It has often been contended that the fifth century BCE and the early modern English age represent two landmark periods for Western theatre. Greek drama arrived in Renaissance England through continental editions and translations which circulated widely in both monolingual (Greek or Latin) and bilingual form (Greek and Latin), as well as in vernacularised versions and rewritings (Italian and French especially). Latin drama provided yet another major source for the early modern English construction of ideas of classical antiquity. However, although it is common opinion that ancient Greek drama and Elizabethan drama represent the cradle of Western theatre, criticism has not yet fully illuminated how the former affected the latter and which consequences it had on its development. While studies have been produced on the dissemination of classical myths in the works of the major writers of the time (both dramatic and poetic), the presence of classical drama in performance and in print culture remains a largely obscure area. What still needs to be understood is the actual penetration of Greek dramas and myths in England, and how they were conflated with medieval drama, also with the help of Latin and early modern models and translations.
This project aims at filling this gap. It offers studies on the textual transmission of narratives of Greek origin and their impact on the inauguration of the modern in the Tudor and Jacobean age. Shakespeare and other major playwrights are not the main foci, while being part of the research, except for John Fletcher whose ‘Roman plays’ are examined as a case study of underexplored classical legacy in the drama of the first quarter of the seventeenth century. The project concentrates on yet understudied corpora testifying to the actual dissemination of classical drama between the early sixteenth century and the end of the Jacobean age. A broader investigation of the dissemination of classical texts at the Elizabethan Court is also connected with the overall research and the impact of Latin on the development of the English language.
The Background
The real dimension of the circulation of classical texts at Court in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is still to be established. Few studies have focused on archival research, and much modern scholarship has not yet made full use of the online databases and archive catalogues currently available. One should also note that many repositories (such as the State Papers at Kew, UK, or the correspondence now in foreign archives) have not been searched in depth, often because wrongly interpreted as only of ‘historical’ nature. Special attention should be paid to the circle of intellectuals who gathered around Sir Walter Ralegh. Its composition and role in the English cultural life of the time is often misunderstood, largely due to the endurable fortune of the ‘School of night’ theory. The set included a large number of scholars, poets, geographers and humanists, from the mathematician and linguist Thomas Harriot and the painter John White, to Ralegh’s cousin Arthur Gorges, the translator of Lucan’s Pharsalia (Nicholls and Williams 2011), and Ben Jonson who was recruited as a contributor for Ralegh’s most ambitious undertaking, The History of the World (1614), and who was a tutor to young Wat. The importance of classical education for the circulation of classical texts among members of this circle cannot be overestimated, and deserves further analysis especially by means of an investigation of their handling and perusal of the texts of the Latin and Greek antiquity.
Within the frame of the European, and Elizabethan, reception of classical literature, much is yet to be researched regarding the circulation of Greek dramatic fragments and classical evidence of lost tragedies, such as the many comprised in Apollodorus’ Bibliotheca (Gr.-Lat. Paris 1555, Heidelberg 1599; Lat. Antwerp 1565, Paris 1578; French Paris 1605), and in Hyginus’ Fabulae (Basel 1549 [many rpts], Paris 1578, Lyon 1608). Scattered in a plethora of Greek and Roman extant works, hundreds of dramatic fragments of the three major Athenian tragedians, along with other minor tragic playwrights, were already virtually known to Europe’s learned readership through fifteenth- and sixteenth-century editions. However, their circulation and impact outside the milieu of the ‘professionalised’ classical scholars of the time are yet to be fully assessed. They were known either in the original Greek or in Latin and vernacular translations, such as Plutarch’s Lives and Moralia (trans. into French by Amyot and into English by North in 1579, and Holland in 1603). Tragic fragments sometimes came to be used as autonomous texts, detached from their sources, as a means to convey philosophical, political, or religious views, thus becoming a vital component of a broader cultural debate.
The project attempts to provide fresh data in this field. Ancient evidence and fragments have mostly been considered in view of the reconstruction of lost plays (Most 1997; Radt 1983) rather than of their impact upon the (re)invention of plots and theatergrams. A case in point is Iulius Hyginus, whose relevance for the main mythical and dramatic cycles is crucial; another one is Plutarch’s Moralia, which, alongside his more famous Lives, were central in the shaping of early modern ethical thinking. Critias’ tragic fr. 19 is yet another case in point: it was incorporated in Greene’s Selimus (see Greenblatt 1988) testifying to the circulation of the Placita philosophorum in Holland’s 1603 translation of Moralia, and even before then in Budè’s Latin and Amyot’s French translations. Sextus Empiricus was to be published later, but was already known in England thanks to the epistolary exchanges between the French-Italian philologist Scaliger and his English correspondents. The history of this fragment is exemplary of how the classical dramatic tradition penetrated the cultural debate and reached the stage.
Connected with this type of transmission are the Latin translations of original Greek dramas of the 1540s and later decades. Scarcely studied to date, Buchanan’s Medea and Alcestis, and Watson’s Antigone provide significant evidence of the classical presence of Euripides and Sophocles in England. Buchanan, in particular, is an outstanding example of the transnational activities of Tudor intellectuals in Europe: he was close to important classical philologists, such as Scaliger, and in Paris was a colleague of Muret and Turnèbe at the Collège du cardinal Lemoine. His Medea and Alcestis are pioneering experiments in translation, casting light on the history of the reception of Greek drama in Neo-Latin form, with special regard to the idea of ‘high language’ and dramatic structure (i.e. division into episodes/acts, presence of choruses and of ‘parabatic’ and liminal speeches). Watson’s Antigone was one of the earliest modern translations of that play, and is also interesting for its performance history, which took place in private milieus and preceded its publication.
In the same years classical ideas on kingship and tyranny as put forward by Xenophon and Plato also reached England, curiously to disappear in the course of the century and resurface in mediated form through French treatises, sometimes circulating clandestinely, and in drama (see Dall’Olio 2017). Seminal studies on this subject (e.g. Bushnell 1990) have overlooked the ideological and cultural dimension of that erasure, as well as of the function of theatre in obliquely relocating centre stage politically delicate questions such as good rule and tyranny in the light of ancient thought. The project proposes a new study of early modern dramas such as Preston’s Cambises (1569) against the backdrop of classical political ideas circulating among early Tudor intellectuals (More, Elyot and Ascham) and at the court of Elizabeth.
Greek comedy in England is yet another underexplored subject, compared to the presence of Latin comedy (e.g. Miola 1994). As in the case of tragedies, the peak of the dissemination of Plautus and Terence was in the second half of the sixteenth century, while publications of Aristophanes are not recorded except for a Greek edition of [H]Ippeis in 1593. However, his Plutus, Pax and Wealth were performed at Cambridge in the course of the sixteenth century, and Randolph’s 1651 Hey for Honesty Down with Knavery, derived from Plutus, has been identified with the Plutophtalmia performed in the early seventeenth century probably at Cambridge. Moreover, even if the circulation of Aristophanes’ dramas was altogether limited, many early modern works can be at least partially traced back to Aristophanic comedies, Ben Jonson being the most evident, albeit contentious, instance. The project looks into the actual circulation of Aristophanes’ dramas and offers new insights into his comedies alongside the Latin ones as models for Shakespeare’s contemporaries (e.g. Steggle 2007).
Perhaps the most distinctive feature of classical drama, and a controversial influence in the shaping of early Elizabethan tragedies, is the chorus. Fresh study is needed in order to trace the seeds of a new conception of that ancient form in the early English translations of Seneca and in the dramas following the classical model (e.g. Gascoigne and Kinwelmershe’s Jocasta). Both textual transmission and the translators’ ingenuity played a relevant role in this process (Bigliazzi 2015), as shown by Drant’s 1567 translation of Horace’s Art of Poetrie and Jasper Heywood’s creative Anglicisation of Troades (1559; rpt 1581), among others. What is immediately clear is that in these early translations the functions of interpreter, editor, and adaptor became one and that contamination with native medieval forms and continental ones was a major factor in the Chorus’s gradual change into a Prologist. No single monograph on the subject has been published to date (cf. McCaulley 1917; Palmer 1982; Weimann and Bruster 2004; Schneider 2011; Davis 1993 remains the only major single study of Senecan choruses).
The impact that Latin had on the development of the English language is another essential object of study for a more accurate understanding of classical receptions in early modern England and of the processes of translation at work. It is well-known that the Latin grammatical tradition had an enormous influence on English grammar writing and that Latin syntax was regarded as a model for English during both the Early Modern English and Late Modern English periods, but there remains much work to be done in this field of research. The digital archive EMEGA will crucially allow researchers to compare the various grammars and explore the influence of the Latin tradition.
The Archives
The project offers:
1) two corpora of relevant primary texts circulating in England at the time, including Greek and Latin editions, Latin translations, English translations and rewritings; these texts are freely accessible in the GEMS (Greek and Latin Drama on the Early Modern English Stage) and EMEC (Early Modern English Choruses) archives, allowing the exploration of intertextual relations between sources, translations, adaptations, rewrites, as well as relevant historical documents, as well as;
2) a corpus of Latin and English grammars, EMEGA (Early Modern English Grammars Archive), providing access to searchable material relevant to an understanding of the translative processes at work in the transmission of classical texts;
3) a catalogue of classical texts at the Elizabethan Court (CoLEEn, Courtiers’ Libraries in Elizabethan England);
4) critical studies of the processes of transmission of classical drama, its spread through print and performance and absorption by English theatre. ClaRE is linked to the PRIN publications available online (see References > Publications).
The four archives allow users to go a step beyond textual comparison through book-form tabulations by providing multiple and aligned texts. Searchable and interlinked editions signalling textual variation and instability are fundamental to achieve philological accuracy and theoretical awareness of the manifold translative processes at work. These concern both linguistic and, more generally, textual and cultural aspects reflecting literary conventions (from mythems, to genres and discursive styles), as well as theatrical and cross-cultural practices. In the European circulation, translation, and adaptation of these early modern editions, significant textual and paratextual variants, additions or excisions have frequently been overlooked, thus potentially distorting the idea we have of early modern ‘resources’ as stable texts to be considered for plot summaries or occasional lexical similarities or borrowings. These archives will show that the stability of such texts cannot be taken for granted. A close comparison of these several texts may be carried out only by having simultaneous access to them. The interlinked GEMS, EMEC and EMEGA archives offer an easy open-access tool to study these early modern texts comparatively and dynamically while CoLEEn provides a crucial contextual frame.