SOURCE: Eggers, Jr., Walter F. “Shakespeare's Gower and the Role of the Authorial Presenter.” Philological Quarterly 54, no. 2 (spring 1975): 434-43.

[In the following essay, Eggers focuses on the character of Gower as an “authorial presenter,” a dramatic role common during late 1500s and early 1600s. The critic suggests that this convention gives the play authority by linking it to the past and by providing the audience with a different perspective on the story.]

In 1606, the prologue to a private-theater play declared, “Inductions are out of date, and a Prologue in Verse, is as stale as a black Velvet Cloak, and a Bay Garland.”¹ These lines testify to the popular fashion of presenters in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, a fashion that persisted in the public theater despite this private-theater caveat. Within the next two years, one of the most popular public-theater plays, Pericles, featured a presenter who spoke in archaic tetrameters, wore the traditional cloak, and carried bays.² The presenter in Pericles is the author of the story behind the play, “ancient” Gower. In the vividness of his characterization, Gower is one of a kind, but as an “authorial presenter” he is also the epitome of a well-established conventional role.

The convention of the authorial presenter has not adequately been explored, and for this reason the special complexities of Gower's character are unrecognized. Any presenter distinguishes himself from ordinary “inductions” and “prologues” by being characterized, by appearing frequently throughout the play, and by speaking directly to the theater audience. An authorial presenter is a more radically presentational device: he provides the audience not only a framework but, through his character as an author, a special perspective on the play proper. Some critics have speculated on the remote origins of the general role of presenter.³ F. D. Hoeniger, in the introduction to his New Arden edition of Pericles, finds exclusive precedents for Gower in two contemporary plays.⁴ But the following list shows that the role of the authorial presenter has roots deep in the history of Elizabethan drama and that (probably because of the popularity of Pericles) its greatest vogue was in the public theaters during the years after it was ridiculed on the private stage:

• *Lydgate in 2 The Seven Deadly Sins (Tarleton? 1585?).
• Venus in Greene's Alphonsus, King of Aragon (1587-88).
• Ate in Locrine (Peele? Greene? 1591-95).
• Truth in Yarington's Two Lamentable Tragedies (1594-ca.98).
• *Skelton in Chettle and Munday's The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington, and The Death of Robert, Earl of Huntington (both performed in 1598).
• Tragedy in A Warning for Fair Women (Heywood? ca. 1598-99).
• St. Dunstan in Haughton's Grim, the Collier of Croydon (performed in 1600).
• *Guicciardini in Barnes' The Devil's Charter (1607).
• Fame in Day, W. Rowley, and Wilkins' The Travels of the Three English Brothers (1607).
• *Gower in Shakespeare's (and another?) Pericles (1606-08).
• *Homer in Heywood's The Golden Age (1609-11), The Silver Age (1609-12), and The Brazen Age (1610-13).
• *Bardh in The Valiant Welshman (Armin? Anton? 1610-15).
• *Raynulph Higden in Middleton's (and W. Rowley?) Hengist, King of Kent, or, The Mayor of Queenborough (1615-20?).
• *Josephus in Markham and Sampson's Herod and Antipater (ca. 1619-22).⁵

This list distinguishes full-fledged authorial presenters (marked with asterisks) from presenters of a vaguely authorial character. As we see, authorial presenters can be found as early as in the fifteen-eighties. Considering the enormous quantity of lost popular dramatic romances from even earlier in the period,⁶ the true prototype of this group of characters may never be found. The question is, what was the value of this conventional role? When the convention was most popular, the audience had certain expectations of the role, and it was the playwright's business to make use of those expectations. What did the popular audience expect of a character like Gower? A survey of examples should enable us to determine typical features of the authorial presenter, and on that basis we can consider the special achievement of Shakespeare's Gower.

I

A presenter's position on stage always carries special prominence and “authority”: he stands alone between the play proper and the audience, at some distance from both. “Authorial” presenters typically appear often enough to seem to exercise continuous control over the presentation of their plays. Several deliver prologues and epilogues and make regular appearances between acts; Gower makes an exceptional eight appearances in Pericles.⁷ Certain authorial presenters effect major structural transitions. Lydgate apparently holds several different playlets together in 2 The Seven Deadly Sins (we have only the “plot” of this play to go by); in the middle of The Death of Robert, Skelton concludes the tragedy of Robin Hood and introduces the tragedy of Matilda with a long narrative and three dumbshows; in one of Gower's narrative choruses in Pericles, the audience must imagine that Marina has matured from an infant to a young woman; seventeen years pass between the first two acts of The Golden Age, and each act of The Brazen Age is a separate playlet, all of which Homer tries to unify.⁸ (Considered as a group, the Ages-plays have an immense narrative scope, but Homer provides some continuity among the plays in which he appears.)

If the single function of these presenters were to expedite the narrative, there would be little reason for their sometimes vivid characterization. The more familiar figure of the nameless chorus can perform a narrator's function less obtrusively. But the presenters on our list are not only narrators but didactic expositors, and this second function is more important as the presenter's authorial character is more conspicuous.

The presenter's position on stage calls attention to the play as a play, and when he moralizes from that position, the framework of the play is manifestly didactic. Guicciardini describes the various scenes of The Devil's Charter as “the visible and speaking shewes, / That bring vice into detestation” (3.5, ll. 1696-97);⁹ and in this framework it is not inappropriate for the hero himself to turn to the audience and declare his story to be exemplary: “Learne wicked worldlings, learne, learne, learne by me / To saue your soules, though I condemned be” (5.6, ll. 3246-47). Between each act of A Warning for Fair Women, Tragedy presents dumbshows containing allegorical representations of characters' motives, turning those characters into examples.¹⁰ In Two Lamentable Tragedies, Truth draws a lesson from the revulsion of the audience when Merry hacks Beech's body and stuffs it into a sack: “All you the sad spectators of this Acte … oh be farre of, to harbour such a thought, / As this audacious murtherer put in vre.”¹¹ Then, to stop our tears, he reminds us that “this deede is but a playe” (sig. E2^v). Perhaps the most overtly didactic of these related plays is Locrine, in which, between each act, Ate presents dumbshows which are not explicitly related to the plot but function as visual emblems of Latin mottos; Ate is the expositor of these emblems and relates their lessons to the play by analogy. Twice in Locrine, once in a chorus and once in the dialogue (sigs. E3^v and K2^r), the broad lesson is drawn which enforces all these others: “our play is but a tragedy.”¹²

There is an in an inherent didactic value in the characterization of “authorical” presenters, and the authority of their lessons is enhanced by a special feature of characterization which most of them share, antiquity. This explains the traditional cloak and archaic verse.¹³ In the prologue to the first of the Ages-plays, Homer demands our attention and respect as only the original of all authors can:

                                                            I was the man
That flourish'd in the worlds first infancy:
When it was yong, and knew not how to speake,
I taught it speech, and vnderstanding both
Euen in the Cradle: Oh then suffer me,
You that are in the worlds decrepit Age,
When it is neere his vniuersall graue,
To sing an old song …

(The Golden Age, 1.1)¹⁴

Venus, the presenter of Alphonsus, King of Aragon, says she is compelled to take the role of author because there are no more Homers to sing the praises of her hero;¹⁵ in The Valiant Welshman, Fortune claims that the story of her hero merits Homer's pen and so calls on the Welsh Bardh “That long hath slept.”¹⁶ Often the idea of a “revival” is explicit. At the end of that last play, the Bardh returns to his tomb expecting to be revived for a sequel; in Hengist, King of Kent, Raynulph Higden's Polychronicon “raiseth him, as works do men, / To see long-parted light again.”¹⁷ In this way, Homer's argument that the world continues to degenerate from its original perfection is appropriate even in unclassical contexts: the Prologue to Herod and Antipater explains the revival of Josephus in the same terms:

                                                            Wit hath runne
In a Zodaicall Circle, like the Sunne,
Through all Inuention; which is growne so poore
She can shew nought, but what has been before.(18)

The lesson is that “Ancient stories have been best” (Hengist, 1. Prol. 10) and that their original authors can tell them with most authority.

The moral values which the authorial presenter inculcates in the audience are thus the heroic values of an older generation or an earlier age—what moves Skelton to present the legend of Robin Hood is that “poets laureate … from their graves, / See asses and knaves.”¹⁹ This aspect of the authorial presenter's role is typified by two allegories, Fame in The Travels of the Two English Brothers and Truth in Two Lamentable Tragedies. The presenter keeps the memory of his hero alive in fame,²⁰ and he enacts the role of Truth in the familiar allegory of Veritas temporis filia.²¹ This association is made explicit in at least two plays from this period, in Herod and Antipater—

Times eldest Daughter (Truth) presents our Play;
And, from forgotten Monuments of clay,
Calls up th' Heroicke Spirits of old Times …
And with Her owne Tongue, and owne Phrase, to tell
The actions they have done

(sig. A4^v)

—and quite elaborately in the framing induction of Dekker's The Whore of Babylon (ca. 1606-07).

The didacticism of these plays is never somber and not usually even consistent. Homer demands a profound respect for himself and his story, as we have seen, but sometimes he elicits an almost jeering incredulity from the audience—“Gods will be gods,” he says, summing up one episode and introducing the next (The Golden Age, 4.1, p. 53). Some of the most frivolous plays we have examined make the strongest claims that their stories have an ennobling effect on the audience.²² Still, the role of the presenter as narrator and expositor is a potentially serious one. Homer's didacticism can be understood as a reflection of Heywood's own intention “to mooue the spirits of the beholder to admiration,” “to new mold the harts of spectators and fashion them to the shape of any noble and notable attempt.”²³ At least in respect to the wonders that these plays dramatize, the presenter speaks for the author in claiming the audience's attention. This brings us to Gower's role in Pericles.

II

Gower was at least partly Shakespeare's conception, and Pericles was the most popular Elizabethan play with a presenter. For these reasons critics continue to discuss Gower's individual character. Gower is also the authorial presenter whose conventional role is most fully developed. We have observed that he exercises almost continuous control over the presentation of the play, appearing more frequently than any other presenter on our list, and that his archaic language and costume help to characterize him uniquely. Shakespeare (or his collaborator) not only adopts the conventional role in its fullest form but turns it to a special purpose. As we shall see, the interplay between Gower and the play proper is a significant interpretive problem from the beginning to the end. Gower comes on stage seeming not to know what to claim for the presentation that follows; by the end, the wonders that have been dramatized have outstripped his narrow view, and his simple moralizing epilogue seems inadequate. The special complexities of Gower's role can best be understood in light of the conventions we have examined.

In the prologue to the opening scene, Gower ascribes apparently opposite purposes and effects to Pericles. First he calls his story an “old song” that

          hath been sung at festivals,
On ember-eves and holy-ales;
And lords and ladies in their lives
Have read it for restoratives.

(5-8)²⁴

In the sense of these lines, the “restorative” is a kind of physic; as an old story, easy to digest, it restores health to the spirits of those in the audience who will take it straight. With the proper frame of mind, the audience's enjoyment should be simple and immediate, and here Gower encourages the audience not to be too critical. With the very next lines, however, Gower describes a different kind of “restoration”:

The purchase is to make men glorious,
Et bonum quo antiquius eo melius.

(9-10)

In this second perspective, the story-teller who restores life to a “mouldy tale” like Pericles is seen to effect nothing less than a renewal of modern culture. For this purpose, the older and ruder the tale—and, by implication, the more critical the audience—the better.

These apparently opposite views of the play's effect do accord with Gower's conventional role as narrator and expositor, for it is Gower's idea that theatrical presentation helps him enforce the didactic lessons of his story—however artistically inept the resulting drama may be. He recognizes that the drama is incapable of representing his story faithfully to a modern audience, first because no theater can contain its epic proportions and second because the story and Gower himself are antique, separated from the modern audience by a great gulf of time. On both accounts he is apologetic, but for his didactic purposes the double measure of “patience” required of his audience is doubly valuable.

Usually when Gower solicits the patience of the audience it is to make one of the great leaps in time and space which his story requires from one episode to the next:

                                                            Be attent,
And time that is so briefly spent
With your fine fancies quaintly eche …

(3. Ch. 11-13)

                                                  The unborn event
I do commend to your content;
Only I carried winged time
Post on the lame feet of my rime;
Which never could I so convey,
Unless your thoughts went on my way.

(4. Ch. 45-50)

(See also 4.4.1-4, 5. Ch. 21, 5.2.15-20, and Epil. 17.) On the basis of this kind of language, Gower has been compared with the Chorus in Henry V,²⁵ where it is clear what serious purpose such language serves. By calling attention to the audience's role in sustaining the play imaginatively, the Chorus in Henry V invites the audience to participate directly in the celebration of the hero. The incapacity of the Chorus, speaking on behalf of the author or the company, to represent the hero as truly “like himself” (Prol. 6) is a measure of the greatness of the hero's story. Choric reminders about the inadequacy of dramatic representation are no way to induce a “suspension of disbelief” in the audience, but Shakespeare seems to intend a different effect: in Henry V, active “belief” on the part of the audience has positive didactic value.²⁶ Likewise, Gower's serious claim that he “restores” his audience is a tribute to the constructive power of the audience's imagination.

Gower's attitude is further clarified by how he expects the antiquity of the story to affect the audience, and in this respect particularly he seems to speak for his fellow authorial presenters as well. The antiquity of the story is reason for Gower to fear that it might not entertain a modern audience; yet on this account, too, he is confident that the presentation of the story will carry didactic value, for the antiquity of the story is what gives his lessons strong authority. The story is older than Gower himself, as he reminds us when he insists that we credit its improbable plot—“I tell you what mine authors say” (1. Ch. 20); “it is said / For certain in our story” (4. Ch. 19-20); “Marina thus the brothel scapes … our story says” (5. Ch. 1-2). The historical time which separates “ancient” Gower from the audience and makes his tale seem “mouldy” also testifies to its enduring didactic value, and any dramatic awkwardness on account of the antiquity of the story only confirms that value.

By this reasoning, the play needs no apology, but Gower delivers an epilogue in which he spells out the lessons of his story one by one and blesses the audience for its “patience.” With this final gesture, Gower once more calls attention to the relationship between the story and its presentation, between the antique world of the play proper and the world of the modern audience, and this has two effects which Gower recognizes: the audience celebrates the hero and takes the lessons represented in the story to itself. From Gower's standpoint, the simple advantage of dramatizing a story is that seeing is believing—

What now ensues, to the judgment of your eye
I give, my cause who best can justify

(1. Ch. 41-42)

—but “belief” is no end in itself. Drama can illustrate the lessons of Pericles more vividly than mere narrative can, but Gower must be there to point up the lessons; unless the audience has distance enough to recognize the story as an illustration, the lessons of the play might be lost. What Gower (and his fellow presenters) require of the audience is deliberate participation in recreating the story as drama.

In the special case of Pericles, this final claim of didactic value may be an ultimate complication of the authorial presenter's role. The wonders of reunion and reconciliation in the last scenes of this play cannot be reduced to facile couplets about the rewards of virtue.

In Antiochus and his daughter you have heard
Of monstrous lust the due and just reward.
In Pericles, his queen and daughter, seen,
Although assail'd with fortune fierce and keen,
Virtue preserv'd from fell destruction's blast,
Led on by heaven, and crowned by joy at last.
In Helicanus …

(1-7)

If this kind of moralizing seems patently inadequate as a conclusion, then in this play the device of the authorial presenter has been made to work ironically, requiring an additional critical perspective in the audience. Gower has once again used his “authority” to enforce some simple lessons, but this story is more significant than the “author” knows.

An authorial presenter is the image of the playwright's difficulties in turning fiction into drama and conveying the significance of his story, but an authorial presenter is also one of many fictional devices by which a playwright can distance his audience from the illusion of the play proper. With Gower and the others as presenters, none of the plays on our list can be understood as simply representational. In most of these plays, an emphasis on presentation has didactic value, and the authorial character of the presenter lends authority to the lessons presented. In Pericles, the audience attains distance on the presenter himself, finally, and Gower's limited perspective makes his story seem the more profound. An emphasis on presentation is evident in Shakespeare's later romances, especially The Winter's Tale, and the special complexity of Gower's role in Pericles may provide an insight into the romances as a group. Shakespeare returns to the rudiments of drama—the presentation of a simple story—to mark the limits of dramatic representation and transcend them.

Notes

1. Beaumont, with Fletcher, The Woman-Hater, ed. A. R. Waller, The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (Cambridge U. Press, 1912), X, 71.

2. See the drawing of Gower on the title-page of George Wilkins' The Painfull Aduentures of Pericles Prince of Tyre (1608), ed. Kenneth Muir (Liverpool U. Press, 1953).

3. The authorial presenter has been related to the poeta of the miracle or Saints' plays and the expositor of the moralities—see especially Howard Baker, Induction to Tragedy (Louisiana State U. Press, 1939), pp. 141-42; F. D. Hoeniger (ed.), Pericles, New Arden edition (London: Methuen, 1963), pp. lxxxviii-xci; and Howard Felperin, “Shakespeare's Miracle Play,” SQ, [Shakespeare Quarterly] 18 (1967), 151-66. Enid Welsford argues that the influence of masques was decisive in The Court Masque: A Study in the Relationship between Poetry and the Revels (Cambridge U. Press, 1927), p. 276 ff. Dieter Mehl stresses the influence of civic pageantry and shows in The Elizabethan Dumb Show: The History of a Dramatic Convention (London: Methuen, 1965), pp. 8-9.

4. Hoeniger concludes that “the dramatic convention of the loose travelogue or romance narrated by a choric figure was begun by Barnes and so successfully developed in Pericles one or two years later that Heywood was persuaded to apply the same technique in his plays on the Ages” (p. xxiii).

5. Throughout this essay, attributions of date and author will follow the Annals of English Drama, ed. Alfred Harbage and Samuel S. Schoenbaum (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 1964). Texts will be cited in individual notes.

6. See especially Lee Monroe Ellison, The Early Romantic Drama at the English Court (Menasha, Wis.: George Banta, 1917), and Betty J. Littleton, Clyomon and Clamydes: A Critical Edition (The Hague: Mouton, 1968), Appendix B.

7. Additional plays in which a presenter makes regular appearances between acts include Alphonsus, King of Aragon, Peele's Battle of Alcazar (1588-89), Locrine, Shakespeare's Henry V (1599), and The Devil's Charter.

8. The chorus in the anonymous The Thracian Wonder (1590-ca.1600) “beguiles” time by turning an hourglass between acts; the Prologue in The Weakest Goeth to the Wall (Dekker in part? ca.1599-1600) effects a transition between generations with a dumbshow at the beginning of the play; in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale (ca.1610-11), Time himself takes the stage to let sixteen years pass between Acts Three and Four. The most radical example of a presenter's control is Fame's in The Travels of the Three English Brothers, whose separate plots never converge until the stage itself is split into three locations for a concluding dumbshow which Fame narrates.

9. Ed. R. B. McKerrow, Materialien zur Kunde des älteren Englischen Dramas, 6 (Louvain: A. Uystpruyst, 1904).

10. Ed. John S. Farmer, Tudor Facsimile Texts (1912; rpt. New York: AMS, 1970), see sig. I3^r. These dumbshows function in a similar way to the “causal induction,” a feature of some Elizabethan plays which is directly related to the role of “authorial” presenters in 2 The Seven Deadly Sins and Two Lamentable Tragedies—see Robert Y. Turner, “The Causal Induction in Some Elizabethan Plays,” SP [Studies in Philology], 60 (1963), 183-90.

11. Ed. John S. Farmer, Tudor Facsimile Texts (1913; rpt. New York: AMS, 1970), sig. E2^v.

12. The idea of theatrum mundi is frequent in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama as a means of making the audience take the lessons of a play to itself. See T. B. Stroup, Microcosmos: The Shape of the Elizabethan Play (U. of Kentucky Press, 1965), pp. 7-36.

13. The most distinctive characterizing verse is Skelton's old skeltonics in the two Robert, Earl of Huntington plays; both Gower in Pericles and Higden in Hengisi, King of Kent usually speak in archaic tetrameters.

14. The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood (London: John Pearson, 1874), III, 5-6.

15. Ed. W. W. Greg, The Malone Society Reprints (1926; rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), 1.1.8 ff.

16. Ed. Valentine Kreb, Münchener Beiträge, 23 (Erlangen and Leipzig: A. Deichert, 1902), 1.1.17-23.

17. The Works of Thomas Middleton, ed. A. H. Bullen (1885; rpt. New York: AMS, 1964), II, 1. Prol. 3-4.

18. London, 1622 (Folger Shakespeare Library, copy 1).

19. The Death of Robert, 2.2—A Select Collection of Old English Plays Originally Published by Robert Dodsley, ed. W. Carew Hazlitt, 4th ed. (London: Reeves and Turner, 1874), VIII, 136.

20. Guicciardini in The Devil's Charter descends “from the Christall Palace of true Fame” (Prologue. 11). Bardh tells the story of Caradoc the Valiant Welshman “that succeeding times, / In leaves of gold, may register his name, / And reare a Pyramys vnto his fame” (1.1.145-47; see also 2.2.8, 4.4.28-32)—The Works of John Day, ed. A. H. Bullen (London: Chiswick Press, 1881).

21. See Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (U. of Michigan Press, 1950), T580. The broad history of this allegory is discussed by Fritz Saxl in “Veritas Filia Temporis,” Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, ed. Raymond Klibansky and H. J. Paton (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), pp. 197-222.

22. See, for example, “To the Ingenuous Reader,” The Valiant Welshman, and The Devil's Charter, 1.2.190-94.

23. An Apology for Actors (1612), ed. Richard H. Perkinson (New York: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1941), sigs. B3^v, B4^r.

24. All references to the text of Pericles use Hoeniger's New Arden edition, cited above.

25. Several echoes suggest to Hoeniger that Pericles is directly indebted to Henry V for the language of the choruses—see p. xx and notes to 3.Chorus.13; 4.Chorus.7, 18-19.

26. J. Dover Wilson describes the Chorus in Henry V as like “a priest leading his congregation in prayer or celebration” with “persuasive tones of eager entreaty from the playwright's own lips”—Henry V, New Cambridge edition (Cambridge U. Press, 1949), p. xv.