THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

notable moralitie’, he was offering what would have struck his contemporaries as the zenith of praise. Gorboduc,
sometimes known by its alternative title The Tragidie of Ferrex and Porrex, remains perhaps the most striking and
novel of the dramas produced in the opening years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. It does more than naturalize Seneca
for an educated English audience; it attempts to harness the potential of national history and myth as a dramatic
contribution to an extended political discourse. The play, first acted by the gentlemen students of the Inner Temple in
the January of 1562, was performed again at court some days later before the Queen herself. Norton (1532-84) is
believed to have contributed the first three acts, Sackville (1536-1608) the last two, but what particularly marks the
play is its consistently high-toned exploration of the roots of political decay. Its story, derived from Geofrey of
Monmouth’s fanciful history of the descendants of the Trojan Brutus, considers the end of the dynasty brought about
by the follies of the old and the jealousies of the young (its parallels to King Lear, written some forty years later,
would have been evident to Shakespeare’s first audiences). As the play’s chorus pre-emptively insists at the end of its
first act, its action could provide ‘A myrrour ... to princes all | To learne to shunne the cause of suche a fall’. At its
end, the dead King Gorboduc’s counsellor, Eubulus, is given a speech of some ninety-nine lines which mourns the
loss of national unity and civil order and insists, with unashamed anachronism, that a proper way forward should
have been the summons of a Parliament that would have appointed royal heirs ‘To stay the title of established right, |
And in the people plant obedience | While yet the prince did live’. It was a warning that was doubtless clear both to an
audience of
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lawyers and to the court of an unmarried Queen. The achievement of Gorboduc is not merely political and monitory.
The play’s effects depend on the steady, intelligent, and dramatic development of its theme and on its spectacle. Each
of the acts is introduced by a dumb-show; in the first, accompanied by ‘the musicke of violence’, six wild men act out
a demonstration of the dangers of disunity; in the fourth, the ‘musicke of howboies’ introduces three Furies in black
who drive before them a king and a queen ‘who had slaine their owne children’; in the last, ‘drommes and fluites’ are
succeeded by armed men ‘in order of battaile’ who march about and (again anachronistically) noisily discharge their
firearms. Despite the presence of what might strike a twentieth-century reader as an excess of both pomp and
pomposity, the text of Gorboduc can be seen as setting a standard against which later Elizabethan dramatists had to
measure their theatrical ambitions.
The Defence and the Practice of Poetry: Puttenham and the Sidneys
The two most articulate and acute Elizabethan critics of poetry, George Puttenham (?1529-91) and Sir Philip Sidney
(1554-86), recognized that they were confronting a crisis in English writing. Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie
(1589) and Sidney’s The Defence of Poesie (1595) endeavour to trace a poetic tradition which embraces the work of
the ancient and of selected vernacular poets and they attempt to define a way forward by offering prescriptive
definitions. Both men confidently press the case for poetry as the foremost of the human arts and they suggest that its
new European refinement ought to be taken as the gauge of true civilization. For Sidney, taking a broad retrospect,
‘neyther Phylosopher nor Historiographer coulde at the first have entred into the gates of populer judgements, if they
had not taken a great Pasport of Poetry, which in all Nations at this day, wher learning florisheth not, is plaine to be
seene, in all which they have some feeling of Poetry’. Poetry, even amongst the marginalized cultures on the fringes
of Europe, had always, he insists, acted as the great communicator, and it was, from the first, the encourager of
learning. In glancing at those lands where ‘learning florisheth not’, Sidney notes that in benighted Turkey ‘besides
their lawe-giving Divines, they have no other Writers but Poets’ and that even in Ireland (‘where truelie learning
goeth very bare’) poets are held ‘in a devoute reverence’ (though he also later recalls the story that Irish bards could
rhyme their victims to death by placing poetical curses on them). For modern England, laying claim to membership of
the exclusive club of ‘learned’ nations, the honour it accorded to its poets should be seen as the touchstone of its
modern sophistication, even though, as Sidney feels constrained to admit, ‘since our erected wit maketh us know what
perfection is ... yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching it’.
Like Sidney’s Defence, Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie is generally
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assumed to have been circulated in manuscript for some time before it finally appeared in print. Puttenham, a nephew
of Sir Thomas Elyot, shared with his uncle a conviction of the cultural centrality and proper eminence of the
cultivated courtier. His treatise, in three books, returns again and again to the notion of the enhancement of the