Titus et Gesippus
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dramatic event occurred in St. Paul's. As the impoverished Foxe, now about thirty years old, sat there, "'spent vvith long fasting, his countenance thinne, and eyes hollovy, after the gastfull manner of dying men; every one shunning a spectacle of so much horror," suddenly a stranger thrust money into his hand and assured him that within a few days his lot would change for the better. It did.
Within three days, Foxe was summoned to live in the home of Mary Fitzroy, Duchess of Richmond, where he found a sympathetic environment and friends such as John Bale. He became the tutor to the three eldest children of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who had been executed in 1547, and after a time moved to Reigate
Castle with them. Meanwhile, Henry VIII had died, and the crowning of Edward VI brought new hope for religious dissenters like Foxe. In 1550, Foxe was ordained a deacon by Nicholas Ridley,
Bishop of London. But by this time political rivalries had dimmed the hopes of all of Edward's subjects, including Foxe. When Queen
Mary ascended the throne in 1553, she was welcomed by most Englishmen irrespective of her Catholicism, but the new realm very soon affected Foxe adversely. Among the political prisoners released immediately were Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester and scourge of reformers, who was made lord chancellor, and the Duke of Norfolk, grandfather of the Howard children who were Foxe's charges. By September, Foxe had lost his position; by the spring
(probably) of 1554 he had joined the Marian exiles on the Continent.
Titus et Gesippus When Foxe made the decision in 1545 which ultimately led him along this path, and when he was writing those letters of application, he attempted to demonstrate his qualifications for a teaching position by sending to his correspondents samples of his writing. This was a common practice. For instance, Nicholas Grimald in 1547, applying for a position at Christ Church, Oxford, sent a copy of his
Archipropheta to Richard Cox, the dean of the College.2° Foxe was wont to send such gifts on other occasions as well, if we may judge
? F. S. Boas, University Drama in the Tudor Age (Oxford, 1914), p. 34.
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from his surviving letters, and he once or twice cited Seneca's counsel that it is less important for a gift to be good than for it to be appropriate to its recipient.* To Cheke he sent something theological, to Benetus he promised to send (apparently) an inspirational tract and a comedy, and to Hedley and Hensey he sent Titus et
Gesippus. Why he thought it an appropriate gift for them I do not know, for I have not identified them beyond the meager information which Foxe gives about them: Hensey, the intended dedicatee, is at Exeter; Hedley, a recent grandfather, knows about the Magdalen statutes.??
In any case, Foxe's references to the play permit us to date it with some precision. To Hedley he wrote, "I took this comedy of Titus and Gesippus into hand and completed it this autumn; indeed, I devoted scarcely more than two months to it. But I still have it under hand and will give it a second polishing. God willing,
I intend to give it to Dr. Hensey."?? And to Hensey he sent "a little comic gift, such as it is, of a poem. I wrote the comedy this autumn, and I'll call it back now for a second polishing during this Lent.
God willing, I mean it to be dedicated to you."?* Clearly, then, Foxe wrote the play in the autumn of 1544 and intended to revise it before April of 1545 (Easter fell on April 5 that year).
The letters quoted are drafts which Foxe kept and took away from Oxford with him. They passed to his heirs and eventually came into the possession of John Strype, the church historian, who planned to write a life of Foxe.?? The manuscript of Titus et Gesippus, preserved in the same volume, has the same provenance. It too is a 21 Lansdowne MS. 388, ff. 81v, 82v.
?? Josiah Pratt (VIII, 599) mentioned a Richard Hedley who in 1556 was accused in St. Peter's parish of being "'a seller of heretical books." Whether this might be Foxe's Hedley I have not determined.
23 Lansdowne MS. 388, f. 120: ""Comoediam illam de Tito et Gesippo hoc autumno in manus coepimus et perfecimus. Huic vix plus profecto duobus mensibus dedimus. Verum adhuc sub manum secundam limam subituram premimus eamque Doctori Henseo, si Deus volet, destinauimus."
24 Lansdowne MS. 388, f. 8ov: ''.
.. ne omnino vacuus literarum ad te veniret, oblata ista occasiuncula perfunctorie saltem te salutare ac comicum hoc interim qualecunque carminis donusculum missitare libuit. Comoediam autumno hoc a nobis conscriptam, ad secundam nunc limam hac quadragesima reuocabimus, tibique, Deo annuente, destinabimus."'
25 See D. N. B., s.v. "'Foxe."
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draft, and it is heavily revised. Conceivably there were earlier drafts, for some pages are relatively clean; but the surviving text must be a very early draft, perhaps the very first, and I cannot believe that it represents the play as Foxe sent it to Dr. Hensey.
For one thing, the revisions seem like the tinkerings of an author in the process of composing: very few of them materially alter the substance, and most of them seem like phraseological fussing. More significantly, though the play is complete, it is not really finished.
Sometimes Foxe has rewritten a clause without troubling to integrate the new version into the sentence; and Foxe's prosody, deficient even in the best of circumstances, in this play often defies analysis. As it stands, then, it would scarcely be a persuasive demonstration of Foxe's competence to teach Latin. Probably the best evidence of the earliness of this draft, however, is in the names of the characters. There is at times profound confusion in those names:
Titus appears once or twice where we expect Gesippus; Titus is once called Pamphilus; Gesippus' mother is called Sostrata in one scene and Sophrona in the scene immediately following; and Stylpho and Crito are confused in Act III.?5 If indeed Foxe carried out his intention to revise the play, he presumably would have eliminated these flaws.
If the confusions of names argue against the surviving version's being the gift that Foxe sent, they are also, a fortiori, strong evidence that the surviving version was not acted. As likely as not, the play was first written as an academic exercise and was pulled out for refurbishing only when Foxe needed gifts in some numbers for his correspondents. On the other hand, such dramatic exercises were probably often (or even usually) performed. In his mind's eye, at least, Foxe evidently saw the play on the Magdalen boards, for he ended it with Phormio addressing the audience in a teasing fashion and regretting the insufficiency of the refreshments (epulae) to supply everyone: surviving records indicate that such epulae were standard after programs at Magdalen.? I should not be surprised to learn that a revised version of Titus et Gesippus was acted at Magdalen
26 See the Textual Notes.
27 R. E. Alton, ed., ""The Academic Drama in Oxford: Extracts from the Records of Four Colleges," Collections V, Malone Society Reprints (Oxford, 1959
[1960]), entries for 1551-52, 1552-53, 1553-54.
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sometime in 1545. Although early records of dramatic productions there have been lost, F. S. Boas has stated that Magdalen was '"'one of the greatest centres of academic acting."
Whether acted or not, the writing of Titus et Gesippus at Oxford in 1544-1545 is noteworthy, for this is a romantic comedy with important Terentian additions. It is thus an epitome of English Renaissance comedy, but quite an early specimen. The immediate source was English, but the play is only one step removed from the wellspring of all the sixteenth-century versions of the Titus-Gesippus story, the eighth tale of the tenth day of Boccaccio's Decamerone. We may be forced, then, to modify Boas' statement that the "first
University play with a plot of undoubted Italian origin" was Hymenaeus in 1579.79 Mary A. Scott counted thirty-three Elizabethan plays with Boccaccian plots,?? but those plays were written considerably later than Titus et Gesippus; as F. P. Wilson wrote, England did not become Italianate until Elizabeth's reign was well under way,"?! but Titus et Gesippus was written while Henry VIII sat on the throne. To be sure, we now have considerable evidence of romantic plays earlier than had once been suspected. A version of Gl' Ingannati, for instance, was performed at Cambridge in 1546-7 (F. P.
Wilson called that *astonishingly early"??); long ago, John Bale reported a play by Ralph Radcliffe on the friendship of Titus and Gesippus written between 1547 and 1553,?? and L. J. Mills speculated on even earlier dramatic versions of the story.?* Besides, our traditional distinction between classical and romantic 1s an oversimplification. Terence's plays are not without romantic interest, however the term be defined; and when the very type of classical stoicism,
Cato the younger, reputedly gave up his wife Marcia so that his friend Hortensius might marry her, his act was not so remote in spirit from that of Gesippus in our play. Elyot told the TitusGesippus story in the same section of The Governor in which he told
28 Boas, p. 385.
29 Ibid., pp. 134-135.
30 Elizabethan Translations from the Italian (Boston, 1916), p. 93.
31 The English Drama 1485-1585, ed. G. K. Hunter (Oxford, 1969), p. 113.
Ef DT MEI IND 33 See below, n. 46.
34 See below, p. 13. Cf. C. R. Baskervill, Some Evidence for Early Romantic . Plays in England," MP, XIV (1916), 229-251, 467-512.
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the stories of such "'classical'' friends as Orestes and Pylades, and Damon and Pythias, and within a few years after Foxe's play was written the Boccaccian pair was included without apology in numerous formulaic lists of prototypical friends.?? Still, these facts merely qualify, they do not destroy, the correctness of our belief that romantic comedy in England is largely to be associated with the period after 1560. Perhaps we should not feel astonishment, but we are entitled to be surprised, that in 1544 Oxford produced a play merging Boccaccian and Terentian matter. Perhaps, too, we shall have to modify Boas' conclusion that Cambridge was more interested in comedy than Oxford was: "In comedy," he said, ""Tudor Oxford has left nothing of first-rate interest." When Oxford comedy was represented by the likes of Nicholas Grimald's Archipropheta and Christus Redivivus—and when the Oxonian John Foxe's only known dramatic work was another comoedia sacra, Christus Triumphans—that was perhaps a fair conclusion. But I suspect that our conclusions have been based upon far less than a representative sample of what was actually produced, at Oxford and elsewhere, and that any general conclusion is therefore suspect.
Perhaps as surprising as anything else about this romantic comedy is that it was written by John Foxe the martyrologist. Although very few people today have read the entire Book of Martyrs, everyone recognizes it as a work which can be called comic only in some specialized sense, if at all, and Foxe is so completely identified with that work that his name 1s seldom mentioned without the distinctive title '*martyrologist." Few other men are so thoroughly identified with a genre in which they wrote.
None of Foxe's previously known works could be called imaginative literature; for instance, his pieces published before his exile in 1554 include translations from the German of sermons by Luther and Oecolampadius and of a tract on Christian faith by Urbanus
Regius, an original tract opposing the death penalty, and a few °° Laurens J. Mills, One Soul in Bodies Twain (Bloomington, Indiana, 1937), pp. 112-113, 402.
6 Boas, p. 347. He did note, however, the fact that some number of Oxford comedies have been lost; significant among these are Nicholas Grimald's Troilus
(before 1557), and Richard Edwardes' Palamon and Arcyte (1564), both in English, both based on Chaucer, and both presumably romantic. The latter, of course, dealt with a theme of love and friendship.
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II other controversialist pieces. Some years after writing Titus et Gesippus, Foxe himself described his writing as "'literary labours on behalf of the Christian republic."?? Even his one previously known comedy, Christus Triumphans, is not so recognizably comic by later standards, or so different in spirit from the Book of Martyrs, that anyone would have thought of Foxe as a comedian. So pervasive is
Foxe's reputation as a religious controversialist that the only two scholars I know of who have referred to Titus et Gesippus both assumed that it belonged to the same class of comedy as Christus
Triumphans. Josiah Pratt, in his note to Foxe's letter, cited earlier, which names the play, stated where the *said Comedy, or rather
Sacred Drama," could be found;?? and J. F. Mozley, also citing the location of the play, identified it as one of the "Latin plays on religious subjects" which Foxe wrote at Oxford.??
Though Pratt and Mozley must both have looked at the play, perhaps they may be forgiven their misjudgment. Like most other scholars who have worked on Foxe's papers, they were looking for biographical or historical information, not literary works. Perhaps, too, they were misled by several pages of the Titus et Gesippus manuscript which are headed by prayerful crosses and, in one instance, by the name Jesus. Even the old biography supposed to be by Foxe's son failed to distinguish more than one kind of comedy:
It should seem he designed the first over branchings of an early wit, to the exercises of Poetry, and wrote divers Latine Comedies. ... But even then he began to give earnest of what he afterward proved, for that neither those first flourishes of his youth were spent, but in holy Histories of the Bible: nor followed he that vein long.*°
Besides the two plays which survive, moreover, Foxe's letter to Benetus, cited earlier, refers to the "argument of a comedy" which 37 Mozley, p. 50, translating a letter from Foxe to Oporinus in British Museum
Harleian MS. 417, f. 98.
38 Pratt, p. 64].
89 Mozley, p. 20.
49 The Second Volume of the Ecclesiasticall History (London, 1641), sig. A4. The original Latin is in Lansdowne MS. 388, f. 5v. The manuscript said that some comedies were extant (Extant Comoediae); the 1641 translation contradicted this by speaking of *divers Latine Comedies yet to be seen."
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he has extracted from ''Solomon's Ecclesiastes"?! unless this is a reference to Titus et Gesippus, the subject of the comedy must have been religious. Conceivably Foxe might have taken some such verse as Ecclesiastes 11.1 (Cast thy bread upon the running waters, for after a long time thou shalt find it again") as the "argument" of Titus et Gesippus, but the possibility seems remote. Among the other
"exercises of Poetry" found in Foxe's unpublished papers are one or two attempts at religious nondramatic poetry,? and the printed edition of Christus Triumphans includes a ptefatory religious poem by Foxe.
There is, however, another ingredient in Foxe's critical temper —seen, for instance, in the occasional witticisms in his correspondence and in an unpublished poem, written about the same time as Titus et Gesippus, which laughs epigrammatically at the discomfiture of a Magdalen master, John Harley, whose cloak was stolen while he was out walking one day at dawn. Though the calamities of the age and the hardships of his own life perhaps impelled Foxe to write mostly serious and controversialist pieces, there was a comedian Foxe.
Yet we do not really need to seek a wholly different temper to understand the existence of Titus et Gesippus. It is not a play of which a man with Foxe's moral proclivities would need to feel ashamed, for it is informed with ethical principles which were perfectly orthodox in the Renaissance. Unlike Christus Triumphans, it does not have a prologue, but, if it did, Foxe might very well have included a statement of the Horatian principle echoed by the prologue of the later play: ''Placere actores omnibus; / Prodesse poeta, nocere studet nemini"
(ll. 33-34). In Boccaccio, the tale fulfills the requirement of the tenth day for stories about generosity in love, and after telling the story Fiammetta comments on its theme of sacred friendship; we hear, moreover, that a common social game in Italy was to debate whether Titus or Gesippus (to use
Foxe's forms of their names) had shown the greater generosity.*4 41 Lansdowne MS. 388, f. 89v: Spero me habere ex Solomonis Ecclesiaste argumentum Comoediae nec invtile nec inamaenum, quod simulatque lambendo paululum conformabimus tibi perpoliendum atque absoluendum committemus."
42 Lansdowne MS. 388, ff. 78-79v.
43 See below, pp. 222-225.
^ Louis Sorieri, Boccaccio's Story of Tito e Gisippo in European Literature (New
York, 1937), pp. 75-76.
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And Sir Thomas Elyot's version is frankly told as a "'goodly example" to "minister to the readers singular pleasure and also incredible comfort to practise amity."
4^? No doubt Foxe (or perhaps his mentor at Oxford) chose the story for the same reason and, having written his version, Foxe then used it to demonstrate his competence as a teacher of the young.
Foxe was not the only playwright to be attracted to the story, but his is the earliest play discovered so far that treats Titus and Gesippus by those names. Jacopo Nardi's Comedia de Amicitia (c. 1510), in Italian rimed verse, is based on the Boccaccian tale
(and is the earliest dramatization of it which is known), but Nardi changed all the names. Within a few years after Foxe there were several Titus-Gesippus plays. In England, Ralph Radcliffe wrote a De Titi et Gesippi Firmissima Amicitia (c. 1547-1553) for his boys at Hitchen School, and in 1577 the Children of Paul's performed a Titus et Gesippus at Whitehall; both of these plays (if they are two) are lost.*6 In Germany we find plays on the subject by Hans Sachs
(1546), Leonhard Schwartzenbach (1551), and Martin Montanus (after 1557); both Sachs (in 1531) and Montanus (in 1557) had also narrated the story in nondramatic versions. As I have noted,
L. J. Mills postulated *'several" early friendship plays, and in particular felt that Elyot's version in The Governor was probably based on a play.*? Such speculation cannot be confirmed or denied with our present evidence, but at least one early play on the theme is now known to exist, and it would not be surprising to find others earlier than Foxe's, by men attracted as Foxe no doubt was by the combination of romance and ethical lesson.
For the simple fact is that the combination of romance and moral lesson in the Titus-Gesippus story made it throughout Europe one
45 The Book Named the Governor, ed. S. E. Lehmberg (New York, 1962), p. 136.
My later quotations from Elyot are from this edition.
46 The former was listed by John Bale, Scriptorum ... Catalogus (Basel, 15571559), p. 700; see Herbert G. Wright, Early English Versions of the Tales of Guiscardo and Ghismonda and Titus and Gisippus from the Decameron, Early English Text
Society, Orig. Ser. No. 205 (London, 1937), cii. For the latter see E. K. Chambers,
The Elizabethan Stage, YV (Oxford, 1923), 93. The 1577 production was a masque.
The possibility is remote that it was a revival of Radcliffe's play, and even more remote that it could have been Foxe's.
47 Mills, pp. 102, 146.
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of the most popular stories in the sixteenth century: as Herbert G. Wright said, *Few stories can have been better known."
4$ When Foxe was writing in 1544, the Decamerone had not been translated into English (the first such translation appeared in 1620), but it was available in numerous printings in Italian or in translations into German and French (the latter was published in 1544). The TitusGesippus story had been plucked out for several Continental tellings: in Latin, by Filippo Beroaldo (1491) and by Matteo Bandello (1509); in French, by Nicholas de Troyes (1536) and by Bertrand de la
Borderie (1544) ; and in German, by Hans Sachs (1531), by Sebastian Frank (1531), and by Christoph Bruno (1541). In English, there were William Walter's verse translation of Beroaldo, published by Wynkyn de Worde under the title History of Tytus & Gesyppus (n.d.), and Sir Thomas Elyot's The Governor, 11.12 (1531).9
Foxe used Elyot's exemplum as his principal, and probably his only, source. In a number of ways Elyot had altered the story so that his version is fundamentally different from all other known versions: in consequence, we cannot be certain about Elyot's source, though no one except perhaps Mills has radically disputed Wolff's conclusion that Elyot used Boccaccio or Beroaldo or both.?? In any case, for our present purposes we may conveniently classify the versions available to Foxe into two types: Elyot's and (essentially including all others) Boccaccio's. Foxe did not follow Elyot in all details, including one or two very important ones; in a few places we find parallels between Foxe and Boccaccio; in many more places we see unprecedented innovations in Foxe. Yet the number and 48 Wright, p. ci.
? See Johannes Bolte, ed., Martin Montanus!
Schwankbücher (1557-1566), Bibliothek des Litterarischen Vereins in Stuttgart, CCXVII (Tübingen, 1899),
580-581; Sorieri, passim; Scott, pp. 96, 226-227; Wright, pp. Ixxvii-cvi; Domenico
Maria Manni, storia del Decamerone di Giovanni Boccaccio (Florence, 1742), pp. 561600. Cf. my "Sempronia, John Lyly, and John Foxe's Comedy of Titus and Gesippus," PQ, XLVIII (1969), 554-561.
?* S. L. Wolff, *A Source of Euphues. The Anatomy of Wyt," MP, VII (1910), 577-585. Clement T. Goode thought that Elyot had used, in addition, Petrus
Alphonsus! Disciplina Clericalis ("Sir Thomas Elyot's Titus and Gysippus," MLN, XXXVII [1922], 8), but Mills (p. 100), while acknowledging that Elyot could not simply have translated either Boccaccio or Beroaldo, disagreed with Goode.
Cf. S. E. Lehmberg, Sir Thomas Elyot Tudor Humanist (Austin, 1960), p. 68 n., and John M. Major, Sir Thomas Elyot and Renaissance Humanism (Lincoln, Nebraska,
1964), pp. 256-258.
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quality of the parallels between Foxe and Elyot, as shown in the accompanying chart, make it virtually certain that Foxe knew Elyot.
Corresponding Correspondences between Details in Elyot Foxe Boccaccio Titus father, Fulvius, is a Roman Senator.
Titus' father (unnamed) is Tito's father, Publio Quinto apparently a Roman Consul.
(Foxe added a second consul, named Fulvius.) Fulvio, is only a Roman gentleman.
Gisippus' father is named Chremes.
Gesippus' father is named Chremes. (Only in Foxe is he still alive at the time of the deception.) Gisippo's father is named Chremete.
Titus and Gisippus cannot be distinguished: they are alike in **years, .
. stature, proportion of body, favour, and colour of visage, countenance and speech."
Titus and Gesippus cannot be distinguished: they are alike in age, height, complexion—in everything except clothing.
Tito and Gisippo are not said to look identical (the bride is deceived, apparently repeatedly, by an exchange in a darkened bedroom).
Gisippo gives up his bride only reluctantly.
Gisippus does not hesitate to give up his bride.
Gesippus does not hesitate to give up his bride.
Neither a dowry nor a wedding feast is mentioned.
A dowry and a wedding feast are planned.
A dowry and a wedding feast are referred to.
On the wedding day, Gesippus goes to the bride's house (to hurry her along), but Titus goes through both the public ceremony and the bedroom ritual.
Gisippo goes through the wedding ceremony, and Tito is substituted for the bedroom ritual.
No one goes to the bride's house on the wedding day.
On the wedding day, Gisippus goes to the bride's house (to complete arrangements), but Titus goes through both the public ceremony and the bedroom ritual.
Tito is called home to look Titus is called home (by friends in the Senate) and offered "advancement to the highest dignities."
Titus is called home to succeed his father as consul. after his private affairs.
Titus leaves Athens very soon after the wedding night.
Tito remains in Athens for some time after the wedding night.
Titus leaves Athens very soon after the wedding night.
In Rome, the exiled Gisippo sees Tito alone returning from the forum.
In Rome, the exiled Gesippus sees both Titus and his bride come from Titus' house.
In Rome, the exiled Gisippus sees both Titus and his bride come from Titus' house.
Gisippo does not consider stabbing himself.
Gesippus considers stabbing himself.
Gisippus considers stabbing himself.
As Gisippo watches, two thieves fall out and one kills the other.
As Gesippus sleeps, a single thief robs and (almost) murders a citizen in some other location.
As Gisippus sleeps, a single thief robs and murders a citizen in some other location.
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The only physical evidence The assailant plants physical evidence on Gesippus The murderer plants physical evidence on Gisippus is the body, near Gisippo.
(exchanging knives with him).
When arrested, Gesippus denies nothing and speaks ambiguously; he is taken to have confessed.
(bloodying his knife).
Gisippo allows himself to be arrested and then falsely confesses.
When arrested, Gisippus denies nothing, desiring to to be thought guilty.
Tito, a private citizen, happens by when Gisippo is being sentenced by the Titus, a consul, is one of the judges before whom Gesippus is arraigned.
(During the trial the Senate is consulted.) Titus, a consul ("or in other like dignity") is present officially when Gisippus is arraigned before the Senate. praetor, Varro.
Titus does not recognize Gesippus until Gesippus' refusal to answer him arouses his suspicion. (Titus Tito recognizes Gisippo immediately at the trial.
Titus does not recognize Gisippus until a pregnant look during an answer brings recognition. is not sure until later.) After the murderer confesses, he is freed by the After the villain confesses, he is freed (and becomes Titus' servant) when Gesippus and Titus plead to Fulvius for him.
After the villain confesses, he is freed when 'Titus appeals to the Senate for him. emperor; Tito and Gisippo do not plead for him.
The list of parallels between Foxe and Boccaccio is much briefer, though one or two parallels involve very important elements.
Corresponding Details in Correspondences between Elyot Foxe Boccaccio The bride's father is not 'The bride's father (Simo) The bride's father (unmentioned. (Other Athenibecomes angry when he named) becomes angry ans become angry when Titus and Gisippus tell them of the deception.) hears of the deception (from a servant who sees Titus leave).
We do not know when the bride learns of the substitution, but in Rome she diswhen he hears of the deception (from the angry bride).
The bride is told of the substitution when Tito must return to Rome. (She becomes angry and tells her father.) There is no mention of the bride's ever being told of the substitution. cusses it with Titus. (She is not angry.) Though invited home (and in the Argument described Titus and Gisippus lead an army to Athens and destroy Gisippus' enemies. The possibility of Gisippus' marrying another girl is never mentioned.
Gisippo stays in Rome (in Tito's house), enriched by Tito, and marries Tito's sister, Fulvia. (Gisippo had earlier told Tito that he could find another girl.) as going home), Gesippus apparently stays in Rome, enriched by Titus, and marries Fulvius' daughter Pamphila (Titus' former sweetheart, in whom Gesippus had expressed interest even as he was about to marry Sempronia).
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On this evidence I see no reason to believe that Foxe knew any Boccaccian version. Although he was an avid reader, his reading, from what we know of it, was not in works like the Decamerone;
Terence, whom he had certainly read, was a school text, and Boccaccio was not. The departures from Elyot are best explained as Foxe's inventions which happen to coincide with Boccaccio. For one thing, they are like Boccaccio only in a general way; in each case the specific details are different. We can see, moreover, why a man treating the story dramatically would alter Elyot's nondramatic exemplum in precisely these ways. The introduction of the bride's father, Simo, for instance, like the inclusion of Chremes (who dies in all other versions), permits Foxe to show us some Terentian fathers
—men worried about their social and financial status, gleeful over their successes, peevish when thwarted by their juniors. Raising the question of the bride's response to the situation corrects a serious flaw in Elyot from a dramatic viewpoint, though in his treatise it would perhaps be irrelevant. The invention which is easiest of all to explain is the finding of a bride for Gesippus: comedies, after all, are supposed to end in marriage. Elyot elected to show the vindication of the true friend politically, for in his version (like Boccaccio's) politics is important: Gisippus is exiled from Athens by political enemies whose hand is strengthened by resentment of the Athenian's giving up his bride to a Roman. Foxe, however, eliminated all references to tension between Athens and Rome and included no political elements except one or two speeches by Fulvius about the need for a public figure to ignore private considerations: in the play,
Gesippus must leave Athens because his father disowns him. The true friend must be vindicated, of course, but it is no denial of the virtues of friendship to have the friend succeed in love as well.
Indeed, Foxe invented a situation to make Gesippus' love-interest ironically parallel that of Titus: Pamphila, whom Gesippus finally marries, is a former sweetheart of Titus whom Gesippus would have wooed long ago but for the hurt it would have caused his friend.
Probably the best argument for calling these departures from Elyot inventions rather than borrowings is the number of other variations that Foxe could not have found in any known source.
Some are trivial, some crucial. Foxe's Gesippus, for instance, falls asleep in a public road (near Titus' house, apparently) rather than
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in a barn (as in Elyot) or in a cave (as in Boccaccio) ; and his heroine is called Sempronia rather than Sophronia. These alterations are not so readily explained as some of the other inventions. The decision, for instance, to keep the victim of Martius' robbery alive is what we would expect in a comedy—though we would hope for a more artful revelation of his survival than Foxe achieves. The omission of the political elements that are so important in Elyot tightens up the play's unity. So do several other omissions, including those of details preceding Gesippus' proposed wedding day: the reasons for Titus' being in Athens, the length of his stay, Gesippus' courtship of Sempronia, and the meeting of Titus and Sempronia.
A strict neoclassicist would presumably have striven for even tighter unity by setting the whole action at Rome, thus avoiding the serious disunity of time and place of which Foxe's play is guilty. From the technical terms which Foxe uses in these plays we can be certain that he had been exposed to critical works which discussed such questions,?! but he (and the presumed tutor for whom he may have written this play) obviously did not believe that plays must observe the minor unities.
Interestingly, John Airy, the tutor of Foxe's fellow Oxonian Nicholas Grimald, did not either: commenting on Grimald's Archipropheta, he found classical precedents for violation of the unity of time, and he expressed approval of the unity of place solely on the grounds of theatrical convenience.?? The minor unities, in fact, did not become law until a generation later, with Castelvetro, and Foxe did not concern himself with them. But he did begin zn medias res to avoid excessive diffuseness.
Some of Foxe's most significant alterations are in the characters.
He supplied names for several characters who are nameless in the sources: Martius, the cutthroat; Cratinus, a member of the Roman posse which arrests Gesippus; and Simo, father of the bride. And he adds several new characters: Crito, who travels to Rome with a message for Gesippus; Stylpho and his daughter Phrygia, who are involved in a plan for a marriage with Gesippus; Trebatius, a messenger from Rome; and a number of comic characters: Dromo,
Midas, Stephanio, and Pythias, all slaves; and Marsias and Misenus, 51 See below, p. 40, and Titus et Gesippus 11.2.47. Cf. T. W. Baldwin, Shakespere's
FiveAct Structure (Urbana, 1947), pp. 355-350.
52 Boas, p. 28.
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musicians. Most of these names seem to have been chosen for some relevant association:
Martius suggests Mars, the fighting god; Marsias, the piper, was presumably named for Marsyas, the satyr who challenged Apollo on the flute; the name of Misenus, another musician, recalls that of Aeneas' trumpeter, the son of Aeolus; and Trebatius, who performs the quasi-legal function of informing Titus of his father's death, may have been suggested by the name of a lawyer friend of Cicero. All the other names listed are Terentian:
Stephanio looks after the kitchen in both Adelphoi and Titus et Gesippus; Simo is an old man in Foxe and in the Andria; Dromo and Syrus are slaves in Foxe and Terence; and Sophrona, the old mother in our play, is an old nurse in several Terentian plays.
The most important Terentian addition by Foxe was Phormio, who functions here as he does in Terence: there he is a scheming adventurer; here he is the clever slave who manipulates affairs on behalf of his master. For a time in Titus et Gesippus, Phormio is the dominant figure. Foxe clearly was aiming not only at making his play Terentian, but also at improving its effectiveness, and Phormio was his way around a dilemma inherent in his story.
If one accepts the orthodox Renaissance (and Platonic) view that friendship is a nobler relationship than heterosexual love, Gesippus' sacrifice of his bride almost at the altar is both noble and understandable; Elyot tried to emphasize this attitude by making Gisippus woo Sophronia in secret at first, as though his romantic interest were a betrayal of his friendship for Titus. But if one accepts the theory, Titus' longing for the girl like a medieval courtly lover is more than a social flaw: it is a gross violation of a most fundamental principle of morality. On the other hand, if one does not accept the theory, Gesippus' gesture, though noble, becomes psychologically incomprehensible. In the former case, one protagonist loses moral stature in a way which is difficult to overcome; in the latter, the other protagonist suffers even more serious loss of intellectual stature. To describe such a dilemma is not to deny the facts of the Renaissance philosophy, but to assert the conflict between humanist theory and human thought. Theoreticians from Bembo to Bacon exalted friendship over love, and imaginative works from Damon and Pythias to Euphues and The Two Gentlemen of Verona explicitly or implicitly endorsed the theory. But the authors of these works recog-
INTRODUCTION
nized practical difficulties in the philosophy and built their dramatic conflicts around those difficulties: Valentine, after all, does not sacrifice Sylvia to Proteus, and no one in the audience expects him to.
In Lyly's Endymion, Eumenides finally accepts Geron's argument that Love is but an eyeworm, which only tickleth the head with hopes and wishes; friendship the image of eternity, in which there is nothing movable, nothing mischievous." But before doing so he has to fight down his own natural desires: ""The love of men to women is a thing common and of course; the friendship of man to man infinite and immortal," he says, and then recoils, "Tush! Semele doth possess my love." Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing puts the conflict more simply: "'Friendship is common in all other things /
Save in the office and affairs of love." Commenting on Elyot's version of the Titus-Gesippus story, L. J. Mills put this conflict into historical perspective: "'For the first time in the sixteenth century the medieval emphasis on love and the classical doctrines of friendship came into dramatic conflict in English literature—but not the laste »* Foxe did not want to eliminate this conflict, and his philosophic bias is apparently orthodox. Yet he did want to make his characters' behavior credible, and the Titus-Gesippus story is one of the very few that call for the friend to sacrifice his love interest so completely.
That Foxe was aware of a problem is shown by a soliloquy which he gives to Gesippus during the off-stage union of Titus and Sempronia
(III.1): Gesippus expresses the orthodox theory, but only after he has voiced his fear that people will think him a stupid weakling for surrendering his bride. Judging from his father's reaction to the sacrifice, Gesippus' fear is well founded, but Foxe tried to keep the audience from such a reaction. Early in the play we see Gesippus impatiently hurrying along the wedding preparations: he is clearly eager to marry Sempronia, whose beauty he rapturously praises.
But even before he knows of Titus' love for Sempronia, we also hear him confess that he has a strong interest in another girl, whom he would have carried off as Paris did Helen if she were not (as he thinks) 'Titus' sweetheart. This device cleverly maintains the nobility of Gesippus' sacrifice even as it makes that sacrifice more under53 Mills, p. 103.
INTRODUCTION
standable. Even more important in serving this end is Phormio. As Phormio becomes the dominant figure for a time, and thus gives the comedy a properly Terentian tone, he also assumes much of the onus of guilt. He overhears Gesippus' confession of interest in Pamphila, and it encourages his efforts on behalf of Titus. It is
Phormio who describes the deadly nature of Titus' disease, Phormio who allows Gesippus to uncover its cause, Phormio who subtly implants the idea of Gesippus' sacrifice, and Phormio who devises the scheme to make it work.
The effect of Phormio's machinations on Titus is even more marked. Titus does not have to confess to Gesippus the nature of his illness (Gesippus' visit to his sick friend occurs offstage). More importantly, Titus does not even know what Phormio is doing. In the opening scene, Titus admits his problem to Phormio and asks for help; but the help he specifies is for Phormio to kill him or to arrange a postponement of Gesippus' wedding so that Titus can leave town, and it is entirely Phormio's idea to promote the substitution while telling Titus that nothing can be done. The gobetween, who comically emphasizes the importance of his function in a hyperbolic soliloquy (1.5.1 ff), thus assumes most of the moral guilt that adheres to Titus in other versions. Not all of it, however, for Foxe deliberately includes certain details that make Titus appear insensitive: though Titus does not know that Gesippus is listening to his exultation after the consummation of the union with the girl whom Gesippus was to have married (II.2.1 ff), yet the juxtaposition of this scene with Gesippus' unhappy soliloquy in II.1 adversely affects Titus' impression on the audience. So does his precipitous departure from Athens (II.5), which we hear about from Gesippus, who is fearful of its consequences: Titus' departure, we realize from Trebatius news (II.3), is motivated by a desire to collect an inheritance, and we sense the unfairness of fortune's workings. In the end, Titus proves his worth as a friend, but before then he fails one more time: his failure to recognize Gesippus is perhaps dramatically justified, since Gesippus is in rags and at first does not speak
(III.8) and since, at the trial, Titus is convinced that the man before him has committed an act of which Gesippus 1s incapable; yet Titus' instinctive coldness toward a less fortunate mortal (a difference in fortune which is emphasized by Titus' rich appearance
INTRODUCTION
and his materialistic conversation with Sempronia) seems a character flaw, and by contrast Phormio recognizes Gesippus the instant he sees him (IV.7).
By this time in the play, the protagonists have come to dominate the action. Phormio is still active in Rome, but nothing comes of most of his activity. He is sent to see Gesippus in prison and confirm
Titus' fears about the Athenian's identity (IV.5), but the confirmation comes before Phormio returns when Crito arrives from Athens
(IV.6). After Titus and Gesippus are both confined for the murder, Phormio runs to tell Sempronia what has happened (IV.7), but it is
Martius' confession that resolves the difficulty. The one useful purpose which Phormio serves in Rome is to promote the wedding of Pamphila and Gesippus. In an effective scene
(IV.4), Phormio finds Pamphila somewhat testily resentful of Titus for abandoning her and apparently of Gesippus for helping him to do so.
But Phormio cleverly persuades her to entertain the idea of marrying Gesippus by noting his resemblance to Titus and by alluding to her as a spinster. Otherwise, Phormio's continuing presence in the play after the action moves to Rome is dramatically useless.
Though Phormio is not consistently useful, on the whole Foxe has improved his play by adding him. Foxe's general conception, moreover, and the broad structural outlines of his play are effective.
But there are structural flaws. When Foxe first introduced the idea that Titus had once loved Pamphila, it prepared for Gesippus' sacrifice of Sempronia and, as we have seen, set up an ironic parallel to the Titus-Sempronia-Gesippus triangle. That parallel could not be carried on after Gesippus learned that Titus loved Sempronia rather than Pamphila, but at least the matter was brought to fruition in the final arrangement between Gesippus and Pamphila.
The addition was a happy one, moreover, if only for the opportunity it gave to Foxe to create an impressive vignette of Pamphila. Not all of his additions worked out so neatly. Most glaring is the unresolved situation in Athens. There, Chremes and Simo become reconciled and actually arrange a new marriage for Gesippus, to Simo's niece Phrygia. Phrygia is brought onstage and Gesippus is sent for. But of course he does not come (though the Argument indicates that he will), for he finds a Roman bride; we do not learn
INTRODUCTION
Chremes' response to this, and we may wonder why Foxe included Phrygia at all.
Foxe's handling of Sempronia also raises questions. Her role in the play is larger than in the sources, but her only real contribution to the dramatic action is to send Phormio for Pamphila (IV.2) in order to help Gesippus' romantic cause. Her appeal to Fulvius to spare Gesippus (V.2) is the sort of scene which was later used to good effect by Shakespeare in Measure for Measure and Coriolanus, but in this play it comes to naught and carries little emotional weight. After her first appearance in III.8, she says all the right things but is not a little vapid; this is especially true in her first scene as she answers Titus' questions about her feelings. It is a little surprising that she does not appear earlier in the play, since all of the action in the first two acts revolves around the question of whom she will marry. On the other hand, Foxe avoided showing the two friends together throughout the first two acts, too, even though the theme of the play concerns friendship. I have attempted to explain the latter omission by noting the dramatic importance of Phormio in those acts. Perhaps the failure to show Sempronia has a similar explanation. By raising the question (in III.8) of how Sempronia had reacted to the substitution of Titus for Gesippus, Foxe showed a concern for the feelings of the bride which Elyot had not shown at all. Boccaccio had deliberately emphasized the bride's feelings in his version by having her become furious and complain to her family about the deception, but Foxe did not want to complicate an already difficult problem by suggesting that both Titus and Gesippus were acting inhumanely in ignoring the wishes of the girl. He may have consciously decided, then, that if the audience did not see
Sempronia until late in the play, until he had allowed time for the fully developed love marriage which it sees in III.8, it would not think of the possible harm to the bride's sensitivities. Conceivably he could have shown a scene in which Titus and Sempronia fall in love with each other, but such scenes do not seem to appear until some time later in English drama. For instance, in Gascoigne's
Supposes (1566), taken from Ariosto's Suppositi, there are no PolynestaErostrato scenes, and we do not even see Polynesta between the first scene and the last.
Most of the structural flaws in Titus et Gesippus are in the middle
INTRODUCTION
of the play. As I have attempted to show, the beginning is effectively structured. The ending is reasonably effective also. The thrust of the action in Rome is toward the discovery of Gesippus' identity.
Here too Foxe was burdened with a difficult fundamental problem:
Gesippus' initial decision, not really comprehensible, to conceal his identity. Given that inherent defect, Foxe invents details which effectively bring on the gradual discovery: the ironic mistaking of Gesippus for a vagabond (III.8) and Gesippus' refusal to answer
Titus in the first trial scene (IV.3) are thé most notable. The innovation of suspending the trial so that Titus can investigate the case
(IV.3), and later of postponing sentencing so that Fulvius can go on a fruitless trip to consult the Senate (V.2), allows time for Martius' guilt to develop and make his confession somewhat less surprising than in the sources. But far too many key decisions are revealed in soliloquies. Much of the dialogue of the play, especially in comic scenes, is very good, but the piling up of soliloquies in places such as I.4-I.5, L.9-II.1, and IV.7-V.1 shows an inconsistent concern for developing naturalistic dialogue and an occasionally expedient decision.
A significant nonstructural addition by Foxe is the comic business.
Two scenes involving musicians (I.6 and II.4) are largely irrelevant, though there is some irony in their preparation for an expected wedding which will not occur. The first of these scenes, with its long discussion of musical modes, is too long, but the tricking of Syrus into thinking that the music of the spheres is being played is a nice comic bit, at least for a (possible) university audience. In the other scene, the comic by-play between Pythias, who wants to go on dancing, and the musicians who are ready to leave is a homely and sophisticated touch. One joke in this scene requires comment. As Misenus emerges from a doorway, he utters a Terentian appeal to Juno
Lucina and claims that the house is giving birth to him; Marsias answers by parodying Horace's dictum, *A mountain in labor produces a ridiculous mouse (mus)": **A house in labor produces a ridiculous man (mas)." No doubt the Magdalen audience thought that funny, and it anticipates some of the courtly wit found in later comedy: one thinks, for instance, of the mas-massMars and as-ass-ars trick which Dares and Samias play on Sir Tophas in Endymion.
Equally esoteric is the humor when Phormio appeals to a large