The Lamentable Tragedy of Locrine: A Critical Edition. Garland English Texts No. 7 by JaneLytton GoochReview by: Leonard R.N. AshleyBibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance, T. 44, No. 2 (1982), pp. 483-485Published by: Librairie DrozStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20676571 .

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COMPTES RENDUS 483

the Theatres and Blurt, Master Constable. Thus Doctor DodypoWs introduction of satire points the way toward the satire in the work of

Marston, etc.; its romantic elements relate to Dekker's work. It was an old-fashioned play in its time and yet offered hints about forthco

ming developments in the popular theatre. The analysis of the play in this critical edition is readable and

sound and relates Doctor Dodypoll in passing or in particular to

plays that range from A Midsummer Night's Dream to The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Supposes to The Malcontent. Here is the French doctor, the lover in disguise, the rejected woman, the willing friend, fairies and enchantments, the father and son as rivals in love, the amorous tyrant, dissembling, a ?chaotic and unsatisfactory ? plot (as Bullen put it), and some useful insights into the traditions and tas tes of its time. Harold Hillebrand (1926) said that Doctor Dodypoll still awaited ? thorough critical examination ? after his book on The Child Actors. Now it has had it (up to 1967) and requires only that the updating be updated. Professor Matson may, as do so many scholars who have do devote a great deal of time to a dissertation

topic, occasionally make greater claims for this chock-full, clumsy, sometimes charming play, but his work here will help to raise our estimate of Doctor Dodypoll above what was described when The

Newberry Library bought a copy of the quarto because of some con nection of the play with Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream

(more imagined than real). The Newberry Library Bulletin damned it as ? filled with bad verse, dull bawdry, and inept characterization ?.

Now you can read a carefully constructed text of Doctor Dody poll and judge for yourself, if you wish.

Brooklyn, New York. Leonard R.N. Ashley.

Jane Lytton GoocH, ed., The Lamentable Tragedy of Locrine: A Critical Edition. Garland English Texts No. 7. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1981, x-172 p. $27.50 US.

One hopes that in time Garland will be able to offer ?The Shakes peare Apocrypha ? in one big volume or affordable series. Mean while, here is another single play, at 27 dollars.

Attribution of the anonymous Elizabethan play Locrine to Peele involved me with its text when I was writing both George Peele: The

Man and His Work and Authorship and Evidence in Renaissance Drama. Now in an edition Jane Lytton Gooch (Visiting Professor of

English at The University of Victoria, Canada) has prepared care

fully from the 13 extant copies of the 1595 quarto (no press variants), I found reading Locrine a pleasure, not a mere problem. The mo

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484 COMPTES RENDUS

dernized text is accompanied by notes and comments, a glossary, appendices (presenting related material from TheMirrour for Magis trates and the contemporary poem The Complaint of Elstred, both, like The Faerie Queene, sources, plus comparisons with the related anonymous play of Selimus), an extensive bibliography of the sort we associate with doctoral dissertations (which is how this edition

began, at The University of Toronto), and a full introduction dealing with such disputed matters as authorship and date of composition and the company which played it in addition to methodical examina tion of structure, historical themes, etc. The text is accurate and the added material very useful.

R.B. McKerrow in his Malone Society reprint of Locrine suggest ed it might have been written as early as 1585, CF. Tucker Brooke

agreed in The Shakespeare Apocrypha it was ?a tragedy of the type of about 1585?, and (in my opinion) John Payne Collier forged a note (supposedly by Sir George Bue, Master of the Revels) to support this date and the authorship of Charles Tilney (executed for treason

1586), but the printed version contains material from other works published after 1585 and it seems impossible to say whether the author revised a play of 1585 or earlier after seeing this material in

print or saw it in manuscript at some time or times between 1585 and the 1594 day on which it was entered in The Stationers Register. All that is certain is that Locrine was printed in 1595 and remained sub

stantially a play in the style of 10 or even 15 years earlier. Based on chronicle history material, Locrine is a tragedy with cer

tain academic overtones and a remarkably interesting comic subplot, but none of it justifies reading the ?W.S.? of the 1595 titlepage as ?William Shakespeare?, though that may have been the intent of the

publisher. It has also been attributed to Peele (as I have said) and to other University Wits (Marlowe, Kyd, Greene), but Professor Gooch is going to get little general argument when she says that ?we cannot determine the author of Locrine? nor be absolutely certain it was

(like Selimus of 1595, which was certainly in hand as the author or reviser prepared Locrine for printing) a play presented by The

Queen's Men. What is clear is that there are many old (dumb show, etc.) and

new elements cobbled together to allow Locrine to take advantage of whatever was popular on the late Elizabethan stage and that in some

respects, especially the character of Strumbo (the clown), the play remains important for the full understanding of the nature and prefe rences of the Elizabethan audience. The tragic plot is replete with

rousing long speeches and three battles onstage; the comic plot shows more vitality and there is an attempt to integrate it with the principal, tragic, action. Strumbo's dialogue is in a vivid vernacular, studded with proverbs and stock jokes, and antifeminist and in other ways typical of Elizabethan comedy, even in his direct address to the

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COMPTES RENDUS 485

audience (as in Ambidexter and other clowns in other plays) and his obvious rapport with the groundlings. Were the play merely rhetori cal arias of tragedy, Locrine might long ago have been utterly forgot ten; what keeps it pretty well preserved is the salt of Strumbo's

humor, a humor which has sociological as well as literary value of a sort even now.

There is some hint in Locrine of the busy carpentry of Eliza bethan house dramatists ? this one may have adapted an academic

play for the public stage ? and from it and similar plays we may

learn more of the profession of dramatist and of the way in which some more talented professionals than the anonymous author of Locrine met the demands of their public and at the same time were able to fashion the same kind of raw material more finely, working under the same conditions and within the same traditions to produce masterpieces in the genres of tragedy, comedy, history play, and so on.

Brooklyn, New York. Leonard R.N. Ashley.

Wolfgang Clemen, English Tragedy before Shakespeare. London and New York: Methuen, 1980, Methuen Library Reprints, 301

p., $32.50 US and ?16.50.

Wolfgang Clemen, Shakespeare's Dramatic Art: Collected Essays. London and New York: Methuen, 1980, Methuen Library Reprints, 236 p., $30.00 US and ? 15.

Methuen has published simultaneously in the US and the UK new hardcover editions of English Tragedy before Shakespeare (first published in London in 1960) and Shakespeare's Dramatic Art (first published in London in 1972) in its Library Reprints series, giving us once again convenient (though not inexpensive) and admirable books

by Wolfgang Clemen, sometime Professor of English at the Univer

sity of Munich. He is known, of course, to Shakespeare scholars (his Shakespeare's Imagery is a classic), to members of The British Aca

demy and the Shakespeare Conference and the Modern Humanities Research Association (addresses to all of which organizations appear in Shakespeare's Dramatic Art) and, indeed, to all scholars of

English literature ? he also has excellent criticism on Chaucer ? and Renaissance studies in particular.

Here it will suffice to say that Die Trag?die vor Shakespeare is very well translated by T.S. Dorsch and in German or in English ought to be in every library. It is unnecessary to repeat here the prais es which greeted its first appearance or to remind Shakespeare schol

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