SOURCE: Clemen, Wolfgang. “Gorboduc.” In English Tragedy Before Shakespeare: The Development of Dramatic Speech, translated by T. S. Dorsch, pp. 56-74. London: Methuen & Co., 1961.

[In the following essay, originally published in German in 1955, Clemen examines the rhetorical style and thematic purpose of Gorboduc.]

The history of rhetorical tragedy in England opens with Gorboduc. In this play the genre Drama has assumed a very strange garb; it is so stiff in movement and so full of elaborate set speeches that it is difficult for us nowadays to appreciate it as drama at all. Yet Gorboduc exerted an unusually powerful influence on English drama. It must have been accepted as a model not only by the literary theorists, but even by the playwrights. We must not, therefore, in trying to set it into historical perspective, start from any preconceived notion of Drama per se, or judge it according to any later conception of what a play should be. In spite of all dramatic and poetic theory, there is no such thing as Drama, in the abstract, to be set up as a norm of value against which to measure the dramatic production of different ages. In the five decades alone between 1550 and 1600 we find half a dozen dramatic forms in England, each possessing its own laws and characteristics.¹

Speech is the life-blood of Gorboduc, the almost exclusive medium by which it is given the character of a play. It is true that the several acts are prefaced by dumb shows,² in which, perhaps in imitation of Italian models, the didactic intention of the succeeding episodes is allegorically and symbolically foreshadowed in mime. These dumb shows are not, however, to be taken as indicating any tendency to carry movement into the recited scenes and make them less stiff. They have a purely didactic purpose; their function is to bring out the moral presented in Gorboduc. No spark of animation passes from them into the spoken scenes. The sphere of vivid but mute action and the sphere of stiff declamation unaccompanied by action stand indeed in close juxtaposition, but they are entirely unrelated to each other. It may be, however, that subconsciously the authors felt the need to make some concession to the eyes of their audience in a work where such immoderate demands were being made on their ears.

It will be easier for us to understand the nature and role of the set speech in Gorboduc if we examine the way in which Sackville and Norton transformed their raw material into a play, with its mechanism of acts and scenes, its entrances and exits, its grouping of the characters, and its dialogues and soliloquies. For this business of dramatizing narrative sources can result in very different types of plays; the way in which it is done is far more important for the structure of the play, its own individual pattern, than the material itself. An outline of the plot of Gorboduc³ might suggest that it is a fast-moving play, full of bustling scenes and animated dialogue. But it is the very reverse of this. From material that abounds in incident the authors have taken for their nine scenes only those portions that might be described as ‘points of rest’ between the actual incidents.⁴ The incidents themselves have been left out of the play: we hear about them only by report, or alternatively they are reflected in the reaction that they produce in the characters. This reaction, however, is manifested only in speech.

This procedure of giving in a play only the antecedents and the consequences of actions, and not the actions themselves, and of presenting these antecedents and consequences very largely in long speeches and soliloquies, is the basis also of the tragedies ascribed to Seneca. For in these plays the thoughts of the characters turn chiefly on happenings of the past and future; we are shown the states of mind and the reflections to which the happenings themselves give rise. The ‘dramatic present’ plays a negligible part. We very often get the feeling that the ‘real play’ is being performed elsewhere, on another stage, and that the speakers are gazing across at this stage from the enclosed space in which they are sitting quietly together like a play-reading society, merely telling us what is going on and giving expression to the appropriate reflections and feelings. The plays of Seneca were very probably designed for reading aloud,⁵ and it was only under a misapprehension that the Elizabethans took them as plays intended for performance. When such an unbroken succession of long speeches, declaimed without any accompanying action, was given the actuality of theatrical performance, some curious antinomies were bound to arise. The elimination of these, necessary as it was, did not come about until much later. There are not yet any signs of it in Gorboduc; on the contrary, in comparison with Seneca, there is a further increase in the undramatic element.⁶ The proportion of long speeches in any particular scene of Gorboduc is even higher than in the Senecan tragedies. In Seneca, moreover, the run of long speeches is often interrupted by dialogue-passages of shorter speeches; at times there is even stichomythia, or lines of verse broken up between several speakers. In Gorboduc, on the other hand, the shorter dialogue-passages occur much less frequently, and some scenes have none at all; nor is there any sustained stichomythia. Often immoderately long, the speeches follow one another in massive and ponderous array, and we can scarcely think of them as dialogue.

Apart from their narrative or descriptive function, the majority of the speeches in Seneca's plays are essentially a medium for the expression of rage or despair, or of intense emotion of some other kind. In Gorboduc, however, only a few scenes, indeed only a few speeches, have strong feelings as their basis.⁷ And for this reason the play lacks one of the primary driving-forces of tragedy. For in most of the scenes we find nothing but cold deliberation and the endless debating of pros and cons. In Seneca most of the speeches are the outward manifestation of highly emotional states of mind; in Gorboduc they serve the ends of hair-splitting argument. The temperature, one might say, is many degrees lower than in Seneca; in place of the sultry heat of emotion we have the frigid atmosphere of a legal process. And in fact both authors of the play were Inns of Court men, so perhaps it is not surprising that a legal cast of thought should be constantly reflected in their style and language.

There are further differences. In many scenes in Seneca's plays something that could be called development takes place. One mood perhaps gives way to another, some resolution is formed, the relationship between two characters changes, and the situation at the end of the scene is different from what it was at the beginning. Speech is the dramatic instrument by means of which Seneca brings this change about and communicates it to the reader. Of disclosures and developments of this kind within the limits of a single scene there is hardly a sign in Gorboduc. Most of the spoken scenes are entirely static. We mark time, as it were, or go round in a circle, and it is nearly always obvious from the situation at the beginning of the scene what its ending will be.

Even with Seneca we can scarcely speak of characters in any true sense of the word. We get no impression of physical presence, of a flesh-and-blood personality behind the parade of emotion. The language of the plays seems remote from the concrete reality of human life of which it ought to be a reflection, seems indeed to be quite independent of it. However, with Seneca the main characters at least are presented as human types with continuous parts in the plot, and they are shown in a variety of situations. Their speeches serve the purpose of revealing their roles as types, and of setting them against the appropriate emotional backgrounds.

In Gorboduc, on the other hand, the speeches are almost entirely unrelated to the characters. Gorboduc himself appears in only three scenes, Ferrex and Porrex each in two, and most of the other characters only once. Furthermore, since the number of characters is greater than in Seneca's plays, new characters make their appearance in practically every scene, and then disappear. There is therefore no continuity in the appearance of the characters on the stage to serve as a constant factor on which to fasten; instead we have a succession of abruptly broken-off situations which have no connexion with one another. For this reason the individual speeches give an even more completely detached impression than they do in Seneca; often indeed there are single speeches by characters who make only single appearances. In addition, in some scenes more characters are present than are ever on the stage in Seneca, and some of these open their mouths only once or twice. When finally we compare the speeches of Gorboduc and Seneca with regard to their bearing on the action of the play, we find that the Senecan speeches have a much closer relevance to such incidents as, we learn, have preceded them in the intervals between the acts and scenes, and this in spite of the often long-drawn description, narrative and reflection that they contain.

Again the reason for this is the way in which the authors have turned their subject-matter into plays. Seneca invariably dramatizes only the closing phases of his story; he begins his action either just before or at the catastrophe, so that a comparatively brief lapse of time is covered by the rapid succession of scenes and speeches. Gorboduc deals with a much longer period; it covers the last part of Gorboduc's reign, and also takes in the events that follow his death. More therefore ‘happens’ in Gorboduc than in a play by Seneca, and thus the discrepancy between the underlying action and the speeches is increased, for the events are so numerous that the speeches cannot cover them satisfactorily, not even by means of outright report, a method naturally also used in Gorboduc. The course of these events remains to some extent obscure; a good deal escapes us altogether, and a good deal becomes clear only in retrospect, after we have been shown the reactions produced by the events. Some of the actions, too, appear to have been inadequately motivated and prepared for; examples are the slaughter of the King and the Queen, of which we are told only in passing in the fifth act (V. i. 7), and the motivation of Ferrex's assassination by Porrex. Then again, because Seneca's plays are more closely knit as a result of his more drastic curtailment of the material that he uses in his plots, his narrative background is less extensive, and is better integrated by his methods of report and description.

However, the ultimate reason for the lack of relationship in Gorboduc between speech and character, speech and action, is not to be found in the management of its characters or the particular way in which its story has been dramatized. The true reason is that in this play the characters are merely an expedient whereby a train of events, essentially impersonal in itself, and designed solely to impart a moral, may be split up and distributed among a number of different speakers. Gorboduc is not conceived in terms of a dramatic conflict between living people, but as an ‘exemplum’ for a moral discourse, the ‘dramatic action’ becoming a mere side-issue.

This is made clear by analysis of the speeches. Much space is given to reflections on the serious consequences of civil war and dissension, on the mischief that arises from an irregular succession to the throne, and on other political topics, and this shows what the authors were driving at. They were warning their audience against the insurrection and political disorder so easily stirred up by uncertainty about the succession.⁸ This warning and this moral, constantly reinforced in one form or another, and combined with other political doctrines, provide the vital thread which runs through the play from beginning to end. The true centre of interest of the play lies in its didactic political import, and its ‘hero’ is something suprapersonal, the welfare of the body politic. In contrast to Senecan practice, there is no ‘protagonist’.⁹Gorboduc is a ‘Mirror for Magistrates’ in dramatic form.

This heavily stressed didacticism, this emphasis on the political and moral application of the play, constitutes the main divergence from Seneca. In Gorboduc the essential thing is not what happens, but the political and moral implications of what happens.¹⁰Gorboduc thus follows the didactic tradition of the Morality Plays;¹¹ the Senecan influence lies more in matters of technique than in anything else, and is less dominant than used to be thought. What a study of the distribution of the speeches and their function in the play reveals is reflected also in their structure. It will be seen that a method of composition taken over from another writer must be modified in several important respects when the later work is informed by a different spirit.

Let us begin with the council scene in the first act and see if we can discover just what it is that lies at the back of the style of speech in Gorboduc. In this scene (I. ii) Gorboduc gets the advice of three of his Lords about the proposed division of the realm. First we have a preamble¹² in which Gorboduc informs the Lords that he intends to ask for their advice, speaking of the significance for the country at large of the question to be decided and pointing out that the ‘common peace’ is a matter of universal concern. Arostus in his reply expresses his readiness to give advice and his devotion to the interests of the King. This reply is a ritual form of address, so to speak, a studied and ceremonious act of courtesy before we come to the matter in hand. This matter, ‘the case’, is first broached by Gorboduc at line 46. The greater part of the scene consists of the three long speeches in which Arostus, Philander, and Eubulus turn over the plan put forward by the King, weigh it up from different points of view, and retail the grounds for their own opinions, which are partly favourable to the project, partly unfavourable. In their train of thought and their argumentative manner these speeches are like legal pleas; they can scarcely be described as ‘persuasion-speeches’ attempting to bring the King round to a different way of thinking. Although Gorboduc himself is several times addressed in person, the speeches are directed less at him than at some higher authority, just as in the courtroom it is not any particular individual that is addressed. They are the formal voicing of different attitudes to a matter that is still sub judice. In their organization, the way in which they break up into separate and distinct sections, these speeches are examples of a clear rhetorical ‘disposition’,¹³ according to which the points at issue are taken up and settled one by one, as in a legal plea. Eubulus's speech even follows fairly closely the scheme of speech-division that Sir Thomas Wilson laid down on the authority of Quintilian, though it does not correspond with it in all particulars.¹⁴

A more important point, however, is that these three speeches, for all their length and detail, do not in any way advance the action of the play. The ‘case’ is considered from various theoretical standpoints, yet Gorboduc's closing speech shows that he has not changed his own point of view: ‘In one self purpose do I still abide,’ he says (l. 342).

The syntax, style, and diction are all appropriate to this static quality of the speeches whereby a thesis is impersonally and dispassionately amplified. As a rule extremely long, carefully constructed sentences are used to convey with great prolixity a simple and often quite commonplace idea, and the impression is given of a stilted attempt at dignity and of a too obviously organized structure. This impression is reinforced by the continual parallelism of half-lines and of line-beginnings and line-endings. As far as metre is concerned, the authors systematically and consistently use the single line as their unit, and subordinate their sentence-structure to it. We scarcely ever find several lines overlapping metrically and building up into the kind of verse-paragraph that we are familiar with in Shakespearian blank verse. The result is a rigidity of pattern and a monotonous uniformity of style which are not only quite undramatic, but also impress the modern reader, through the inflexible regularity with which the iambic rhythm is used, as being wearisomely pedantic and long-winded.¹⁵ Retaining their natural accentuation, the nouns and adjectives dutifully accommodate themselves to the exigencies of the iambic pentameter; there is none of that clash between natural stress and metrical stress, none even of those displacements and inversions of stress, that can be so effective.

A reflection of the objective and didactic treatment of the subject may be seen in the ‘substantival’ nature of the style in Gorboduc; it is a style in which verbs are heavily outnumbered by nouns and adjectives. The nouns are nearly all, by way of amplificatio, qualified by empty and colourless adjectives, which hang from them like clogs and still further slow down the movement of the speech. Many noun-adjective combinations of this kind, often cemented by alliteration, are paired off and arranged antithetically in symmetrically divided lines, or are made to balance each other at the ends of lines. The commonest pattern of all, the combination of a disyllabic adjective with a monosyllabic noun, lends itself especially well to this arrangement.¹⁶ The frequent use of hendiadys leads to constant tautology, and furthers the efforts of the authors to be weightily reflective, and at the same time explicit, in their speeches. A whole series of other rhetorical devices, anaphora, climax, parallelism, alliteration, and chiasmus, all serve the purpose of imparting order and clear organization to the speeches; their effect is much more to clarify the meaning than to enhance the effect of what is said.

The almost exclusively abstract vocabulary, lacking the force of concrete expression and devoid of figurative quality, also contributes to the uniformity and the dry objectivity that are so characteristic of the style. Whether we have a scene involving strong emotion or a conference scene, the diction remains fundamentally the same. Everything is stamped with the same die; the speech has become merely an impersonal, and homogeneous, means of communication, treating subjects of very different kinds in exactly the same way, and moreover treating them so generally that they are all reduced to the same level of cold, rational abstraction.

Everything conspires, then, to strip away from Gorboduc all the ebb and flow of mental excitement and changing humours, all the colour that goes with diversity of character-interest and fluctuations in style and tempo at different stages of the action. Everything works to this end: the monotonous regularity of the blank verse, the colourless and abstract diction, the systematized clarity of the syntax for all its involutions, the prolixity of the speeches and their lack of connexion with one another, the absence of movement and development in the scenes, and the stiff and lifeless grouping of the characters. All these features of the play are mutually interdependent. Corresponding to the singular lack of subtlety with which the rhetorical figures are used, we have the over-elaborate organization of the speeches and the explicit, minutely detailed exposition. This again has a close bearing on the static, uncomplex structure of the whole scene, which is connected with the preceding or following scene by nothing more than some simple contrast or parallel. Matched with this, finally, is the symmetrical and all too obvious grouping of the characters, which is a legacy from the Morality Plays.¹⁷

Thus in every way the style and language of Gorboduc are calculated to further the main endeavour of the two authors, that is, to make their ‘matter’ as easily intelligible as possible. And as far as they are concerned, intelligibility is synonymous with generalization. Nothing that cannot be adapted to the general formulas that swarm on every page of Gorboduc is capable of being expressed in the medium they devised. In such a style there could be no room for any differentiation or complication in the ‘matter’ such as might have been brought about by the clash of different temperaments and personalities, or by development and change in these personalities—assuming that Sackville and Norton had been capable of conceiving dramatic personalities, which on the face of it does not seem very likely. However, the real reason for the generalized and ‘depersonalized’ character of this style was not merely the lack of dramatic power in the authors; it was much more the didactic spirit in which they wrote their play.

Their purpose is not revealed gradually as the play proceeds; the gist of their argument emerges quite clearly at the very beginning. And once it has been stated, their moral is constantly recapitulated. It is repeated by the Chorus, by the dumb show, by the various characters, and, moreover, both at the beginning and at the end of scenes. A prose paraphrase of the whole play would be revealing; it would show, first, how few ideas it really contains, though they are paraded with the maximum of verbiage, and secondly, how often these few ideas are repeated in the course of the play. With other playwrights the paraphrasing of a speech always involves some loss, the loss of just that quality which gives the play its special character, but that is not true of Gorboduc. In Gorboduc very long speeches can be paraphrased quite briefly, and there would be no loss at all if odd lines here and there, or even whole periods, were left out.

The highly inflated language of Gorboduc reflects the ideal of ‘copiousness’ that was so dear to the hearts of Elizabethan writers.¹⁸ But the great abundance of verbiage has not yet been assimilated in this play, and employed in such a way as to give intensity to the sentiments expressed or to produce striking poetic effects. On the contrary, the copiousness here is useless adornment, mere patchwork, involving a lavish expenditure of artistry for a limited end. Nor is it copiousness in the sense of exuberance, as it so often is in Marlowe and Shakespeare; it is sheer affectation, a pedantic fondness for reduplicating ideas, merely a means of amplifying a statement with a whole paraphernalia of parallels, antitheses, and other rhetorical devices.

As has already been shown, it is natural to this whole way of writing that the emphasis should fall on what is impersonal, general, and didactic. It is therefore no accident that the ‘counsel-speech’, the paraenesis, as we have seen it exemplified in Act I, Scene ii, should so often be used in Gorboduc. For this is the very type of speech, since it consists of admonition, instruction, advice or dissuasion, that gives the speaker the best opportunities to refer continually to the impersonal higher authority of general moral principles, and this means of course that his own personal feelings and opinions have to be suppressed. The more purely objective he can be, and the better he can succeed in keeping his own personal concerns out of it, the more persuasive the counsel-speech will be. The characters in Gorboduc are not therefore made to change their views, as are those of Marlowe and Shakespeare later, by the impact on them of a forceful personality which works on them rather by psychological means than by argument; they are won over by the objective logic of supra-personal facts, which is independent both of the speaker and of the character who is being worked on.

This is well illustrated in the two scenes that make up the second act. In both we have a situation involving persuasion and dissuasion. The first time it is Ferrex who is addressed by a good and an evil counsellor, the second time Porrex. The basic situation of the Morality Play, that of the man who is exposed to equal pressure from the Good and the Evil Angel, is here carried a stage further. In this particular exchange there is no dispute between the speakers; the speeches are an eloquent affirmation of the principles of good and evil, maintained on both sides on general political grounds. The person spoken to, whether it is Ferrex or Porrex, is virtually left out of account; to all intents and purposes the speeches are directed at the audience. There are, it is true, a few occasions when the interlocutor appears to be addressed personally (e.g., II i. 68, 168), but generally speaking the characters ‘speak past’ one another, as we have already observed in Act I, Scene ii.

It is interesting to see how the moral bearing of this debate between the principles of good and evil is immediately conveyed to the audience. The moment Hermon has finished his inflammatory speech, we are given Dordan's revealing comment:

O heauen was there euer heard or knowen,
So wicked counsell to a noble prince?

(II. i. 162-3)

In every scene of Gorboduc remarks of this kind are addressed to the audience, and are clearly interposed for their benefit. The same type of revealing commentary is used also in later plays, where it runs side by side with the more strictly dramatic forms of representation, and provides pointers to the authors' intentions. It is a device which is common, indeed, to the whole of Elizabethan drama, and even Shakespeare makes frequent use of it,¹⁹ though in him it is increasingly assimilated and in some subtle fashion made dramatic.

If we examine pre-Shakespearian drama in this light and go through the plays line by line, we shall be astonished to find how strong is this tendency to introduce explanatory comment. Nor is this necessarily true only of specifically didactic plays. The practice stems from the technique of the Morality Play, and the frequency with which these passages of comment crop up in Gorboduc shows better than anything else that in this play we are not dealing with mere slavish imitation of Seneca, but with a work that stands in the line of English tragedy. Certainly Sackville and Norton learned much from Seneca as far as style and structure are concerned, but in several very important respects they were carrying on the English dramatic tradition.²⁰

For this particular device is not found in Seneca. Seneca can indeed be edifying, and his lavish use of epigram and sententious maxim might at first sight appear to be a means of elucidating his intentions. In the final analysis, however, the shrewd dicta scattered through his plays are a product of his preoccupation with rhetoric.²¹ They are his way of adding rhetorical point and colour to his writing, and of giving his emotional outbursts a sophisticated and rational form of expression, which, with the admixture of Stoic doctrine, turns them into a species of hybrid creation, a compound of thought and feeling. But Seneca's sententiae are not meant as hints to the audience, pointing the way to his meaning, the role that such forms of expression so often assume in Elizabethan drama. Where different functions are involved, apparent similarities are not real similarities.

With Senecan usage in this matter we may compare the sententious maxims so freely introduced into the speeches of Gorboduc, where they are sometimes made to stand out of the surrounding text by means of quotation-marks:

Within one land, one single rule is best:
Diuided reignes do make diuided hartes.

(I. ii. 259-60)

O most vnhappy state of counsellers,
That light on so vnhappy lordes and times,
That neither can their good advise be heard,
Yet must they beare the blames of ill successe.

(II. ii. 69-72)

In the first of these maxims the moral underlying the whole play is propounded; the second passage, in which a proverbial saying is amplified into a general reflection, gives Philander the opportunity to explain in his own words his role as a counsellor.

Sometimes, however, whole speeches could be said to consist of elucidatory comment; such are, for example, the closing speeches of Dordan and Philander in II. i and II. ii, the final speech of Eubulus (V. ii. 180 ff.), and of course the speeches of the Chorus. A function which in ancient tragedy is reserved for the Chorus alone is taken over in Elizabethan drama by the acting characters as well, and, moreover, so very extensively that, when in the course of time the Chorus itself disappears, the ‘choric utterance’ remains and is almost universally employed by the dramatists.

The fourth act of Gorboduc is by Sackville. In contrast to Norton, whose scenes have a predominantly political and didactic stamp and in structure are a pretty close approximation to the Morality technique, Sackville tends to lay his greatest stress on powerful emotion and sensation.²² This does not mean, however, that the different subject-matter in which he deals is presented in an essentially different style. The long lament spoken by Videna at the beginning of Act IV is his work,²³ but it can scarcely be said to differ in any considerable respect from the lament that Norton gives to Gorboduc in Act III, Scene i. As far as technique is concerned, however, it is characteristic that in this soliloquy by Videna a more intense relationship with another character is to be observed than in any of the speeches addressed to a person who is actually present. For paradoxically the interlocutor is missing in this case; it is in his absence that Porrex is ‘addressed’ in the soliloquy. Once more an opportunity for the really dramatic presentation of characters confronting one another face to face has been missed. It is true that in the maledictions hurled at Porrex and the sorrowful invocations of the dead Ferrex the style of this soliloquy at first glance appears to communicate a stronger pathos than is usual in Gorboduc; but this impression is at once counteracted by the systematic way in which the antitheses and parallels are grouped. Moreover, in the structure of the soliloquy as a whole, as in these smaller units within it, we find the same rationalizing tendency at work as in the counsel-speeches; there is the same insistence on subdivision and explanation. For like the counsel-speeches, Videna's soliloquy breaks up into distinct and independent sections, which again are capable of further subdivision. Each of the six or seven ideas it contains is sorted out into one such compartment, and usually these ideas are expressed in several alternative ways.²⁴ So that here, too, we have that rigid organization of material according to which the various points are ‘disposed of’ one by one. There is still no overriding central idea, and none of that surge of feeling which, rising and falling in intensity, can go flooding through a whole speech. In this style emotions are rationalized, generalized, and subordinated to an impersonal pattern in just the same way as ideas and decisions.

Smacking as it does of academic theory, this same speech-style, in which a ‘case’ is weighed and debated as it were from the outside even when the speaker's own interests are at stake, is carried into the following scene. Here father and son confront each other, and in such a meeting might have lain the potentialities of a highly dramatic scene, for Porrex is to be called to account for the murder of his brother. It is turned into a ‘tribunal-scene’, however, with a speech for the prosecution from the father followed by two speeches for the defence, of which the first is a speech expressing remorse, and the second a’report’, in which Porrex gives an account of the events leading up to the murder. Not even in this situation, fundamentally dramatic as it is, do we find anything approaching a genuinely dramatic conflict, even though Gorboduc and Porrex speak with the express intention of influencing each other. The speeches and their speakers are juxtaposed, but there is no contact between them.

Even when later in the scene Marcella comes running in with cries of lamentation to announce the death of Porrex, there is no real departure from the normal pattern on which the speeches in this play are built. It is true that the other characters, Gorboduc, Eubulus, and Arostus, interrupt Marcella's report with exclamations and questions; but to all intents and purposes this report is a continuous speech, and one completely detached from its environment at that, for though it has auditors it has no counterpart to match it. Admittedly Marcella's speech, in which in striking contrast to the usual style of Gorboduc there is even for once a concrete situation pictured (l. 219), is more expressive than anything that precedes it, as Charles Lamb remarked. But even so no dialogue develops in this episode.

This is true also of the last act, although to the eye there is something here, in the succession of short speeches, that has the appearance of a dialogue-structure. However, the four utterances of the British leaders with which the scene opens are not related to one another in the manner of dialogue; they constitute a commentary which is divided between the four speakers. And in this undramatic sequel to the tragedy that has already been played out, the action for which the leaders have met together is less important than the expression of opinion. The core of the scene, however, lies in the excessively long speech by Eubulus. In its comprehensive statement of political principles, this is a key-speech for the whole play, although it stands outside the main drama of Gorboduc and his sons. Two further speeches by Eubulus, those which open and round off the final scene, serve the same purpose; they consist of admonition and instruction directed at the audience, and are intended to sum up the moral which has been offered in the ‘exemplum’ represented by the action of the foregoing acts. From the ‘Expositor’ or ‘Doctor’ of the Morality Play, who came on to the stage as Epilogue and spoke the final words, there has grown up the part of the ‘Good Counsellor’, to whom the author assigns this function of commentator.²⁵

Gorboduc lends itself to disparagement as a pretty sorry piece of work, and it is easy enough to point to its artistic and dramatic deficiencies.²⁶ Yet the play represents a landmark in the history of English drama, and in it we find a significant starting-point for the development of dramatic speech. It was not for nothing that Sidney praised the ‘stately speeches’ and ‘well sounding phrases clyming to the height of Seneca his stile’.²⁷ We must grasp the problems of form and style that manifest themselves in this play if we are to understand rightly the further development out of which eventually Shakespearian drama was to come into existence. The task which was laid down for the English drama of the future, as well as some of the conventions that were to persist in this later drama, may be very clearly seen in Gorboduc.

Notes

1. T. S. Eliot: ‘The forms of drama are so various that few critics are able to hold more than one or two in mind in pronouncing judgment of “dramatic” and “undramatic”’ (‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’, Selected Essays, London, 1948, p. 75).

2. On the dumb shows in Gorboduc see George R. Kernodle, From Art to Theatre, 1944, p. 145. Kernodle makes a convincing case for the street tableaux as a major influence on the dumb shows.

3. E.g., in Holzknecht's Outlines of Tudor and Stuart Plays, 1497-1642, New York, 1947.

4. Cf. Rudolf Fischer, Zur Kunstentwicklung der englischen Tragödie, Strassburg, 1893.

5. Disagreement with this view is expressed by Léon Herrmann, Le Théâtre de Séneque, Paris, 1924.

6. The view is maintained here that the composition of Gorboduc in the larger sense was influenced by the practice of Seneca. However, this thesis has been strongly contested by Howard Baker in Induction to Tragedy, Louisiana State U.P., 1939. Many of the views put forward in this stimulating book can be accepted, but not that Senecan influence on Gorboduc is all but non-existent. This is no place to take up the large and often discussed problem of Seneca's influence on Elizabethan tragedy. Some relevant studies are J. W. Cunliffe, The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy, London, 1893; F. L. Lucas, Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy, London, 1933; H. B. Charlton, The Senecan Tradition in Renaissance Tragedy, Manchester U.P., 1946 (earlier as the Introduction to the Dramatic Works of Sir William Alexander, Earl of Stirling 1921); Hardin Craig, ‘Shakespeare and the History Play’, in Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies, Washington, 1948; Theodore Spencer, Death and Elizabethan Tragedy, Harvard U.P., 1936; Henry W. Wells, ‘Senecan Influence on Elizabethan Tragedy’, in Shakespeare Assoc. Bull. XIX, 1944; S.R. Watson, ‘The Senecan Influence in Gorboduc’, in Studies in Speech and Drama in Honor of Alexander M. Drummond, New York, 1944.

7. In the main they are the scenes by Sackville.

8. Cf. S. A. Small, ‘The Political Import of the Norton Half of Gorboduc’, PMLA, XLVI, 1931; also Baker, op. cit.

9. Cf. H. E. Fansler, The Evolution of Technic in Elizabethan Tragedy, Chicago, 1914; and Baker, op. cit.

10. On the didacticism of Gorboduc cf. C. F. Tucker Brooke, The Tudor Drama, London, 1912, pp. 192-3; E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays, London, 1948, pp. 93 ff.

11. Cf. W. Farnham, The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy, Berkeley, 1936, pp. 352 ff. Important remarks on the influence of the Morality Plays on later English drama will be found in A. P. Rossiter, English Drama from Early Times to the Elizabethans, London, 1950.

12. As a sample of the style, here are the first 26 lines, which together form a single sentence:

    My lords, whose graue aduise & faithful aide,

    Haue long vpheld my honour and my realme,

    And brought me to this age from tender yeres,

    Guyding so great estate with great renowme:

    Nowe more importeth me, than erst, to vse

    Your fayth and wisedome, whereby yet I reigne;

    That when by death my life and rule shall cease,

    The kingdome yet may with vnbroken course,

    Haue certayne prince, by whose vndoubted right,

    Your wealth and peace may stand in quiet stay,

    And eke that they whome nature hath preparde,

    In time to take my place in princely seate,

    While in their fathers tyme their pliant youth

    Yeldes to the frame of skilfull gouernance,

    Maye so be taught and trayned in noble artes,

    As what their fathers which haue reigned before

    Haue with great fame deriued downe to them,

    With honour they may leaue vnto their seede;

    And not be thought for their vnworthy life,

    And for their lawlesse swaruynge out of kinde,

    Worthy to lose what lawe and kind them gaue:

    But that they may preserue the common peace,

    The cause that first began and still mainteines

    The lyneall course of kinges inheritance,

    For me, for mine, for you, and for the state,

    Whereof both I and you haue charge and care, …

    (I. ii. 1-26)

13. Quintilian (Institutio Oratoria) divides the juristic speech into five sections: prooemium, narratio, probatio, refutatio, peroratio. To these Wilson added the ‘proposition’ and the ‘division’, on which W. F. Schirmer remarks that they ‘have no independent existence’ (‘Shakespeare und die Rhetorik’, in Kleine Schriften, Tübingen, 1950 p. 90). In Eubulus's speech we may distinguish the following: Introduction, with the request for a favourable hearing (‘the Entrance … whereby the will of the standers by of the Judge is sought for, and required to heare the matter’), the apodeictic formulation of his divergent standpoint (‘narration is a plaine and manifest pointing of the matter …’), in which this particular standpoint is corroborated by a maxim of general application and further confirmed by examples drawn from human experience and history (‘The proposition is a pithie sentence comprehended in a small roome, the somme of the whole matter.’). Then we are shown how the decision that is contemplated will affect Ferrex and Porrex. The King is exhorted not to take this course, but to keep his sons longer under his own supervision. (This section only approximately conforms to the Wilsonian scheme.) Finally the King is asked again to keep the government in his own hand (Conclusion). Howard Baker's contention (Induction to Tragedy, p. 39) that Eubulus's speech corresponds exactly to the Wilsonian disposition is true only of certain parts of it.

14. Philander's 100-line speech exemplifies this preconceived disposition. Before he develops his theme in the body of his speech, Philander in the first part (217-29) introduces the two points of view to be discussed (agreement with the division of the realm, 219-24, and rejection of a premature abdication by the King, 225-9); then in the divisio, the development of the theme, he argues both sides in greater detail (230-303), on general grounds as well as from historical precedents, answers possible objections (confutatio), and puts forward his own counterproposals. In the conclusio he refers to the will of the gods in support of his advice.

15. There are some general comments on the language of Gorboduc in Moody E. Prior, The Language of Tragedy, New York, 1947, p. 32.

16. Thus the first and second or the second and third stresses of the line must all on the first adjective and its noun, and the fourth and fifth stresses must always fall on the last adjective and noun. Cf. lines 12, 13, 21, and 25 in Gorboduc's lament reproduced in Chap. 15, p. 253.

17. Cf. J. W. Cunliffe, Early English Classical Tragedies, Oxford, 1912, pp. 301-2; and Baker, op. cit.

18. Cf. Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art, pp. 46 ff.

19. Cf. Schücking, Character Problems in Shakespeare's Plays, passim.

20. Cf. A. P. Rossiter, op. cit., p. 134.

21. Cf. Howard Vernon Canter, Rhetorical Elements in the Tragedies of Seneca, Univ. of Illinois Press, 1925.

22. Apart from the opening scene, the first three acts are by Norton, as is also the final scene of the play. Cf. Baker, Induction to Tragedy, p. 44.

23. Analysed in Chap. 15, p. 257.

24. Why have I not died before this time? (1-14, four times asked). Then should I not need to be suffering thus (15-22, in three different forms). Apostrophe to Ferrex (23-6). Apostrophe to Porrex (27-9). Declaration of vengeance against Porrex (30-5, three times). Was there no one else you could have slain? (36-57, three times). Then Ferrex would still be with us (58-60). But why do I speak thus? Can I still think of you as my child? (61-4). No, I renounce my motherhood (65-76, four times). Do you think that you can escape vengeance? (77-81, four times).

25. It is no wonder that the final words correspond closely to a passage in a parliamentary speech delivered, probably by Norton himself, on 16 January 1552. Cf. L. H. Courtney, ‘Ferrex and Porrex’, NQ, ser. 2, pp. 261-3; cited by Baker, op. cit., p. 222.

26. ‘The play belongs rather to antiquarianism than literature’ (F. L. Lucas, Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy, p. 96).

27. An Apologie for Poetrie, ed. E. S. Shuckburgh, Cambridge, 1948, pp. 51-2.