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Controversia in the English Drama: Medwall and Massinger

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Eugene M. Waith
Eugene M. Waith*
Affiliation:
Yale University, New Haven, Conn.
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Extract

To students of the classics the Roman practice of declamation has long been known as an influence on Roman satire and drama and on the early Greek romance. Apparently this rhetorical exercise is less well known to students of English drama, for in the standard histories and editions there is little to be found on the subject. Yet the controversia, the most important form of declamation, affected English drama early and late. A Renaissance imitation of a controversia furnished the plot of the earliest surviving secular play in English, Henry Medwall's Fulgens and Lucrece (1497?), and some of the Roman originals provided the most fashionable dramatists of the Jacobean era with plots for a number of plays. Of these, Massinger and Field's The Fatal Dowry (1618-19?), whose source has not previously been identified, is an unusually fine example of the transformation of controversia into drama. The early interlude and the later tragedy, examined side by side, reveal much of the operation of this special branch of classical rhetoric. I shall suggest that the controversia gave much more than plots to the English playwrights—that it influenced literary theory, method, and style.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 68 , Issue 1 , March 1953 , pp. 286 - 303
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1953

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References

1 See my “John Fletcher and the Art of Declamation,” PMLA, lxvi (1951), 226-234.

2 The fullest account in English is S. F. Bonner, Roman Declamation in the Late Republic and Early Empire (Liverpool, 1949); Henri Bornecque has an excellent brief analysis in the introduction to his edition of Sénèque Le Rhéteur, Controverses et suasoires, Nouvelle éd. (Paris, 1932).

3 See T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke (Urbana, Ill., 1944), ii, 355 ff.

4 Ancient Rhetoric and Poetic (New York, 1924), p. 134.

si plosoris eges aulaea manentis et usque
sessuri, donec cantor “vos plaudite” dicat,
aetatis cuiusque notandi sunt tibi mores,
mobilibusque decor naturis dandus et annis.
reddere qui voces iam scit puer et pede certo
signat humum, gestit paribus colludere, et iram
colligit ac ponit temere et mutatur in horas.
imberbis iuvenis, tandem custode remoto,
gaudet equis canibusque et aprici gramine Campi,
cereus in vitium flecti, monitoribus asper,
utilium tardus provisor, prodigus aeris,
sublimis cupidusque et amata relinquere pernix. (154-165)

I have taken the Latin text and the English translation from Horace, Satires, Epistles, Ars Poetica, tr. H. Rushton Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library (London, 1947), pp. 462-465. See Baldwin's discussion of the Ars Poetica in Ancient Rhetoric, pp. 242-247.

6 In what I have said about Seneca I have drawn freely upon Bonner, Roman Declamation, pp. 160-167, where a full account of the effect of declamation upon Senecan tragedy will be found.

7 See G. Zaccagnini, “Bonaccorso da Montemagno, il giovane,” Studi di letteratura italiana, i (1899), 339-380; R. J. Mitchell, John Tiptoft (London, etc., 1938), p. 176. In quoting from the Controversia de nobilitate I have used the edition printed in Leipzig ca. 1494; I have retained the spelling of this edition, while expanding the contractions.

8 Henry Medwall, Fulgens & Lucres, ed. F. S. Boas and A. W. Reed (Oxford, 1926), p. xiii.

9 See Erwin Rohde, Der griechische Roman und seine Vorläufer (Leipzig, 1876), pp. 336-360.

10 Prose e rime de due Buonaccorsi da Montemagno (Florence, 1718), pp. 98-148.

11 De nobilitate tractatus is the title used in some of the MSS. (see Zaccagnini, pp. 355-359); Orationes Bonacursi oraioris clarissimi de vera nobilitate … is the title of the 1494 Leipzig edition, where the plural orationes, referring to the speeches of the two rivals, distinguishes the work from a “Ciceronian oration.” In this same edition Controversia de nobilitate is the heading which follows the dedication of the publisher.

12 Reprinted by Mitchell, Tiptoft, pp. 215-241.

13 K. W. Cameron, Authorship and Sources of “Gentleness and Nobility” (Raleigh, N. C., 1941), pp. 59-92, concludes that the interlude was composed by John Heywood before 1523. His case cannot be considered as proven, however: see the Malone Society Reprint of the play (Oxford, 1950), p. vii.

14 Reference is to The Works of Thomas Kyd, ed. F. S. Boas (Oxford, 1901). The additions, by an unknown author, first appeared in the 1602 Quarto. In Boas' edition italic numbers distinguish these lines from those of the original text.

15 The Fatal Dowry, ed. C. L. Lockert, Jr. (Lancaster, Pa., 1918), p. 6. All references to the play are to this edition.

16 Controverses et suasoires, ed. Bornecque, ii, 192; my translation.

17 Ibid., ii, 198; my translation.

18 Three Plays … by Nicholas Rowe, ed. J. R. Sutherland (London, 1929), p. 233.

19 See B. L. Joseph, Elizabethan Acting (London, 1951). Joseph's conclusions confirm those reached by A. Harbage, “Elizabethan Acting,” PMLA, liv (1939), 685-708.

20 The Complete Works of John Webster, ed. F. L. Lucas (London, 1927), iv, 42.