Humanities: Drama

HUMANITIES 0 time, thou must entangle this, not I It is too hard a knot for to untie . . . we are in the realm of High Comedy. 409 Thus the pretensions of man, the would-be-serious sophisticate, his airy bubbles are neatly deflated by the dramatist. Here is the light touch of the gentle Shakespeare who once again seems to be echoing, with the same tolerant amusement, Puck's "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" I fear that we all share the professional tendency to become a bit too serious when we talk of "the Bard." (CHARLES TYLER PROUTY) Acolastvs A Latin Play of the Sixteenth Century, by Gulielmus Gnapheus (1529), based on the parable of the Prodigal Son, edited by W . E. D. Atkinson with a critical introduction and an English translation (London, Ont.: Humanities Departments of W estern Ontario, 1964, pp. viii, 234, $3.00), is a welcome addition to the small.number of readily available texts of Renaissance Latin Literature. There were forty-seven editions of Acolastvs by 1585; the only other English translation is Palsgrave's "stammering paraphrase," where each Latin phrase is given two or three versions since it was intended to teach Tudor schoolboys Latin (EETS, 202, 1937). In the lengthy introduction (Dr. Atkinson has analysed and documented the "Design of the Play" and the influence of "classical literature, notably T erentian comedy and Horatian satire," and has shown similarities between Acolastvs and The Praise of Folly. He then argues that "Gnapheus synthesised classical literature with Christian theology, and more specifically with Lutheran doctrine" and suggests that "the profoundly deterministic structure of Acolastvs is an effect of Luther's doctrine of -mera necessitas with its complete denial of the freedom of the will." Gnapheus added a new character to the story: Eubulus the wise counsellor. Dr. Atkinson believes that in Eubulus and Pelargus [the father of the prodigal son] Gnapheus has adumbrated the personalities and points of view of Luther and Erasmusas these might be found in De servp arbitrio by a reader sympathetic to Luther, but not blindly partisan. On the whole, Luther's attitude toward Erasmus as it emerges from De servo arbitrio is one of benevolent impatience, very much resembling that of Eubulus toward Pelargus. There is little trace of the bitterness which developed later. Luther is the magister, Erasmus a pupil who is good-hearted and only needs to have his errors pointed out to him. Yet at times he can be exasperatingly obtuse. 410 LE'ITERS IN CANADA: 1965 The appendix shows how Acolastvs is different from and better than five plays about the Prodigal Son which preceded it. But to say that all the other sixteenth-century Latin plays except Acolastvs are ·~of minor historical importance" seems unnecessarily harsh to writers such as Buchanan, Grimald, and Macropedius; whose plays are surely in the same category as Acolastvs. Most modem critics, as Dr. Atkinson readily admits, "unite in treating Acolastvs as a comedy of the temporal world, with certain religious overtones" and take T. W. Baldwin's viewpoint that "the sequence of the play is a . .. chronological one, and its connecting thread an assumed moral, which is extraneous to the machinery of the play." Yet it is tempting to agree with Dr. Atkinson when he writes about "the poetic logic" of the structure with its "error, reversal and recognition" and about the affinity Gnapheus saw between Acolastvs and The Praise or Folly; on the other hand it is hard to be convinced about the LutherErasmus allegory, which of course adds an interesting dimension to the discussion but seems to be only tenuously linked to the play. Though the translation is only meant to be a "crutch," it is readable and actable, for Dr. Atkinson clearly understands the theatre and has caught the spirit of the original. It is not too literal; some readers might object to "I have been endowed with a certain remarkable talent" for "Est istuc datum mihi." Some might also wonder why the lines are numbered by scenes rather than consecutively as in the Loebs; others will think nostalgically of Palsgrave's delightful phrases such as "wamblynges about the stomake" for "nausea." And there are a...