The Tragedy of Gorboduc

The Tragedy of Gorboduc or Ferrex and Porrex was written for performance as part of the Christmas revels of 1561/2 at the Inner Temple, where the authors, Thomas Norton (1532-1584) and Thomas Sackville (1536-1608), were both members (on the former, see Graves 1994; on the latter, see Zim 2015). Based on the entry in the stationers’ register for the first edition, Norton has generally been held to have been responsible for the first three acts, and Sackville for the last two, though the actual division has been a matter for debate (Dust 1978, 108 has a useful summary). It formed part of that year’s particularly lavish festivities, which celebrated Robert Dudley (who had recently intervened on behalf of the Inner Temple in a dispute with the Middle Temple) as the presiding Lord (see Axton 1970). Henry Machyn, who recorded the revels procession in his diary, testifies both to the extravagance of the celebrations and the significance of the audience: “for ther was grett cher all Cryustynmas tyll (blank), and grett revels as ever was for the gentyllmen of the Tempull evere day, for mony of the conselle was there” (Nichols 1848, 273-4). The tragedy provided by the lawyers evidently met with success, since it was restaged shortly afterwards before Queen Elizabeth I at Whitehall, on 18^th January, which Machyn again records: “The eighteenth day of January was a play in the Queen’s hall at Westminster by the gentlemen of the temple, and after, a great masque” (275).

That Gorboduc was the play mentioned by Machyn is confirmed by the title pages of the first and second editions. The first edition, printed by William Griffith and dated 22^nd September 1565, declares that the play is “Set forth as the same was showed before the Queen’s most excellent Majesty, in her highness’ Court of Whitehall, the 18 day of January, Anno Domini 1561”. This claim to accuracy, however, was disputed by the second edition, which was printed in 1570 by John Day, this time “set forth without addition or alteration but altogether as the same was showed on stage before the Queen’s Majesty” (Day’s edition is found either separately or as part of a volume of All such treatises as have been lately published by Thomas Norton). In his preface to the reader, Day declares that the first edition had been printed without the knowledge or consent of the authors, and was “put forth exceedingly corrupted” (11-12; on the prefatory letter, see Sincox 2023). Nonetheless, Day’s edition seems to have used Griffith’s as the copy-text for correction; for the most part they do not differ substantially, and while the 1570 certainly makes many minor corrections, it also introduces some new errors (see Cauthen, 1962). The most significant difference between the two texts is an eight-line passage in Act 5, Scene 1 (Q1 5.1.42-49), which appears in the first edition but is omitted in Day’s authorized version, either by accident or by design (Craik 1974, n. ad loc. suggests that perhaps “Norton (as a strong Calvinist) disagreed with the principle of non-resistance expressed here by Sackville”). The passage also appears in the third edition, which was printed in 1590 by Edward Allde for John Perrin and based on Griffith’s text rather than Day’s. This edition prints the play together with John Lydgate’s Serpent of Division, which narrates the collapse of the Roman Republic and subsequent civil wars; originally composed in the 1420s, the text is modernized for a late sixteenth-century readership and no attribution to Lydgate is given (on this volume see Shrank, 2015). The play has appeared in a number of modern editions, though generally along with other early dramatic works rather than separately; these are listed at the beginning of the bibliography, below.

Aside from Machyn’s brief notes, a further contemporary account of the play in performance at survives (BL Add. MS 48023; reproduced and transcribed in Jones and White, 1996), which was uncovered in the 1990s. The anonymous author writes that “Ther was a Tragedie played in the Inner Temple of the two brethren Porrex and Ferrex”, which might suggest that it is an account of the first performance, but the concluding comment is that “This play was the [blank] daye of January at the courte before the Quene”. The author may well have witnessed both productions; if so, no particular difference seems to be registered between them. On the other hand, the account does suggest that there may have been differences between the play as it was performed (on one or both occasions), and the play as it appeared in all of its printed editions. The author of the account pays particular attention to the dumb shows; of the second, in which “cam[e] in a king to whome was geven a clere glasse, and a golden cupp of golde covered, full of poyson, the glasse he caste under his fote and brake hyt, the poyson he drank of”, he says that it was “declared by the Chor[us…] to sigyfie […] howe that men refused the certen and toocke the uncerten, wherby was ment that yt was better for the Quene to marye with the L[ord] R[obert] knowen then with the K[ing] of Sweden”. Aside from suggesting some stage business which is not specified in the printed texts (“the glasse he caste under his fote and brake hyt”), the interpretation of this dumb show’s meaning is presented rather differently, both by the Chorus (2 Chorus 21-26) and in the printed explanation (“The delightfull golde filled with poyson betokeneth flattery”). Furthermore, the account suggests that “Many thinges were handled of mariage, and that the matter was to be debated in p[ar]liament, because yt was much banding but th[at] hit ought to be determined by the councell”; the play-text as we have it certainly depicts a crisis in succession, but cannot be said to say anything explicit about marriage.

What the precise nature of the changes between one or both of the early performances of the play and the printed texts might have been has formed the subject of much discussion. Henry James and Greg Walker considered that “the sort of prolonged debate [on marriage] which this description suggests looks [. . .] like a carefully prepared and rehearsed alternative script” (1995, 119). Mike Pincombe, on the other hand, has argued that the changes were “quite slight, though not trivial” (2003, 19). Norman Jones and Paul Whitfield White also raise the possibility that cues for this kind of interpretation might be non-verbal; for instance the costumes of those offering the goblets to the king in the second dumb show could have invited connections to Robert Dudley and King Eric of Sweden, at this time rival suitors for Elizabeth’s hand (1996, 11). Of course, as Cathy Shrank points out, “you do not necessarily need a different text to produce different interpretations, just a different set of eyes, ears, beliefs, or circumstances” (2015, 454).

What the eye-witness account certainly demonstrates is that early modern audiences and readers could certainly seize the opportunity to connect the fictional subject matter of a dramatic work to contemporary political concerns. Like the account’s author, modern critics have been keen to highlight Gorboduc’s political relevance. The play’s insistence on the dangers of foreign rule and advocation of the native line, as well as invoking Dudley as a suitable husband for Elizabeth, also gestures towards the legitimacy of Catherine Grey as heir to the throne, as opposed to Mary Queen of Scots (Axton 1972, 46). Likewise, the threat of the latter is shadowed by the invasion of Fergus from the north (Bevington 1968, 145), which could also again apply to the foreign threat of the King of Sweden (James and Walker 1995, 115). Marie Axton’s highly influential argument that the play is a response to the succession crisis is in essence undeniable, though the extent of Gorboduc’s authors’ support for Dudley specifically, and her proposal that the play was shown alongside a masque overtly proposing him as a candidate for Elizabeth’s hand, have been questioned by Pincombe (2003).

Recent critical approaches have been interested in broadening interpretations of the play. Jessica Winston (2005) and Ivan Lupics (2019), for instance, shift the focus from reading it as offering specific political advice to Elizabeth on the subject of marriage, to seeing it as reflecting on the mechanisms of council itself; a play about (legal) advice, performed by and for lawyers. The play’s significance reaches far beyond its political moment, as the first original English tragedy in blank verse (on the play’s versification, see Tarlinskaja, 50-2); its influence on Shakespeare’s King Lear was argued for by Barbara Mendonca (1960). It also inaugurated a neo-Senecan style of English drama, though the extent of Senecan influence in relation to native traditions was much debated by earlier critics (Schmidt 1887 put an early case for Seneca, which Baker 1939 argued against; Herrick 1944 sought to establish a middle ground). The ultimate source for the plot is Geoffrey of Monmouth, though it is likely that the authors gathered details from other sources as well (see Cauthen 1970, xiv-vi). Another innovation was the use of dumb shows before each act – imitated in the later Inns of Court plays Jocasta (1566) and The Misfortunes of Arthur (1587) for example – which has been the subject of a similar debate as to whether these were inspired by Italian intermedii (Cunliffe 1907) or arose from native dramatic traditions (Watt 1910). For a more recent account of the dumb shows in Gorboduc, see Hunt (2012).

As well as the dumb shows, Gorboduc includes four choruses, spoken by “four ancient and sage men of Britain”. These occur at the end of each act (except the last), and offer moralizing explanations for the dumb shows which had preceded the acts. Howard Baker, while acknowledging that “the bare word chorus seems to go back to Seneca”, essentially rejected any further relation to Seneca, instead arguing that “the chorus in Elizabethan tragedy is entirely in harmony with the older and non-Senecan habits of composition”, evolving from the commentator figure of earlier drama (141-3). Most critics, however, have seen it as a feature from classical tragedy blended with such an English mode. The first chorus consists of four six-line stanzas in iambic pentameter, rhymed ababcc. The second is essentially the same, with four stanzas in the same form as the previous chorus, but it finishes by adding a final extra rhyming couplet onto the end of the fourth stanza, bringing it to twenty-six lines instead of twenty-four. The third consists of twenty pentameter lines with alternating rhymes in an ababcdcd (etc.) pattern, again with a final extra rhyming couplet at the end. The fourth and final chorus is mostly back in the ababcc scheme, with the exception of the second stanza, which is extended to ababcdcdee, bringing the total to twenty-eight lines across four stanzas. It has generally been assumed that the choruses would have been spoken rather than sung, but Ross Duffin points out that the fact that they are rhymed makes them stand out against the (innovative) blank verse of the rest of the play, and perhaps indicates that something different was going on in terms of performance. He demonstrates that they could feasibly be sung to common psalm tunes, with which Norton was especially likely to be familiar as the author of metrical psalm translations himself (Duffin 2021).

Selected modern editions:

• Tydeman, William ed. 1992. Two Tudor Tragedies. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
• Fraser, Russell, and Norman Rabkin eds. 1976. Drama of the English Renaissance I: The Tudor Period. New York: Macmillan.
• Craik, T. W. 1974. Minor Elizabethan Tragedies. London: J. M. Dent & Sons. 
• Cauthen Jr., Irby B. ed. 1970. Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex. London: Edward Arnold.
• Walsh, Sister Maureen 1965. ed. "A Critical Edition of Gorboduc". DA 25, 4693A.
• Gassner, John ed. 1963. Medieval and Tudor Drama. New York: Bantam Books. 

Axton, Marie. 1977. The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession. London: Royal Historical Society.

Axton, Marie. 1970. “Robert Dudley and the Inner Temple Revels.” The Historical Journal 13: 365-78.

Baker, Howard. 1939. Induction to Tragedy: A Study in a Development of Form in Gorboduc, The Spanish Tragedy and Titus Andronicus. Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press.

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

Cauthen Jr, I. B. 1962. “Gorboduc, Ferrex and Porrex: The First Two Quartos.” Studies in Bibliography 15: 231-3.

Cunliffe, J. 1907. “Italian Prototypes of the Masque and Dumbshow.” PMLA 22: 140-56.

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

Dust, Philip, and William D. Wolf. 1978. "Recent Studies in Early Tudor Drama." English Literary Renaissance 8 (1): 107-119.

Graves, Michael. 1994. Thomas Norton: The Parliament Man. Oxford: Blackwell.

Hunt, Alice. 2012. “Dumb Politics in Gorboduc.” In Thomas Betteridge and Greg Walker eds. The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

James, Henry, and Greg Walker. 1995. “The Politics of Gorboduc.” The English Historical Review 110: 109-21.

Jones, Norman, and Paul Whitfield White. 1996. “Gorboduc and Royal Marriage Politics: An Elizabethan Playgoer’s Report of the Premiere Performance.” English Literary Renaissance 26 (1): 3-16.

Lupić, Ivan. 2019. Subjects of Advice: Drama and Counsel from More to Shakespeare. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Majumder, Doyeeta. 2019. Tyranny and Usurpation: The New Prince and Lawmaking Violence in Early Modern Drama. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Mendonca, Barbara H. C. de. 1960. “The influence of Gorboduc on King Lear.” Shakespeare Survey 13: 41-8.

Nichols, John Gough ed. 1848. The Diary of Henry Machyn: Citizen and Merchant-Taylor of London, from A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1563. London: Camden Society.

Pincombe, Mike. 2003. “Robert Dudley, Gorboduc, and ‘The Masque of Beauty and Desire’: A Reconsideration of the Evidence for Political Intervention.” Parergon 20 (1): 19-44.

Schmidt, H. 1887. “Seneca’s Influence Upon Gorboduc.” Modern Language Notes 2 (2): 28-35.

Shrank, Cathy. 2015. “Community.” In Brian Cummings & James Simpson eds. Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance Literary History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sincox, Bailey. 2023. “The Sexual Politics of Paratexts: John Day’s Gorboduc.” The Review of English Studies 74: 222-36.

Tarlinskaja, Marina. 2014. Shakespeare and the Versification of English Drama, 1561-1642. Farnham: Ashgate.

Watt, Homer. 1910. Gorboduc; or, Ferrex and Porrex. Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin, no. 351. PhD thesis.

Winston, Jessica. 2005. “Expanding the Political Nation: Gorboduc at the Inns of Court and Succession Revisited.” Early Theatre 8 (1): 11-34.

Zim, Rivkah.  2015. “Sackville, Thomas, first Baron Buckhurst and first earl of Dorset (c. 1536–1608), poet and administrator.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Retrieved 27 Sep. 2024, from https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-24450.

The modernized edition presented here is based on the second edition of the play, printed by John Day in 1570. The copy used is held by the Bodleian Library, Oxford. USTC 515649.

The title page reads: “The Tragidie of Ferrex and Porrex, set forth without addition or alteration but altogether as the same was shewed on stage before the Queenes Maiestie, about nine years past, vz. The xviij. day of Ianuarie. 1561. by the gentlemen of the Inner Temple. Seen and allowed &c. Imprinted at London by Iohn Daye, dwelling ouer Aldersgate”.

Collation: 8^o, A-H⁴ [fully signed except C F H], 32 leaves unnumbered (Greg 1962, 116). Contents:

(1) The argument of the Tragedie (A1v).

(2) The P. to the Reader (A2r).

(3) The names of the speakers (A2v).

(4) [The play, including dumb shows] (A3r-H3v).