The Plays of John Marston by H. Harvey Wood; John MarstonReview by: W. W. GregThe Modern Language Review, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Jan., 1935), pp. 90-94Published by: Modern Humanities Research AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3715658 .

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90 Reviews

lower classes.' Dr Tannenbaum counters this accusation of class-preju- dice by citing the case of Posthumus and Imogen in Cymbeline, where the Princess 'sets social usages at defiance and allies herself with one of her father's dependents.'

What might seem to be an academic question has recently been given 'actuality' by the political passions aroused by the performance of Coriolanus in Paris. And Dr Tannenbaum might have found support for his views in some words of Edward Dowden written nearly half a century ago: 'In the play of Coriolanus the intolerant haughtiness and injustice of the patrician is brutal and stupid, not less, but rather more, than the plebeian inconstancy and turbulence.' To me, at any rate, Dr Tannenbaum is more persuasive when he is discoursing on such a theme than when he is on the trail, hunting for forgeries.

FREDERICK S. BOAS. LONDON.

The Plays of John Marston. In three volumes. Vol. I. Edited from the earliest texts with introduction and notes by H. HARVEY WOOD. Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd. 1934. xliv+246 pp. 8s. 6d.

This edition has at least the merit of not taking itself too seriously: it is bad, but it is not pretentious. Mr Wood's aim appears to have been to produce a popular edition-supposing that Marston could ever be popular -for when in his introduction he comes to any real difficulty he passes it by with the excuse that this is no place for discussion. His ideal is a Bullen 'in the newest cut.'

Mr Wood has been at pains to make himself acquainted with the latest writings and research on Marston: he does not appear to have con- tributed anything of his own, nor can he be said to have woven the yarn supplied by others into any very engaging pattern. The best section of his introduction is that on 'The Plays,' which contains a sensible estimate of Marston as a writer. The rest is hardly adequate. The poetomachia, which, deadly as it is, has made Marston's name more widely familiar than any of his plays, receives hardly more than passing mention; while the Drummond conversations are quoted in seeming ignorance of the work of Penniman and Simpson. Histriomastix and Jack Drum's Enter- tainment are casually mentioned as 'early works of Marston's,' without discussing the attributions or indicating whether it is proposed to include the pieces in the present edition. The bibliographical evidence respecting the authorship of The Insatiate Countess is imperfectly stated. The question of Webster's share in the 'augmented' Malcontent is almost entirely burked: it is futile to consider the evidence of the obviously in- correct title-page apart from that afforded by the head-title. No attempt is made to discuss the intriguing stage history of the play, any more than the curious problems offered by the text. On one discovery Mr Wood is to be congratulated. He has detected in the National Library of Scotland a copy of the Sophonisba of 1606 with a variant title hitherto unrecorded.

90 Reviews

lower classes.' Dr Tannenbaum counters this accusation of class-preju- dice by citing the case of Posthumus and Imogen in Cymbeline, where the Princess 'sets social usages at defiance and allies herself with one of her father's dependents.'

What might seem to be an academic question has recently been given 'actuality' by the political passions aroused by the performance of Coriolanus in Paris. And Dr Tannenbaum might have found support for his views in some words of Edward Dowden written nearly half a century ago: 'In the play of Coriolanus the intolerant haughtiness and injustice of the patrician is brutal and stupid, not less, but rather more, than the plebeian inconstancy and turbulence.' To me, at any rate, Dr Tannenbaum is more persuasive when he is discoursing on such a theme than when he is on the trail, hunting for forgeries.

FREDERICK S. BOAS. LONDON.

The Plays of John Marston. In three volumes. Vol. I. Edited from the earliest texts with introduction and notes by H. HARVEY WOOD. Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd. 1934. xliv+246 pp. 8s. 6d.

This edition has at least the merit of not taking itself too seriously: it is bad, but it is not pretentious. Mr Wood's aim appears to have been to produce a popular edition-supposing that Marston could ever be popular -for when in his introduction he comes to any real difficulty he passes it by with the excuse that this is no place for discussion. His ideal is a Bullen 'in the newest cut.'

Mr Wood has been at pains to make himself acquainted with the latest writings and research on Marston: he does not appear to have con- tributed anything of his own, nor can he be said to have woven the yarn supplied by others into any very engaging pattern. The best section of his introduction is that on 'The Plays,' which contains a sensible estimate of Marston as a writer. The rest is hardly adequate. The poetomachia, which, deadly as it is, has made Marston's name more widely familiar than any of his plays, receives hardly more than passing mention; while the Drummond conversations are quoted in seeming ignorance of the work of Penniman and Simpson. Histriomastix and Jack Drum's Enter- tainment are casually mentioned as 'early works of Marston's,' without discussing the attributions or indicating whether it is proposed to include the pieces in the present edition. The bibliographical evidence respecting the authorship of The Insatiate Countess is imperfectly stated. The question of Webster's share in the 'augmented' Malcontent is almost entirely burked: it is futile to consider the evidence of the obviously in- correct title-page apart from that afforded by the head-title. No attempt is made to discuss the intriguing stage history of the play, any more than the curious problems offered by the text. On one discovery Mr Wood is to be congratulated. He has detected in the National Library of Scotland a copy of the Sophonisba of 1606 with a variant title hitherto unrecorded.

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Reviews 91

This he has reproduced as the frontispiece to the present volume-rather strangely, since it does not include the play.

Explanatory notes fill twenty-eight pages of large type at the end of the volume. The lines are not numbered and the only references are to pages, a clumsy arrangement rendered no more convenient by Mr Wood's liability to omit or misprint the page numbers and misplace the notes. These include a certain amount of interesting information, but as a rule Mr Wood, instead of discussing or explaining his author, is content to refer to places, often in periodicals, where others have done so. This is not editing. Moreover, many difficulties-and he admits that Marston is not an easy writer-are passed over in silence; at least there are a number of passages the sense of which is to me obscure, on which he offers no help.

One of the ways in which Mr Wood has sought to bring Bullen up to date is by printing the text in 'old spelling,' that is to say the spelling of the edition he has chosen as the basis of his own. At the same time he modernises the use of i andj and of u and v. This seems a futile concession to 'popularity.' It will do little to smooth the path of those to whom the orthography of the early seventeenth century is a stumbling block, while to those who are familiar with it the practice is a constant source of irritation. And while making this petty change, the editor keeps lower- case letters at the beginning of lines, sentences, and even proper names whenever carelessness or shortness of type prompted the original com- positor to use them.

The present volume, the first of three, contains the text of three plays, Antonio and Mellida, Antonio's Revenge, and The Malcontent. The first two depend practically upon a single early source, for the collection of 1633 is textually almost negligible. Suffice it to say that Mr Wood's text seems to be substantially correct, that he has adopted without acknow- ledgment some of Bullen's emendations and might with advantage (and acknowledgment) have adopted more, and that he has a few interesting conjectures of his own. But of the plays in this volume The Mlalcontent alone affords an editor real opportunity to show his mettle.

Of this there are three early editions, or what may be best called editions-the two that contain the original text, though they sometimes differ markedly, are partly from the same setting of the type, while copies of the third, the 'augmented' version, differ among themselves in a number of readings. These three editions are represented for Mr Wood by the following copies: A, Dyce 6250; B, BM. C. 39. c. 25; C, BM. C. 34. e. 17; he has not thought it necessary to examine any others. This order, which I proposed as long ago as 1908 and substantiated in 1921, has not been challenged: why then should Mr Wood write: 'These three copies, without reference to Dr Greg's classification, I have called A, B, and C' ? Now, The Malcontent is one of those plays whose textual structure is full of difficulties, only to be solved, if at all, by a detailed examination of all available evidence. But Mr Wood's collation of the three texts is perfunctory and incomplete, and is robbed of such little value as it might have possessed by the fact that he frequently forgets which copy he has

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92 Reviews

decided to call A, which B, and which C! Further, I think that I am right in saying that on only one occasion does he mention the variants presented by different copies of the 'augmented' edition (C). He then prints in his text a perfectly senseless passage, adding at the end of his volume the remark: 'most probably the correct reading is that of the other quarto....' Obviously it is: but Mr Wood appears to have had only the vaguest notion what 'the other quarto' was. Perhaps he imagined that he was dealing with a variant between A and B, for he failed to record the important fact that the passage is found in C alone. It would seem that he was aware of the variant only because Dr McKerrow mentions it in his Introduction to Bibliography in the course of a most ingenious argument on the practice of dictation in the printing house-' not very happily,' Mr Wood rashly remarks.

B is taken as the basis of the text: 'I have used B as my original, but have adopted (with acknowledgment) what seem to me to be better and fuller readings from A and C.' The passages that first appeared in C are duly inserted, and are distinguished by asterisks-when the editor remembers to do so. But there is nothing in his text to indicate that C alone supplies the Induction and a long passage at the end of Act I. And if B is the basis, why is the address 'To the Reader' printed from C, and why do fragments of C-text appear sporadically elsewhere? It is, indeed, not always easy to determine what text Mr Wood is following, for his pages are full of misprints. In the course of two short scenes (filling scarce more than two pages) I have counted twenty-eight un- recorded departures from the original, of which not more than eight small differences of punctuation can be attributed to emendation. The rest include 'not unlike' for 'not much vnlike' and 'out of' for 'from out'; while one deliberate alteration deserves the pillory. A and B afford the perfectly satisfactory reading (if the necessary query be supplied):

Vlisses absent, 0 Ithaca, can chastest Penelope hold out [?]

Mr Wood, by adopting a misprint of C and tampering with the punctua- tion, produces the nonsense:

Ulises absent, O Ithacan, chastest Penelope, hold out.

The editor's attitude towards collation appears in such a character- istically impatient note as 'There are in A many minor variants on this paragraph'-a speech of some dozen lines. In fact apart from negligible (and unusually rare) differences of spelling and punctuation, there are only two variants, both important and one probably preserving the correct reading.

Mr Wood reproduces in the main the rather clumsy punctuation of the original, even preserving such accidents and eccentricities as commas and semi-colons at the end of speeches and full stops after questions. On the other hand, his occasional interferences are haphazard and not always happy; and when he feels constrained to introduce a period in the middle of a speech, he neglects to supply a capital after it. He departs from the original, most inconveniently, in printing stage directions in roman (like

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Reviews 93

the text) except here and there where he inadvertently slips into the more usual practice of italicising. Some entrance directions are for no apparent reason printed in brackets (as is the heading 'Prologue'). Other directions are misplaced, or omitted, or altered without warning: one obviously absurd one is left as it stands. There is no attempt to supply necessary exits.

At one point a portion of a speech is unnecessarily taken to be a stage direction; at another some words, which in the original stand within parentheses in the margin, are similarly treated, though they are almost certainly a clumsy addition to the text.

At least once a passage printed as prose in the quarto is silently rearranged as verse, and at least once verse has been improperly re- duced to prose. But as a rule rearrangements are suggested by intro- ducing virgules in the text. The suggestions are perfunctory; some passages allowing no satisfactory division into verse are marked, while others more amenable have been overlooked. Four perfectly satisfactory lines of verse are proposed for rearrangement.

The editor has used parentheses to indicate alike letters that should be supplied and letters that should be omitted. He also uses them to dis- tinguish certain minor additions of C, which is unfortunate, since one such addition is already so marked in the original. Elsewhere he notes an addition of B without indicating its extent. In at least one instance he has in his text a reading which, though clearly not intended as an emendation, agrees with no quarto, while the accompanying collations are incorrect. The latter often happens. A reading is quoted as an emendation by Bullen which is in fact found in A; while another emendation of Bullen's is quoted without the reading of A for which it is an emenda- tion (B and C differing). A number of clearly correct suggestions of Bullen's are rejected, and several obvious misprints have been allowed to pass uncorrected'. The copy-text is at times either retained or silently misamended when A or C or both afford the correct reading. On the other hand, readings are arbitrarily introduced from C (some of them obvious errors) and a whole line is deliberately omitted (as the collation shows) because the compositor of C accidentally overlooked it. Readings are given as emendations (or as supplied by C) which are in fact those of the copy-text. A passage which first appeared in B is stated to have been 'omitted in A,' implying a critical judgment which may be correct, but for which no reason is advanced. At the same point a line is said to be repeated in C: this is incorrect, it is B that repeats the line. There are in B (not A, as stated) many manuscript notes and emendations in what appears to be a contemporary hand. Of these three are quoted, one incorrectly. Some readings are mere misprints in the present edition.

Altogether a slovenly piece of work, unredeemed by either judgment or

1 The most important I have noticed is on p. 212 where all three quartos (and Bullen) have the absurd line:

Death giues eternitie a glorious breath:

in which the last word should be 'birth' to rime with' mirth' ('breath' has been accidentally repeated from the third line above).

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94 94 Reviews Reviews

taste. The only comfort is that it is too obviously defective to interfere with the production of the serious edition which is rather urgently needed.

The volume announces itself as the first of a series of 'Blackfriars Dramatists edited by H. Harvey Wood.' It is well printed and attrac- tively bound, but I look forward to its successors without enthusiasm.

W. W. GREG. LONDON.

The Classic Deities in Bacon, a Study in Mythological Symbolism. By CHARLES W. LEMMI. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press; London: Milford. 1933. ix+224 pp. 12s. 6d.

Professor Lemmi has succeeded in establishing, against the tradition of Bacon scholarship, the fundamental thesis of his book on Bacon's treat- ment of classical mythology; the thesis is an important one, and it is a pity that Professor Lemmi's method of exposition tends to obscure it and to surround it with unnecessary difficulty.

The introduction gives a thorough account of the many interpretations of classical mythology current during the Renaissance, an account useful in contributing to an understanding of the intellectual climate, so to speak, of Bacon's De Sapientia Veterum. At the end of the introduction appears the following passage, as it would seem, the central proposition to be sustained by the ensuing discussion: 'More recently it has been said of his mythological exegesis that "a good deal of it seems to be original." I hope to show in the following pages that even this cautious estimate goes too far.' Certainly this declaration seems to deny to Bacon any sub- stantial originality in either the interpretation or the application of the fables; but the reading of a page or two makes it clear that the author cannot mean anything so sweeping. Bacon is given credit for 'skilfully refreshing' a myth, for 'a subtle gift of transmutation,' for elevating and blending 'his acquired conceptions into a loftier and more beautiful whole.' The course of the argument shows Bacon making express the implicit and giving definiteness to the vague in the interpretations of his predecessors. If the work were designed as a study in sources, proving that Bacon had borrowed his whole system, it would be completely un- convincing. The difficulty which Professor Lemmi has himself made is not solved until almost the very end of the book. Professor Lemmi's purpose really is to confute Spedding's declaration in his preface to De Sapientia Veterum: 'The object of the work was probably to obtain a more favour- able hearing for certain philosophical doctrines of Bacon's own; for it seems certain that the fables could never have suggested the ideas, how- ever a man to whom the ideas had suggested themselves might find or fancy he found them in the fables.' To overthrow this contention it suffices to show that Bacon accepts the methods of interpretation con- ventional in his time; the argument is strengthened by demonstrating that for many of his ideas Bacon is indebted in detail to others, while others are implicit or indistinctly stated by earlier writers. In fact, the argument against Spedding is triumphantly successful; and it is no small

taste. The only comfort is that it is too obviously defective to interfere with the production of the serious edition which is rather urgently needed.

The volume announces itself as the first of a series of 'Blackfriars Dramatists edited by H. Harvey Wood.' It is well printed and attrac- tively bound, but I look forward to its successors without enthusiasm.

W. W. GREG. LONDON.

The Classic Deities in Bacon, a Study in Mythological Symbolism. By CHARLES W. LEMMI. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press; London: Milford. 1933. ix+224 pp. 12s. 6d.

Professor Lemmi has succeeded in establishing, against the tradition of Bacon scholarship, the fundamental thesis of his book on Bacon's treat- ment of classical mythology; the thesis is an important one, and it is a pity that Professor Lemmi's method of exposition tends to obscure it and to surround it with unnecessary difficulty.

The introduction gives a thorough account of the many interpretations of classical mythology current during the Renaissance, an account useful in contributing to an understanding of the intellectual climate, so to speak, of Bacon's De Sapientia Veterum. At the end of the introduction appears the following passage, as it would seem, the central proposition to be sustained by the ensuing discussion: 'More recently it has been said of his mythological exegesis that "a good deal of it seems to be original." I hope to show in the following pages that even this cautious estimate goes too far.' Certainly this declaration seems to deny to Bacon any sub- stantial originality in either the interpretation or the application of the fables; but the reading of a page or two makes it clear that the author cannot mean anything so sweeping. Bacon is given credit for 'skilfully refreshing' a myth, for 'a subtle gift of transmutation,' for elevating and blending 'his acquired conceptions into a loftier and more beautiful whole.' The course of the argument shows Bacon making express the implicit and giving definiteness to the vague in the interpretations of his predecessors. If the work were designed as a study in sources, proving that Bacon had borrowed his whole system, it would be completely un- convincing. The difficulty which Professor Lemmi has himself made is not solved until almost the very end of the book. Professor Lemmi's purpose really is to confute Spedding's declaration in his preface to De Sapientia Veterum: 'The object of the work was probably to obtain a more favour- able hearing for certain philosophical doctrines of Bacon's own; for it seems certain that the fables could never have suggested the ideas, how- ever a man to whom the ideas had suggested themselves might find or fancy he found them in the fables.' To overthrow this contention it suffices to show that Bacon accepts the methods of interpretation con- ventional in his time; the argument is strengthened by demonstrating that for many of his ideas Bacon is indebted in detail to others, while others are implicit or indistinctly stated by earlier writers. In fact, the argument against Spedding is triumphantly successful; and it is no small

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