Abstract
This chapter considers two manuscripts of a seventeenth-century play based on the ‘Ghismonda’ tale from Boccaccio’s Decameron. Although there is no evidence the play ever saw print, I argue that the manuscripts do show clear indications of a life in performance and revisions aimed at achieving such a life. The plays are untitled in manuscript, though I have called them Glausamond and Ghismonda to differentiate the two substantially different versions of the same play. The Glausamond manuscript can be found in the Newdigate family papers at the Warwickshire County Record Office and the Ghismonda manuscript is part of the miscellany held at Arbury Hall (A414) that includes The Humorous Magistrate, described by Mary Polito in the preface to this volume. These manuscripts have been attributed to John Newdigate III (1600–1642), whose family seat was Arbury Hall and whose name has in recent years been linked with an entire oeuvre of amateur dramatic works, including The Humorous Magistrate.1 This chapter considers the ‘Ghismonda’ play manuscripts as the work of John Newdigate III and argues that the revisions evident between the manuscripts suggest specific performance conditions and reveal something of the way amateur dramatic texts were revised and circulated in literary circles.
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Notes
For details of Newdigate’s life and literary pursuits, see Vivienne Larminie, Wealth, Kinship and Culture (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1995).
For ascription of the plays to Newdigate, see Trevor Howard-Hill, ‘Another Warwickshire Playwright: John Newdigate of Arbury’, Renaissance Papers (1988): 51–62.
Margaret Jane Kidnie, ‘Near Neighbours: Another Early Seventeenth-Century Manuscript of The Humorous Magistrate’, English Manuscript Studies 13 (2007): 187–211.
Kirsten Inglis and Boyda Johnstone, ‘“The Pen lookes to be canoniz’d”: John Newdigate III, Author and Scribe’, Early Theatre 14.2 (2011): 27–61. Plays in Arbury Hall MS A414 associated with Newdigate include: The Twice Chang’d Friar, Ghismonda and Guiscardo, The Emperor’s Favourite and The Humorous Magistrate. The University of Calgary holds a second, later, manuscript of THM (MsC 132.27).
Anon, ‘The Twice chang’d friar: A comedie: (MS Temp. Charles I)’, The Gentleman’s Magazine (1906): 290.
Margaret Jane Kidnie, ‘“Suit the Action to the Word”: An Early Seventeenth-Century Allusion to Hamlet in Performance’, Theatre Notebook (1995): 62–5.
Michael Dobson, Shakespeare and Amateur Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) 2–11.
Dobson, Amateur Performance, 22. For issues of s ite-specific performance, see the companion to this volume, Susan Bennett and Mary Polito (eds), Performing Environments: Site Specificity in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
Grace Ioppolo, Dramatists and their Manuscripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and Heywood (London: Routledge, 2006) 7.
W. W. Greg, The Shakespeare First Folio (Oxford: Clarendon, 1955) 106.
Purkis considers Newdigate’s revisions to THM and argues for a ‘textual malleability’ in early modern manuscripts that likewise cannot be accounted for by Greg’s theory (119). See also Paul Werstine, who challenges Greg’s definition of ‘foul papers’ based partly on the evidence of the three Ghismonda plays in ‘Plays in Manuscript’, A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) 481–97.
See Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993).
Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). Love’s notion of scribal communities is particularly apt in discussing Newdigate’s manuscripts. Kidnie, Larminie, Polito, and Julie Sanders have all considered the literate and literary Midlands community within which Newdigate lived and wrote; ‘Sanders Geographies of Performance in the Early Modern Midlands’, Performing Environments, 119–37.
Arthur F. Marotti and Michael D. Bristol, ‘Introduction’, Print, Manuscript & Performance, ed. Marotti and Bristol (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2000) 6.
Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, vol. 1, ed. Vittore Branca (Torino: Einaudi, 1992). King Tancredi, overjoyed to have his widowed daughter with him again, neglects his paternal duty to find her a new husband. Ghismonda takes Guiscardo, an honourable and trusted servant of the court, as her lover. Tancredi observes them in bed together and orders Guiscardo killed and his heart brought to Ghismonda in a golden cup. The grieving princess adds her tears and poison to the cup and drinks; after Ghismonda’s suicide Tancredi repents his harsh punishment of Guiscardo, recognizes the strength of the lovers’ passion, and decrees they be buried together in one grave.
John R. Elliott, Jr., ‘Plays, Players, and Playwrights in Renaissance Oxford’, in John A. Alford (ed.), From Page to Performance: Essays in Early English Drama (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1995) 179–94 (181).
Alan H. Nelson, ‘The Universities and the Inns of Court’, The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre, ed. Richard Dutton (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009) 280–91 (281).
Jonathan Walker, ‘Introduction: Learning to Play’, in Jonathan Walker and Paul D. Streufert (eds), Early Modern Academic Drama (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008) 1–18 (2).
Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) 93.
Douglas Bruster and Robert Weimann, Prologues to Shakespeare’s Theatre (New York: Routledge, 2004) 35.
Mike Pearson, Site-Specific Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) 55, 16–17.
Gordon Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature (London: Athalone, 1994) 658.
See, among many others, Dobson, Amateur Performance, esp. ch. 1; Alison Findlay, Playing Spaces in Early Women’s Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Julie Sanders, The Cultural Geography of Early Modern Drama, 1620–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Marta Straznicky, Privacy, Playreading, and Women’s Closet Drama, 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Suzanne Westfall, ‘“He Who Pays the Piper Calls the Tune”: Household Entertainments’, Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre, ed. Richard Dutton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) 263–79. The Records of Early English Drama (REED) record many and varied traces of performance in the domestic spaces of early modern England.
Gerald K. Morton, ‘Mildmay Fane’s Northamptonshire Theatre’, Northamptonshire: Past and Present (1988–89): 397–408 (397).
Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 45.
James Fitzmaurice, ‘Shakespeare, Cavendish, and Reading Aloud in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Katherine Romack and James Fitzmaurice (eds), Cavendish and Shakespeare, Interconnections (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) 32.
Hero Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers 1650–1689 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004) 130–3.
Considering vocalized reading and communal reading as performance also blurs the boundary between drama and closet drama; the possibility that gatherings of friends or family could have read ‘closet drama’ aloud upsets the defining categories of ‘public’ and ‘private’ that scholars use to compartmentalize these texts. On redefining closet drama, see Findlay, Playing Spaces; Karen Raber, Dramatic Difference: Gender, Class, and Genre in the Early Modern Closet Drama (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2001); and Straznicky, Women’s Closet Drama.
On the relationship between hospitality and drama, see also Martin Butler, The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Sanders, Cultural Geography.
On the paratexts of Newdigate’s plays, see Amy Scott, ‘The Prologues and Epilogues of the Arbury Plays’, Early Theatre 14.2 (2011): 227–44. I had not seen Scott’s work at the time of writing this chapter, and we make some parallel claims regarding the paratextual materials and their indications of performance settings.
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Inglis, K. (2014). Playing Ghismonda for ‘fooles’ and ‘noble freinds’: Revising for Performance Between Glausamond and Ghismonda . In: Jenkins, J., Sanders, J. (eds) Editing, Performance, Texts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137320117_8
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