Mucedorus
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Mucedorus is an Elizabethan play, enormously popular in its own era and after, that was at one time attributed to William Shakespeare.
Mucedorus was the most frequently reprinted play of its age, with 17 quarto texts before the end of the 17th century. They are: Q1—1598; Q2—1606; Q3—1610; Q4—1611; Q5—1613; Q6—1615; Q7—1618; Q8—1619; Q9—1621; Q10—1626; Q11—1631; Q12—1634; Q13—1639; Q14—1663; Q15—1668; and two that are undated or undatable (Q16, Q17). The first six of these quartos were published by the bookseller William Jones.[1]
The title page of Q3 (1610) of Mucedorus claims that it was in the repertoire of the Globe Theatre:
A/Most pleasant/Comedie of Muce-/dorus the Kings sonne of Valen-/tia, and Amadine the Kinges/daughter of Aragon./With the merry conceites of Mouse./Amplified with new additions, as it was/acted before the Kings Maistie at/White-hall on Shroue-/sunday night./By his Highnes Seruantes vsually/playing at the Globe./Very delectable, and full of conceited Mirth./Imprinted at London for William Iones./dwelling neare Holborne Conduit/at the signe of the Gunne./1610./[2]
Starting with this same Q3 and continuing through all subsequent editions, the text of the play is augmented with six additional passages, which are plainly not the work of the original author. Some early critics considered Shakespeare as a potential author of these additions rather than the original play — though even this view is not regarded with favor by the modern scholarly consensus.[3]
The play was assigned to Shakespeare in Edward Archer's play list of 1656, published in his edition of The Old Law; it was also bound together with Fair Em and The Merry Devil of Edmonton in a book labelled "Shakespeare. Vol. I" in the library of King Charles II.
The play is a romantic comedy about the titular character, prince of Valentia, who rescues the princess Amadine from a bear and eventually marries her. The bear was frequently played by an actual bear — something that, perhaps, contributed to the play's popularity. The bear in Mucedorus has been linked to the bears in Jonson's 1611 masque Oberon, the Faery Prince and Shakespeare's play of the same era, The Winter's Tale.[4]
Mucedorus was performed by strolling players as late as the eighteenth century. One such performance, at Witney in Oxfordshire on February 3, 1654 (new style), saw a number of the audience killed and injured when the floor collapsed under the weight of the crowd. A Puritan preacher considered the accident a sign of God's displeasure with play-acting.
Modern scholarship suggests a date for the play's origin c. 1590. Individual critics have considered The Arcadia of Sir Philip Sidney (one of whose characters is named Musidorus) as a source for the play, and have studied its relationship to pastoral and folkltale forms, and to traditional mummers' plays, Medieval theatre and chivalric romances, and the Italian Commedia dell'arte.[5]
[edit] Notes
- ^ Chambers, Vol. 4, p. 34.
- ^ Henrietta C. Bartlett, Mr. William Shakespeare, Original and Early Editions of His Quartos and Folios: His Source Books and those containing Contemporary Notices (New Haven 1922), p. 61.
- ^ One exception among twentieth-century critics: MacDonald P. Jackson, who assigned the 1610 additions to Shakespeare. Logan and Smith, p. 228.
- ^ Logan and Smith, pp. 228-9.
- ^ Logan and Smith, pp. 229-30.
[edit] References
- Chambers, E. K. The Elizabethan Stage. 4 Volumes, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1923.
- Kozlenko, William, ed. Disputed Plays of William Shakespeare. Hawthorn Books, 1974.
- Logan, Terence P., and Demzell S. Smith, eds. The Predecessors of Shakespeare: A Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama. Lincoln, NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1973.
- Tucker Brooke, C. F., ed., The Shakespeare Apocrypha, Oxford, the Clarendon Press, 1908.
[edit] External links
- text of Mucedorus at Project Gutenberg
- The Comedy of Mucedorus, ed. Warnke and Proescholdt (Halle, 1878)
