Supposes

First performed in 1566 at Gray's Inn, George Gascoigne's Supposes is the first English prose comedy. It is a direct translation of Ludovico Ariosto's I suppositi, an erudite comedy penned in verse (hendecasyllable) between 1528 and 1532, and probably never performed; a previous version, in prose, dated back to around 1508, and was first performed in Ferrara during the Carnival of 1509 (a second performance was staged in Vatican in 1519, for pope Leo X, with set designs by Raffaello Sanzio). Ariosto's Suppositi enjoyed huge success throughout early modern Europe: in addition to Gascoigne's English translation, it was translated three times into French, and it was the first comedy to be staged at the Spanish court in Valladolid (1548).

The printed text of Gascoigne's Supposes is most likely not a script for the actors, but rather a record of a specific performance of the play, as the final stage direction ("Et plauserunt", at the past tense) may well indicate (Bevington 1998: 33). Gascoigne worked on both versions of Ariosto's original, the prose and the verse ones, and whenever the two versions differed he did not confide solely in the verse version, known to be less coarse and more romantic. 

Dramatizing a typical series of comic exchanges, subterfuges, and misunderstandings, Ariosto's comedy draws heavily from ancient models, although with the methods of contaminatio: as Casella 1974: xxi has persuasively demonstrated, Ariosto's plot can be related to dramatic situations from nineteen comedies by Plautus and six by Terentius, as well as to several of Boccaccio's novelle. Actually, in the case of Suppositi (as well as Gascoigne's Supposes) the traditional methods of intertextuality seem to fall short: rather than seeing the play as the product of tens of specific intertextual tiles, it may be more productive to consider Ariosto's comedy as a text more generally inspired by a wider literary model, that of romantic comedy as was first designed by Latin comedy and was later developed, in other literary genres, in Medieval and early modern literatures (another such case is Ben Jonson's use of ancient comic models: see the relevant chapters in Bigliazzi and Pollard 2024). 

There is no certainty as to why Gascoigne chose to translate Ariosto's play. Perhaps it was not only out of humanist curiosity for a well-known and widely respected author, or out of the will to produce a neoclassical play (thus Beecher, in Beecher and Butler 1999). The cultural exchanges between Italy and England during the Elizabethan era were intense and, although mostly enthusiastic, not entirely free from artistic and moral concerns. The decision to translate an Italian play may then have been due, as Bevington 1998 puts it, to the willingness of taking a position on the matter, or may have been a strategy for dealing with some thorny issues and situations through the filter of translation from another language and another culture. 

As a matter of fact, Gascoigne's translation is quite close to the original. It retains the five-act division, the number and names of characters, the basic plot (very few substantial changes can be observed), the setting in Ferrara (although allusions to specific places and institutions are often deleted: Beecher, in Beecher and Butler 1999: 64). Of course, puns, calembours and proverbs in Italian are frequently rewritten, in order to be made acceptable for an English-speaking audience. Compared to the original, Gascoigne added the stage directions, which are notoriously absent from modern Italian theatre. Such proximity to the original allowed Gascoigne to retain some of the thorniest aspects of the original. In particular, the female protagonist, Polynesta, is conspicuously depicted as a sexually active and independent character: she gets into a love affair with what seems to be a servant of her father's household, Erostrato (only later in the play will she find out that Erostrato is a gentleman, after all). The premarital love affair is handled and discussed in a strikingly candid way, one that would look unacceptable for the English standards (Bevington 1998). 

In his prologue, Gascoigne also advises as to what we should suppose on his Supposes: in a deliberately intricate and ambiguous prologue, Gascoigne warns the reader not to "suppose the meaning of our supposes". In the printed edition of the play, Gascoigne adds 27 marginal notes signalling each situation that we may call a "suppose", that is, each of the misunderstandings on which the text is based. This, as Ingram 2007 (96) puts it, "shits the emphasis of Ariosto’s play from pleasure in the trickery to pleasure in decoding deceit” (see also McCoy 2023).

Gascoigne's Supposes will enjoy a surprising success in the subsequent history of literature. As Beecher (22) summarises, Gascoigne's play "contributes more directly than any other both to the founding of the European drama, and to the shaping of the English stage". The clearest and most direct case of the influence exerted by the play is, as well known, William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew: see Lovascio 2009 for a detailed analysis.

Austen, Gillian ed. 2023. Selected Essays on George Gascoigne. London, New York: Routledge.

Beecher, Donald and Butler, John Anthony eds. 1999. L. Ariosto, Supposes. Translated by George Gascoigne. Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions.

Bevington, David. 1998. 'Cultural Exchange: Gascoigne and Ariosto at Gray’s Inn in 1566'. In Marrapodi 1998: 25-40.

Bigliazzi, Silvia and Pollard, Tanya eds. 2024. What is a Greek Source on the Early English Stage? Fifteen New Approaches. Pisa: ETS.

Casella, Angela ed. 1974. Ludovico Ariosto. Commedie. Milan: Mondadori.

Ingram, Jill P. 2007. 'Gascoigne’s Supposes: Englishing Italian ‘Error’ and Adversarial Reading Practises'. In Marrapodi 2006: 83-96.

Lovascio, Domenico. 2009. 'Ariosto, Gascoigne e The Taming of the Shrew'. L'analisi linguistica e letteraria 17: 71-92.

Marrapodi, Michele ed. 1998. The Italian World of English Renaissance Drama: Cultural Exchange and Intertextuality. Newark: University of Delaware Press.

Marrapodi, Michele ed. 2007. Italian Culture in the Drama of Shakespeare & his Contemporaries. Rewriting, Remaking, Refashioning. Ashgate: Aldershot.

McCoy, Richard C. 2023. 'Gascoigne's Poses and Supposes'. In Austen 2023: 69-78.

The volume of The Poesies of George Gascoigne by George Gascoigne is in octavo, measures 14cm high, and consists of 538 pages. It is held at the Huntington Library.

The frontispiece reads: 

The Posies of George Gascoigne Esquire.

Corrected, perfected, and augmented by the Authour. 1575.

Tam Marti, quàm Mercurio.

Imprinted at London by H. Bynneman for Richard Smith.

These Bookes are to be solde at the Northwest dore of Paules Church.

At bottom of page, the volume has signatures: ¶-¶¶¶¶¶ⁱ; A-U². In the section of Supposes, at top of page each page also has an arabic number from 1 to 68, with remarkable mistakes: after 36, numbering resumes from 45 and goes on to 56; after 56, numbers are 49, 50, 51, 52, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68.

The volume is a revised and enlarged edition of A hundreth sundrie flowres bounde up in one small poesie.

"Hearbes" has separate divisional title and pagination, with register recommencing with B. Within this register, "Iocasta" and "VVeedes" have separate divisional titles; pagination and register are continuous.

The text is in gothic characters. Stage directions are often written as marginal notes; marginal notes also indicate each suppose of the plote (see Introduction to the play). There are no manuscripts notes or inking defects. On the frontispiece, the title is framed by an illustration representing a complex architecture. Each section of the volume (Flowers, The fruits of Warre, Hearbes, Weedes) has a table of contents framed by an abstract ornament. In the part containing Supposes, the volume has intricate initials at the beginning of the prologue and at the beginning of Act 1.

The EEBO bibliographical number is Greg, III, p. 1062-3; STC (2nd ed.) / 11636.

Italian (prose): Ludovico Ariosto Suppositi

Italian (verse): Ludovico Ariosto Suppositi