What kind of political lesson might an early Elizabethan audience expect from tragic theatre? One clue to this can be derived from the principal source for one of our plays, Thomas Preston’s Cambises, first performed at the Elizabethan court during the Christmas season of 1560-1 (E. Chambers 1923: iv. 79). The events it depicts are drawn indirectly from Herodotus’ Histories, but the play relies upon their retelling by the Henrician humanist Richard Taverner in his The Garden of Wisdom, first printed in two parts in 1539 (Baskervill 1932:154-5; Farnham 1936: 263-4; Armstrong 1950). This collection of exemplary historical anecdotes and sayings, drawn largely from Erasmus and reinforced by Taverner’s own extensive commentary, displays the humanity and wisdom of a range of monarchs, philosophers, and statesmen from antiquity (Starnes 1956). Instances of corrupt rule are rare, but the outstanding example is Cambises. The Garden of Wisdom is usually deemed to be the ‘doctrinaire creation’ of a Henrician loyalist (Armstrong 1955: 294), but this judgement is questionable in ways that are significant for Preston’s play. Still, its political orthodoxy should not be underplayed, and tyrants such as Cambises allow Taverner to augment the distinction between those monarchs who embody in person and in practice an ideal standard of kingship and those who disgrace their office. The latter contrast sharply with Henry VIII, who is so assured of his subjects’ love that he dispenses with a personal guard:
Lord god wyth what inward joy, with what hartie love and reverence do al his liege subjectes imbrace the majestye of his graces person, and not only his liege subjectes, but also even the very ranke traytours, whiche intended nothyng elles but sedicion, yet the incomparable majestie of his owne person they coulde not, but have in wonderous reverence [...] his grace beareth hym so benignely, so gentilly, so lovyngly to all his subjectes, that he may very well be called pater patriae, the father of the countrye [...] the noursynge father.
(Taverner 1539: A2r-A3v)
Admittedly this passage acknowledges that ‘ranke traytours’ have defied Henry’s sovereign presence, but even these succumb in the end to the universal recognition of his ‘incomparable majestie’. In this account, the only conflict that arises in relation to political sovereignty is between those, like Henry VIII, who honour the obligations of their divinely endowed office as a ‘noursynge father’ and those whose ungoverned appetites lead them to violate these solemn duties.
The tragic effect of both Cambises and Gorboduc can be understood in this moralized way: they teach by negative example. They depict monarchs who fail to govern their own wills and who fall into immorality or show drastically poor judgement, thereby destroying the moral or material basis of their sovereignty. The power of such works also derives from their playing upon the apprehensions and anxieties generated by the great political question of the day: the resolution of the Elizabethan succession (Levine 1966). In Cambises supreme power is invested in an evil incumbent who abandons all the values that should make him a fitting object of loyalty; in Gorboduc the sovereign’s use of his prerogative to decide the succession results in catastrophe and the king loses his power of command. Both plays project nightmarish outcomes to the question of succession for admonitory effect: to deepen gratitude for the benefit deriving from Elizabeth’s accession and to stress the importance of ensuring its continuity. If we follow the ramifications of this lesson in both plays, we can evaluate more clearly whether this tragic method of instruction is their sole rationale.
The great contemporary interest in the succession does help to explain why Preston found such a sensational story from The Garden of Wisdom so compelling and apparently edifying. The play describes how Cambises succeeds to the imperial throne of Persia and his attempt to follow the glorious example of his father, Cyrus. His first action is to launch a military campaign against Egypt. During his absence, he appoints the judge Sisamnes as his deputy; the latter proves to be corrupt, and in his one just if grisly deed, Cambises has this unruly magistrate beheaded and then flayed in front of Sisamnes’ son (Figure 29.1). However, the king is himself in need of correction, most notably in his increasing drunkenness. When advised against this vice, Cambises shoots his counsellor’s son in a ghastly demonstration of prowess, cutting out the child’s heart as a trophy. Meanwhile, the play invents its own narrative concerning the Vice Ambidexter, an unprincipled hypocrite and mischief-maker. He moves between scenes of rough comedy and the world of the Persian court, leading the innocent and the guilty towards their destruction and advancing the corruption of those in authority. He incites Sisamnes to new excesses and cultivates a murderous jealousy within Cambises towards his guiltless brother. The king concludes his tyrannous career consumed by an incestuous passion for his cousin, whose life he swiftly dispenses with after their marriage. Cambises dies providentially, or perhaps merely accidentally, impaled by his own sword as he mounts his horse.
The political meaning of this shocking narrative, featuring ‘an outrageously cruel protagonist stalking through a succession of bloody crimes to a bloody doom’ (Farnham 1936: 268), is made evident from the outset when the play specifies its concern with the duties of a sovereign. It begins with a battery of sententiae that advise kings on how they should understand their powers and responsibilities, especially the imperative to ‘rule with laws, eke justice’ and to be ‘himself a plain and speaking law’ (Preston 1974, Prologue, 4, 9). Cyrus understood this, yet his son fails to recollect any of the wisdom bestowed upon him: ‘He in his youth was trained up, by trace of virtue’s lore; | Yet (being king) did clean forget his perfect race before’ (19-20). Succession can result in a monarch who derogates from all the great responsibilities of the office. Consequently, the play intensifies appreciation of the good government practised by our ‘noble Queen’ and ‘honourable council’ in comparison to the ‘tragical history of this wicked king’ (Epilogue, 15-16, 2).
Norton and Sackville’s Gorboduc is also deeply concerned with the difference between virtuous and irresponsible monarchy and, especially, with the importance of a well-ordered succession. It was performed a year after Preston’s play, on 18 January 1562, and it too featured as part of the Christmas festivities held at court having been produced a month earlier at the Inner Temple, of which both authors were members. There are certainly striking formal differences between the two works, but both are dedicated to imbuing tragic and sorrowful events with a didactic political meaning. Norton and Sackville derive the events of their play from the ancient ‘British’ past as recounted in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of Britain. From this material they weave a revenge drama in the Senecan mode, replete with machination, plot, and counter-plot, and culminating in national as well as royal catastrophe. At the core of this is the issue of succession. King Gorboduc abdicates from the throne and divides the kingdom between his two sons. Subsequently, the two brothers resort to armed conflict over the right to supreme sovereignty and the younger kills his elder. Their mother, Queen Videna, has been appalled throughout at the loss inflicted upon her elder son by Gorboduc’s decision and in revenge for his death murders her youngest child. This atrocity provokes a popular revolt in which both Videna and Gorboduc are slaughtered and the royal line of Brutus is destroyed: ‘No ruler rests within the
Fig. 29.1 An allegorical representation of Justice, with her eyes closed. The corrupt judge is on the left, with the flayed skin of Sisamnes hanging over the lectern. Stephen Batman, The Christall Glasse (1569), P1v.
Regal seat’ (Norton and Sackville 1974: 5. 2. 184). Once this rebellion is quelled, the nobility fall into further armed conflict over the succession. Each act of the play is preceded by a Dumb Show and then concluded by a Chorus so that the audience is left in no doubt over the implications of what it witnesses. The former insists ‘that a state knit in unity doth continue strong against all force, but being divided, is easily destroyed’ (Dumb Show 1) and the latter confirms:
And this great king that doth divide his land,
And change the course of his descending crown,
And yields the reign into his children’s hand,
From blissful state of joy and great renown A mirror shall become to princes all,
To learn to shun the cause of such a fall.
(Chorus 1: 388-93)
If Gorboduc had settled the succession in the traditional way and preserved the unity of the kingdom, none of the desperate events which follow would have occurred.
Interpreting Cambises and Gorboduc as admonitory political homilies on the succession is one answer to the question of what political tragedy meant in the 1560s: both plays deepen the audience’s appreciation of the political stability it enjoys, and that can prove so fragile, as well as underlining the obligation of the monarch to preserve this. Yet Rabkin was correct to identify an excess within each play that makes their doctrinal message seem far from comprehensive. Although the problem of Cambises’ succession is evident, it is less easy to know what to do about it. After all, he is a legitimate monarch whose succession is uncontested; the consequences of this, it seems, can only be endured. Perhaps that it is the lesson. One critic asserts that ‘discerning members of Preston’s audience’ would agree with the play’s voluble condemnation of those who complain against the king’s tyrannical actions as traitors and with its commendation of the passive obedience that is urged upon Cambises’ persecuted brother (and later, in similar terms, his queen): ‘Let him alone, of his deeds do not talk [...]| live quietly, do not with him deal’ (636, 640; Armstrong 1955: 295-6). Yet this advice is proposed by Ambidexter, the play’s opportunistic intriguer and hypocrite. Some commentators suggest that this displacement of sober discourses is far from accidental and that it reveals the play’s unregenerate delight in acting and spectacle for its own sake. On this view, the play’s shameless indulgence of Ambidexter and, more generally, of comedic and parodic material results in a pointed mockery of homiletic theatre. Consequently, the play is shaped primarily for theatrical pleasure rather than solemn instruction (Bushnell 1990: 80-2; Cartwright 1999:102-8).
Equally, the didactic assurance of Gorboduc is incomplete. The judgements offered by the Chorus do not always address the scale of the tragedy unfolded by the play. The king should have ensured an uncontested succession after his death by allowing the throne to pass to his elder son, Ferrex, yet the latter proves to be unreliable. In the second act of the play, he is consumed by violent resentment towards his younger brother, and one of his advisers urges Ferrex to set aside scruple and to seize full sovereign powers. The fittest candidate should rule, he argues, and even the principle of succession by primogeniture is not sacrosanct:
If Nature and the Gods had pinched so Their flowing bounty and their noble gifts Of princely qualities from you, my lord,
And pour’d them all at once in wasteful wise Upon your father’s younger son alone,
Perhaps there be, that in your prejudice Would say that birth should yield to worthiness.
(2.1. 81-7)
Now the speaker here is Hermon, a cynical counsellor who is attempting to incite Ferrex to destroy his brother; it would be foolish to trust anything he says. Yet as this example shows, it is difficult to turn aside all the implications of his argument. In Taverner’s Second Book of the Garden of Wisdom, for example, Cambises’ predecessor, the admirable Cyrus the Elder, makes a powerful case that ‘it is not the byrth of man’ but personal excellence that should distinguish a prince (Taverner 1539: B4r). This was an argument which other Tudor humanists had explored (Starkey 1989: 68-76). As Cambises shows, trusting to succession simply on the grounds of primogeniture can indeed result in catastrophe. Some commentators feel Gorboduc is also composed in a sophistic rather than a didactic mode. It explores many different sides of an issue in a playful, explorative way to provoke continuous reflection in the viewer (or reader). This encourages multiple ways of seeing the issue at stake so that the full complexity of the problem is grasped rather than the solution to it (see Altman 1978: 249-9; Herman 2001).
This chapter will propose another reason why both plays present a less coherent lesson about political sovereignty than first appears. This depends upon emphasizing the tragic aspirations of these dramatists. Those critics who observe a playful or sceptical disposition in these works make an important contribution because they stress that although each play may elaborate a political moral they are not political moralities. In the latter tradition of drama, in plays such as Skelton’s Magnificence (c.1520-2; printed 1530) or Sir David Lindsay’s Satire of the Three Estates (1554; printed 1602), it appears that the sovereign is potentially redeemable and sovereignty can be reformed and reconstituted on a more equitable basis. In Cambises and Gorboduc the lawless or misguided sovereign is not capable of moral recuperation (cf. Bushnell 1990: 96). These plays present a much bleaker form of tragic narrative where irredeemable consequences follow from the embodiment of sovereignty in a single person. The latter point is crucial because it helps to foreground the implications of another constitutive aspect of tragic experience in these plays: their insistent representation of suffering and lament. Readings which emphasize the playful or intellectual qualities of these dramas can grant less weight to this. However, in both works, mourning and lament have an unusual degree of prominence and provide a primary means by which the exercise of sovereign power is comprehended and endured.
Gorboduc and Cambises grasp the issue of sovereignty in tragic as well as homiletic terms and there is a tension between these two categories. As tragedies, both plays imagine conditions of emergency where the sovereign ruptures the standards, institutions, and processes by which a state should be governed. This is a much more alarming experience than depicting an erring but redeemable monarch because the very existence of the state and of monarchy itself is jeopardized. What would one do then? Some crucial questions follow from this: what kind of authority abandons just governance or renders it impossible? What happens to a society under the sway of inequitable rule? What should subjects do about it? What limits are there to the powers of the Crown? How should they be enforced? What alternatives are there to monarchical sovereignty? Cambises and Gorboduc establish tragedy as a medium in which these enduring questions could be considered.
World History
