The Sixteenth-Century English “Proverb” Play

Abstract

COMPARATIVE drama 1 Volume 18 Spring 1984 Number 1 The Sixteenth-Century English “Proverb” Play Paula Neuss In the drawing rooms of nineteenth-century France, a form of drama known as the “proverbe” became popular mainly through the works of Alfred de Musset. A “proverbe” was “a play of which a proverb is taken as the foundation of the plot,”l and the genre is now being revived in the films of Eric Rohmer, especially in his new series of “Comedies et Proverbes.” It has not generally been realized, however, that this drama­ tic genre existed much earlier in England and that Shakespeare himself indulged in it. Sixteenth-century moral interludes are often proverbial in title, and play on a chosen proverb in much the same way as their French descendants. These plays were educational, designed to be read as a demonstration of the truth of the proverb the playwright chose to illustrate. As the author of Enough is as Good as a Feast (c. 1571),2 William Wager, tells us in his prologue: Our title is Enough is as good as a feast Which rhetorically we shall amplify So that it shall appear both to most and least That our meaning is but honesty; PAULA NEUSS’ most recent book is Aspects of Early English Drama (Boydell and Brewer, 1983). She teaches at Birkbeck College, University of London. 1 2 Comparative Drama Yet now and then we will dally merrily. So shall we please them that of mirth be desirous, For we play not to please them that be curious. (11. 79-85; italics mine3) Wager’s reference to rhetorical amplification, which shows him to have been an educated man, gives us a clue to the develop­ ment of this particular technique of playwriting, for it relates to the author’s rhetorical training. There were many books from which Wager might have been taught, but, as with the advice they give, these books all say the same thing; indeed, they are “one and the same thing . .. concealed under multiple forms . . . varied and yet the same”4 as Geoffrey de Vinsauf, the author of the twelfth-century Poetria Nova, one of the most popular rhetorical treatises, put it. The later sixteenth-century writers had the advantage of English translations or adaptations of the rhetoric books that had long been in use in schools, the most famous of these being the third-century Progymnasmata of Aphthonius. This contained “fourteen different types of elementary exercises in theme-writing, ranging from the retelling of a fable or myth, through the narratio (a short narrative on an historical, poetical, or judicial topic), the chria (a theme on the saying or deed of some famous person), and the sententia (on some wise saying or proverb), to the thesis or consultatio (a speech marshalling arguments for one side or another of some debatable abstract proposition) and the legislatio (for or against a proposed or existing law) .”5 Of these the sententia became one of the most popular when it came to choice of theme (or, as it was generally termed, “matter”) for a play, and it is easy to see why. A proverb is a very convenient theme for a writer of a play of the morality type since in proverbs there is “likely to be a second level of meaning”6 and proverbs are “statements which convey a more or less obvious moral or lesson.”7 I have shown elsewhere that some earlier morality plays turn out partly to be amplifications of proverbs,8 but these examples do not state explicitly that they are based on a proverb as the later Tudor Interludes do. Wager has chosen proverbs for the themes of both his plays, as seems to have been particularly fashionable at the time he was writing (compare, for example, Lupton’s All for Money of c.1560 or Fulwell’s Like Will to Like of 1568). The title of Wager’s other play, The Longer Thou Livest the More Fool Thou Art, is a variant of Proverbs 27.22: “Though thou shouldst Paula Neuss 3 bray a fool in a mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet will not his foolishness depart from him...