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New Facts and Theories About the Parnassus Plays
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Students of English drama have long been interested in the Parnassus trilogy, produced in St. John's College, Cambridge, at the turn of the sixteenth century. The third play, The Reiurne from Parnassus, or The Scourge of Simony, was the only one published contemporaneously. Since the Reverend W. D. Macray's edition of the entire series in 1886, following his discovery in the Bodleian of a manuscript copy of the long-lost first two plays, the trilogy has been acclaimed as “the most brilliant product of the Tudor university stage.” Successive scholars have analyzed its sources, argued the problems of its authorship and dating, and variously interpreted its personal satire and allusion. Still unsolved, however, is the problem of authorship; still uncertain the answer to a famous crux in Shakespearean scholarship—the identification of Shakespeare's “purge” of Jonson, alluded to in the third play. It is the purpose of this paper (1) to introduce a new name in connection with the authorship of the trilogy; (2) by means of previously unused internal evidence to establish beyond any possibility of doubt J. B. Leishman's well-reasoned, but nevertheless inconclusive, identification of the “purge” with Dekker's Satiro-Mastix, despite the Parnassus poet's attribution of it to Shakespeare; and (3) to use this same internal evidence to reveal the Cambridge playwright's hitherto unsuspected satire of Jonson.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- PMLA , Volume 74 , Issue 4-Part1: Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America , September 1959 , pp. 325 - 335
- Copyright
- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1959
References
1 The Pilgrimage to Parnassus with the Two Parts of the Return from Parnassus (Oxford).
2 Frederick S. Boas, University Drama in the Tudor Age (Oxford, 1914), p. 346.
3 The Three Parnassus Plays, ed. J. B. Leishman (London, 1949)—hereafter cited as Parnassus Plays. Parenthetic references in the text will be to Leishman's Introduction and Appendix to this edition.
4 A probable, though indirect, allusion occurs in Jonson's “Apologetical Dialogue,” spoken once as an epilogue to Poetaster, but first published in the Folio of 1616, when, after justifying his attacks on the players involved in the stage quarrel, Jonson adds:
Onely amongst them, I am sorry for
Some better natures, by the rest so drawne,
To run in that vile line. (ll. 150-152)
5 A Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama 1559-1642 (London, 1891), ii, 189-190; Shakespeare's Works (London, 1790), i, 321.
6 See John S. P. Tatlock, “The Siege of Troy in Elizabethan Literature, Especially in Shakespeare and Heywood,” PMLA, xxx (1915), 727-734; Oscar J. Campbell, Comicall Satyre and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida (San Marino, Calif., 1938), pp. 218-219.
7 W. Macneile Dixon, “Chapman, Marston, Dekker,” in CHEL, vi (1910), 50. Sir Sidney Lee, A Life of William Shakespeare (London, 1898), p. 220, earlier reached the same conclusion.
8 The Tudor Drama: A History of English National Drama to the Retirement of Shakespeare (Boston, ca. 1911), pp. 385-386.
9 Parnassus Plays, Introd., p. 59 and App., pp. 369-370. The same identification was earlier suggested by Josiah H. Penniman, The War of the Theatres, Pubs. of the Univ. of Penn., Series in Phil., Lit., and Archaeol., iv, iii (Boston, 1897), 149, and by E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford, 1923), iv, 40.
10 “The Parnassus Plays,” Mod. Lang. Rev., x (1915), 168-170.
11 Smith gives credit to C. W. Previté-Orton for having first mentioned Dodd's claims in “The Parnassus Trilogy,” Cambridge Rev., xxxii (1910-11), 266.
12 Repr. by W. W. Greg in A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration (London, 1939), i, 21.
13 Alumni Cantabrigienses (Cambridge, 1922), Pt. 1, iv, 295.
14 History of the College of St. John the Evangelist, Cambridge, ed. John E. B. Mayor (Cambridge, 1869), i, 204.
15 Letter printed in the Eagle, xxi (1900), 153-154.
16 Information supplied by the editor's introduction to Vaughan's letter.
17 The University of Cambridge (Cambridge, 1884), ii, 387.
18 Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series of the Reign of James I, 1603-1610 (London, 1857), xii, 189.
19 The Eagle, xxi, 153-154.
20 Athenae Cantabrigienses, ii, 473, and Alumni Cantabrigienses, Pt. 1, ii, 394.
21 Referred to in Vaughan's letter to Gwyn.
22 Alumni Cantabrigienses, Pt. 1, i, 278; Baker, i, 204. Gwyn was instituted to the rectory of Honington, in the diocese of Norwich, 10 April 1600.
23 Gwyn was admitted a pensioner, Easter 1584; see Alumni Cantabrigienses, Pt. 1, ii, 278. Nashe was admitted a sizar, Oct. 1582, and as Lady Margaret Scholar two years later; see Athenae Cantabrigienses, ii, 306, and ii, 552, “Additions and Corrections.”
24 The reflection of Every Man out of His Humour (acted winter of 1599, pub. after 8 April 1600) in The Returne, Pt. i (dated Christmas 1599/1600, Parnassus Plays, Introd., p. 26) is confirmed as follows: Charles Reed Baskerville (English Elements in Jonson's Early Comedies, Bull. of the Univ. of Texas, No. 178, Austin, 1911, pp. 185-186) says: “More nearly related, even than Jonson's own characters, are Brisk and Gullio of The Return from Parnassus, Part I.” Leishman (Parnassus Plays, Introd., p. 52 and Commentary, pp. 178-180) shows in detail the correspondence between the two characters in traits, behavior, and actual lines. Reflections of Poetaster (acted 1601, pub. 1602) in The Returne, Pt. ii (dated Christmas 1601/1602, Parnassus Plays, Introd., p. 26) are as follows: Besides Kempe's allusion to Jonson's “pill,” easily, of course, a point of general knowledge, Ingenioso's imitation of two comments about Horace in Poetaster (ii.i.167; iv.iii.104-105) in his designation of Jonson as “one that getts what he hath by observation” (i.ii.294-295) and his echoing of Jonson's own declaration of “well-erected confidence” (Prologue of Poetaster, l. 13) in his description of Jonson as a “bold whorson, as confident now in making a book, as he was in times past in laying of a brick” (i.ii.297-299). The Parnassus poet's heavy indebtedness to Satiro-Mastix (not pub. until 1602) in The Returne, Pt. ii (Christmas, 1601/1602) will be analyzed in the body of this paper.
25 Charles H. Cooper, Annals of Cambridge (Cambridge, 1843), ii, 618.
26 Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson, iv (Oxford, 1932), 234. All subsequent quotations from Jonson's plays are from this edition.
27 Satiro-Mastix, or The Vntrussing of the Humorous Poet, ed. Dr. Hans Scherer (Louvain, Leipzig, London, 1907). All subsequent quotations are from this edition.
28 Saliro-Mastix, ll. 631 ff. and 1518 ff.
29 A Biographical Chronicle, ii, 352; Introd., The Return from Parnassus or The Scourge of Simony (London, 1905), pp. xxi-xxii.
30 Elizabethan Drama 1558-1642 (Boston, New York, ca. 1908), ii, 67.
31 Roscoe A. Small, The Stage-Quarrel between Ben Jonson and the So-called Poetasters (Breslau, 1899), p. 133.
32 Elizabethan Stage, iv, 40.
33 Introd., pp. 82-83; Commentary, pp. 256, 258, 303, 317.
34 Thomas Kyd uni sein Kreis (Berlin, 1892), pp. 78-79.
35 Comicall Satyre and Shakespeare's “Troilus and Cressida,” pp. 90-91, 107. Herford and Simpson, Ben Jonson, I (Oxford, 1925), 28, doubt “whether Cynthia took any notice of it [Jonson's applogies for her severity to Essex], whether it ever came directly to her ears,” but Dekker's taunting of Horace-Jonson in Satiro-Mastix about his plays being mis-liked at Court (l. 2634) tends to discount this opinion.
36 Commentary, p. 365.
37 Review of Henslowe's Diary, ed. W. W. Greg, in Mod. Lang. Rev., iv (1909), 411. Chambers arrives at his conclusion by correlating two entries in the Acts of the Privy Council (Acts. xxviii.33). The first, dated 15 Aug. 1597, records the imprisonment of some of the players who acted in The Isle of Dogs, “whereof one of them was not only an actor, but a maker of part of the said plaie.” The second shows that on 8 Oct. 1597, just before the lifting of the restraint on the theaters, imposed because of the play, the Privy Council issued two warrants to the keeper of the Marshalsea: one, an order “to release Gabrieli Spencer and Robert Shaa, stage players, out of prison”; the other, “a like warrant for the releasing of Benjamin Johnson.”
38 Ben Jonson, I (Oxford, 1925), 16.