Parnassus plays

• 1. Introduction

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  The Parnassus plays are three satiric comedies that emerged from St John's College at Cambridge University between 1598 and 1602. They were written by students, performed by students, and aimed squarely at an audience of students gathered for the Christmas festivities. Nobody knows who wrote them. That anonymity is part of what makes them strange and fascinating. What we do know is this: whoever the author was, they were intelligent, observant, and deeply read, and they created something that has been called the supreme memorial of the Elizabethan university stage.

  The three plays are The Pilgrimage to Parnassus, The Return from Parnassus, and The Return from Parnassus: Or the Scourge of Simony. Taken together, they orbit a single Elizabethan anxiety: after years of expensive, rigorous education, what exactly does a scholar do? Francis Bacon had put his finger on the same problem in his essay "Of Seditions and Troubles" - universities were generating more learned men than society had places for them. The University Wits, a circle that included Marlowe, Nashe, and Greene, were scholars who had washed up in the theatre. It was not, for most of them, the destination they had imagined. The Parnassus plays transform that collective unease into dark, funny, and sometimes bitter theatre.

• 2. The Allegory of Education

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  The Pilgrimage to Parnassus, the first of the three plays, opens with a farmer named Consiliodorus giving advice to his son Philomusus and his nephew Studioso before they set off on their journey. His instructions are precise: avoid wastrels, shun alcohol, and stay away from the distractions of sex. What follows is an allegory, though the audience at St John's would have recognized the terrain immediately. The journey to Mount Parnassus, home of the Muses, stands in for the traditional university curriculum known as the trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

  Along the route, the two young men move through a landscape named after the very subjects they are studying. In the mountainous land of Logique, they encounter Madido, a poet who regards Parnassus as a myth and insists that genuine inspiration comes only from drink. In the land of Rhetorique, they overtake Stupido, a character who set out on the same pilgrimage ten years earlier, gave up, and now conceals his failure with a pose of disdaining scholarship entirely. The lover Amaretto nearly pulls them off the path altogether, and for a time he succeeds. The two students linger in the land of Poetry until they come to their senses.

  The most revealing encounter comes with Ingenioso, a former student who tries to warn Philomusus and Studioso that only poverty waits at the summit of Parnassus. His warning goes unheeded. The play ends with the two students gazing up at the mountain in a spirit of genuine celebration, as Studioso invites the audience to applaud. That note of triumph is the last uncomplicated joy the trilogy will offer.

• 3. Scholars Without a World

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  Seven years pass between the first play and the second. Consiliodorus meets a messenger named Leonarde and asks for news of Philomusus and Studioso. The answer disappoints him. His son and nephew have descended from Parnassus to find a world that has no real use for them. Philomusus has taken a job as a sexton and gravedigger. Studioso has worked as a household servant, a farmhand, a waiter, and a tutor. They owe money to a draper and a tailor who trusted them, and both men have fled without paying.

  The plays' sharpest comic scene involves Ingenioso and his patron Gullio. Gullio is a foppish, self-aggrandizing character drawn in part from Thomas Nashe's portrait of "an upstart" in his pamphlet Pierce Penniless. Ingenioso offers himself as a poet, promising to immortalize Gullio in verse. His reward is two small coins. Ingenioso then obliges Gullio in a stranger task: impersonating Gullio's mistress, Lesbia, while Gullio rehearses love poetry he plans to use for his actual courtship. That poetry, Gullio makes clear, he has derived directly from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Venus and Adonis.

  Luxurio attempts to sell his own poems at a fair, using a boy to recite them, and fails. By the end of the second play every route has closed. Philomusus loses his sexton position. Studioso loses his tutoring job. They agree, dejectedly, to go wandering off in poverty together. Ingenioso falls back on pamphleteering for the popular press. Luxurio, broke, bids farewell to poetry and accepts his status as a beggar. The second play ends without a single character having found a dignified exit.

• 4. Shakespeare on Stage, Shakespeare Mocked

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  William Shakespeare is mentioned by name in the last two plays, and by one count his works are quoted at least 95 times across the trilogy. He is, almost without exception, the object of satire. That makes a certain sense: in a satire aimed at the university crowd, a highly successful playwright who never attended university was a natural target.

  The sharpest passage comes when Philomusus and Studioso, out of desperation, audition for the professional stage. Their judges are Richard Burbage and Will Kemp, two prominent members of Shakespeare's company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men. The exchange the author gives them is a comedy of condescension, with Kemp noting that "few of the University plaies well, they smell too much of that writer Ovid, and that writer Metamorphosis." Kemp then declares that Shakespeare "puts them all downe, I and Ben Jonson too." The joke turns on the audience's recognition that Kemp has confused Ovid's Metamorphoses with a writer named Metamorphosis, that Burbage and Kemp are being presented as illiterate fools, and that the praise of Shakespeare is delivered by characters the play is holding up to scorn.

  The audition piece Philomusus is asked to perform is the opening monologue from Richard III: "Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York." And Gullio's worship of Shakespeare, voiced in the second play as a desire to keep Venus and Adonis under his pillow the way a king supposedly slept with Homer, is equally double-edged. Judicio, the character in the third play who may be the author's self-portrait, praises Shakespeare's early poems while suggesting he wasted talent on love poetry when a graver subject might have suited him better.

• 5. The Political Theater of Observation

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  St John's College at Cambridge was not a neutral space when these plays were performed. Elizabethan England was in the middle of a dramatic transition. Universities were shifting from Catholic to Reformed institutions, and where scholars had once trained for set roles in the church, they now graduated into a far less predictable world. The Tudor Court watched universities closely, and within Cambridge itself, the wooden architecture of the theatre was deliberately designed to seat teachers and college authorities above and to the side, where they could observe both the performance and the student audience.

  Some Puritan voices objected to student performances altogether, with one observer claiming that the devil used the "cover of recreation in London and of exercise of learning in the universities, by seeing of plays" to corrupt the young. The Privy Council took the opposite view and funded certain performances, but that support came alongside surveillance. Students understood themselves to be watched.

  The second and third Parnassus plays respond to that climate directly. Characters occasionally break the fourth wall to address the audience, and with it the professors and authorities perched in their elevated seats. The observation of students becomes a minor theme of the plays themselves. Shakespeare's Hamlet was performed at Cambridge in roughly the same period. The title page of the first quarto of Hamlet, published in 1603, notes that the play was acted "in the two Universities." Like the Parnassus plays, Hamlet fills its cast with university students - Hamlet, Horatio, Polonius, and likely Laertes, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern - and places them inside a court defined by spying. The two works illuminate each other in ways scholars have only begun to trace.

• 6. The Third Play and Its Targets

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  The Return from Parnassus: Or the Scourge of Simony is more ambitious than its predecessors, and the only one of the three plays published in its own time. Its subtitle names the practice of selling church positions for money, and the plot delivers exactly that: Amoretto has accepted a bribe to give a church position to a man called Immerito, leaving his old college friend Academico with nothing. The word "simony" in the title was a pointed accusation in a newly Reformed England where such corruption was supposed to have been left behind.

  The third play also introduces Ingenioso in a new role as a satirist who, on the pretext of discussing John Bodenham's recently published anthology Belvedere, delivers brief critiques of Edmund Spenser, Henry Constable, Michael Drayton, John Davies, John Marston, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare, and Thomas Nashe. Nashe is noted as dead. The printer who appears in this play, Danter, is based on a real figure, John Danter, known for printing the piratical first quarto of Romeo and Juliet.

  The character Gullio is understood to satirize the Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare's patron, who had also attended St John's. Southampton would not have been in the audience for the 1601 performance: he was at that moment under sentence of death for his part in the Essex conspiracy. The college recorder Francis Brackyn appears as the character "Recorder" and is harshly satirized; Brackyn had already been mocked in another university play, Club Rules, and would be mocked again in George Ruggle's 1615 academic comedy Ignoramus.

• 7. Lost, Found, and Still Neglected

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  The third play was licensed and entered into the Stationers' Register in 1605 by Owen Gwyn, then published twice in 1606, with significant textual variations between the two editions. For many years it was the only part of the trilogy anyone knew. The first two plays were considered lost.

  In 1886, W. D. Macray, the librarian of the Bodleian Library at Oxford, was working through manuscripts collected by Thomas Hearne as part of the Richard Rawlinson collection when he came across the missing plays. He edited and published all three together immediately. The handwritten manuscripts of the first two plays cover twenty folio leaves, written imperfectly by a copyist who appears to have struggled at times to read the original text. A separate handwritten manuscript of the third play was found in an old family library; the handwriting dates it to the period of the play's first performances. That manuscript, a small quarto volume bound in parchment, is now housed at the Folger Shakespeare Library. A copy owned by James Halliwell-Phillipps helped correct errors in the early printed editions.

  Despite recovery, the plays have not gained the academic attention their complexity might warrant. They are known mainly as a source for early references to Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, rather than as works of dramatic art in their own right. A rehearsed reading of The Scourge of Simony was performed on the 6th of December 2009 as part of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre's Read Not Dead series, with David Oakes as Ingenioso and Kevin Quarmby as Burbage. That the plays still wait for a proper revival says something about the fate of the ambitious young scholars they portray: neglected, despite everything they had to say.