1.
The comedy Hymenaeus, produced at St. John’s College,
Cambridge, in 1578, is based on Decameron
IV.10. But, as the author points out in
the Prologue, it is a highly creative adaptation of
Boccaccio’s tale. In the original, a surgeon’s wife thinks
her lover is dead, and puts him into a chest which is carried off by
two usurers. He wakes up and is arrested as a thief. The lady’s
servant tells a magistrate how she had put him into the chest,
unknown to the usurers. He escapes hanging, the money-lenders are
fined, and the lover is free to continue his adulterous relation with
the surgeon’s wife. In Hymenaeus, the physician and his
wife are transformed into the standard authoritarian father of Roman
comedy and his daughter, and the adulterous lover into a suitor.
Hence the play’s ending is a stock comic wedding. Further
complications are added. The lover has two rivals, a comic physician
and a German, and each suitor is given a cheeky servant, so the play
is loaded with plenty of witty backchat. The setting is shifted from
Salerno to the university city of Padua and the play’s lover,
Erophilus, is made a student, which allows for the inclusion of a
certain amount of academic humor of the kind that would especially
interest a Cambridge audience. It will be seen, therefore, that
Boccaccio’s story has been recast along the lines of a Roman
comedy and its characters are all familiar comic stereotypes. But,
even if Hymenaeus breaks no new ground, the quality and
economy of its plot-construction has found admirers. NOTE
1
2.
The play presents problems of title, date, and authorship. Neither
manuscript has a title, and in Smith’s
edition and the secondary literature it is called Hymenaeus
because Hymenaeus, the Roman god of weddings, speaks the
Prologue. But it is unlikely that such was the title its author gave
it, and various others have been proposed. More likely it was named
after one of the principal characters, Julia or Erophilus.
3.
Evidence for the play’s date is supplied by the cast list
preserved by MS. j, which records the academic
degrees
possessed by each of the actors at the time of its performance (this
list may be seen at Nelson II.944).
By
consulting university records to discover when each of these degrees
was conferred, Smith (pp. ixf.) fixed
the date of its production to between July 1578 and July 1579. The
Bachelor’s Commencement of 1579 can be excluded because Thomas
Legge’s Richardus
Tertius was performed on that occasion. Although
some
have written about Richardus Tertius as if it were a play,
it
is in fact a trilogy that required three successive evenings for
production. That trilogy employed so many actors (many of whom also
performed in Hymenaeus - cf. Nelson
II.944f.), and must have placed such a strain on the
college’s resources, that the possibility of other plays being
performed at the same time is unthinkable. With considerable
confidence, therefore, Hymenaeus can be dated to Candlemas
1578.
4.
The MSS. do not record the author’s name, and two of the actors
who performed in the play have been suggested as possible authors by Smith,
Henry Hickman (the Erophilus) and Abraham Fraunce (the Ferdinandus).
Other than
the fact that he played a
prominent role, it is difficult to understand why Smith fixed on
Hickman as a possible author; with equal plausibility he could have
lighted on any other name on the list since, save for Fraunce, there
is no evidence that any of them wrote plays. Fraunce is a
candidate worth considering, since he subsequently wrote another
comedy performed at St. John’s College, Victoria,
and went on to become a rather prolific writer. Blume
(p. 2) vigorously denounced this possibility
on the
grounds that Victoria is a very different play, but since it
was an adaptation of Luigi Pasqualigo’s Il Fidele, a
commedia erudita , the
kind of
differences Blume had in mind can probably be explained in terms of
the different sources used, and the consideration that
these plays represent very different kinds of comedy. Hymenaeus
dramatizes an episode from the Decameron,
which would have afforded Fraunce considerably more scope for
displaying his own
dramaturgic talent. No
other John’s playwright of the time can be identified with
confidence. NOTE 2 Then
too, speaking in favor of attribution to Fraunce is the consideration
that three lines of Hymenaeus reappear in Victoria
(23, 287,
747). Some disquiet, however,
is
created by the fact that Hymenaeus contains several stylistic
features not shared by Victoria. 1.) Eccum is a
contraction of ecce illum, and one should write eccam
of a woman and eccos of two or more people.
The
author of Hymenaeus, however, uses eccum as if it
were
an uideclinable synonym for ecce (cf. 519,
533, 744).
2.) The author of Hymenaeus is inordinately fond of
employing
supines in the accusative to express purpose. 3.) He likewise uses
plural nouns and verbs for single individuals with unusual frequency.
4.) He tends to overwork certain pet words to the point they attract
the reader’s notice, such as adeo, eccum, placet, and
precor. The fact that stylistic features such as these are
not
found in Victoria does not seem explicable because
Hymenaeus is a comedy of the Plautus-Terence type, while
Victoria belongs to the rather different genre of commedia
erudita, and so they cast a certain degree of doubt upon the idea
of Fraunce’s authorship. Whether this doubt is sufficient to
discredit the theory may be left to the individual reader’s
judgement, but surely it would be injudicious to place Fraunce’s
name on the title page without the addition of a question mark.
5.
Hymenaeus is preserved in two mss. The first, Gonville and
Caius College (Cantab.) MS. 125/62, pp. 111 - 40 (c)
also
contains the texts of Legge’s Richardus
Tertius and Edward Forsett’s comedy Pedantius
(1581). A photographic reproduction has been published, with an
Introduction by Blume. The second, St.
John’s College (Cantab.) MS. S.45 (James) (j) is a
seventeenth century ms. bound in a literary and antiquarian
commonplace book maintained by Henry Smith (1615/6 - 1702), Master of
Magdalene College, Cantab., and subsequently by Thomas Baker, with an
included list of actors in the original performance. c was
once appraised as a ms. probably written prior to 1600, NOTE
3 and for this reason Smith
gave it preference in his edition. But one sees at a glance
that
c is written in a distinctly seventeenth-century
secretarial
hand. The only possible indication of its date is that it might seem
most likely that Pedantius was included before its appearance
in print, in 1631. But surely many examples can be adduced of
literary texts being hand-copied after they been published, and
c’s copyist may conceivably have been motivated by a
desire to preserve a text of Pedantius which differs
markedly from the printed one. As for the date of c, Blume
(p. v) wrote that it “can be dated about 1630,” but
gave no reason for this statement, and no opinion about the date is
ventured in the detailed catalogue description kindly furnished me by
Jonathan Harrison, Special Collections Librarian of the College.
Hence all that can be said is that Hymenaeus is preserved in
two manuscripts emanating from the first decades of the seventeenth
century, and considerations of date cannot be used to establish the
superiority of either. But, even if motivated by a misapprehension,
Smith was correct to base his edition
predominantly on c, which on the whole presents a
better text.
This does not mean that j has no role to play, for
at a number
of points it preserves superior readings (and also stage-directions,
entirely missing from c). But it does mean that when
the two
mss. present differing lections of equal plausibility, the c
reading ought to be preferred. Then too, at several points the
two manuscripts present a shared reading that is palpably wrong, or a
word obviously missing, from which fact it can be inferred that they
are descended from a common original, itself a defective copy ms. in
which these mistakes were already present. These errors must be
corrected by conjecture.
6.
Hymenaeus has already been the subject of a very serviceable
edition, by Smith. Although I believe I have
managed to produce a somewhat better Latin text and more elaborate
commentary, the chief reason why a new edition was necessary is that
nowadays it is mandatory that texts of English academic dramas be
accompanied by English translations. In both manuscripts, the text is
written in lines, as if it were poetry, but it is in fact prose.
Elsewhere
I have explained that this practice, common in Elizabethan and
Jacobean academic comedy, appears to have been no more than a writing
convention designed to give plays the physical appearance of those of
Plautus and Terence (which were understood to have been written in
prose until Bentley demonstrated otherwise in the eighteenth
century). I see no reason for perpetuating this feature, which would
only lead the unwary to look for verse where none exists. I have gone
even farther than did Smith in silently imposing modern punctuation
on the text.
7.
It should be noted that Hymenaeus employs three stage
“houses,” used to represent the houses of Alphonsus and
Camillus’ father Lucius, and the sinister inn. All three
“houses” are employed in Act IV,
and elsewhere
I
have discussed the problem of staging academic plays that require
more than two of these structures within a single Act.
NOTE
1 Boas 134 - 140, Blume, 2 -
5.
NOTE
2 To be sure, Nelson I.288
records a
record from a college accounts-book itemizing the payment of two
shillings sixpence “To Mr. Stanton for the making of a parasites
coate” in 1580, identifies him as Laurence Stanton, who acted in Richardus
Tertius, and
(II.972) lists him as the author or producer of a play produced in that
year.
But there is no
corroborative evidence that Stanton was a playwright, and the comedy
in question can always have been one by Plautus or Terence, with
Stanton serving as the producer, just as Plautus’ Persa
was performed at John’s four years later.
NOTE
3 George B. Churchill and Wolfgang Keller, “Die lateinischen
Universitäts-Dramen Englands in der Zeit der Königen
Elizabeth,” Shakespeare Jahrbuch 34 (1898) ,287.
Blume,
Horst-Dieter, Hymenaeus, Abraham Fraunce, Victoria, Laelia,
Prepared with an Introduction by Horst-Dieter Blume (Renaissance
Latin Drama in England series II:13, Hildesheim, 1991)
Boas,
Frederick C., University Drama in the Tudor Age (Oxford,
1914,
repr. New York, 1966)
Nelson,
Alan H., Cambridge (Records of Early English Drama series,
Toronto, 1989)
Smith,
G. C. Moore, Hymenaeus, A Comedy Acted at St. John’s College,
Cambridge (Cambridge, 1908)