The Trickster-Hero and Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters

Abstract

The Trickster-Hero and Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters William W. E. Slights When we first meet Richard Follywit, the hero of Middleton’s A Mad World, M y Masters, he is a prodigal bereft of everything but his drunken companions, his wit, and an inaccessible inheritance guarded by his stingy grandfather. Like the archetypal witty rogue, Falstaff, he blames his misfortunes on bad company: Hang you, you have bewitch’d me among you. I was as well given till I fell to be wicked, my grandsire had hope of me, I went all in black, swore but o’ Sundays, never came home drunk but upon fasting nights to cleanse my stomach; ’slid, now I’m quite altered, blown into light colors, let out oaths by th’ minute, sit up late till it be early, drink drunk till I am sober, sink down dead in a tavern and rise in a tobacco shop. Here’s a transfor­ mation. I was wont yet to pity the simple, and leave ’em some money; ’slid, now I gull ’em without conscience. I go without order, swear without number, gull without mercy, and drink without measure.1 Nor does the parallel with Falstaff end with this parody of a prodigal’s progress;2 Follywit is also an inveterate thief. In fact, he masterminds three separate schemes to fleece his grandfather. Like other witty rogues in the English tradition, Follywit is a protean performer in his disguises. As his robberies become more elaborate, however, they net him less and less, until he is caught and forced to throw himself on his elder’s mercy. There is, of course, more to the trickster-hero of seventeenthcentury comedy than his tough language, dishonesty, and bad company. His forebears include not only the comic Vice of English stage tradi­ tion but, more pertinently, the adulescens and witty slave (dolosus servus) of Roman comedy. Richard Follywit in patricular acts a combination of the two Roman comedy types. Working within a more strict conception of social decorum than governed Middleton and his contemporaries, the Latin comedians, Plautus and Terence, were careful to distinguish between the proper roles of the noble young lover and the scheming slave. While in Terentian comedy there is considerable variety in the author’s attitudes toward his lovers and his slaves, he does not vary their essential functions. For example, there are two adulescens in the Andria, Pamphilus and his inept friend 87 88 Comparative Drama Charinus. Both young men pursue the girls they love with the help of their servants, Davus, a cunning and jovial character who success­ fully gulls Pamphilus’ uncooperative father, and Byrria, who is “a constant source of despair to his master,” Charinus.3 Regardless of their effectiveness in their respective roles, young men are to fall in love, servants are to arrange the matches. A witty servant may rise to the level of title character, as in Plautus’ Pseudolus, but his intrigues are still intended to forward the romance of his young master, Calidorus. Calidorus, like most Roman adulescens, is unable to manage his own romantic imbroglios with the ease of his seventeenth-century trickster-hero descendants. He is the slave to his passion and, ironically, to his bondsman. In only one of his twenty-one plays, the Persa, did Plautus give the role of adulescens to the slave, Toxilus. This situation still does not parallel the plot of Middleton’s A Mad World, however, since Toxilus does not have the justifying aristocratic claim to maid and money that Follywit has. Although there are no explicit prototypes for the trickster-hero in Roman drama, the influence of Plautine comedy on Middleton’s conception of the character type is clear in A Trick to Catch the Old One. Witgood, the trickster in that play, finds himself in a world of “old foxbrained and ox-browed uncles [who] have still defenses for their avarice, and apologies for their practices,” a stock situation in Latin comedy.4 His problem is that of the traditional adulescens and his technique is that of the witty slave. I dare not visit the city; there I should be too soon visited by that horrible plague, my...