Edward and Mary seem to have stuck more with the old pattern
of holding revels around Christmas and the visits of overseas dignitaries. Edward’s
surviving accounts refer to banquets and maskings. Mary’s Master of the Revels,
Thomas Cawarden, gave considerable attention to maintaining the Queen’s wardrobe
and her gardens at Nonesuch. She did have regular banquets.
Elizabeth’s courtiers were returning from their embassies to
Venice, and its neighboring Italian states, having studied the secular theater
there. It is with her reign, and the advent of the printing press, that England
would join that Renaissance world.
It is Elizabeth, then, who condescended to attend the play The
Tragidie of Ferrex and Porrex at the Inner Temple Hall on “xviij. day of
lanuarie. 1561.” Condescended even more than usual as the play was written and
performed in English rather than the customary Latin.
To that date, almost all plays performed before the monarch at
universities were written and performed in Latin. Elizabeth was fluent in the
language and patiently watched dozens of such university plays during the annual
summer progresses of her long reign.
This would be the first English play her court would attend
at the nearby Inns of Court (a law school) in London. History would remember it
even more for being the first English play written in unrhymed iambic
pentameter “blank verse”.
The Inns of Court were filled with young sons from noble and
wealthy merchant families. They served as finishing schools as much as law
schools. Their extra-curricular activities were almost as much a part of the life
at court as activities immediately around the Queen herself. So was their
competition to please potential patrons within the higher circles of court power.
The Queen, for her part, was surely looking forward to an
entertaining evening watching a play. She no more than anyone could have known
that history was in progress of being made. No one could know that blank verse
was soon to become the language of the English stage for centuries to come.
But, when in her own court, she expected to see her plays performed
in English. And she probably enjoyed, as much as any, the bloom of secular
theater made possible by her young intellectuals’ fascination with vernacular Renaissance
drama and novels.
What she may have suspected from the evening’s
entertainment, like any other, however, was that the play would include encouragement
to marry and produce an heir. The subject was kept before her day and night. A
great many literary works, dedicated to her in English and Latin, slipped in the
subject of providing an heir to the throne. She could barely leave her private
chambers without running a gauntlet of “off-hand” observations relating to the
subject in one way or another.
So then, it seems unlikely that she was shocked to hear the
Argument of the play start matters off in a fashion to which she had grown
accustomed after 2 years.
And afterwards for want of issue of the prince whereby the
succession of the crown became uncertain, they fell to civill warre, in which
both they and many of their issues were slaine, and the land for a long time almost
desolate and miserably wasted.
Her subjects were afraid of yet another ruinous civil war.
And, besides, it was a woman’s place to have children. Especially if the women
were Queen’s.
But Elizabeth had said that it was enough that she was
married to her kingdom. In the language of the time, this was a dangerous “fancie”
on the part of a Queen:
…so
is wont to be.
When lords, and trusted rulers under
kings,
To please the present fancie of the
prince,
With wrong transpose the course of
governance.
Murders, mischief, or civill sword at
length,;
Or mutuall treason, or a just revenge,
When right succeding line returns
again,
By loves just judgement and deserved
wrath,
Brings them to cruell and reprochfull
death.
And roots their names and kindreds from the earth.
The line could only be meant for her as none of the king or
the princes in the play shares the fancy in the least. They all are pleased
to have provided a succession to the kingdom.
King Gorbodoc makes precisely that point.
Gorb…. That when by death my
life and rule shall cease.
The kingdom yet may with unbroken
course,
Have certain prince, by whose undoubted right,
Your wealth and peace may stand in
quiet stay,
And eke that they whom nature hath
prepared,
In time to take my place in princely seat,
And a fine example he is for a Queen who is already past
prime marriageable age at 28 years. Before anyone knew it, King Gorbodoc’s
lesson could all go for naught.
In the great tragic turn of the play, in fact, Gorbodoc and
both of his sons die in violent, rapid succession. Without being too open to
the accusation of chastising their Queen, the playwrights are now in a position
to float a few other suggestions for her Royal consideration.
No, no: then Parliament should have
been holden,
And certain heirs appointed to the
crown,
To stay the title of established right,
And in the people plant obedience,
While yet the prince did Hue, whose
name and power
By lawfull summons and authoritie
Might make a Parliament to be of force,
And might have set the state in quiet
stay.
But now O happie man, whom speedie death
Deprives of life, ne is enforced to see
These hugie mischiefs and these
miseries,
These civil warres, these murders &
these wrongs.
Of justice, yet must God in fine
restore
This noble crown unto the lawfull
heir:
For right will always Hue, and rise at
length,
But wrong can never take deep root to last.
Elizabeth’s counselors had already
been pressing persistently for her to allow parliament to establish a successor
until she could put an end to the nation’s fears by virtue of a biological
child.
On that historical January day, the
play The Tragidie of Ferrex and Porrex would not only begin to establish
blank verse as the language of English plays but it would equally establish
court plays as a medium for suggesting to Elizabeth directions to take in her
government of the court and the realm. Suggestions that otherwise would have
been considered impertinent or worse. The Queen truly loved a good play.
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