Library of Eton College. Though its date is gone with the title-page, it is, no doubt, a copy of the edition known to have been printed in 1566. The much earlier date of the play itself is proved by a reference to it in 1553, in the third edition of Sir Thomas Wilson's "Rule of Reason, conteinyng the Arte of Logique." In that book, under the head of "The Ambiguitie," Ralph's love-letter is given as "An Example of soche doubtful writing, whiche by reason of poincting maie have double sense, and contrarie meaning, taken out of an entrelude made by Nicolas Vdal." Still among scholars, we turn now from Eton to the Inner Temple.' The first English tragedy, "Gorboduc," was produced five years after the death of Nicholas Udall. It was written for the Christmas festivities of the Inner Temple in the

accord with the doctrine and discipline of Calvin at Geneva. As a youth of eighteen, he was employed and favoured by the Protector Somerset, and published a translation into English of Peter Martyr's letter to Somerset. After the death of the Protector, whom he is said to have served as a state amanuensis, Norton in 1555 turned to the law, and entered himself as a student of the Inner Temple. His strong interest in the religious questions of his time continued throughout all his life. A few months before his participation in the writing of "Gorboduc," he published in a folio of nine hundred pages (about one hundred and fifty being a table of matters contained in the book) a translation into English of Calvin' great summary of his doctrine, "The Institutes," which had been completed at Geneva but two years

year 1561 by two young members of that InnThomas Norton, then twenty-nine years old, and Thomas Sackville, then aged twenty-five.

Thomas Norton was the eldest son of a Bedfordshire gentleman, who lived to old age on the manor of Sharpenhoe, in the parish of Streatley, and died there in 1583, when his heir had but another year to live. As a youth, Thomas Norton became a ready Latin scholar, but was not sent to either of the Universities. It was not until nearly four years after he had taken part in the writing of "Gorboduc" that he entered himself at Pembroke Hall, Oxford, where he remained until he graduated as M.A. in 1569, when he was thirty-seven years old. Thomas Norton's early training, whatever it was, had developed in him deep religious feeling and an active interest in the Reformation of the Church, which he would have been glad to see brought into

1 Mr. Edward Arber has included in his admirable series of "English Reprints" "Ralph Roister Doister," with its text exactly priated from the copy at Eton, which was made accessible to him by the kindness of the Provost and Fellows of the College. Its price is sixpence; and every book produced by Mr. Arber may be obtained by post, direct from the editor, for its price in postage-stamps. His address is E. Arber, Esq., F.S.A., Bowes, Southgate, N.

before. A few months after "Gorboduc" was acted, there appeared the completion of Sternhold's version of the Psalms into English as "The Whole Booke of Psalmes collected into English metre by T. Sternhold, L. Hopkins, and others," in which one of the "others" was Thomas Norton; versions of twentyeight psalms were contributed by him."

Thomas Sackville, who joined Norton in the writing of "Gorboduc," had an advantage over his fellow-labourer in being really a poet. He was the son of Sir Richard Sackville, and was born at Buckhurst, in the parish of Withyham, in Sussex, in the year 1536. He was at Oxford for a time, but removed to Cambridge, and there graduated. Thomas Sackville, married when he was nineteen, was a member of Parliament for the county of Westmoreland at twenty-one, and at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign entered Parliament again as member for East Grinstead, which is the town nearest to Buckhurst. He was also much employed in private attendance on the queen, whom his father served as Privy Councillor, and who recognised in him a touch of

2 See Vol. II. of this Library, "Illustrations of English Religion," pages 149 and 173.

blood relationship, for his grandmother had been aunt to the queen's mother. His career was to be that of a statesman. He had brought from the universities, and since maintained, reputation as a wit and poet. In 1560, Jasper Heywood wrote

how

"Sackville's sonnets sweetly sauced And featly finéd be,"

and the part taken by him in the production of "The Mirror for Magistrates" has been told in another volume of this Library, which contains the work of his that best assures his place among the poets,1

He was Mr. Thomas Sackville in 1561, when he joined in the writing of "Gorboduc," and had entered himself of the Inner Temple, not that he might study law as his profession, but that he might obtain the knowledge of law necessary to a statesman. He was not knighted until 1567, when he was also made on the same day a baron of the realm, as Lord Buckhurst, and from that day forward his public life was exclusively political. He became first Earl of Dorset in 1604, and died in 1608.

of joy and good liking, the Bench and company pass beneath the hearth, and sing a carol."2

The revellings began on Christmas Eve, when three Masters of the Revels sat at the head of one of the tables. All took their places to the sound of music played before the hearth. Then the musicians withdrew to the buttery, and were themselves feasted. They returned when dinner was ended to sing a song at the highest table. Then all tables were cleared, and revels and dancing were begun, to be continued until supper and after supper. The senior master of the Revels, after dinner and after supper, sang a carol or song, and commanded other gentlemen there present to join him. This form of high festivity was maintained during the twelve days of Christmas, closing on Twelfth Night. On Christmas Day (which in 1561 was a Thursday), at the first course of the dinner, the boar's head was brought in upon a silver platter, followed by minstrelsy. On St. Stephen's Day, December the 26th, the Constable Marshal entered the hall in gilt armour, with a nest of feathers of all colours on his helm, and a gilt poleaxe in his hand; with him sixteen trumpeters, four drums and fifes, and four men armed from the middle upward. Those all marched three times about the hearth, and the Constable Marshal, then kneeling to the Lord Chancellor, made a speech, desiring the honour of admission into his service, delivered his naked sword, and was solemnly seated. That was the usual ceremonial when a grand Christmas was kept. At this particular Christmas, 1561, in the fourth year of Elizabeth, it was Lord Robert Dudley, afterwards Earl of Leicester, who was Constable Marshal, and with chivalrous gallantry, taking in fantastic style the name of Palaphilos, Knight of the Honourable Order of Pegasus, Pegasus being the

OLD HALL OF THE INNER TEMPLE.

The senior bencher there made a speech; officers were appointed for the occasion, "and then, in token

1 See "Shorter English Poems," pages 169-177. On page 170 there is a portrait of Sackville, and on pages 170-177 will be found the whole of Sackville's "Induction" to "The Mirror for Magistrates," followed by other illustrations of that work on pages 177-184.

ARMORIAL DEVICE OF THE INNER TEMPLE,

he contributed to the splendour of this part of the entertainment. After the seating of the Constable Marshal, on the same St. Stephen's Day, December the 26th, the Master of the Game entered in green velvet, and the Ranger of the Forest in green satin; these also went three times about the fire, blowing their hunting-horns. When they also had been ceremoniously seated, there entered a huntsman with a fox and a cat bound at the end of a staff. He was followed by nine or ten couple of hounds, who hunted the fox and cat to the blowing of horns, and killed

2 Sir William Dugdale's "Origines Juridiciales," in which full details are given of the usages at a "Grand Christmas" in the Inner Temple.

them beneath the fire. After dinner, the Constable Marshal called a burlesque court, and began the Revels, with help of the Lord of Misrule. At seven o'clock in the morning of St. John's Day, December the 27th (which was a Saturday in 1561), the Lord of Misrule was afoot with power to summon men to breakfast with him when service had closed in the church. After breakfast, the authority of this Christmas official was in abeyance till the afterdinner Revels. So the ceremonies went on till the Banqueting Night, which followed New Year's Day. That was the night of hospitality. Invitations were sent out to every House of Court, that they and the Inns of Chancery might see a Play and Masque. The hall was furnished with scaffolds for the ladies who were then invited to behold the sports. After

to general tranquillity," and spoke of "concord and unity, the very marks which they were now to shoot at." But unity was hard to attain. When she had been queen not quite a year, the Spanish Ambassador reported from London to the Count de Feria, “It is the devil's own business here. But the Catholics grow stronger daily; and the heretics are quarrelling with one another so bitterly that they have forgotten their other enemies." To say nothing of other jarring notes, in August, 1561, Mary Stuart landed in Scotland. Sackville and Norton, therefore-one of them a young poet with the aspirations of a statesman, the other a man intensely interested in the contest against Roman Catholic influenceresolved to present before their audience of privy councillors, lawyers, and other foremost men, a play

the Play, there was a Banquet for the ladies in the library; and in the hall there was also a Banquet for the Lord Chancellor and invited ancients of other Houses. On Twelfth Day, the last of the Revels, there were brawn, mustard, and malmsey for breakfast after morning prayer, and the dinner as on St. John's Day. It was for the Banqueting Day of the Grand Christmas of the Inner Templars that the two members of that Inn, Thomas Sackville, whose father was then governor of the Temple, and Thomas Norton, wrow a play in English upon the model of the tragedies of Seneca, as Ralph Roister Doister" had been written on the model of Plautus or Terence, and acted instead of "Andria" or "Phormio."

66

There was a reason for their choice of subject. Elizabeth had not been very long upon the throne. Before her accession England had been a house divided against itself by strong conflicts of opinion. Elizabeth was queen of a divided people. In her first speech from the throne she said that her desire was "to secure and unite the people of this realm in one uniform order, to the honour and glory of God, and

that should urge with all possible force "concord and unity" as the very mark at which a nation must shoot. Their patriotic purpose was to insist on the queen's thought, by writing a play that should dwell throughout upon the danger hanging over any nation that is as a house divided against itself. They found a tale of civil strife to suit their purpose in the same old chronicle which has yielded also to poetry the story of King Lear, and which brought King Arthur again among us, Geoffrey of Monmouth's Chronicle of British kings. The story chosen by them is, indeed, in the chronicle the next narrative after that of Lear. Cordelia in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Chronicle enabled her father to defeat his sons-in-law, and end his life as King of all Britain. She succeeded him, and was for five years queen; then she was rebelled against by her sister's sons, Margan and Cunedagius. They overcame her, and divided the island between themselves. But Margan then attacked Cunedagius, who, by overthrowing his cousin, again brought Britain under single rule. And this is said by the ingenious chronicler to have happened at the time when

Romulus and Remus founded Rome. Then Geoffrey goes on to the story which seemed to Sackville and Norton fitted for their purpose:

At last Cunedagius dying, was succeeded by his son Rivallo, a fortunate youth, who diligently applied himself to the affairs of the government. In his time it rained blood three days together, and there fell vast swarms of flies, followed by a great mortality among the people. After him succeeded Gurgustius his son; after him Sisillius; after him Jago, the nephew of Gurgustius; after him Kinmarcus the son of Sisillius; after him Gorbogudo, who had two sons, Ferrex and Porrex.

When their father grew old they began to quarrel about the succession; but Porrex, who was the most ambitious of the two, formed a design of killing his brother by treachery, which the other discovering, escaped, and passed over into Gaul. There he procured aid from Suard, king of the Franks, with which he returned and made war upon his brother; coming to an engagement, Ferrex was killed and all his forces cut to pieces. When their mother, whose name was Widen, came to be informed of her son's death, she fell into a great rage, and conceived a mortal hatred against the survivor. For she had a greater affection for the deceased than for him, so that nothing less would appease her indignation for his death, than her revenging it upon her surviving son. She took, therefore, her opportunity when he was asleep, fell upon him, and with the assistance of her women tore him to pieces. From that time a long civil war oppressed the people, and the island became divided under the power of five kings, who mutually harassed one another.

Having arranged this story for their purpose, the authors of our first tragedy parted the work between them; Norton writing the first, second, and third acts, and Sackville the fourth and fifth, though, as they worked in fellowship, each may have had some hand in the part chiefly entrusted to the other. They divided the story into five acts, each closed with a chorus, exactly in Seneca's manner, and the verse they agreed to use was the blank verse upon which Italian poets had been experimenting. Experiment of that kind had been first tried among us at the close of Henry VIII.'s reign, when the Earl of Surrey, imitating the Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici, or the poet Molza, who allowed that Cardinal to take all credit for his work, translated into blank verse the second and fourth books of Virgil's Æneid. Very little blank verse had been tried in England, and that had not been printed until just before Elizabeth's accession. The use of it in our first tragedy was, therefore, a trial made accidentally of a new-fashioned measure. When other tragedies followed, the more familiar forms of rhyming verse were at first generally used, and "Gorboduc" had probably no part in determining the later adoption of blank verse by English dramatists. We have blank verse now as it has been developed by the genius of two such poets as Shakespeare and Milton. Only in England has it thus been created anew by supreme masters of song. For that reason we have it as a national measure, and the worthiest that ever any nation called its own. In "Gorboduc" there was slight indication of its undeveloped powers. arranged for representation, was

The

set forth in an Argument by the two dramatists. When put thus baldly, it is, with its "kill, kill, kill," a little ludicrous through the intensity of its suggestion that disunion may lead to the extremest ills.

THE ARGUMENT OF THE TRAGEDY.

Gorboduc, King of Britain, divided his realm in his lifetime to his sons, Ferrex and Porrex. The sons fell to dissension. The younger killed the elder. The mother, that more dearly loved the elder, for revenge killed the younger. The people, moved with the cruelty of the fact, rose in rebellion, and slew both father and mother. The nobility assembled, and most terribly destroyed the rebels; and afterwards, for want of issue of the Prince, whereby the succession of the crown became uncertain, they fell to civil war, in which both they and many of their issues were slain, and the land for a long time almost desolate and miserably wasted.

The play was received with great applause. Lord Robert Dudley, high in honour at that particular grand Christmas in the Inner Temple, and first favourite of the queen, would add his witness to the common report of that zeal for the welfare of England, which had caused the writers of the play to insist with all their might upon concord and unity as the very mark at which good Englishmen should aim. The queen, therefore, added to the lesson all emphasis in her power by commanding the play to be repeated about a fortnight later-that is to say, on the 18th of January, 1562 (new style)-before herself and her court at Whitehall. It thus had the conspicuous success that, in a new thing, always suggests imitation. A contemporary MS. note' says of the performance before Queen Elizabeth that "on the 18th of January, 1561" (new style, 1562), "there was a play in the Queen's hall at Westminster by the gentlemen of the Temple after a great mask, for there was a great scaffold in the hall, with great triumph as has been seen; and the morrow after, the scaffold was taken down."

The fame of the play caused some young Templar in the year 1565 (the year after the birth of Shakespeare) to sell a copy of it-perhaps one of the MS. copies used by the performers in learning their parts -to William Griffith, a bookseller, whose shop was opposite the Temple in St. Dunstan's Churchyard, and by him it was first published on the 22nd of September of that year as "The Tragedie of Gorboduc, whereof three Actes were wrytten by Thomas Nortone, and the two last by Thomas Sackvyle. Set forth as the same was shewed before the Queen's most excellent Maiestie, in her highnes Court of Whitehall, the xviii. day of January, Anno Domini, 1561. By the gentlemen of Thynner Temple in London." This was an unauthorised publication; upon which the following note was made in the authorised edition, which did not appear until the beginning of 1571 (1570, old style):-"Where this Tragedy was for furniture of part of the Grand Christmas in the Inner Temple, first written about nine years ago by the right honourable Thomas, now Lord Buckhurst, and by T. Norton, and afterwards

1 Cotton MSS., Vit. F. v.

showed before Her Majesty, and never intended by the authors thereof to be published: yet one W. G." [William Griffith] "getting a copy thereof at some young man's hand that lacked a little money and much discretion, in the last great Plague, anno 1565, about five years past, while the said lord was out of England, and T. Norton far out of London, and neither of them both made privy, put it forth exceedingly corrupted"-and so here was a true copy, printed by John Day, at Aldersgate. Probably to distinguish this edition from the spurious one, the title of the play was altered from "Gorboduc"under which name it must certainly have been presented-to" Ferrex and Porrex." The title of this edition was "The Tragidie of Ferrex and Porrex, set forth without addition or alteration, but altogether as the same was shewed on stage before the Queens Maiestie about nine yeares past, vz, the xviii. day of Janvarie, 1561, by the gentlemen of the Inner Temple." The first, second, and third acts it will be enough to describe with occasional quotation; the fourth and fifth acts (Sackville's part) are the

best, and shall be given complete. The text quoted is, of course, that of the authorised edition; but all variations from it in the edition of 1565, published by William Griffith, will be found in foot-notes. Each act was preceded by an allegorical masque foreshadowing the meaning of its story, and closed with meditative stanzas spoken by a Chorus of four wise elders of Britain. As the original name of the play was "Gorboduc"-for the young man "that lacked a little money and much discretion" would not have been so indiscreet as to raise money upon its credit by selling it under any other name than its own-we may set aside as an after-thought the change of title. It may be true, however, that besides the distinguishing clearly by a difference of name authorised from the unauthorised copies, the central thought of the play-strife, and the ruin in its train - is better marked by the names of the two brothers between whom the feud began, than by the single name of the father whose establishment of a divided power in the land caused all the misery that followed.

THE ORDER OF THE DUMB SHOW BEFORE THE FIRST ACT,

AND THE SIGNIFICATION THEREOF.

First, the music of violins began to play, during which came in upon the stage six wild men, clothed in leaves. Of whom the first bare on his neck a fagot of small sticks, which they all, both severally and together, assayed with all their strength to break; but it could not be broken by them. At the length, one of them pulled out one of the sticks, and brake it: and the rest plucking out all the other sticks, one after another, did easily break them, the same being severed; which being conjoined, they had before attempted in vain. After they had this done, they departed the stage, and the music ceased. Hereby was signified, that a state knit in unity doth continue strong against all force, but being divided, is easily destroyed; as befell on

Duke Gorboduc dividing his land to his two sons, which he before held in monarchy; and upon the dissension of the brethren, to whom it was divided.

ACT I.

has two scenes, one for the Queen Videna, one for the King Gorboduc.

SCENE 1.-Queen Videna, wife to King Gorboduc, is, at night, in anxious dialogue with her elder son, Ferrex, because her husband has resolved, by dividing his kingdom between both sons, to spoil Ferrex of his birthright. On the day then about to dawn

He will endeavour to procure assent
Of all his council to his fond devise.

Fer. Their ancestors from race to race have borne True faith to my forefathers and their seed:

I trust they eke will bear the like to me.