A long tradition of criticism has established Gorboduc as ‘the first Elizabethan succession tract’ (Levine 1966:30), a theatrical tragedy intended to circumvent historical tragedy. One of its speakers condenses its message concerning the succession into a simple imperative: ‘keep out [...]| Unnatural thraldom of [a] stranger’s reign’ (5. 2.176-7). Indeed, an important piece of eyewitness testimony has been recovered in which exactly this understanding of the play is deduced, reading it as dissuading Elizabeth from foreign suitors and promoting a native-born candidate, Robert, Lord Dudley, created Earl of Leicester in 1564 (H. James and Walker 1995). In this interpretation, the play presents both a diagnosis of the problem of succession and a cure for it by supporting Leicester. It should also be noted that Elizabeth’s response to such advice ‘stressed the limits of [Parliament’s] authority to counsel a prince’ so as to ‘insulate her sovereignty’ (Guy 1995: 302). The Queen’s response to a parliamentary petition on this issue presented in 1566 is explicit: ‘I will deal therein for your safety, and offer it unto you as your Prince and head, without request; for it is monstrous that the feet should direct the head’ (Levine 1966:185).
The neoclassical decorum of the play can also be seen to reinforce its message, and, in this, it contrasts strikingly with Cambises. Gorboduc uses blank verse for the first time as its principal dramatic medium and it adopts Senecan conventions throughout. The play also moves away from affective spectacle, which emphasized the physical presence of the suffering body, towards affective rhetoric in which such suffering was only described; comedic or parodic episodes are also omitted. If Norton and Sackville were aware at all of Preston’s play, their own work might be understood as a learned rebuke to its predecessor. Understood in this way, Cambises exemplifies the potentially undisciplined energy of the native theatrical tradition that Gorboduc refines and concentrates into a new kind of tragic experience.
Yet the play’s tragic elements, especially its extensive use of lament, complicates its political teaching and ensures that Gorboduc probes deeper into the question of sovereignty. Even the presentation of the core issue of abdication and division is far from straightforward despite the testimony of the Dumb Show and the Chorus. In the second scene, the king’s counsellors discuss his proposal in a self-reflexive mode by citing tragic examples in a manner very similar in kind to the play that is now unfolding. For Eubulus, the king’s determination will lead to disaster and the moral is simple: ‘Within one land, one single rule is best’ (i. 2. 259) because ‘faith and justice, and all kindly love, | Do yield unto desire of sovereignty’ (265-6). Nothing should be done to provoke the fearful consequences of the latter, and Eubulus reminds the king of some ancient history. ‘Brute, first prince of all this land’ (270), divided the kingdom between his three sons and the result was tragic: bloodshed, treachery, civil war, and the loss of sovereignty (269-82). Eubulus’ bleak moral realism proves to be accurate, and his understanding of the lesson taught by tragic history is correct. Yet, it is not the only conclusion to be derived from a lamentable tale in this scene. Philander also opposes the king’s decision to abdicate but agrees with him on the issue of division, otherwise political ambitions will be inflamed, not extinguished (148-246). If the kingdom becomes Ferrex’s alone, Philander imagines a tragic future which will be the subject for lament, one deriving from the ‘unkindly wrong’ done to the subjected younger son who ‘Gapes’ for the elder’s death and who will embark on vengeance (183, 194). Experience discloses other and equally tragic instances of the ‘famous stocks of royal blood destroy’d’ (191) by botching the succession in this way.
Events show Philander to be mistaken, but he is not corrupt or flagrantly irresponsible. In fact, his tragic insight is not without credibility: Gorboduc’s younger son is moved easily to act against his brother when he possesses half the kingdom (2. 2. 38-66). It may be that his sudden change of fortune has provoked him, but his mother suspects from the outset his ‘growing pride’ (1. 1. 31). Would the sole succession of Ferrex have prevented this? Perhaps so, and the division is the catalyst for all that follows. Eubulus may well be the more serious student of tragic history because he considers what has happened, as well as the prudential action needed to avoid its reoccurrence, rather than imagining possible futures. Yet the presentation of the issue elicits questions and conjectures; it is, at least, debatable, and seriously so because different and opposing moral lessons can be deduced in good faith from tragic examples. Philander’s argument is a moving one and driven equally by his care for the commonwealth. In this way, the experience of division is also a problem of understanding or response; even the ‘right’ decision in this case might not have avoided catastrophe. For Norton and Sackville, tragedy is not the place where conventional moral or political judgements are easily vindicated. More daringly, Gorboduc suggests that the crisis would not simply be averted by the sovereign making the ‘correct’ decision; it is not simply a matter of his or her personal virtues or faults. It results rather from one individual possessing the authority to decide the succession and to determine which body (or bodies) should be invested with this supreme power. Even the outrageous Cambises appeared to take the practice of counsel very seriously at the start of his reign; in contrast, it is implied that Gorboduc has already made his decision and that this debate, with its tragic speculations pro and contra, is largely superfluous (see 1.1. 45-50).
The use of tragic examples in this scene of counsel is one example of how Gorboduc releases the power of lament to sweep away assurance and to stimulate thinking about fundamental questions of power and prerogative. In its fourth act, for example, the catastrophe that follows from Gorboduc’s division of the realm is intensifying: the younger son, Porrex, has invaded his brother’s land and killed him. The act opens with Videna, Gorboduc’s queen, and her lament for her ‘beloved son! O my sweet child!’ (4. 1. 23). In this extensive speech of mourning, Videna disowns her treacherous younger child: ‘Ruthless, unkind, monster of nature’s work’ (71). His inherited entitlements are rendered meaningless as Videna places him outside the familial and human community as an animal who can be slaughtered. Yet the Porrex we see immediately after this, appealing to his father for pity, is remote from this unfeeling monster (4. 2.35-134). He too draws upon lament, appealing to be seen as a ‘woeful man’ with a ‘mournful case’: his elder brother planned to assassinate him and Porrex moved against him only to preserve his own life (43, 45). The act ends with another extensive female lament, the servant Marcella’s piteous account of Porrex’s killing by his mother. The ‘peerless prince, | Son to a king, and in the flower of youth’ cried to his mother for aid not realizing she was his assassin (200-1).
In the fourth act of Gorboduc, mourning deepens problems of judgement and demands that rival claims are considered critically. Porrex is condemned by his mother and father, but then presents a full and convincing account of his tragic dilemma; finally, his death elicits such eloquent pathos that it endows him with a heroic presence. As Kent Cartwright has shown, Norton and Sackville deploy a subtle management of retrospect throughout the play to show ‘that meaning can be provisional’ (1999: 112-21). Lament is crucial to this process, and although it gives great power to all of its speakers, it bestows none of them with the credibility to make a definitive judgement or decision. Gorboduc mourns the passage of events, but he remains mystified by them and can only blame ‘cruel destiny’ and ‘froward fate’; he is unable to grasp his own responsibility (4. 2.142-8). Benjamin stressed the importance of this aspect of the mourning play: as successive scenes and speeches qualify and counter each other, the argument of the play becomes more unfathomable. Within Gorboduc, no one can find a solution that will resolve the tragic crisis.
This openness of the play to speculation about motives and judgements also grants it a remarkable range of reflections on the nature of sovereignty, and it subjects the true purposes of the latter to constant redefinition. Gorboduc perceives his own office in a perfectly orthodox manner, despite his disastrous exercise of prerogative. He believes the monarch’s primary duty is to
Preserve the common peace,
The cause that first began and still maintains The lineal course of kings’ inheritance.
(1. 2. 22-4)
The piety of these reflections is soon challenged, however, when the king signally fails to fulfil this obligation. In the counter-case, put by the inflammatory adviser Hermon, the sovereign’s only duty is to maximize the scope of his or her powers regardless of moral scruple. Monarchs may adopt a moralized discourse to justify themselves, but when reality is exposed by a state of emergency we grasp a very different truth: power seeks to perpetuate and augment itself. Hermon urges Ferrex to understand this and to dismiss illusions such as the ‘fear of gods’ or ‘nature’s law’ (2.1.140-1):
Know ye, that lust of kingdoms hath no law.
The gods do bear and well allow in kings
The things [that] they abhor in rascal routs.
Murders and violent thefts in private men
Are heinous crimes, and full of foul reproach;
Yet none offence, but deck’d with glorious name
Of noble conquests in the hands of kings.
(2.1.143-5,152-5)
Hermon insists that ‘reason of state’ should be the sovereign’s pre-eminent concern: the necessity to maintain and, where possible, enlarge their dominion (see Viroli 1992). Yet even those who oppose such an unprincipled view provoke a competing question about sovereignty: where is it best located? Who or what possesses the quality that demands loyalty and in whose defence we might surrender our lives? Lament is again crucial to the formulation of these questions because it also allows a new object to come into view as the locus of sovereignty: ‘Britain land, the mother of ye all’, ‘your mother land’ (5. 2.115-79,135,179). It is the country, in the last instance, that demands protection and constitutes the foundation of loyalty; the concluding imperative is ‘To save your realm, and in this realm yourselves’ (119; cf. Vanhoutte 2000). Admittedly, the definition of the nation here is an exclusive one based on an aristocratic sense of custodianship: the ‘ancient honour of your ancestors’ (143). Yet it does allow another sovereign institution to become significant because it is only ‘by common counsel of you all | In parliament’ (157-8) that the succession can be decided and ‘the regal diadem | Be set in certain place of governance’ (158-9). In his concluding lament, Eubulus despairs over whether parliamentary agreement could now be reached in this matter and foresees only further catastrophe (180-279). He does not dispute, however, that this was the solution missed earlier and that a decision of the king-in-parliament would have had a truly distinctive power rather than simply the king’s alone. Such a lawful solution is now far too late and the crown will be seized and lost by force.
If Gorboduc teaches a lesson about sovereignty, it also considers questions about its nature. In this respect, Stephen Alford is right to note how the play addresses ‘the controversial issue of the location of power in the English polity in the 1560s’ (1998:103). Cambises too opens up onto a speculative situation where the premisses and limits of allegiance are tested during a crisis. Lament is the principal way in which this situation is addressed, experienced, and challenged, and it constitutes a place where some of the play’s most exacting thinking is done on political problems. This identifies one crucial point of contact between earlier and later instances of Elizabethan tragic theatre. Robert Y. Turner has suggested that the creation of pathos was the common motivation of tragedians from the 1560s until the 1590s. Understanding the experience of tragedy involves grasping ‘the playwrights’ practical concern for expressing sorrow and suffering and for moving their audiences’, especially on the part of ‘those who have been deprived of some loved one’ (1961-2: 98,110). However, these episodes of personal loss are always connected to broader issues of governance in the ethos of the mourning play. Tragedy is a medium in which the period’s enduring political concern with the responsibilities of sovereigns and subjects is addressed in ways that extend far beyond homiletic conventions: this is what drew audiences and dramatists to the form. It is in this respect that we can begin to re-examine the relationships between early and late forms of Elizabethan tragic theatre. When the grief-stricken Hieronimo in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (c.1582-92; printed 1592) imagines the power of his lament for his butchered son Horatio, he describes it as disrobing nature and penetrating hell itself (Kyd 1974: 3. 7.1-18). Yet when his lament reaches ‘the brightest heavens’, his words ‘find the place impregnable; and they | Resist my woes, and give my words no way’ (13,17-18). Hieronimo must endure and act in this world; there is no higher court of appeal he can resort to beyond confronting those worldly powers that are the origin of rather than the solution to political crisis. It is to this scene that Elizabethan tragedy returns repeatedly and one of its most compelling qualities lies in portraying how the failures and excesses of sovereignty leave it open to question.
PRIMARY WORKS
Kyd, Thomas (1974), The Spanish Tragedy, in T. W. Craik (ed.), Minor Elizabethan Tragedies (London: Dent).
Norton, Thomas, and Thomas Sackville (1974), Gorboduc, in T. W. Craik (ed.), Minor Elizabethan Tragedies (London: Dent).
Preston, Thomas (1974), Cambises, in T. W. Craik (ed.), Minor Elizabethan Tragedies (London: Dent).
Starkey, Thomas (1989), A Dialogue between Pole andLupset, ed. T. F. Mayer, Camden Society, 4th ser., 37.
Taverner, Richard (1539), The Garden of Wysdome and The Second Booke of the Garden ofWysdome.
World History
