Thersites; A Farce for Students
Roberta Mullini - Università di Urbino
1. The play, its sources and its narrative structure
A new enterlude called Thersytes is the title of a play which was printed about 1562, but written - or at least prepared for performance - about the end of 1537(1)
. Internal evidence supports the hypothesis that it was composed to be acted by and for Oxford students, and various relationships with coeval writings suggest that its author was Nicholas Udall(2)
. The subtitle adds that "Thys enterlude folowynge doth declare how that the greatest boasters are not the greatest doers", with both a clear reference to the old Plautine tradition of the miles gloriosus(3)
and an attempt to point at an explicit moral.
Marie Axton's edition prints the direct source of the play, i.e. Ravisius Textor's Latin dialogue Thersites, consisting of 262 lines plus a five-line "Conclusio", thus helping the modern reader to an easy recognition of the use the English playwright made of it. Udall (?) enlarged the Latin text up to 889 lines, plus twenty-six lines addressed directly to the audience as both a moral and a prayer to God for the king (Henry VIII) and "Lovely Ladie Jane, and the prince that he [God] has sent them betwen" (l. 913)(4)
. To the flimsy plot of its source - Thersites has new arms made for him by Mulciber but, in spite of all his boasting, recoils under his mother's skirt when a snail appears, and flees away when a real soldier prompts him to combat - the English adaptor adds the farcical maltreating of Thersites' mother by her son, and a parodic exorcism exerted by the woman in order to cure young Telemachus of worms.
This "charming interlude", as Richard Axton defines the text - perhaps playing on the implications of the adjective (the play as a valuable and pleasant dramatic piece, and the same as including the staging of a parodic charm)(5)
- therefore could be labelled as doubly academic: first because it was written for University students, secondly because it derived from a source which was, in its turn, academic, Textor's dialogue having been composed for the Parisian students of the French scholar(6)
. However, more academic nuances might be glimpsed, i.e. one concerning the characters who (apart from Mater and Miles(7)
) come from classical texts studied at school and university, and
another related to the connected carnivalesque attitude, usual among
students, to parody literary works included in the list of their
compulsory readings. But the additions in the English text also show
the playwright's interest in folk culture, represented here in its
"Brueghelian colour[s]", as Richard Axton, again, names the
low-life world of the play evoked by Mater's speeches especially.
2. The needs of the stage
The text is extraordinarily rich in stage directions (there are twenty-seven of them), thus showing the playwright's attention to the business of the stage and to the various aspects of performance. In fact, together with the simple indications of exits and entrances (e.g. "The Mater commeth in", l. 265; "Then he [the challenging soldier] goeth oute and the Mother saith:", v. 507), there are some, most of them actually, which help the modern reader visualise the action since they name props necessary to the performance, and movements of the actors in the playing area. In this way one gets to learn that "Mulciber must have a shop made in the place" (l. 21), and that there exists sort of a domus for Mater ("Then the mother goeth in the place which is prepared for her", l. 381); that Thersites' arms are a club and a sword, and that he wears a "sallet" (i.e. a helmet, named during the dialogue, but also in the SSDD). Furthermore, specific gestures and actions are signalled: Thersites must "fyghte against the snayle with his club" (l. 444), after which the club "must [be] cast [...] awaye" (l. 448) and substituted by "his sworde" (l. 455); his cowardice is exposed when he, in front of his challenger, "must ren awaye and hyde hym behynde hys mother backe" (l. 478); Telemachus must lie down, ready for the exorcism to be carried out by Mater, "with his bely upward" (l. 696). The dramatist also seems to pay attention to the modes of vocal delivery of his text, when, besides using the neutral verb "to say" in many stage directions, he stresses that certain speeches must be shouted or pronounced in a tearful voice: Thersites must address Mulciber, who is inside his "shop", speaking "a loude" (l. 21); and when at first Mater refuses to cure Telemachus, "he [Thersites] must take hyr by the armes and she crieth oute" (l. 621).
Certainly the presence of a snail in the playing area, which is surely ridiculous as an enemy but should be big enough to frighten Thersites (the SD says that "hee must loke fearfully uppon the snaile", l. 387), may constitute a scenic problem. Marie Axton suggests that a device might be used similar to the snail-on-a-pillar reproduced in an engraving printed by Guy Marchant in 1491 and often reprinted in England(8)
, provided with "a large glove puppet, its horns moved by two fingers, or, alternatively, inflated as children's curled party blowers are"(9)
.
Richard Southern is not so much concerned with the staging of the snail combat as with the existence and position of the house/s (Mulciber's shop and Mater's 'place'), especially because he seems puzzled by the availability of such a prop as a domus as early as 1537(10)
. But on this point I think that the evidence from college documents can help solve the problem: even if not from the university of Oxford, what is known about the construction of aedes for a "comedia plauti" as early as 1522-3 at Queens' College Cambridge testifies to the possibility of building temporary structures for performances in college halls(11)
. Another of the points touched upon by Southern is Thersites' baffling address to women in the audience (ll. 252-63), since, he writes, "one may be surprised to find women and girls in a sixteenth-century university audience"(12)
. Yet, even if again well aware of the caveat due to the generalisation of evidence from another university, one cannot forget that Cambridge college plays, especially those in English, sometimes had citizens among their audience(13)
, very probably with women included.
3. The farce and its tradition
"I wyll go seke adventures for I can not be ydle" exclaims Thersites soon after entering the playing area (l. 13): in so doing he activates in his audience the memory of the heroes of chivalric romances, but the spectators realise quite soon that the action to follow will be comic, since Mulciber, asked to build new arms for Thersites, starts playing on the latter's words when he jokingly makes the title hero explain the meaning of "sallet". (Perhaps this is a device used not only because Mulciber himself does not know the word, but also because the audience as well might have found it obsolete and unrecognisable(14)
). Another subtle piece of information passes to the audience: the interlude will be a medley of cultures able to compound the classical frame with Christian and native lore: the list of past heroes is not limited to Greek mythology, but also includes such personages from the Bible as Samson and young David as examples of proverbial strength in comparison to which, Thersites boasts, he is much more valiant. This can be read not only as the fashionable insertion of the usual anachronisms which are present in all the texts of medieval English drama (an example being the prayers to Christ pronounced by Old Testament characters in the cycles), but also as a self-conscious way of the adaptor's 'translating' Textor's dialogue for an English audience. In other words it works as a device to get text and audience nearer to each other, beyond what can be obtained through the translation proper from Latin into English.
Another point due to the up-dating of the French text and to the need for it to mirror - even in a farcical context - the religiously controversial spirit of the times, appears when Thersites boasts that he will go to hell to fight the devil himself. His voyage, he says, will be quick, because
[...] there I wyll bete the devyll and his dame
And bringe the soules awaye, I fullye entende the same.
After that in hell I have ruffled so,
[Streyghte] to olde purgatorye wyll I go.
I wyll cleane that so purge rounde aboute
That we shall nede no pardons to helpe them oute. (ll. 178-83)
One is here reminded of the burlesque trip to the underworld narrated by the Pardoner in John Heywood's The Foure PP, only that the present text does not seem to accept the doctrine of pardons any longer, while the older one, though highlighting the abuses connected to it, does not go so far as stating the Reformist view of the utter uselessness of pardons.
After getting all the new arms from Mulciber, Thersites - always ready to "seek adventures" - starts challenging the audience in a more involving manner than his homonym in the source:
How say you, good godfather, that loke so stale,
Ye seeme a man to be borne in the vale -
Dare ye adventure wyth me a tripe or two?
Go coward! Go hide the as thou wast wonte to do.
What a sorte of dastardes have we here?
None of you to battaile with me dare appeare. (ll. 246-51)
The case of a miles gloriosus vaunting his strength, power and courage and ready to give in when faced with a real peril represented by a flesh-and-blood enemy certainly derives from the Plautine model, but also the popular tradition had its comic braggarts already well before the dawn of classical studies in England, even if they were not soldiers (I am thinking here of Master Brundich, the quack in The Croxton Play of the Sacrament, for example, whereas Herod and Pilate in the mystery cycles can be considered boasters but not braggarts). But in the text the mixture of vainglory and arms, which English theatre will show at its highest in the character of Falstaff, also seems to be influenced by the French monologue Le Franc Arcier de Baignolett, an anonymous play of the 15th century(15)
, besides being a feature drawn from Plautus.
Actually the situation of a coward who tries to show off his courage, challenging members of the audience (whom, of course, theatre conventions prevent from accepting the challenge, depriving them of the status of possible offenders), and the episode of an attack to a small animal are present in the French piece, where the Franc Archer, after boasting his valour and challenging the audience, decides to fight against a cock. The tone of his vaunted violence soon changes when he sees what he thinks is a soldier-at-arms: in front of him he surrenders completely, till he discovers that this 'terrible' enemy is nobody but a scarecrow, which he finally plunders as his own booty(16)
. This sort of farcical miles - together with the popular tradition of the snail combat(17)
- may have been at the back of Textor's Thersites and have influenced the construction of the character in the Latin dialogue which was later adapted for an English audience. The Plautine miles, in this way, is still more enriched with farcical elements, even if deprived of his sexual pride (which Udall will use again, though, when writing Ralph Roister Doister, i.e. a full-length comedy about another miles gloriosus ).
After testing his male spectators in order to find an enemy to fight with, the English Thersites addresses himself to a woman asking her licentious questions (this is the passage in the text which seems to show that also women were part of the audience):
What saie you, hart of gold, of countenaunce so demure?
Will you fighte with me? No, I am righte sure.
Fye! blusshe not, woman, I wyll do you no harm
Excepte I had you soner to kepe my backe warme.
Alas, lyttle pums, why are ye so sore afrayd?
I praye you, shew how longe it is sence ye were a mayd. (ll. 252-7)
These references to the audience are not present in the Latin source of the interlude: they on one hand show the adaptor's interest in reaching his spectators and on the other, as in many other interludes, his awareness of the performance conditions of interludes.
If the main narrative of the play (Thersites' request of new arms to Mulciber and the combat with a snail) comes to the English text straight from the French, many other features of which the adaptation consists of seem to derive from local popular culture, i.e. folk drama and popular medieval attitudes.
The length of Textor's Thersites is itself doubled, because the original 262 lines in Latin become 523 in the English version, to which another fourteen must be added, since Thersites' dread of his challenger and refusal to fight envelop the charm episode, and actually end with the braggart's flight only at l. 885, when the SD says that "Thersytes muste runne awaye and leave his clubbe and sworde behynde", after which the soldier concludes his comment about his enemy's cowardice up to l. 889. The episode concerning young Telemachus and what follows, therefore, serves to slow down the pace of the challenge with a grotesque interval and to stress Thersites' fear which is, in this way , exposed twice.
At l. 524, then, Ulysses' son arrives "bringinge a letter from his father" (SD), which is soon afterwards read aloud by Thersites. In it the Greek hero prays the receiver to ask his mother to cure Telemachus "From the wormes that do hym harme" (l. 562), since "better charmer is no other / Then is youre owne deare mother" (ll. 567-8). The letter finishes with a promise of revels at Ulysses' house and Penelope's 'best greetings', so to speak ("My wife Penelobe / Doth grete you well by me" (ll. 575-6). The image of the Homeric protagonist emerges degraded and belittled from this letter: in the eyes of the young Oxonians he is reduced to an anti-heroic man, worried by his young son's disease - and what a disease! - and married to a wife who contributes to build up an everyday, quiet, and domestic little picture. Furthermore, the letter is dated in a very extraordinary manner: "on Candelmasse daye / Mydsomer moneth the Calendars of May" (ll. 577-8). The funny mixture of the month of February with May and June goes hand in hand with the overlapping and juxtaposition of a Christian feast day (Candlemas) and pagan and folksy festivals (Midsummer and May Day), with a reminiscence of the Roman calendar (the Calends of May) where alliteration is more relevant than meaning. The festive and carnivalesque picture of Ulysses emerges as a parody of the hero students are compelled to study at school and university, thus adding a comic flavour to the serious and bookish reading of his enterprises.
The parodic richness of the text, though, is more evident during the burlesque charm carried out by Thersites' mother. Here the anti-Catholicism of the play is evident in the alliterative list of absurd invocations pronounced by Mater over young Telemachus who, for the time being, must lie on the ground "with his bely upward" (SD, l. 696). But before that, that is before Mater is convinced by her son to cure Telemachus, there takes place another little episode connected with the former and equally added by Udall (?) to his source: Mater refuses to obey Thersites and therefore is scolded, maltreated, and called names by him. It is a piece of action which highlights the protagonist's cowardice once more: the man who has trembled in front of a snail, who has hidden himself behind his mother's skirt, who has boasted his courage for so many lines, is simply a pusillanimous and spoilt child who abuses his own mother. Not that she is portrayed as a very dignified person: on the contrary both from what Thersites says of her and from her mock exorcism the audience receive the characterisation of a talkative old woman, too ready to defend and justify her overfrightened child.
During the action, besides being beaten she is called "olde witche": the epithet is not only one of the abusive names she is called, but also, together with what she performs soon afterwards, a means to connect her to popular magic. The procedures of her charm put together many aspects of unofficial exorcisms, such as invocations of relics and objects mentioned in the Bible, mention of well-known personages belonging to biblical stories and classical mythology, use of arcane language (there is a phrase in Latin, "Facie ad faciem" mistranslated as "turninge tayle to tayle", l. 713), prayers to fellow witches and formal adjurations to the worms themselves(18)
. The farcical and burlesque anti-Catholic flavour of this charm goes hand in hand with the passage about "old purgatory" and "pardons" quoted above, since in its considerable length (ll. 697-754) it is a tirade against the Catholic practice of exorcisms ridiculed through the juxtaposition of preposterous relics invoked to cure Telemachus:
The bottome of the shyppe of Noe,
And also the legge of the horse of Troe,
The peece of the tounge of Balaams asse,
The chawbone of the oxe that at Christes byrth was,
The eye tothe of the dogge that went on pylgremage
With yonge Thobye, these wormes sone may swage.
The butterflye of Bromemycham that was borne blinde,
The blaste of the bottell that blowed Aelous wynde,
The buttocke of the bytter boughte at Buckyngame,
The bodye of the bere that wyth Bevis came,
The backster of Balockburye with her bakinge pele,
Chylde, fro thy wormes, I praye maye sone the hele. (ll. 715-26)
The power of Mater's charm, which resides in words only, is such that Telemachus soon rises completely healed, thus reminding the audience of a basic structure of folk drama, i.e. the sudden 'resurrection' of the hero through the intervention of a quack doctor. But the audience, certainly acquainted with many spectacular forms, have already been reminded of popular drama also at the very beginning of the interlude, when Thersites arrives in the playing area crying "Abacke, geve me roume! In my way do ye not stande" (l. 3). At the same time the audience are also called to recognise their national British culture by the challenges thrown by the protagonist to heroes of old legends such as "king Arthur, and the knightes of the rounde table" (l. 126), to "Gawyn the curtesse, and Cay the crabed" (l. 130) and to "syr Launcelot de Lake" (l. 136). Arthurian heroes are used here in a sort of mocking ubi sunt? list which does not lament the ephemeral passing of time and the levelling power of death, but craves for ancient, powerful, and threatening enemies to duel with.
The tradition of the mystery cycles is also recalled in Thersites. It is not that episodes from the mysteries are mentioned, even if characters from the most famous biblical stories as performed in the cycles are named in Mater's charm, but admittedly the misogynist flavour of the characterisation of women seems to pass from that genre to this academic farce. In fact the fight between Mater and her son echoes the slapstick scene between Noah and his wife in the Deluge episodes of the Towneley and Chester cycles, although Mrs Noah appears certainly more energetic than poor Mater hurled here and there by Thersites. The cycle episodes, though, portray a fray between husband and wife, while in the interlude the two 'fighters' are mother and child. The physical and 'psychological' picture of his mother drawn by Thersites soon after Telemachus' healing (ll. 782-863) also sounds similar to those of women portrayed in the cycles: the Second Shepherd's speech in the Towneley Secunda Pastorum comes to one's mind, doubled, so to speak, by Mak's description of his wife. Again, as for the Noah's plays, the portraits of women in the cycles concern wives, which constitute the principal difference between them and Thersites' degrading picture of his mother. Nevertheless, what emerges from all of them is still the same misogynist attitude. In the Towneley play the Shepherd's speech is mirrored in Mak's, thus rendering the attack on women stronger, but here, in the Oxonian text, Thersites' words alone are sufficient in building a spoken parallel to his abuse of his mother acted earlier:
Thys totheless trotte kepeth me harde
And suffereth no money in my warde [...]
Aboute the house she hoppeth
And hyr nose ofte droppeth
When the wortes she choppeth.
When that she dothe brewe
I maye saye to you
I am redy to spew.
The droppes to see downe renne,
By all chrysten menne,
From hyr nose to hyr knen. (ll. 789-90; 798-806)
This "haggish mother"(19)
is depicted as sordid and totally unpleasant, with a touch of misery which, perhaps, was an attempt - on the dramatist's side - to capture the sympathy of young penniless students tyrannised by female relatives(20)
.
As mentioned beforehand, only at the very end, after the farcical engrafting of the worms episode and of the misogynist speech, does the episode of Thersites' cowardice reach its end. To the soldier who, when the coward runs away, is left alone, is given the task of concluding the performance and to pronounce the moral (besides the prayer for the royal family). It is noteworthy that in a play like this, i.e. so free from moral tones and based only on farce and comic action, the conclusive speech should contain so many pieces of advice all crammed together. Evidently, the young spectators among the audience had to be led to understand the play as a condemnation of cowardice, certainly, but also of pride (paralleled to vainglory in Miles' words), and of the hardly filial behaviour of the title hero:
Suche gyftes of God that ye excelle in moste
Use them wyth sobernesse and youre selfe never bost.
Seke the laude of God in all that ye doo;
So shall vertue and honoure come you too.
But if you geve youre myndes to the sinne of pryde,
Vanisshe shall youre vertue; your honoure away wil slide.
For pryde is hated of God above
And meekenesse sonest obtaineth his love.
To youre rulers and parentes be you obediente,
Never transgressinge their lawefull commaundemente.
Be ye merye and joyfull at borde and at bedde.
Imagin no traitoury againste youre prince and heade. (ll.
896-907)
With these exhortations the play ends, admittedly in a very traditional way. But the conventional necessity to stress order and law, and to advise the onlookers about a religiously correct behaviour does not efface the bright action and the comic episodes of the farce which the students in the hall and those acting it surely enjoyed.
1. Quotations from, and all relevant information about the play are taken from the edition printed in Marie Axton (ed.), Three Tudor Classical Interludes, Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1982.
2. See M. Axton, "Introduction", ibid., p. 8.
3. In my article on Udall's plays ("At work with young actors and old structures: 'Certen plaies made by Nicholas Udall & their incydentes'"), presented in Girona in 1992 and printed in Francesc Massip (a cura de), Formes Teatrales de la Tradiciò Medieval, Barcelona: Institut del Teatre, 1996, pp. 437-43, I aimed at showing Udall's authorship of Thersites on the basis of a similar use of structures - parody, among others - and of the Roman tradition in the other plays attributable to Udall (Roister Doister, Jacke Jugeler, and Respublica).
4. This is the point in the text which suggests the terminus ad quem of the interlude, since it "pins at least one performance of Thersites to a period of days between 12 October 1537 and 24 October when Jane Seymour was alive." (M. Axton, "Introduction", p. 13).
5. "Folk Play in Tudor Interludes", in Raymond Williams and Marie Axton, eds, English Drama. Forms and Development, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977, pp. 1-23, p. 11.
6. Textor's Thersites was published in 1530 in Paris together with the author's other dramatic dialogues. There is a possible reference to an English performance of this text in an entry in the Magnum Journale of Queens' College Cambridge for 15 January 1542-3: on that day money was given to "magistro perne pro expensis circa actionem dialogi textoris", and about a month later - on 22 February - "magistro perne" got 8d "pro picto clipeo quo miles gloriosus usus est in comoedia" (Alan H. Nelson, ed., Cambridge, REED, 2 vols, Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1989, vol. 1, pp. 128-9; see also M. Axton, "Introduction", p.6).
7. In the English text, Miles is not only the version of the soldier in Textor's dialogue, but also an English soldier, thus adding to the adaptor's efforts to comply with the tastes of his own audience (in l. 411 he says to have "come of late from Calice", that is from Calais still in the hands of the English crown). In this way, the despicable behaviour of the representative of the Homeric world is compared to the courage of a modern and native anonymous soldier (of course, to the latter's advantage).
8. Cf M. Axton, "Introduction", pp. 9-10.
9. Ibid., p. 14.
10. Richard Southern, The Staging of Plays Before Shakespeare, London, Faber, 1973, pp. 290-304, especially p. 300.
11. From the Magnum Journale of Queens' College for 1522-3 we are informed that a certain Richard Robyns was given money for the "ornamenta edium" on the occasion of the performance of a "comedia plauti" (Alan H. Nelson, Cambridge, REED, vol. 1, p.93; of the same author see also Early Cambridge Theatres, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
12. R. Southern, op.cit., p. 290.
13. See, for example, Christ's College Accounts for 1552-3, when money was spent for the "honest enterteynemente of ye worshippe of the towne & thuniuersitie which resorted to our colledge to see ye plaies there" (A.H. Nelson (ed.), Cambridge, REED, vol 1, p. 178). For the presence of women in the audience, the effect of which was "to increase the pressure for plays in English", see also A.H. Nelson, "Women in the Audience of Cambridge Plays", Shakespeare Quarterly, Fall 1990, vol. 41, n° 3, pp. 333-6 (p. 335).
14. See also note 16 infra. The OED quotes some occurrences of the word in the fifteenth century (including one from the Paston Letters, 1465), but indicates Thersites as the first occurrence in the sixteenth century.
15. The text of the monologue, attributed to François Villon by a 16th-century tradition and thought to have been written in the 1470's - can be found in Émile Picot et Christophe Nyrop (eds), Nouveau recueil de farces françaises des XVe & de XVIe siècles, Paris: Damascène Morgand & Charles Fatout, 1880. Cf Gustave Cohen, Le théâtre en France au Moyen Age, 2 vols, Paris: Les Éditions Rieder, 1928-31, vol 2, pp. 65-8; Jean-Claude Aubailly, Le monologue, le dialogue et la sottie, Paris: Honoré Champion, 1976.The monologue was performed in Toronto at the VIII Colloquium of the Société Internationale pour l'Étude du Théâtre Médiéval (1995) by Raphaël Goldwaser.
16. It is curious that the Archer signals his initial surrender to his supposed enemy by offering him his "salade": in fact "sallet" is also the word used by Udall (?) to name Thersites' helmet at the beginning at the interlude.
17. M. Axton (pp. 8-10) traces the origin of this sort of combat in popular culture (proverbs and calendars).
18. For a discussion of the aspects of medieval exorcisms, see Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, especially pp. 69-75.
19. M. Axton, "Notes to Thersites", op.cit., p. 178. M. Axton also stresses the influence of John Skelton's "Elynour Rummynge" on this portrait.
20. The dramatist's attention to his audience is also shown by what is considered to be the internal evidence which connects Thersites to the context of Oxford university: while boasting his courage, Thersites states that "The proctoure and his men I made to renne their waies / And some wente to hide them in Brolen Heys" (ll. 154-5), thus hinting at university officers and to a place in the university surroundings (cf M. Axton, "Notes to Thersites", op.cit., p. 165). What follows immediately in the text is another reference to students' life, i.e. their desire to break university rules and go to London (ll. 156-61):
I tell you, at a woorde,
I set not a torde
By none of them al.
Early and late I wyll walke
And London stretes stalke
Spyte of them greate and small.