A Look at Thomas Sackville's and Thomas Norton's, Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex (1562) with Reflections on Sir Philip Sidney's Apology for Poetry and postmodern critical theory
Robert Barrie
9-95

Gorboduc was written for the 1561-62 Christmas festivities at the Inner Temple, which was one of the Inns of Court providing law training following (usually) after some education at one of the universities. These institutions were supported by the Court, and were a gathering place for ambitious and spirited young men anxious for some public career.

Attitude toward text revealed in printer's preface. [Please re-read that preface.] Note that it reflects the privileged attitude of the authors which is further reflected in the invectives against the "common people" in Act 5. The message is one of control, and this printed edition of the play goes to extra pains to be sure the work is not "misinterpreted." Note, for example, that each act begins with the description of a dumbshow (which is then interpreted) and ends with a Chorus which also serves to explain the action at the same time that it controls meaning by closing off all debate. [Though it is interesting that no Chorus appears at the end of the play and that the play's ending in some respects appears quite open.]

The play is based on classical models. Note thus: (1) carefully structured orations, one purpose of which (so humanist defenders of drama would later argue) was to train the students (especially the student actors) themselves in rhetorical speech; (2) use of messengers to explain action (especially bloody action); (3) use of the Chorus; and (4) the division into five acts (each containing two scenes). [Even the structure suggests rigid control.]

The editors' intro suggests that Sir Philip Sidney did not like Gorbouc. In fact he did, but he disapproved of its violation of the unity of time. Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesie is probably the best known example of the neoclassical (humanist) position regarding literature. Literature and drama were valuable to the extent that they taught virtue.
Perchance it is the Comick, whom naughtie Play-makers and Stage-keepers, have justly made odious. To the argument of abuse, I will after answer, onely thus much now is to be said, that the Comedy is an imitatio of the comon errors of our life, which he representeth in the most ridiculous & scornefull sort that may be : so as it is impossible, that any beholder can be content to be such a one. . . . So that the right use of Comaedie, will I thinke, by no bodie be blamed ; and much lesse of the high and excellent Tragedie, that openeth the greatest woundes, and sheweth forth the Ulcers that are covered with Tissue, That maketh Kings feare to be Tyrants, and Tyrants manifest their tyrannicall humours. . . . (23)

Sidney is quick, however, to chastise the excesses of the common stage:
Our Tragedies and Commedies, not without cause cryed out against, observing rules neither of honest civilitie, nor skilfull Poetrie. Excepting Gorbuduc . . . which notwithstanding as it is full of stately speeches, and well-sounding phrases, clyming to the height of Seneca his style, and as full of notable morallitie, which it doth most delightfully teach, and so obtain the very end of Poesie. Yet in truth, it is verie defectious in the circumstances, which grieves me . . . . (38)
Sidney finds violations of the classical unities particularly "defectious":
But besides these grosse absurdities, howe all their Playes bee neither right Tragedies, nor right Comedies, mingling Kinges and Clownes, not because the matter so carrieth it, but thrust in the Clowne by the head and shoulders, to play a part in majesticall matters, with neither decencie nor discretion. . . . I know the Auncients have one or two examples of Tragicomedies, as Plautus hath Amphitrio. But if we mark them well, wee shall finde that they never, or verie daintily, matche horn Pipes and Funeralls. (39-40)
The blank verse poetry of Gorboduc is important to note because the greatest drama of the Elizabethan and later Stuart periods were written in such verse, though the verse here is less supple than the best of what would come later. I can imagine, however, this play's "elite" audience smugly enjoying the avant-garde experience of poetry with no rhyme. Certainly they must have thought their drama superior to such popular tragedies as Cambyses with its common-style (ballad-like) fourteeners. It must have made the play seem somehow more intellectual. [This is perhaps a type of conceit (pride) many of us educated (literary) types fall into.] Imagine the audience's experience of the opening lines of Act 1 (1-6). Utterly conventional and somewhat confusing, but the authors must have thought it pretty good stuff.


One central message of the play is totally in line with official Tudor propaganda. That is, rebellion against a monarch is never justified and always brings chaos. This play is said to have been performed at Whitehall before Queen Elizabeth. Looked at in one way the play can be seen as a warning to her of the dangers of not ruling firmly and with justice. She is also warned of the dangers threatened by a lack of clear succession. The deaths of Ferrex and Porrex result in chaos and civil war because there is no longer any clear line of succession. Elizabeth did not have an heir, and her public (or part of it) wanted her to take care of that. Let's consider what was going on.

The Tudor Myth was history interpreted according to the needs of the Tudor monarchs.  [Interestingly, it can be shown that the orthodox twentieth century view of English history is very much based on the orthodox Tudor view of Tudor society.  In other words, our historians have largely bought the interpretation of the events of the fifteenth century that Henry VII's historians invented.]

The first major premise of the orthodox "Tillyardian" view is that 16th century Englishmen felt the need for a strong and unified government because the Wars of the Roses were still vivid in their memory and they felt insecure regarding the stability of the Tudor monarchy. [When you think about it, this sense of insecurity might be seen to undercut the notion that Elizabethan society was "utopian." To explore this further at this time, see Barrie's notes on The Tudor Myth.]
 
History is an interpretation of events which always occurs within a historical/cultural context. To suggest, therefore that the Tudor interpretation of fifteenth century English history (that God directly punished England for the usurpation of Richard II's crown and his eventual murder by bringing the chaos of civil wars culminating in the Wars of the Roses on England) was unusual in its self-interestedness is to miss the point. New historicism holds that every interpretation (either of history or of a text) always (without exception) occurs in a historical context. History is always written and disseminated by those in power, and the existence of some base of power in any given culture is a given. That power is sometimes understood as absolute, but new historicism tends to understand power as a dynamic, as a play of tensions. Tudor power was not absolute. Therefore the Tudor's needed the Tudor myth. It has been suggested that Shakespeare has been used to prop up existing but perhaps threatened structures of colonialist power in the early part of this century. Well, Shakespeare today is being used by others to topple that same power base. Formalist criticism tended to assume that literature was a special form of discourse unrelated to political ideology. Marxist, feminist, and new historicist criticism challenges that assumption. Given this, what is the importance of the author? Michel Foucault wrote a much cited essay entitled "What Is An Author" in which he explores that concept as itself a cultural construction. My own ambivalence regarding authorship of Elizabethan drama comes from different sources. I was trained as a formalist close reader of texts, in which tradition any reference to an author's intention got denigrated under the rubric of "intentional fallacy." Formalist criticism generally disallowed appeal to authorial intention. Postmodern criticism like Foucault's challenges our conventional understanding of what an author is. New historicist criticism insists on seeing an author not as a kind of godlike "maker," as Sidney insists, but as woman or man embedded in and circumscribed by her or his particular time and place. Thus the work is emphasized as a collaborative cultural product as opposed to a unique and original work from the mind of an individual author/priest/maker.

Coming back to the English renaissance and the circumstances of the Tudors. The two books which I have recently read on the period of the Wars of the Roses both argue that the ordinary Englishman was not much affected by its battles.  The battles were not long sieges but a spread out series of rather brief pitched battles which did not much affect the common man.  In point of fact, according to John Gillingham, the fifteenth century was a century of peace and prosperity for most people in England.  Therefore, maybe men and women in the sixteenth century were not at all shaken by their common memory of the Wars of the Roses.  Maybe they did not cling tenaciously and of one accord to the Tudor doctrines of the providential status quo.  Maybe that is why some Tudor historians and the play of Gorboduc lay such stress on a national ideology.
     
Gorboduc seems to be reminding its audience that the civil wars of the fifteenth century (The Wars of the Roses) produced horrible chaos [which they perhaps did not] and reassuring the Queen (also in the audience) that those lessons have not been forgotten. The play does not refer (except obliquely) to those most immediate wars, however, but to Britain's more ancient history. See Eubulus' speech 1.2.269-281. See also the explanation to the dumbshow of Act 5. The impression being created in Gorboduc is that the period following the reign of King Gorboduc was similar to the period of the Wars of the Roses. And it is the Tudor interpretation of those wars that constitutes the Tudor myth.

Gorboduc also insists that (1) order exists naturally in nature (1.2.205-221). (2) That God (and only God) is responsible for revenging injustice: 1.1.50-67; 4.2.273ff (making explicit that this play is considered a "mirror" in which we may see the results of crime and so avoid the crime); 5.2.276ff (last lines of the play). (3) That under no circumstances is rebellion on the part of the common people justified: 5.1.17-29, 41-51. Why is there such rabid scorn for the masses in this play? See 5.1.58-73; 5.2.1ff, 48ff. Use of horses. (Also 5.1.107-110). [Yet note how open the end of the play actually is].

So what? I would argue that Gorboduc and its elite audience existed in a dialogic relationship to Mankind and Cambises and their audiences. The dialogic model, the idea for which I take from Mikhail Bakhtin, stands in contrast to the (perhaps Darwinian) model of a developing tradition culminating in Shakespeare. I am interested in Gorboduc, then, as evidence of a particular sort of cultural dynamic in the sixteenth century.

Sir Philip Sidney's Apology for Poetry (1595) illustrates the critical theory of the socially elite humanists. To Sidney an author is a priest or seer: "Among the Romans a poet was called Vates, which is as much as a diviner, forseer, or prophet. . . . (112). Among "the Greeks," according to Sidney, a poet was "a maker" (113). This "maker" breathes forth a divine truth unrestricted by any material (cultural) conditions: "Neither let it be deemed too saucy a comparison to balance the highest point of man's wit with the efficacy of Nature; but rather give right honour to the heavenly Maker of that maker, who, having made man to His own likeness, set him beyond and over all the works of that second nature: which in nothing he showeth so much as in Poetry, when with the force of a divine breath he bringeth things forth far surpassing her doings. . . ." (114).

Having made this high claim for the poet/maker, however, Sidney backs up. Poetry "is an art of imitation" (this sounds Aristotelian) with the end of teaching and delighting (114). The best poetry imitates the truth of God (this sounds platonic). Such poets "do imitate to teach and delight, and to imitate borrow nothing of what is, hath been, or shall be; but range, only reined with learned discretion, into the divine consideration of what may be, and should be. These be they that, as the first and most noble sort may justly be termed Vates . . . for these indeed do merely make to imitate, and imitate both to delight and teach, and delight to move men to take that goodness in hand, which without delight they would fly as from a stranger, and teach, to make them know that goodness whereunto they are moved" (115). Thus the end of learning is ideal perfection which leads to virtuous action (116-117).

Sidney is arguing that the poet imitates nature, i.e., the actual manners and habits of men, but in such a way that Truth (a humanistic, neo-platonic construction understood as compatible with Christianity) is supported. We can see from the examples he chooses, such as Gorboduc (140) that this Truth is related to a particular social ideology. If I were to put it in stronger language, I might say that Sidney's Truth is a mystification of the values and interests of his own class of nobility. But this is a mystification which we see challenged in the margins and liberties of London by the Vice and his confederates on the stage and in the audience. [See Hamlet 2.2.417ff and 3.2.1ff.]



Issues of privilege, control, history, literature, interpretation:

Gorboduc is an instrument of control (a piece of state propaganda designed to influence political thought ). It would be a mistake to take it as more than a part of the socio-political dialogue of the English renaissance, but it presents the Tudor Myth as God's Truth.

Inn of Court play, later performed at court.

1st issue the printer takes up is that the play was misappropriated and changed. The image of an abused maiden is employed to suggest that the author's original document possessed an authorized purity or authority. Such an assumption resonates with Sidney's assertion in the Defense of Poesy that the author is a kind of Maker or lesser god who in copying (presenting) the truth of nature (holding, as it were, a mirror up to nature) presents virtue or truth. Behind this lies the assumption that there is one truth handed down by one God. The signs of this truth are embedded in Nature like a text. Hence the popular renaissance conception of the Book of Nature. God of course is the author of this book, and human authors copy that book. Thus an author is given a priestlike status, and such unauthorized changes of the author's text as the printer alludes to in his preface ("The Printer to the Reader") are seen as a kind of rape/mutilation of truth.


The Dumbshows and their explanations are attempts to control the meaning of the text. [These explanations could not easily have been incorporated into a performance.]

The Chorus at the end of each act (except the last) are similar attempts to control meaning.

Gorboduc asserts that the natural order (God's order) is the order of the current socio-political order and that any attempt to change that order is a violation of God's will, which God will punish.

The Tudor Myth is presented in the above context of the natural order. It is thus a part of the one truth. What I think we must see is that it was in fact a contrived narrative designed to maintain the existing socio-political hierarchy. That narrative asserts the existence of a rigidly hierarchical society which embraced monolithically (even utopically) that official truth.

Modern historians have often tended to look back on this period of English history as "a lost golden age of peace, prosperity and social harmony" (Holderness). Shakespeare, as the preminent voice of that official truth, is therefore made the cornerstone of the new educational program, in order to bring back (or hold onto) that conservative, hierarchic society. Thus our education (yours and mine) was and is no more a disinterested presentation of facts woven into a story than was the educational program of the Tudors. That is why we look back now to find evidence in the renaissance of resistence to the official truth because in foregrounding that resistance we also challenge official truths of our own culture. Study and interpretation of the past is not the study of old stuff that no longer matters. Certainly it was not for the Tudors, and it is no more so for us. When we interpret (or reinterpret) the past we are entering the dialogue of contestation by which the myth of our own culture is constantly being renegotiated. What I am asserting, then, is that the study of literature is not the study of a-political texts containing universal truths (lofty thoughts) as Sidney and much of the modern humanistic tradition claim.