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The Genesis of the Strozza Subplot in George Chapman's The Gentleman Usher
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Abstract
George Chapman's source for every important incident in the Strozza subplot of The Gentleman Usher was Chapter x of De Abditis Nonnullis ac mirandis morborum & sanationum causis liber, a collection of medical case histories written in Latin by Antonio Benivieni, a fifteenth-century Florentine physician and associate of Ficino. Both works are informed with Neo- Platonism. Chapman took from Benivieni's work several key phrases and in cidental details. Possibly echoing Italian political names, he added a villain, Medice, and changed the name of the protagonist from Gaspar to Strozza; to establish a Platonic parallel with Vincentio and Margaret of the main plot, he replaced Gaspar's spiritual counselor, a friend named Marioctus, with a wife, Cynanche, who serves the same function. The names Strozza and Cynanche contribute significant lexical meanings to the play: strozza is Italian for “throat,” and κυνάγχη Greek for both “sore throat” and “dog collar”; primarily, Cynanche is a collar to her husband in the common Renaissance symbol of discipline. Poetic elaboration aside, Chapman's only other important alteration was to allow Strozza to retain, in an apparently weakened form, the prophetic gift which Gaspar lost immediately after his miraculous cure.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1968
References
1. Quellen-Studien zu den Dramen George Chapmans, Philip Massingers und John Fords, Quellen und Forschun-gen, Heft, LXXXII (Strassburg, 1897), 221.
2. Thomas Marc Parrott, ed., The Plays of George Chapman: The Comedies (New York, 1914), pp. 754–755; see also Samuel Schoenbaum, “The ‘Deformed Mistress’ Theme and Chapman's ‘Gentleman Usher’,” N&Q, N.S. vii (1960), 22–24.
3. Parrott, p. 757; see pp. 753–754. Parrott withdrew his own earlier suggestion that the source was “some French or Italian novel” (All Fooles and The Gentleman Usher, The Belles-Lettres Series, Boston, 1907, p. xi).
4. George Chapman (1559-1634) : sa vie, sa poésie, son théâtre, sa pensée (Lyons, 1951), p. 94 and n. According to Samuel Tannenbaum's bibliography of Chapman, a study of the sources of The Gentleman Usher by O. Cohn was published in the Frankfurt Festschrift (1912); I have been unable to find a copy of this work,
5. “Ethics in the Jacobean Drama: The Case of Chapman,” Essays in Dramatic Literature: The Parrott Presentation Volume, ed. Hardin Craig (Princeton, 1935), p. 37.
6. A. C. Swinburne, George Chapman: A Critical Essay (London, 1875), p. 61; J. R. Lowell, The Old English Dramatists (London, 1892), p. 86; Una Ellis-Fermor, The Jacobean Drama: An Interpretation (London, 1953), p. 58.
7. E.g., Charles W. Kennedy, “Political Theory in the Plays of George Chapman,” Essays in Dramatic Literature: Parrott Presentation Vol. p. 76.
8. Koeppel, p. 11; Wilhelm Creizenach, The English Drama in the Age of Elizabeth, tr. Cécile Hugon (London, 1916), p. 101.
9. The Growth and Structure of Elizabethan Comedy (London, 1955), p. 174.
10. E.g., Jacquot, p. 262; and Michael Higgins, “The Development of the ‘Senecal Man’: Chapman's Bussy D'Ambois and Some Precursors,” RES, xxiii (1947), 29–30.
11. Jacquot, pp. 94–95.
12. “The Dramatic Uses of Homeric Idealism: The Significance of Theme and Design in George Chapman's The Gentleman Usher,” ELH, xxviii (1961), 129–130.
13. The first edition was edited by Antonio's brother, the poet Girolamo Benivieni, some of whose own work was also known in England: his Neo-Platonic Comma dell'Amore Celeste e Divino has been identified as a source for Spenser's Fowre Hymnes; see Edwin Greenlaw et al., éd., The Works of Edmund Spenser: The Minor Poems, i (Baltimore, Md., 1943), 662–676. The Nouvelle Biographie Universelle, v (Paris, 1853), col. 364, speaks of two other editions of Antonio Benivieni's work, including a first printing in 1506, but the statement seems to be erroneous. The 1507 edition is available in facsimile, with a slightly inaccurate translation by Charles Singer (Springfield, 111., 1954); the work had previously been translated into Italian by Carlo Burci in 1843. For Benivieni's life and his place in medical history, see Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, viii (Rome, 1966), 543–545; and Esmond R. Long, “Antonio Benivieni and His Contribution to Pathological Anatomy,” in Singer, pp. xvii-xlvi.
14. Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare and the Rival Tradition (New York, 1952), p. 242.
15. Jacquot, p. 94; see Petri Pomponatii… Opera (Basel, 1567), p. 54.
16. Including some translated from I. Goulart's French by Edward Grimeston, a distant relative of Chapman who provided the playwright with materials for the Byron plays and possibly for Bussy D'Ambois (Admirable and Memorable Histories, London, 1607, “Wounds cured,” pp. 90–101); none of these involve imbedded arrows. This book was published a year after Chapman's play, and I present it merely as illustrative of the widespread appeal of such stories. The popularity is a reflection of the Renaissance fascination with supernatural stories; but it is also a part of the almost universal interest in medical matters, which was at least partly practical. In particular, the number of stories about imbedded arrows suggests a common fear of such occurrences. The means of dislodging arrows from bones had been described at least as early as Celsus (De Medicina, vii, 5), and many instruments had been invented to facilitate the task. Ambroise Paré, probably the greatest battlefield surgeon of the Renaissance period, insisted that arrowheads be removed: “it is an inhumane part, and much digressing from Art, to leave the Iron in the wound; it is sometimes difficult to take it out, yet a charitable and artificiall worke. For it is much better to try a doubtfull remedy, than none at all” (Works, tr. Th. Johnson, London, 1634, p. 388). But presumably not all practitioners followed orthodox procedure.
17. I have followed the British Museum copy of the edition published nearest the date of The Gentleman Usher (which was written ca. 1602), in Remberti Dodonaei Medici Caesarei, Medicinalivm Obseruationum exempta rara, recognita 6 aucta (Cologne, 1581), pp. 152–154. All other editions are substantially identical.
18. In the following sentences, all English quotations are from the Parrott ed. of The Gentleman Usher (Comedies, 1914) to which the line numbers in parentheses refer.
19. The quarto (1606) has Beniuemus on sig. Fl; Benenemus [sic] on sig. Gl; Beneuemius on sig. G2; and Beneuenius consistently thereafter (sigs. H4,12 v, and 14).
20. The midriff, or diaphragm, was considered a dangerous place to be wounded: the OED quotes Lloyd's Treasure of Health (ca. 1550), “A wounde in the braynes, hert, midrife, … or lyuer is deadly”; Paré (p. 388) discussed wounds of the “Diaphragma or midriffe.”
21. For the change from the Arno to the sea, see below, n. 25. When Chapman made Strozza threaten to leap from a turret rather than into a well, he may have mistaken the dative puteo for an ablative and confused the word with a rare medieval homograph which meant “mountain” (Du Cange, Glossarium ad Scriptores Mediae et Infimae Latinitalis, s.v. ¶ 2. Puteus”). A faulty construction as an ablative would have necessitated some such interpretation. But the change may have been deliberate, perhaps to echo Marston's Antonio's Revenge iv. i.206-208 (“from a turret's top / He threw his body in the high-swoll'n sea; / And … he headlong topsy-turvy ding'd down”), or perhaps to parallel Margaret's threat later in Gentleman Usher v.iii.6 (“I'll cast myself down headlong from this tower”).
22. Conceivably Chapman intended an even further irony in a pun on the roots kuv-, “dog,” and yvp-, “woman.” In any case, the ambiguities in the name suggest that critics have overstated the contrast between Chapman's attitude toward Cynanche and his attitude toward the women in his other plays, such as The Widow's Tears. In fact, I think they have overstated the cynicism of the other plays.
23. The Works of George Herbert (Oxford, 1953), p. 531. Some fictional details in Strozza's speeches to his wife seem to confirm that Chapman had this symbol in mind: for instance, he calls her bis “good angel” (v.ii.17), a phrase which he elsewhere uses (v.iv.200) for the mystically perceived deity itself; cf. also iv.iii.17 ff.
24. Allan Holaday tells me that in Chapman's Monsieur D'Olive (ii.ii.273) he has discovered a similar instance of Chapman's playing with the semantics of foreign words; see his forthcoming edition of Monsieur D'Olive. For helpful suggestions I am grateful to Mr. Holaday and to Samuel Schoenbaum; I record my indebtedness also to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation under whose Fellowship I performed this work.
25. Several critics have noted the unlocalized Italian setting, some calling it romantically dreamlike (e.g., Jacquot, p. 91). It seems relevant that Chapman deleted Benivieni's localizing details (see above, p. 1450), except possibly the name Medice. Interestingly, that name is twice spelled Medici in the 1606 quarto.