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THE DRAMATURGICAL AND THEATRICAL HERITAGE is homophonous with “glossator,” the learned commentator of glosses,’ or in other words, written texts, and thus, his blinding on stage perfectly symbolizes his failure of proper interpretation and also physically manifests his inability to produce reliable readings. This idea is perfectly in line with the data provided by the OED, making clear that in the seventeenth century, the verb “gloss” already had the meaning “to veil with glosses; to explain away; to read a different sense into.”!® Verbal and Visual Disguises Another dramaturgical element that appears in all three plays is the use of elaborate disguises which characters don in order to hide their true intentions or to manipulate others. In Magnyfycence the conspirators cunningly conceal their dishonest intentions and replace Felicity, Liberty, and Measure, the prince’s counselors. Technically speaking, this replacement most likely involved changing the actors’ costumes, but the disguises are also verbally marked, since the characters appear with a new name on stage; Fansy as Largesse, Folly as Conceit, Crafty Conveyance as Sure Surveyance, Cloaked Collusion as Sober Sadness, and Courtly Abusion as Pleasure. As Scattergood explains, the disguises and dresses in Skelton’s play fulfill a dramaturgical function, as they draw attention to Magnyfycence’s failure as a wise prince in two particular respects. First of all, regardless of the costumes and the name change, Magnyfycence should have known that he could not trust Fansy: “Among the commonplaces of that tradition of ‘mirrors for princes’ literature which depends on the secreta secretorum is that the wise prince ought to be skilled in judging the character of men with whom he comes into contact, especially if they are prospective servants, and sometimes this involved an assessment of their appearance — particularly their physiognomies.”’” Since Fansy is supposed to be a short man," he could not credibly act as Largesse, a feature to which even the text of the play alludes: 168 “‘Glossator’ is a trisyllable, but its second syllable, a schwa, would be inevitably elided in speech so that the word would become virtually indistinguishable in sound from the name of Edgar and Edmund’s father, the Earl of Glossator(s), whose titular preeminence might be supposed, therefore to make him better at what he does.” Mark Taylor: Letters and Readers in Macbeth, King Lear, and Twelfth Night, Philological Quarterly 69:1 (1990), 41. Simpson-Weiner: The Oxford English Dictionary, n.p.n. John Scattergood: Dressing the Part in Magnyfycence: Allegory and Costume, in Peter Happé (ed.): Tudor Theatre. Allegory in the Theatre. Lallegorie au theater, Collection Theta, Volume 5., Bern, Peter Lang, 2000, 69. As Counterfet Countenaunce remarks: “A rebellyon agaynst Nature / So large a man, and so lytell of stature!” Skelton: Magnyfycence, lines 522-23. 169 170 171 «43 ¢
