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Robert Greene and John of Bordeaux

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Waldo F. McNeir
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Extract

Practically every play of the period 1587–92 that cannot be definitely credited to somebody else has at one time or another been attributed to Robert Greene.1 The canon of Greene's dramatic work has now been fairly well established, however, by conservative modern critics and it includes only those dramas for which there is reasonably sound evidence, external or internal or both, of his authorship. The attribution of yet another play to the formerly all-too-convenient Greene would not ordinarily arouse interest. But the recovery in recent years of John of Bordeaux, a sequel to his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (ca. 1589), the appearance in 1936 of an edition of this sequel in the Malone Society Reprints, and the tentative assignment of it to Greene by two such careful scholars as W. L. Renwick and W. W. Greg, its editors—these are developments which deserve more attention than they have yet received.2 There is no contemporary evidence concerning a second part of Friar Bacon,3 and now that a sequel is known to exist, there is no external evidence as to who wrote it. My purpose here is to analyze John of Bordeaux in relation to Greene and his work. This analysis, it may be said at once, supports at every point the assignment of the play to Greene.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 64 , Issue 4 , September 1949 , pp. 781 - 801
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1949

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References

1 For the modern attitude toward the guesses of Grosart, Fleay, and others, see J. C. Jordan, Robert Greene (New York, 1915), pp. 182–189.

2 The attribution to Greene is not questioned in the notice of the volume, LTLS, Nov. 28, 1936, p. 999; by F. S. Boas, YWES, xvii (1936), 152; by Alfred Harbage, “Elizabethan and Seventeenth Century Play Manuscripts: Addenda”, PMLA, lii (1937), 904; or by J. H. Walter in his review, MLR, xxxiii (1938), 278–280. The most recent study of the play is not concerned with the question of its possible relation to Greene—Harry R. Hoppe, “John of Bordeaux: A Bad Quarto that Never Reached Print”, Univ. of Missouri Studies (1946), xxi, 121–132.

3 In his introduction Renwick suggests, pp. viii–ix, that Henslowe's entries may perhaps refer to two Bacon plays under one name. But Henslowe as a rale seems to distinguish between the first and second parts of a two-part play; see W. W. Greg, ed. Henslowe's Diary (London, 1904–8), i, 18–19, 21, 22, 24–25 ff.

4 It is generally accepted that the failure of Alphonsus on the stage is resented by Greene in the Epistle to Perimedes; see E. K. Chambers, Elizabethan Stage (Oxford, 1923), iii, 327. Perhaps the disappointment of his inability to “make [his] verses jet upon the stage in tragicall buskins” prevented him from continuing in the same vein in the announced sequel to Alphonsus (Epilogue, 1923–35), which never appeared.

5 Since Bordeaux does not appear as a name-part in the earlier play, it may be conjectured that he was one of the nameless courtiers in Frederick's entourage.

6 See my “Traditional Elements in the Character of Greene's Friar Bacon”, SP, XLV (1948), 172–179.

7 Hoppe, op. cit., pp. 130–132, notes that “the original episode in Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay has Vandermast carried off on Hercules' back”, and remarks that “the allusions to a horse suggest an actor-reporter not familiar with the play to which this is presumably a sequel.” He misses the humor as well as the meaning of the reference to Vander-mast's “stead”, or “jade.”

8 Earlier occurrences of this motif are the carrying off of the Soul in The Castle of Perseverance, of Covetouse in W. Wager's Enough is as Good as a Feast, and of Nicholas Newfangle in Ulpian Fulwell's Like Will to Like; cf. Histriomastix (ii, i, 281).

9 Asmenoth, Asteroth, and Astmeroth are variant forms of the same name which appear in the two Bacon plays. All are corruptions of Astarte, the Phoenician moon-goddess who figures in Christian demonology. In Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft, Bk. xv, chap. 2, Astaroth is characterized, appropriately enough for Bacon's uses, as a spirit who “maketh a man woonderful learned in the liberall sciences.” He is invoked by Bishop Dunstan in A Knack to Know a Knave, and in Chapman's Bussy d'Ambois; cf. “Asmath” in 2 Henry VI (i, iv, 25).

10 The name “belce” in the MS is struck out and “Lucifer” written in. Renwick, p. vii, is undoubtedly correct in taking “belce” to be the beginning of Belcephon, a name which, significantly, appears to be Greene's invention. It does not occur in Sprenger and Kramer's Malleus Maleficarum (ca. 1485), Agrippa's De Occtdta Philosophia (1531), Wier's De Praesligiis Daemonum (1564), Lavater's De Speclris (1570), Bodin's Démonomanie des Sorciers (1580), or Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584). Belcephon may possibly be derived, as Fleay suggested, from Baalzephon, a place-name in Exodus xiv: 2, and Numbers xxxiii: 7; see A. W. Ward, Old English Drama, 4th ed. (Oxford, 1901), pp. 231–232.

11 See Nashe's translation of Georgius Pictorius' De Illorum Daemonum (1563) in his Pierce Penilesse, R. B. McKerrow, ed. Works of Thomas Nashe (London, 1910), i, 229–232. Scot in his Discoverie of Witchcraft, Bk. xv, chap. 3, calls Zimimar “king of the north.” In the English Faust Book, Astaroth is placed “in Occidente”; see Philip M. Palmer and Robert P. More, Sources of the Faust Tradition (New York, 1936), p. 150. The “lordly monarch of the north” is referred to, but not by name, in 1 Henry VI (v, iii, 6).

12 Op. cit., p. ix, n. 1. It is worth recording that the name Vandermast occurs in Greene's Vision, in which is told the story of Alexander Vandermast, a Fleming who is unjustly jealous of his wife; A. B. Grosart, ed. Complete Works of Greene (London, 1881–86), XII, 236–269. The recurrence of this name may be compared with several similar duplications between Greene's prose and dramas: Fabius and Flaminius in Alphonsus and Tullies Love; Brandemart, Sacrepant, Rossilion, Melissa, and Angelica in Orlando Furioso and Perimedes; Radagon in Francesco's Fortunes and A Looking Glass.

13 W. J. Thoms, ed. Early English Prose Romances, 2nd ed. (London, 1858), i, 225–227.

14 Ibid., i, 219.

15 Ibid., i, 229–235.

16 Ibid., i, 222–225.

17 Johannes Bolte and Georg Polívka, Anmerkungen zu den Kinder- una HausmSrchen der Brüder Grimm (Leipzig, 1913–32), ii, 490 ff.

18 Thorns, ed., i, 247.

19 Ibid., i, 211–216.

20 Ibid., i, 206.

21 Ibid., i, 198–204, 228–229, 249.

22 Thomas Wright, Narratives of Sorcery and Magic (New York, 1882), pp. 80–81.

23 Thorns, ed., i, 249. Ward, pp. cl–cli, notices Bacon's death in such a cell as the tradition prescribed.

24 Renwick, p. xi.

25 For a brief discussion of the Turkish “history” in Alphonsus, see Samuel C. Chew, The Crescent and the Rose (New York, 1937), pp. 473–474.

26 Louis Wann, “The Oriental in Elizabethan Drama”, MP, xii (1915), 440–441.

27 Renwick, p. xi.

28 Orlando's defense of Angelica as her champion may also be compared with Sir John of Bordeaux' pledge of himself as the Empress's champion in any cause: “ser Iohn is soulder to her mightines void [i.e., vowed] in her quarell for to breake his Launce” (20–21).

29 For the regulations governing the judicial combat, see Henry C. Lea, Superstition and Force, 4th ed. (Philadelphia, 1892), pp. 166–179; George Neilson, Trial by Combat (New York, 1891), pp. 259–272; and Robert C. Clephan, The Tournament (London, 1919), Appendix H, pp. 184–187. The most famous dramatic survival of this medieval institution, the trial by combat scene in Richard II, is analyzed by Francis H. Cripps-Day, The History of the Tournament in England and in France (London, 1918), pp. 72–77. A trial by combat appears in Clyomon and Clamydes, but it is interrupted, as it is in John of Bordeaux, A Knack to Know an Honest Man, and Richard II. Only in Orlando Furioso and 2 Henry VI does a trial by combat proceed to a conclusion in the early Elizabethan drama, and in the latter it is not a chivalric battle between knights.

30 There is no agreement as to the respective shares of Greene and Lodge; see F. G. Fleay, Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama (London, 1891), ii, 54; C. M. Gayley, ed. Representative English Comedies (New York, 1903), i, 405, n. 3; and Henry David Gray, “Greene as a Collaborator”, MLN, xxx (1915), 244–246.

31 In Mucedorus, similar stage business accompanies the altercation of Mouse and the ale-wife over her stolen pot.

32 Huon of Bordeaux was translated by Lord Berners, printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1534, and reached a third edition in 1601; see Arundell Esdaile, A List of English Tales and Prose Romances Printed before 1740 (London, 1912), p. 79. The choice of the hero's name in the present play, like the same name for the old knight in Lodge's Rosalynde, was an apparent attempt to suggest an association with the redoubtable Huon.

33 Renwick, pp. x–xi.

34 Ibid., p. x.

35 Examples of it occur in Cambises (965 ff.); in Stipposes (i, ii–iii); in George-a-Green, which has five such scenes (165–166, 363–366, 633–639, 1096–1106, 1321–22); in Love's Metamorphosis (v, iv—end of the play) and Mother Bombie (v, iii—end of the play) and in Old Wives Tale (1080 ff.—end of the play). It was an early characteristic of Shakespeare, possibly influenced by Greene's practice, in his Comedy of Errors (v, i, 406 ff.—end of the play) and Two Gentlemen of Verona (v, iv, 160 ff.—end of the play).

36 Grosart, ed., op. cit., iii, 9–42; xii, 68–92; xi, 115–204. Philomela was not published until 1592, but it had been “written long since.”

36a In his Groatsworlh of Wit (15.92) Greene speaks of “young Juvenall, that byting satirist, that lastly with mee together writ a comedie.” Pursuit of this tantalizing suggestion has led to a good deal of speculation; see Richard Simpson, School of Shakspere (London, 1878), ii, 383; Gayley, ed., op. cit., i, 424–426; and J. Churton Collins, ed., Plays and Poems of Greene (Oxford, 1905), i, 138–139, n. 3. It would be fruitless to try to establish John of Bordeaux as the comedy “lastly writ”, and impossible to show that “young Juvenall”, if he could be identified, had a hand in it. Renwick refrains—rightly, I think—from discussing the possibility of joint authorship.

37 H. T. Price, “Towards a Scientific Method of Textual Criticism for the Elizabethan Drama”, JEGP, xxxvi (1937), 151–167. In “The Authorship of Tihcs Andronicus”, JEGP, xlii (1943), 55–81, Price rejects the familiar tests of tie “revisionists”—vocabulary and parallel passages, meter, quality and range of classical learning, language and style—in favor of other criteria which he believes cannot be imitated or stolen, such as construction, characterization, intensity of conflict, and power to give variety with unity. R. A. Law makes a similar distinction in his review of William A. Abrams' edition of The Merry Devil of Edmonton (Durham, N. C, 1942), JEGP, XXII (1943), 589–594. In general, I agree with this point of view. The tests applied here are presented in the ascending order of their value. For a useful summary and appraisal of most of the standard tests, see E. K. Chambers' chapter, “The Problem of Authenticity”, William Shakespeare, A Study of Facts and Problems (Oxford, 1930), i, 205–242.

38 An example of this method is A. B. Grosart's much-maligned study, “Was Robert Greene Substantially the Author of Titus Andronicus?” ES, XXII (1896), 389–435.

39 For a yet more cautious statement, see Allison Gaw, “The Origin and Development of 1 Henry VI”, Univ. of Southern California Studies, First Series, No. 1 (1926), pp. 124–125, n. 33.

40 F. S. Boas, Shakspere and his Predecessors, 7th imp. (London, 1940), pp. 85-88; C. F. Tucker Brooke, The Shakespeare Apocrypha (Oxford, 1908), pp. xvii–xix.

41 Greene und The Play of George-a-Green, the Pinner of Wakefield (Breslau, 1885), pp. 8–10.

42 Some significance may be felt in the references to Lucrèce, since her pathetic fate had considerable attraction for the sentimental Greene. He rarely loses a chance to compare his own chaste heroines to the wronged Roman matron, whose example is cited thrice in Penelope's Web, in Friar Bacon, twice in the Vision, in Farewell to Folly, and in Philomela. The “show of Lucres” (1267), though missing from the preserved text, has further importance as the first attempt at dramatic presentation of the story before Heywood's Rape of Lucrece of 1608. As early as 1594 Drayton in his Matilda speaks of “Lucrece … Acting her passions on our stately stage.” A regular drama, now lost, rather than the dumb show of Bordeaux, is probably meant; but the “show of Lucres”, which would have been dramatically impressive itself, may also have been in Drayton's mind.

43 G. B. Harrison, ed. “Menaphon” and “A Margarite of America” (London, 1927), p. 37.

44 Renwick, pp. xi–xii. The source of the error is Metamorphoses, xi, 640: “Hunc Icelon superi, mortale Phobetora vulgus nominat.”

45 Collins, ed. Plays and Poems of Greene, i, 74.

46 B. A. P. Van Dam, “Robert Greene's James IV”, EStudies, xiv (1932), 97, finds that twenty-nine verse lines in Alphonsus begin with “for to”, and only four in James IV.

47 “Repetition and Parallelism in the Earlier Elizabethan Drama”, PMLA, xx (1905), 360–379.

48 Ibid., p. 372; N. Burton Paradise, Thomas Lodge (New Haven, 1931), p. 136.

49 The three comic scenes allotted to Perce (v, vii, and xii) are independently interspersed through roughly the first half of the play. But Perce's appearance with Bacon in the Turkish camp (iii) and his rescue from prison by Bacon (xviii) connect him with the serious action. It was characteristic of Greene, perhaps alone among the early Elizabethan dramatists, that all his clowns—Rafe and the Fiddler in Orlando Furioso, Miles in Friar Bacon, Adam in A Looking Glass, and Slipper and Nano in James IV—are vitally connected with the serious elements in his plays; see Boas, op. cit., p. 86.

50 Alfred Hart, “The Length of Elizabethan and Jacobean Plays”, RES, viii (1932), 145–146, calculates the linage of Greene's plays: Alphonsus, 1941; Orlando Furioso, 1457; Friar Bacon, 2102; A Looking Glass, 2286; James IV, 2451. Renwick, p. vii, estimates that Bordeaux would run to some 1720 lines of print. That is the number of lines in a regularized version which I have made.

51 Paradise, op. cit., pp. 133 ff.

52 F. S. Boas, ed. Works of Thomas Kyd (Oxford, 1901), pp. xxxi ff.

53 C. F. Tucker Brooke and N. Burton Paradise, eds. English Drama, 1580–1642 (New York, 1933), p. 226.

54 Arthur M. Sampley, “Plot Structure in Peele's Plays as a Test of Authorship”, PMLA li (1936), 689–701.

55 Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, iii, 412; F. S. Boas, An Introduction to Tudor Drama (Oxford, 1933), pp. 85–92.

56 George E. Woodberry, “Robert Greene: His Place in Comedy”, in Gayley, ed. cit., i, 393.

57 Jordan, op. cit., p. 51; Gayley, “Robert Greene”, op. cit., i, 429; JosephL. Tynan, “The Influence of Greene on Shakespeare's Early Romances”, PMLA, xxvii (1912), 248–250.

58 Elizabethan Drama (London. 1922). p. 51.