A new Enterlude called Thersytes

In Book 2 of Homer's Iliad (ll. 212 ff.), a low-born soldier, Thersites, dares to abuse the king Agamemnon during an assembly of the Greek army. Thersites is described by Homer as the ugliest man at Troy — lame, almost bald, bow-legged — and is violently silenced by Odysseus, who beats him into silence with a club. An anti-hero featured in a relatively small episode, Thersites would quite surprisingly go on to become one of the best known characters of the Iliad: he was mentioned in the Aethiopis (where he is related to Diomedes, and killed by Achilles himself for gossiping about his relation with Penthesilea), and later on he appeared in several of Ovid's works (most notably in Book 13 of Metamorphoses), in Juvenal's Satires (8 and 11), and in Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead and Menippus. 

Due to this ample success in antiquity, Thersites is also a relevant character in Europe's early modern literature, as shown, for instance, by Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida (c. 1602) and Thomas Heywood's The Iron Age (c. 1611). Already in the first decades of the 16th century, an influential French humanist, Ravisius Textor, wrote a Latin dialogue entitled Thersites (published posthumously in 1530) and destined to become the basis for an English comic interlude, also called Thersites, performed in c. 1537 and published in 1562. Although there is no complete certainty as to the identity of its author, the English interlude is commonly attributed to Eton Master Nicholas Udall (Axton 1982: 1-8). Udall translated the French interlude and retained its basic plot: Thersites persuades Vulcan (Mulciber) to equip him with armour worthy of Greek heroes, then boasts of his martial prowess; he then meets a snail, which terrifies him but is eventually defeated in battle; later on, a soldier challenges Thersites, who tries to hide behind his mother but is shooed away and leaves his weapons behind. However, Udall's interlude is three times longer than Textor's (more than 900 lines), and includes a second plot, in which Theristes' mother (Mater) uses witchcraft to cure Ulysses' son Telemachus of worms.

Only in the second half of 16th century would Homer's Iliad become accessible to a relatively vast readership in Europe, thanks to a number of vernacular translations of the whole poem or parts thereof. The first, although partial, English version appeared in 1581 (Arthur Hall's Ten Books of Homers Iliades translated out of French); starting from 1598, George Chapman’s well-known translation (based on Jean de Sponde’s 1583 Greek-Latin edition) was also published. However, as Kenward 2018 has clearly demonstrated, Udall's Thersites presupposes a somewhat direct knowledge of the poem — or better the poem's plot and characters — not only on the part of the author but also on the part of his audience. Several loci of the text point toward this conclusion: in a number of cases, Udall's text explicitly upturns the situation of the Greek original, in order to emphasize Thersites' bragging and misrepresentation of himself. For the comic effect to work, such strategy needed the audience to be sufficiently well acquainted with the plot of the Iliad and its system of characters. To be sure, the interlude shows a remarkable metaliterary, and intertextual, ambition. See for instance the very first lines of the play:

Abacke, geve me roume, in my way do ye not stand,

For if ye do, I wyll soone laye you lowe.

In Homere of my actes ye have red I trow:

Neyther Agamemnon nor Ulysses, I spared to checke:

They coulde not bringe me to be at theyr becke.

(ll. 3-7)

While l. 6 provides a clear example of the comic overturning of the original situation (never had Thersites "spared" Ulysses, who in fact beat him hard in the Iliad), l. 5 shows that this strategy can only be understood if it is framed within the context of a deliberate intertextual relation with Homer's epic.

This intertextual play was certainly made possible by Udall's culturally high-end audience (possibly, the Court or Oxford: Wiggins and Richardson 2012, 46-7). However, not even such an audience could be directly familiar with the text of Homer. More likely, Thersites and his (dis)adventures must have been known through the filter of summaries of the poem found in modern rhetorical handbooks, dictionaries, and commentaries. As Kimbrough 1964, 174 recognised, through these works Thersites had continuous currency in the Middle Ages and the modern era while the Iliad was mostly forgotten. Udall himself, for instance, translated Erasmus' 1531 Apophthegmes into English, a text containing clear references to Thersites, as well as an interpretation of the character as a laughing stock. Even more generally, both Udall and Textor also offer in their texts a parodic version of some well-established epic models and conventions, such as the arming of the hero, to be found in Homer and later codified by Virgil in Book 8 of the Aeneis. Of course, intertextual memories of ancient literatures mingle with more or less explicit references to contemporary culture: Thersites' battle against a snail, for instance, is quite clearly the enactment of a common French and Enlish proverb on an armed knight battling a snail (Axton 1982: 8-9).

Udall's general intertextual strategy, along with the interlude's metaliterary ambition, makes Thersites a comic reenactment of epic texts, a re-reading of a serious genre through the lenses of stock comedy. An anti-hero himself, Thersites embodies Udall's (and Textor's) literary aim — a funny questioning of the principles and conventions of a celebrated genre.

Of course, Udall will work once again on the figure of the braggart soldier, and some 15 years after Thersites he will stage his famous Ralph Roister Doister, a clear reshaping of both Plautus' Miles Gloriosus (a widespread text in English colleges around the first decades of 16th century) and Terence's Eunuch (see for instance Guastella 2009). We cannot tell whether Udall had already those models in mind while composing Thersites, or Thersites is a literary forerunner of an even more complex intertextual play with ancient literatures.

Axton, Marie ed. 1982. Three Tudor Classical Interludes. Thersites, Jacke Jugeler, Horestes. Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer.

Guastella, Gianni. 2009. 'Pirgopolinice, Trasone, Ralph Roister Doister: evoluzioni di un paradigma classico'. In Raffaelli and Tontini 2009: 53-109.

Kenward, Claire. 2018. '‘Of arms and the man’: Thersites in Early Modern English Drama'. In Macintosh et al. 2018: 421-38.

Kimbrough, Robert. 1964. ‘The Problem of Thersites’. Modern Language Review, 59: 173-6.

Macintosh, Fiona, McConnell, Justine, Harrison Stephen and Kenward, Claire eds. 2018. Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century. Oxford: OUP.

Raffaelli, Renato and Tontini, Alba eds. 2009. Lecturae Plautinae Sarsinates. XII: Miles Gloriosus. Urbino: QuattroVenti. 

Wiggins, Martin and Richardson, Catherine eds. 2012. British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue. Vol. 1: 1533–1566. Oxford: OUP.

The volume of A New Enterlude called Thersytes, possibly by Nicholas Udall, is in quarto and consists of 36 pages. It is held at the Huntington Library.

The frontispiece reads: 

A new Enterlude called Thersytes

¶ Thys Enterlude Folowynge Dothe Declare howe that the greatest boesters are not the greatest doers.

¶ The names of the players



Thersites, A boster.
Mulciber, A smyth.
Mater, A mother.
Miles, A knyght.
Telemachus, A childe.

At bottom of page, the volume has signatures, starting from A¹ and going to E².

The whole text is in verse and is written in Gothic characters. The last leaf is blank. The printer's name and address can be found in the colophon, at E²v. There are no manuscripts notes nor major inking defects. At the top and the bottom of the frontispiece two floreal ornaments can be found.

The EEBO bibliographical number is Greg, I, 37; STC (2nd ed.) / 23949.

English: Homer Iliad 2

Greek: Homer Iliad 2