The Misfortunes of Arthur

According to the title page, The Misfortunes of Arthur was performed in front of Elizabeth I at Greenwich Palace on the 28^th February 1588. In the accounts of the Revels Office, reference is made to “shewes by the Childeren of Poles her Maiesties owne servantes & the gentlemen of grayes In”, on which “was Inployed dyverse remnanttes of Clothe of goulde & other stuffe oute of the Store” (Feuillerat, 378); the entry suggests that these took place “betwixte Christmas & Shrouetid”, i.e. before the 20^th February. Though the title-page date is generally accepted, John Payne Collier put the date as 8^th February (Collier, 1833), while Alan Stewart observes that “another possibility would be 18 February (the day before Shrove Tuesday) with the printer making the common misreading of ‘18’ for ‘28’” (2012, 64). Soon afterwards, the play was in print: it must have been in press by late March, since the colophon reads 1587 (the new year began on 25^thMarch, after which the play would have been dated 1588); on the speed with which this was accomplished, see Corrigan (1992, 4).

The text also provides information about the people involved in the production in various capacities. Eight are named: Thomas Hughes, Nicolas Trotte, William Fulbeck, Francis Flower, Christopher Yelverton, Francis Bacon, John Lancaster, and John Penruddock. All are known to have been members of Gray’s Inn with the exception of Francis Flower. The most famous member of the group is Francis Bacon, who had joined Gray’s Inn in 1576, and was nearly thirty by the time of the play’s performance. Christopher Yelverton had been involved in a previous Gray’s Inn production, the Jocastaperformed in 1566, by George Gascoigne and Francis Kinwelmersh, for which Yelverton provided an epilogue. For biographical information on the other members of the group, see Ramel (1967). Stewart further speculates that Sir Christopher Hatton (1540-1591) might have been involved in some capacity, perhaps financial, given his connections to Lancaster and Flower (71), while Curtis Perry suggests that it was “written to support the political agenda of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who was both a member of Gray’s Inn and an active patron within the institution during the 1580s” (513).

The printed text purports to be a faithful representation of the play “as it was presented, excepting certain words and lines, where some of the actors either helped their memories by brief omission, or fitted their acting by some alteration” (sig. 0.iii.r). Following the “introduction penned by Nicolas Trotte”, the majority of the text was by Hughes, with alternative speeches for Gorlois at the beginning and end provided by Fulbeck and printed at the end; these were the versions used in the performance before Elizabeth (Corrigan’s edition switches the printed order to reflect this, so that Fulbeck’s versions appear in the main body of the play and Hughes’ at the end). A final note specifies that Flower wrote “a Chorus for the first act, and another for the second act” (on which, see below), while the dumb shows were devised by Yelverton, Bacon, Lancaster, and Flower; the production was directed by Flower, Penruddock, and Lancaster (sig. G.ii.r). Given that eight gentlemen are mentioned by name, and that the play itself can be performed with eight principal actors, it seems likely that the creators of the production were also the performers. While the collaborative origins of the play are clear, as Stewart observes, an anonymous satirical poem which appears to relate to Arthur complains “thow art but one mans child”, perhaps suggesting “some sort of suspicious behaviour at the point of printing” (2012, 75-6); Corrigan argues that the poem many have been written by Trotte (1992, 245).

The play takes its plot from Arthurian legend, dealing with the civil wars between Arthur and his son Mordred, culminating in their deaths at one another’s hands. The main source is Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century Historia Regum Britanniae (see Grumbine, 1900, 17-51), supplemented by details from other sources, probably including “the late fourteenth-century alliterative Morte Arthure” (Corrigan 1992, 10). While the plot is derived from these narrative sources, the execution draws heavily on classical sources, most obviously Seneca. Earlier critics tended to treat this as a negative form of dependence; Ribner, for instance, despite some attempt to rehabilitate the play, still called it a “slavish imitation” (1957, 229). John W. Cunliffe identified around 300 lines in which Arthur translates or imitates directly specific lines from Seneca’s tragedies (1893, Appendix II, 130-55). Meanwhile, George Logan (1962) observed the play’s additional debt to Lucan’s Bellum Civile, identifying this text behind more than 330 lines in Arthur. From this perspective, Lucan’s presence in the play even outweighs Seneca’s, attributable to the civil war subject-matter; though Logan acknowledges that beyond the verbal parallels, Seneca as a dramatist (unlike Lucan) also provided models “for structure, incident, characterization, and, especially in passages of stichomythia, for versification” (22). Corrigan (1992) in his appendices helpfully brings together the most compelling parallels between Arthur and its classical sources.

The play’s depiction of an ancient Britain torn apart by civil wars, threatened by hostile forces both from without and from within, must have resonated with the historical moment of its first performance in February 1588. A year before, on 8^th February 1587, Mary Queen of Scots had been executed for her repeated involvement in plots against Elizabeth. Meanwhile, the threat of Spanish invasion was growing, and would culminate in the defeat of the Spanish Armada in August that year. Early twentieth-century critics drew attention to analogies between the Inns of Court play and the Mary Queen of Scots affair; Evangelia Waller (1925), for example, saw her son James VI of Scotland (subsequently I of England) in Arthur and her third husband Bothwell in Mordred, while Gertrude Reese (1945) more straightforwardly mapped Elizabeth onto Arthur and Mary onto Mordred. Subsequent work has tended to move away from identifying such specific political allegories, but has remained interested in the play’s political resonances, often seeing it as a deliberate intervention or attempt to influence Elizabeth’s policy. For William Armstrong the play treated the “distinctively Elizabethan” themes of “usurpation, ambition, civil war, tyranny, kingship, and the fate of the commonweal” (1956, 238), while Marie Axton (1977) has placed it alongside other plays with similar themes which she takes as responding to the succession crisis. Others have focused on the mixture of praise and criticism of Elizabeth I presented by the play (Crosbie, 1999; Gamble, 1991), and on its relationship to emergent British imperialism (Spradlin, 2005; Perry, 2011). There has also been continued interest in Arthur’s relations to its classical sources beyond the specific verbal parallels, with Richard McCabe arguing for the thematic importance of Seneca’s treatment of incest to the play (1993, 120-6), and Edward Paleit exploring the nuances of its appropriations of Lucan (2013, 137-40).

One of the play’s key inheritances from Seneca is the presence of the Chorus, and this tends to be the focus of the little critical attention it has so far attracted. Ribner considered the “moralizing choruses at the end of each act” to be a result of “the slavish imitation” of Seneca (1957, 229), while Perry comments more generally on the “conventional style of Neostoic moralizing offered throughout by the chorus” (2011, 517). In Arthur’s original performance, the Chorus consisted of four actors, as the argument of the first dumb show informs us (sig. A.i.r). They enter after the first dumb show, and presumably remain on stage until the end; certainly, no cue is ever given for them to exit. The specific wording of the argument of the first dumb show – that after it concluded, “the four which represented the Chorus took their places” – suggests that they had an assigned position from which to observe the action, coming forward to deliver their odes between the acts, and to participate in the dialogue in 5.1, after which they deliver their final remarks, prior to the reappearance of Gorlois and the epilogue. 244 lines are assigned to the Chorus, representing about twelve per cent of the spoken part of the play (not including Trotte’s Introduction). Although the identity of the Chorus is not specified, it clearly represents Arthur’s subjects, from whose perspective its members speak in 5.1.

The note at the end of the printed play text specifies that besides Fulbeck’s alternative speeches for Gorlois which have just been given in full, “there was also penned a Chorus for the first act, and another for the second act, by Master Francis Flower, which were pronounced accordingly” (sig. G.ii.r). This wording might suggest that in the text as it is printed, we have the versions for the first and second Choruses originally written by Hughes, as is the case for Gorlois’ speeches, but that the alternative Choruses by Flower which were actually performed are not likewise included at the end. On the other hand, the first and second Choruses share some different characteristics as compared to those following the third and fourth acts, which might indicate a change in authorship. Each choral interlude is divided into four stanzas, corresponding to the four members of the Chorus. These, like the rest of the play, are in iambic pentameter, with no attempt to distinguish the choral parts metrically (as in Jasper Heywood’s translation of Thyestes (1560), for instance, where the iambic pentameter of the choral odes is distinguished from the play’s regular hexameters). However, the first two Choruses subscribe to a strict and regular rhyme scheme (ABABCC in the first, and ABABCCDD in the second), while the others are in blank verse. In addition, the specific classical sources that have been identified (as summarised in Corrigan’s appendix) are heavily concentrated in the third and fourth odes, with the former weaving together lines from a number of Seneca’s choruses, and the latter drawing on Lucan’s Bellum Civile, book 7. Specifically, 3 Chorus 33-4 = Agamemnon 62-3; 35-8 = Thyestes 391-2/401-3; 41-5 = Hercules Oetaeus 694-9; 59-60 = Hercules Furens 162-3. Meanwhile, 4 Chorus 4-8 = BC 7.58-60; 16-17 = 7.95-6; 41-4 = 7.185-9. The third and fourth choral odes, which we know to be by Hughes, therefore demonstrably exhibit strategies which are consistent with his practices in the rest of the play. The only other known writing by Flower is commemorative verse for Hatton’s tomb in St Paul’s Cathedral, which can be found in William Dugdale’s History of Saint Paul’s (ed. Henry Ellis, 1818, 56).

Armstrong, William A. “Elizabethan Themes in The Misfortunes of Arthur.” The Review of English Studies 7.27 (1956): 238-49.

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Bevington, David. Tudor Drama and Politics: A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968.

Collier, John Payne ed. Five Old Plays. S. Prowett: London, 1828; 2^nd edn, William Pickering: London, 1833.

Corrigan, Brian ed. The Misfortunes of Arthur: A Critical, Old-Spelling Edition. Garland: New York, 1992.

Crosbie, Christopher J. “Sexuality, Corruption, and the Body Politic: The Paradoxical Tribute of The Misfortunes of Arthur to Elizabeth I.” Arthuriana 9.3 (1999): 68-80.

Cunliffe, J. W., The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy. London: Macmillan, 1893.

Ellis, Henry e.d. The History of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, in London, from its Foundation: Extracted out of Original Charters, Records, Leiger-Books, and other Manuscripts, by Sir William Dugdale, Knight. London: Lackington et al., 1818.

Gamble, Giles. “Power Play: Elizabeth I and The Misfortunes of Arthur.” Quondam et Futurus 1.2 (1991): 59-69.

Grumbine, Harvey Carson ed. The Misfortunes of Arthur, by Thomas Hughes and others, edited with an introduction, notes and glossary. E. Felber: Berlin, 1900.

Logan, George M. “Hughes’s Use of Lucan in The Misfortunes of Arthur.” The Review of English Studies 20.77 (1969): 22-32.

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Paleit, Edward. War, Liberty, and Caesar: Responses to Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile, Ca. 1580-1650. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Perry, Curtis. “British Empire on the Eve of the Armada: Revisiting The Misfortunes of Arthur.” Studies in Philology108.4 (2011): 508-37.

Ramel, Jacques. ‘Biographical Notices on the Authors of Misfortunes of Arthur.’ Notes & Queries 14.12 (1967): 461-7.

Reese, Gertrude. “Political Import of The Misfortunes of Arthur.” The Review of English Studies 21.82 (1945): 81-91.

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The printed octavo of The Misfortunes of Arthur bears the date 1587, i.e. early 1588. There are three extant copies, held by the British Library, the Huntington Library, and Harvard. The British Library copy, on which this edition is based, includes a number of cancel slips and deletions which are not present in the others.

The title page reads: “Certaine Deuises and shewes presented to her Maiestie by the Gentlemen of Grayes-Inne at her Highnesse Court in Greenewich, the twenty eighth day of Februarie in the thirtieth yeare of her Maiesties most happy Raigne. At London Printed by Robert Robinson. 1587.”

Collation: 8^o, π⁴ A-F⁴ G² [B-F fully signed ; leaving C3 D2 unsigned, misprinting F3 as F4] (Greg 1962, 167). Contents:

(1) An Introduction peened by Nicholas Trotte (π2r- π3r)

(2) The misfortunes of Arthur [half-title] (π3v)

(3) The argument of the Tragedie (A1r)

(4) The Argument and manner of the first dumbe shewe (A1r)

(5) The argument of the first Act (A1v)

(6) The names of the speakers (A1v)

(7) [The Misfortunes of Arthur, including descriptions of subsequent dumb shows and arguments] (A2r-F4v)

(8) A speach penned by William Fulbecke gentleman (G1r-v)

(9) One other speeche penned by the same gentleman (G1v-G2r)

(10) Besides these speaches there was also penned [note] (G2r)