Indeed, inasmuch as he was currently quarreling with Coke, the discomfiture it caused the Attorney General and the controversy it provoked may have pleased James as much or more than Ignoramus itself, and his second trip to Cambridge may have been undertaken, not merely to enjoy the play, but also to show the nation exactly where he stood in the controversy. But in any event, surely Ignoramus would not have provoked such widespread ill feelings, had it been generally understood as a personal attack on Francis Brackyn rather than on common lawyers in general.
3. Ruggle’s play is best understood within a wider context. In Ignoramus the unprincipled title character is played off against a second lawyer, the university-trained Musaeus, who is presented in an entirely favorable light. Since on multiple levels Ignoramus is a comedy about language, the contrast between these two individuals is highlighted on a linguistic level: Musaeus is made to speak good Latin whereas Ignoramus is such a bad Latinist that the participants in one hilarious scene imagine that he is speaking in tongues because he is demonically possessed and therefore in need of exorcism (in consequence he is of course “baptized” by having a chamber-pot emptied over his head). NOTE 4 There is a strikingly similar contrast in Thomas Ryley’s 1637 Cambridge comedy Cornelianum Dolium, a medical comedy which features an incompetent and unprincipled barber-surgeon named Syringius who is contrasted with a Neapolitan Stranger who is a properly university-educated physician. Then too, there is an unpublished manuscript by the Aristotelian John Case in the library of Corpus Christi College (Oxford), MS. C 321, in which the author inveighs against self-appointed leaders of congregations who regarded themselves as sufficiently credentialed by a special degree of spiritual illumination rather than the learning which characterizes a properly ordained Church of England clergyman, for which only holders of appropriate academic degrees were eligible. In all three cases, the contrast is between a practitioner with a formal education largely based on theoretical book-learning NOTE 5 with one taught in the school of practical experience.
4. A common denominator links these three documents. The existence of the common lawyer, the barber-surgeon and the hedge-preacher all challenged the universities’ pretention to be the gateway to the professions (and use of the Latin language was the distinguishing feature of English academic culture). Hence within the universities they were regarded as threatening rivals and therefore provided attractive targets for expressions of resentment, comic in the case of the two plays but serious in Case’s treatise. Through most of the play, Ignoramus seems to pose no serious threat because he is such an obviously incompetent specimen of his breed. But in this context Stephens’ satirical essay becomes highly instructive, because it invites us to pay particular heed to some details in Ignoramus’ characterization that might otherwise fail to receive the attention they merit. Regarded cumulatively, Ruggle gives us an impressive amount of evidence that he is supposed to be a London lawyer. He reckons time according to the sessions of the courts at Westminster Hall (179), the place he hopes eventually to best his adversaries in the play (2751, 3198), and speaks in the Epilogue of departing on a route that will carry him from Cambridge to London. More specifically, he expresses an appreciation of the trumpet that issues the summons to meals at the Inns of Court (2498).
5. So, for all his ignorance, lack of principles, and stooge-like ways Ignoramus cannot be written off as a mere bottom-feeder within his profession. Rather, he is to be regarded as a typical member of the Inns of Court (comically exaggerated, of course). Certainly this is the way play was received and understood by Ruggle’s contemporaries. In a 1906 Jena dissertation, NOTE 6 Justin Loomis Van Gundy provided a highly instructive (albeit usually overlooked) study of Ignoramus’ impact on subsequent seventeenth century English literature. For our purposes, the most illuminating information is provided on pp. 66 - 8, where the author lists the wounded yelps of practitioners of the common law protesting what they saw as an unwarranted slander of their profession and therefore provided literary rejoinders. Besides the present poem, which appeared as the fourth item in Essayes and Characters Ironicall and Instructive (printed by E. Allde for Philipp Knight, London, 1615, pp. 29 - 50), written by a certain John Stephens (who identified himself on his title page as the yonger). the title of which explicitly states its author’s intention of defending common lawyers, he mentions:
a. To the comedians of Cambridge, who in three acts before the king abused the lawyers with an imposed Ignoramus, in two ridiculous persons, Ignoramus the master and Dulman the clerk; John a Stile, student of the common law, wisheth a more sound judgment and more reverent opinion of their betters (Brit. Mus. MS. Sloane 1775).
b. The Soldier’s Counterbuff to the Cambridge Interludians of Ignoramus (Brit. Mus. MS. Harl. 5191).
c. An anonymous A modest and temperate Reproof of the Scholars of Cambridge for slandering Lawyers with that barbarous and gross Title Ignoramus (mentioned by John Hawkins in introducing his 1787 edition of Ignoramus, p. lxiii n. a).
d. The Case and Argument against Sir Ignoramus of Cambridge, by Robert Callis, of Gray’s Inn, Esquire, afterward Sergeant at Law at Staples Inn in Lent, 14 Ja. R. (i. e. written in 1617, but only printed at London in 1648).
e. “It is also not improbable that Selden’s History of Tithes, printed in 1617, was composed in a spirit of retaliation for Ruggle’s Ignoramus. Fuller, in his Church History, Book X, p. 71 gives as his authority for such an opinion the author of Dr. Preston’s life.”
(For a list of the ballads and other minor effusions elicited by the play cf. John Hawkins’ edition, pp. cviif. and note c on p. 259).
6. Of all these items, Stephens’ contribution is perhaps the most interesting because it seems to have been the most immediate such response, being written in the same year that Ignoramus was acted. What he writes offers no reason for imagining he had somehow been at Cambridge as a member of the original audience. More likely he had the opportunity to read an early-circulating manuscript (his familiarity with the play is especially suggested by line 247, in which he was able to name a character in the play), and Ignoramus does survive in both a large number of manuscripts as well as printed editions (the earliest of which appeared in 1630).
7. Little is known about our author’s life. Stephens, (a Gloucester man, not to be confused with the like-named lawyer who served as Attorney General to Henry, Prince of Wales) was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn in 1611. In 1613 he published a rather bad play entitled Cinthia’s Revenge, or, Maenanders Exstasie, and in 1615 a volume entitled Satyrical essayes, characters, and others, or, Accurate and quick descriptions fitted to the life of their subjects. This book began with three versified “essays,” and in a reprinting issued later in the same year he added a fourth one, the subject of the present edition. NOTE 7
8. In one respect this volume is a rather strange one. In the English language the noun “essay” can have two possible meanings, “an attempt, a venture,” and “a reasonably short prose composition devoted to a given subject.” The former meaning was traditional, the second obviously new-minted by Sir Francis Bacon for his famous 1597 collection of such pieces, where the word was his anglicization of Essaies used by his model Montaigne). Bacon soon found imitators (most memorably Sir William Cornwallis, whose first set was printed in 1600,, was subsequently reprinted repeatedly in expanded form) who wrote similar pieces which they described by repeating the word in Bacon’s new sense on their title pages. But in the same time-frame we find publications such as Samuel Daniel’s 1599 The poetticall essayes of Sam. Danyel and Alexander Craig’s 1604 The poeticall essayes of Alexander Craige Scotobritane, in both of which “poeticall essayes” meant something like “ventures at writing poetry.” What uniquely distinguishes Stephens’ volume is that the both definitions of the word “essays” are used to describe various contents within one and the same volume. The first four items (in the second edition) are written in verse and identified as “satyricall essayes.” These are followed by a group of prose essays of the Bacon type written on such subjects as On high birth, Of disinheritance, Of poetrie, and Of discontents. Then follows a section containing examples of a specialized form of currently popular essay (perhaps taking their inspiration from Theophrastus) entitled Two Bookes of Characters in which sundry quaint character-types are delineated, usually in a whimsical manner. Conceivably Stephens used the word “satiricall” to distinguish them from what follows by suggesting some imitatio of the satires of Horace, Juvenal and/or Persius, but the resemblance of at least this fourth one to the work of those Roman satirists seems remote in the extreme.
9. Surely it is significant that not only Stephens but also Robert Callis, author of one of the abovementioned works, were inmates of the Inns of Court who regarded the play as an attack against their own profession in general and against their London base of operations in particular, and reacted accordingly. This is also suggested by the extract from Chamberlain’s letter to Carleton quoted at the beginning of this Introduction, citing Attorney General Coke’s personal ire and a number of “rhymes and ballads” aimed at Ignoramus composed by Inns of Court men. In this they were most likely correct. Not only was the existence of individual common lawyers (like that of barber-surgeons and hedge-preachers) a challenge to the academic establishment insofar as the four Inns of Court were the training ground for common lawyers they could be regarded as a rival institution and therefore as a particularly inviting target for comic ridicule (in the same way, William Johnson’s 1638 Cambridge comedy Valetudinarium uses St. Bartholomew’s Hospital as its setting and paints a rather mordant picture of the place, which becomes understandable when one reflects that any hospital serves as a place of learning, so that a university partisan could equally well regard a hospital as an unwelcome rival institution). In rather the same vein, a several Cambridge comedies, most memorably Robert Ward’s 1623 Fucus sive Histriomastix, poke fun at Puritans, at least in part because Puritans were outspokenly opposed to university dramatics and hence were another kind of enemy to the academy. So Stephens’ poem serves as a useful reminder that a serious purpose underlay the writing of Ignoramus.
10. One final remark is in order. In an interesting article entitled “The 1663 Doctor Faustus and the Royalist Marlowe,” NOTE 8 Meghan C. Andrews has shown how during the Restoration earlier literature could be “repurposed” so as to satisfy contemporary needs and political enthusiasms (so that at this time Marlowe’s play was read “as an allegory of Oliver Cromwell’s fall.”) The version of the play in question was issued in 1663 by the Royalist printer W. Gilbertson. Gilbertson also put out a modernized translation of Ignoramus in 1662, and on p. 48 Andrews wrote “Lastly, critics have long recognized Ignoramus as an implicitly Cavalier play, satirizing common-law lawyers whom Royalists often associated with Puritans.” If she meant only to indicate the 1662 translation, I have no quarrel with her. But this sentence is so unfortunately worded that it is liable to be misinterpreted as referring to Ruggle’s original play. This would be highly objectionable, since there is not a trace of the Puritan in the delineation of his title character any more than there is anything in Marlowe’s Faust to make one think of opponents of his brand of Anglicanism. If James liked the play, it was not because it in any way agreed with his views on religion.
NOTES
NOTE A The text of this letter is printed by Alan H. Nelson, Cambridge (Records of Early English Drama series, Toronto, 1989) I.530f. This notion has most recently resurfaced in Cressida Ryan’s “An Ignoramus about Latin: the importance of Latin literatures to George Ruggle’s Ignoramus,” a paper read at the 2007 meeting of the Cambridge Neo-Latin Society and newly posted on the Academia website.
NOTE 2 This suggestion was very sensibly rejected by G. C. Moore Smith in his edition of Club Law (Cambridge, 1907) p. lvi.
NOTE 3 The letter is reproduced by Nelson, ib. I.542.
NOTE 4 In view of this fact, it is difficult to see why Ferdinando Parkhurst entitled his Restoration adaptation Ignoramus, the Academical Lawyer. In a 1970 Harvard dissertation presenting a critical edition of Parkhurst’s play, subsequently reprinted as vol. 30 of the The Renaissance Imagination series (Oxford - New York, 1987), E. F. H. Tucker does not seem to offer any help in understanding this. On the other hand, Tucker had the considerable merit of seemingly being one of the very few modern scholars to appreciate the value of Van Gundy’s earlier dissertation (see note 6).
For the exorcism scene in Ignoramus see the interesting article “Exorcism and the Interstices of Language: Ruggle’s Ignoramus and the Demonization of Renaissance English Neo-Latin,” in Rhoda Schnur (ed.), Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Cantabrigiensis: Proceedings of the Eleventh International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies (Tempe, Arizona, 2003) pp. 303 - 310.
NOTE 5 Particularly since the books in question were probably of highly questionable utility. It is far easier to understand the contents of legal education in Germany because in that country the writing of dissertations was obligatory, and hundreds or more likely thousands of these survive. These give us great insight into Renaissance legal education in Germany, and presumably that in England operated along similar lines. The vast majority of them deal with subjects of Roman law, as if students were required to read the textbooks of medieval legalists of the Bartolus de Saxoferrato / Baldus de Ubaldis variety and their offspring. A modern observer cannot help wondering about the practical value of proficiency with the Corpus Iuris Civilis and the Pandects for a German lawyer pleading a case in his own national court. Presumably the same question could be asked about England, since the common law has Germanic rather than Roman roots.
In the same way, an excessive devotion to Hippocrates and Galen probably did much to impede the advance of English academic medicine. Edward Forsett’s 1581 Cambridge comedy Pedantius reveals how sorely at least some students chafed under a steady diet of Aristotle. And of what value was intimate familiarity with, say, the theological opinions of St. Augustine or the sermons of St. John Chrysostom for providing a parish with spiritual guidance and comfort? Regarding another branch of learning, we get a great breath of fresh air in the exclamation uttered by Christopher Wren in the 1657 inaugural address he delivered when installed as Oxford’s Professor of Astronomy, Et iam primum philosophiae, Graecorum tyrannide oppressae, restituta libertas illuxit [“Now restored liberty has dawned for philosophy, freed from the tyranny of the Greeks.“]
NOTE 6 James Loomis Van Gundy, “Ignoramus“ Comoedia coram Regia Maiestate Jacobi regis Angliae: An Examination of its Sources and Literary Influence with Special Reference to its Relation to Butler’s Hudibras (diss. Jena, 1906), which can be read here.
NOTE 7 This information is taken from the O. D. N. B. article on Stephens, written by A. F. Pollard and revised by Lisa Hopkins.
NOTE 8 Marlowe Studies for 2011 (ed. M. L. Stapleton, West Lafayette, Indiana) pp. 41 - 58.