A.D. 1561] SACKVILLE AND NORTON 331 those old entertainers a complaint raised also against the first professional actors in Elizabeth's day, that they profaned the holy days. "Goddis halidays non observantur honeste, For unthrifty pleyes in eis regnant manifeste." From that time till the first years of Elizabeth's reign there had been itinerant performers, acting as retainers of the nobility. In the north, in 1556, there were six or seven persons acting in the livery of Sir Francis Leek. Sir Robert Dudley, afterwards Earl of Leicester, had such theatrical servants, and wrote in April, 1559, to the Earl of Shrewsbury, Lord President of the North, for their licence to play in Yorkshire, they having already leave to play in divers other shires. Mary suppressed plays which contained attacks upon her Church, and gave impulse to the production of miracle-plays. In 1556 the "Passion of Christ" was acted at Greyfriars in London, before the Lord Mayor and Privy Council. It was repeated in 1557, and in the same year, on St. Olave's night, the "Life of St. Olave" was acted in his church in Silver Street. Elizabeth on her accession required the licensing of plays and interludes, with refusal of licence to those touching questions of religion and government. Court entertainments had been placed in 1546 under the management of Sir Thomas Cawarden, probably the first Master of the Revels; and at Christmas there was a Lord of Misrule. At Christmas in 1551, Holinshed says that in the place of the Lord of Misrule "there was, by order of the Council, a wise gentleman and learned, named George Ferrers, appointed to that office for this year, who being of better credit and estimation than commonly his predecessors had been before, received all his commissions and warrants by the name of Master of the King's Pastimes." But Sir Thomas Cawarden was Master of the Revels-or, in official language, Magister Jocorum, Revellorum et Mascorum-until 1560, when he died, and was succeeded by Sir Thomas Benger. Elizabeth reduced the cost of her amusements. Mary had paid two or three thousand a year in salaries to her theatrical and musical establishment; Elizabeth reduced this, but still had salaried interlude players, musicians, and a keeper of bears and mastiffs. The gentlemen and children of the Queen's chapel were also employed as entertainers. At Christmas, 1561, many of the queen's council were present at the festivities of the Inner Temple; and the Lord of Misrule rode through London in complete harness, gilt, with a hundred horse and gentlemen riding gorgeously with chains of gold, and their horses goodly trapped. The play produced on this occasion was Sackville and Norton's Gorboduc; and on the 18th of January it was presented upon a great decorated scaffold in the queen's hall in Westminster by the gentlemen of the Inner Temple, after a masque. An unauthorised edition of it was published in 1565, as The Tragedy of Gorboduc. Our first printed tragedy appeared, therefore, when Shakespeare was one year old. “Ralph Roister Doister,” our earliest comedy, was first printed in 1566, when Shakespeare was two years old. Thus Shakespeare and the English drama came into the world together. On the title-page of this unauthorised edition of "Gorboduc" it is said that the three first acts were by Norton. The authorised edition did not appear until 1571, and in that the name of the play appeared as Ferrex and Porrex. The argument was taken from Geoffrey of Monmouth's "History of British Kings" (ch. iii. § 8), and was chosen as a fit lesson for Englishmen in the first year of the reign of Elizabeth. It was a call to Englishmen to cease from strife among themselves. and knit themselves into one people, obedient to one undisputed rule. Each act is opened with a masque, or dumb-show ; and as the play was modelled on the Tragedies of Seneca, there was at the close of every act except the last a chorus. Except for the choruses, Sackville and Norton used the newly-introduced blank verse as the measure of their tragedy. Hitherto this measure had been little used by us, and never in an original work of any magnitude. The plot of “Gorboduc" is very simple. Act I.-After a dumb-show of the bundle of sticks which could be broken only when they were no longer bound together, Videna, the wife of King Gorboduc, tells Ferrex, her eldest son, with "griefful plaint," that his father intends to deprive him of his birthright by equal division of his kingdom between both his sons. King Gorboduc will seek that day the consent of his council. Gorboduc then himself unfolds his plan to his council, One councillor argues at length that the king does wisely; another argues at length that equal division between the two sons is good, but not good to be made in their father's lifetime; a third, the good councillor, Eubulus argues at length that division of rule is bad for Gorboduc, bad for Ferrex and Porrex : TO A.D. 1565] THE FIRST ENGLISH TRAGEDY He recalls the civil wars that had been : "What princes slain before their timely hour! The gods forbid the like to chance again." 333 Gorboduc having listened to his councillors, does what he meant to do. He assigns England north of the Humber to Porrex, and the south to Ferrex. A chorus then in four stanzas points the moral of this portion of the story. Act II.—After a dumbshow of a King who refused the good wine offered by age and experience, and took the poison offered by one who looked pleasanter, there are two scenes. One shows Ferrex between two counsellors, of whom one is a parasite, the other trustworthy. The parasite humours wrath against father and brother; the good counsellor seeks to prevent dissension. Ferrex resolves to prepare himself in arms against the possible devices of his brother, and leaves the stage in company with the bad counsellor. Porrex is then shown also between two counsellors; one of whom tells him that his brother is arming against him, and promoting a strife which the other counsellor endeavours to prevent. Porrex will not give Ferrex leisure to prepare his force, but will at once attack him. He also leaves the stage in company with his bad counsellor, and the good counsellor resolves to haste to Gorboduc "ere this mischief come to the likely end." Chorus then in four stanzas deplores the rashness of youth, and condemns the false traitor who undermines the love of brethren. Act III. After a mask of mourners clad in black, who pass thrice about the stage, Gorboduc is shown as he lays before his best and worst councillor the tidings of the strife between his sons, tidings brought to him promptly by the peacemaker from each. While he is being counselled to use his authority as a father, and to make his power seen, a messenger comes to tell that Porrex has already carried out his threat, and slain his brother Ferrex. The father breathes revenge against the traitor son, and Chorus ends the act with moralising on the lust of kingdoms and the cruelty of civil strife. Act IV.-After a masque of the three Furies, each driving before her a king and queen who had unnaturally slain their own children, Queen Videna laments for her firstborn, and breathes vengeance against Porrex : "Changeling to me thou art, and not my child, King Gorboduc then has his son Porrex brought before him by "Though kings forget to govern as they ought, A long argument of Eubulus upon the best way to deal with "skilless rebels," is followed by the marching off of all the lords, except Fergus Duke of Albany, who stays to meditate the raising of himself to supreme rule. Fergus proceeds to his own kingdom to buy arms. Eubulus relates, with moralising, the misery and destruction of the people ; the great lords return from " 'The wide and lazy fields With blood and bodies spread of rebels slain; The lofty trees clothed with the corpses dead, But a messenger brings news of the advance against them all of conflict They hasten to more "Upon the wretched land Where empty place of princely governance, Thus leave this guideless realm an open prey To endless storms and waste of civil war." One argues that for the welfare of their native land the crown TO A.D. 1559) THE MIRROR FOR MAGISTRATES 335 be adjudged to one of their own country by common counsel of them all: "Such one, my lords, let be your chosen king, Such one so born within your native land: The heavy yoke of foreign governance." The play ends with a long moralising on the situation by Eubulus, which includes a glance at the danger to the kingdom: "When, lo, unto the prince, Whom death or sudden hap of life bereaves, No certain heir remains." Thus our first tragedy distinctly grew out of the life of its own time, and gave expression to much that lay deep in the hearts of Englishmen in the first years of Elizabeth's reign. The best poetry of the play is in the fourth act, which certainly is Sackville's; and the fifth may well represent the youth of one who gave his after life to state affairs. 9. With one other work of mark in the Elizabethan time, Sackville's name was associated before he turned from poetry, as pleasure of his youth, and gave his life to politics. This was the Mirror for Magistrates, a work that expanded as the reign went on into a long series of poems moralising those incidents of English history, which warn the powerful of the unsteadiness of fortune by showing them as in a mirror that “who reckless rules, right soon may hap to rue." A printer in Queen Mary's time seems first to have designed a long sequence of narrated Tragedies, as all tales of the reverse from high and happy fortune were then called. From the Conqueror downward, a series of poems from English history suggested by Boccaccio's "Falls of Illustrious Men" (ch. v. § 13) was to moralise the past for the use of the present, and teach men in authority to use their power well. In Sackville's mind, the plan of a mere rhyming sequel to Lydgate's "Falls of Princes" took shape nobly, and he meant himself to write a sequence of the tragedies, but he wrote only two poems, an Induction, which was designed as general introduction to the series of his own writing, and the Complaint of Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham. The Induction is the best of Sackville's poetry. It follows the old forms, and is an allegory in Chaucer's stanza. Opening, not with a spring morning, but with winter night and its images of gloom and desolation, the poet represents himself abroad, mourning the death and ruin of all summer glory, when he meets a woebegone woman |