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PLOT Structure in Peele's Plays as a Test of Authorship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Arthur M. Sampley
Arthur M. Sampley*
Affiliation:
North Texas State Teachers College Denton, Texas
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Extract

Sir Edmund Chambers writes that “Peele's hand has been sought in nearly every masterless play of his epoch.” The evidence advanced for such attributions has usually consisted mainly of parallel passages and verbal tests, with the result that plays as different in structure as The Troublesome Reign of King John and King Leir have been fathered upon Peele by the same critic. Most scholars have been inclined to overlook the importance of structure as a means of determining authorship, though the dramas of Jonson and Shakespeare structure appears to be as much a constant as style or characterization. It is the purpose of this paper to show that Peele's known plays reveal a fairly constant type of structure, and that this type can be used as a determinant in considering the authorship of anonymous plays.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , September 1936 , pp. 689 - 701
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1936

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References

1 The Elizabethan Stage (1923), iii, 462.

2 Mr. H. Dugdale Sykes in Sidelights on Shakespeare (1919), and Sidelights on Elizabethan Drama (1924).

3 I have not included The Battle of Alcazar (probably written about 1589) in this discussion mainly because there is no certainty that Peele wrote the play. The ascription of it to him by Malone and Dyce has been followed by all subsequent scholars. The external evidence for this ascription rests on the doubtful and equivocal attributions of England's Parnassus (1600), in which six lines from the play are assigned to Peele and one line is attributed to Dekker. Some nineteen parallels have been adduced between Peele's known works and The Battle of Alcazar, of which about five are significant. These seem to show either that Peele is the author of the play or that he borrowed from it. The metrical evidence is somewhat adverse to the theory of Peele's authorship, as is also the fact that the play contains no humorous material. On the whole, the ascription to Peele is probably correct.—In note 22 below I have given my general conclusions about the structure of The Battle of Alcazar.

4 The Arraignment of Paris was published in 1584, but may have been written as early as 1582. See P. H. Cheffaud, George Peele (Paris, 1913), pp. 31–33, and Thorlief Larsen, “The Early Years of George Peele, Dramatist, 1558–1588,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, Section ii (1928), 292–298. Cheffaud assigns Edward I to 1590–91, The Old Wives Tale to 1591–92, and David and Bethsabe to 1592. The last three plays, however, show evidence of revision at later dates.

5 The Tragedies of George Chapman (1910), p. 690.

6 The Growth of English Drama (Oxford, 1916), pp. 172–173.

7 George Peele (Paris, 1913), p. 171.

8 The Works of George Peele (1888), i, xxxii.

9 English Writers (1893), x, 79.

10 The Tudor Drama (1911), p. 338.

11 Shakespeare's Predecessors in the English Drama (1881), p. 570.

12 All line references to Peele's plays are to the Malone Society Reprints of the plays.

13 There are eleven songs in the play, nine of which are given in the quarto.

14 A clear indication of the state of the text is given by the fact that vv. 2949–54 are almost surely an older version of vv. 2239–43. Cheffaud, who notes this duplication, thinks that vv. 725–727, 763–784, Sc. xv, and probably also vv. 785–806 show evidence of transposition of scenes. He mentions also the curious error noted by Bullen that in Sc. xiii, vv. 2175–76, Edward addresses David in a friendly fashion, although in a preceding scene David has shown himself to be a traitor. From this fact Cheffaud concludes that all the Robin Hood scenes and the comic passages are later additions made by Peele. One might equally well suppose that the scenes dealing with Queen Elinor's perfidy are a later addition, since vv. 808–832 have no connection with the context and since the Mayoress is first mentioned as being in Wales in v. 1869 although she must have come with Queen Elinor, whose arrival with her train is described in vv. 1102–6. Such a theory would also find support in vv. 2952 ff. as contrasted with vv. 2239–41. If the former passage represents the original version of the play, Elinor did not in that version remain in Wales after the departure of Edward, but went with him into Scotland. In the present text of the play the Mayoress of London is murdered in Wales after Edward leaves for Scotland. A further difficulty not connected with either Queen Elinor or the Robin Hood scenes is to be found in vv. 2354 and 2363, in which Lluellen and David speak of getting “the Bride,” who is evidently Lluellen's wife Ellen; but Lluellen had recovered his fiancée in Sc. v, some twelve hundred lines earlier.

15 Most incidents in the Queen Elinor plot are also to be found in a ballad of unknown date, “A Warning-Piece to England against Pride and Wickedness.” This ballad is reprinted in The Works of George Peele, ed. Bullen, i, 77–83.

16 The song is given in vv. 497–505. Mention of songs is made in vv. 681–682, 1368–69, 1453, 1907, 2393–95.

17 Gayley, Charles Mills, ed., Representative English Comedies, I, 341.

18 It is perhaps possible to consider the third and fourth plots as one plot, but inasmuch as two distinct stories are told and as the emphasis is rather upon the two love stories than on Lampriscus, it seems better to consider them two plots.

19 W. W. Greg, who edited The Old Wives Tale in the Malone Society Reprints, comments on the bad text of the quarto. See p. ix of the Malone Society Reprint of the play.

20 The quarto text of the play is almost certainly a radical alteration of Peele's original version, as I have tried to show in “The Text of Peele's David and Bethsabe,” PMLA, xlvi (1931), 659–671. However, since it is pretty clear that the quarto text is Peele's throughout and is therefore a product of his invention, I have not thought it worth while to complicate this study of structure with the intricate and puzzling problem of what constituted the original version of the play.

21 Vv. 591–595.

22 It is here pertinent to ask whether The Battle of Alcazar shows the same structural features. This play has three plots, which are well integrated, and originally had five spectacular sets of dumb shows: cf. W. W. Greg, Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgments: The Battle of Alcazar & Orlando Furioso (Oxford University Press, 1923). On the other hand, it has much digressive material, and Acts ii, iii, and iv are weak because of lack of action. There are strong moments at the beginning and at the end of the play, but the intervening acts are almost devoid of interest. In this respect as well as in the general outlines of the main plots, The Battle of Alcazar resembles Greene's Alphonsus, King of Arragon. The pageantry of the dumb shows, the poor development of the plots, and the faulty distribution of emphasis suggest Peele as the author of The Battle of Alcazar. On the other hand, the exceptional unification of the plots and the scantiness of action in the play are not in accord with Peele's habits of play construction. Nor does one find in The Battle of Alcazar the trick of balancing one plot or situation against another, a device which occurs in all Peele's known plays. These differences from Peele's known structural methods may be partly explained by the nature of the material which he was treating, but the fact remains that the play is not in Peele's usual manner. Given the refractory source material of an African battle and asked to concoct hurriedly some sort of dramatic pageant, Peele might have constructed such a play.

23 The chief proponents of the theory that Peele wrote these plays are J. M. Robertson and H. Dugdale Sykes, though Robertson gives Peele only a part in each play. The ascriptions of Robertson are set forth in his Introduction to the Shakespeare Canon (1924); Mr. Sykes's attributions are contained in Sidelights on Shakespeare (1919) and Sidelights on Elizabethan Drama (1924). See my criticism of the verbal evidence of Robertson and Sykes in StPh, xxx (1933), 473–496.

24 This play has been attributed to Peele by Fleay, Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama, ii, 153; Hugo Schütt, The Life and Death of Jack Straw, Kieler Studien zur englischen Philologie (Heidelberg, 1901); H. C. Hart, The Second Part of King Henry the Sixth, Arden Shakespeare (London, 1909), pp. xxiv–xxix; and J. M. Robertson, An Introduction to the Shakespeare Canon, pp. 251–252.