, 1590, and printed by him in the same year. Tucker Brooke has referred to this two-part play as ‘the classic instance of chivalrous romance turned drama’,⁵⁸ and he has called it, in fact, ‘the source and original of the English history play’ (p. 302). In this play, which was to have such great influence upon those which followed it, Marlowe drew upon the stage tradition of the heroic drama, but he went for his hero not to folk-lore but to recent history, and he approached his subject with a mature philosophy of history. Implicit in the play is a view of man and his relation to the state, and a concept of kingship, with its prerogatives and powers which place Marlowe's achievement firmly in the history play line of development.

The philosophy of history explicit in Tamburlaine is quite different from that in Gorboduc or Cambises. It is deeply indebted, as I have elsewhere indicated,⁵⁹ to classical sources. Tamburlaine is treated as he had been treated before Marlowe by a long line of earlier humanist historians: as the new Renaissance prince who, by his own ability and without regard for any supernatural power, could conquer the world and revitalize empires. The story of Tamburlaine was told for the first time by Poggio Bracciolini;⁶⁰ it was retold by Aeneas Silvius, Battista Fregosa, Cambinus, Sansovinus, Petrus Perondinus, Pedro Mexia, Louis LeRoi, and others. Almost all of the earlier accounts of Tamburlaine were available to Marlowe at Cambridge.⁶¹ We know that he consulted at least several of these, including the Magni Tamerlanis Scythiarum Imperatoris Vita (1553) of Petrus Perondinus and Thomas Fortescue's The Forest, or Collection of Histories (1571) itself translated from the Spanish of the Silva de Varia Lection (1542) of Pedro Mexia.⁶² It is possible that his principal source was George Whetstone's The English Mirror whose recent publication in 1586 may have drawn Marlowe's attention to the subject. There is some evidence that he knew also the account in Jean Bodin's Six Livres de la republique (1576) and that he may have seen in manuscript the yet unpublished treatment in Richard Knolles' Generall Historie of the Turkes.⁶³ The Tamburlaine legend, as it came down from Poggio and his followers had glorified Tamburlaine as the ideal Renaissance prince, the symbol of virtù.⁶⁴ Tamburlaine's defeat of Bajazeth I at Ankara in 1402 had temporarily halted the threat of the Turks to Western Europe, and Tamburlaine, although a pagan himself, was glorified as the defender of Christian culture against Turkish barbarism. For Poggio, moreover, Tamburlaine came to embody a new Renaissance idea. His account, as Voegelin puts it, ‘is the first “Mirror of Princes” of an age in which the meaning of power and politics is demoniacally narrowed down to the self expression of the individual’.⁶⁵

Throughout both parts of Tamburlaine there is a strong and direct denial of the role of providence in human affairs. History for Marlowe in this play is created by two things: fortune and human will. Fortune is not conceived of in the medieval Christian manner as the instrument which executes God's providence; Marlowe's is the classical fortune, the capricious, lawless element in the universe which can be controlled and directed only by human wisdom and power.⁶⁶ His hero, like the heroes of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, is the man who can master fortune and bend her to his will, for the classical fortune, it must be remembered, is a woman who can easily be swayed.

The hero of such a view of history could assert his will in opposition to fortune and triumph for a brief period. Finally he must be cut off by death which is the lot of all men, and this being so, he must accept his end with stoical resignation and courage. Of this human ability to master fortune, the first part of Tamburlaine provides a supreme example, while the second part reveals the inevitable triumph of death in spite of human prowess. In Whetstone's English Mirror Marlowe might have read that ‘this great personage, without disgrace of fortune, after sundry great victories, by the course of nature died’. This is in accord with the general view of humanist historians who had seen Tamburlaine as one who had mastered fortune as long as it was possible for any man to do so. His death was the necessary culmination of his greatness, for he was cut off, as classical historians held that great men should be, at the very peak of his glory.⁶⁷

Tamburlaine conforms to the heroic drama in that it presents a heroic figure in an episodic series of events to gratify an audience's intrinsic love of such figures. It also serves a serious historical function in that it uses history to express political doctrines with which Marlowe, who has been called the most thoughtful dramatist of his age,⁶⁸ must have been deeply concerned. On the one hand it follows the tradition of the Italian humanists in glorifying Tamburlaine's ruthless self-sufficiency as an ideal of kingship. In spite of his cruelty—most of which is in the play for its dramatic sensationalism—Tamburlaine is offered as an ideal for kings to emulate.⁶⁹ On the other hand, Marlowe presents his own unorthodox theories both of the origins of kingship and of the rights and duties of kings.

Since he rejects the providential scheme of the universe which is so basic an element in the orthodox Elizabethan world picture, it follows almost inevitably that Marlowe should reject the notion that kings receive their authority from God. For Marlowe kingship is attained by human merit. It does not depend upon noble birth, and it is, moreover, a goal for which it is in the nature of all men to strive and which even the man of most lowly origins may attain. Of this Tamburlaine himself serves as the supreme example.

Although he denies its customary philosophical bases, Marlowe does not, however, deny Tudor absolutism. He is, in fact, more absolutist than the most orthodox of the Tudor theorists. They held that a king was responsible only to God, but that God would inevitably destroy the ruler who did not conform to natural law. Marlowe's king is completely absolute; he is responsible to no one but himself. He may do whatever he pleases, has complete power over the life and property of his subjects,⁷⁰ and is completely outside of law, human or divine. This is a strange concept in Elizabethan England. It is related, if anything, to Nicolò Machiavelli's concept of the lawgiver, the one great leader who can restore a corrupt state to virtue, but who while effecting his reform may rule outside of law and with complete authority.⁷¹ Both in its philosophy of history and in the political doctrine which it espouses, Marlowe's play is among the most unorthodox of his age.

The great popularity of Tamburlaine caused it to be widely imitated, and thus the matter of history in the form of heroic romance became a lasting part of Elizabethan theatrical tradition. The Wars of Cyrus, usually considered an imitation of Tamburlaine, but probably written for the children of the Chapel Royal by Thomas Farrant before 1580, was printed in 1594 in a form resembling that of Tamburlaine.⁷² Robert Greene imitated Tamburlaine in Alphonsus of Aragon, printed in 1599, although probably written in 1588, and perhaps again in Selimus printed in 1594, but written some time after 1591.⁷³ Both of these plays ape the outward form of Tamburlaine, but in what political doctrine they contain they tend rather to refute Marlowe's heretical notions.⁷⁴

By 1594, when Selimus was printed, the Tudor history play has completely emerged. All of the elements which were to go into the genre have begun to fuse: the morality play, the heroic drama, and the regularizing influence and some of the stock devices of the Senecan tradition. We can already see two general lines which the history play is to follow. On the one hand there is to be the line stemming from Gorboduc and continuing the scheme of the morality drama; on the other there is to be the tradition of the heroic drama, with its secular tone and romantic hero, but carrying on the episodic structure of the miracle play. The two lines are both to continue separately and to combine.

All of the subjects of historical drama have already been introduced. Legendary history, begun in Gorboduc, continues with The Misfortunes of Arthur (1588), Locrine (1591), Leir (1594), and others. To plays on contemporary foreign history have been added such works as George Peele's Battle of Alcazar (1589) and Marlowe's Massacre at Paris (1591?). In 1594 the Tamburlaine motif is carried into Roman history with Thomas Lodge's Wounds of Civil War. By 1594 plays on English history itself have long been on the stage. …

Notes

1. See E. K. Chambers, The Medieval Stage, Vol. I; The English Folk Play.

2. Chambers, Medieval Stage, I, 154-5.

3. I have treated this development at some length in ‘Morality Roots of the Tudor History Play,’ Tulane Studies in English, IV (1954), 21-43, of which the following paragraphs present only a brief summary. A close relation between the Tudor history play and the earlier mystery plays has been argued by E. Catherine Dunn, ‘The Medieval “Cycle” as History Play: an Approach to the Wakefield Plays,’ Studies in Renaissance, VII (1960), 76-89. ‘The creation of a Tudor history play in the 1530s and the following decades,’ Miss Dunn suggests, ‘was a successful enterprise precisely because the English populace was thoroughly familiar with history in dramatic form and gradually accepted a transfer of perspective from Biblical history to that of national import.’ See also Effie MacKinnon, ‘Notes on the Dramatic Structure of the York Cycle,’ SP, XXVIII (1931), 433-49.

4. See J. W. Allen, A History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century, pp. 125-84.

5. English Drama From Early Times to the Elizabethans, p. 115.

6. See Madeleine H. Dodds, ‘Early Political Plays,’ The Library, Third Series, IV (1913), 393-5.

7. See Madeleine H. Dodds, ‘The Date of “Albion Knight”,’ The Library, Third Series, IV (1913) 157-70.

8. Lyndsay's play, a comprehensive treatment of the social and economic ills of its age, was first performed at Linlithgow, Scotland, on January 6, 1540. It was written to teach specific political lessons, and within the allegory there are probably references to specific figures in the Scottish court. Lyndsay was influenced by French farce, Scottish verse satire, and the English morality play, but there is little likelihood that he contributed to the continuous dramatic tradition out of which the English history play emerged. His play was never performed in England, and it was not printed until 1602. Even if we could demonstrate that the play was known in England, there is nothing in it which represents an advance from Magnyfycence or Albion Knight towards the history play.

9. See the Malone Society edition by J. H. P. Pafford, 1931.

10. Honor McCuskor, John Bale, Dramatist and Antiquary, pp. 32-47.

11. See Ruth Wallerstein, King John in Fact and Fiction, pp. 38-39.

12. Jesse W. Harris, John Bale, A Study in the Minor Literature of the Reformation, p. 93.

13. See Herbert Barke, Bales ‘Kynge Johan’ und sein Verhältnis zur zeitgenössischen Geschichtsschreibung, pp. 44-136. Ruth Wallerstein has further written that ‘Bale had studied many of the original historians, whom he condemned for having more Romish blasphemy than godliness, as well as the later writers, such as John Major, Hector Boece and Polydore Vergil’ (p. 36).

14. The Obedience of a Christian Man in Doctrinal Treatises, p. 338.

15. Bale's extensive use of Tyndale not only in Kynge Johan, but in his other writings as well, has been argued by Rainer Pineas, ‘William Tyndale's Influence on John Bale's Polemical Use of History,’ Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, LIII (1962), 79-96. See also McCuskor, pp. 90-93.

16. The Dramatic Writings of John Bale, ed. John S. Farmer (London, 1907), p. 197.

17. Leicester Bradner, ‘A Test for Udall's Authorship,’ MLN, XLII (1927), 378-80. On the staging of the play, see D. M. Bevington, From Mankind to Marlowe, pp. 27-28.

18. I use John Day's 1570 quarto as reproduced in John W. Cunliffe, Early English Classical Tragedies. This volume contains notes to Gorboduc by Homer A. Watt which include the major results of his own study, Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex (Madison, Wis., 1910).

19. H. Schmidt, ‘Seneca's Influence upon Gorboduc,’ MLN, II (1887), 56-70; J. W. Cunliffe, The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy (London, 1893). Cunliffe modified his views somewhat in his 1912 volume.

20. Induction to Tragedy.

21. Early English Classical Tragedies, p. lxvii ff.

22. ‘The Senecan Influence in Gorboduc,’ Studies in Speech and Drama in Honor of Alexander M. Drummond, pp. 78-104. See also Wolfgang Clemen, English Tragedy Before Shakespeare, pp. 56-74. F. L. Lucas, Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy is a good general study.

23. Early English Classical Tragedies, p. ix.

24. J. W. Cunliffe, ‘Italian Prototypes of Masque and Dumb Show,’ PMLA, XXII (1907), 140-56.

25. S. A. Small, ‘The Political Import of the Norton Half of Gorboduc,’ PMLA XLVI (1931), 641-6.

26. Sara R. Watson, ‘“Gorboduc” and the Theory of Tyrannicide,’ MLR, XXXIV (1939), 355-66, arrived independently at this same conclusion.

27. The most important works in opposition to the doctrine were by the Puritans, George Buchanan, John Knox, John Ponet, and Christopher Goodman.

28. Cited by Baker, p. 23.

29. See edition by Harold J. Laski (London, 1924).

30. Op. cit. Miss Watson sees in Gorboduc a debate in which the two attitudes towards tyrannicide are pitted against one another, Sackville taking the orthodox position and Norton that of the Puritan extremists.

31. The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy, p. 353.

32. William Dinsmore Briggs recognized in Gorboduc, ‘a stage of the treatment of English history following upon that of Kynge Johan,’ but he did not consider Gorboduc a true history play precisely because of its links with the medieval drama and its obvious moral and political didacticism: ‘English history is not yet presented for its own sake.’ Briggs carried on the nineteenth-century critical myth of a non-didactic history play. He failed to realize that history in the Renaissance was never considered important for its own sake. The very political and moral elements to which Briggs objected in Gorboduc are what make it a history play. See Marlowe's Edward II, p. xxxv.

33. See, S. F. Johnson, ‘The Tragic Hero in Early Elizabethan Drama,’ Studies in English Renaissance Drama, pp. 157-71.

34. Although the play was not entered in the Stationers' Register until 1569, we know that a play called Huff, Suff and Ruff was performed at court on February 17, 1560/61, and since these are the names of the three ruffians in Cambises, that may well have been Preston's play. See Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, III, 470; IV, 79.

35. I use the edition in J. Q. Adams, Chief Pre-Shakespearian Dramas.

36. The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy, p. 56.

37. See Louis B. Wright, ‘Social Aspects of some Belated Moralities,’ Anglia, LIV (1930), 107-48.

38. A stage direction tells us that a false skin was used on the stage for this purpose.

39. W. A. Armstrong, ‘The Background and Sources of Preston's Cambises,’ English Studies, XXXI (1950), 129-35.

40. See Histories, ed. G. C. Macaulay (London, 1890), I, 224-7.

41. Ibid., II, 11.

42. See Arthur Lincke, ‘Kambyses in der Sage, Litteratur und Kunst des Mittelalters,’ Aegyptiaca, Festshrift fur Georg Ebers (Leipzig, 1897), pp. 41 ff.

43. See Furnival ed. (London, 1879), III, 97.

44. Herodotus was not available in English translation until 1584.

45. The source problem has been well surveyed by D. T. Starnes, ‘Richard Taverner's The Garden of Wisdom, Carion's Chronicles, and the Cambyses Legend,’ Univ. of Texas Studies in English, XXXV (1956), 22-31. Starnes holds that Taverner translated his material on Cambises directly from the Latin of Bonnus’ 1537 translation of Carion, rather than from the German itself as Armstrong suggests. That Carion himself may have been Preston's immediate source, as suggested by D. C. Allen, ‘A Source for Cambises,’ MLN, XLIX (1934), 384-7, is extremely unlikely.

46. ‘The Elizabethan Concept of the Tyrant,’ RES, XXII (1946), 176.

47. Cited by Armstrong, English Studies, p. 135.

48. Ibid., p. 134.

49. English Drama from Early Times to the Elizabethans, p. 144.

50. See Bernard Spivack, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil, pp. 286-91.

51. Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy, pp. 267-8.

52. On the structure of Cambises and its relation to the requirements of the professional troupe for which it was written, see D. M. Bevington, From Mankind to Marlowe, pp. 183-9.

53. I use the edition by J. S. Farmer in Five Anonymous Plays (Fourth Series; London, 1908), pp. 1-46.

54. See Spivack, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil, pp. 269-72.

55. See Ronald S. Crane, The Vogue of Medieval Chivalric Romance During the English Renaissance; Louis B. Wright, Middle Class Culture in Elizabethan England, pp. 375 ff.

56. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, IV, 6.

57. See C. R. Baskervill, ‘Some Evidence for Early Romantic Plays in England,’ MP, XIV (1916), 229-51, 467-512; Lee M. Ellison, The Early Romantic Drama at the English Court.

58. The Tudor Drama, p. 235.

59. ‘The Idea of History in Marlowe's Tamburlaine.’ ELH, XX (1953), 251-66; ‘Marlowe and Machiavelli,’ Comparative Literature, VI (1954), 349-56.

60. De varietate fortunae Libri quattor (Paris, 1713), p. 25 ff.

61. See John Bakeless, The Tragicall History of Christopher Marlowe, I, 204-38.

62. Fortescue lists his own indebtedness to earlier accounts: ‘This then I heere giue you, that all haue I borowed of Baptista Fulgotius, Pope Pius, Plantina upon the life of Boniface the ninth, of Matthew Palmier and of Cambinus a florentine writing the history and exploits of the Turks’ (Sig. S3ⁿ).

63. Thomas Izard, ‘The Principal Source of Marlowe's Tamburlaine,’ MLN, LVIII (1943), 411-17; Ethel Seaton, ‘Fresh Sources for Marlowe,’ RES, V (1929), 385-401; Hugh G. Dick, ‘Tamburlaine Sources Once More,’ SP, XLVI (1949), 154-66.

64. See Eric Voegelin, ‘Das Timurbild der Humanisten,’ Zeitschrift für Öffentliches Recht, XVII, No. 5. In a later study Voegelin has shown how the Tamburlaine legend was used in Machiavelli's Prince. See ‘Machiavelli's Prince: Background and Formation,’ Review of Politics, XIII (1951), 142-68.

65. Review of Politics, XIII (1951), 161.

66. On classical and Christian concepts of fortune, see Howard R. Patch, The Goddess Fortuna in Medieval Literature, particularly pp. 8-34.

67. On the relation of the two parts of the play to one another, see Clifford Leech, ‘The Structure of Tamburlaine,’ Tulane Drama Review, VIII (1964), 32-46. On Marlowe's glorification of the heroic man in Tamburlaine, see E. M. Waith, The Herculean Hero, pp. 60-87.

68. Una M. Ellis-Fermor, Christopher Marlowe, pp. 132-3.

69. Paul H. Kocher, Christopher Marlowe, A Study of his Thought, Learning and Character. Chapel Hill, 1946, pp. 181 ff.

70. This notion Marlowe had already expressed in Dido Queen of Carthage:

    Those that dislike what Dido gives in charge,
    Command my guard to slay for their offence.
    Shall vulgar peasants storm at what I do?
    The ground is mine that gives them sustenance,
    The air wherein they breathe, the water, fire,
    All that they have, their lands, their goods, their lives;
    And I, the goddess of all these, command …

    (IV, iv, 71-77)

    Reference is to The Complete Plays of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Irving Ribner (New York, 1963).

71. Irving Ribner, ‘Marlowe and Machiavelli,’ Comparative Literature, VI (1954), 349-56.

72. James P. Brawner, ed. The Wars of Cyrus (Urbana, 1942), p. 10; Irving Ribner, Tamburlaine and the Wars of Cyrus,’ JEGP, LIII (1954) 569-73; G. K. Hunter, ‘“The Wars of Cyrus” and “Tamburlaine”,’ N & Q, VIII (1961), 395-6.

73. Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, IV, 46.

74. I. Ribner, ‘Greene's Attack on Marlowe: Some Light on Alphonsus and Selimus,’ SP, LII (1955), 162-71. Greene's authorship of Selimus, although likely, is not certain.

A Chronological List of Extant English History Plays, 1519-1653

… Probable dates of composition are given in parentheses. Names of the publishers of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century editions are in italics. Full bibliographical descriptions may be found in W. W. Greg, A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama in the Restoration. Convenient modern editions follow, but no attempt has been made to include all of them. Collected editions of individual authors are referred to simply as Works, with the name of the editor and the year of publication. Fuller listings may be found in E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage and G. E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage. …

Since title-pages differ in various editions, modern usage has been followed in listing play titles.

The following abbreviations are used:

MSR: Malone Society Reprint

Sh. Soc.: Shakespeare Society Publications (1841-53)

TFT: Tudor Facsimile Texts and Stuart Facsimile Editions

The following collections are referred to:

Adams, J. Q. Chief Pre-Shakespearean Dramas. Boston, 1924.

Cunliffe, J. W. Early English Classical Tragedies. Oxford, 1912.

Kynge Johan (1530-6) by John Bale

Huntington Library MS.

Ed. J. S. Farmer, Works, 1907; J. H. P. Pafford, MSR, 1931

Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex (1561) by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville

William Griffith, 1565; John Day, 1570; Edward Allde, 1590

Ed. W. D. Cooper, Sh. Soc., 1847; L. T. Smith, 1882; J. M. Manly, 1897; J. S. Farmer, TFT, 1908; Cunliffe, 1912

Cambises, King of Persia (c. 1561) by Thomas Preston

John Allde, 1569; Edward Allde,, n.d.

Ed. Dodsley, 1874; J. S. Farmer, TFT, 1910; Adams, 1924

A Select Bibliography of Secondary Materials

Writings on the Elizabethan and Jacobean history play have been extraordinarily voluminous. I have tried to include below only those items which are still important to the student of the historical drama in England. I have seen no reason to include here some works, which, although significant and important in themselves, touch only indirectly upon the history play, although many such have been used in this study and are referred to in the notes. Similarly I have been forced to exclude many short notes and some longer studies by nineteenth-century scholars which seem today to touch on matters of minor significance or to offer opinions which are obviously no longer tenable. Since bibliographies for the Shakespearian plays are readily available, I have included only those Shakespearian items which bear most immediately upon this study.

The following abbreviations have been used:

CL: Comparative Literature

EHR: English Historical Review

ELH: A Journal of English Literary History

HLQ: Huntington Library Quarterly

JEGP: Journal of English and Germanic Philology

JHI: Journal of the History of Ideas

MLN: Modern Language Notes

MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly

MLR: Modern Language Review

MP: Modern Philology

N & Q: Notes and Queries

PBA: Proceedings of the British Academy

PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America

PQ: Philological Quarterly

RES: Review of English Studies

SEL: Studies in English Literature

SP: Studies in Philology

Sh. Jahr.: Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft

SQ: Shakespeare Quarterly

I. Renaissance Historiography and Political Theory

Allen, J. W. A History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century. London, 1928.

Laski, Harold J., ed. Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos (1579). London, 1924.

Tyndale, William. Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Different Portions of the Holy Scriptures. Ed. Henry Walter. The Parker Society. Cambridge, 1858.

Wright, Louis B. Middle Class Culture in Elizabethan England. Chapel Hill, 1935.

II. General Studies of the Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama

Baker, Howard. Induction to Tragedy. Baton Rouge, La., 1939.

Bevington, David M. From Mankind to Marlowe: Growth of Structure in the Popular Drama of Tudor England. Cambridge, Mass., 1962.

Brooke, C. F. Tucker. The Tudor Drama. Boston, 1911.

Chambers, Edmund K. The Medieval Stage. Oxford, 1904. 2 v.

Chambers, Edmund K. The Elizabethan Stage. Oxford, 1923. 4 v.

Chambers, Edmund K. The English Folk Play. Oxford, 1933.

Clemen, Wolfgang. English Tragedy Before Shakespeare: The Development of Dramatic Speech. Trans. by T. S. Dorch. London, 1961.

Cunliffe, John W. The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy. London, 1893.

Cunliffe, John W. ‘Italian Prototypes of Masque and Dumb Show,’ PMLA, XXII (1907), 140-56.

Ellis-Fermor, Una M. Christopher Marlowe. London, 1927.

Ellison, Lee M. The Early Romantic Drama at the English Court. Menasha, Wis., 1917.

Farnham, Willard. The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy. Berkeley, 1936.

Kocher, Paul H. Christopher Marlowe, A Study of his Thought, Learning and Character. Chapel Hill, 1946.

Leech, Clifford. ‘Document and Ritual,’ Durham University Journal, XXX (1937), 283-300.

Lucas, F. L. Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy. Cambridge, 1922.

Rossiter, A. P. English Drama from Early Times to the Elizabethans. London, 1950.

III. Specialized Studies

Allen, Don C. ‘A Source for Cambises,’ MLN, XLIX (1934), 384-7.

Armstrong, William A. ‘The Background and Sources of Preston's Cambises,’ English Studies, XXXI (1950), 129-35.

Armstrong, William A. ‘The Elizabethan Concept of the Tyrant,’ RES, XXII (1946), 161-81.

Bakeless, John. The Tragically History of Christopher Marlowe. Cambridge, Mass., 1942. 2 v.

Barke, Herbert. Bales ‘Kynge Johan’ und sein Verhältnis zur zeitgenössischen Geschichtsschreibung. Wurzburg, 1937.

Baskervill, Charles R. ‘Some Evidence for Early Romantic Plays in England.’ MP, XIV (1916), 229-51, 467-512.

Bradner, Leicester. ‘A Test for Udall's Authorship,’ MLN, XLII (1927), 378-80.

Briggs, William Dinsmore, ed. Marlowe's Edward II. London, 1914.

Crane, Ronald S. The Vogue of Medieval Chivalric Romance During the English Renaissance. Menasha, Wis., 1919.

Dodds, Madeleine H. ‘The Date of “Albion Knight”,’ The Library, 3rd series, IV (1913), 157-70.

Dodds, Madeline H. ‘Early Political Plays,’ ibid., pp. 393-5.

Dunn, E. Catherine. ‘The Medieval “Cycle” as History Play: an Approach to the Wakefield Plays,’ Studies in the Renaissance, VII (1960), 76-89.

Harris, Jessie W. John Bale, A Study in the Minor Literature of the Reformation. Urbana, Ill., 1940.

Herrick, Marvin T. ‘The Senecan Influence in Gorboduc,’ Studies in Speech and Drama in Honor of Alexander M. Drummond. Ithaca, N.Y., 1944, pp. 78-104.

Johnson, S. F. ‘The Tragic Hero in Early Elizabethan Drama,’ Studies in the English Renaissance Drama, ed. Bennett, Cargill and Hall. New York, 1959, pp. 157-71.

McCuskor, Honor. John Bale, Dramatist and Antiquary. Bryn Mawr, Pa., 1942.

Patch, Howard R. The Goddess Fortuna in Medieval Literature. Cambridge, Mass., 1927.

Pineas, Rainer. ‘William Tyndale's Use of History as a Weapon of Religious Controversy,’ Harvard Theological Rev., LV (1962), 121-41.

Ribner, Irving. ‘The Idea of History in Marlowe's Tamburlaine,’ ELH, XX (1953), 251-66.

Ribner, Irving. ‘Morality Roots of the Tudor History Play,’ Tulane Studies in English, IV (1954), 21-43.

Ribner, Irving. ‘Tamburlaine and The Wars of Cyrus,’ JEGP, LIII (1954), 569-73.

Ribner, Irving. ‘Marlowe and Machiavelli,’ CL, VI (1954), 349-56.

Ribner, Irving. ‘Greene's Attack on Marlowe: Some Light on Alphonsus and Selimus,’ SP, LII (1955), 162-71.

Schmidt, H. ‘Seneca's Influence upon Gorboduc,’ MLN, II (1887), 56-70.

Small, Samuel A. ‘The Political Import of the Norton Half of Gorboduc,’ PMLA, XLVI (1931), 641-6.

Spivack, Bernard. Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil: The History of a Metaphor in Relation to his Major Villains. New York, 1958.

Starnes, D. T. ‘Richard Taverner's The Garden of Wisdom, Carion's Chronicles, and the Cambyses Legend,’ University of Texas Studies in English, XXXV (1956), 22-31.

Waith, Eugene M. The Herculean Hero in Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare and Dryden. London, 1962.

Wallerstein, Ruth. King John in Fact and Fiction. Philadelphia, 1917.

Watson, Sara R. ‘“Gorboduc” and the Theory of Tyrannicide,’ MLR, XXXIV (1939), 355-66.

Watt, Homer A. Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex. Madison, Wis., 1910.

Wright, Louis B. ‘Some Social Aspects of Some Belated Moralities,’ Anglia, LIV (1930), 107-48.