Ralph Roister Doister, among the first regular English comedies - Then to our recorder with toodleloodle poop

Ralph Roister Doister (written c. 1550, published 1567) once had the distinction of being the first comedy in English.  Please see this 1911 edition of the play calling it “the first regular English comedy.”  I do not know what 19th century critics meant by “regular” but this was a 19th century idea, as scholars began to work seriously on figuring which plays survived from the 16th century, that Ralph Roister Doister was the first English comedy.  It is not the first, regular or otherwise.  Let’s return to this issue.

A braggart soldier type (“I am sorry God made me so comely, doubtless,” Act I, Scene ii), the title character, decides, urged on by a parasite type, Matthew Merrygreek, to woo a widow, who is engaged and not very interested.  The big comic misunderstanding involves the mispunctuation of a love letter.  The result is a battle between the widow and her maids, armed with their “tools” (for sewing and weaving and so on) versus Roister Doister, a pail on his head, and his idiot servants.  Perhaps there is a goose involved:

Tibet Talkapace:                                   Shall I go fetch our goose?

Dame Custance:  What to do?

TT:  To yonder captain I will turn her loose:

An she gape and hiss at him, as she doth at me,

I durst jeapord my hand she will make him flee.  (IV. viii)

The battle scene is a bit vague, with lots of room for whatever gags the director can think of.  As you see, the play is written in competent rhyming couplets.

The braggart soldier, and more or less the plot is from Miles Gloriosus (2^nd cent. BCE) by Plautus.  The parasite is from English morality plays.  The servants, the goose, the songs, the names, and the whole tone of the thing are likely from English popular plays, whatever touring groups were performing at fairs.

The names are wonderful.  Tristram Trusty, Margery Mumblecrust, Tibet Talkapace.  I’ve remembered Ralph Roister Doister’s name since I first saw it in some potted history of English theater nearly forty years ago.  The first English comedy should be titled Ralph Roister Doister.

The domestic detail is also a delight.  Here are the maids early on, at work:

Margery Mumblecrust: Well, ye will sit down to your work anon, I trust.

Tibet Talkapace: Soft fire maketh sweet malt, good Madge Mumblecrust.

MM: And sweet malt maketh jolly good ale for the nones.

TT: Which will slide down the lane without any bones.   [Sings.

Old brown bread-crusts must have much good mumbling,

But good ale down your throat hath good easy tumbling.  (I.iii)

The play is slackly paced giving plenty of its time to watching the maids sew and sing.  It is not exactly digressive, but like a musical.  Let’s stop and have a song or whatever:

With every woman he is in some love’s pang.

Then up to our lute at midnight, twangledom twang;

Then twang with our sonnets, and twang with our dumps,

And heigho from our heart, as heavy as lead lumps;

Then to our recorder with toodleloodle poop,

And the howlet out of an ivy bush should whoop…  (II.i)

Nicholas Udall, the likely author, was a schoolmaster.  He likely wrote this play for performance by his schoolboys.  Maybe he was the first schoolmaster to rewrite a Plautus play for his students, although I doubt it.  He may have been the first to make his rewritten Plautus so inventively English.  It could easily be much, much less English.  The Englishness is the best part.

The title character is a direct ancestor of Falstaff, although, remembering the pail on Roister Doister’s head, the Falstaff of Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff in the laundry basket.

The play is also a little step towards the creation of the professional boy’s companies, the aspect of Elizabethan theater I find hardest to imagine.  Fourteen year-old boys performing plays at the level of The Alchemist, how did that work?  But I can imagine them doing Ralph Roister Doister.

Next Monday I will write about another early boy’s comedy, and is it ever, Gammer Gurton’s Needle.

A readalong of Christopher Marlowe and friends - I fear they know we sent the poison'd broth

Please join me this fall in reading the plays of Christopher Marlowe and some of his contemporaries, if that sounds enjoyable to you.  The more I have thought about it, the more enjoyable it sounds to me.  I have many questions.

Below is an attempt at a schedule, with a play every two weeks, slower than when we read all of the Greek plays.  In September, though, I will blow through some early plays the precede the commercial London theater.  They are a bit shorter and frankly I doubt that anyone else will want to read them, so let’s get on to Marlowe, right?  Marlowe is outstanding.

I hope to put up a post every Monday (the dates below), with the alternating posts about some related topic: another play, perhaps even one by Shakespeare, or poetry, or criticism, or even in theory a performance although that does not seem likely.

I think of these works more as poems than as plays; this will mostly be an exercise in poetics and literary history.  But there is no reason anyone else has to read along for that.

Early Precursors
Sep. 1	1552	Ralph Roister Doister	Nicholas Udall
Sep. 8	1553	Gammer Gurton's Needle	authorship much disputed
Sep. 15	1561	Gorbuduc	Thomas Norton & Thomas Sackville
Marlowe & Co.
Sep. 29	1587	Dido, Queen of Carthage	Christopher Marlowe
Oct. 6	1587	Tamburlaine, Parts I & II	Christopher Marlowe
Oct. 20	1587	The Spanish Tragedy	Thomas Kyd
Nov. 3	1589	The Jew of Malta	Christopher Marlowe
Nov. 17	1591	Arden of Faversham	???
Dec. 1	1592	Doctor Faustus	Christopher Marlowe
Dec. 15	1592	Edward the Second	Christopher Marlowe
Dec. 29	1593	The Massacre at Paris	Christopher Marlowe

The years are all from the chronological table in the back of The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, 1990, eds. A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway.  Most of these years are marked with an asterisk meaning “best guess” so please use them skeptically.  The year of The Spanish Tragedy is especially convenient – plausible but convenient – because paired up with Tamburlaine it creates a handy Year When Everything Changed, a concentrated explosion of theatrical innovation.  But maybe it did not happen.

The first London commercial theater (The Theatre) opened in 1576, the next few in 1577.  One of my puzzles is what happened in the ten years before the Tamburlaine / Spanish Tragedy revolution.  Barely more than a dozen plays survive from that period, a number of them closet dramas, not written for performance.  What the heck was on those stages?

Some of what else was going on:

1580s	Astrophel and Stella	Philip Sidney
	An Apology for Poetry	Philip Sidney
	Caelica	Fulke Greville
1590	Henry VI, parts 1 to 3	William Shakespeare, et. al.
	The Two Gentlemen of Verona	William Shakespeare
	The Faerie Queene I-III	Edmund Spenser
1591	The Taming of the Shrew	William Shakespeare
	The Comedy of Errors	William Shakespeare
	Richard III	William Shakespeare
	Titus Andronicus	William Shakespeare
	Complaints	Edmund Spenser
	Summer's Last Will and Testament	Thomas Nashe
1592	Delia and the Complaint of Roasmund	Sanuel Daniel
	Pierce Penniless	Thomas Nashe
1593	Idea: The Shepherd's Garland	Michael Drayton
	Venus and Adonis	William Shakespeare
	Hero and Leander	Christopher Marlowe
	The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia	Philip Sidney

 

The sonnet craze – Sidney, Greville, Daniel, Drayton – is at its peak.  Lots of great poetry of all types, really, but oh so many sonnets.  Then there is the upstart, catching up with Marlowe fast.  I remind myself that Shakespeare was two months younger than Marlowe.  The theaters are closed because of the plague in 1592, which is why Shakespeare and possibly Marlowe switched from plays to best-selling narrative poems (although Hero and Leander was not published until 1598).

Please feel free to offer corrections, major or minor omissions, or really any comment at all.  I have read a lot of this stuff before but have no other expertise.

In December I will think about what happens next.  But in the meantime let’s have some laughs with the hilarious comedies of Marlowe and pals.  The title quotation is from, where else, The Jew of Malta, Act 4, Scene 1.

A draft Elizabethan Not Shakespeare syllabus

In case yesterday’s invitation was a bit abstract, here is my current sense of a twenty-play Elizabethan Not Shakespeare syllabus that I would like to investigate beginning next fall.  I’ve read twelve of them.

Please note that almost every date below should be preceded by “c.”  A few are likely quite wrong.

Ralph Roister Doister (1552), Nicholas Udall

Gammer Gurton's Needle (1553), authorship much disputed – start with two influential pre-Elizabethan comedies written for academic settings.

Gorbuduc (1561), Thomas Norton & Thomas Sackville – the first English tragedy in blank verse, performed before young Queen Elizabeth.

Somewhere in the mid-1570s permanent theaters begin to succeed, and it is tempting to see what might have been on those early stages, but let’s jump to Marlowe, the great young innovator.

Dido, Queen of Carthage (1587), Christopher Marlowe – not that you would know from this one, not that I remember.

Tamburlaine, Parts I & II (1587), Christopher Marlowe – cheating a bit, putting the two plays together.  Now things are starting to get good.

The Spanish Tragedy (1587), Thomas Kyd – the first revenge tragedy, very exciting.

The Jew of Malta (1589), Christopher Marlowe

Arden of Faversham (1591), ??? – more cheating, since this may actually be Shakespeare, not Not Shakespeare.  Or it’s Marlowe.  Or anyone.

Doctor Faustus (1592), Christopher Marlowe

Edward the Second (1592), Christopher Marlowe

Selimus (1592), Robert Greene – one of many, many Tamburlaine knockoffs.  Static and dull, I assume.

The Massacre at Paris (1593), Christopher Marlowe – Oddly, this is the only play I will mention of which I have seen a performance, an almost hilariously gory French adaptation.  It is not a good play, but it is sure an interesting one.

The Old Wife's Tale (1593), George Peele – A parody of a genre of fairy tale romance plays none of which are extant, meaning this might be gibberish.

Every Man in His Humour (1598), Ben Jonson – I do not remember this as a great play, but young Jonson is inventing a new kind of comedy that will pay off in his later masterpieces.

The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599), Thomas Dekker – An early “city comedy.” 

Antonio's Revenge (1600), John Marston – revenge!

The Tragedy of Hoffmann (1602), Henry Chettle – revenge!

Sejanus His Fall (1603), Ben Jonson – Ambitious Jonson wrote a couple of serious Roman tragedies.  I remember them as weak, but I’ll give this one another chance.

A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603), Thomas Heywood – A domestic melodrama, in case you were wondering why those were not popular in the old days.  Oh, they were.

The Malcontent (1603), John Marston – Really very early Jacobean, but it let’s me end the list on an unusual masterpiece, featuring one of the period’s great characters.

What was going on in that five-year gap after Marlowe’s death in 1593?  I will have to investigate more.  I know one thing.  If Shakespeare, like Marlowe, had died at age 29, perhaps knifed in the same tavern fight, he would be remembered as the promising young author of Richard III.  Over the next five years he became the greatest playwright in British history.  The greatest writer?  Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Julius Caesar, Falstaff, his sonnets.  He became the center of gravity that turns everyone else into Not Shakespeare, into Shakespeare’s great predecessor or disciple or rival, something defined against Shakespeare.

I am still tempted, I don’t know, by a Greatest Hits approach, which would drop a dozen of the above and continue on into the 17th century with Jonson’s great comedies, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, The Atheist’s Tragedy, some selection of Thomas Middleton, those two magnificent John Webster plays, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, ending with the collapse of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore a decade before the Puritans put the exhausted, decadent London theaters out of their misery.

Not Shakespeare - a preliminary, semi-formed invitation to read plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries

Here’s something I’ve been wanting to do.  I’ve been wanting to return to the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson and so on.  The Spanish Tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi, The Knight of the Burning Pestle,  Bartholomew Fair.  It has been a while since I have read them, twenty years or more.  Plays are well-suited for ongoing readalongs, so in the spirit of reading the Greek and Roman plays a couple years ago, why not invite anyone interested to join in.

I have been calling this idea Not Shakespeare.  What am I trying to do?

1.  The plays are so good.  Many of them.  I want to read them again.

2.  I want to learn more about the technical aspects of the innovations of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, especially the poetry and structure.  Things moved very fast for forty years.

3.  Genre, too, which appears to be where a lot of the academic attention has gone (as with fiction generally).  It is here that I am most tempted to read bad plays, and not just revenge tragedies, for which I have a strong taste.

4. I want to put a personality of some kind on more of these writers.  Some of them are easy.  Just read The Duchess of Malfi and you know John Webster well enough to get Tom Stoppard’s jokes about him in Shakespeare in Love.  I think I know Marlowe and Jonson.  But other major writers are ciphers, Thomas Middleton especially.  I don’t know if the answer is to read more of the writer, read more about the writer, or think more about them.  I hope not the latter.  I should say I mean know them as artists, not whether or not they were nice people.  Maybe I should also say that this is all a fiction, a creative collaboration between the writer and the reader.

Still, Middleton, who was that guy?  If you have read a lot of Shakespeare you have likely read a lot more Middleton than you realize.  A good fifth item for this list would be to learn more about how these writers collaborated, but I fear that is hopeless.  We wish we knew.  The computer programs can only get us so far.

The logistics of Not Shakespeare are a little different than the Greek plays.  The Elizabethan and Jacobean plays are longer and the English is more difficult than the modern translated English I read with the Greeks.  A play a week with the Greeks, but I think a play every two weeks makes more sense with the Not Shakespeares.  Plus that will give me more time to read other things.  The poetry of the time – John Donne, George Herbert, the sonnet craze, much more – is also tempting me.  And I want to read some secondary works, although how far that will go I do not know.

It is tempting, and likely best for a readalong, to read the Twenty Greatest Hits.  But I want to go a little deeper.  How about twenty Elizabethan plays to begin, actually Elizabethan, stopping in 1603?  Marlowe, The Spanish Tragedy, Jonson finding his voice, new genres, many crazy revenge tragedies.

My method was to see what New Mermaids has in print, and then poke around at Broadview and Penguin Classics, and then add this and that.  George Chapman and John Fletcher seem to be out of fashion in the classroom for some reason.

Twenty Elizabethan plays in forty weeks, beginning in September, how does that sound?  In August I will rewrite this post and put up a timeline.  I do not expect anyone to read all, or most, of the plays.  Someone may well be inspired to read Shakespeare rather than Not Shakespeare, which is understandable.

I am asking for advice in some sense.  Don’t miss this play; that Cambridge Companion is the really good one; so-and-so’s essay is way better than T. S. Eliot’s.  I don’t know.  Anything. 

This is also a method to make myself write more.  For some reason a committed structure, however artificial, does the trick.