Oldal 29 [29]
THE DRAMATURGICAL AND THEATRICAL HERITAGE
monarch’s personal struggle as part of a political one.” This idea is perfectly
compatible with the Renaissance idea that dramatic works, tragedies in
particular, were attributed moral and political force. As Sir Philip Sidney
explains in his Apology for Poetry, which was published in 1595, while comedies
aim to display “an imitation of the common errors of our life,” tragedies are
meant to reveal social and political issues when they represent a diseased
body politic on stage with an overtly didactic purpose: “the high and excellent
Tragedy, that openeth the greatest wounds, and showeth forth the ulcers that
are covered with tissue; that maketh kings fear to be tyrants, and tyrants
manifest their tyrannical humours; that with stirring the affects of admiration
and commiseration, teacheth the uncertainty of this world, and upon how
weak foundations gilden roofs are builded.””
In his translation of Cicero’s De Officiis, which was published in English in
1606 under the title Foure bookes of offices enabling privat persons for the speciall
seruice of all good princes and policies, Barnabe Barnes, one of Shakespeare’s
fellow dramatists, also explains why people should read the “histories,” of the
states and lives of princes of old times:
The interior goodnesse and bountie (which accompanieth him) is decently garnished
with temperance, innocencie, faithfulnesse, gentlenesse, humanitie, prudence, and
foresight; requiring a vertuous circumspection and doubt, as in not committing any
thing to the wheele of fortune, but vpon ineuitable necessitie, least his actions be
racked vpon it, as hath beene found in diuers captaines, which by the like temeritie
fell downe, when they with all their forces leaned vpon her wheele.”°
It is no surprise that both Skelton’s and Shakespeare’s playtext provide ample
allusions to the same wheel of Fortune (rota Fortune), a conventional trope
of the “fall of princes” tradition representing the unpredictability of human
life. In Magnyfycence, Poverty warns the monarch: “Syr remembre the tourne
of fortunes whele / That wantonly can wynke and wynche with her hele /
Nowe she wyll laughe; forthwith she wyll frowne / Sodenly set vp and sodenly
pluckyd downe.”” In King Lear, it is Kent who first recalls this image when
he is sitting in the stocks: “Fortune goodnight, / Smile, once more turne thy
wheele;"" but later Edmund, having lost all his power, also alludes to the wheel
74 Walker: A Domestic Drama, 93.
> Sir Philip Sidney: “An Apology for Poetry.” English Critical Texts, ed. F. Enright — L. Chickera,
Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1962, 31-32.
7° Barnabe Barnes: Foure bookes of offices enabling privat persons for the speciall seruice ofallgood
princes and policies, London, Printed at the charges of George Bishop, T. Adams, and C. Burbie,
1606. 169 B.
77 Skelton: Magnyfycence, lines 2056-2059.
78 Shak-speare: His True Chronicle, sig. E3r.
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