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Three Rastell Plays: Four Elements, Calisto and Melebea, Gentleness and Nobility
The three interludes in this volume come from the press of John Rastell, barrister, printer, adventurer, member of parliament, brother-in-law of Thomas More, and one of the first men in England to have a stage built at his own house. The Four Elements is unique in its genre of scientific morality play. Rastell composed it himself to expound the rudiments of natural science and to air his own frustrating experience of venturing to the New World, in 1517. The anonymous Calisto and Melebea is based on the beginning of the notorious Spanish novel, La Celestina, and has an elegance and subtlety in its satirical comedy of manners that is not found elsewhere in earlyEnglish drama. Gentleness and Nobiblitycrisply debates the case of aristocracy against meritocracy in a mocking humanist vein. It is probably by John Heywood, Rastell's son-on-law. The variety of the play testifies to Rastell's enterprise as publisher and their conmon theme of social responsibility to his strength of personality.
175 pages, Hardcover
First published November 21, 1979
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July 1, 2024
I had the incredible good fortune of finding a first-edition copy of this book which used to belong to the great Professor Catherine Belsey. My copy has her handwritten notes on these plays and a small collection of her thoughts on the book itself (all of which I've reproduced at the end of this review). Her marginalia is concentrated in the first of the three plays, Rastell's own Four Elements, which she went on to write about in her book The Subject of Tragedy. The process of reading these plays (and Axton's excellent introduction), and comparing Belsey's marginalia with her published writing, has been—and I know this is a little ridiculous—one of the most exciting and stimulating intellectual activities of my life (at least outside my specialization).
Do I need to say that these plays are obscure? almost totally unread? Probably not. Rastell isn't so early or so great a printer to be famous for his press alone, and he didn't print any Shakespeare. Nor is he a great writer or scientist. In fact, he seems most at home writing moralizing epilogues, whose great theme is the need for legislation to curtail wayward youth. This volume contains Rastell's original "scientific morality play," alongside an (apparently infamously) bad translation of the Spanish La Celestina, and a somewhat shy humanist dialogue called Gentleness and Nobility by Heywood (John, not the more famous Thomas).
These plays did not meaningfully contribute to the development of early modern drama, or genre, nor were they popular, nor are they great works. That much is, I think, sadly pretty much indisputable. But I think these plays are distinguished—really distinguished—by their great and unusual amenability to analysis, even to non-experts.
In this sense certainly the greatest of these three is Rastell’s Four Elements. What exactly I mean I’ll explain below, but first I want to talk about it on its own terms. I think Belsey is right on the money when she calls its exposition “exactly the style of a good lecture — vigorous, colloquial, and transparent.” It is also, I think, a good lecture in substance; we all know the Earth is round, but could we make the case to a person from the 16th century? or, if we could, could we show it is round in both directions? or round all the way (around, so to speak)? Rastell can and does. Another minor point: Rastell evinces some genuine poetic sensibility in at least two moments, both having to do with his conception of the (scientific) world: First, he calls the horizon “The sercle partynge the yerth and skye” — a nice line. Second, he has Humanyte make the rather good observation that it may be that only the Earth’s land is curved, while the sea is flat, at which point Experyence shows that not to be the case, concluding that “And that provyth the see rounde.” The round sea is an image I quite like. More minor points include: the play as snapshot of early 16th century science; its place in the tradition of popular science; a defense of the vernacular; Axton’s inexplicable insistence that Experyence be equipped with a telescope, which Belsey in the margins points out with a question mark and silently elides in her book; Sensuall Appetyte as and as-not a morality-play Vice; and the bibliographical interest of Rastell being the first to print a musical score with movable type (in this book).
The real pull of this play for me is that Rastell opens Pandora’s Box: why ought one acquire scientific knowledge? Rastell—always a moralizer—wanted to make Four Elements just as much informative about science as instructive as to why its audience ought to be well-informed (about science). His justification comes in the form of a rapid succession of arguments, each less secure in itself than the last, but what’s interesting is that each of them supposes a different worldview. Crucially, Rastell displays awareness of the traditional (of his time) moral framework (what Belsey calls “the discursive model”), viz. that a thing is good insofar as it leads to awareness of one’s duty towards God and to salvation. He is operating in this mode when he argues that by studying “Furst of the elementis the sytuacyon, / And of their effectis the cause and generacyon,” one can rise by degrees all the way to “The knowlege of God and his hye mageste, / And so to lerne to do his dewte.” Later, wary perhaps that his audience will not be convinced to study science by promises of long-term gain, he employs the prosperity gospel: Nature tells Humanyte “For if thou wylt lerne no sciens / Nother by study nor experiens, / I shall the[e] never avaunce, / But in the world thou shalt dure th[e]n, / Dyspysed of every wyse man.” Most interesting is Rastell’s employment of what appears to be a wholly original to him and wholly circular scientism. Throughout the play Rastell argues that acquiring scientific knowledge is virtuous because doing so allows a person to elevate members of his community out of (scientific) ignorance, which everyone knows to be bad. The presence and obvious immaturity of this argument is a fascinating artifact of just how new science was at his time.
His uncertainty as to how to fit science into his moral framework(s) permeates the play. This uncertainty—this immature scientism—together with what is recognizably a modern scientific outlook, is a wonderful thing.
While any modern person can, I think, feel this tension in Rastell’s play, Heywood’s Gentleness and Nobility seems to be in tension in two (connected) directions: on the level of genre and late-medieval literary convention, and on the more obvious (to us) epistemological/foundational level. Certainly Axton only has time for the former in his teasing introduction, which is just begging for a more thorough analysis (which I don’t know enough to really do). But the epistemological issues are glaringly obvious: when, in a movement depicted with exceptional naturalism, the dialogue devolves from substantial to about the parameters of the debate itself, cracks begin to show, and when a character intervenes to reorient the debate it’s as much genre convention as necessary defense. To be brief I’ll just supply a few extracts:
A good analysis of moments like these ought, in my opinion, to make the unified case that Heywood’s genre-conventional debate is on unsteady generic-epistemological footing.
But what I really want to say that Heywood’s dialogue humanized the period for me in a way e.g. Chaucer never really did. When you hear the Plowman and the Knight have the same debate about the morality of inheritance you’ve heard a million times; or when the Plowman bemoans that “such extorsyoners had oppressyd / The labouryng people” from time immemorial; or maybe most of all when the Plowman says that, when people are set in an opinion, even “If God hym selfe wold than wyth [them] reason / In effect it shal nomore avayle / Than wyth a whip to dryfe forth a snayle;” it all makes you think of people and conversations you’ve had in today’s world. Gentleness and Nobility is full of these little moments.
Of these three surely the worst is Calisto and Melebea, inferior in every way to both the Spanish original and the 1631 prose translation which followed it. A somewhat labored text, Axton wants to convince me that there are moments where one can delight in the vernacular, but I’m not sold, and apparently neither were Rastell’s clients since he died with 300 or so copies of this unsold. For the die-hard fan of La Celestina there’s interest here, or for the scholar of Anglo-Spanish literary relations, or even for the person interested in seeing the reformation played out on the English stage (Celestina is an ardent Mariolater and veneratrix of relics). For me (and spoiler warning for the rest of the paragraph) what’s interesting here is one simple aspect: this play adapts the obscenity of the original allegorically, all hinging on this one line:
Celestina has just convinced Melebea to give over her girdle. In the original, this is the first step towards the ultimate seduction of Malebea by her lover. In the English adaptation, this is the climax of the work, allegorically signifying the corruption of Melebea’s will, for which she then immediately repents, and the play ends. But if I were staging this play I’d end the work right here. This is exactly the tragic fall which ends later drama but which of course cannot be the end of a light Interlude. Anyway, it’s a great symbolic moment in an otherwise quite stale drama.
As to the edition itself, it is excellent. The text is conservatively printed but with the usual concessions to modern readers (i/j, u/v; abbreviations spelled out), though separately from the notes and without indication as to which lines have notes corresponding to them. The notes themselves are pretty good though at times uneven—for instance they sometimes offer glosses of difficult words, sometimes not (there is a separate glossary). Small mistakes are infrequent but exist: phantom notes, wrong line numbers, even out of order notes. The introduction is wonderful and concisely covers all major points of interest. I look forward to reading the rest of the series.
--------------------
Here follow Cathrine Belsey’s marginalia, all in light pencil. Things in brackets are my notes.
The following was printed neatly in the back cover:
Rastell is not part of the Great Tradition, which is odd, in a way, since his work shows awakened moral intensity and a clear commitment to “life”. But these interludes are a bit early for the canon, and are earnest about rather different things. In these hard times, it is gratifying to find find publishers are still willing to produce scholarly editions of work which cannot expect to find a large and immediate market.
It appears that Rastell, printer, lawyer and member of the Sir Thomas More circle, may also have taken took something of a risk in offering plays for sale in print in the first decades of the 16th c. But he too was committed to dispelling ignorance and making recondite knowledge available, in palatable form. Richard Axton, elegantly printed and lightly but reliably annotated volume included Rastell’s own…
None of these has hitherto been available in good modern editions and students of the [work?] have had either to depend on the work of the notoriously unreliable J.S. Farmer or to have recourse (extremely reluctantly in my experience) to the Tudor typefaces of the MSRs [Malone Society Reprints].
Part of Series. Continuity. Neglected period.
Here follow annotations to Rastell’s Four Elements, in the form:
[line number] when text has been highlighted, usually by means of a line running vertically along the text
[line number] (annotation) when something has been written in the margins
[line number] (u “text”) when “text” has been underlined
or combinations thereof, separated by a semicolon. Sometimes two things have been written, one in each margin.
Title Page (c. 1520 / info not new, but popularized), 19-21, 22 (class), 25-26 (vernacular), 28 (u “gravyte”), 50-51, 50-56 (u “for a commyn wealth”; wisdom of this world / Secular values & analysis ↓; riches vs. common wealth), 68 (again), 70 (u “their neyghbours distruccion”), 74-75 (!) , 76 (!), 83 (u “God”), 84 (u “the commyn welth”), 85 (↓; clerks), 90-91 (*; u “to knowledge that yngnorant be.), 92-94 (u “creaturys”; things, not meanings (Plato) via S. Paul / a parallel trad which takes over? Book of Nature.), 99-101 (u “mageste”, “to do his dewte”; A bit brisk? project), 108 (necessary), 133 (u “hurt the sentence.”), 211-215 (dominion ha / knowledge for own sake? / cf. [p.] 38), 218-224 (participation in secular drama), 245 (plain style), 290-295 (? / cf. [p.] 36; Plain style), 340-347 (logical proof), 405-409 (exactly cf. [Mauliad?]), 418 (nonsense), 535-538 (?), 562-565 (materiality of the [synafer?] !), 598-600 (pun), 617 (pun), 667-666, 778, 870 (u “we knowe nothynge at all”), 871-875 (↓; curiosity of audience Stimulated?), 1040-1042, 1063-1068 (empirical evidence), 1101-1105 (empirical evidence), 1122-1123 (u “shew” & “playne experimentis”), 1134 s.d. (u “demonstrates”; circles “telescope”; ?), 1137-1138, 1141-1144, 1204 (u “losophy”), 1301-1303, 1432-1443, Under last lines (S. A. [Sensual Appetite] Is not exactly Vice, but has that role, a clear opp. between them & learning.)
Here follow annotations to the anonymous Calisto and Melebea, in form as above:
Title page (c. 1525), 74 (Wyatt!), 117 (Petrarchan - condemned p 31), 122-124, 198 (?), 227 (↓), 234-240 (Undermines anticipates Shak. comedy - [acid?] comments on excesses of Petrarchan love but also looks back to RR?), 311-317 (Seneca -> Maquerelle)
There were no annotations to Gentleness and Nobility, or to the notes or glossary.
Do I need to say that these plays are obscure? almost totally unread? Probably not. Rastell isn't so early or so great a printer to be famous for his press alone, and he didn't print any Shakespeare. Nor is he a great writer or scientist. In fact, he seems most at home writing moralizing epilogues, whose great theme is the need for legislation to curtail wayward youth. This volume contains Rastell's original "scientific morality play," alongside an (apparently infamously) bad translation of the Spanish La Celestina, and a somewhat shy humanist dialogue called Gentleness and Nobility by Heywood (John, not the more famous Thomas).
These plays did not meaningfully contribute to the development of early modern drama, or genre, nor were they popular, nor are they great works. That much is, I think, sadly pretty much indisputable. But I think these plays are distinguished—really distinguished—by their great and unusual amenability to analysis, even to non-experts.
In this sense certainly the greatest of these three is Rastell’s Four Elements. What exactly I mean I’ll explain below, but first I want to talk about it on its own terms. I think Belsey is right on the money when she calls its exposition “exactly the style of a good lecture — vigorous, colloquial, and transparent.” It is also, I think, a good lecture in substance; we all know the Earth is round, but could we make the case to a person from the 16th century? or, if we could, could we show it is round in both directions? or round all the way (around, so to speak)? Rastell can and does. Another minor point: Rastell evinces some genuine poetic sensibility in at least two moments, both having to do with his conception of the (scientific) world: First, he calls the horizon “The sercle partynge the yerth and skye” — a nice line. Second, he has Humanyte make the rather good observation that it may be that only the Earth’s land is curved, while the sea is flat, at which point Experyence shows that not to be the case, concluding that “And that provyth the see rounde.” The round sea is an image I quite like. More minor points include: the play as snapshot of early 16th century science; its place in the tradition of popular science; a defense of the vernacular; Axton’s inexplicable insistence that Experyence be equipped with a telescope, which Belsey in the margins points out with a question mark and silently elides in her book; Sensuall Appetyte as and as-not a morality-play Vice; and the bibliographical interest of Rastell being the first to print a musical score with movable type (in this book).
The real pull of this play for me is that Rastell opens Pandora’s Box: why ought one acquire scientific knowledge? Rastell—always a moralizer—wanted to make Four Elements just as much informative about science as instructive as to why its audience ought to be well-informed (about science). His justification comes in the form of a rapid succession of arguments, each less secure in itself than the last, but what’s interesting is that each of them supposes a different worldview. Crucially, Rastell displays awareness of the traditional (of his time) moral framework (what Belsey calls “the discursive model”), viz. that a thing is good insofar as it leads to awareness of one’s duty towards God and to salvation. He is operating in this mode when he argues that by studying “Furst of the elementis the sytuacyon, / And of their effectis the cause and generacyon,” one can rise by degrees all the way to “The knowlege of God and his hye mageste, / And so to lerne to do his dewte.” Later, wary perhaps that his audience will not be convinced to study science by promises of long-term gain, he employs the prosperity gospel: Nature tells Humanyte “For if thou wylt lerne no sciens / Nother by study nor experiens, / I shall the[e] never avaunce, / But in the world thou shalt dure th[e]n, / Dyspysed of every wyse man.” Most interesting is Rastell’s employment of what appears to be a wholly original to him and wholly circular scientism. Throughout the play Rastell argues that acquiring scientific knowledge is virtuous because doing so allows a person to elevate members of his community out of (scientific) ignorance, which everyone knows to be bad. The presence and obvious immaturity of this argument is a fascinating artifact of just how new science was at his time.
His uncertainty as to how to fit science into his moral framework(s) permeates the play. This uncertainty—this immature scientism—together with what is recognizably a modern scientific outlook, is a wonderful thing.
While any modern person can, I think, feel this tension in Rastell’s play, Heywood’s Gentleness and Nobility seems to be in tension in two (connected) directions: on the level of genre and late-medieval literary convention, and on the more obvious (to us) epistemological/foundational level. Certainly Axton only has time for the former in his teasing introduction, which is just begging for a more thorough analysis (which I don’t know enough to really do). But the epistemological issues are glaringly obvious: when, in a movement depicted with exceptional naturalism, the dialogue devolves from substantial to about the parameters of the debate itself, cracks begin to show, and when a character intervenes to reorient the debate it’s as much genre convention as necessary defense. To be brief I’ll just supply a few extracts:
The Plowman says that people improving land for the purpose of passing it on to their successors is [...] a good dede upon an yvell intent, and that the devil will pay such people their due, whereupon the Knyght replies Whyder God or the devyll quyt them therfore, / Is now to our purpose never the more.
And yet ye knowe well that of phylozophy / The pryncyples of contraryant be / Unto the very groundys of devynite. / For the phylozophers agre here unto: Quod mundus fuit semper ab eterno, and devynys: quod in principio omium / Cravit deus terram et celum.
A good analysis of moments like these ought, in my opinion, to make the unified case that Heywood’s genre-conventional debate is on unsteady generic-epistemological footing.
But what I really want to say that Heywood’s dialogue humanized the period for me in a way e.g. Chaucer never really did. When you hear the Plowman and the Knight have the same debate about the morality of inheritance you’ve heard a million times; or when the Plowman bemoans that “such extorsyoners had oppressyd / The labouryng people” from time immemorial; or maybe most of all when the Plowman says that, when people are set in an opinion, even “If God hym selfe wold than wyth [them] reason / In effect it shal nomore avayle / Than wyth a whip to dryfe forth a snayle;” it all makes you think of people and conversations you’ve had in today’s world. Gentleness and Nobility is full of these little moments.
Of these three surely the worst is Calisto and Melebea, inferior in every way to both the Spanish original and the 1631 prose translation which followed it. A somewhat labored text, Axton wants to convince me that there are moments where one can delight in the vernacular, but I’m not sold, and apparently neither were Rastell’s clients since he died with 300 or so copies of this unsold. For the die-hard fan of La Celestina there’s interest here, or for the scholar of Anglo-Spanish literary relations, or even for the person interested in seeing the reformation played out on the English stage (Celestina is an ardent Mariolater and veneratrix of relics). For me (and spoiler warning for the rest of the paragraph) what’s interesting here is one simple aspect: this play adapts the obscenity of the original allegorically, all hinging on this one line:
Now know ye by the half tale what the whole doth meane;
Celestina has just convinced Melebea to give over her girdle. In the original, this is the first step towards the ultimate seduction of Malebea by her lover. In the English adaptation, this is the climax of the work, allegorically signifying the corruption of Melebea’s will, for which she then immediately repents, and the play ends. But if I were staging this play I’d end the work right here. This is exactly the tragic fall which ends later drama but which of course cannot be the end of a light Interlude. Anyway, it’s a great symbolic moment in an otherwise quite stale drama.
As to the edition itself, it is excellent. The text is conservatively printed but with the usual concessions to modern readers (i/j, u/v; abbreviations spelled out), though separately from the notes and without indication as to which lines have notes corresponding to them. The notes themselves are pretty good though at times uneven—for instance they sometimes offer glosses of difficult words, sometimes not (there is a separate glossary). Small mistakes are infrequent but exist: phantom notes, wrong line numbers, even out of order notes. The introduction is wonderful and concisely covers all major points of interest. I look forward to reading the rest of the series.
--------------------
Here follow Cathrine Belsey’s marginalia, all in light pencil. Things in brackets are my notes.
The following was printed neatly in the back cover:
Rastell is not part of the Great Tradition, which is odd, in a way, since his work shows awakened moral intensity and a clear commitment to “life”. But these interludes are a bit early for the canon, and are earnest about rather different things. In these hard times, it is gratifying to find find publishers are still willing to produce scholarly editions of work which cannot expect to find a large and immediate market.
It appears that Rastell, printer, lawyer and member of the Sir Thomas More circle, may also have taken took something of a risk in offering plays for sale in print in the first decades of the 16th c. But he too was committed to dispelling ignorance and making recondite knowledge available, in palatable form. Richard Axton, elegantly printed and lightly but reliably annotated volume included Rastell’s own…
None of these has hitherto been available in good modern editions and students of the [work?] have had either to depend on the work of the notoriously unreliable J.S. Farmer or to have recourse (extremely reluctantly in my experience) to the Tudor typefaces of the MSRs [Malone Society Reprints].
Part of Series. Continuity. Neglected period.
Here follow annotations to Rastell’s Four Elements, in the form:
[line number] when text has been highlighted, usually by means of a line running vertically along the text
[line number] (annotation) when something has been written in the margins
[line number] (u “text”) when “text” has been underlined
or combinations thereof, separated by a semicolon. Sometimes two things have been written, one in each margin.
Title Page (c. 1520 / info not new, but popularized), 19-21, 22 (class), 25-26 (vernacular), 28 (u “gravyte”), 50-51, 50-56 (u “for a commyn wealth”; wisdom of this world / Secular values & analysis ↓; riches vs. common wealth), 68 (again), 70 (u “their neyghbours distruccion”), 74-75 (!) , 76 (!), 83 (u “God”), 84 (u “the commyn welth”), 85 (↓; clerks), 90-91 (*; u “to knowledge that yngnorant be.), 92-94 (u “creaturys”; things, not meanings (Plato) via S. Paul / a parallel trad which takes over? Book of Nature.), 99-101 (u “mageste”, “to do his dewte”; A bit brisk? project), 108 (necessary), 133 (u “hurt the sentence.”), 211-215 (dominion ha / knowledge for own sake? / cf. [p.] 38), 218-224 (participation in secular drama), 245 (plain style), 290-295 (? / cf. [p.] 36; Plain style), 340-347 (logical proof), 405-409 (exactly cf. [Mauliad?]), 418 (nonsense), 535-538 (?), 562-565 (materiality of the [synafer?] !), 598-600 (pun), 617 (pun), 667-666, 778, 870 (u “we knowe nothynge at all”), 871-875 (↓; curiosity of audience Stimulated?), 1040-1042, 1063-1068 (empirical evidence), 1101-1105 (empirical evidence), 1122-1123 (u “shew” & “playne experimentis”), 1134 s.d. (u “demonstrates”; circles “telescope”; ?), 1137-1138, 1141-1144, 1204 (u “losophy”), 1301-1303, 1432-1443, Under last lines (S. A. [Sensual Appetite] Is not exactly Vice, but has that role, a clear opp. between them & learning.)
Here follow annotations to the anonymous Calisto and Melebea, in form as above:
Title page (c. 1525), 74 (Wyatt!), 117 (Petrarchan - condemned p 31), 122-124, 198 (?), 227 (↓), 234-240 (Undermines anticipates Shak. comedy - [acid?] comments on excesses of Petrarchan love but also looks back to RR?), 311-317 (Seneca -> Maquerelle)
There were no annotations to Gentleness and Nobility, or to the notes or glossary.
September 17, 2015
I read Four Elements from this book and now, having had the book recalled, I'll just leave a review of it. So keep in mind I haven't finished all of these plays!
Axton provides a good biographical introduction to John Rastell and a short introduction to each of the plays included. The text itself is still in Middle English, but has been cleaned up and is easily readable even for those (such as my poor boyfriend...) who haven't encountered it before. Take, for instance, the opening lines:
"Thaboundant grace of the power devyne,/
Which doth illumyne the worlde invyron,/
Preserve this audyence and cause them to inclyne/
To charyte, this is my petycyon."
The play itself is fascinating and nicely coupled with Axton's explanation of where and how Rastell may have gotten his information. This interlude, similar to a morality play, allegorically pits vice against virtue for mankind's attention. Here it is Sensuall Appetyte and Studyous Desire fighting for Humanyte, aided respectively by Yngnoraunce and Experyence. Nature Naturate and his Messengere make an appearance and set the play in motion; the Taverner figures as well! While fairly instructive, it is also entertaining--and according to the playwright himself you can even leave out the "sad mater," i.e. the more serious scientific instruction, and just focus on the wine and women and dancing and fighting!
Although some of the leaves of the print are missing, Axton does well to briefly fill in readers. Delightfully, musical notation has been included too. The real strength of Axton's edition is his careful presentation of the text, having noted its deficiencies and included information such as music in order to support it.
Axton provides a good biographical introduction to John Rastell and a short introduction to each of the plays included. The text itself is still in Middle English, but has been cleaned up and is easily readable even for those (such as my poor boyfriend...) who haven't encountered it before. Take, for instance, the opening lines:
"Thaboundant grace of the power devyne,/
Which doth illumyne the worlde invyron,/
Preserve this audyence and cause them to inclyne/
To charyte, this is my petycyon."
The play itself is fascinating and nicely coupled with Axton's explanation of where and how Rastell may have gotten his information. This interlude, similar to a morality play, allegorically pits vice against virtue for mankind's attention. Here it is Sensuall Appetyte and Studyous Desire fighting for Humanyte, aided respectively by Yngnoraunce and Experyence. Nature Naturate and his Messengere make an appearance and set the play in motion; the Taverner figures as well! While fairly instructive, it is also entertaining--and according to the playwright himself you can even leave out the "sad mater," i.e. the more serious scientific instruction, and just focus on the wine and women and dancing and fighting!
Although some of the leaves of the print are missing, Axton does well to briefly fill in readers. Delightfully, musical notation has been included too. The real strength of Axton's edition is his careful presentation of the text, having noted its deficiencies and included information such as music in order to support it.
September 25, 2024
I can cheerfully report that these are three of the worst plays I have ever read. So bad they’re good.
Most shocking is Calisto and Melebea. It starts off so well. The author is the best poet here, on a line by line basis, and he’s correctly selected a classic of Spanish literature to adapt. Things start to wobble when he completely fails to bring out all those rich themes of the original, and it completely derails when he literally loses the plot. The play consists solely of the set-up at which point Rastell himself has added an entirely inappropriate epilogue. Shocking. I’m not surprised the author has seen fit not to reveal his name. The film equivalent would be a remake of Jurassic Park which gets to the bit where they’re in the Jeep and he swivels her head but then the credits roll.
Almost as bad is Gentleness and Nobility. The author, John Heywood, describes this as a dialogue. It literally is. A knight, a merchant, and a ploughman argue about which of them is most noble. The ploughman hits the knight a couple of times but quite frankly Plato is more action oriented. It beggars belief that anyone would think it appropriate to stage something so lacking in basic stagecraft.
However, just reading it is not unpleasant. It’s very much in the Piers Plowman tradition. It was written to be staged at court and it’s rather interesting to see just how much bald political dissent could be openly expressed in that setting – as long as the ploughman does not get the last word, and as long as women get no word at all.
The Four Elements. This one is by Rastell himself. It’s a secular morality play in which Mankind is offered an education and rejects it in favour of the pub before repenting. It largely consists of a series of lectures about the scientific knowledge of the day. There’s a good reason why we never actually hear how Sir Bedivere knows the world to be banana shaped. Astounding that anyone would think this was a good idea for a play.
However, it is an interesting read if you’re curious about the development of scientific knowledge. I’d recommend this, John Wilkins’ Discovery of a World in the Moone and Arthur C. Clarke’s Interplanetary Flight.
Also interesting are Rastell’s priorities, placing science above belief.
‘Wherfore it behovyth the of verey nede
The cause of thyngys furst for to lerne,
And than to knowe and laude the hye God eterne.’
As I read I took Rastell to be an atheist who was choosing his words carefully, though having googled him he was very much into religion and wrote on the subject, lost his fiends when he converted to Protestantism. He died in prison because he had a big mouth.
So, on the whole, all very enjoyable, though not for the reasons the authors intended. The edition very well done as you’d expect for a D. S. Brewer book. Largely the original spelling with just enough modernisation to make it intelligible. Excellent introductions, notes and glossary.
Most shocking is Calisto and Melebea. It starts off so well. The author is the best poet here, on a line by line basis, and he’s correctly selected a classic of Spanish literature to adapt. Things start to wobble when he completely fails to bring out all those rich themes of the original, and it completely derails when he literally loses the plot. The play consists solely of the set-up at which point Rastell himself has added an entirely inappropriate epilogue. Shocking. I’m not surprised the author has seen fit not to reveal his name. The film equivalent would be a remake of Jurassic Park which gets to the bit where they’re in the Jeep and he swivels her head but then the credits roll.
Almost as bad is Gentleness and Nobility. The author, John Heywood, describes this as a dialogue. It literally is. A knight, a merchant, and a ploughman argue about which of them is most noble. The ploughman hits the knight a couple of times but quite frankly Plato is more action oriented. It beggars belief that anyone would think it appropriate to stage something so lacking in basic stagecraft.
However, just reading it is not unpleasant. It’s very much in the Piers Plowman tradition. It was written to be staged at court and it’s rather interesting to see just how much bald political dissent could be openly expressed in that setting – as long as the ploughman does not get the last word, and as long as women get no word at all.
The Four Elements. This one is by Rastell himself. It’s a secular morality play in which Mankind is offered an education and rejects it in favour of the pub before repenting. It largely consists of a series of lectures about the scientific knowledge of the day. There’s a good reason why we never actually hear how Sir Bedivere knows the world to be banana shaped. Astounding that anyone would think this was a good idea for a play.
However, it is an interesting read if you’re curious about the development of scientific knowledge. I’d recommend this, John Wilkins’ Discovery of a World in the Moone and Arthur C. Clarke’s Interplanetary Flight.
Also interesting are Rastell’s priorities, placing science above belief.
‘Wherfore it behovyth the of verey nede
The cause of thyngys furst for to lerne,
And than to knowe and laude the hye God eterne.’
As I read I took Rastell to be an atheist who was choosing his words carefully, though having googled him he was very much into religion and wrote on the subject, lost his fiends when he converted to Protestantism. He died in prison because he had a big mouth.
So, on the whole, all very enjoyable, though not for the reasons the authors intended. The edition very well done as you’d expect for a D. S. Brewer book. Largely the original spelling with just enough modernisation to make it intelligible. Excellent introductions, notes and glossary.
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