Russell - STUART ACADEMIC DRAMA: an edition of three university plays

Routledge Library Editions: Renaissance Drama

Volume 13

STUART ACADEMIC DRAMA

An Edition of Three University Plays

Edited by
David L. Russell

First published in 1987 by Garland Publishing, Inc.

This edition first published in 2017
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1987 David L. Russell

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ISBN: 978-1-138-71372-7 (Set)
ISBN: 978-1-315-19807-1 (Set) (ebk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-23988-3 (Volume 13) (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-29461-2 (Volume 13) (ebk)

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Stuart Academic Drama An Edition of Three University Plays

edited by
David L. Russell

1987 David L. Russell
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stuart academic drama.

(The Renaissance imagination; v. 34)
Bibliography: p.
1. College and school drama, English. 2. English
drama17th century. I. Russell, David L., 1946 .
II. Series.
PR1259.C57S78 1987 822'.3'08 87-7451
ISBN 0-8240-8414-4

Printed on acid-free, 250-year-life paper
Manufactured in the United States of America

STUART ACADEMIC DRAMA: AN EDITION OF THREE UNIVERSITY PLAYS

transcribed and edited
by

DAVID L. RUSSELL

The texts of the three Stuart plays in this edition have not before been transcribed and published, but have remained in an obscure commonplace book for over three centuries. While we can gather very few facts about these plays, we can with some assurance ascribe them to one of the English universities and each is indicative of a distinctly different influence on the Renaissance academic drama. Heteroclitanomalonomia is part of a minor, but interesting, subgenre we can call the academic grammar play. It demonstrates the predominance of language or rhetoric studies in the period and its very subject is of purely academic interest. Gigantomachia displays the continuing interest of the Renaissance in classical mythology. And A Christmas Messe follows a more homely tradition, a farcical personification of the mundane. Yet all three contain a similar plot structure -- a struggle between two equally strong forces, both partly right and partly wrong in their claims, and, except in the case of Gigantomachia , a resolution coming from a non-partisan arbiter. ( Gigantomachia 's "arbiter" is Jove's thunderbolt--brute force, and hardly unbiased.) All three are allegorical to varying extents, albeit their messages rarely exceed the frivolous. Two contain jibes against the freshmen and various other topical allusions which substantiate their university origin. Gigantomachia 's origin is much less certain, and, except for some similarities to other academic dramas in its approach, and some minor pedagogical references, there is nothing concrete on which to establish it as a college play. But outside of the universities, only the Inns of Court can lay any real claim to Gigantomachia , and there we are on much less solid ground. Drama at the Inns of Court was characteristically much more closely aligned to the classical lmodels, following a five-act structure, using blank verse, limiting the number of characters appearing on the stage, admitting no on-stage violence, and generally observing the unities. That Gigantomachia violates all these premises argues against such an origin.

The manuscripts of these plays are to be found in the Folger Shakespeare Library Ms. J.a.1., a commonplace book containing seven entertainments. In their composition, and surely accident more than logic brought them together under one cover. Since our province is English academic drama, and since Boot and Spur contains neither any academic reference nor suggests the interests of the still largely classical education provided by the universities, it has been eliminated from this edition. As a prose allegorical drama about footwear without any hint of a reference to university life, it is somewhat far removed from the poetic drama and classical overtones demonstrated by the three pieces included here.

A. Wigfall Green, The Inns of Court and Early English Drama (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1965), p. 19.

"Elizabethan and Seventeenth-Century Play Manuscripts," PMLA , 50 (1935), 687-99.

The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (1941-56; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon, 1949-68), V, 1345.

One published book and one unpublished dissertation constitute the principal works on English Renaissance university drama. The first is F. S. Boas' University Drama in the Tudor Age , a long-admired study; the second is Carl Stratman's "Dramatic Performances at Oxford and Cambridge, 1603-1642," intended to pick up where Boas left off. There are a handful of articles scattered about scholarly journals, G. C. Moore Smith being among the more prominent contributors. Lip service is paid by others in assorted historical surveys, but the field has been largely neglected--and particularly in recent years. Those mentioned above all date from the first half of the twentieth century.

There is, perhaps, ail all-too-obvious explanation for this apparent oversight. The quality of the university drama is unquestionably second-rate (even this, in some cases, is inordinate praise). The themes are didactic, the plots imitative, the verse doggerel--by and large, the university drama was amateurish and uninnovative. Marlowe may have done some inspired writing while at Cambridge, and Lyly was strongly influenced by the college drama, but the English universities were hardly the fountainheads of the nation's literary achievement -- and certainly not of its dramatic achievement. But, after all, the universities did not exactly encourage the drama, and, on occasion, did prohibit certain forms of it (more will be said of this below). The value of plays, as far as the universities were concerned, was chiefly didactic--whether they be religious and moral (as they were especially in early Tudor times) or pedagogical, introducing students to the venerated classical works and aiding their instruction in rhetoric and declamation. All this served to inhibit academic dramatic development, for the limitations would certainly discourage any dramatist of talent and originality. Even when the recreative purpose of drama gained favor in academe--at least by the turn of the seventeenth century--the college authorities must still have rigidly restricted the scholar-dramatists, for the English Renaissance universities were seldom accused of fanning flames of intellectual stimulation. However, if much of the blame for the poor quality of the academic drama must be placed on conservative university authorities, it must not be forgotten that if the London city fathers had had their way, there would have been no drama in England at all.