1. Little is
known about the author of the tragedy Adrastus Parentans
sive Vindicta Peter Mease of Jesus College, Cambridge. He
matriculated from that college in 1614, was admitted to the B. A. in
1618, and incepted is a M. A. in 1621. In later life he received
several ecclesiastical appointments, and died in 1649. NOTE
1 The present play, evidently his single literary effort,
must have been performed at Jesus College ca. 1620. NOTE
2
2. The play is a
short and straightforward dramatization of Herodotus’ account of
the accidental killing of Croesus’ son Atys during a boar hunt.
Its most striking feature, and doubtless its author’s principal
interest in writing it, is that it imitates the form of Attic rather
than Senecan tragedy. Mease probably gives a hint that this play is
written as a formalistic experiment in his dedicatory epistle to
Bishop Lancelot Andrewes, in which he describes it with the words historiam ad accuratas tragoediae antiquis novae, nobis antiquae
leges descriptam (“a tale, written in conformity with the
exacting canons of tragedy (novel for the ancients, ancient for
ourselves)”).
3. In English
Renaissance academic drama Senecan tragedy was paradigmatic and so
was closely imitated. Perhaps this principle is most dramatically
illustrated by Thomas Watson’s Latin translation of the Antigone,
in which Watson added a Prologue and imposed a
five-Act structure on Sophocles’ play in order to make it
conform to the obligatory Senecan paradigm. NOTE
3 Mease dispensed both with divisions into Acts, and with
subdivisions of Acts into numbered scenes. He only retained the lists
of characters inserted at each point the grouping of onstage speakers
changes, a device that functioned as a rather imperfect means of
indicating entrances and exits, but, in the manner of a Greek
tragedy, nothing is allowed to interrupt the continuous flow of the
action.
4. Equally
Hellenic is the prominence given the Chorus. In proper Greek fashion,
it is constantly onstage and at a number of points engages in
dialogue with the actors. The length of some of the choruses is
remarkable: three purely choral passages (82 -
137, 296 - 403, and 808
- 846) consume 200 lines, just about twenty percent of the play,
to which may be added the lyric passages involving the Chorus and an
actor, itself a Greek dramatic feature (167 -
78, 626 - 725, 859
- 927, 974 - 1009), another 223
lines. Over forty percent of the play is therefore devoted to lyric
passages.
5. A no less
important deviation from the English Renaissance norm is the
play’s short length, just slightly over a thousand lines.
Audiences of the time liked long entertainments, just as
congregations liked lengthy sermons. I have already alluded to the
Prologue Thomas Watson wrote for Sophocles’ Antigone;
this and other material he added for the play made for a considerably
longer performance (probably at the Inns of Court) than the
Sophoclean original. Likewise, William Gager wrote a lengthy new
beginning and extra scenes for Seneca’s Phaedra, NOTE
4 and several of the translations in the 1581 Seneca His
Tenne Tragedies are beefed up with extra scenes. NOTE
5 William Alabaster’s Roxana
is a drastically shortened adaptation of its Italian model, Luigi
Groto’s sprawling La
Dalida, but even in its severely pruned form it is half again
as long as Adrastus Parentans. Some academic dramas (such as
Thomas Legge’s trilogies Richardus
Tertius (1579) and Solymitana Clades
(date unknown), and Matthew
Gwinne’s Nero
(1603) are genuinely huge, running to several thousand lines.
It may not be wrong to describe Mease’s brevity as
revolutionary. Subtract more than four hundred lines of lyric
material, and the dramatic portion of the play is transacted in just
under six hundred lines. Also contributng to the austerity is
the absence of a Prologue or Epilogue, standard fare in academic
drama. Surely Mease intended his brevity to imitate Hellenic economy
and efficient story-telling. The same can probably be said about the
play’s very limited number of speaking parts as well as its
absence of song, dance, instrumental music, spectacular stage
effects, and the similar trapppings one frequently encounters in
contemporary university drama. Then too, of course, such economy was
appropriate for Jesus College, which lacked the resources available
to such larger and wealthier institutions as Trinity and St.
John’s Colleges, Cambridge, and Christ Church, Oxford, where the
entertainments were sometimes far more lavish.
6.
The historian of the theater will therefore be interested to observe
Greek tragedy replacing Seneca as the object of imitation. But the
success of this experiment is rather questionable. In important
respects Adrastus Parentans suffers considerably by comparison
with another university tragedy about a disastrous boar hunt, William
Gager’s Meleager (1582), a play with which Mease may well
have been familiar, as it had been printed at Oxford by Joseph Barnes in
1593. Meleager
contains brilliantly-delineated characters, particularly its
hubristic, ranting Oeneus, a figure that could almost come from the
pen of Marlowe, and its messenger speech describing the actual boar
hunt is elaborate and exciting set-piece loaded with plenty of
circumstantial detail (793 - 881). Mease’s characters are
not especially memorable, and his equivalent messenger speech
(595 - 625) skids over the boar hunt in a
very cursory way and gives the audience little more than the minimum
information necessary to comprehend the story. The same can be said
about his second messenger speech describing Adrastus’ suicide
(943 - 73), which demands a longer and
more pathetic final speech. One cannot help thinking that Adrastus
Parentans might have been a more interesting play if its author
had allowed himself more space to develop characterizations and
incidents that would do more to engage our attention. Even the Greek
tragedians took more time to develop their plays: most plays in the
Greek tragic repertoire, after all, occupy considerably more than a
thousand lines.
7. But a
critique of the play that operates along these lines criticizes Mease
for what he did not do, and only serves to distract attention from
what he did. Beginning with his lengthy first chorus, he employs the
play to hammer home the points made to Croesus by Solon (404
- 550), that we are all playthings of Fate, which capriciously
lifts up and casts down, so that no man can be reckoned truly blessed
until he dies, and that in fact the best thing is not to have been
born at all (825 - 27). Of course this is
all taken from the similar philosophy attributed to Solon by
Herodotus (I.30 - 32), with a couple of modifications.
Herodotus’ Solon attributes the problem to “the divine,
which is jealous and prone to troublemaking” (I.32 ad
init.), whereas Mease shifts the blame to capricious human
destiny, under the name of Fortuna, fata, NOTE 6 and sors. This change is probably made under the
influence of Senecan tragedy. Mease also adds a passage that attempts
to harmonize the seemingly contradictory ideas that Fortune is fickle
and that each man has his own immutable destiny (127
- 133).
8. In the play
the catastrophes suffered by overconfident Croesus is presented as an
illustration of Solon’s theology of Fortune, if so it may be
called. This too is Herodotean, insofar as the tale of Atys’
death at the hands of Adrastus is immediately linked to the debate
between Solon and Croesus, as an illustration of the “nemesis of
the god” that befell Croesus (I.34 - 45). In both Herodotus and
Mease, the juxtaposition of these two incidents conveys something
that is not actually said: that this great reversal suffered by
Croesus is caused, if not by his actual rejection of Solon, at least
to the overconfident, possibly even hubristic, attitude that provoked
this rejection. At the same time, Mease revises Herodotus by making
it seem that Atys’ death, rather than Croesus ultimate defeat at
the hands of Cyrus (to which he never alludes), is the fulfillment of
the curse hanging over Gyges’ progeny: the oracle at Delphi
predicted that the fifth in his line should pay the penalty for his
murder of Candaules and usurpation of the Lydian throne (Herodotus
I.13). Hence Croesus is the victim both of Fortune and of destiny
(and hence the need for attempting to reconcile the two concepts). As
told by Herodotus, the story is already cast in a recognizably tragic
pattern - a story of somebody misguidedly trying to rationalize the
meaning of an oracle or a portentious dream and avoid his destiny
obviously conforms to a narrative pattern familiar in Hellenic
tragedy — and Mease took steps to enhance the effect.
9. Mease was a
divinity student, and all of this appears to be very much at odds
with Christian theology (since Croesus’ suffering illustrates
the principle that what befalls a man at the hands of the divine is
unrelated to his behavior, or to his moral and spiritual condition).
So too do his lines praising Adrastus’ suicide (978f.,
998f.). Being thoroughly inexpert on the
subject of seventeenth century Protestant theology, I am in no
position to rule out the possibility that Solon’s philosophy
appealed to Mease because in some way it resonated with contemporary
notions about the nature of sin and retribution. But, obviously, it
is far likelier that he emphasized this Solonic philosophy as much as
he did because it was endorsed by Herodotus, and was therefore
genuinely Hellenic, so that it was consonant with his program of
writing a play that imitated Greek tragedy.
10. Adrastus
Parentans is uniquely preserved by the British Library ms. Add.
MS. 10417. The extreme neatness with which this is executed gives an
initial impression that it may be a presentation manuscript, perhaps
even a one prepared for Lancelot Andrewes by the author himself.
Closer inspection, however, shows that it is in fact a copy
manuscript. Although comparatively free of error, it does contain a
number of mistakes that would be made by a copyist but not an author
(at 27, 83,
243, 488,
495, 526,
678, and perhaps also at 485,
578, and 786).
For the most part these minor difficulties are easily corrected, but
more serious textual corruption is found at 614
and 816f., passages that cannot be fixed
without an intolerable amount of conjecture, and a line containing a
verb must have dropped out after 419.
Emendation (unwelcome in the case of a holograph) is therefore
legitimate. Other forms of editorial intervention are required by the
manuscript’s idiosyncracies. The punctuation is often palpably
wrong, and the copyist’s commas are written so small that they
often are indistinguishable from periods, so that an editor is
obliged to form a personal judgment of the proper articulation of
many sentences. I have therefore silently imposed modern punctuation,
based on my understanding of sentence-articulation. Then too, the
copyist makes no distinction between the digraphs ae and
oe, which is not surprising, since these two diphthongs
received the same value in contemporary pronunciation even though
writers usually managed to distinguish them on paper. NOTE 7 I could have arbitrarily selected either digraph and
employed it uniformly, but the result would sometimes seem peculiar
to a modern reader. Certainly I would not have used oe, which
would have produced very odd-looking first declension case-endings,
but using ae would have yielded such strange spellings as
Craesus for Croesus. On the whole, it has seemed the
most sensible policy is to introduce distinctions between the two, in
accordance with normal practice of the times.
11. Mease’s
Latin is in general readily comprehensible, although sometimes his
desire to create an epigrammatic effect leads to excessive
compression of the thought. Occasionally he omits verbs, leaving the
reader to supply them (although the effect of a missing verb is so
jarring at 418f. that I am inclined to
think a verb-containing line has dropped out of the text). He was
inordinately addicted to verbs ending in -erim, both the
future perfect indicative, which he often employs where a
straightforward future would seem more satisfactory, and the perfect
subjunctive; the reader should bear in mind that the correct rules
governing the use of tenses in the subjunctive mood were not
rediscovered until the nineteenth century.