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“You Talks Brave and Bold”: The Origins of an Elizabethan Stage Device

1974; Western Michigan University; Volume: 8; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cdr.1974.0024

1936-1637

Kenneth Friedenreich,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

“You Talks Brave and Bold”: The Origins of an Elizabethan Stage Device Kenneth Friedenreich The first great wave of heroic drama in England surely be­ gan with Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and crested with Shakespeare’s Henry V. In a 1964 article, Robert Y. Turner argued that in Tamburlaine, Marlowe invented the “public confrontation scene” to depict political conflicts more dramatically than ever before.1 Marlowe’s imitators, such as Greene in Alphonsus, King of Aragon and Selimus, Lodge in The Wounds of Civil War, and Peele in David and Bethsabe, adapted Marlowe’s dramaturgical innovation for their own purposes. Not surprisingly Shakespeare, as Turner demonstrates, uniquely expanded the device that he inherited from Marlowe because he added moral significance to the pattern of challenge and counterchallenge. Marlowe’s understanding of public events, at least in the Tamburlaine plays, as struggles for power re­ stricted the verbal clashes and the brutal triumphs afterwards to morally neutral remarks. Shakespeare’s characters talk more about political proprieties than strength.2 Indeed, Turner’s essay further attests to the indisputable origi­ nality of Marlowe’s conception of his Scythian hero; neverthe­ less, we must remember that Tamburlaine simply was not con­ ceived in a vacuum. Source studies by Ethel Seaton and more recent accounts of heroic plays by Eugene M. Waith and David Riggs have shown Marlowe’s debt in Tamburlaine to an eclectic variety of matter —from Ortelius to chivalric romance to classical rhetoric.3 Yet to limit our perspective of Marlowe’s remarkable dramatic achievement and its imitators only to non-dramatic materials ignores completely a rich native dramatic heritage. Even Turn­ er, when looking backward, does not look that far.4 239 240 Comparative Drama I suggest that this native dramatic heritage is extensive, em­ bracing not only the cursing devils and ranting Herods of the craft cycles, but also those medieval entertainments whose em­ phasis was on the expression of heroic ideals through literal actions rather than spoken words: the popular mummers’ plays and the tournament. In both, the central action involves a chal­ lenge and a counterchallenge by the hero and his adversary, a combat, and a decisive victory earned by one or the other.5 From these entertainments, conventions of dramatic action which in the era of Marlowe and Shakespeare became what Turner terms the “public confrontation scene” probably had their theatrical origins. I Attempts to determine the continuity between the mum­ mers’ entertainments and the later drama of the Renaissance are by no means new. Chambers looked for textual affinities between them.6 He overlooked, however, the elementary affinities of structure between the mummers’ plays and the later drama, which I think are rooted in the overall pattern of action he de­ scribed.? Therefore, I am less interested in demonstrating a specific continuity encompassing everything from the folk play to Tamburlaine and its imitators than in describing how one convention of dramatic action was transformed over a long period of time. Fortunately, there has been a revolution in criti­ cal attitudes towards the early English drama, which has forced commentators to extend their criteria for evaluation to include aspects of production and performance beyond surviving texts.8 Alan Brody’s study, The English Mummers and Their Plays, reflects this revolution of attitudes towards the early drama. In addition to his valuable efforts to reduce the confusion of termi­ nology concerning these early plays, Brody makes two important observations about the mummers’ plays in general: first, that the plays endured well into an age for whose audiences the original ritual significance of the plays is lost; and second, that in the plays themselves it was simply the ritual performance of the action that was its raison d’etre, and that if there were words attached, they were used to effect a result within the context of the action itself and not to serve an interpretive role for an unnecessary audience.9 Kenneth Friedenreich 241 Brody recognizes that the currency of this drama is action, not language. He is heavily indebted to Antonin Artaud, a pioneer of modem theater, who believed that the tyranny of spoken dialogue had vitiated the force of Occidental drama since the Renaissance; Brody argues...