Cornelia

Thomas Kyd’s translation of Robert Garnier’s Cronelie was published in 1594 with the title Cornelia and re-issued in 1595 with the title Pompey the Great, his fair Cornelia’s Tragedy: affected by her Father and Husband’s down-cast, death and fortune. The play was based on the story of Cornelia – daughter of Metellus Scipio – who had first married Crassus, one of the components of the first triumvirate with Caesar and Pompey. After Crassus’ death, Cornelia married Pompey who had become an enemy of Caesar against whom he was fighting in the civil war.

The play starts with Cicero’s lament for the end of the Republic and is followed by the moment in which, after she learns about the death of Pompey, Cornelia decides to die. The play deals with Cornelia’s death resolution as well as with Cicero’s counsel to the lady against suicide and on how to confront with tyranny. The other acts concern: the description by Philip (a messenger) of the death of Pompey; Cassius’ and Brutus’ discussion on the civil war and on the possibility of killing Caesar due to his rising ambition which is transforming him into a tyrant; Caesar’s and Marc Antony’s dialogue on the future of Rome and on Caesar’s triumphs. The play ends with Cornelia’s realisation her father has died too in order to escape servitude, and with her decision to live in order to honour his memory as well as that of her dead husband.

            In the play, Cornelia principally speaks with Cicero, with the Chorus and with messengers reporting the death of her beloved ones. The main themes of these speeches regard Fortune, the gods’ indifference to human suffering, death as an escape from slavery and from the tyrant’s power. As Cornelia states “then let me die my liberty to save, / For t’is a death to live a tyrant’s slave” the themes of liberty against the tyrant and of choosing one’s destiny (even if it means to choose death) are prominent in the whole play. The play also presents the delineation of some themes (which can then be then found in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar) such as that of the legitimacy of killing a tyrant in case their power becomes too despotic, and the major importance given to state affairs and to the Roman people’s wellbeing than to family or friendship ties which emerges from the dialogue between Brutus and Cassius.

In this sense, the play translates Garnier’s disparaging attitude towards Caesar, who represents the figure of the overly ambitious tyrant, who has put Rome under a yoke. The same hate for the tyrant, although for a different one, is perceivable also in the other work by Garnier, Marc Antoine, which had been translated into English in 1590 by Mary Sidney and published in 1592. In that case the tyrant from which to escape was Caesar Octavianus, Julius Caesar’s adoptive son and heir, interestingly referred to as Caesar throughout the whole play and representing the oppressive and coercive power from which Marc Antony and Cleopatra escape through suicide. In Cornelia, the opposition to the tyrant is represented by the woman’s husband Pompey and by her father Scipio as well as in the discourses of Cassius and Brutus.

Cornelia is also characterised by elements of stoicism principally represented via Cicero’s speeches and by the Christianisation of ancient themes typical of Garnier. The emphasis on moral exempla, which are often highlighted by the use of commonplace marks to highlight the typical Senecan sententiae, is also very frequent. The main ancient tropes rearticulated by Cornelia concern “the mutability of Fortune, the dangers of hubris, or the relative advantages of mercy and justice” (Belle and Cotteignes 2017, 58). The stoic ideals, concern the “virtues of constancy and steadfastness, and by emphasizing the Stoic (and Christian) principle of conforming one’s mind to divine will” (62) against suicide.

            Kyd also highlights the destruction and immense injustice of the civil war in his translation of Garnier, who was, in his turn, particularly interested in the subject due to the political situation of France at the time, stricken by the religious wars between Catholics and Huguenots (Garnier 2010). Although the English situation was slightly different, the translation of the play managed to portray the fear of political unrest depending on the fragile equilibrium between Catholics and Protestants which characterised the society and politics of the time, made even more unstable by the refusal by Queen Elizabeth to name an heir in order to prevent a succession crisis, as well as by the impending menace of a Spanish invasion. Indeed, King Philip II of Spain was depicted as an usurper and tyrant, who aimed to England’s throne: as Kewes states, early modern English plays often portrayed countries conquered by the Romans in order to artfully represent European states “currently at war with or annexed by Spain” (Kewes 2012, 253). Many critics suggest that

the conflation of Roman history, Christian providentialism, English traditional political thought and Continental republicanism be read as a multi-faceted commentary on this troubled period, and an invitation to explore, from a variety of perspectives, the vexed political debates of the 1590s. (Belle and Cotteignes 2017, 70)

The political dimension, however, is not the only one to have contributed to the genesis and to the choice of this particular play by Kyd, personal reasons mingle with the urge to portray the English situation of the time. At the time, Kyd had been part of the so-called ‘Dutch Church Libel’ scandal, which saw him accused of having written an anonymous blank-verse tract threatening Flemish and French Protestant refugees and containing heretical claims. Although pleading innocent, in 1593 he was imprisoned. Kyd himself would have declared in some letters that the accusations costed him the protection of his patron, although he did not mention his/her name. Thus, the publication of Cornelia at the beginning of 1594 might appear as a bid for patronage, probably to the dedicatee Bridget Fitzwalter, Countess of Sussex, wife to the 5th Earl of Sussex. However, it has been suggested that Kyd actually pointed at another patron with his work, namely at Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke.

Some circumstances might indicated that Mary Sidney was the actual addressee of Kyd’s work: Cornelia is the translation of one of the three plays composing Garnier’s trilogy on Roman History: Porcie, Cornelie and Marc Antoine. Mary Sidney had translated Marc Antoine in 1592 and Cornelia can be considered as its prequel; in addition, Kyd had announced his resolution of translating also Porcie. Moreover, “a few years after Sir Philip Sidney’s much lamented death, it would have been suitable to present the character of Cornelia, a virtuous matron mourning the death of her kinsmen fighting against tyranny, as a noble precedent for the Countess’s public grieving” (Belle and Cotteignes 2017, 53). Furthermore, the Sussex and Pembroke families were connected by family ties, thus, it can be assumed that, by dedicating Cornelia to the Countess of Sussex, Kyd could be sure also the Countess of Pembroke would have come into contact with his work.

            The connection with Mary Sidney’s work, moreover, covers many further aspects. Firstly, what Kyd and Sidney share is the application, through the translation of Garnier, of the Senecan tragic model consisting of long monologues, actions taking place off-stage and being narrated by the characters (often by a messenger who announces the death of central characters and describes the manner of their death), and the presence of the chorus at the end of each act, the stichomythiae (short and fast dialogues between characters, often consisting of shared lines), the sententiae, and long rhetorical speeches. Typically, in Garnier and in both translations “the action starts in medias res, and scenes develop according to two main patterns: either they revolve around descriptive or expressive monologues by main characters; or they stage a debate — typically between a key figure and his/her confidante” (Belle and Cotteignes 2017, 13). As Belle and Cotteignes claim, the influences on the two plays, besides Plutarch’s Lives (Life of Antony and Life of Pompey, translated into French by Jacques Amyot and into English by Thomas North), are manifold: “while clearly steeped in the imitation of Seneca’s drama, Garnier’s Cornélie and Marc Antoine also draw from Greek dramatic sources, especially in the choruses, in which various echoes of Sophocles and Euripides can be heard” (Belle and Cotteignes 2017, 13).

While Antonius by Mary Sidney was published in 1592 and Kyd’s Cornelia in 1594 probably as a response to the former, the publication in French of Cornelie, in 1572, actually preceded the 1574 publication of Marc Antoine and the facts of the two tragedies follow indeed a chronological order which goes from the events of Cornelie portraying the death of Pompey, Caesar’s conquest of power over Rome, and the following plot by Brutus while Caesar and Marc Antony speak of the conquest of Italy; to those taking place in Marc Antoine which displays the love between Marc Antony and Cleopatra and the advance and conquest of Caesar’s successor, Octavianus, over Egypt.

            Furthermore, as Mary Sidney’s play, also Kyd’s one has often been considered as a “closet drama” because of its destination to a restricted circle of people, by whom it was read or recited rather than performed. However, following Daniel Cadman claims, the label “Neo-Senecan dramas” seems to be fitter to describe Kyd’s and Mary Sidney’s plays. According to Cadman, indeed, this definition unites 14 early modern plays sharing formal and content characteristics such as similar political and philosophical concerns, the representation of political crises and the interest in “politically marginalised individuals who are forced to endure the circumstances of affairs they are powerless to influence” (Cadman 2016, 6). In particular, the Neo-Senecan label goes against claims about the works’ alleged unperformability and antagonism towards the commercial theatre of the time (Cadman 2016, Lamb 1981). This is particularly true for Kyd, who had written mainly for the public stage, and who was unlikely to be against it. As a matter of fact, Kyd’s Cornelia has been seen to have also influenced Kyd’s main public theatre production, and, in particular, The Spanish Tragedy, through its humanist vein, thematic traits, and intertextual strategies[1] which allowed Kyd to insert contemporary political and religious, mainly Protestant, discourses in the English tragedy.

On the other hand, Kyd’s translation distances itself from the original in various points, the English play contains amendments, omissions and additions. In particular, the choruses are often modified by Kyd who changes Garnier’s words for stylistic and metrical reasons or to favour the understanding of the various passages by an English audience. On occasions, Kyd also adds verses to Garnier’s original, in particular at the beginning of Act 3, to which he adds these 18 lines:

The cheerful cock (the sad nights comforter),

  Waiting upon the rising of the sun,

  Doth sing to see how Cynthia[2] shrinks her horn,

While Clitie[3] takes her progress to the east.

   Where wringing wet with drops of silver dew, 

  Her wonted tears of love she doth renew.

The wandering swallow with her broken song,

The country wench unto her work awakes;

While Cytherea[4] sighing walks to seek

Her murdered love, transform’d into a rose.

   Whom (though she see) to crop she kindly fears,

   But, kissing, sighs, and dews him with her tears,

Sweet tears of love, remembrancers to time.

Time past with me that am to tears converted,

Whose mournful passions, dull the morning’s joys.

Whose sweeter sleeps are turn’d to fearful dreams.

   And whose first fortunes, filled with all distress,

   Afford no hope of future happiness.

Works Cited:

Belle, Marie-Alice and Line Cottegnies, eds. 2017. Robert Garnier in Elizabethan England, Mary Sidney Herbert’s Antonius and Thomas Kyd’s Cornelia. Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association.

Cadman, Daniel. 2016. Sovereigns and Subjects in Early Modern Neo-Senecan Drama: Republicanism, Stoicism and Authority. Oxon: Routledge.

Garnier, Robert. 2010. Théâtre complet, ed. by Jean-Claude Ternaux. Paris: Classiques Garnier.

– 1585. Les Tragedies. Paris: Mamert Patisson chez Robert Estienne.

Kewes, Paulina, 2012. ‘“A Fit Memorial for the Times to Come”: Admonition and Topical Application in Mary Sidney’s Antonius and Samuel Daniel’s Cleopatra’, The Review of English Studies, 63.259, 243–64.

Lamb, Mary Ellen, 1981. ‘The Myth of the Countess of Pembroke: The Dramatic Circle’, Yearbook of English Studies, 11, 194–202.

[1] For a more detailed description of the points in common between Cornelia and The Spanish Tragedy, see Belle and Cotteignes 2017, 54.

[2] Diana, goddess of the moon

[3] Clytie or Clytia was a water nymph in love with Helios, the sun god. When he left her for another woman she kept staring at him from the ground and turned into a heliotrope, a flower that gazes at the Sun.

[4] Venus.

Belle, Marie-Alice and Line Cottegnies, eds. 2017. Robert Garnier in Elizabethan England, Mary Sidney Herbert’s Antonius and Thomas Kyd’s Cornelia. Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association.

Boas, Frederick S., 1955. The Works of Thomas Kyd. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Braden, Gordon. 1985. Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press.

– 1984. “Senecan Tragedy and the Renaissance”. Illinois Classical Studies 8 (2): 277-92.

Cadman, Daniel. 2016. Sovereigns and Subjects in Early Modern Neo-Senecan Drama: Republicanism, Stoicism and Authority. Oxon: Routledge.

Charlton, Henry Buckley. 1946. The Senecan Tradition in Renaissance Tragedy. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Cunliffe, John. 1893. The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy. London: MacMillan.

Doran, Susan and Kewes, Paulina, eds. 2014. Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Freeman, Arthur. 1967. Thomas Kyd, Facts and Problems. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Garnier, Robert. 1585. Les Tragedies. Paris: Mamert Patisson chez Robert Estienne.

– 1574. Cornélie, Tragédie. Paris: Robert Estienne.

Kewes, Paulina, 2012. ‘“A Fit Memorial for the Times to Come”: Admonition and Topical Application in Mary Sidney’s Antonius and Samuel Daniel’s Cleopatra’, The Review of English Studies, 63.259, 243–64.

Lamb, Mary Ellen, 1981. ‘The Myth of the Countess of Pembroke: The Dramatic Circle’, Yearbook of English Studies, 11, 194–202.

Plutarch. The lives of the noble Grecians and Romanes compared together by that graue learned philosopher and historiographer, Plutarke of Chæronea translated out of Greeke into French by Iames Amyot . . .; and out of French into Englishe, by Thomas North. Imprinted at London: By Thomas Vautrouillier and John Wight, 1579.

Straznicky, Marta 2004. Privacy, Playreading, and Women’s Closet Drama 1550–1700, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

– 1994. ‘“Profane Stoical Paradoxes”: The Tragedie of Mariam and Sidneian Closet Drama’, English Literary Renaissance, 24 (1): 104–34.

Ternaux, Jean-Claude (ed.) 2002. Cornélie: Tragédie, Paris: Honoré Champion.

Thomas Kyd. 1594. Cornelia, London: James Roberts, for N[icholas] L[ing] and John Busbie.

– 1595. Pompey the Great, his faire Corneliaes tragedie effected by her father and husbandes downe-cast, death, and fortune. Written in French, by that excellent poet Ro: Garnier; and translated into English by Thomas Kid. London: [James Roberts] for Nicholas Ling.

Winston, Jessica. 2016. “Early, ‘English Seneca’: From Coterie Translations to the Popular Stage”. In Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Senecan Tragedy, edited by Eric Dodson-Robinson, 174-202. Leiden: Brill.  

– 2006. “Seneca in Early Elizabethan England”. Renaissance Quarterly 59: 29-58.

Thomas Kyd’s Cornelia was published in a volume in 1594, then it was reissued in 1595 with the new title Pompey the Great, his faire Corneliaes Tragedie: Effected by her Father and Husbandes down-cast, death and fortune.

According to the USTC, there are seven extant witnesses of Kyd’s Cornelia (512538), preserved in the UK and the US – two in London, one at the British Library and one at the Victoria and Albert Museum, one in Oxford at the Bodleian Library, one at the National Library of Scotland; and three in the US (at the Huntington Library, at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, and at the Folger Shakespeare Library).

The witness used for this edition is an octavo of 96 pages. The edition presents, in the first page (<A1r>, not numbered), an ornament representing a winged figure surrounded by flowers, followed by the title Cornelia with the indication of the printer, publisher, place and date of publishing (“at London, Printed by James Roberts, for N. L. and John Busbie. 1594”). The name of the author, ThoMas Kyd and the indication it is a first edition, have been added manually between the title and the editing information.

Signatures in this edition go from A to L, the pages are numbered on the recto page, till the third, then left unnumbered. The first signature is represented only with a letter followed by a full-stop (A., B., C. …L.), the second and third with the letter and Arabic number (A2, A3, B2, B3…etc.) the fourth is left unnumbered. The “Dedication” and “the Argument” pages of Cornelia feature ornate initials.

The volume contains: the title page, the dedication to To the vertuouſly Noble, and rightyly honoured Lady, the Counteſſe of Suβex, The Argument¸ the Interlocutors, and the tragedy itself. The dedication is in italics while the rest of the volume is in Roman type, except for the choruses, and the names of people and places which are in italics.

The tragedy is composed of five acts all terminating with Choruses, in act four “A Chorus of Caesar’s Friends” appears, which is however absent from the list of Interlocutors.