‘A Mirror for Magistrates’ and the ‘de casibus’ Tradition by Paul Budra (review)

216 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 >crucial evidence for the invention of the image of the cottage as a comfortable house: they demonstrate the historical contingency of comfort as a value.= Verandahs, too, developing out of British imperial presence in difference parts of the world, helped to redefine the notion of comfort as they protected houses from both heat and cold. Finally, although the idea of the comfortable house took root later in America (where displays of refinement and gentility seemed more important) than in England, the nineteenth century changed that. Nowhere are the influences for this change, and its gendered nature, more apparent than in the architectural writings of Andrew Jackson Downing and the domestic treatises of Catherine Beecher. Crowley=s book is not only well argued, it also provides fascinating detail on the etymology of relevant words to underline their contemporary meanings, the technological evolution of a variety of inventions relating to heating, glass-making, and lighting, and a great deal of architectural detail. In addition, it successfully combines material culture, technology, literature, and biography to make the argument that >culture shapes consumption= and that in the eighteenth-century Anglo-American world comfort >asserted its essential domesticity, its technological promise, and its universality: all people were entitled to physical comfort, and all people could be comfortable the same way.= For a general reader or academic audience Crowley=s well-illustrated book will shed new light on our understanding of what it means to be comfortable. (ADRIENNE D. HOOD) Paul Budra. >A Mirror for Magistrates= and the >de casibus= Tradition University of Toronto Press. xiv, 120. $45.00 Certain works have long been more appreciated for their famous readers than for their own qualities. Few scholars approach Raphael Holinshed=s Chronicles unaware of their famous adaptations in the Elizabethan history plays, and most are directed to works like A Mirror for Magistrates by Geoffrey Bullough=s multi-volume guide to the Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. To judge by recent studies, however, the practice of reading over the shoulders of giants is under increasing scrutiny. Paul Budra=s new book reads A Mirror for Magistrates not as a source for later poets, but as a text with sources and attributes all its own B one which is better appreciated for what it was, than for what it would become. By retrieving the Mirror from the footnotes and appendices of teaching editions, Budra does for this poem what Annabel Patterson recently did for Holinshed=s Chronicles. The result is that one would no sooner read these works merely as >source-texts= to elucidate later adaptations than one would read Antony and Cleopatra merely to appreciate Dryden=s All for Love. HUMANITIES 217 As his title suggests, Budra is interested in the poem=s precursors in the de casibus tradition. The form originated in Boccaccio=s De casibus vivorum illustrium, a collection of historical biographies all following a similar trajectory of downfall and ruin. Chaucer characteristically experimented with this form by softening its moral tone for the Monk=s Tale, which John Lydgate then characteristically elaborated in his Fall of Princes (ostensibly a translation of Boccaccio from the French). The latter was printed by Richard Pynson in 1497 and 1527, and reprinted by both Richard Tottel and John Wayland in 1554. Wayland=s scheme to edge out his competitor with an updated edition of the Fall of Princes was the impetus behind A Mirror for Magistrates. This poem, whose printing was delayed until 1559, lent itself quite volubly to further extensions, until its fourth and final edition of 1610 comprised a concatenated biographical history of Britain from the landing of Brute to the death of Elizabeth. The teleology manifest in these accumulated narratives, Budra lucidly explains, was necessary for the de casibus formula to have its full polemical impact. He carefully distinguishes this historical formula from the tragedy of fortune, two forms which are often falsely equated, and differentiates between Boccaccio=s moral exemplars and Chaucer=s sympathetic figures. Having thus established the poem within the de casibus tradition, Budra uses it to elucidate two particular elements of the Mirror. The first is its representation of women, who do not often...