[59] There is an edition of this by Miss Alice Luce, Literarhistorische Forschungen, 1897, but I am told it is out of print, and at any rate I have been unable to procure it. The extracts I give are transcripts from the British Museum copy, which is indexed thus: Discourse of Life and Death written in French by P. Mornay. Antonius a tragedie, written also in French by R. Garnier. Both done in English by the Countesse of Pembroke, 1592. This edition has generally been overlooked by historians of the drama, from Professor Ward to Professor Schelling (probably because it is associated with Mornay’s tract), and, as a rule, the translation of Garnier is said to have been first published in 1595. That and the subsequent editions bear a different title from the neglected first; the Tragedie of Antonie, instead of Antonius.
[60] That is, in the original version. Subsequently Daniel threw a later narrative passage describing Cleopatra’s parting from Caesarion and Rodon into scenic form, introduced it here, and followed it up with a discussion between Caesar and his advisers. This seems to be one of his attempts to impart more dramatic animation to his play, and it does so. But as dramatic animation is not what we are looking for, the improvement is doubtful.
[61] Dr. Grosart’s Edition.
[62] Kyd, ed. Boas. The Cornelia has also been edited by H. Gassner; but this edition, despite some considerable effort, I have been unable to procure.
[63] The last point is mentioned by Mr. Furness (Variorum Edition), who cites others, of which one occurs in Plutarch and the rest seem to me untenable or unimportant.
[65] Étude sur Garnier, 1880.
[66] I quote from Dodsley’s Old English Plays, ed. Hazlitt.
[67] Professor Ward calls attention to the stage direction(Act iii.): “Enter Sylla in triumph in his chair triumphant of gold, drawn by four Moors; before the chariot, his colours, his crest, his captains, his prisoners; ... bearing crowns of gold and manacled.” This, he points out, seems a reminiscence of the similar situation in Tamburlaine II., Act iv. sc. 3.: “Enter Tamberlaine drawn in his chariot by the Kings of Trebizon and Soria, with bits in their mouths, reins in his left hand, and in his right hand a whip with which he scourgeth them.” From this Professor Ward infers that Lodge’s play belongs approximately to the same date as Marlowe’s, possibly to 1587. It may be so, but there are some reasons for placing it later. The mixture of rhyme and prose instead of the exclusive use of blank verse would suggest that the influence of Tamburlaine was not very immediate. It has some points of contact with the Looking Glass which Lodge wrote along with Greene. It has the same didactic bent, though the purpose is political rather than moral, for the Wounds of Civill War enforces on its very title page the lesson that Elizabethans had so much at heart, the need of harmony in the State. Like the Looking Glass it deals rather with an historic transaction than with individual adventures, for it summarises the whole disastrous period of the conflict between Marius and Sulla. And like the Looking Glass it visualises this by scenes taken alike from dignified and low life, the latter even more out of place than the episodes of the Nineveh citizens and peasants in the joint work. In so far one is tempted to put the two together about 1591. And there is one detail that perhaps favours this view—the introduction of the Gaul with his bad English and worse French. In Greene’s James IV. (c. 1590) the assassin hired to murder Queen Dorothea is also a Frenchman who speaks broken English, and in that play such a personage is quite in keeping, violating the probabilities neither of time nor of place. It is, therefore, much more probable that, if he proved popular, Lodge would reproduce the same character inappropriately to catch the applause of the groundlings, than that Lodge should light on the first invention when that invention was quite unsuitable, and that Greene should afterwards borrow it and give it a fit setting. In the latter case we can only account for the absurdity by supposing that Lodge carried much further the anachronism in Cornelia of “the fierce and fiery-humour’d French.”
[68] Floor.