Representative English Comedies, v. 1. From the beginnings to Shakespeare

by Unknown

CRITICAL ESSAY

Date of the Play and its Authorship.—The title-page of the earliest known edition of Gammer Gurtons Nedle, printed by Thomas Colwell in 1575, states that this "right pithy, pleasaunt, and merie comedie" was "played on stage, not longe ago, in Christes Colledge in Cambridge," and that it was "made by Mr. S., Mr. of Art." There is here no intimation that any former edition had appeared. But the register of the Company of Stationers shows that in the year ending 22 July, 1563, Colwell paid 4d. for licence to print a play entitled Dyccon of Bedlam, etc.; and as "Diccon the Bedlam" is a most important character in Gammer Gurtons Nedle (his name, by good right, standing first in the list of dramatis personæ), there is a fair presumption that the piece for which Colwell obtained a licence in 1562-3 was in substance identical with that which he actually printed in 1575 under another title.[644] Whether Dyccon was really published in or soon after 1563, or whether Colwell for some reason or other allowed twelve years to elapse before carrying out his intention of publishing the play, cannot now be determined with certainty; the balance of probability seems, however, to be in favour of the latter supposition.[645]

The identity of "Mr. S., Master of Art," to whom the authorship of the comedy is ascribed on the title-page, appears to be discoverable by means of certain evidence contained in the bursar's books of Christ's College, for the knowledge of which the present editor is indebted to the kindness of the Master of that college, Dr. Peile. If we are right in identifying Gammer Gurtons Nedle with the play which was licenced to the printer in the year ending 22 July, 1563, the performance at Christ's College must have taken place before that date, for it was not the custom to send a play to the press before it had been acted. Now, in the academic year ending Michaelmas, 1563, there is no record of any dramatic representation having been given in the college. In the preceding year, 1561-62, the accounts mention certain sums "spent at Mr. Chatherton's playe." The person referred to is William Chaderton, then Fellow of Christ's; but, as his name does not begin with S, this entry does not concern our inquiry. In 1560-61 there is no mention of any play; but in 1559-60 we find the two following items:—

"To the viales at Mr. Chatherton's plaie, 2s. 6d."

"Spent at Mr. Stevenson's plaie, 5s."

As no evidence to the contrary has been found, it appears highly probable that the "Mr. S." of Gammer Gurtons Nedle was William Stevenson, Fellow of Christ's College from 1559 to 1561. It is further probable that he is identical with the person of the same name who was Fellow of the college from 1551 to 1554,[646] and who appears in the bursar's accounts as the author of a play acted in the year 1553-54. It may be presumed that he was deprived of his fellowship under Queen Mary, and was reinstated under Elizabeth. Whether Stevenson's play of 1559-60 was the same which had been given six years before, or whether it was a new one, there is no evidence to show. The former supposition, however, derives some plausibility from the fact that, as several critics have pointed out, the allusions to church matters in Gammer Gurtons Nedle seem to indicate a pre-Elizabethan date for its composition.[647] At all events it seems likely that the play of 1553-54 was in English, for the accounts speak of a Latin play (managed by another Fellow, named Persevall) as having been performed in the same year.

Of Stevenson's history nothing is known, beyond the bare facts that he was born at Hunwick in Durham, matriculated as a sizar in November, 1546, became B.A. in 1549-50, M.A. in 1553, and B.D. in 1560. He was ordained deacon in London in 1552, appointed prebendary of Durham in January, 1560-61, and died in 1575, the year in which Gammer Gurton was printed.

It may at first sight appear to be a formidable objection to Stevenson's authorship of the play, that the title-page of the edition of 1575 speaks of the representation at Cambridge as having taken place "not longe ago." But Colwell had had the MS. in his possession ever since 1563; and there is nothing unlikely in the supposition that the wording of the original title-page was retained without any other alteration than the change in the name of the piece. The title-page, it may be remarked, is undated, the tablet at the foot, which is apparently intended to receive the date, being left blank. This fact may possibly indicate that when the printing of the volume was begun it was anticipated that its publication might have to be delayed for some time.[648] The appearance of the title-page suggests the possibility that it may have been altered after being set up: "Gammer gur-| tons Nedle" in small italic may have been substituted for Diccon of | Bedlam in type as large as that of the other words in the same lines. In Colwell's edition of Ingelend's Disobedient Child (printed 1560) the title-page has the same woodcut border, but the name of the piece is in type of the same size as that of the preceding and following words. As this woodcut does not occur in any other of Colwell's publications now extant, it seems reasonable to infer that Gammer Gurton was printed long before 1575.

Former Attributions of Authorship.—It is necessary to say something about the two persons to whom the authorship of Gammer Gurtons Nedle has hitherto been attributed—Dr. John Bridges, who was in succession Dean of Salisbury and Bishop of Oxford, and Dr. John Still, who was made Bishop of Bath and Wells in 1593. It is curious that both the distinguished churchmen who have been credited with the composition of this very unclerical play received the degree of D.D. in the same year in which it was published.

The evidence on which it has been attempted to assign the play to John Bridges is contained in certain passages of the "Martin Marprelate" tracts. In the first of these, the Epistle, published in 1588, the author addresses Bridges in the following terms:—

"You have bin a worthy writer, as they say, of a long time; your first book was a proper enterlude, called Gammar Gurtons Needle. But I think that this trifle, which sheweth the author to have had some witte and invention in him, was none of your doing, because your books seeme to proceede from the braynes of a woodcocke, as having neither wit nor learning."

In his second pamphlet, the Epitome, "Martin Marprelate" twice alludes to the dean's supposed authorship of the play, in a manner which conveys the impression that he really believed in it. None of "Martin's" adversaries seem to have contradicted his statement on this point, though Cooper in particular was at great pains to refute the pamphleteer's "slanders" on other dignitaries. It must be admitted that everything that is known of Bridges is decidedly favourable to the supposition that he might have written comedy in his youth. His voluminous Defence of the Government of the Church of England abounds in sprightly quips, often far from dignified in tone; and his controversial opponents complained, with some justice, of his "buffoonery." He is recorded by Harrington to have been a prolific writer of verse; and that his interests were not exclusively theological appears from the fact that he is said to have translated, in 1558, three of Machiavelli's Discourses, having previously resided in Italy. The only reason for rejecting "Martin Marprelate's" attribution of Gammer Gurtons Nedle to him is that he was not "Mr. S.," and that he belonged not to Christ's College, but to Pembroke. But as he was resident at Cambridge in 1560 (having taken the degree of A.M. in that year), it is quite possible that he may have assisted William Stevenson in the composition or revision of the play.

The name of Bishop Still is so familiar as that of the reputed author of Gammer Gurton, that many readers will be surprised to learn that this attribution was first proposed in 1782 by Isaac Reed in his enlarged edition of Baker's Biographia Dramatica.[649] Reed discovered in the accounts of Christ's College an entry referring to a play acted at Christmas, 1567 (not 1566, as he states); and as this is the latest entry of the kind occurring before 1575, he plausibly inferred that it related to the representation of Gammer Gurtons Nedle, which in Colwell's title-page was stated to have taken place "not long ago." The only Master of Arts of the college then living, whose surname began with S, that he was able to find, was John Still, whom he therefore confidently identified with the "Mr. S." who is said to have written Gammer Gurton. If our arguments in favour of Stevenson's authorship be accepted, Reed's conclusion of course falls to the ground; and the character of Bishop Still, as it is known from the testimony of several of his personal friends, renders it incredible that he can ever have distinguished himself as a comic writer. The characteristic quality by which he seems chiefly to have impressed his contemporaries was his extraordinary seriousness. Archbishop Parker, in 1573, speaks of him as "a young man," but "better mortified than some other forty or fifty years of age"; and another eulogist commends "his staidness and gravity." If Still's seriousness had been, like that of many grave and dignified persons, in any eminent degree qualified by wit, there would surely have been some indication of the fact in the vivaciously written account of him given by Harrington. But neither there nor elsewhere is there any evidence that he ever made a joke, that he ever wrote a line of verse, or that he had any interests other than those connected with his sacred calling. A fact which has often been remarked upon as strange by those who have accepted the current theory of Still's authorship of Gammer Gurton is that in 1592, when he was vice-chancellor of Cambridge, his signature, followed by those of other heads of houses, was appended to a memorial praying that the queen would allow a Latin play to be substituted for the English play which she had commanded to be represented by the university actors on the occasion of her approaching visit. The memorialists urged that the performance of English plays had not been customary in the university, being thought "nothing beseminge our students." It is not necessary to attribute much importance to this incident, but, so far as it has any bearing on the question at all, it goes to support the conclusion, already certain on other grounds, that the author of Gammer Gurtons Nedle cannot have been John Still.[650]

Place in the History of Comedy.—In attempting to assign the place of Gammer Gurtons Nedle in the history of the English drama, we should remember that it is the sole surviving example of the vernacular college comedies—probably more numerous than is commonly suspected—produced during the sixteenth century, and that most of the features which appear to us novel were doubtless the result of a gradual development. So far as our knowledge goes, however, it is the second English comedy conforming to the structural type which modern Europe has learned from the example of the Roman playwrights. The choice of the old "septenary" measure, in which most of the dialogue is written, may have been due to recollection of the Terentian iambic tetrameter catalectic, just as the rugged Alexandrines of Ralph Roister Doister were probably suggested by the Latin comic senarius. But while in Udall's play the matter as well as the form is largely of classical origin, the plot and the characters of Gammer Gurtons Nedle are purely native. Its material is drawn at first hand from observation of English life; its literary ancestry, so far as it has any, is mainly to be traced through John Heywood's interludes to the farces of the fifteenth-century mysteries, of which one brilliant example is preserved in the Secunda Pastorum of the Towneley cycle.

The artistic merit of the piece has often been unduly depreciated, from causes which it is not difficult to understand. The very rudimentary kind of humour which turns on physically disgusting suggestions is no longer amusing to educated people, and there is so much of this poor stuff in the play that the real wit of some scenes, and the clever portraiture of character throughout, have not received their fair share of acknowledgment. Most people who have lived long in an English village will recognise Gammer Gurton and Dame Chat as capital studies from life, though their modern representatives are not quite so foul-mouthed in their wrath as the gossips of the sixteenth century; and Hodge, whose name has become the conventional designation of the English farm labourer, is an equally lifelike figure. The brightly drawn character of Diccon represents a type which the working of the poor laws, and many social changes, have banished from our villages. But old people who were living down to the middle of this century had many stories to tell of the crazy wanderer, who was recognised as too feather-brained to be set to any useful work, but who was a welcome guest in cottage homes, and whose pranks were looked on with kindly toleration by well-disposed people, even when they led to inconvenient consequences.[651] The game of cross-purposes brought about by Diccon's machinations, which forms the plot, is humorously imagined, and worked out with some skill. It does not, of course, rise above the level of farce; but there is real comedy, not quite of the lowest order, in the scene where the fussy self-importance of Dr. Rat, bursting with impotent rage at his well-merited discomfiture, is confronted with the calm impartiality of "Master Baily"—the steward of the lord of the manor, apparently, and the representative of temporal authority in the village. The common verdict that Gammer Gurtons Nedle is a work of lower rank than Ralph Roister Doister is perhaps on the whole not unjust; but the later play has some merits of its own, and, as the first known attempt to present a picture of contemporary rustic life in the form of a regular comedy, it may be admitted to represent a distinct advance in the development of English dramatic art.

Dialect.—The treatment of dialect in the play demands a word of notice. All the characters, except the curate and the baily, who belong to the educated class, and Diccon, who may be presumed to have come down from a better social station than that of the village people, use a kind of speech which is clearly intended to represent the dialect of the southwestern counties. It is not always very correct; the writer, for instance, seems to have thought that cham stood for "am" as well as "I am," so that he makes Hodge say "cham I not." Stevenson, as we have seen, was of northern birth; and, as a line or two in the same dialect is found in Ralph Roister Doister, there is some reason for believing that the dialect of the stage rustic was already a matter of established convention.[652] The word pes, a hassock, which occurs in the play, is peculiar, so far as is known, to the East Anglian dialect, and may have been picked up by the author in his walks about Cambridge. Whether derived from Gammer Gurton or from plays of earlier date, the conventional dialect of the stage rustic kept its place throughout the Elizabethan period. Shakspere's rustics, as is well known, mostly use the southwestern forms, not those current in the poet's native Warwickshire.

The Present Text.—The text of the present edition is taken from the copy of Colwell's edition (1575) in the Bodleian Library. The original spelling has been preserved, except that j and v are substituted for i and u when used as consonants, and u for v when used as a vowel. Obvious misprints have been corrected, but are mentioned in the footnotes (except in the case of mere errors of word-division, which it seemed unnecessary to notice). The punctuation, and the use of initial capitals, have been conformed to modern practice. Another copy of Colwell's edition is in the British Museum. The play was reprinted in 1661, and, with modernised spelling, in Dodsley's Old Plays, and in the new edition of Dodsley by W. C. Hazlitt. An excellent edition, with the original spelling, was published in 1897 by Professor J. M. Manly, in vol. ii. of his Specimens of the Pre-Shaksperean Drama. Several of the readings which are given in Professor Manly's text or footnotes as those of Colwell's edition do not agree with those either of the London or the Oxford copy. In the footnotes to the present edition reference to Colwell's, Hazlitt's, and Manly's editions are indicated by Ed. 1575, H. and M., respectively.

Henry Bradley.