William Strode’s The Floating Island: Play and Political Propaganda

Abstract

In August 1636 Charles I, accompanied by his queen, nephews and Court, decided to pay the University of Oxford a three-day visit. In the previous seven years Archbishop Laud, Chancellor of the University since 1629, had made a number of important improvements to the University, including the building of a new quadrangle at his own old college, St John's; this royal seal of approval showed recognition of Laud's achievements and gave the impression that he had come to possess influence at the highest level. Officially the King was the guest of the University; it was the Public Orator, William Strode, who gave the speech of welcome when the royal party arrived, and the University who footed most of the bill; but it was the Archbishop who masterminded the whole affair.1 Among the entertainments provided for the guests were three plays. Two romantic comedies performed on the second day of the visit were well received, but William Strode's allegorical play The Floating Island, acted at Christ Church on the first evening of the visit, was a failure. What the royal party made of it is not recorded, but the Earl of Northumberland's chaplain thought it 'fitter for schollers then a Court', and Lord Carnarvon, less restrained, considered it the worst play he had ever seen except for one at Cambridge.2 A dedicatory poem which the author later attached to the play makes it plain that there was considerable barracking at the first performance (the second, staged for the university once the royal visit was over, was more successful). For the playwright the evening had clearly been a disaster, and the prologue quickly written a few days later for the repeat performance, to replace that addressed to the royal couple, shows his ruffled feelings:We hope to find Spectatours, and we may,For you'l not act the Humours of the Play;Or fret at Passions e'er you read them calm'dIn the next word. Your stomacks feele no QualmRising through smell of rude Philosophy:Nor shall you finde much more then to descryAn Academick birth.3Plainly for Strode the fault was in the audience, not in the play. Laud's opinion was similar: the play was 'very well penned, yet did not take the court so well'.4Later judgements of The Floating Island have, with justification, been less kind. The genre - half morality play, half masque - has been seen as an unfortunate choice, and the characters, representing various humours or 'Passions', as stilted and wooden. The plot, in which the Passions revolt against the benign rule of King Prudentius, but later realise their mistake and welcome his return, is hardly gripping, and attempts to enliven it with episodes of comedy are not successful. The dialogue attempts to be lively, but the sequence of events is too inconsequential and unmotivated for it to be convincing. The play is laboured, and patently produced with little sense of the dramatic.5Its author, William Strode, was at this time a man in the early stages of what appeared to be a promising career. Like several of his colleagues at Christ Church, he had been schooled at Westminster, where the writing of poetry was encouraged,6 and it was as a lyric poet that he first made his mark. He had arrived at Christ Church in 1617 at the age of fifteen or so;7 only two years later he was a contributor to the volume of Latin verse with which Oxford mourned the death of Queen Anne in March 1619,8 and he continued to contribute Latin verse to University publications for the next two decades. His contemporaries doubtless paid more attention to the poems in English which he produced throughout the 1620s. His love-poetry, elegies, comic verses, occasional pieces, parodies, satires, or 'posies' for necklaces and rings were copied widely in the University and further afield, and his songs were not only transcribed but sung on convivial occasions. Meanwhile he followed the normal academic and clerical course; in the summer of 1624 he had reached the stage of taking his MA, and by 1628 must have passed through the diaconate, since in December of that year he was ordained priest. …