Page images
PDF
EPUB

He talks much of the Kingdome of Cathaya,

Of one great Caan, and goodman Prester Iohn,

(What e're they be) and sayes that Caan's a Clowne
Unto the Iohn he speaks of. And that Iohn
Dwels up almost at Paradice: But sure his mind
Is in a wildernesse : For there he sayes

Are Geese that have two heads a peece, and Hens
That beare more wooll upon their backs than sheep.

And men with heads like hounds.

(Antipodes 1. 3, p. 240)

With this passage compare the following three from Mandeville: Under the firmament is not so great a lord, ne so mighty, ne so rich as is the great Chan; not Prester John, that is Emperor of the high Ind, ne the Soldan of Babylon, ne the Emperor of Persia. All these be not in comparison to the great Chan, neither of might, ne of noblesse, ne of royality, ne of riches; for in all these he passeth all earthly princes.' (Chap. 25, p. 161)

'In that country be white hens without feathers, but they bear white wool as sheep do here.'

(Chap. 22, p. 136)

And all the men and women of the isle have hound's heads, and they be clept Cynocephales.'

Peregrine.

Chap. 21, p. 130)

And seen the trees of the Sunne and Moone, that speake. And told King Alexander of his death,

Ha you bin there Sir, ha' you seene those trees? Doctor. And talked with hem, and tasted of their fruit. Peregrine. Read here againe then it is written here, That you may live foure or five hundred yeere.

(Antipodes, 1. 6, p. 248-9)

Compare: 'But it was told us of them of the country, that within those deserts were the trees of the Sun and of the Moon, that spoke to King Alexander, and warned him of his death. And men say that the folk who keep those trees, and eat of the fruit and of the balm that groweth

there, live well four hundred year or five hundred year by virtue of the fruit and of the balm.'

Are they not such

(Chap. 32. p. 196)

As Mandevile writes of without heads or necks,
Having their eyes plac'd on their shoulders, and
Their mouths amidst their breasts ?

Compare

(Antipodes, 1. 6, p. 250)

And in another isle toward the south dwell folk of foul stature and of cursed kind that have no heads. And their eyen be in their shoulders.'1

Mandivell writes

(Chap. 22, p, 133)

Of peopel near the Antipodes, called Gadlibriens :
Where on the wedding-night the husband hires
Another man to couple with his bride,

To clear the dangerous passage of a Maidenhead.

She may be of that Serpentine generation

That stings oft times to death (as Mandevile writes). (4. 10. p. 315)

The source of this is the following passage in Mandeville. (Chap. 31, p. 188):

'Another isle is there, full fair and good and great, and full of people, where the custom is such, that the first night that they be married, they make another man to lie by their wives for to have their maidenhead: and therefore they take great hire and great thank. And there be certain men in every town that serve of none other thing; and they clepe them Cadeberiz, that is to say the fools of wanhope. For they of the country hold it so great a thing and so perilous for to have the maidenhead of a woman, that them seemeth that they that have first the maidenhead putteth him in adventure of his life. And if the husband find his wife maiden that other next night after that she should have been lain by of the man that is assigned therefore, peradventure 1 Cf. also Othello 1. 3. 144.

Anthropaphagi and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.

for drunkeness or for some other cause, the husband shall plain upon him that he hath not done his devoir, in such cruel wise as though the officers would have slain him. But after the first night that they be lain by, they keep them so straitly that they be not so hardy to speak with no man. And I asked them the cause why that they held such a custom : and they said me, that of old time men had been dead for deflowering of maidens, that had serpents in their bodies that stung men upon their yards, that they died anon: and therefore they held that custom, to make other men ordained therefore to lie by their wives, for dread of death, and to assay the passage of another [rather] than for to put them in that adventure.'

Before leaving this matter of the relation of Mandeville to Brome, I must mention the occurrence in Schelling's list1 of a play called Sir John Maundeville, which is alluded to by Henslowe 2 in 1592. As this is all that is known of the play, it is idle to conjecture whether there was any relation between it and the Antipodes.

Another important element on which the play depends, more a matter of structure than of subject-matter, is the dramatic device of presenting a play within a play. There are many parallel cases of this in Elizabethan drama, from the Spanish Tragedy down. The device must have been very familiar to Brome, for I have run across seven or eight cases of its use in the plays I am familiar with. We may add to these the large number of plays that contain elaborate masques.

In Middleton's Mayor of Queenborough (c. 1596) 5. 1, a company of strolling players come in and give a scene of horse-play as an interlude for the amusement of the mayor, but the scene is purely outside the main action of the piece. A more elaborate one is presented by a body of masquers in Chapman's Gentleman Usher (c. 1601) 2. 1, but here again we have the disconnected interest of an interlude in the

1 Op. cit., 2. 587. 2 Henslowe's Diary, ed. Greg, p. 13. 3 Dr. H. Schwab has briefly treated a few such plays in Das Schauspiel im Schauspiel (1896).

[ocr errors]

plot. The play in the fifth act of Midsummer Night's Dream bears the same relation to the main plot. The only example in Jonson of this sort of thing is the long masque of five motions' that concludes the Tale of a Tub (? 1601). But this masque is far from being connected with the main plot, which it merely summarizes, and is added after the conclusion of the real action of the play. In Shirley's Traitor (1631) 3. 2, there is a short play, which, though it does not form an integral part of the plot, fits into it very well, and contributes to the atmosphere. Occurring in the middle of the play, it partly reviews the antecedent action, like the Mouse-Trap in Hamlet, and partly foreshadows the revenge to come.

All of these pieces, however, have nothing in common with the Antipodes except the idea of a play within a play. But there are a half dozen of the older plays which use this device as an important integral part of the whole plot. The Spanish Tragedy (1586) 4. 3, and Hamlet (1602) 3. 2, are of course the most obvious examples, which must have influenced considerably all later attempts at this sort of thing in drama. Middleton and Rowley's Spanish Gipsy (1623) 4. 3 uses the play within a play in much the same marner, so that through the influence of the scene on the spectator for whom it is devised the resolution of one of the interests of the plot is brought about. The two first-mentioned plays of this type were, of course, well known to Brome, and Faust's proof that the Spanish Gipsy is the main source of the Jovial Crew 1 shows that this other case of an included play was known as well.

Though these examples may be considered as a sort of precedent for Brome, there are three more uses of the same dramatic idea that are close enough parallels to be looked upon almost as direct suggestions, if not actual sources. In structure, Randolph's Muses' Looking-Glass (1634) is so much like the Antipodes that we may say that together they form a special type, of which, as far as I know, there are no other examples in the period. Both consist for the 1 Faust, op. cit., p. 85.

greater part of a series of disconnected scenes, which form a loose kind of play within a rather slight framework. The Taming of the Shrew is hardly of the same type, because the framework is connected only mechanically with the included play, which is a complete drama in itself. The resemblance of the Antipodes and the Muses' Looking-Glass ceases at the similarity of structure. Randolph's comedy is more serious in its purpose, didactic in its point of view, and less interesting in theme and treatment than the clever farce of Brome, with fun for its only aim.

Another play of the same general type as we have been discussing, but quite different in structure from the two last mentioned, is the one in Massinger's Roman Actor (1626) 2. 1. Here the Emperor Domitianus attempts the cure of the rich miser Philargus by having the players give a short play in which a miser is shown his own folly, and cured. Old Philargus takes the representation very seriously, and loses himself in interest, just as Peregrine and Martha do in the Antipodes, but, unlike them, he is not cured by the emperor's device. In the same play further on (3.2), the Empress Domitia, in witnessing another little piece, forgets that Paris, the Roman actor, is acting, and betrays her love and anxiety for him, just as Diana and the more naïve Martha openly express their admiration for the characters on the antipodean stage. Finally, in 4. 2, the masque in the Roman Actor becomes a reality, a tragic one however, just as the comic antipodean play merges, toward the end, into the main plot or framework of Brome's piece. The comparison of the two plays adds another possible reminiscence of Massinger in Brome to that of the appearance of the genius in both the Virgin Martyr (1620) and the Queens' Exchange (1631), noted by Ward.1

Finally, there is one more close parallel of a play, or rather a masque, within a play which is intended to operate as a cure on one of the characters in the main plot. In Ford's Lover's Melancholy (1628) 3. 3, the physician Corax presents a strange masque, representing six different kinds of melancholy, before the Prince Palador, in order to make him realize how foolish 1 Op. cit., 3. 129, note 4.

« PreviousContinue »