The Tragedie of Gorboduc - To see the hugy heaps of our unhaps

King Gorboduc, his head heavy from wearing the crown of England, divides his kingdom between his two sons.  One son quickly murders the other; the grieving mother (!) murders the surviving son; the outraged populace rises to murder the queen and poor, hapless King Gorboduc; England collapses into civil war. 

This sounds so exciting!  And look at all of those hints of later plays, of the history plays and King Lear.  The Tragedie of Gorboduc (1562, pub. 1565) is not exciting.  It is static and anti-dramatic.  It barely has characters. The action is presented in the dumb shows that lead each act, and in messenger speeches.  The play is mostly a mix of political speeches, advice to the king and so on, and messenger speeches.

The model is Seneca curiously mixed with English morality plays.  Seneca’s characters declaim in long set-speeches, but with an emotional intensity, building to pathos or horror, that is absent in Gorboduc, which was written by a couple of lawyers, Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, for a performance before an audience of lawyers.  The warning about the dangers of a weak monarchy are the real point, the real plot, of the play.  No surprise that it was published relatively soon after its performance, that a particular audience wanted the text.

I know this sounds dull, and I do not know how it would be to sit through the play, but I found it highly readable.  I am now used to theater more undramatic than this, all kinds of crazy anti-plays, and I will note that the most produced play in America last season was Heidi Schrek’s What the Constitution Means to Me (2017).

A few scenes get close to later drama.  The queen has a two-page soliloquy about murdering her own son where she would, in Seneca or Racine, whip herself up into a frenzy.  Maybe we in the audience are horrified or somehow sympathetic:

Never, O wretch, this womb conceived thee;

Nor never bode I painful throes for thee.

Changeling to me thou art, and not my child,

Nor to no wight that spark of pity knew.

Ruthless, unkind, monster of nature’s work…  (IV.1, 67-71)

The queen is more a type than a character – she has barely been on stage before this scene – and the ideas in this speech do not really develop.  But I can see the future in it.  I can imagine Marlowe or Shakespeare reading it and wanting to fix it.  I can also imagine a less anarchically commercial English theater developing in a more Racine-like direction.

Gorboduc is the first published English play written in blank verse.  This is really why we read it.  Henry Howard’s partial translation of The Aeneid in blank verse had been published just a few years earlier.  The whole point of the exercise is that Roman poetry did not rhyme, so how can that be duplicated in English and still be interesting poetry?  Howard’s Virgil was a success, wonderful stuff, and I am not surprised that these two educated lawyers borrowed it for their pseudo-Seneca.  Their blank verse is competent, and they were right, it creates a kind of speech that sounds natural but lends itself to elaboration, that is pleasant to hear and read and not so bad for an actor to memorize.  Sackville and Norton great virtue is clarity, but they have their poetic moments:

And ye, O gods, send us the welcome death,

To shed our blood in field, and leave us not

In loathsome life to linger out our days,

To see the hugy heaps of our unhaps,

That now roll down upon the wretched land…  (V.ii, 105-10)

Almost an Anglo-Saxon poetic quality in those lines.  Compared to what Marlowe or Webster or Shakespeare will do with blank verse, sure, sure, no comparison.

I read Gorboduc in a 1974 collection titled Minor Elizabethan Tragedies which reprints a 1910 volume titled Minor Elizabethan Drama.

Next week I will glance at Stephen Greenblatt’s new biography of Christopher Marlowe (which I have not read) and poke at the idea of authorship. Then in two weeks we will begin reading Christopher Marlowe with what feels to me like the early, even unformed, Dido, Queen of Carthage.