The Glass of Government

George Gascoigne’s Glass of Government was printed in 1575, with a dedicatory letter present in some copies dated 26^th April (see the appendix to this edition). Unlike his earlier Inns of Court plays, Supposes and Jocasta, both of which were produced for the Gray’s Inn Christmas revels of 1566-7, there is no record suggesting that The Glass of Government was ever performed. Critics tend to agree that it probably was not written for performance; it is often referred to as a ‘closet drama’, while C. S. Lewis noted its similarity to “an Erasmian ‘colloquy’” in its educational content and “undramatic” form (1954, 269). At the same time, as Richard Hillman (2008, 394-5) has pointed out, the text presents itself unambiguously as a play, with a prologue and epilogue addressing the audience, and stage directions no less frequent or helpful than in most early modern dramatic works. The main reason for the general feeling that this is “a work which never could have held the stage” (Salamon 1974, 48) tends to come down to the two extremely long pedagogical scenes, in which Gnomaticus delivers lengthy and repetitive lectures to his students in real time (1.4 and 2.1). Were these scenes to be substantially trimmed, we would essentially be left with a viable performance text. Gascoigne’s prose is natural and colloquial, and leavened with touches of wit; his characters, while primarily embodying their nominal characteristics, are not without interest.

  Nevertheless, the printed form of the play as we have it is designed as a text to be read. The principle of learning sound precepts through repetition in various forms is extended through the interaction of text and paratexts. Before coming to the action of the play, the reader is offered a scheme of the “sentences” upon which the work is composed, drawn up by “C. B.” (Christopher Barker, the publisher, A4r), and based on Gnomaticus’ teachings later on. Gnomaticus’ lectures themselves are further supplemented by marginal notes which indicate the main point (“Fear God”, “Love God”, etc.). The students are then set the task of setting the precepts they have been given in verse, and the two resulting poems are read aloud in 3.6. Moreover, the entire action of the play, as Gascoigne informs us from the very beginning, is designed to illustrate “the rewards and punishments of virtues and vices” respectively (A3r): the two bright but disobedient older sons of two respectable citizens are seduced by lewd company and come to a bad end, while the slower but diligent younger sons are rewarded with professional success. Unsurprisingly, this relentlessly moralizing presentation of its theme has often proved alienating to the play’s modern readers; in Peter McCluskey’s damning view, for instance, Gascoigne’s readers “are rewarded for their piety with a grimly sanctimonious morality without peer as a soporific text” (2018, 45). McCluskey’s sentiment is not exclusively modern; one seventeenth-century reader, Richard Smith, expressed his opinion by writing “old Teadious” in his copy of the play (see Atkin 2018, 1). It has not been without admirers, however: Felix Schelling, writing at the end of the nineteenth century, called it “a remarkable play; excellent, if over regular in construction, rapid and logical in its movement, and clear in character-drawing”, though he did feel that Gnomaticus’ instructional speeches were a touch over-long (1893, 47).

  In fact, the severity of the play’s moral judgement upon the two elder sons, in that no possibility of repentance is entertained, is remarkable from several perspectives. It is contrary to the Biblical parable of the prodigal son, in which the younger son, having “wasted his substance with riotous living” (Luke 15:13, KJV), is allowed to repent and return home. GG is essentially an original composition, unlike Supposes and Jocasta which were both translations (from Ariosto and Dolce respectively). But one source of inspiration is likely to have been the Dutch “Christian Terence” plays, designed for performance in a pedagogical context, in particular Gnaphaeus’ Acolastus and Stymmelius’ Studentes, both of which were known in England (this connection was first proposed by Herford 1886). These examples, however, follow the redemptive pattern set by Biblical precedent. GG, on the other hand, as Sylvia Feldman has pointed out (discussing the play in relation to the morality-play genre) entirely “rejects the premise upon which the didactic intention and the formal elements of the morality depend, the premise that sinful man is capable of regeneration” (1970, 150). This has been explained in light of the play’s “profoundly pessimistic Calvinistic determinism” (Helgerson, 396), under which both elect and reprobate are predestined, so repentance for the latter is impossible.

  Linda Salamon finds Gascoigne’s pattern instead in his major English source, Roger Ascham’s pedagogical treatise The Scholemaster (printed in 1570), in which he writes that

"while those which be commonly the wisest, the best learned, and best men also, when they be old, were never commonly the quickest of wit when they were young [. . .] amongst a number of quick wits in youth, few be found in the end either very fortunate for themselves, or very profitable to serve the commonwealth, but decay and vanish, men know not which way" (Salamon 1974, 51). As Salamon has demonstrated, Gascoigne’s debts to Ascham in GG are substantial and pervasive. But if he was “deliberately alluding to this model of English humanist education theory in order to demonstrate his understanding (and acceptance of) its tenets” (Austen, 269), again the unregeneracy of the older sons proves problematic. The play is insistent that the all the sons have received exactly the same upbringing and education, but that it has only been effective in the case of the younger two, who have taken its tenets to heart; the hope of Gnomaticus that their older brothers may yet turn out well proves unfounded, and thus appears somewhat naïve. This does not make a powerful case for the efficacy of the kind of Christian humanist education advocated by Ascham and carried out by Gnomaticus.

  Furthermore, the play’s denial of the possibility of repentance seems surprising in light of the position that Gascoigne himself was adopting at this time as a ‘reformed prodigal’. A number of critics have read GG in light of the circumstances of Gascoigne’s biography, not least because he himself was apparently “intellectually the type of ‘quick wit’ Ascham criticized” and the play condemns; “E. K.” comments on his “natural promptness” in Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar (Austen, 104). Gascoigne himself appears to encourage this connection, since he uses the same proverb to describe the older two brothers later in an autobiographical context. It is notable, too, that instead of doing their schoolwork, the two elder brothers respectively compose poetry about love and martial deeds, the two activities that Gascoigne himself was involved in during his time in the Low Countries. Gillian Austen, marshalling the evidence, approaches the play rather in light of its instrumental function within Gascoigne’s career. His poetry collection, An Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573) had attracted trouble, and just a few months earlier (Feb 1575) he had re-issued it with a number of changes, adopting in the prefatory material for the first time the stance of the ‘reformed prodigal’. This, too, had caused problems, however; and it is at this moment that Gascoigne chose to publish GG, in which he “seeks to consolidate” the persona of “Gascoigne the Reformed Prodigal” (Austen, 105). As a result, Austen suggests that “even the severity of Gascoigne’s ending may be related to the expediency of the publication, the apparent need to demonstrate his reformation”, even to the extent of symbolically killing off the avatars of his younger self (104).

  Recent critical approaches have continued to be interested in the play’s engagement with humanist pedagogy (Jean Lambert’s Teachers in Early Modern Drama: Pedagogy and Authority (2019), and Katherine Little’s Humanism and Good Books in Sixteenth-Century England (2023)), its representation of Antwerp and concern with foreign travel (McCluskey’s Representations of Flemish Immigrants on the Early Modern Stage (2018), and Michelle Dowd, The Dynamics of Inheritance on the Shakespearean Stage, 2015), respectively), and its engagement with the ‘prodigal son’ drama (Alison Jack’s The Prodigal Son in English and American Literature (2018), and Ezra Horbury’s Prodigality in Early Modern Drama (2019)). Horbury notably pays more sustained attention to the play’s female characters than has generally been the case. Lorna Hutson, in The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama, has importantly situated the drama in the context of Gascoigne’s Inns of Court background, relating its concerns to contemporary legal issues and reading its “forensic” plot as carefully constructed to “engag[e] the audience in the work of evaluating the probabilities of the inferences drawn by different characters” (2007, 215-16). In this, Hutson considers, lies the significance of Gascoigne’s contribution to later drama, including Shakespeare.

  Gascoigne’s use of a chorus in The Glass of Government is often referred to as one of the ‘classical’ features of the play, along with its five-act structure and the influence of Latin comedy, particularly Terence. However, it is worth noting that the chorus had already dropped out of Latin comedy by the time of Plautus and Terence; in Gascoigne’s self-styled “tragical comedy”, the verse choruses, distinguished from the prose of the play’s dialogue, constitute one of the “tragical” elements. That Gascoigne perceived it as such is suggested by the fact that in his previous dramatic pieces, the tragedy Jocasta (descended from Greek tragedy via Lodovico Dolce) includes a chorus, while the comedy Supposes (descended from Latin comedy via Ariosto) does not. Gascoigne specifies that the chorus of The Glass of Government consists of “four grave burghers” of Antwerp; the chorus for Jocasta was made up of “four Theban dames”. Unlike in Jocasta, though, the chorus in The Glass of Government does not take part in the dialogue of the play at any point, being restricted to moralizing reflections at the end of each act (except Act 5, which is followed by an epilogue). The first chorus consists of eight stanzas of rhyme royal (ababbcc), which recalls the first, second and fourth choruses of Jocasta, also in rhyme royal, but Gascoigne uses greater variety throughout the following choral odes in The Glass of Government. The second has twenty-four cross-rhymed pentameter lines (six quatrains, not separated) followed by a final rhyming couplet. The third has six stanzas of six pentameter lines each, in the rhyme scheme ababcc. The fourth has thirty-four lines consisting of rhyming couplets in poulter’s measure (alternating twelve and fourteen syllable lines). Ross Duffin, challenging the assumption that verse choruses in Inns of Court drama were spoken rather than sung, has recently demonstrated that all The Glass of Government’s choruses, like those of Jocasta, could be sung to contemporary psalm tunes (Duffin 2021, 26-8). On the other hand, the other instances of metrical, rhyming verse on moralistic themes in The Glass of Government are the poetic efforts of the virtuous sons, Philotimus and Philomusus – written compositions which they read aloud in Act 3 Scene 6. Once again, Gascoigne’s play hovers between privileging its performance dimensions and insistence on its textuality.

Austen, Gillian. 2008. George Gascoigne. Cambridge: DS Brewer.

Cunliffe, J. W. 1910. The Complete Works of George Gascoigne, vol. II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dowd, Michelle M. 2015. The Dynamics of Inheritance on the Shakespearean Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Duffin, Ross W. 2021. “Hidden Music in Early Elizabethan Tragedy.” Early Theatre 24 (1): 11-61.

Feldman, Sylvia. 1970. The Morality-Patterned Comedy of the Renaissance. The Hague: Mouton.

Gascoigne, George. 1914. The Glass of Government. Amersham: Tudor Facsimile Texts.

Gregg, W. W. 1962. A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration. London: Bibliographical Society.

Helgerson, Richard. 1976. The Elizabethan Prodigals. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.

Herford, C. H. 1886. “Gascoigne’s Glasse of Government.” Englische Studien IX: 201-9.

Hillman, Richard. 2008. “Measure for Measure and the (Anti-) Theatricality of Gascoigne’s The Glasse of Government.” Comparative Drama 42 (4): 391-408.

Horbury, Ezra. 2019. Prodigality in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.

Hutson, Lorna. 2007. The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jack, Alison. 2018. The Prodigal Son in English and American Literature: Five Hundred Years of Literary Homecomings. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lambert, Jean. 2020. Teachers in Early Modern English Drama: Pedagogy and Authority. Abingdon: Routledge.

Lewis, C. S. 1954. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Little, Katherine. 2023. Humanism and Good Books in Sixteenth-Century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

McCluskey, Peter. 2019. Representations of Flemish Immigrants on the Early Modern Stage. Abingdon: Routledge.

Salamon, Linda. 1974. “A Face in The Glasse: Gascoigne’s Glasse of Government Re-Examined.” Studies in Philology, 71 (1): 47-71.

Schelling, Felix. 1893. The Life and Writings of George Gascoigne. Boston, MA: The Athenaeum Press.

The Glass of Government was printed in quarto in 1575, in an edition which is extant in three states, as described by W. W. Greg, 68a(i-iii) (1962, 148-9). In a(ii), ‘a cancel, printed from a fresh setting of the type, replaces the original N1 (or perhaps the whole half-sheet N)’; this adds the errata list at the end, and slightly alters the colophon. In copies of a(iii), the only addition is the presence of a dedication to Sir Owen Hopton, inserted separately after the title page on an unsigned leaf.

The present edition uses the copy of a(ii) held by the British Library, shelf-mark C.34.f.6.(2.). This is also available in a facsimile edition by the Tudor Facsimile Texts series (Gascoigne, 1914). Because this copy does not include the dedicatory epistle to Hopton, this has been added as an appendix to the modernized text, based on the text of Cunliffe’s edition of Gascoigne’s works (1910), with spelling modernized.

The title page, the same in all three states, reads: “The Glasse of Gouernement. A tragicall Comedie so entituled, bycause therein are handled aswell the rewards for Vertues, as also the punishment for Vices. Done by George Gascoigne Esquier. 1575. Blessed are they that feare the Lorde, their children shalbe as the branches of Oliue trees rounde about their table. Seen and allowed, according to the order appointed in the Queenes maiesties Iniunctions. Imprinted at London for C. Barker”.

Collation: 4^o, ^πA⁴ A-M⁴ N² [fully signed except F H ; leaving K 2 unsigned], 54 leaves unnumbered (Greg 1962, 148). Contents:

(1) The names of the Actors (^πA2^v).

(2) The Argument (^πA3).

(3) The Prologue (^πA3^v).

(4) This worke is compiled vpon these sentences following, set downe by mee C. B. (^πA4).

(5) In Comoediam Gascoigni, carmen B. C. (^πA4^v).

(6) The Glasse of Gouernement (A1-M4^v)

(7) Epilogus (M4^v).

(8) Colophon (N1^v).