| Author | George Gascoigne |
|---|---|
| Genre | tragedy |
| Form | verse |
| Code | Gas.0001 |
| Language | English |
| Title | Jocasta |
| Ancient Title | Phoenissai |
| EMEC editor | Silvia Bigliazzi and Carla Suthren |
| Introduction | Separated by a few decades only, two Jocastas were published in Italy and England in the mid-sixteenth century. The frontispiece of the Italian one, issued in Venice in 1549 by Manuzio’s printing house, claimed Lodovico Dolce’s authorship (“GIOCASTA. | TRAGEDIA DI | M. LODOVICO | DOLCE | . . . | IN VINEGIA, M.D.XLIX. In Vinegia appresso i figliuoli d’Aldo | M.D.XLIX. il mese di Marzo”). The English one, whose first quarto was contained in George Gascoigne’s 1573 A Hundreth Sundrie Flowers imprinted for Richard Smith, attributed its paternity to Euripides and added, in smaller font, the translators’ names as well as the play’s staging history: IOCASTA: A Tragedy written in Greke by Euripides, translated and digested into Acte by George Gascoygne, and Francis Kinwelmershe of Grayes Inne, and there by them presented. 1566. As a matter of fact, neither frontispiece was entirely truthful, at least going by modern standards: Dolce was only in part the original “author” of Giocasta, and the English play had not been translated from Euripides’s Greek text. Not surprisingly, both publications were derived from previous works: the former was an adaptation of Rudolphus Collinus’ 1541 Latin version of Euripides’ The Phoenician Women, the latter a translation of Dolce’s Italian adaptation. And yet, neither claim was entirely untrue. Turning to the English version, Gascoigne’s and Kinwelmershe’s false claim that their play derived from the Greek, already present in the scribal presentation copy of 1566 (BL Add MS 34063), has long been exposed, and yet it remains surprising that for centuries it was seriously thought to derive from Euripides. “The indebtedness of the Jocasta of Gascoigne and Kinwelmersh to Dolce’s tragedy”, Cunliffe noted in his 1906 parallel edition (xxix-xxx), “was first pointed out by Professor J. P. Mahaffy in his little book on Euripides (Classical Writers Series), published in 1879; afterwards by J. A. Symonds in his Predecessors of Shakespeare (1884), where it attracted more general attention. The closeness with which the English translators stuck to their Italian text (except in the choruses) is made clear for the first time in the parallel text and notes following.” He also claimed that “The translators of Dolce . . . added practically nothing to their original” (xxx), which is true in terms of entirely new material or textual reshuffling, although they occasionally expanded the text by adding lines or elaborating on the topics. More recently, attempts have been made to demonstrate a closer, if tenuous, link with the Euripidean play by claiming that Gascoigne and Kinwelmersh might have also consulted Collinus’ 1541 Latin edition or others available at the time (for instance Melanchthon’s, published by Johannes Oporinus in 1558, Basel, or Stiblinus’ Greek-Latin edition published in 1562, again by Oporinus in Basel; see e.g. Dewar-Watson 2010, and Peyré 2020). The major innovation made by Gascoigne and Kinwelmersh on Dolce’s play is the addition of four dumb shows in the style of another Inns of court play, Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville’s Gorboduc, first performed at the Inner Temple during the Christmas celebrations of 1561. This online edition brings together Collinus’ Latininised text of Euripides’ Phoenissae, with the act division from Stiblinus’ 1562 parallel edition; Lodovico Dolce’s 1549 edition of his Giocasta published by Aldus Manutius’ sons in Venice; and George Gascoigne and Francis Kinwelmersh’s Jocasta printed edition collected in George Gascoigne’s 1573 A Hundreth sundry flowers published by Richard Smith. It also presents excerpts from the anonymous report of a performance of Dolce’s play at Viterbo in 1570, organised by the Academia degli Ostinati: a unique document offering a first-hand response to the show by a spectator well acquainted with the Academicians, and an accurate report of how the performance took place in this indoor theatre, suggesting a particular responsiveness to visual spectacle. The alignment of Dolce’s and Gascoigne and Kinwelmersh’s texts shows how close a translation the English play is to the Italian text. The Latin version of Collinus has been divided into acts following Stiblinus’ 1562 division, to give the reader a sense of how a Renaissance editor interpreted the Greek text according to contemporary act division criteria. The alignment, in this case, is less straightforward: Dolce intervened heavily on the text, especially in acts 1, 3 and 5, reshuffling turn-takings, expanding the material and occasionally modifying the dramaturgy and altering the topics. Three major changes – the chorus of Phoenician women turned into a group of Theban gentlewomen, the omission of the teichoscopy, and the addition of the sacrifice of a goat on stage – contribute to the reinvention of the play for a Renaissance audience. Textual correspondence with the Latin text is preserved when possible, highlighting the extent to which Dolce, and the English translators, adapted the play. For a fuller discussion, see Bigliazzi and Suthren (forthcoming).
References - Anon., Descrittione de la scena et intermedii fatti per aere e per terra ne la Tragdia di GIOCASTA, recitata in Viterbo, dalli virtuosi & honorati Sig. Academici OSTINATI li 9. De Ottobre 1570. Viterbo: Agostino Colaldi. - Cremante, Renzo. 1998. “Appunti sulla grammatica tragica di Ludovico Dolce”. In Cuadernos de filología italiana, ed. by E. M. Garrido. Madrid: Servicio de Publicaciones UCM: 279-90. - Cunliffe, John W., ed. 1906. Supposes and Jocasta. Boston, MA: D. C. Heath. - Dewar-Watson, Sarah. 2010. “Jocasta: ‘A Tragedie Written in Greeke’”. International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 17 (1): 22-32. - Giazzon, Stefano. 2011a. Venezia in Coturno. Roma: Aracne. - Giazzon, Stefano2011b. “La Giocasta di Lodovico Dolce: note su una riscrittura euripidea”. Chroniques italiennes, 20: 1-46. - Montorfani, Pietro. 2006. “Giocasta, un volgarizzamento Euripideo di Lodovico Dolce (1549)”. Aevum 80 (3): 719-39. - Neuschäfer, Anne. 2001. “Da Thieste (1543) a Le Troiane (1566): le tragedie di Lodovico Dolce tra traduzione e rifacimento”. La parola del testo. Semestrale di filologia e letteratura italiana e comparata dal Medioevo al Rinascimento 5 (2): 361-80. - Norland, Howard B. 2009. Neoclassical Tragedy in Elizabethan England. Newark: University of Delaware Press. - Peyré, Yves. 2020. “Eclectism and Syncretism in Gascoigne and Kinwelmershe’s Jocasta”. Translation and Literature, 29: 44-58. |
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| Bibliography | - Anon., Descrittione de la scena et intermedii fatti per aere e per terra ne la Tragdia di GIOCASTA, recitata in Viterbo, dalli virtuosi & honorati Sig. Academici OSTINATI li 9. De Ottobre 1570. Viterbo: Agostino Colaldi. - Austen, Gillian. 2008. George Gascoigne. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008. - Cicogna, Emanuele Antonio. 1963. “Memoria intorno agli scritti di Lodovico Dolce, letterato veneziano del secolo XVI”. Memorie dell’Istituto veneto di Scienze, Lettere e Arti, vol. 11 (Venezia), 93-200. - Cremante, Renzo. 1998. “Appunti sulla grammatica tragica di Ludovico Dolce”. In Cuadernos de filología italiana, ed. by E. M. Garrido. Madrid: Servicio de Publicaciones UCM: 279-90. - Cunliffe, John W., ed., 1912. Early English Classical Tragedies. Oxford: Clarendon Press. - Cunliffe, John W., ed. 1906. Supposes and Jocasta. Boston, MA: D. C. Heath. - Demetriou, Tania. 2021. “How Gabriel Harvey read tragedy”. Renaissance Studies 35 (5): 757-87. - Dewar-Watson, Sarah. 2010. “Jocasta: ‘A Tragedie Written in Greeke’”. International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 17 (1): 22-32. - Giazzon, Stefano. 2011a. Venezia in Coturno. Roma: Aracne. - Giazzon, Stefano. 2011b. “La Giocasta di Lodovico Dolce: note su una riscrittura euripidea”. Chroniques italiennes, 20: 1-46. - Lamari, Anna A. 2010. Narrative, Intertext, and Space in Euripides’ Phoenissae. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. - Mahaffy, J. P. 1879. Euripides. New York: D. Appleton & Company. - Mastronarde Donald J., ed., 1994. Euripides. Phoenissae. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. - Mastronarde Donald J., ed. 1990. “Actors on High: The Skene Roof, the Crane, and the Gods in Attic Drama”. Classical Antiquity 9 (2): 255-7 - Medda, Enrico. 2013. “Fare teatro in un’epoca di crisi (II). La nuova drammaturgia delle Fenicie”. In La saggezza dell'illusione. Studi sul teatro greco. Pisa: ETS. - Miola, Robert S. 2002. “Euripides at Gray’s Inn. Gascoigne and Kinwelmersh’s Jocasta”. In The Female Tragic Hero in English Renaissance Drama, ed. by Naomi Coon Liebler, 33-50. Houndmills: Palgrave. - Montorfani, Pietro. 2006. “Giocasta, un volgarizzamento Euripideo di Lodovico Dolce (1549)”. Aevum 80 (3): 719-39. - Neuschäfer, Anne. 2001. “Da Thieste (1543) a Le Troiane (1566): le tragedie di Lodovico Dolce tra traduzione e rifacimento”. La parola del testo. Semestrale di filologia e letteratura italiana e comparata dal Medioevo al Rinascimento 5 (2): 361-80. - Norland, Howard B. 2009. Neoclassical Tragedy in Elizabethan England. Newark: University of Delaware Press. - Peyré, Yves. 2020. “Eclectism and Syncretism in Gascoigne and Kinwelmershe’s Jocasta”. Translation and Literature, 29: 44-58. - Pigman III, G. W., ed. 2000. George Gascoigne: A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres. Oxford: Oxford University Press. - Prouty, C.T. 1942 George Gascoigne: Elizabethan Courtier, Soldier, and Poet. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. - Smith, Bruce R. 1988. Ancient Scripts and Modern Experience on the English Stage. 1500-1700. Princeton: Princeton University Press. - Stiblinus’ Prefaces and Arguments on Euripides (1562): https://ucbclassics.dreamhosters.com/djm/stiblinus/stiblinusPhoenissae.html - Suthren, Carla. 2020. “Translating Commonplace Marks in Gascoigne and Kinwelmersh’s Jocasta”. Translation and Literature 29: 59-84. - Terpening, Ronnie H. 1997. Lodovico Dolce, Renaissance Man of Letters. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. - Winston, Jessica. 2016. Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558-1581. Oxford: Oxford University Press. |
| Witness Description | Jocasta The copy-text for Jocasta is the quarto edition collected in George Gascoigne’s A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres bounde up in one small Poesie (London, imprinted for Richard Smith, by Henry Bynneman and Henry Middleton, 1573; USTC 507655). The miscellany is mainly by Gascoigne, but includes “divers excellent devices of sundry gentlemen” (Aiv), suggesting collaborative work. The title page suggests original inventions as well as derivation from other authors, classical as well as contemporary: Gascoigne’s “flowers” are said to be “Gathered partely (by translation) in the fyne outlandish Gardins of Euripides, Ovid, Petrarke, Ariosto, and others…”. In fact, all the volume is by Gascoigne except for Jocasta, which he collaboratively authored with Francis Kinwelmersh. The earliest extant copy of this play is the manuscript scribal presentation copy of 1566 (BL Add MS 34063), which offers the closest witness of the play as it was performed at Gray’s Inn for the Christmas celebrations. The play was reprinted twice, in 1575 and in 1587. Gascoigne justified the need for a revised edition because of some scandal about A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, but the material remained substantially unaltered, except for its rearrangement into “Flowers to comfort, Herbs to cure, and Weeds to be avoided” (¶¶¶iir). The new collection was entitled The Posies of George Gascoigne, Corrected, perfected, and augmented by the Author and was imprinted by Henry Bynneman for Richard Smith (STC 11636 and STC 11637). Both Jocasta and Supposes were listed under “Herbs”. In 1587, a decade after Gascoigne’s death (1577), a third edition was printed by Abel Jeffes with the alternative titles of The Whole woorkes of George Gascoigne Esquire and The pleasauntest workes of George Gascoigne Esquire, where the only difference was the title page (STC 11638 and STC 11639). These two editions differ from the 1573 one for the addition of marginal notes. The variants are recorded in the running notes of this online edition. Jocasta has two main modern editions: the 1575 edition was used as copy-text by John Cunliffe in Supposes and Jocasta (1906) and Early English Classical Tragedies (1912), while the 1573 one by Pigman’s 2000 edition of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, which however introduces some readings from MS and 1575. The scribal copy of Jocasta and Dolce’s 1549 Giocasta are the copy-texts of Bigliazzi and Suthren’s recent parallel edition of the two texts for MHRA. To this edition the readers are referred for further details.
Variants: The apparatus of variants for Jocasta and Giocasta is given in the running footnotes. The printed marginal notes in Jocasta introduced in 1575 are given in notes, marked with [m].
Giocasta and Phoenissae The copy-text for Ludovico Dolce’s Giocasta is the 1549 octavo edition published in Venice by the sons of Aldo Manuzio. The play was republished in 1560 in Tragedie di M. Lodovico Dolce. Di novo ricorrette e ristampate (Vinegia: Appresso Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari). The copy-text for the Latin edition is Phoenissae. In Euripidis Tragoediae XVIII nunc primum per D. Camillum [i.e. Rudolphus Collinus] & Latio donatae (Basle: Ex officina Roberti Winter, 1541; USTC 654885). Act division is from Phoenissae, Latinised by Caspar Stiblin, in Euripides poetae tragicorum princeps, in latinum sermonem conversus . . . Basel, per Johannan Oporinus, 1562 (USTC 654877).
Modernisation criteria for the Italian text: The original Italian spelling has been preserved when bearing a linguistic function or showing regional provenance: e.g. audience> avenue (= avviene: ‘it happens’). The non-geminated consonant is a northern trait; ancho > anco (= ancora, ‘still’ or ‘also’) is Tuscan and has a literary connotation. Other forms of Tuscan hypercorrection have been preserved: ritruova (= ritrova, ‘finds again’); basciò, basci (= baciò, baci: ‘kissed’). When it does not, the spelling has been normalized (e.g., angoscie > angosce, lancie > lance, leggiero > leggero, loggietta > loggetta, saggie > sagge, but ebbrio has not been modernised because a Latinised form from ebrium; but triomphò > trionfò). Gli in place of li (third person plural) has been maintained because common until the early nineteenth century before words beginning by vowel or s before consonant (see Gerhard Rohlfs, Historische Grammatik der Italienische Sprache und ihrer Mundarten. Bern: A Francke AG, 1949, § 462). We refer to the same for the other cases of preserved spellings listed below and in the glossaries). Divided forms of articulated prepositions have all been made into a single word with no gemination (e.g. a i > ai; a gli > agli; a la = ‘ala’; a li > ali; de l’ > del’; de la = ‘dela’; de gli > degli). Divided words have been modernised when orthographic change does not imply linguistic alteration (e.g. d’inanzi > dinanzi; da poi > dapoi; (da) poi che > (da)poiché, if causal, but > (da)poi che, if temporal); simple consonants have not been geminated. The original spelling has been preserved in the following cases: not geminated consonants have been preserved when reflecting a northern Italian trait: e.g. avien (= avviene; ‘it happens’), oblighi (= obblighi: ‘obligations’); geminated consonants have been preserved if are Latinised forms (e.g. commanda = comanda: ‘he orders’, ‘guides’) or examples of northern Italian hypercorrection (arrisse = arrise: ‘it was propitious’, ‘smiled on’). Accents have been omitted in cases such as à > a, fù > fu, su > sù (adverb: up, above etc., but sù > su: preposition: ‘on’, ‘over’), and added in cases like ne > né, perche > perché. Upper case letters had been changed into lower case letters in the following cases: Reina > reina; Re > re; Regni > regni; Nuntio > nunzio; Real > real; Signore/-i > signore/-i; Iddio > iddio (a pagan god). In the case of adjectives of places and people, we have always used the lower case (Tebani > tebani; Argivi > argivi), but they are nouns the capital letter has been preserved (Tebani; Argivi). Proper names have been modernised: Polynice > Polinice; Hemone > Emone; Hymeneo > Imeneo, but Edippo has been preserved. The punctuation has been modernised and lower case letters have been changed into upper case letters after question marks. Line numeration is continuous within the acts; within square brackets numbers indicate alternative numbering following added scene division. Textual additions have been indicated by square brackets, errata corrige insertions within angle brackets. ſ > s; ß > ss & > e (ed if followed by a word beginning with e- or by a vowel only in metrical passages, not in prose) v > u, u > v: vltimo > ultimo; uidi > vidi i / j: sajo > saio no h at the beginning or in the middle of a word when it has no phonetic function (e.g. hora, talhora, luogho ecc.); but it has been kept when ha, hanno follow ch’ (c’hanno, ch’hanno) > ch’hanno, ch’hanno; and in the following: ammi > hammi, oime > ohimè c > z: giudicio> giudizio, condicione > condizione single z for -ti-, -tti-, cti-, zzi- x is used only once (exti)
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| Links to the texts |
Greek and Latin: Euripides Phoenissae, Gasparo Stiblino interprete 1562 Greek and English: Euripides, Phoenissae Italian: Lodovico Dolce, Giocasta, 1549
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