'MISOGONUS': EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION Item Type text; Dissertation-Reproduction (electronic) Authors Barber, Lester E., 1938- Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 09/10/2021 23:53:58 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/290200 This dissertation has been ~ microfilmed exactly as received 67-11,363 BARBER, Lester Ernest, 1938- MISOGONUS: EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION. University of Arizona, Ph.D., 1967 Language and Literature, general University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan MISOGONUS EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION by Lester Ernest Barber A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the—Graduate College . THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 19 6 7 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE I hereby recommend that this dissertation prepared under my direction by Lester Ernest Barber entitled MISOGONUS: EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement of the degree of Ph. D. l <1 (i i ^ j? A /4 £ Dissertation Directorictor ^ Date After inspection of the dissertation, the following members of the Final Examination Committee concur in its approval and recommend its acceptance:* . Qq~HA-0-W /1 j(o b ^ p/9/u Qf yg 4J /-£ *This approval and acceptance is contingent on the candidate's adequate performance and defense of this dissertation at the final oral examination. The inclusion of this sheet bound into the library copy of the dissertation is evidence of satisfactory performance at the final examination. STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at The University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allow­ able without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manu­ script in whole or in part may be granted by the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his judgment the proposed use of the material is in the interests of scholarship. In all other instances, however, permission must be obtained from the author. SIGNED: 2- \ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to express my indebtedness to Richard Hosley, my dissertation director, for introducing me to the skills of editing Elizabethan dramatic texts and for helping me in countless ways during the preparation of this edition. I am also deeply grateful to my wife for the aid she has given me at every stage of the project. I wish to thank the Librarian of the Huntington Library in California for granting me permission to edit the manuscript of-Misogonus and for allowing me to reproduce the title-page and prologue-page in this dissertation. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT v INTRODUCTION . 1 The Manuscript 1 Authorship \l Date 26 The Text .. 28 Act and Scene-Division 37 The Play ^ Sources ^ Plot and Structure 69 Setting and Characterization 75 Language and Prosody . 77 Staging 78 MISOGONUS . 82 APPENDIX A Textual Notes 283 APPENDIX B A List of Reconstructions ....... 297 APPENDIX C A Historical Collation 313 APPENDIX D A List of Oaths 3^8 APPENDIX E An Index of Words Glossed ....... 350 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY N. 369 iv ABSTRACT Misogonus is a manuscript play of the sixteenth century, one of the earliest English comedies. It has not received as much attention as it deserves, in part because it is not readily accessible, all three of the editions before this one being out of print, in part because none of the three previous editions provided a readable text of the play. The manuscript has deteriorated at the corners, and readings have been lost on almost every page. Earlier editors printed texts with a distracting number of lacunae, leaving their suggested reconstructions in the footnotes. In this edition I have not only systematically attempted to reconstruct the lost matter of the play wherever possible, but I have also presented my reconstructions as a part of the text itself. The Introduction includes discussion of the manuscript; of authorship, date, and sources; and of the literary merit of the play. There are no references to Misogonus or its author in sixteenth- or seventeenth-century records, but the names of three men are prominently written in the manuscript. One of them, Anthony Rudd, was a Yorkshireman, and since the manuscript contains some v vi thirteen words which had limited Yorkshire or Northern currency at least as early as the eighteenth century, there is some reason to suppose that Anthony Rudd wrote the play. This dialectal evidence is not conclusive, our knowledge of language variations in the Renaissance being very infirm, but it does permit the tentative hypothesis that Anthony Rudd wrote Misogonus sometime before 1577, the date given on the title-page of the manuscript. The other two important names in the manuscript are apparently those of the scribe- Thomas Rychardes—and the manuscript reviser (possibly also its owner)—Laurentius Bariona. The principal sources of Misogonus are twos Roman Comedy and the Neo-Latin education-drama of the so-called Christian Terence (especially the Dutch plays Acolastus by Gnaphaeus and Asotus by Macropedius). Misogonus takes its principal action, that of the prodigal-son tale, from the Christian Terence. It uses a device from Roman Comedy, the lost child, to resolve the complications of the plot. The present text of the play is in modern spelling and modern punctuation. But the general editorial methods used in critical, old-spelling editions by such scholars as R. B. McKerrow, W. W. Greg, and Predson Bowers have been the constant models for this edition. All substantive emendations of the manuscript are recorded, and the usual vii scholarly apparatus, as well as a list of reconstructed matter, is provided. In two appendices are given (1) a list of the oaths which appear in the play and (2) an index of words glossed in the explanatory notes. I INTRODUCTION THE MANUSCRIPT Misogonus is extant in a unique manuscript, now held by the Huntington Library in California (HM ^52). It is a fair copy written on twenty-four folio sheets, both recto and verso. One sheet has been lost between fols. 6 and 7, as has at least one sheet at the end of the manuscript. Most of the folios are imperfect, the bottom corners in par­ ticular having suffered damage. Pol. 4, where about a third of the sheet has been torn away (the upper right-hand corner as one looks at the recto page), is the most badly mutilated. The manuscript is written in two hands. The first writer, here called the Scribe, copied out the entire play beginning with the prologue on fol. lv. The Second writer, here called the Corrector, made a number of revisions and corrections in the text of the play and wrote the title-page on fol. Ir. The Scribe's handwriting is neat and regular for the most part, although at intervals the writer appears to have tired. At these times a noticeable decline in the legibili­ ty of his hand is evident. The lettering is neatly done and the lines carefully spaced through fol. 7r. Neatness decreases through the top of fol. 9v, The neat, careful 1 2 writing then resumes and continues to fol. llv where there is a decided falling off. This kind of alternating con­ tinues at shorter intervals throughout the rest of the play. On the whole, the Corrector's hand is easily dis­ tinguished from the Scribe's (exceptions occur where the sample is very small—where, for example, the Corrector interlineates only a short word or two)• The Corrector loops the upper right-hand corner of his capital "A"'s; he uses a special ligature mark to connect long "s" with a directly succeeding long letter; he elongates the ascending tail of final "s"; and he writes a distinctive lower-case "e." More generally, his handwriting is scrawled and unattractive in comparison with the Scribe's. In addition, his corrections and the title-page are written in a darker ink than that used by the Scribe. The manuscript is generally clear of defacing marks, but there are occasional letters, words, and phrases, not part of the text itself, in the margins of various pages. On the title-page, for example, someone—possibly the Scribe—has duplicated the words "A mery and" just below those in the title itself. Just below the line reading "The Names of the Speakers," something has been erased. Five "d"'s are written together just before the name "Anthony Rudd," and at the bottom of the page, on the right, someone has copied—rather badly—the large ornament with which the Corrector separated "Laurentius Bariwna" from the place-name, "Kettheringe," and the date, "Die 20 Nbvembris Anno 1577«" In the list of speakers, "moris," directly^ following "morio," has been partially erased. Finally, what is apparently the word "Ward" or "Warde" has been written over the last five letters of "Kettheringe" (or "Kettheringe" may have been, in part, written over the original word, "Warde"). Only the "W" is clearly decipherable, and nothing can be said about the hand that wrote the word. Marginal jottings occur on five other pages as well. On fol. l6r, "Co" is written near the edge of the left margin.