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Reviews 229 for considerable further work of analysis and synthesis. The latter should be awaited with interest. SybU M . Jack Department of History University of Sydney Sutton, Dana F., ed. & trans., Thomas Legge: the complete plays. Vol. I: Richardus tertius (Richard the third). Vol II: Solymitana eludes (The destruction ofJerusalem), N.Y. and Bern, Peter Lang, 1993; boards; pp. xlvii, 387 & xxviii, 613; R.R.P. SF200.00. This very important edition prints bUingualtextsof tbe two cycles of Latin dramas by Thomas Legge, Master of Caius College, Cambridge, from 1573 to 1607. Richardus tertius is a trilogy on theriseand fall of Richard III. It survives in eleven manuscripts, not all of them complete. It has been printed three times, but never in a fuUy satisfactory edition. Solymitana eludes is a trilogy on the Jewishrevoltagainst Roman mie in A D 66-70 and tbe destruction of Jerusalem by Titus. It survives in a single manuscript and was unidentified until 1974. It has been published previously only in the form of a facsimile of the manuscript. Sutton provides the first comprehensively critical edition of Legge's substantial body of dramatic writing. In doing so, he reveals these six plays as notable English contributions to a characteristic enterprise of Renaissance humanism. Legge was an excellent stylist in the Senecan mode and his plays deployed tbe full range of Senecan tragic rhetoric. There are complaints against tyranny, the perils of high rank, and the turns of Fortune's wheel. There are speeches of sombre premonition, of stoical resolution or consolation, and of counsel or deliberation. There are learned mythological and geographical allusions, elaborate chronographias and impossibilia, pungent aphorisms and stichomythia. To these classical conventions Solymitana eludes adds Christian and Renaissance ones such as liturgical prayers and Latin verse translations of the psalms. It also adds to the repertoire of Senecan horrors by its descriptions of starvation during the siege of Jerusalem, including the detaUed narrative of a mother cooking and eating her chUd. The conjunction of Legge's Senecanism with his historical subjects entails fascinating Romanizations of England and Israel. Richard of Gloucester is addressed as 'Claudiane'. The Hebrew God becomes also 230 Reviews 'tonans', the classical thunderer, whUe Hebrew soldiers speak of being ruled by the Fates and scourged by Furies. The destruction of Jerusalem recalls both the biblical book of Lamentations and Aeneas's description of the fall of Troy. The last stages of Solymitana eludesfittinglyinclude a debate on therivalhistorical missions of R o m e and of Israel that anticipates the same debate in Paradise regained. Though he bases his trilogic form on Greek precedent, Legge does not adopt a strictly neoclassical dramaturgy. H e does not observe the unities of time or place nor does he include a chorus. H e does attend to unity of action, though with mixed success. The Richardus tertius plays are formally taut, but the Solymitana clades plays are long and wayward. Legge's dramaturgy relates to that of his vernacular English precedessors and successors as much as to classical tragedy. He relishes spectacular processions and, in Solymitana clades, he stages battlefield combats, executions, and massacres, as weU as a macabre display of dead bodies that anticipates the display of Horatio's body in The Spanish tragedy. Solymitana clades also shows an antiquarian interest in the staging of Jewish religious rituals that anticipates Jonson's staging of Roman ceremonies in Sejanus. Legge flouts the decorum of classical tragedy by introducing a robber chief and a peasant chief, in the manner of a Shakespearean history play. In Richardus tertius Legge appears indeed to have written the first English history plays. N o w that w e can read all six of his plays in a convenient edition we can appreciate then innovative boldness as well as then imitative skill. It is striking that they emanated from a university context. Sutton's edition will contribute to the current reevaluation of the importance of the English theatre outside London, an activity which owes much to the University of Toronto Press's project of printing the theatrical records of provincial centres. The reevaluation, and our understanding of Legge's role in particular, will be further advanced by Alan Nelson's...

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