Fulgens and Lucrece and Early Modern Drama

sull42093_ch03.qxd 5/27/05 16:29 Page 23 MASTER ➀ 3 Fulgens and Lucres and Early Tudor Drama Greg Walker This chapter focuses on the drama of the late medieval and early Renaissance periods, the time when the religious mystery cycles and the secular morality plays and interludes held sway. This was the period before the building of the professional theaters (the first of which opened in the suburbs of London in the 1560s), during which rather than people “going to the theater,” “theater” in the form of plays performed by touring players or members of the local community “came” to people. This drama was thus essentially localized and was designed to fulfill a range of social functions as well as to entertain. It might instruct and confirm its audiences (and actors) in the principles of their religious faith; criticize moral failings such as greed, pride, lust, or overambition; or protest against social injustices such as poverty or political or economic oppression.1 Because these plays contained such material and dealt with characters that were often personified sins, virtues, or human attributes such as ignorance or understanding, critics have often dismissed them as crudely didactic, socially and intellectually conservative, and lacking the sophistication of later drama. But this is misleading. Many of the plays were experimental and socially progressive. This chapter considers one such play, Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres. As I will suggest, it is both dramatically innovative, playing with its audience’s expectations about what constitutes a dramatic performance, and politically sophisticated, dealing with an issue of great sensitivity in an open-ended, accommodating way that neither condemns nor insists upon social change, but allows for a degree of accommodation between social classes. In order to appreciate the distinctive qualities of the play, however, we need to consider it in the context of its original performance. To do so, let us eavesdrop on a curious conversation. The Dramatic Context: Fulgens and Lucres in Performance It is Christmastide 1491—or thereabouts. And after what one imagines was a very good dinner in the household of Cardinal John Morton, archbishop of Canterbury, a visitor to the hall began loudly and unexpectedly to address the assembled throng regarding their seeming lack of gratitude for the meal that they had just enjoyed. Soon a second man, apparently a household servant, approached him, and they talked about a play that was going to be performed for the entertainment of their patron and his guests. There was initially some confusion, as the first man, our source calls him simply “A,” initially thought that the second, let us follow the source and call him “B,” was one of the actors, given that, as he said, “Ther is so myche nyce array / Amonge these galandes now aday / That a man shall not lightly / Know a player from a nother man.”2 But, after some discussion of the plot of the play to follow and the intentions of the actors, they stood back to watch the 23 sull42093_ch03.qxd 5/27/05 16:29 Page 24 MASTER ➀ 24 EARLY ENGLISH DRAMA unfolding action attentively. After no more than a couple of minutes, however, A could resist the temptation no longer and declared loudly his intention to approach one of the actors onstage for a job, as he had just announced that he was looking for a servant. This apparent confusion of the play-world with reality evidently horrified B, who warned his fellow, [. . .] Pece, let be! Be God, thou wyll distroy all the play. (362–63) But A’s response was dismissive. His intrusion, he confidently asserted, would improve the play, not spoil it. “Distroy the play,” quod a? Nay, nay, The play began never till now! I wyll be doing, I make God avow, For there is not in this hondred myle A feter bawde [better pimp] than I am one. (363–68) Such confidence might seem misplaced. But on this occasion A turned out to be right. His intervention did improve the play. For A and B were, of course, themselves actors—or rather, are dramatic characters—and their “intervention” in the action initiates the subplot of the innovative play known to modern scholars as Fulgens and Lucres. Our “source” is the text of the play, printed by John Rastell (Thomas More’s brother-in-law and one of London’s most experimental early printers) at some point between 1510 and 1516. It is worth foregrounding the strangeness of the play’s opening in this slightly arch way because it is easy to lose sight of just how dramaturgically sophisticated Fulgens is. It is conventional to see “early drama” (by which people usually mean anything before Shakespeare) as a crude form, reliant on simple plots and limited characterization and designed to teach basic religious and moral truths. It is instructive, then, to consider a play such as Fulgens, which is so obviously none of these things. Fulgens deals with its audience’s expectations in an overtly self-referential and playful way. The preliminary exchanges between A and B create the impression that the play flows naturally from the feasting that it accompanies, leaving the audience uncertain whether they are watching actors acting or impatient spectators threatening to spoil the play. Nor are A and B obviously “instructive” figures in any obvious way. They are certainly not morally admirable: they swear, fight, lust after Lucre’s female servant, Joan, and generally seek their own financial and social advancement. Yet the play does not overtly condemn them either, using them instead as sources of morally ambiguous comedy and as links between audience and actors in much the way that Shakespeare would use fools such as Feste and Touchstone a century later. All of this is obviously the work of a playwright and acting company so much in command of their chosen medium that they can playfully experiment with its conventions, seemingly confident that their audience will appreciate and enjoy their experimentation. The teasing complexities of the play, and of A and B’s parts in it, do not end there, however. For the names “A” and “B” in the text seem not to have been the given names of characters at all, but flags of convenience indicating two roles that were taken by individuals in Morton’s household (and others elsewhere, if the play was later performed by other companies) who would effectively have been “playing” themselves, and bringing sull42093_ch03.qxd 5/27/05 16:29 Page 25 MASTER ➀ Fulgens and Lucres and Early Tudor Drama 25 their own names with them.3 Notably the script makes a point of never naming either character, having them refer to each other only as “what calt” (“whatever your name is”) and making the noble characters address them vaguely as “thou,” “syr,” or “he / That I have sought” (1003–04). At one point A even claims to have forgotten his own name and offers to go and ask “som of my company” what it is (1782). The point about names is not incidental, particularly if it prompts us to reconsider a well-known tale concerning a young and highly precocious servant in Morton’s household at about this time, Thomas More. More’s son-in-law William Roper’s Lyfe of Sir Thomas More famously relates how More’s interest in drama and talent for mimicry prompted him at times to make impromptu interventions into plays. “Though he was younge of yeares,” Roper noted, yeat wold he at Christmas tyde sodenly sometimes steppe in among the players and, never studyeng for the matter, make a parte of his owne there presently among them, which made the lookers on more sporte than all the plaiers beside.4 Scholars have been reluctant to accept the association of this story with the subplot of Fulgens, but this seems unnecessarily severe. Admittedly we have precise dates for neither the first performance of the play in Morton’s house nor More’s period of service there. But the coincidence seems too strong to ignore, and it seems reasonable to infer that a recollection of a young boy apparently stepping in among the actors during a Christmastide play in the cardinal’s great hall and a play written for performance in that hall at roughly the same time, in which a couple of characters seem to step in among the players and make parts of their own (thereby providing more sport for the spectators than the rather dour events of the main plot), might very plausibly refer to the same event. Roper’s account may well, therefore, be an only slightly fanciful reconstruction of More’s own recollection of having played one of the comic servants, most probably B, who does indeed, as we have seen, promise to improve the play through his involvement.5 The two roles are thus likely to have been the source of a whole series of in-jokes that we can only begin to guess at from the text alone. (The impact of lines such as A’s “This felowe and I be maysterles / And lyve most parte in ydelnes” [398–99] seems predictable, if indeed the two were well-known local characters.) But the idea of two household servants appearing in a play under their own names and, notionally at least, “pretending” to be actors creates fascinating possibilities and tensions in the play on a more general level, raising questions about what exactly is part of the play and what is “real life,” who is performing and for whom they are performing. But there is more to Fulgens than simply the possibility that the future lord chancellor of England may have acted in it. It has the distinction of being not only the first secular drama in English to be printed, but also the first for which a known author can be established. The title page of the first edition declared it to have been Compyled by mayster Henry Medwall, late chapelayne to ye right reverent fader in god, Johan Morton, cardynall and Archebysshop of Caunterbury.6 Henry Medwall was born around September 8, 1461, in Southwark, the borough on the south bank of the Thames, across London Bridge from the city. He attended Eton College and King’s College, Cambridge, studying arts and civil law, before finding employment in the service of the future Cardinal Morton, who was then bishop of Ely. sull42093_ch03.qxd 5/27/05 16:29 Page 26 MASTER ➀ 26 EARLY ENGLISH DRAMA Despite the (possibly erroneous) claim in the printed text that Medwall was “late chaplain” to the archbishop, his work for Morton was primarily legal. As a notary public, he was responsible for drafting and authenticating legal documents and was also keeper of Morton’s legal archive. In his spare time he also evidently wrote, and probably also produced, entertainments for his employer’s household, for Fulgens is not the only play of his to survive. In 1530, John Rastell’s son William printed Nature, which was also attributed, posthumously, to Medwall’s pen.7 If we are considering the nature and significance of Fulgens, the printed title page is a good place to start, as it suggests a number of interesting things about the play and about its author’s and printer’s attitudes toward it. First it indicates the affinity that early humanist drama enjoyed with other quasi-dramatic forms such as the dialogue. The edition announces itself in the following terms: Here is conteyned a godely interlude of Fulgens, Cenatoure of Rome, Lucres his doughter, Gayus Flaminius & Publius Cornelius, of the disputacyon of nobleness, & is devyded in two partyes, to be played at ii [two] tymes. The modern convention is, of course, to call the play Fulgens and Lucres after the first two characters named here. But this is somewhat awkward, and it has never been made entirely clear why the text should carry the name of the relatively minor character Fulgens (indeed, the name itself is probably a printer’s error for Medwall’s source’s “Fulgeus”8) alongside that of his daughter, rather than of the central antagonists, Gayus and Cornelius. What Rastell’s title page suggests is that he, and perhaps Medwall too, probably thought of the play as The Disputation of Nobleness, a title more in keeping with his source, John Tiptoft’s Declamation of Noblesse (see later), and that the names of the principal characters were provided as supplementary information only. The text is described, we might note, as both an “interlude” (of which more in a moment) and a “disputacyon”—that is, a formal debate, and Rastell’s equivocation between the two terms suggests an element of uncertainty on his part about what exactly he was printing and how much appeal it might hold for prospective customers. Previously printers had ignored the rather ephemeral form of drama, choosing instead to print more substantial and respectable genres in prose and verse. So, in printing Fulgens, Rastell was taking something of a risk, gambling perhaps on the humanist content of the text attracting some of his regular customers, while he also tried to draw in new buyers who might be interesting in reading or staging a play with a substantial social pedigree. Hence his decision to hedge his bets and refer to the book as something his customers would have been familiar with: “a disputation” or dialogue, as well as something that they may have had less contact with: an “interlude” from a distinguished churchman’s household. The term “interlude” has come to refer to an entire genre of early Renaissance moral and political plays performed in the great halls of noble households and other communal spaces and acted by small touring companies or actors drawn from the nobleman’s own household. Rastell’s use of the term here, along with the other details that he provides on the title page, tells us a good deal about the circumstances of the original production. The play is, we are told, an “interlude [. . .] in two parts, to be played at [two] times.” This highlights the intimate association between the play and the household context of holiday feasting and entertainment for which it was written. For the word interlude, or “enterlude” as it was often spelled in the early Tudor period, suggests sull42093_ch03.qxd 5/27/05 16:29 Page 27 MASTER ➀ Fulgens and Lucres and Early Tudor Drama 27 a play or game (ludus) that was brought into the hall between (inter or entre) the courses of a formal meal. And, as the text itself confirms, the “two times” at which this play was intended to be performed were the two main meals, dinner in the middle of the day and supper in the evening, on a single day, probably during one of the major holidays in the late medieval calendar, Christmas or Eastertide. The action begins with A drawing attention to the festive banquet setting by mischievously asking the spectators, A[h], for goddis will What mean ye, syrs, to stond so styll? Have not ye etyn [eaten] al your fill And payd no thinge therefore? (1–4) Perhaps anticipating the audience’s mock indignation at this jibe, he quickly moves on to commend his host’s hospitality to all those present before launching into the opening exchanges with his fellow servant B. The first half of the play ends similarly with a reference to dining. The characters commit themselves to meeting again soon, “in the evynyng, aboute suppere” (1360). And, as the second part begins, A enters alone once more to remind the assembled spectators that [. . .] my felowys and I were here Today, whan ye where at dyner, And shewed you a lytyll disport [. . .] (1440–42) Mention of “A” and “B” returns us to the most innovative feature of the play, as it alone among the early Tudor interludes has something that is legitimate to describe as a fully developed subplot. The main plot is set in ancient Rome and, as the title page suggests, concerns a disputation between two characters, the aristocratic but amoral Publius Cornelius and the virtuous but nonaristocratic Gayus Flamineus. The prize at stake is marriage to the virtuous and beautiful Lucres, daughter to the wealthy senator Fulgens, who has declared that she will marry whichever of them can prove himself the more noble. Publius Cornelius interprets nobility in a social context and argues for the superior lineage of his family, while Gayus interprets it morally and asserts the superiority of his own honor and virtue. In the end Lucres chooses Gayus, as we probably suspected that she might, although not without qualification, as we shall see. Yet the play offers a complex, equivocal exploration of the issues at stake rather than a simple moral that either virtuous poverty or social status is better. Again, Medwall provides sophistication of argument and exposition where we might, if we followed conventional scholarship, have expected didactic simplicity. A and B’s courtship of Lucres’s maid Joan (referred to in the dramatis personae simply as “Ancilla,” a female servant) does not simply offer comic relief from the seriousness of this central “disputation” (although A does at one point refer to the “dyvers toyes” or jests “mengled” with the “matter principall” in order to provide “solace” for those spectators who enjoy “tryfles and japys” [1452–61]). It provides a counterpoint to, and running commentary on, the fortunes of the principal characters. Similarly, their pursuit of Joan offers a rival, more materialistic series of marriage negotiations to set alongside the more idealistic attitudes of Lucres and her father. Indeed, Joan’s concerns about the kind of jointure that A and B might offer her probably had more in common with most Tudor marriage negotiations than Lucres’s concerns for virtue and honor in a potential spouse. sull42093_ch03.qxd 5/27/05 16:29 Page 28 MASTER ➀ 28 EARLY ENGLISH DRAMA The Intellectual Context: The Debate About True Nobility The fact that Medwall felt the need to introduce a subplot should not, however, suggest that he lacked confidence that the central disputation would entertain his audience. On the contrary, the latter concerned an issue of direct importance to both the author and his episcopal employer. The disputation drew upon a prose treatise, the Contoversia de nobilite (“The Controversy [or Debate] About Nobility”), written by the Florentine lawyer Buonaccorso da Montemagno in 1428, which was translated into English around 1448 by John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester, and published by England’s first printer, William Caxton, as the Declamation of Noblesse, in 1481. The central issue at stake in the treatise—“does true nobility consist in aristocratic birth or in personal virtue?”— may seem to modern eyes relatively easy to settle; yet it preoccupied contemporary writers, as, for them, what may appear to us a predominantly moral issue also had profound—and profoundly troubling—social, political, and cultural implications. The sheer longevity of the debate is a good index of its problematic nature. Its origins were, as with so much of medieval culture, classical. Horace, Cicero, and the Stoics had asserted that nobility resided in personal virtue rather than social status or family wealth,9 but they were arguing against the prevailing assumptions of Roman society, in which a small number of great families dominated civic politics. The debate was renewed and reinvigorated in the Italian Renaissance. The exiled Florentine Brunetto Latini’s The Books of Treasure cited Horace in defense of the claim that true nobility was nothing but virtue and good character. Hence, he argued, learned men should be preferred to ignorant aristocrats in appointments to civic offices, as knowledge was the basis of all wisdom, and wisdom brought the only true virtue. Latini’s pupil Dante in turn argued in The Banquet that those who thought that ancient wealth was the basis of nobility were profoundly mistaken, for “wherever virtue is, there is nobleness.”10 In England, Geoffrey Chaucer has inserted a defense of the idea that “gentilesse” lay in virtue rather than wealth or lineage into his Wife of Bath’s Tale when the old faery woman delivered a forthright lecture on the subject to her young, knightly husband: [. . .] ye speken of swich gentilesse As is descended out of old richesse, That therfore sholden ye be gentil men, Swich arrogance is nat worth an hen. Looke who that is moost vertuous alway, Pryvee and apert [in public], and moost entendeth ay [always] To do the gentil dedes that he kan; Taak hym for the grettest gentil man.11 And in the later fifteenth century, there is considerable evidence of a renewed interest in arguments for a nobility of merit at a time when the role and influence of common lawyers and university-educated scholars in government was increasing.12 The idea became a humanist commonplace because it addressed a real and pressing issue, the status of the educated commoner who had made his way on the strength of his own ambition in a society stratified by birth and lineage and driven by an explicitly aristocratic conception of personal honor from which he was excluded by both birth and profession. sull42093_ch03.qxd 5/27/05 16:29 Page 29 MASTER ➀ Fulgens and Lucres and Early Tudor Drama 29 A whole gamut of social and political tensions thus lay behind the “merry tale” told by Richard Pace, the learned secretary to Henry VIII, concerning the nobleman who had announced publicly that if his son could hunt, hawk, and blow a horn, he was educated well enough. In Pace’s account it was he himself who delivered the cutting retort that if that were so, the king would need to look to the sons of commoners for his councillors in future.13 The issue was still generating heat in 1531, when Sir Thomas Elyot, another royal administrator, but self-taught and himself a country gentleman, argued in his Boke Named the Governour that those who “do thinke that nobilitie may in no wyse be but onely where men can avaunte them [boast] of auncient lignage, an ancient robe, or great possessions” were entirely mistaken. If a man is less virtuous than his ancestors, then the contrast between them is a standing reproach to him. If he is more virtuous, then he would be foolish to base his claim to nobility on the status of forebears who were less virtuous than he is (Elyot sig. Ov).14 “Thus I conclude that nobilitie is nat after the vulgare opinion of men, but it is only the praise and surname of vertue. Whiche the lenger it contineuth in a name or lignage, the more is the nobilitie extolled and mervailled at” (Elyot Oviiv). It was not so much that these texts mark key moments of profound structural change in society, when new classes of courtier bureaucrats arose to displace old elites and the assumptions that sustained them. Even the briefest glance at the social history of Tudor England reveals that the traditional landed nobility retained its influence long after the publication of Fulgens and Elyot’s Governor.15 Rather the processes of challenge and accommodation between social classes and groups were a constant feature of life at the apex of late medieval and Renaissance society, part of the structure itself rather than threats from outside. It was in the very nature of the early modern social elite to be in a continual state of flux. New men, and less visibly new women, rose to positions of influence and authority all the time, often founding new dynasties in the process, and old families declined or disappeared, whether through natural wastage (the failure of a line or the inability of an heir to maintain his estate) or political displacement. Such literary discussions of the nature of true nobility as Fulgens contains and the parables of social change which they told, were, consequently a vital part of the political culture. In them we can see reflected both the anxieties of the dominant landed establishment and the aspirations of the emerging meritocracy of scholars, bureaucrats, and men of business who carried on the day-to-day business of government and civil administration. Such texts oiled wheels that might otherwise have ground violently together, paralyzing the political machinery in the process. For, while seeming to argue for radical change, they almost always conclude with a compromise, either explicitly or implicitly suggesting that, while true nobility lay in virtue and good character alone, the ideal individual would combine personal virtue with noble lineage, and so be a nobleman as well as a noble man.16 Hence Elyot’s Governor concluded that, unless a man of base estate was so obviously superior to all other candidates that everyone recommended him, the commonwealth’s governors should be chosen from among the traditional elites, for “it is of good congruence that they whiche be superiour in condition or haviour shulde have also pre-eminence in adminisatration if they be nat inferiour to other in virtue [. . .] as vertue in a gentylman is commonly mixte with more sufferaunce, more affabilitie, and myldenes than for the more parte it is in a persone rural, or of a very base lynage” (Elyot Bviv–Bvii). sull42093_ch03.qxd 5/27/05 16:29 Page 30 MASTER ➀ 30 EARLY ENGLISH DRAMA Such a conclusion has led some critics to take an overtly pessimistic view of the social utility of these humanist texts. Quentin Skinner, for example, citing the passage from Elyot’s Governor just quoted, concludes that: For all their apparent support [. . .] of egalitarian claims [. . .] the northern humanists generally handled the debate about vera nobilitas [true nobility] in such a way that any subversive implications of that argument were entirely neutralised [. . .] This stratagem was based on the empirical claim—which at one level was simply a play on words—that while virtue undoubtedly constitutes the only true nobility, it happens that the virtues are always most fully displayed by the traditional ruling classes.17 There is a good deal of truth in this, but Elyot’s statement does not quite support the use Skinner makes of it. There are crucial qualifications in his proviso that “vertue in a gentylman is commonly mixte with more sufferaunce” than it is “for the more part” in baser individuals. The qualifications each carry a due weight. Elyot does not assert that virtue is found exclusively among the governing classes, or that gentlemen always—or even nearly always—possess it, only that when they do they are preferable to men of lower social rank. That is, when traditional assumptions about the social order coincide with more progressive suggestions about individual character and fitness to govern, this situation is preferable to when they do not. This is social conservatism, but of a kind that leaves room for accommodation. The aim was reform, not revolution. The conclusion that a virtuous man was good but a virtuous nobleman was better was a platitude, but it was an enabling one, precisely because it gave something to each side in the debate. Texts such as Fulgens stated the claims of the meritocrats to social respectability and authority, and in satisfyingly celebratory tones, but they also provided sufficient comfort to established interests to secure their compliance in the process of accommodation. Thus the elite classes might absorb the energies of a new generation of scholars and administrators and a new portfolio of useful social ideas, without upsetting the existing hierarchies of patronage and influence. Few really successful lawyers or civil servants, after all, encouraged their sons to follow them into their professions. Rather they invested in land, “set themselves up as gentry,” and, if they prospered, established aristocratic dynasties of their own.18 Hence, Janus-faced, humanist theory accommodated itself to aristocratic practice, painted one way like a lion, the other like a lapdog. What seems hard to deny, however, is that such drama was not wholly or unproblematically conservative. Even at its most didactic, it offered too much stage time and invested too much dramatic energy in the expression of the alternative, countercultural values that it would go on to reject (here those of A and B) for the end result to be wholly or simply reactionary in its effects. Even the most apparently didactic interlude opened a door onto an alternative, imagined, reality that, once ajar, would be hard to close again definitively once the play was over. Alternatively, some critics have made much of the fact that both Medwall and his patron Morton were themselves “self-made men,” arriviste commoners who had risen to their present positions through diligent study and their own aptitudes and ambition. Would not such men have favored a work that argued consistently and unambiguously for a nobility of virtue rather than of blood?19 But, on close examination Fulgens proves, like most examples of the tradition, less partisan and more accommodating to both sides of the argument. Given that the author of Medwall’s source, John Tiptoft, combined sull42093_ch03.qxd 5/27/05 16:29 Page 31 MASTER ➀ Fulgens and Lucres and Early Tudor Drama 31 nobility of blood with the kind of scholarly training that endowed him with humanist virtues (he was studying Latin and Greek at the University of Florence when he began work on his translation of Buonaccorso’s text), this should not really surprise us. Yet Medwall’s play seems even more anxious to appeal to both sides of the argument, and to offend no one, than Tiptoft had been. Far from offering a straight choice between lineage and honor, Fulgens goes out of its way from the outset to tilt the balance so far in favor of Gayus that not even the most diehard advocate of aristocratic superiority could prefer Cornelius. The latter is a dissolute and vain man who indulges in every excess of the archetypal late medieval overmighty subject. He retains criminals in his service, protecting them from the law, and may even indulge in crimes of violence and extortion himself, if Gayus’s claims are correct. And in his own defense he offers not a word about his own merits, resting his case entirely upon the deeds of his ancestors and the fact that, if Lucres chooses him, she will be able to live “in ease and plesaunt idelnesse all her days” (1979). Against this straw man, Gayus’s case is a catalogue of conventional virtues. He cites his own noble deeds in defense of the city, his personal piety, and the frugal simplicity of his lifestyle. This said, the future he offers Lucres is not exactly virtuous poverty. Rather he suggests that they might enjoy “moderate richess, / And that sufficient for us both” (2126–27). And more importantly he presents himself to the virtuous maid as “a man accordyng / To youre owne condicions in every thing” (2128–29). So he is in reality no dangerously jumped-up “churl” but a substantial citizen whose pedigree is only slightly less impressive than Cornelius’s. The dangers of a verdict that flies in the face of noble sensibilities are highlighted, and to some extent disarmed in the opening exchanges between A and B. When A, summarizing the plot to follow for B’s benefit, announces that the debate will be taken to the Roman Senate, where a decision will finally be offered in favor of the lower-born Gayus, B responds angrily: By my fayth, but yf it be even as ye say, I wyll advyse them to change that conclusion. What? Will they afferme that a chorles [churl’s] son Sholde be more noble than a gentilman born? Nay, beware, for men wyll have therof grete scorn: It may not be spoken in no maner of case. (128–33) Having been forewarned of the “radical” nature of the verdict to come, however, the audience is allowed to soften its indignation when it becomes clear that A has got it wrong: the selection of a husband will not be taken to the Senate at all, but will be decided by Lucres alone, thus reducing it from a matter of state to a purely private decision. And, as she assures her suitors at the outset, her choice must not be seen to have any wider implications. [. . .] what so ever sentence I gyve betwyxt you two After myne owne fantasie, it shall not extende To any other person. I wyll that it be so, For why no man ellis hath theryn ado. It may not be notyde for a generall precedent. (1857–62) sull42093_ch03.qxd 5/27/05 16:29 Page 32 MASTER ➀ 32 EARLY ENGLISH DRAMA Even then, when she does finally decide in Gayus’s favor she is at pains to make clear to the audience that her choice does not imply any disrespect on her part for Cornelius’s lineage or social position: And for all that, I wyll not dispise The blode of Cornelius: I pray you thinke not so. God forbede that ye shulde note me that wyse, For truely I shall honoure them where so ever I go, And all other that be of lyke blode also. But unto the blode I wyll have lytyl respect Wher the condicyons be synfull and abject. I pray you all, syrs, as meny as be here: Take not my wordis by a sinistre way. (2189–97) Finally, when “B” challenges Lucres’s decision and suggests the counter case of a gentleman of birth who also has “godely maners to his birth accordyng” (2211), she replies with due deference to traditional wisdom on the subject that, Suche one is worthy more lawde and praysyng Than many of them that hath their begynnyng Of low kynred [kindred/family], ellis God forbede! I wyll not afferme the contrary for my hede, For in that case ther may be no comparyson. (2213–17) Thus Medwall is at pains to balance intellectual liberalism with social conservatism throughout. By staging the contest between Cornelius and Gayus as a debate, with Lucres acting as judge, he effectively contained aristocratic claims to superiority within a humanist framework: the legal moot or schoolroom disputation. In such a contest the scholar would enjoy a natural advantage, as the weapons employed—eloquence and logic—were ones with which he, rather than his aristocratic opponent, was familiar. Yet, in making the subject of the debate the marriage of Lucres, the only daughter and heiress of the wealthy and noble senator Fulgens, the play also focuses upon questions of lineage, inheritance, and dynastic succession that were of acute concern for aristocratic society, many members of which would have been among Medwall’s original audience. The play thus stages a debate that is at heart about both the merits of personal virtue and the means of perpetuating it within established families. The moral, that personal honor was more important than blood alone, was aimed more at the aristocrats in the audience than the scholars. As “B” explicitly claims at the end of the play, it was devised, Not onely to make folke myrth and game, But that suche as be gentilmen of name May be somwhat movyd By this example for to eschew The wey of vyce and favour vertue; For syn is to be reprovyd sull42093_ch03.qxd 5/27/05 16:29 Page 33 MASTER ➀ Fulgens and Lucres and Early Tudor Drama 33 More in them, for the[ir] degre Than in other parsons such as be Of pour kyn and birth. (2320–27) Rather than prompting ambitious commoners to aspire to high office, the play encouraged the aristocracy to embrace virtue and so prepare themselves more effectively for public service. The resulting fusion of moral and social distinction would, it was hoped, result in a renovation of established elite society in line with the highest standards of contemporary education and conduct. Again, reform rather than revolution was the intended outcome. Here too the A and B scenes complement rather than undercut the emphases of the main plot. Their parodic, scatological joust at “farte prycke in cule”—in which each of them hops toward the other tethered in a squatting position, and with a broom handle held between their legs as a lance—parodies the duels of aristocratic honor culture. But the joke is as much on the crassness and folly of the servants who know no better as it is upon the absurdities of the culture it burlesques (especially given that Joan eventually deserts both A and B, leaving them to be discovered, still tethered in this embarrassing position, by Gayus). And, rather than be punished further or condemned for their immorality or folly, A and B remain onstage at the end of the play, ready to merge back into the throng of household servants from which they emerged, once the action is complete. Again, the play offers, as with its central message about true nobility, the opportunity to laugh at others’ expense to both the aristocrats and the commoners in the audience, thus fulfilling A’s assurance that It is the mynde and intent Of me and my company to content The leste [lowest] that stondyth here. (1472–74) That Medwall was able to do so with a play that both pushed forward the boundaries of the dramatic medium and established principles of plotting and comic business that still looked fresh a century later says much for the enduring qualities of this particular example of “early drama.” NOTES 1. See Greg Walker, The Politics of Performance in Early Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998) 209–11, 301–03; Walker, ed. Medieval Drama: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). All line references are to this edition. 2. Walker 308, 53–56. 3. See Meg Twycross, “The Theatricality of Medieval English Plays,” The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ed. Richard Beadle (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994) 37–84, esp. 79. 4. See William Roper, The Lyfe of Sir Thomas Moore, Knyghte, ed. E. V. Hitchcock. Early English Text Society, vol. 197 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1935) 5. 5. See Alan Nelson, ed. The Plays of Henry Medwall (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1980) 17. 6. See Walker 304. 7. See Nelson 2–14. sull42093_ch03.qxd 5/27/05 16:29 Page 34 MASTER ➀ 34 EARLY ENGLISH DRAMA 8. See R. J. Mitchell, John Tiptoft (1427–1470) (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1938) 83. 9. See Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1978) 1:39–40. 10. See Skinner 46. 11. See Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987) 120, 1109–16. 12. For valuable studies of Fulgens in context, see David Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1968); and Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind (Berkeley: U of California P, 1978). 13. See John Skelton, The Complete English Poems, ed. V. J. Scattergood (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983) 473. 14. See Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour (London, 1531). 15. See G. W. Bernard, Power and Politics in Tudor England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). 16. Bernard 43. 17. Skinner 238. 18. Bernard 44. 19. John Watkins, “The Allegorical Theatre: Moralities, Interludes and Protestant Drama,” The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999) 767–92, esp. 783–84. READING LIST Altman, Joel B. The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978. Bernard, G. W. Power and Politics in Tudor England. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. Bevington, David. Tudor Drama and Politics: A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1968. Nelson, Alan, ed. The Plays of Henry Medwall. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1980. Skinner, Quentin. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1978. Twycross, Meg. “The Theatricality of Medieval English Plays.” The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre. Ed. Richard Beadle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. 37–84. Walker, Greg. The Politics of Performance in Early Renaissance Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. ———. ed. Medieval Drama: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Watkins, John. “The Allegorical Theatre: Moralities, Interludes and Protestant Drama.” The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature. Ed. David Wallace. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 767–92.