[In the following excerpt, Lea examines English plays that appear to have been directly influenced by the commedia dell'arte and not merely by broader trends in Italian comedy.]

It is hardly to be expected that we should find the precise original of any English play among the miscellanies of the Commedia dell'arte. Putting aside the probabilities that scenari have been lost, and that many Italian plays never attained the permanence of a written record, it is the nature of the material that it should be flexible. Themes and situations were continually reshuffled. If Italian professionals had little feeling for the integrity of a scenario, English dramatists in search of plot materials might be expected to have less. This seems to have been the case, and it is by now impossible to tell whether they worked from memory of Italian plays in England, from accounts of some performance in France or Italy, or from written scenari. We know too little of the intercourse between the contemporary stages to be able to choose between these three possibilities in the case of individual plays. The versions which are extant may be the result of several revisions. The authorship and chronology of Elizabethan drama is too uncertain for us to be able to trace borrowings to the taste of any particular period, company, or dramatist. Although the conclusions as to the influence of the Commedia dell'arte can only be tentative, the comparison is worth making for the sake of tracing the unmistakable but elusive Italianate flavour which prevails in spite of the English details of manners and setting. As the plays are examined severally it will be seen that the impression can sometimes be traced to a common theme or situation, sometimes to a familiar arrangement of typical personages, or to the function of a particular character as a plot agent. Singly the points of resemblance might pass unnoticed: taken out of their context they might be dismissed as chance variations of common devices. But it is the accumulation of Italian characteristics in these plays that rouses the suspicion of contact with the mass of material in the collections of scenari. That English actors and dramatists could easily have invented the situation is a negative, defensive argument. We need not be jealous for their independence for there is little virtue in the invention of such plots: it remains a matter of taste whether we prefer to believe in their originality or their powers of adaptation.

So far no source has been discovered in English or Italian fiction or drama for The Wit of a Woman, Englishmen for My Money, Jack Drum's Entertainment, Ram Alley, Greene's Tu Quoque, and The Hog hath lost his Pearl. The grouping of the characters, the crudeness of the motifs continue to suggest the influence of the Commedia dell'arte, and what little we know of the authorship and circumstances of production does not contradict the impression. Each might be described in Gosson's admirable phrase as composed of ‘a cast of Italian devices’.

The similarity between the dramatis personae of the scenari shows the tendency of the Commedia dell'arte towards a symmetrical arrangement which almost amounts to a pattern. The characters group themselves automatically into households consisting each of a father, a servant, a son, and a daughter, often one member of the family is lost or disguised at the beginning of the play, but by the third act the four lovers are sorted out and neatly arranged for the double marriage. When there is a mother living the caste generally includes a courtesan as her counterpart. Although there are rarely less than two Zanni there may be only one maidservant: occasionally a fantastic captain or a grotesque doctor is left without a mate. In the simpler farces numerical balance is substituted for interest in individuality. The plot is made by the repetition of a situation or the crossing of parallel themes. The lovers are whisked forward like couples in a dance, executing the same figures turn and turn about, exchanging partners momentarily.¹

THE WIT OF A WOMAN

The symmetry of the cast for the anonymous comedy Wherein is merily shewen; The Wit of a Woman, with its four families, reminds us at once of the Italian method. The play is plotted like a catch. With four old men, Bario a merchant, Nemo a physician, Ferio a lawyer, and Dorio a captain who each have a son and a daughter, with two common disguise tricks a comedy is contrived by quadruple repetition:

‘O, but Mrs. Balia, heere hath been double dealing,’ says one of the deceived fathers in the last act.

‘Marry, I thinke heere hath been treble dealing,’ the Doctor retorts. ‘What say you, Mr. Ferio?’

FERIO.
Marry I thinke it hath been a song of four parts: What say you Maister Bario?
BARIO.
I say I know not what to say, but we sing all one tune.

The function of the minor characters is explained by the significance of their Italian names. Balia is the schoolmistress who acts as the nurse and messenger for the young women. The stupid servant is Goffo, the ruffian Bragardo, and his pert attendant Bizardo. Giro is the vintner's boy who reels on to the stage half drunk. The proper names Misa, Bilia, Dano or Dives, and Sir Lawrence for the old woman, the maid, the rich citizen, and the priest are generally discarded in the course of the dialogue. In the Quarto of 1604 the names and relationship of the four families are in a hopeless tangle, but the chief positions of the plot are clear.

The young women take hands not to disagree ‘upon husbands’ but ‘if there come any to our mindes, let us have a-bout with our wittes, to fit our wils to the full’. The young men make a corresponding pact ‘Wee foure wagges to foure mad wenches, our crosse sisters, let us to our wits, to laye them abroad for their loves, and though some of our parents seeme not to favour us in such courses, let us doe them as little offence, and in our lives as much good as we can.’

The disguises they adopt served many Italian lovers. Fileno is to attend the ladies as a Doctor of Physic, Veronte will teach them how to read and write, Gerillo is to go wooing as a dancing master, Rinaldo as an itinerant painter. The writing master and the painter set up their signs, the dancing master gives a display, and while Fileno is engaged with his mistress in the house, Goffo, now called Foggo, with the usual lewd equivocations of the quack's attendant, interviews the neat maiden, the old woman, and the rich citizens who come as patients.

Meanwhile the fathers discuss the natures and upbringing of their children, and the Captain (now miscalled Giro), left alone, reveals that though he is ‘old, foolish & froward’, he is in love with his neighbour's daughter Giannetta. He hopes his wealth may win over the Balia.

The old physician is also suffering from ‘this disease called love’. He remarks that Erinta Bario's daughter seems to suffer from the green sickness and visits her professionally. Bario leaves him for the State house ‘about a little common-wealthes businesse’ and the soliloquy in which the Doctor reveals his passion shows his addiction to Latin tags.

Bario and the doctor commission Rinaldo and Veronte to attend their daughters, and in the tenth scene the Balia leaves her charges to entertain the young men who take their chance of discovering their intentions in dialogues full of facetious equivocation. The scene ends with a dance: the lovers agree to go home to quiet the suspicions of their parents. On the way they meet with Bragardo preening himself before Bizardo on a visit to the ladies. None of the young men can resist the chance of a practical joke. Rinaldo sells him some black soap as a box of complexion, the dancing master trips him up in a Lavolta, Neofilo pretends to sweeten his breath with a foul pill, and the love character written out for him by Veronte contains nothing but a fool's cap and a coxcomb. The episodes with Bragardo could hardly be called a subplot; in the jargon of the scenari they would be ‘burle’. The swaggerer makes one more attempt to board the wenches in face of the gallants and hopes he may meet with the cheaters to be revenged. This time he gets past the insolent servants and is welcomed by the Balia who takes him into the house with a false show of cordiality. In a few minutes he reappears without hair and beard and explains to Bizardo that ‘Mistris Balia hath betrayed me, there was a wedding: & the dogges that the tother day misused me were there, & fell upon mee, & used me as you see, & but that I bestirred me with my curtilax, I had never come away alive, but I will be revenged on this house’. His thrusts are cut short by the maid who sweeps him from the doorstep with her broom, ‘What Captain Swappes is it you? Ile be with you by & by’ (just as D. Diego di Mendoza is tumbled out by the servant in Troiano's plot). The theme of the old men's wooing is introduced by the Balia who speaks to Isabella for Bario. Isabella confides in Giannetta who is equally averse to the idea of being ‘married to the Coughe, the Rewme, the Stone, the Strangurie, the Gowte & the Dropsie’, and they enlist the wits of their ‘sisters’ to hoax the old suitors. Bario is so eager for a young wife that he submits to the condition that as part of the marriage settlement he shall endow his daughter with £5,000 and his son with £20,000. Lodovica entraps Ferio into promising to impersonate the old Doctor so that he may satisfy the priest that the marriage between Gerillo and Giannetta has parental sanction. This bargain is repeated off the stage so that each couple is provided with an assumed father and a handsome endowment, and each old man thinks he is sure of his neighbour's daughter. When the Balia leads them into the feast and discovers the quadruple hoax there is nothing for it but to put a good face on the matter and to join hands and promise that lovers shall inherit their lands and goods, like the foiled fathers at the end of the improvised farces. There is no need to ransack Italian fiction for the source of this comedy which gives us the clearest instance of the influence of the Commedia dell'arte. Properly speaking it has no story, but is constructed from the simple materials of the theme of a double love-interest and a couple of disguise manœuvres.

ENGLISHMEN FOR MY MONEY

The fact that in Haughton's Englishmen for my Money comedy is made at the expense of the aliens in London entirely from the English point of view does not dispense with the impression that at some stage the play has been in contact with the Italian scenari. The construction allows for a triple repetition of the chief situations. Each of the three daughters of Pisaro, a Portuguese merchant, has an English and a foreign suitor. The Englishmen have mortgaged their estates to Pisaro but hope to recover their fortunes by marrying his daughters, but the usurer who is cunning enough to see through their designs favours the foreigners. In spite of his instructions the daughters obstinately encourage the Englishmen and are abetted by Antony their tutor who plays the part of the astute servant in contrast to Pisaro's clownish man Frisco. Pisaro is suspicious of the tutor, and overhears him delivering love-messages and tokens under cover of a lesson in moral philosophy. Antony is dismissed and Frisco is instructed how to inquire for a tutor skilled in music and languages to prepare the girls for the foreign suitors.

Locatelli would have summarized as ‘parole et azzi’ the quibbles and blunders that the stupid servant raises as Pisaro tries to explain how he is to recognize the Frenchman who will say, ‘Awee’, the Dutchman who speaks with his mouth full, and the Italian with the ‘Divell in his countenance’.

Antony warns the English suitors and leaves them to direct Frisco to ‘Paul's’ where the old tutor is to be found in a new beard. Frisco is only too pleased to end his search and engages Antony as M. la Mouche.

Meanwhile Pisaro, half crazed with anxiety at bad news of pirates which he hears in the Exchange, has invited the Englishmen to dinner as well as the foreigners. When both sets of lovers meet at his house we are reminded of the scenes in which the daughter of Pantalone or Gratiano entertains the rich foreigner whom her parents regard as a desirable suitor. As Doralice teases the stranger Horatio² so Pisaro's daughters leave the Dutchman, the Frenchman, and the Italian stammering and bowing to the delight of the Englishmen.

Another familiar situation presents itself when Frisco returns with the new tutor. The daughters and the Englishmen who are in the secret recognize Antony and stand by in trepidation as he is put through his paces in the three languages by his introduction to the genuine foreigners. The imposter carries it off, thanks to the kindly intervention of the women whose impertinence exasperates Pisaro.

The blundering Frisco gives the second turn to the intrigue. As he runs after the lovers with a message from the daughters that they will expect them at ten o'clock when their father is in bed, he meets his master with the merchants and, like any booby Zanni, explains his errand. Pisaro at once contrives a counter move: the foreigners are to come one by one disguised as the Englishmen. This is reckoning without the gleam of wit in Frisco, who promises himself the ‘gallantest sport’ in this night's work and promptly confides in Antony who warns the women.

The night-scenes in which Frisco and the Englishmen lead the strangers a dance about the city are written for audiences expert in the topography of London. While the details are entirely English they exploit a device common on the Italian stage by which women and servants cheat the rival lovers by rushing them to and fro in the darkness.³ Only the Dutchman is allowed to realize that he has reached his destination; Laurentia engages him in conversation while her sisters fetch a rope and a basket and persuade him to be hoisted up to their window. They leave him swinging half way and mock him for a parrot, and offer him a cushion. An episode in a story by Pietro Fortini has been suggested as the source of Laurentia's trick.⁴ If we are seeking parallels we might find the hint in Aristophanes, or the story of St. Paul's escape from Damascus. Regarding the incident from the theatrical point of view as a practical effect it is worth while considering two occurrences on the Italian stage of which record has survived. One is in Calmo's La Spagnolas where the bravo is hoisted up, the other in the scenario of Li Vecchi Scherniti in the Florentine miscellany. It was probably a favourite device when the stage conditions were suitable. As soon as Vandalle has restrained his outcries for fear lest the wenches will cut the rope as they have threatened, Pisaro enters below, remarking as before on the darkness of the scene, and gloating over the thought of the foreigner's success. As he lurks in the doorway he overhears the Englishmen arranging with his daughters to meet at the church, boasting that they will cancel their debts by the marriage. Pisaro calls to the tutor for his musket and hustles the girls within doors. Antony remains to advise the lovers; he has a plan ready for each but will only give a hint—like the Zanni who whispers his second schemes to the lovers—then, aware of Pisaro's eavesdropping on the balcony he raises his voice and pretends to reprove the young men for their ingratitude to his master. Pisaro, like Pantalone on another occasion,⁵ is deceived into a favourable impression of the tutor's loyalty and prepares for the wedding feast. The intrigue takes on a new lease of life as when the plotters of the scenari, after the failure of the second ‘burla’, change their tactics for a last attempt. Antony comforts the women and gives them their instructions. Laurentia is to borrow his clothes, and ‘for the other two some other drift devised must bee’.

Walgrave, Mathea's lover, is smuggled into the house disguised as Susan, a neighbour's daughter to whom Pisaro had promised a night's lodging during her mother's illness. Her appearance arouses the unpleasant trait in Pisaro which completes his resemblance to the stage-father of the Magnifico type. He complains of his lonely widowhood and makes love to the disguised Walgrave, but finding no response sends him in to be Mathea's bed-fellow.

The plan for Harvie, Marina's suitor, is the old ruse of feigned illness. Cozened by the rumour that Harvie is dying, Pisaro is greedy enough to sanction his nominal marriage with his daughter with the bargain that at his death she shall inherit his lands. No sooner is the deed signed than the dying man rises from his chair in lusty good health.

Laurentia's disguise is equally successful; passing as the tutor she is sent with a message to Heigham and returns with him as her husband. Mathea comes down wedded to the supposed Susan, and the enraged Pisaro has no course but to submit like all the duped parents of the Commedia dell'arte.

An interesting suggestion has been made by Mr. W. J. Lawrence that there may be some connexion between Haughton's comedy and the play of the Three Sisters of Mantua, which was acted at Court in 1578 and required as stage-properties a basket and pulley.⁶ The supposition agrees nicely with the internal evidence. It would help to account for the Italianate features of the plot if we could imagine the earlier play as being intermediary between some foreign dramatic original such as a scenario or performance of the Commedia dell'arte, and the play as it was entered in the Stationers' Register in February 1598 and printed in 1616. We are left with this mere conjecture as to whence the Italian element came into a play so English in setting and sentiment; but when, or howsoever it was introduced, it is unmistakable to any one familiar with the contemporary Italian stage.

JACK DRUM'S ENTERTAINMENT

The alternative titles of Jack Drum's Entertainment, or the comedie of Pasquill and Katherine give a hint of the way in which the play may have come into being. It can be dated with some certainty as written for the Children of Paul's in 1600. In the Quarto of 1601 it is anonymous, but no one has doubted that Marston had at least a share in its composition. Hitherto the play has chiefly been studied in connexion with the War of the Theatres, and critics have been concerned to detect Marston's handiwork and to follow up traces of personal satire in the plot of the cuckolding of Brabant Senior, which is said to be based upon a story that Jonson once told to Drummond. In Brabant, Fleay is inclined to see Jonson himself: in Brabant Junior, Marston; in Mammon, Henslowe.⁷ Sir Edmund Chambers will not go so far, but agrees that Sir Edward Fortune probably represents Edward Alleyn.⁸ Absorbed by interest in the controversial element and topical allusions it is easy to set aside the substance of the play which consists of a couple of crude plots, one tragi-comic and the other farcical, both blatantly Italianate in the characters and theme. The types of the spiteful, miserly, amorous, old man, the light, witty maidservant, the cowardly braggart and his booby companion, the good-natured clown, and the pair of sentimental and the pair of scheming lovers, might have stepped out of the Commedia dell'arte and brought with them the motifs of madness, feigned death, vituperation and the time-honoured ruse of the lover in the sack.

Sir Edward Fortune has two daughters, Camilia, whose love is ‘just like a whiffe of Tobacco, no sooner in the mouth but out at the nose’, and Katherine, the constant lover of Pasquill. The banter between the young men, spiced with satire of English manners and topical allusions, helps to make Camilia's part of the plot less obviously Italianate than the scenes that are devoted to Katherine and Pasquill, but considered in outline the former involves the familiar theme of the punishment of fickleness in a lover with scenes of jealousy, misunderstanding, pleading, and disdain, and the common situations of a lover who makes secret advances by means of the waiting maid and apparently plays false to his friend by forestalling him with his mistress, and so provokes the friend to an attempted suicide. Camilia cannot choose between the admiration of Brabant Senior, a married man, the open suits of his brother Brabant Junior, and the rich booby John Ellis, and what she takes to be the secret advances of Planet the younger Brabant's friend. She is swayed by the opinions of her maid Winifred who is in league with Planet. When Camilia fondles Ellis she rouses the younger Brabant's jealousy and provokes him into beating the booby; but when Winifred chooses to praise Planet she immediately professes herself ‘Planet-struck’, and formally refuses Ellis. To punish her fickleness Planet pretends to scorn her advances. He does not explain his tactics to Brabant ‘least nice jealousie mistakes a friendly part’, but the sight of Winifred delivering Camilia's scarf to Planet is sufficient to convince Brabant that his friend has supplanted him with his mistress. He determines to murder Planet, and sends his page to ‘shoote him quite through and through’ and to bring back his cloak and hat for a token. Dressed in his friend's clothes he goes to Camilia, who is deceived by the disguise and beseeches him as Planet to soften his disdain. Brabant is horrified to realize how much he has wronged his friend and tries to stab himself, but he delays so long, calling on Planet to accept ‘the smoake of reeking blood’ to expiate the murder, that Sir Edward Fortune has time to intervene; Planet walks in and asks calmly for his clothes, and the page explains the fraud.

The plot of Katherine and Pasquill is not broached until the second act which opens with two successive serenading scenes. Katherine is saluted with a song first from Puffe, the absurd courtier, and then from Mammon, the ‘yeallow toothed, sunck-eyde, gowtie shankt usurer’. She shuts the window on this disgusting old man as he woos her with the promise of his wealth in the song,

Chunck, chunck, chunck, chunck, his bags doe ring,
A merrie note with chuncks to sing.

He looks in the corner to witness a love-scene between Katherine and Pasquill, who indulge in speeches full of euphuistic conceits and end by capping each other's protestations in a passage of rhyming stichomythia in the style approved for the dialogues of reciprocal love between the innamorati in the miscellanies.

PASQUILL.
When I turne fickle, vertue shall be vice.
KATHERINE.
When I prove false, Hell shall be Paradise.
PASQUILL.
My life shall be maintain'd by thy kinde breath.
KATHERINE.
Thy love shall be my life, thy hate my death.
PASQUILL.
Oh, when I die let me imbrace thy waste!
KATHERINE.
In death let me be constant, true & chaste!
PASQUILL.
Heavens graunt, being dead, my soule may live nie thee.
KATHERINE.
One kisse shall give thee mine eternally.
PASQUILL.
In faire exchange vouchsafe my heart to take.
KATHERINE.
With all my mind. Weare this, Ned, for my sake.

Mammon hires John So-de-King to murder his rival, but Pasquill has no difficulty in persuading the bravo, who is a comical coward, to take a bribe. He sends him to call Mammon, ‘that he vainely triumph in my bloud’, warning us that ‘I have some painting which I found by chaunce in loose Camilia's chamber, with that Ile staine my breast’. John makes off, ‘Hee, by Gor, I smell a rat, me flee’. With Brabant and Planet as witnesses Mammon mourns the death of the ‘vertuous youth’, pretending that his last words had been, ‘Katherine … hold M. Mammon dear’; but when he is left alone gloating and singing the corpse rises and strikes him. Mammon rushes out thinking he has met with the ghost of his victim. At the rumour of Pasquill's death Katherine loses her wits and passes over the stage raving and tearing her hair. No sooner has she gone out than Pasquill appears to reassure Sir Edward, and hearing of her frenzy rushes in pursuit. Later in Act iii, Katherine, now in only a petticoat, searching wildly for her lover, meets the live Pasquill just in time for him to save her from stabbing herself. Again they embrace extravagantly and she is restored to serenity. But as her lover goes out to fetch her a gown Mammon spies her through his spectacles; and filing his tongue to smooth lines taken from Lyly's Woman in the Moone makes up to her promising, ‘To furnish’ her ‘with brave abiliaments’. When she resists him he resorts to a trick stolen from Sidney's Arcadia and dashes her face with the venomous oil of toads. As Pasquill returns Katherine rushes out trying to hide her disfigurement. The shock sends Pasquill mad, and he immediately begins to rave in Latin and snatches at Mammon's bonds and indentures, tearing them as though they were almanacks. The usurer's rage is brought to the pitch of desperation when he is informed that his ships have foundered and his house is burnt; he stumbles outyelling, ‘Roome for Mammon, roome for usurie’.

The dramatist makes the most of the lover's madness, and in Act iv gives Pasquill a scene to himself in which he breaks a basket of eggs and raves in scraps of mythology. Meanwhile Katherine's disfigurement has been cured by a beldame's herbs: Pasquill is restored to his senses by gazing at her under the influence of music.

John So-de-King serves in a triple capacity. As a Frenchman he is the butt of Brabant and Planet; as a bravo, the instrument of Mammon; as an amorous braggart, the catspaw of two sub-plots. In the third act, when Planet has confessed to Winifred that his affection for her was only feigned as a means of approaching his mistress, the maid is left free to occupy herself completely with her other suitors, John Drum the free-lance clown and John So-de-King. She plays off one lover against the other by the sack-trick, a device which was only less common on the English stage than in the Commedia dell'arte. She promises the Frenchman that she will wait for him in a sack in two hours' time, and meanwhile sends a message to John Drum that she will be his if he will tie himself up in the sack which Timothy Tweedle will provide. The first lover comes in carrying the sack which he supposes contains his mistress and drops it with a disgusted, ‘He Jack Drum, Jesu vat made you dere?’, as its real occupant puts out his head. The Frenchman is never allowed the revenge that he promises himself: he is merely a puppet character with no claim to poetic justice, when next we hear of him he is being used in the conspiracy to make Brabant Senior a cuckold.

Three plays which all came to the printer's hands between 1611-14 show signs of the influence of the Commedia dell'arte, but from what we know of the acting dates it does not seem likely that this group represents a revival of the taste for popular Italian plots. The first edition of Ram Alley belongs to 1611: the earliest notice is the entry in the Stationers' Register 1610, but Mr. Lawrence, who has identified the author as a young Irish nobleman, Lording Barrey, suggests 1607/8 as the probable date of composition.⁹Greene's ‘Tu Quoque’ was acted at least two years before it was printed in 1614.¹⁰ For The Hog hath lost his Pearl there is a more definite date. A letter from Sir Henry Wotton written 1612/13 refers to the circumstances of production:

On Sunday last at night, and no longer, some sixteen Apprentices (of what sort you shall guess by the rest of the Story) having secretly learnt a new Play without Book, intituled The Hog hath lost his Pearl; took up the White-Fryers for their Theater: and having invited thither (as it should seem) rather their Mistresses than their Masters; who were all to enter per buletini for a note of distinction from ordinary Comedians. Towards the end of the Play, the Sheriffs (who by chance had heard of it) came in (as they say) and carried some six or seven of them to perform the last Act at Bridewel; the rest are fled. Now it is strange to hear how sharp-witted the City is, for they will needs have Sir John Swinerton, the Lord Major, be meant by the Hog, & the late Lord Treasurer by the Pearl.¹¹

There is nothing in what we know of the stage history of this second group of plays to explain the anglicizing process through which the Italian material may have passed. We do not know whether Barrey, Taylor, and Cooke worked over old plays or whether they borrowed themes, devices, and situations separately and promiscuously to serve as plot scaffolding. The traces of the Commedia dell'arte that come up so clearly under the X-ray of criticism are of little artistic value in comparison with the presentation of English city life with which the details of the play are concerned.

RAM ALLEY

The titles of Barrey's play, Ram Alley or Merry Tricks, indicate its form and subject matter. Ram Alley was notorious for its stews and the play was no doubt intended to attract by the realism of the lewd wit of the dialogue and the discovery of the sharp practice of the knavish Lawyer Throat and the bawds and courtesans. All that was needed by way of plot to display this side of London life was a rough framework of disguise tricks. The faithful lady as a page and the courtesan as an heiress served. Constantia, the daughter of Lady Somerfield, dressed as a boy attends Boutcher, her fickle lover, on his visits to Taffeta and saves him from suicide when he finds that he has been forestalled by the decrepit rival Sir Oliver Smallshanks. She offers to console him with the real Constantia and appears at the dénouement in her woman's dress apologizing to her mother for her adventure and converting her lover. This theme had been naturalized so long that it could hardly be regarded as a sign of the influence of the Commedia dell'arte if it were not for other familiar Italian material.

A scene in the second plot reproduces one of the most effective situations of the popular Italian comedies. Will Smallshanks' plan to dupe his father by passing off Frances, a common courtesan, as an heiress is the counterpart of a scene in the Epidicus, one of the commonest of Plautus's plots to be reworked. It was reproduced for the Commedia erudita in Cieco d'Hadria's Emilia, which was then drafted for improvisation and variously entitled Le due Schiave (Loc. i. 28), La Schiava (Cors. i. 2), and in the Neapolitan miscellany Emilia. Of these three extant scenari Locatelli's is the most circumstantial. Pantalone's son leaves word with Zanni the servant that before his return he is to procure for him Cintia, a slave with whom he is in love. Pantalone confides to Zanni that he is expecting the arrival of Clarice his daughter whom he has not seen for nearly twenty years. Zanni seizes his chance and after acquainting Cintia with as much of Clarice's history as he can remember he presents her to Pantalone as his daughter. When he first sees her Pantalone ‘gazes at her with delight, and then turns away saying, “I am not a bit happy, somehow I don't feel it in my blood that she is my child”’. Zanni says this is because it is so long since he saw her, how could he feel an affection for her when he had only seen her once? ‘True, true,’ says Pantalone. After this he asks her name, and Zanni, pretending to sing, moves to and fro saying, ‘Clarice’. Pantalone turns on him saying, ‘Be quiet, you brute: don't talk to yourself’. One by one he puts her through the questions for which she has been prepared, and all the time Zanni prompts her by the singing trick. Pantalone gets furious and at last asks her the name of the old woman whom she had left with her mother, saying, ‘if she can tell me that I will be sure that she is really my daughter’. Zanni is in despair because he does not know the name: no more does Cintia, but turning to Pantalone she says that since she has been able to answer so many questions to his satisfaction it is now her turn to assure herself that he is really Pantalone, and that if he can tell her what the old woman is called she will be certain that he is her father. Then Pantalone praising Cintia says, ‘She 's a fine girl, and she 's quite right, now to convince her that I am her father, I will tell her that the old woman's name is Filippa’. ‘Filippa, Filippa’, cry Cintia and Zanni delightedly, and with by-play over ‘Filippa’ (azzi di filippa) they go into the house. So in the English play Sir Oliver kisses the girl and inquires after her father, and William saves the situation by interrupting to answer the unexpected question himself. The subsequent intrigue in which Throat the Lawyer marries the girl by fraud only to discover that she is nothing but a poor witty adventuress, is not remarkably Italianate.

In the farcical sub-plot, however, we encounter a group of characters who might have stepped out of the Commedia dell'arte. The behaviour of Captain Puffe as the braggart and of Adriana and Taffeta as the typical bawd and courtesan has already been described.¹² Sir Oliver Smallshanks, who has been duped like a Pantalone-father over the supposed heiress, now takes heart as a Pantalone-lover and woos Taffeta. While he is engaged with the courtesan the Captain is heard storming on the stairs. Sir Oliver in a panic inquires if she has not an inner room and Tutchin suggests a trunk or a chest as a hiding-place. Adriana's idea of pushing him under his mistress's farthingale may have been original, but it is also Zanni's trick to escape his rival the French servant Jacobillo and Coviello the Neapolitan doctor in Il Pantalone Impazzito by Fr. Righello, a comedy entirely in the popular tradition published in 1613. As Puffe advances defying all the constables and halberdiers with whom he is threatened he kicks at the farthingale and discovers the Knight. Before it can be proved who is the greatest coward, the Captain, the Knight, or his companion Justice Tutchin, a servant separates them and the Captain retires. Even this fright does not cure Sir Oliver; as in the Commedia dell'arte his misfortunes become comic by repetition, and at his second visit to the widow he is driven behind the hangings to avoid his son who treats the listener to some sharp home-truths.

The resemblance between Tutchin and Gratiano does not go far: he is only a reluctant wooer and is loath to visit Lady Somerfield when Sir Oliver wants to be rid of him: Barrey uses him chiefly as a confidant and may be adapting Kempe's caricature of the foolish justice rather than borrowing from the Italian mask of the Doctor.¹³

GREENE'S ‘TU QUOQUE’

A summary of the action of The City Gallant shows Cooke making use of a few common Italian situations as the scaffolding for a play which by its presentation of London life in the taverns, stews and prisons strikes the reader as peculiarly English. The performance of Thomas Greene as Bubble the good-natured Clown which gave the play its alternative title of Greene's ‘Tu Quoque’ might be taken as a measure of the relationship between the English and the Italian elements. Bubble, the servant of a knavish gallant Staines, is suddenly enriched by the death of a usurer uncle. He changes places with his master and is accepted by Sir Lionel Rash as a desirable suitor for his daughter. The mainspring of the comic situation corresponds to Zanni's trick in Il Finto Servo, a brisk popular version of Li Suppositi; the introduction of the rich booby to the young who openly flouts him has its counterpart in the scenes in Locatelli's Oratio Burlato; and the trick by which Staines, disguised as an Italian makes off with Bubble's cloak, provides the hue and cry exit for which the Italian coneycatching ‘lazzi’ were contrived. But the details of the clown's part are purely English and the play owes more to the personality of the actor, to his gesture, and the intonation of his catchword, ‘Et tu quoque’, than to the comic ideas which the dramatist seems to have borrowed from the Commedia dell'arte.

Other parts of the play are Italianate in structure. As Bubble is a good-natured booby of the type of a ‘Pulcinella sciocco’, so his counterpart Will Rash is the correspondingly astute servant. As the son of Sir Lionel he is above the Coviello type in rank, but his talent for organizing an intrigue and his lack of all sentimental interest in the final marriages fit him for the part of the Coviello plot-agent. He manipulates the love affairs of his sisters Gertrude and Joyce with young Geraldine, a neighbour's son, and Staines the penniless gallant who is disguised as a man-servant.

These lovers are remembered as types rather than as persons. Geraldine and Gertrude are shy and sentimental and will not acknowledge their love for each other: Joyce and Staines are bold, railing, and scornful. Their speeches for all the matter that they contain, collapse into the formulae of the miscellanies and might be summarized as soliloquies of a diffident lover, of lover unrequited, and dialogues of wooing and disdain.

The most obvious Italian traces appear in the scene in which Joyce and Will Rash bring matters to a head between Gertrude and Geraldine by the device of feigned death. The young man is persuaded to lie flat on the stage with a veil sprinkled with blood over his face. Gertrude is called from the window and rushing down she overwhelms him with kisses and lamentations. Reassured by this demonstration of her real feelings he rises. Gertrude is angry to think of the foolish figure she has cut, but does not go back on her word to Geraldine. For the rest of the play this pair of lovers is occupied in revenging themselves upon Joyce and Staines by putting them into an equally embarrassing position. Their efforts culminate in a night scene in which three couples of eloping lovers (for Spendall and the widow are also taking advantage of the dark) pass to and fro over the stage terrified at the thought of meeting Sir Lionel and scared by Will Rash who prowls round the house with a lantern to spy on these ‘little children of Cupid that walk two by two’. This typical scene leads up to an equally common dénouement which emphasizes the likeness between the English and Italian fathers. On the morning appointed for the marriages of Gertrude and Joyce with the two rich blockheads Bubble and Scattergood, Sir Lionel and old Geraldine come to wake up their daughters and discover that they have been at church an hour ago with the lovers of their choice. Bubble and Scattergood came in rubbing their eyes, cheated of their brides, and the fathers can only assent weakly to the marriages which have been consummated before their consent was asked.

THE HOG HATH LOST HIS PEARL

Taylor may have had the tale of Carracus, Albert and Maria, the afflicted lovers of The Hog hath lost his Pearl, from some chapbook romance, but his source does not appear to be extant. It is therefore worth pointing out the correspondence between his dramatic material and the stock-in-trade of the tragi-comedies of the Commedia dell'arte. Carracus, the lover of Maria, the daughter of Old Lord Wealthy, is superseded by his friend Albert. After debating the rival claims of love and friendship, the deceiver mounts the ladder and is received as Carracus, who arrives later and waits below depending upon his friend's good faith. As he retires to see that the horses are in readiness for the elopement, Albert descends and now that his pleasure is over is immediately stricken with shame. He repents loudly in a soliloquy but does not confess to Carracus who goes off safely with Maria. Albert retires into the woods to wear out his life as a hermit and relieve his conscience by carving his story on the trees. Maria's explanation of how she came by Albert's ring rouses Carracus to suspicion, not of his friend's faith, but of his wife's honesty. At his accusation she swoons and is carried into the house. Carracus, imagining she is dead, begins to rave and compares himself to Orpheus seeking his Eurydice. He is too crazed to take in the Nurse's announcement that his wife had recovered and has taken a vow of voluntary banishment.

Disguised as a boy Maria wanders into the woods until she comes to one of the trees upon which Albert has engraved the story of his repentance. Although she is faint with hunger she has strength left to decipher his twenty-three lines, and to announce her pardon in time for the hermit to overhear. As she is about to faint with exhaustion he takes her into his cave, promising that she shall be entertained by the melancholy stories of Albert and his repentance.

Carracus, meanwhile, after a mad scene in which he enacts the monarch and refers to Maria as sleeping, wanders into the same woods dancing fantastically and raving against women. Albert overhears him, and helped by the Echo manages to make sense of his random answers. He offers to cure his distraction at an enchanted well and returns him to Maria with his senses restored. The lovers are reunited; Albert is pardoned and, returning to the city, they are forgiven and accepted by Old Lord Wealthy.

Madness and supposed death as the consequence of the treachery of a friend and the accusation of an innocent lady follow the expected sequence of the tragi-comedies of the popular Italian stage which proceeds in the normal course to a happy ending contrived by a scene in which the lover's frenzy is miraculously cured and the villain makes a handsome apology. The change of scene from the outside of a house with a balcony to a wood with the entrance to a cave is the favourite double setting of Italian plays of this type.

The rest of the play is concerned with the elopement of Rebecca, the daughter of Hog the usurer, with Haddit, a prodigal gallant whom Hog has ruined. The usurer tries to press the suit of Young Lord Wealthy, and the perversity of the daughter drives the lover to bribe Peter the serving man to help him. Rebecca agrees to rob Hog and run away, she steals her father's keys and connives with her lover and Lightfoot his cousin and a hired player in a plan to cheat the usurer with a scene of faked conjuring. Lightfoot, disguised as the spirit of Croesus, persuades Hog that he can change his silver into gold, and his gold into pearls. While Hog stands gloating over the prospect the imposter hands over the money, the jewels, and the mortgage paper to his accomplices who are dressed as the spirits Ascarion and Bazan. It is not until Peter and Young Lord Wealthy, who have been intoxicated by the conspirators, stumble out of the cellar that Hog realizes that he is doubly ruined, for the heir refuses to think of marrying Rebecca now that she has no dowry to bring. A little later the married couple steal back separately, Rebecca with a tale that she has been chased through the streets by robbers, Haddit pretending to condole with the usurer and offering to take his daughter without a dowry if he will destroy the mortgage on his lands. Hog agrees and promises publicly to forswear all usurious practices.

It was suspected on the occasion of the first production that Hog was meant to represent the Lord Mayor of London. Certain characteristics may have had an English original but functionally the usurer is a typical Pantalone-father. The correspondence between the English usurer and the miserly Venetian is borne in upon us by the familiar scenes of the forced betrothal, the conjuring hoax which succeeds thanks to his greedy credulity, and the promise of wholesale amendment provoked by the failure of his schemes, which is the tradition of the dénouement of ‘Pantalone Avaro’.

Notes

1. Li tre Becchi, Le tre Gravide, Li tre Matti, Li tre Orbi, Li quattro Pazzi, Li quattro Pollicinelli Simili, Quattro medici, 4 astrologi, e 3 vammene [sic]. Scenari in which groups of lovers repeat the same tricks and plots: Zanni Beccho, Il Servo Ritornato, Il Falso Indovino (as parody), Li Consigli di Pantalone, Costanza di Flaminia, Zanni finto morto.

2. Oratio Burlato.

3. Li due Trappolini, Li Finti Amici, Nozze degli Ebrei, Volubiltà di Flaminia, Fido Amico.

4. Compare P. Fortini (died 1562), Novella V. ‘Un pedante credendosi andare a giacere con una gentildonna, si lega nel mezzo perchè ella lo tiri su per una finestra; resta appiccato a mezza via: di poi messolo in terra, con sassi e randelli li fu data la corsa’, quoted by A. C. Baugh's edition of this play, p. 34, n. 2.

5. Servo Ritornato.

6. See Review of English Studies, April 1925, p. 216.

7. Fleay, Biographical Chronicle of the English Stage (1891), ii. 74.

8. Eliz. Stage, iv. 71.

9. Studies in Philology, 1917, xiv.

10. Eliz. Stage, iii. 269.

11. Reliquiae Wottonianae (1685), p. 402.

12. Supra, pp. 396-7.

13. Parnassus, Act iv, sc. iii.

Bibliography

Barry, L. Ram Alley, or Merry Tricks. 1611.

Baugh, A. C. See Haughton.

Chambers, Sir E. K. The Elizabethan Stage. 1923.

Fleay. Biographical Chronicle of the English Stage. 1891.

Haughton, Englishmen for My Money; or A Woman Will Have Her Will. Ed. A. C. Baugh, 1917.

Lawrence, W. J. The Elizabethan Playhouse. 2nd series, 1912. Englishmen for My Money; a possible prototype. See Rev. of Eng. Studies, i. 216, April 1925.

Wit of a Woman. A pleasant Comedie wherein is merily shewen: The wit of a Woman. 1604.