From Mankind To Marlowe: Growth Of Structure In The Popular Drama Of Tudor England

From Mankind to Marlowe From Mankind to Marlowe GROWTH OF STRUCTURE IN THE POPULAR DRAMA OF TUDOR ENGLAND D A V I D M. B E V I N G T O N HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS · CAMBRIDGE · 1962 © Copyright 1962 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Distributed in Great Britain by Oxford University Press, London Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Ford Foundation. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 62-9424 Printed in the United States of America For my wife, Peggy Acknowledgments Perhaps a scholar can claim only a remote and pallid kinship with the "mankind" hero of the morality play. Even so, I must, like Mankind or Everyman, give thanks for all those counselors who have compassionately watched my struggle toward an academic state of grace. Among my many teachers I am especially indebted to Professors Alfred Harbage and Bartlett Jere Whiting of Harvard University. Whatever I now know of late medieval and Renaissance drama I owe to their instruction and example. Many attitudes and conclusions contained in my study are properly theirs to an extent that can never be indicated by citation. In a different manner, but certainly to no less degree, I am grateful to my parents, both Professors of English at Duke University, who have read and reread this study with an eye to style and accuracy, and who have shared with me their faith in the vocation of teaching. Professors Gerald Bentley of Princeton University and Jonas Barish of the University of California at Berkeley read the manuscript as it neared completion, and rescued me from many errors of fact and judgment. I wish also to thank Professors Fredson Bowers and Lester Beaurline of the University of Virginia, Miss Kathleen Ahem and other editors of the Harvard University Press, and the library staffs at Harvard, Duke, and the University of Virginia. Most of all I must acknowledge the help of my wife, herself a teacher and loving taskmistress of English usage. Hers has been a service beyond the call of any duty, marital or otherwise. She has read and discussed with me all of the Tudor popular drama, and has painstakingly ameliorated the style of virtually every sentence in this book. Notwithstanding all this guidance, the ultimate assault on truth had to be mine; and I must finally confess, with Mankind, that any failures are plainly attributable to my own weak merit and not to a lack of merciful warning. viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Two important studies of the Tudor stage have been published since I began this present investigation four years ago: T. W. Craik, The Tudor Interlude (Leicester, 1958) and Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages 1300 to 1660, Vol. 1 (London, 1959). I have endeavored in revising this study to incorporate their findings when applicable, to abbreviate or excise those parts of my work which they have discussed fully, and to acknowledge their research where it has anticipated my own conclusions. The overlapping has in fact been slight, for both studies deal with the stage whereas my concern is primarily with the popular drama and the evolution of its structure. Charlottesville, Virginia January 15, 1962 D. Μ. B. Contents I. Introduction: From Mankind to Marlowe II. Criteria for a Popular Repertory I 8 III. Auspices for the filite Drama 26 IV. The Popular Canon 48 V . "Four Men and a Boy" VI. The Tradition of Versatility 68 86 VII. Doubling Patterns in the i58o's and 1590's 104 VIII. The Origins of Popular Dramatic Structure 114 IX. The Pioneering Contributions of Bale and Skelton 128 χ . The Intermediate Morality: Repetition, Expansion, and Elaboration 141 XI. Dual Protagonists and a Formula for Homiletic Trage