SOURCE: Baker, Howard. “Gorboduc: Some Fundamental Problems in the Early Dramatic Tradition.” In Induction to Tragedy: A Study in a Development of Form in Gorbudoc, The Spanish Tragedy, and Titus Andronicus, pp. 9-47. New York: Russell & Russell, 1939.

[In the following excerpt, Baker argues that the ongoing critical debate about the themes and philosophy of Gorboduc can best be resolved by considering the lives and literary concerns of the play's two authors, Sackville and Thomas Norton.]

Gorboduc has been more than usually subject to the vicissitudes of opinion. Composed in 1561 by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton and played as “furniture of part of the grand Christmasse in the Inner Temple,”¹ it was acted at Queen Elizabeth's invitation, a month later before her in Whitehall Palace. While its style and morality inspired the encomiums of Sir Philip Sidney, its failure to abide rigidly by Aristotle's precepts of regularity drew his condemnation.² To Edward Alde it was apparently a political piece, for Alde reprinted it in 1590 as an appendix to Lydgate's Serpent of Division, a prose work on the evils of the civil wars in the time of Julius Caesar. During the following century it belonged to oblivion. Then Thomas Rymer, using it as a club to inflict his militant pedantry, described it inaccurately and commended it heartily.³ And Alexander Pope, in his concern for its “propriety in sentiments, dignity in sentences, and unaffected perspicuity of style,” committed himself to the opinion that the tragedy has virtues which “all succeeding poets, not excepting Shakespeare himself, either little understood, or perpetually neglected.”⁴ With these overtures, Gorboduc returned to the polite world, dressed out sumptuously in an edition printed in 1736; and immediately it fell back into oblivion.

Thomas Warton, the younger, made motions towards retrieving it; but, besides arbitrarily amputating one of its authors from it, Warton, in his account, was hampered by an unfortunate metathesis of the name Gorboduc. In transcribing William Griffith's title page Warton twisted Gorboduc into Gordobuc, and he let the confused form persist throughout his extended discussion of the tragedy. The error is especially curious since another metathesis appears to be historically a part of the development of the name: for Geoffrey of Monmouth King Gorboduc is King Gorbogudo. But the difference between a variant and a blunder is so vast that Joseph Ritson in a single pointed sentence could make Warton's whole chapter look ridiculous.

For modern scholars Gorboduc, over and above its chronological significance, makes two special appeals for notice. One group of critics—Schelling, Ward, H. Schmidt, and Cunliffe⁵—sees it as a strictly Senecan tragedy. Another group—L. H. Courtney, L. Toulmin Smith, and S. A. Small⁶—sees it primarily as a political piece which aimed to persuade Elizabeth to resolve the question of the succession to her throne. For the former critics the play is Senecan in form and rhetoric, and, in view of the prominence of blood, of murder and revenge, also Senecan in content: “Gorboduc is pure Seneca,” says Schelling.⁷ For the latter critics the play is essentially native English and political in content, a representation of political division, dissension, and rebellion; rhetorically and even to a certain extent formally it follows, they believe, the molds of political oratory: “The play,” says Courtney, “is rather a political argument than a simple tragedy.”⁸ The fruits of these Senecan and political investigations are collected in Homer Andrew Watt's study of the play.⁹ But Professor Watt, aiming at inclusiveness and exhaustiveness, has reconciled only the most glaring of the inconsistencies in the two critical approaches, and so today criticism of Gorboduc is in a state of uncomfortable dualism. The old play itself is referred to by all and read by few. The few readers that it wins to itself hold it, either with deference or with condescension to Pope, to be utterly dull and, with sheer indifference to the rules of Sidney and Rymer, regular to the point of being dreary.

The varied and mutually exclusive views of the play must be re-examined. Gorboduc is probably not a unified whole, but in certain parts preponderantly literary and in other parts preponderantly political; and these parts are in all likelihood the separate contributions of the two authors. By approaching Gorboduc through the problem of division of authorship, I think that a somewhat more just view of the play, and of early Elizabethan tragedy in general, can be obtained. …

3.

In political terms Gorboduc is a warning against the rebellions and civil wars which follow upon uncertainty in the succession of the crown. The warning is aimed directly at Elizabeth; for in the early years of her reign Englishmen looked on the future with foreboding: Elizabeth was in ill health, the succession was in doubt, her immediate predecessors had had very short reigns, and strife between the extreme protestants and the Catholics smoldered throughout the country. According to the will of Henry VIII, which had been given authority by the Act of Succession, the successor to Elizabeth, if she were to die heirless, would be Lady Katharine Grey. The weight of Katharine Grey's claim to the throne, however, was doubtful. Henry's will had been disputed by Northumberland at the time of Edward's death; and, while Catholics were unwilling even to concede legitimacy to Elizabeth, they would have been totally opposed to granting precedence to Katharine, a descendant of Henry's younger sister, over Mary Stuart, the descendant of his elder sister. But most threatening of all was the fact that Katharine came from a hotly protestant family. Consequently Elizabeth's first parliaments pleaded with her either to establish an appointed successor as firmly as possible—the appointed successor in all probability would have been Katharine Grey—or to marry and produce an heir. Gorboduc in effect is saying to Elizabeth: take good advice; resolve the question of the succession, lest uncertainty lead us into “tumults, rebellions, arms, and civil wars.” Elizabeth, of course, did nothing, for she was intent on picking her way gingerly between Catholicism and protestantism.

But within this framework of political significance there is room for more than one political philosophy. There are in Gorboduc, I think, two distinct philosophies, not wholly contrasting philosophies but ones which, starting from the same position, look in different directions. I shall attempt to state them by paraphrasing certain lines in the text. The one may be put as follows:

When a prince, refusing sage counsel, succumbs to flattery and allows the succession to be broken, civil strife follows. But no subject may call to account the doings of a prince; nor may any subject rebel against a prince in act or in speech or even in secret thought.¹⁰

The other philosophy may be framed thus:

When a prince, refusing sage counsel, succumbs to flattery and allows the succession to rest in doubt—then, if the prince dies suddenly, civil strife follows. Therefore parliament should convene and should appoint an heir to the throne—a rightful heir by virtue of birth within the native land, and by virtue of descent or of “some former law.”¹¹

In these two views the common lesson in political morality is that monarchs should harken to good advice and rule wisely; if they do not, they and their nation will be overtaken by ruin. This is the general lesson of the chief metrical tragedies from the work of Lydgate through The Mirror for Magistrates. In “The Complaint of the Duke of Buckingham” Sackville himself expresses his devotion to the text for these numerous political sermons:

Byd kings, bid kesars, bid all states beware …
Who reckles rules, right soone may hap to rue.(12)

Beyond the common ground of general morality, these political doctrines diverge sharply in that the one is unlimitedly monarchical and the other is parliamentary. The first sees, as the fruit of monarchic mistakes, the horror of civil war, and ends in an emotional contemplation of the wickedness of any sort of rebellion. The second, without condoning rebellion, proceeds immediately to ways and means of avoiding monarchic mistakes—that is, to parliamentary action. The first pursues error into unmitigated catastrophe, a course which is not uncongenial to tragedy, as is proved by the medieval metrical tragedies, by the Senecan tragedies, and by the “hugger-mugger” conclusion of Hamlet. The second ends in a specific moralitas: it applies the fable to the cause of Lady Katharine Grey and to this cause alone.

The first doctrine, that of extreme monarchism, is the core of the first scene of the fifth act of Gorboduc. It is expressed most pointedly by Eubulus, the good counsellor, who says:

Eke fully with the duke my minde agrees
That no cause serues wherby the subiect maye
Call to accompt the doynges of the prince,
Muche lesse in bloode by sworde to worke reuenge,
No more then maye the hande cut of the heade.
In acte nor speache, no, not in secrete thoughte,
The subiect maye rebell against his lorde,
Or iudge of him that sittes in Caesars seate …

(V, 1, 41-8)

Monarchism here is so extreme that an eighteenth-century commentator, after quoting the laudations of Mr. Pope and describing the elegant edition which Mr. Spence had given the play, suggests that “the strongly pointed Antirevolutional principles at the conclusion have had a share” in throwing Gorboduc “nearly again into its former state of neglect.” This critic then produces as evidence the lines given above.¹³

I am proposing of course that Thomas Sackville was the vigorous monarchist. The monarchism in question can be defined further by examining its counterpart, that is, the value put upon common people, statements of which occur in almost identical words in this scene and in “Buckingham.” Farther along in the speech from which we have just quoted, Eubulus ejaculates:

So giddy are the common peoples mindes,
So glad of chaunge, more wauering than the sea …
                                                  … the rascall routes
… Are neuer trustie to the noble race.

(V, 1, 72-3; 100, 102)

And Buckingham complains:

O let no prince put trust in commontie,
Nor hope in fayth of giddy people's mynde,
But let all noble men take heede by mee,
That by the proofe to well the payne do fynde:
Loe, where is truth or trust? or what could bynde
The vayne people, but they will swerue and swaye,
As chaunce brings chaunge, to driue and draw that way?(14)

In flat contradiction to this antithesis, in Act V, Scene 1, of the sacred prince with the giddy commons, is the final scene's unqualified emphasis on parliament: parliament becomes, by force of the “lawful summons and authority” of the prince, the ultimate seat of government.¹⁵

Absolutism such as this of the first scene of the fifth act was not the political doctrine of all Englishmen in the mid-sixteenth century. It could scarcely have been Thomas Norton's doctrine. For Norton was a Calvinist; and, probably earlier in the year in which he composed his share of Gorboduc, he had, in bringing to a close his translation of Calvin's Institutes, written these sentences, which occur at the end of the remarkable and quietly revolutionary fourth book of the Institutes, entitled “Of outward means to salvation”:

For though the correcting of unbrideled gouernement be the reuengement of the Lorde, let us not byandby thynke that it is committed to us, to whom there is geuen no other commaundement but to obey and suffer. I speake alway of private men. For if there be at this time any Magistrates for the behalfe of the people … I do not forbidde them according to their office to withstande the outragyng lycentiousnesse of kynges, that I affirme that if they winke at kynges wilfully ragyng ouer and treadyng down the poore communaltie, their dissembling is not without wicked breache of faithe, bicause they deceitfully betray the libertie of the people, wherof thei know themselues to be appointed protectors by the ordinance of God.¹⁶

In this fashion Calvin subtly defeats the theory of divine right of kings by giving similar divine right to magistrates. Thus Norton's position in regard to the succession could have been this: if Elizabeth's neglect of the matter could be construed as a raging over and treading down of the commons, then Norton, as a member of the House of Commons was justified in withstanding this “licentiousness” on her part. Practically, of course, such construction could scarcely be put on Elizabeth's inaction.¹⁷ But in the final scene of the play the sense that the magistrate is obligated, even against the will of the sovereign, to protect the commonalty, is unmistakable.

4.

Since the political morality of Gorboduc must be but a reflection of the moralities of the men who wrote it, we are justified in grafting into our account some relevant biography.

In the year of the composition of the tragedy, 1561, Sackville had probably already written his “Induction” and “Buckingham,”¹⁸ of which the former is certainly a distinguished precursor of The Faerie Queene, both in respect to its smooth and deftly archaic verses and its lofty allegorizing of virtues and vices. In 1561 Norton's translation of the Institutes came from the press, a book of a thousand blackletter pages, each trenchant and each dangerous to the older order of things; it was followed the next year by a second edition. In 1561 there also appears, in Sir Thomas Hoby's translation of Castiglione's Courtier, a commendatory sonnet by Sackville; a few lines from it will illustrate Sackville's predilection for the splendors of royalty and for the Italian manner in poetry:

These royall kinges, that reare vp to the skye
Their pallace tops, and deck them all with gold:
With rare and curious workes they feede the eye:
And shew what riches here great princes hold …(19)

The sonnet is as worthless in its way as Norton's minor poems; it is a piece of graceful artificiality, the point of the conceit being that Castiglione's work is richer and rarer than that of kings. There is nothing Italianate or graceful in Norton's metrical psalms, which also were printed for the first time in 1561; they are simply a serious, rough-and-ready contribution to a reform project begun in Edward VI's reign.

Sackville, in the year of Gorboduc, was twenty-five years old. He was precocious: favored by birth—he was related to Elizabeth, and his father was a Privy-Counsellor under Edward and Mary as well as under Elizabeth—Thomas had been lavishly educated, had been a member of parliament, and had won a reputation in the newer school of poetry, that is, in the Italianate school promoted by Tottel. His father in all respects belonged to an earlier generation; frugal, conservative, and homely, Sir Richard Sackville was nicknamed in his county Sir Richard Fill-sack. Consequently Sir Richard was probably only seeking moral support for his own convictions when, in talking in 1563 with Roger Ascham about ways and means “to keepe yong men from licencious liuyng,” he drew from Ascham a condemnation of “the fansie that many yong Ientlemen of England haue to trauell abroad, and namely to lead a long lyfe in Italie.”²⁰ In spite of this disapproval and notwithstanding wife and children, who could not be taken along, Thomas Sackville went this year to Italy, where before he returned three years later he was imprisoned briefly, either at the order of his father for general extravagance or else for the particular extravagance of proclaiming too loudly his approval of the English church.

One other activity of Sackville has a bearing on Gorboduc. Shortly before 1570 the authors, according to John Day, prepared the manuscript of their tragedy for the authorized edition; thus, if Day is trustworthy, Sackville must have given attention again to the play at a time when he was occupied in another way with the problem of the succession. For in 1568 and again in 1571 he was in France attempting to arrange with Catherine de' Medici for the marriage of her third son, the Duke of Anjou, with Elizabeth. Of the embassy of 1571, which was intended as well to congratulate Charles IX for his marriage, Holinshed writes:

… as his ambassage was great, so was his charge no less, in furnishing himself and train accordingly, being both in number and furniture such in every point, as did appertain unto his character; and his receiving and entertainment in France, by the King and others, was agreeable thereto … He was banquetted by diverse, and that very sumptuously; which by him was not left unrequited to the uttermost, and rather with the better; for his liberality unto the French was very large, but his reward at the King's hands was only a chain, weighing a thousand French crowns …²¹

In his will Sackville remembers his part in arranging the secret treaty of marriage as what he calls “a matter of great trust and importance.”²²

The ambassador to whom the arrangements were entrusted could hardly have been unfavorable to the project. Yet the marriage would have united Elizabeth with a Roman Catholic family, albeit one that pretended at times to some moderation in its treatment of protestants; and we know how sharply Spenser opposes such a marriage in Mother Hubbard's Tale. Sackville, therefore, could have been in agreement with Norton that the succession was a problem of great moment, but it is altogether unlikely that his could have been the ardently protestant voice which, in the final scene of Gorboduc, pleads so openly for the appointment of Lady Katharine Grey as the successor of Elizabeth.

That voice could well have been Norton's, for Thomas Norton was as completely protestant as anyone in England. Norton had been secretary to Protector Somerset, he had married a daughter of Cranmer, and after Cranmer had been burned at the stake, the marriage of the widow united Norton's household with that of Edward Whitchurch, the influential puritan printer. When Norton was twenty he entered into a correspondence with Calvin which culminated in the translation of the Institutes. He published many Calvinistic tracts, and urged fervently on parliament the sanctioning of Cranmer's Calvinistic system of ecclesiastical reform. Later, as licenser of the press in London, he conducted examinations of accused authors so vigorously that the Catholics bestowed the title archicarnifex upon him; he is said to have boasted that he stretched a Jesuit on the rack until he made him a foot longer than God had arranged for him to be. He was so much a puritan that in 1574, in an exhortation to the Lord Mayor in connection with the plague, he shows himself strongly opposed to the public stage—to the “unnecessarie and scarslie honeste resorts to plaies, to shewes to thoccasion of thronges and presse, except to the servyce of God; and especiallie the assemblies to the unchaste, shamelesse and unnaturall tomblinge of the Italion Weomen … : to offend God and honestie is not to cease a plague.”²³

But he, too, had a connection other than that of Gorboduc with the movement to limit the succession. Just a year after Elizabeth had seen Gorboduc played, she was waited on by the whole House of Commons and presented with a petition for such limitation. This petition had been read in the commons two days earlier by Norton, who also, in all likelihood, was the author of it. It is in effect the last scene of Gorboduc thrown into oratorical form; its substance is this:

[Your majesty's late sickness has moved your subjects to frame a petition] for establishing some certain limitation of the imperial crown, for the preservation of your subjects from certain and utter destruction … They cannot, I say, but acknowledge your maj. hath most graciously considered the great dangers, the unspeakable miseries of civil wars, the perilous intermingling of foreign princes with seditious, ambitious and factious subjects at home, the waste of noble houses, the slaughter of peoples, subversion of towns; intermission of all things pertaining to the maintenance of the realm, unsurety of all men's possessions, lives and estates; daily interchange of attainders and treasons …

Your maj. hath weighed the examples of foreign nations, as what ensued the death of great Alexander, when for want of certain heirs by him begotten, or appointed, the variety of titles, the diversity of dispositions in them that had titles, the ambition of them that under colour of doubtfulness of title forsook all obedience of titles, destroyed his dominions, and wasted posterity with mutual wars and slaughters …

We have been admonished of the great malice of your foreign enemies, which even in your lifetime have sought to transfer the dignity and right of your crown to a stranger … we fear a faction of heretics in your realm, contentious and malicious Papists … lest they … lay in wait to advance some title, under which they may revive their unspeakable cruelty, to the destruction of goods, possessions and bodies, and thraldom of the souls and consciences of your faithful and Christian subjects … ; we see, on the other side, no such danger to your maj. by ambition of any apparent heir established by your benefit and advancement, for want of issue of your maj.'s royal body …

[There follow the modern examples of France and Scotland and a general appeal.]²⁴

This petition like the conclusion of Gorboduc presents the extreme anti-Catholic position of Norton and the puritans. At other times parliament urged the conciliatory project, that of marriage, in which Sackville was soon to be active.

Biography predicates the view that Norton wrote the parts of Gorboduc which are preponderantly puritanical in politics. Biography likewise favors the general view that Norton wrote the scenes in which interest in practical politics is uppermost, while Sackville contributed those in which the interest is mainly esthetic and dramatic. Such a view is a general principle of this study; specifically this chapter intends to modify William Griffith's information that Norton wrote the first three acts and Sackville the last two, by proposing that the last scene of the play is by Norton and the first scene by Sackville.²⁵ But these proposals can be supported best by the more concrete evidence of diction and style.

5.

Criticism of the poetic language of Gorboduc has almost without exception come to a halt in the blind alley of “Senecan diction.” H. Schmidt and his successors in this phase of study find neither discrepancies in diction between the parts of the play nor any variation in what appears to them to be a uniform exploitation of the Senecan vocabulary. But a greater burden of proof rests on these critics than they have thus far been willing to assume; for evidence that Seneca is the source of the diction of Gorboduc is valid only when more immediate sources have been examined and rejected. The language of the Bible, for instance, must have come more readily to the tongues of the authors, or most certainly to Norton's tongue, than that of either the Latin or the translated Seneca. So in this connection, probably for the first time since Warton allowed himself his outburst of impatience, we shall glance at the psalms which Norton versified shortly before he set to work on the tragedy.

The Senecan critics have picked from the play a series of passages in which references to blood and carnage resemble lines in Seneca. The following are examples:

Thus fatall plagues pursue the giltie race,
Whose murderous hand, imbrued with giltlesse blood,
Askes vengeaunce still before the heauens face,
With endlesse mischiefes on the cursed broode.

(III, Ch., 13-6)

Oh cruele wight! should any cause preuaile
To make thee staine thy hands with brothers bloud?

(IV, 2, 135-6)

                                                                                Is all the world
Drowned in bloud and soncke in crueltie?

(IV, 2, 169-70)²⁶

While the phrasing of Seneca is often parallel to that of these lines,

Rudem cruore regio dextram inbuit.

(Tr. 220)

Hominum cruenta caede pollutas manus …

(Oct. 423)

                                                  … hinc terras cruor
Infecit omnes fusus, et rubuit mare.

(Hip. 551-2)²⁷

yet these “Senecan” images also appear, for example in Psalm 106:

To fiendes their sons and daughters they
          did offer up and slay.
Yea with unkindly murdering knife,
          the guiltlesse bloud they spilt:
Yea their owne sonnes and daughters bloud,
          without all cause of guilt.
Whom they to Canaan Idols then,
          offered with wicked hand:
And so with bloud of innocents
          defiled was their land.
Thus were they stained with the works
          of their owne filthy way …
Therefore against them lifted he
          his strong reuenging hand:
Them to destroy in wildernesse,
          ere they should see the land.
And to destroy their seede among
          the nations with his rod …
And in his so enkindled wrath
          the plague upon them broke …(28)

Here, collected into a few verses from a single psalm, is a richer “Senecan vocabulary” than that of Seneca himself; for in addition to the favorite Senecan words such as blood and stain and hand, the word plague appears both here in the psalm and in the lines from Gorboduc above; the phrase guiltless blood is common to both, and the expression murdering knife is paralleled in Gorboduc by slaying knife (V, 2, 151) and revenging sword (V, 2, 51). In this psalm, moreover, the theme of divine vengeance occurs just as it does in Gorboduc: vengeance is regarded as an act of punishment which extends into later generations.

One school of critics has gone so far as to formulate the principle that frequent appearances of the word blood and the personifications of hand and heart in early tragedies are tests of Seneca's influence.²⁹ Norton's psalms, however, and other of the Psalms, as well as other parts of the Bible and there is no telling how much more literature, use characteristically this same vocabulary and these same rhetorical devices. Consequently, since these tests, if they are to prove anything, must be supported by other evidence, we may turn to other aspects of the problem of Senecan influence on the ideas and language of this play.

“Nemesis,” H. A. Watt declares, “and what Courthope calls the ‘moving necessity of the family curse’ are almost as apparent in Gorboduc as in Seneca.” Professor Watt continues: “The idea of a Nemesis, of an overhanging Fate which controls the destiny of mankind, is one of the commonest themes in Seneca …”³⁰ But Nemesis, thus adequately defined, does not come into Gorboduc at all. What does come in is the divine vengeance which we noticed in the psalm above. As a concrete case for analysis, an important and typically “Senecan” speech will serve. At the beginning of Act III, King Gorboduc, learning of the civil war undertaken by his sons, cries out:

O cruel Fates! O mindful wrath of goddes!

He then runs through a catalog of instances of the wrath of the gods. The list is at once a manifestation of the medieval fondness for classical allusions and at the same time a parallel with the “notable examples” with which the petitions of parliament are swollen: for, it should not be forgotten, the victims at Troy, for instance, were King Gorboduc's legendary ancestors.³¹ The fates and gods, moreover, are the simplest of poetic devices, and are probably no more exclusively Senecan than are the abundant classical allusions in the “Induction.”³² And at the end of this speech the significance of the peculiar phrase “mindful wrath of gods” is unmistakable:

Yet, O ye goddes, if euer wofull kyng
Might moue ye, kings of kinges, wreke it [vegeance] on me
And on my sonnes, not on this guiltlesse realme!

(III, 1, 22-4)

In other words, the vengeance of the gods is conceived of here as divine retribution for specific faults; instead of retribution, the Senecan Nemesis is a curse, the origins of which lie in a deterministic universe and are unknown to those upon whom it is visited.

Support for this important distinction could be gathered in quantities from the early “tragical” literature. And, inasmuch as The Mirror for Magistrates is literally a series of illustrations of “how God plagued evil rulers,” it is not quite reasonable to suppose that Sackville, a moving spirit in The Mirror, would have regarded Gorboduc from a basically different angle. It happens also that Lydgate has commented on heavenly vengeance in connection with a “tragedy” which has certain resemblances to Gorboduc:

This tragedie be cleer inspeccioun
Openli declareth in substaunce,
How slauhtre of princis causith subuersioun
Off rewmys, cites put out off ordynaunce,
Off mortal werre long contynuaunce …
The fyn declaryng off moodre & fals tresoun:
The deede horrible crieth ay vengaunce
To God aboue to caste his eien doun,
To punshe this synne thoruh his myhti puissaunce …(33)

In their version of Lydgate's philosophy, Sackville and Norton seem merely to substitute the names “fates” and “gods” for God. And these names, I believe, are broadly classical rather than narrowly Senecan; certainly the real morality of Gorboduc is the reverse of Senecan morality: witness the concluding speech—

                                                  Yet must God in fine restore
This noble crowne vnto the lawful heire;
For right will alwayes liue and rise at length,
But wrong can neuer take deepe roote, to last.(34)

It is said that Sackville and Norton imitated passages of sententious moralizing from Seneca. Several instances given by Watt are short rhetorical periods on the theme of royal lust for kingdoms: each contains the specific statement that the ambition of kings knows no law. Seneca begins, in the relevant passage, with a particular proposition: “Lex alia solio est, alia privato in toro,” and then develops the idea of royal privilege in general terms.³⁵ Though the lines in Gorboduc are similar to those of this passage, a number of considerations make the “imitation” doubtful. In the first place Seneca makes a flat statement of a truism: he merely says that a king is a law unto himself. Gorboduc is saying, on the other hand, that ambition is lawless and exceedingly dangerous to the realm; and if a certain amount of rhetoric on this subject and in these terms is Senecan, then most Elizabethans and their forefathers before them spoke endlessly from the mouth of Seneca.

The passage which most resembles Seneca in phrasing, moreover, has been wrenched out of its context by the Senecan critics. Actually it is a scathing invective against monarchic ambition. It is satiric—a fact not mentioned by the critics; spoken by an evil counsellor who is but a scarcely disguised vice from the moral plays, it lays open the evils of ambition by seeming to praise ambition. Any broad sententiousness that it may have, could scarcely be less than the effect of the satiric purpose. And what should be very certain is that the bitter ring in the words of this passage carries down even to our ears in this day, when we too are not unmindful that in our age there is “in men the greedy mind to power, in worldly stage the stateliest parts to bear.” The poetry of the passage is excellent, the question of debt to Seneca important; this is the passage:

Know ye that lust of kingdomes hath no law:
The goddes do beare and well allow in kinges
The thinges [that] they abhorre in rascall routes …
Murders and violent theftes in priuate men
Are hainous crimes, and full of foule reproch;
Yet none offence, but deckt with glorious name
Of noble conquestes, in the handes of kinges.

(II, 1, 143-5; 152-5)

It is worth the remark that the Elizabethan translator of the proposed source for this passage, John Studley (1566), so little understood the original, or was so little interested in it as a sententious truism, or was so enchanted with the Senecan context, that four out of his six lines have lost even the faintest grounds for a comparison with Gorboduc.³⁶

To support this claim of Senecan sententiousness in Gorboduc, Professor Watt records only three more parallel passages. Of these one is again on the dangers of ambition; another is a two-line passage which appears to contain a purely accidental similarity; and the last is the lines on the “giddy commons” which were noticed earlier in this chapter. Watt compares the lines on the giddy commons at one place with Seneca, at another place with Virgil, and at a third place, just after he has granted that the play may echo the “Induction,” with lines in “Buckingham.”³⁷

And indeed any passage which castigates popular fickleness may find numerous parallels in earlier literature. Seneca must not be ignored completely. This is especially true since Sackville himself has left a memorandum, scribbled at the end of the manuscript recently published by Marguerite Hearsey, which appears to read as follows:

Remember Magister Burdeus [?] promise for the showing of Senecas chore [?] touching the captation of auram popularem.³⁸

On the other hand when Sackville wrote the lines in “Buckingham” which seem most nearly to anticipate those in Gorboduc, it is quite clear that he had models other than the Senecan tragedies in mind. For Miss Hearsey has shown that Sackville's digression on the giddy people, the “commontie,” was most likely suggested by Lydgate's treatment of Scipio and by examples in Valerius Maximus' Dictorum et Factorum Memorabilium; the identity of Sackville's illustrations—Camillus, Scipio, Miltiades, and Hannibal—with those in Lydgate and Valerius is at least very strong evidence of such connection; and Sackville, moreover, wrote the name Valerius Maximus on the margin of the manuscript at a later place in the poem.³⁹ In any event, to revile the masses was commonplace. The Senecan scholars have been at fault in tracing this theme back exclusively to Seneca.

Nor is there much to show that Gorboduc in form is welded exclusively, or even at all very securely, to the Senecan tragedies. The English play, it is true, has five acts, but several circumstances indicate that this mode of division may, in greater likelihood, have been derived from the classical comedies. For in the early sixteenth century the fusion of classical form with native medieval traditions is most evident in the school comedies, in Ralph Roister Doister, for instance; and these comedies moreover were composed directly to be acted on a stage. In comparison with comedy, English tragedy was a late development, and Seneca probably always remained primarily an author to be “read by candle light” rather than to be played. It is to be expected consequently that comedies had a greater influence on the processes of preparing a piece, like Gorboduc, for the stage than did tragedies. In this period, too, the names comedy and tragedy were of broad and imprecise significance, and the genres themselves were not distinct. Again, Seneca's tragedies, both in England and in Italy at this time, were not divided into scenes; but comedies in general were. Those divisions in the Senecan tragedies which we now call scenes are marked always by the entrance of a new character or characters; this is the structure neither of Gorboduc nor of the earlier English classical comedies. The method of announcing a new character in Gorboduc—

                                                                      Loe, yonder comes in hast
Philander from my lord your yonger sonne.

(III, 1, 57)

—does not, as it does in Seneca, introduce a new scene. But it comes in the midst of the scene, as it does in the comedies:

But yond commeth Roister Doister nowe, in a traunce.

(III, 3, 5)

Finally, two parasites figure in the action of the tragedy; and, although they play the parts of vices in the moralities or moral plays, the name given them points exclusively to comedy.

Gorboduc is also structurally like a moral play in that good and evil counsellors, who are given tagnames, vie with each other for the favor of the central characters. The authors use long monologues where Seneca would have rendered the speeches in a dramatic form, often with the aid of a confidant; in this the authors are probably following the technique of the metrical tragedies as well as of the moralities. The monologues themselves, when they are political, reproduce the structure of a formal oration so exactly that even Sir Thomas Wilson's elaborate scheme of oratorical rhetoric applies to them.⁴⁰

Gorboduc also, it is said, lacks a protagonist and consequently, unity of action; said in other and doubtless in better terms Gorboduc makes the commonwealth the protagonist. In this, a most important point in form, this tragedy is probably closer to the moral play Respublica (1553) than to any other play. For Respublica also aimed to show “how commonweals ruin and decay when wrong takes place of right”; and the author also makes his drama apply to the contemporary political situation. The characters are given abstract names and rôles: Respublica (really the Commonwealth of England) is a widow whom Vices, led by Avarice in the guise of Policy, delude; she is rescued from her difficulties by the Four Daughters of God, Misericordia, Veritas, Justitia, and Pax. Respublica, like Gorboduc, is divided into five acts with scenes.⁴¹

And so, to cast our immediate accounts, we may venture to propose that Gorboduc is a play made up of a diversity of elements. There may prove to be some patches of Senecan rhetoric in it: I should not care to propose that there definitely are none, but I am very certain that any such unmistakably Senecan elements would turn out to be less prominent than are identical elements in Sackville's “Induction” and “Buckingham”; and it is notable that Marguerite Hearsey, in her excellently grounded edition of these poems, makes illuminating comparisons with Virgil and Douglas' version of Virgil, with Boccaccio and Lydgate, with Valerius Maximus and other authors, but none at all with Seneca. It would seem that the Senecan critics, in order to substantiate their special case, have still to show that the diction and rhetoric and ideas of Gorboduc are not essentially traditional and that its form is not derived more importantly from the metrical tragedy, moral play, and comedy than from Seneca's tragedies.

7.

The tone of Sackville's contribution … is set by the opening lines of the play.

The silent night, that bringes the quiet pawse
From painfull trauailes of the wearie day,(42)
Prolonges my carefull thoughtes, and makes me blame
The slowe Aurore, that so for loue or shame
Doth long delay to shewe her blushing face …

These lines have a movement, a purely lyrical movement, it will be noticed, like the beginning of the “Induction,” whence they go back to Gavin Douglas' prologues and thence into the pure stream of medieval, dream-vision, and allegorical poetry.⁴³ And Sackville's part in Gorboduc is notable for its insight into the possibilities of dramatic writing. It contains for instance the thoroughly articulate and soundly psychological soliloquy of the Duke of Albany, and also the vivid account of the death of Porrex, which Charles Lamb admired. And there are in it inconspicuous lines of subtle merit; these, for example, advise how the rebellion of the common people should be put down:

Perswade by gentle speach, and offre grace
With gift of pardon, saue vnto the chiefe,
And that vpon condicion that forthwith
They yelde the captaines of their enterprise …
This shall, I thinke, scatter the greatest part
That now are holden with desire of home,
Weried in field with cold of winters nightes,
And some, no doubt, striken with dread of law.

(V, 1, 86-96)

Gorboduc, then, taken as a whole, seems to throw into focus a complicated and lively picture of its times. It is a picture lighted by the flares of two diverse renaissances in poetry—the one, following on the recovery of Piers Plowman, stiff and moralistic; the other, following on the printing of Tottel's Miscellany, elegant and Italianate. And over these flares hangs the glow of the greater, classical renaissance; but around and behind everything are the comfortable, familiar lights and shadows of the Middle Ages. A Vice stalks through the first dramatic tragedy and is hissed by the audience—the printer has taken care to indicate the hissing in his typography. And then there enters a nuntius to tell a tale which gleams with blood and armor.

The puritan pleads for the welfare of the commons, while the courtier jibes at the rascal routs, but both come together momentarily in Gorboduc to urge preparations against a dubious political future. Probably only the deepest apprehension of the future could have enabled two men so fundamentally different to collaborate successfully; this, and their mutual zest for sheer creation in literature.

Notes

1. The printer's note to the edition of 1570, reprinted in Chief Pre-Shakespearean Dramas, ed. J. Q. Adams (Boston, 1924), p. 503: the text cited hereafter.

2. Apologie for Poetrie, ed. Edward Arber (London, 1929), p. 63.

3. “… Gorboduck is a fable, doubtless, better turn'd for Tragedy, than any on this side the Alps in his time; and might have been a better direction to Shakespear and Ben. Johnson than any guide they have had the luck to follow.

   “Here is a King, the Queen, and their two Sons. The King divides his Realm, and gives it betwixt his two Sons. They quarrel. The Elder Brother Kills the Younger. Which provokes the Mother to Kill the Elder. Thereupon the King Kills the Mother. And then to make a clear Stage the people rise and dispatch old Gorboduck.

   “It is objected by our Neighbors against the English, that we delight in bloody spectacles. Our Poets who have not imitated Gorboduck in regularity and roundness of the design, have not failed on the Theatre to give us the atrocité and blood, enough in all Conscience.” Thomas Rymer, A Short View of Tragedy (London, 1693), pp. 84-5. Rymer appears to have deviated from the fable for the sake of climax. Actually the people kill both the king and queen.

4. Biographia Britannica (London, 1747), pp. 3543 ff.

5. F. E. Schelling, Elizabethan Drama (Boston, 1908), II, 401; A. W. Ward, A History of English Dramatic Literature (London, 1899); H. Schmidt, “Seneca's Influence upon Gorboduc,” Modern Language Notes, II (1887), 2, pp. 28-35; J. W. Cunliffe, The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy (London, 1893).

6. L. H. Courtney, “Ferrex and Porrex,” Notes and Queries, ser. 2, X, pp. 261-3; L. Toulmin Smith (ed.), Gorboduc, Englische Sprach-und-Literaturdenkmale des 16. 17. und 18. Jhrhts (Heilbronn, 1883); S. A. Small, “The Political Import of the Norton Half of Gorboduc,” PMLA, XLVI (1931), 3.

7. Schelling, l. c.

8. Courtney, l. c.

9. H. A. Watt, Gorboduc; or, Ferrex and Porrex (Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin, No. 351 [1910]). The substance of this study is to be found in Professor Watt's notes on Gorboduc, in Early English Classical Tragedies, ed. J. W. Cunliffe (Oxford, 1912), pp. 297-307.

10. Cf. I, 1, 59 ff.:

    When lordes, and trusted rulers vnder kinges,
    To please the present fancie of the prince,
    With wrong transpose the course of gouernance,
    Murders, mischiefe, or ciuill sword at length …
    Bringes them to cruell and reprochfull death …

    and V, 1, 41-45.

11. I submit lines from V, 2, with a few italics to indicate the cruxes:

    And thou, O Brittaine, whilome in renowme, 229
    Thus wasted and defaced, spoyled and destroyed! 232
    This is the end when in fonde princes hartes
    Flattery preuailes, and sage rede hath no place. 236-7
    And this doth growe when, loe, vnto the prince
    Whom death or sodeine happe of life bereaues
    No certaine heire remaines—such certaine heire
    As not all-onely is the rightfull heire
    But to the realme is so made knowen to be … 246-50

    No, no; then Parliament should haue bene holden
    And certeine heires appointed to the crowne … 264-5
    While yet the prince did liue, whose name and power
    By lawfull sommons and authoritie
    Might make a Parliament to be of force … 268-70
    In which your Parliament, and in your choise,
    Preferre the right my lordes … 160-1
    Right meane I his or hers vpon whose name
    The people rest by meane of natiue line
    Or by vertue of some former lawe,
    Already made their title to aduance.
    Such one, my lordes, let be your chosen king,
    Such one, so borne within your natiue land,
    Such one preferre. 164-71

12. In The Mirror for Magistrates, ed. Joseph Haslewood (London, 1815), II: At the end of the poem.

13. Biographia Britannica, l. c.

14. Stanza 61 (Haslewood, II, 349). Cf. also St. 71. The fact that these sentiments in Gorboduc are expressed by a dramatic character qualifies them in no way: Eubulus is the good counsellor throughout the play. Cp. these lines with II, 1, 143-5, where scorn of rascal routs is bitterly satirized; and cf. infra pp. 35-8.

15. Cf. V, 2, 269; and note 22 supra.

16. Calvin, The Institutes (London, 1562), p. 502 verso.

17. Note, however, the violent construction put upon inaction in Norton's oration on the subject (cf. pp. 28-9 infra), and also the language of V, 2.

18. Although these poems were not printed until 1563, in the second edition of The Mirror, the fore-link which introduces them, the fact that Sackville wrote an “induction” intended for a series of tragedies and the fact that in the Induction he writes:

    My busie minde presented unto mee
    Such fall of pieres as in this realme had be:
    That ofte I wisht some would their woes descryve
    To warne the rest whom fortune left alive.

    (St. 10)

    —would seem to indicate that Sackville began work on tragedies before interest in tragical literature crystallized into The Mirror. The first edition of The Mirror appeared in 1559.

19. Reprinted by Haslewood in his introduction to The Mirror.

20. Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster, ed. Edward Arber (London, 1895), p. 71.

21. Biographia Britannica, l. c.; Holinshed's Chronicles, year 1570/1.

22. Biographia Britannica, l. c.

23. Quoted by E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford, 1923), IV, 273.

24. William Cobbet, The Parliamentary History of England … (London, 1806), I, 695. I identify the petition quoted in the text above by combining the references in the various editions of the Commons Journals. With lines 8-12 above compare Gorboduc V, 2, 227-33:

    The townes shall be consumed and burnt with fire,
    The peopled cities shall waxe desolate;
    And thou, O Brittaine, whilome in renowme,
    Whilome in wealth and fame, shalt thus be torne,
    Dismembred thus, and thus be rent in twaine,
    Thus wasted and defaced, spoyled and destroyed:
    These be the fruites your ciuil warres will bring.

    With lines 15-20 compare Gorboduc V, 2, 153-6 and 195-7:

    If ye shall all with one assent forbeare
    Once to lay hand or take vnto your-selues
    The crowne by colour of pretended right
    Or by what other meanes so-euer it be …
    And who will not by force attempt to winne
    So great a gaine, that hope perswades to haue?
    A simple colour shall for title serue.

    Cp. 7 and 21-3 with Gorboduc V, 2, 176-9:

    With that same hart, my lordes, keepe out also
    Unnaturall thraldome of strangers reigne,
    Ne suffer you against the rules of kinde
    Your mother land to serue a forreine prince.

    —and note how sharply both are directed against Mary Stuart.

25. S. A. Small in one of the most recent studies of Gorboduc—“The Political Import of the Norton Half of Gorboduc,” PMLA, XLVI (1931), No. 3—accepts Griffith's division of the play without question. The conclusions of this study are as follows:

    “Thomas Norton, the staunch puritan, naturally chose in his half of the play (the first three acts) to emphasize, principally through the counselors, the moral lesson that rulers should obey the good advice of their statesmen on matters pertaining to the welfare of the kingdom. This would very naturally prepare the mind of the Queen for Sackville's argument for the limitation of the succession which is presented in the fifth act.”

    (p. 641.)

    This article rests on the fallacy which Watt pointed out in the work of F. Koch: “Koch makes a slip in logic … in believing that the three-fold repetition of the allusion to Phaeton in the first two acts, while the story is not referred to in the last two acts, is an indication of Sackville's authorship of Acts IV and V; with the end of the third act, the practical need of the story was over; there was in the last two acts no demand for such an illustration.” (Watt, l. c., p. 30.) Similarly, after King Gorboduc has proceeded to definite action, there is no demand for stressing the importance of good advice; and actually good advice is stressed in the second part, e.g., in V, 2, 236-7 (see note 22 supra), etc. But the reverse of this situation is more importantly true: while Gorboduc and his heirs are living there could not possibly be “an argument for the limitation of the succession.” And, as all the historical critics have observed, it is the final scene of the play which contains the natural appeal of the staunch puritan—i.e., the appeal for Lady Katharine Grey.

26. Schmidt, l. c.; Watt, op. cit., pp. 68 ff.

27. I have retained Watt's readings and enumerations of the Senecan text.

28. Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins, The Whole Booke of Psalmes, Collected into English Meeter (London, 1616).

29. Watt follows Schmidt in these tests. Compare the diction in the following lines from Norton's Psalms:

    Therefore now, all ye bloody men … Ps. 139

    He turned their waters into blood … 105

    Whose subtil mouth of vanity
              with flattering words do threat,
    And their right hand is a right hand
              of guile and subtilty. 144

    But in their tents with grudging heart
              they wickedly repine. 106

    —etc.

30. Watt, op. cit., p. 58.

31. This legend, as in the Middle Ages, connects English with classical history, and it is in Gorboduc quite unmistakably a motivation for the classicism. This is rather clearly indicated, I think, by some lines which occur earlier in the play:

    … if the mindfull wrath of wrekefull gods,
    Since mightie Ilions fall not yet appeased
    With these poore remnantes of the Troian name,
    Haue not determined by vnmoued fate
    Out of this realme to rase the Brittishe line …

    (II, 2, 75-9)

32. The Induction, because of its Virgilian and generally classical imagery, appears also to be more Senecan than is Seneca himself; e.g.:

    When I beheld the wofull werd befall,
    That by the wrathful wyl of Gods was come:
    And Jove's unmooved sentence and foredome
    On Priam kyng …

    (St. 63)

    Sorrowe I am, in endles tormentes payned,
    Among the furies in the infernall lake:
    Where Pluto god of hel so griesly blacke
    Doth hold his throne, and Letheus deadly taste
    Doth rieve remembraunce of eche thyng fore past.

    (St. 16)

    See also pp. 85-6 infra.

33. Lydgate, Fall of Princes, ed. Henry Bergen (E.E.T.S., 1924), Bk. III, 1, 890 ff.

34. L. H. Courtney (l. c.) pointed out that these lines are an exact counterpart to the conclusion of an oration, probably by Norton, on the succession, given in the House of Commons, Jan. 16, 1562/3:

    If we shall for any affection take away the right from those who have the right, let us remember this saying of the Holy Ghost, ‘Propter injurias et injustitias transfertur regnum a Gente in Gentem.’

35. Agam., 264 and 269-72:

    Ignota tibi sunt jura regnorum aut nova.
    Nobis maligni judices, aequi sibi,
    Id esse regni maximum pignus putant,
    Si quidquid aliis non licet, solis licet.

    With this Watt compares Gorboduc I, 2, 262-6; III, Ch. 1-3; and (incompletely) II, 1, 143-55 (to be quoted immediately above).

36. Newton's Seneca, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York, 1927), II, 112:

    The subtil science of the law,
              the statutes of our land,
    (That long agoe decreed were)
              thou dost not understand.
    The Judges be malicious men,
              they spyght and envye us,
    But he shal have them partiall
              his causes to discus.
    This is the chiefest priviledge
              that doth to Kinges belong.
    What lawes forbiddeth other men,
              they doe, and doe no wronge.

37. Watt, l. c., pp. 67, 72, and 34.

38. The Complaint of Henry Duke of Buckingham, ed. Marguerite Hearsey (New Haven, 1936), p. 92.

39. Ibid., p. 115. The relevant passages from Buckingham and Gorboduc are quoted on p. 22 supra.

40. Cf. Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique (Oxford, 1909), p. 7 with, e.g., Gorboduc I, 2, 247-336 (Eubulus' oration).

41. For a discussion of the chorus and nuntius see Chapter III, pp. 141 and 144 ff. infra.

42. Note that this is a balanced line, like those characteristic of Norton, but that in its context it is a part of a highly complicated, run-on movement.

43. See p. 82 ff. infra.