The Mysterious James Gurney

Scholars sometimes find themselves in a position where they think they may have discovered an important association of some kind, but aren’t really sure if it’s just coincidence or the real thing. This poses a dilemma: should they publish what they have, or wait for more evidence to come in?

A common technique to deal with this dilemma is to go ahead and note the association, but just say it is ‘curious’. It’s a pretty good strategy. If you turn out to be right, the association was worth noting, and you get the credit; if it turns out you were wrong, well, all you said was that it was curious.

E.A.J. Honigmann used this technique when glossing the following passage in his 1954 Arden edition of King John:

Enter Lady Faulconbridge and James Gurney

Bastard O me! ‘tis my mother. - How now, good lady?

What brings you here to court so hastily?

Lady Faulconbridge Where is that slave, thy brother? where is he,

That holds in chase mine honour up and down?

Bastard My brother Robert? old Sir Robert’s son?

Colbrand the giant, that same mighty man?

Is it Sir Robert’s son that you seek so?

Lady Faulconbridge Sir Robert’s son! Ay, thou unreverend boy –

Sir Robert’s son? – why scorn’st thou at Sir Robert?

He is Sir Robert’s son, and so art thou.

Bastard James Gurney, wilt thou give us leave awhile?

Gurney Good leave, good Philip.

Bastard  Philip? – sparrow! – James,

There’s toys abroad: anon I’ll tell thee more.

Exit Gurney.

Honigmann noted that the passage "would suit A. Harbage's thesis that Guy Earl of Warwick (1661) ('by B.J.') contains an early satire of Shakespeare ... It is curious that Shakespeare drags in the Guy story [by referring to Colbrand, the giant who Guy fights and defeats in the romance legend of Guy of Warwick] ... then recalls P.Sparrow ... whom B.J. first associated with Guy, adding ‘There’s rumours abroad’”.

In other words, it looks like the passage is a response by Shakespeare to being satirised as the clown Sparrow in Guy of Warwick. A number of scholars believe that the passage is exactly that. Helen Cooper discusses it at length in Guy of Warwick, Upstart Crows and Mounting Sparrows, Katherine Duncan-Jones accepts it in Shakespeare, Guy of Warwick, and Chines of Beef, and even Helen Moore, who is not committed to Harbage’s hypothesis, concedes in her Malone Society Edition of Guy of Warwick that it is “undoubtedly ‘curious’”.

A key, albeit very short, role in this pasage is that of James Gurney (spelled alternately ‘Gurney’ and ‘Gournie’ in the First Folio, but also spelled ‘Gournay’ at the time). James Gurney enters with Lady Faulconbridge, says one line, ‘Good leave, good Philip’, then exits. It’s not a role for the ages, though Samuel Taylor Coleridge was apparently quite excited by it [Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge]:

“For an instance of Shakespeare’s power in minimis, I generally quote James Gurney’s character in King John. How individual and comical he is with the four words allowed to his dramatic life!”

Ignoring Coleridge’s excess of zeal (or laudanum), we can see that James Gurney’s only real purpose in the passage is to serve as the prompt for the Bastard’s outburst “Philip? – sparrow! – James, There’s toys abroad”, as Helen Cooper noted:

“The juxtaposition of Colbrand and Sparrow suggests at the least an association on Shakespeare's own part. It also raises the further possibility that the [Bastard's] exclamation had some immediate and topical point recognisable by both players and audience ... Gurney, to whom the 'Sparrow' remark is made, seems to be introduced only in order to give the excuse for it.” [my italics]

This should put us on the alert for any other oddities about James Gurney, and there is indeed another one -  that he is called James Gurney at all. That is, it is odd that this inconsequential character is fully named. Characters with only one line in Shakespeare are usually just given a generic name ('Page’, 'Gentleman’, 'Commoner' etc), or at most only a first name (see Shakespeare characters, sorted by number of lines). The First Folio doesn’t tell us who James Gurney actually is, but he is usually assumed to be a servant, so why does Shakespeare go to the bother of fully naming him? Just ‘Servant’ would have sufficed, or if something more personal was required (though it doesn’t seem to be, really), just ‘James’ would have been fine. But ‘James Gurney’? Why did Shakespeare bother to give him a full name, and why did he make it ‘Gurney’?

Originally, I suspected that the answer to this question might lie in an allusion to some historical figure called Gurney, but after much fruitless Googling of the Gurneys I could only come to this conclusion - the Gurney family didn’t leave much of a mark on history. This left one alternative: that the meaning of the name itself might be the point. Since the etymology of the name Gurney is not of great general interest, this also led to much fruitless searching. Eventually, however, I stumbled on the following: Daniel Gurney, Supplement To The Record Of The House Of Gournay, London, 1858, a tome from the 19th century dedicated to the ‘House of Gournay’. On page 725, there’s a section on the origin of the name Gurney.

Now if you have read the Background or Articles section of this blog you will know my hypothesis: the clown Sparrow in Guy of Warwick is a satirical response to Shakespeare’s original satire of the Isle of Dogs affair in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Sparrow’s genesis, if you like, was The Isle of Dogs, “a peninsula in the Thames known for its wet, marshy conditions”. Imagine my surprise then when I read the following in The House of Gournay:

“The derivation of the name Gournay appears to arise from this circumstance: Gore in Saxon, and I believe in Celtic, means mud, the Saxon genitive of which is Gorena; and Eye, which means waters, or island, is the second syllable of the word; hence Gorena-eye, the muddy waters or island.”

‘Muddy waters or island’! What are the chances that to a character whose only apparent purpose is to provoke an allusion to Sparrow in Guy of Warwick, Shakespeare has given a name more than a little evocative of the Isle of Dogs? For my hypothesis this is surely a Eureka moment?

Not really. More like a ‘you cannot be serious’ moment i.e. too good to be true.

But I’m recording it here anyway. It's surely worth noting as ‘curious’.

Shakespeare Apocrypha and Exotica

I recently came across a site with a reference to my 2006 paper linking Mucedorus with Guy of Warwick. The site is Sabrina Feldman's The Apocryphal William Shakespeare.

Feldman is an anti-Stratfordian who has proposed yet another candidate to add to the already staggeringly long list of people who were the ‘real’ Shakespeare: Thomas Sackville. It is bizarre how the most unlikely people get on this list, but not the candidate whose credentials dwarf all others: William Shakespeare from Stratford-Upon-Avon.

Unlike most anti-Stratfordians who allow the Stratford man no writing capabilities at all, Feldman is from the school of Shakespeare sceptics who give him some connection with the plays, but only a very mean one. Disgruntled by the notion that Shakespeare could actually have been human, made mistakes, wrote bad stuff as well as good, and even had some unlikeable personal characteristics, they prefer to imagine a neat binary situation where everything they like about Shakespeare was the work of the ‘Bard’, and everything they dislike was the work of someone else. The Bard is always a 'concealed' poet, and nearly always Sir Someone, Lord So and So, or, preferably, the Earl of Something or Other. In this case, Thomas Sackville (aka Baron Buckhurst) is the 'Bard', and William Shakespeare from Stratford-Upon-Avon is the 'someone else'.

Feldman’s twist on the usual scenario is to focus on the 'Shakespeare Apocrypha' (plays like Locrine, Fair Em, The London Prodigal etc, attributed at various times to Shakespeare, but not generally accepted as his), and on the ‘bad quartos’, supposed stolen or mangled versions of Shakespeare's acknowledged plays.  She thinks that William of Stratford, though not the actual Bard, was a "gifted poet who wrote in the Bard's style" and “wrote the apocryphal plays and bad quartos (in large part) while serving as a front man for the Bard”. Her revelation that William wrote the bad quartos is particularly surprising. You’d think the Bard might have told his front man to stop it.

Anyway, my interest in all this is really with how Feldman deals with my paper on Mucedorus, one of the plays included in the Shakespeare Apocrypha. The short answer is that she quotes the paper fairly, but, as you would expect, interprets differently the verbal links between Mucedorus and Guy of Warwick that I noted. Where I saw Sparrow's allusions as a satire on Shakespeare, she sees it through her Bard/William prism. Thus, she believes that 'William' wrote Mucedorus, and that Sparrow’s allusions to that play in Guy are a ridiculing of William’s less-than-Bardish writing style.

I can't think of much to say about this, other than there's no evidence for it, and no need for it. If we are unburdened by any psychological impulse to protect the ‘Bard’ against criticism by deflecting that criticism to a mythical ‘William’, there’s no need to doubt that Shakespeare was the object of ridicule in Guy. Whether or not he wrote Mucedorus is relatively unimportant. All that really counted was that an audience would recognise him, as the leading playwright of the company that played Mucedorus, in Sparrow’s satirical allusions. If Shakespeare did have a hand in Mucedorus, all the better, but it was not a necessary condition for the satire to have been effective.

[Addendum: One question I did not address in my 2006 paper - because I did not have any answer to it then - was why exactly the author of Guy chose Mucedorus as a vehicle for satirising Shakespeare. There were, after all, other plays indisputably by Shakespeare that he could have chosen. Since then, however, I have proposed that Guy was written in 1598, and I now suspect Mucedorus was chosen for reasons of timing more than anything else. The play was printed for the first time in 1598, and the likelihood is that the author of Guy chose it as a target because its first printing made it a topical item. Unfortunately, we do not know when exactly in 1598 Mucedorus was printed, so this can only be a guess.]

That Old Devil Belimoth

Scholarly consensus on whether the 1604 or 1616 quarto of Doctor Faustus best represents Marlowe’s original version of the play has swung back and forth over the years. The two texts - known as the ‘A’ and ‘B’ texts, respectively - differ quite significantly. The B-text is about 600 lines longer overall, mainly due to additional lines in Acts 3 and 4.

In his diary for 22 November 1602 Philip Henslowe noted payment of £4 to William Birde and Samuel Rowley for ‘adicyones in doctor fostes’. The simplest explanation for the additional lines in the B-text is that they are these 1602 additions by Birde/Rowley. The majority of late nineteenth and early twentieth century editors accepted this, and consequently gave primacy to the A-text as being closer to Marlowe’s original text. However, the B-text gained scholarly ascendancy in the mid twentieth century, largely through the efforts of Kirschbaum and Greg, who argued that the A-text was a ‘bad quarto’  of the more authoritative B-text. In the last decade or so, the scholarly pendulum has swung back to the A-text, and although there is some dissent,  the B-text is now generally regarded as a revised version of Doctor Faustus, with the additional lines having little or no Marlovian authority.

One of the more notable differences between the A and B texts of Doctor Faustus is that the B-text contains a few devils not present in the A-text. Called 'Belimote', 'Argiron' and 'Asterote', these devils appear in Act 4, Scene 1, summoned by Faustus to punish three gentlemen, Benvolio, Frederick and Martino, for their mockery of him. In Scene 2, Belimote and Asterote (now called ‘Belimoth(e)’ and ‘Asteroth’) reappear to execute Faustus’s further revenge. Belimoth, in particular, is singled out to punish Martino ("Go Belimothe, and take this caitife hence, And hurle him in some lake of mud and durt").

Despite much speculation, the source of the name ‘Belimoth’ in the B-text eluded scholars until very recently. However, Michael Keefer noted in 2007 that "the author of this scene appears to have derived these names…from one or another of the grimoires from which Reginald Scot mockingly quotes in The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584)" [Michael Keefer (ed.), Doctor Faustus, Second Edition, Broadview Press (2007), 202]. The name ‘Belimoth’ actually appears in Scot’s book (as one of three names used "To speake with spirits"), so it doesn't really seem necessary to postulate, as Keefer does, that the Belimoth reference in the B-text was derived directly from a grimoire. Since Scot’s work was published in 1584, the name Belimoth could simply have been lifted from The Discoverie of Witchcraft itself.

The name ‘Belimoth’ appears in only one other work from the period: The Tragical History, Admirable Atchievments and various events of Guy earl of Warwick. If this were all, we could probably just mark it down as ‘curious’ that Guy shares this rare name with the B-text. However, the Belimoth link is far more substantial than this. There are very strong verbal parallels between the passages in which Belimoth appears in Guy and the B-text, which make it virtually certain that one text has influenced the other in some way. The passages where these parallels occur  are shown below:

Faustus B-text

Faustus

...

But wherefore doe I dally my reuenge?

Asteroth, Belimoth, Mephostophilis,

[Ent. Meph. & other Diuels.]

Go horse these traytors on your fiery backes,

And mount aloft with them as high as heauen,

Thence pitch them headlong to the lowest hell:

Yet stay, the world shall see their miserie,

And hell shall after plague their treacherie.

Go Belimothe, and take this caitife hence,

And hurle him in some lake of mud and durt:

Take thou this other, dragge him through the woods,

Amongst the pricking thornes, and sharpest briers,

Whilst with my gentle Mephostophilis,

This Traytor flies vnto some steepie rocke,

That rowling downe, may breake the villaines bones,

As he intended to dismember me.

Fly hence, dispatch my charge immediatly.

Guy of Warwick

Sultan. O speak Zorastes, what Divel or Man is that,

which in his Fury confounds such heaps of men?

Zorast. My Lord I cannot tell, but this I know,

neither Turk nor Saracen can withstand his blow,

our Souldiers fly like chaff before the Wind,

and none can stand against his Conquering sword.

Sultan. Canst thou not tell me what he is?

nor by thy Magick charmes confound the slave?

Zorast. I can do both as you shall streight behold;

Bellemoth, Asteroth Ascend.

Spirit. Quid me vis?

Zorast. I charge thee tell me truly who it is,

that in his rage confounds and spoiles our men.

Spirit. 'Tis Guy of Warwick that is hither come,

of holy zeal to see his Saviour Tomb.

Zorast. But never shall he see that Marble Grave,

go Bellemoth, and in a fierce flame,

hoyse him aloft into the vacant Air,

and throw him headlong into the Neighbouring Seas.

There can be little doubt that these passages are connected. The words are not identical, but they are consistently close thematically and verbally: ‘Go Belimothe’/‘go Bellemoth’; ‘fiery backes’/‘fierce flame’ ; ‘mount aloft’/‘hoyse him aloft’; ‘pitch them headlong’/‘throw him headlong’. It surely cannot be coincidence that in the only two plays from the period that mention Belimoth at all we also have such close verbal parallels.

That there should be such strong verbal connections between Guy and Doctor Faustus is not in itself remarkable. Marlowe’s play was one of the most famous of the period, and it would not be surprising to see allusions to it in Guy. What makes the connection intriguing is that all the connections are to lines that exist only in the B-text. This has potentially significant implications for our understanding of the provenance and dating of both Guy and the B-text. If, for example, the Belimoth lines in Guy are an allusion to Doctor Faustus, and the corresponding Belimoth lines in the B-text are the Birde/Rowley additions of 1602, then Guy cannot have been written any earlier than 1602. This would mean, of course, that my dating of Guy to 1598 (or, at the latest, 1601 when Dekker’s Satiromastix was entered in the Stationers' Register) is simply wrong.

No doubt, many would be happy to accept this conclusion. However, the implications are wider than just my dating being wrong.  Under this interpretation, all datings of the play to the 1590s or earlier (Harbage, Cooper, Duncan-Jones etc) would be wrong. This is not impossible, but before making such a drastic conclusion we should look more closely at the assumptions behind this particular interpretation.

Firstly, it is assumed that the shared Belimoth lines are due to Guy alluding to Faustus, rather than the other way round. This is a  natural assumption: Faustus was famous, Guy was not, and I have argued myself that the latter play seems to go out of its way to allude to other works, notably Mucedorus and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Nevertheless, many a famous play has borrowed lines from an obscure one (and no play is famous at the time of writing, anyway),  so we can certainly not rule out that the direction of influence for the Belimoth lines could have been from Guy to the B-text. On balance, though, it seems a reasonable assumption that the Belimoth lines in Guy allude to, or borrow from, Doctor Faustus.

Secondly, although there is currently a general consensus that the additional lines in the B-text are the Birde/Rowley additions of 1602, this does not bind us to the assumption that all the additional lines in the B-text  were the original work of Birde/Rowley. Keefer, in particular, has argued against such an assumption. While agreeing that the B-text is generally a revised version of the more authentic A-text, he puts forward evidence that some of the lines in the B-text  preserve readings earlier than those of the A-text [Michael Keefer, ‘The A and B Texts of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus Revisited’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, June 2006, 227-257].

If it turns out that Guy is indeed a play from the 1590s or earlier, it will have the important implication that the Belimoth lines in the B-text cannot be the original work of Birde/Rowley in 1602, since the corresponding lines already existed in Guy. While it would be possible that the lines originated in Guy, and Birde/Rowley borrowed directly from that play, the more likely scenario would be that Guy and the B-text were referencing a common source: a version of Doctor Faustus earlier than that of the A-text, but preserved in the B-text.