Those pistol-packing Romans: Richards' "Messalina", 1640

Some work by one of my postgraduate students led me to read Nathaneal Richards’s The tragedy of Messallina the Roman emperesse, 1640. The passage in the page image above is the most rewarding moment. Our author ushers his text to the press with an array of dedicatory poems complimenting him on successfully writing such a chaste and inoffensive play about such an unchaste woman. Throughout his text, the author supplies footnote quotations, often for the naughtier moments of his play, deploying pieces of choice Latinity as a fig-leaf for his own inevitable sensationalism. So, the empress’s context with a prostitute as to who can take on most men in a night features in the play (Messalina winning her bet with a total of 25, to the disgust of the bawd Veneria, whose contestant Calphurnia has lost her 10,000 sesterces), and it gets its substantiating quotation from Pliny.

But here Richards manages in a single opening to quote Tacitus (bottom right), and yet have his Roman empress enter with a pistol to threaten Silius (top left). The situation is that Silius opened the play as a virtuous-minded man (he was even reading a book, not itself an entirely Roman moment ). However, as soon as he sees Messalina, he succumbs. She is forcing him to kill his wife:


Silius kneels.
Desist faire beauties abstract, I implore;
Spur me not on to murders horrid act
Which I shall ever rue; let it suffice,
I’m only yours, never Syllana’s more;
Sworn a perpetual exile from her bed.
Exit Messalina.

Vanished so soon, how wondrous strange seems this?

Enter Messallina with a Pistol.

Messalina.
Death and destruction satisfy my will
Or take’t in thy bosom, I’m intemperate
Briefly resolve.
Silius.

But I protract delay, there’s danger in’t;
Video meliora, proboque, deteriora Sequor.
Never was man so infinitely
Bewitcht; charm’d, and inchanted as is Caius
Silius, to leave a constant wife; farewell,

We must part…

The Latin tag is from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Richards has his pistol-toting Romans occasionally given to using a bit of Latin. The effect is disconcerting:

What saies our Roman phrase,
Si non letaris vivens laetabere nanquam?

Of course, hunting out anachronisms in a 16th-17th century play is always easy (Richard’s Romans also play tennis). These dramatists did not worry about such things. But a pistol is so egregious an error, in an age which considered the printing press and gunpowder to be two great inventions that distinguished their time from the past, that I wondered what led Richards so far.

 

My first thought was that he was being deliberately anachronistic, to trigger the audience into seeing his play in contemporary terms. I thought of Richard Brathwait’s verse attack on Frances Howard, Countess of Essex:

 

‘Upon our Ages Messalina, insatiat Madona, the matchless English Corombona’

Here lies Lust,
Revenge, Defame.
Woe to man, to woman shame;
Faire and false, as great as ill,
Weake in Grace, but strong in Will.
Honours blemish, Hymens stayne,
Virtues poyson, Beauties baine,
Albions -Siren, tyrant-woman,
Faith-infringer, true to no man;
Femall-Divell, plots-contriver,
Worths-tormenter, lifes depriver;
Tragick actor, blood effuser,
Times corrupter, States-abuser;
Brothel-Turner, virgin-Trader,
Husband-hater, Lusts-perswader;
Ages-monster, youths-deflourer …

- there’s plenty more of this outpouring; it appeared in his The honest ghost (1658). Was a Messalina play always going to be a Frances Howard play in Roman dress? The play forcing the audience, at pistol-point, to see the depravity of the present in that of the past?

 

But reading the play shows what the form is: Richards was a highly derivative writer. His work contains many moments of plagiary; half-quotation, half-imitation:

‘The thanks 'mong Princes of ignoble brain / That shines like rotten wood…’ uses a famous line from Ralegh’s anti-court poem, ‘The Lie’.

An asseveration about having your ‘eye-balls to drop out’ rather than see something unwelcome is Tourneur’s Damville: “Drop out mine eye-balls, and let envious Fortune play at tennis with’em”. “A drab, /  Of state, a cloth of Silver slut” is a direct lift from The Revenger’s Tragedy, where Vindice gets indignant about Castiza his sister might become ‘The duke’s son’s great Concubine: / A drab of State, a cloth a’silver slut, / To have her train borne up, and her soul trail i'th dirt.”

Richards’ Messalina threatens Silius with a pistol because Richards was thinking only of the scene in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi when Julia enters to court Bosola at pistol-point. Julia charges Bosola with having put a love-potion in her drink: it is almost as if Richards wants us to be as attuned as him to Webster, as he barely explains that Silius is also dosed with a love potion, and so loses his head.

The ‘drab of state’ phrase also appears in Richards’ commendatory verse to Women beware Women:

‘UPON The Tragedy of My Familiar Acquaintance, THO. MIDDLETON.’

“Women beware Women”! 'tis a true Text
Never to be forgot: Drabs of State vext,
Have Plots, Poisons, Mischeifs that seldom miss,
To murther Virtue with a venom kiss.
Witness this worthy Tragedy, exprest
By him that well deserv’d among the best
Of Poets in his time: He knew the rage,
Madness of Women crossed; and for the Stage
Fitted their humors, Hell-bred Malice, Strife
Acted in State, presented to the life.
I that have seen’t, can say, having just cause,
Never came Tragedy off with more applause. 

Richards commends Middleton for having written such a rattling good anti-feminist play, accurately capturing the immorality of great women. His own play follows the model, and incorporates the same sentiment:

 

Weake mindes of men they are, fit to be fool’d,
Slighted, add scorn’d, whose dull ignorance
Knowes not that women in their height of ill,
Who barres them their delight, delight to kill.

The breeches of Bussy D'Ambois

One of the great deaths in Jacobean drama is that of Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois: impelled by his own maniacal courage, which obliges him to disregard all warnings (both human and supernatural), not to answer his lady's summons, Bussy is ambushed in the bedchamber of his mistress by the bravoes hired by his cuckold, the Count of Montsurry. He chases them all out, killing one, then summons the Count to appear in his own quarrel, overpowers him, spares his life at the request of Tamyra, but then is shot from off-stage. Bussy resolves to die like the Emperor Vespasian, standing up, though not held up by menials, but propped up only by his sword.

All this amid some splendid or murky blank verse – Chapman at his rather mixed best:

.. I am up

Here like a Roman Statue; I will stand

Till death hath made me marble: O my fame

Live in despite of murder; take thy wings

And haste thee where the gray-eyed morn perfumes,

Her Rosie chariot with Sabaean spices,

Fly, where the evening from th’Iberean vales,

Takes on her swarthy shoulders, Hecate

Crowned with a grove of oaks: fly where men feel

The burning axletree: and those that suffer

Beneath the chariot of the Snowy Bear:

And tell them all that D’Ambois now is hasting

To the eternal dwellers; that a thunder

Of all their sigh together (for their frailties

Beheld in me) may quit my worthless fall

With a fit volley for my funeral.

But here’s a different telling of the death, which I came across in A pleasant treatise of witches their imps, and meetings, persons bewitched, magicians, necromancers, incubus, and succubus's, familiar spirits, goblings, pharys, specters, phantasms, places haunted, and devillish impostures : with the difference between good and bad angels, and a true relation of a good genius (1673). I don’t quite know where the anonymous author got this from: it seems to be a mix of recollections of the play, and a historical source unknown to me. This was probably The Amours of Solon, Socrates, Julius Caesar, Cato of Utica, D'Andelot, Bussy D'Amboyse newly translated out of French (1673), but EEBO does not have any page images yet (but notice the coincidence of dates, which makes me think it will prove the source of the story).

“Henry the third King of France, had a brother called the Duke of Allenzon, who came to England formerly to be a suiter to Queen Elizabeth, in whose retinue was the Valiant Busidamboyes who took the Dukes part, between whom and the King was a perpetual feud. The King, therefore by nature timerous and suspicious, was always afraid of this valiant person, and after his return into France, devised several means to take him out of the way …

… there being a constant report at Court that Bussidamboyes was in favour with the Earl of Monsurrous wife, he sent for an Italian Negromancer, famous at that time, and called Triscalino. Of him he enquires if he could shew or declare to him, what Bussidamboyes was then doing, which the Magician after certain conjurations shewed him in a Glass, where was Bussidamboyes in bed with a Lady. Hereupon the King sent for his Courtiers, amongst whom was the Earl of Monsorrou at that time, and asked if they knew that Lady. The Earl much abased, replyed, it was his wife. Then said the King, I will have no Cuckolds to be my Courtiers. To which the Earl made answer, that to hinder what was done was not in his power, but that it was in the Kings, to give him leave to avenge himself, which he earnestly requested.

The King glad to be any ways rid of Bussidamboyes, gave his assent, and the Earl posted away immediately to his own house; and coming betimes in the morning to his wife, as she lay in bed, offered her the choice of three things, either a draught of Poyson, a Dagger to kill her self, or to write such a Letter as he would dictate to her. The miserable woman terrified with the thoughts of death, consented to the Latter; and, according to her husbands dictating, sent for Bussidamboyes, who suspected nothing, to come unto her. In the mean time the Earl concealed himself in the house, armed with six more, and behind the Curtains in her chamber. Bussidamboyes came not long after, and offering to go up stairs in his accustomed manner, was desired by a Page, set for that purpose, to leave his Spurs and his Sword below, because his Lady was ill, and the least noise disturbed her. This he did, not mistrusting what would follow; but as soon he entred the Chamber, the Lady gave a sign, and all rusht in upon him. Nevertheless, being of an undaunted courage, he took the first chair he found, and so behaved himself with that weapon, by reason of his great strength, that he kild two of them; and then being wounded in divers places, he leapt out of the window into the Garden. But fell by misfortune upon a pole that prop’t up a Vine, and there stuck fast by the Breeches, which the Conspirators perceiving, ran down and made an end of him there.”

Somehow, being caught by the trousers on a vine pole after jumping out of a window has a ring of truth to it – and of course Chapman reworked this ignominious end.

I got the purported portrait of Bussy from the French Wikipedia (it is a 19th century effort, but perhaps based on an earlier):

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussy_d%27Amboise

Chapman’s play was admired, and revived in the restoration period. I came across an allusion to it in James Blackwel’s splendidly malicious The Nativitie of Mr Will Lilly astrologically performed shewing how he hath lived, and what death he may probably die. For the satisfaction of astrologers and others (1660), where the writer congratulates himself:

“Let Mr Lilly tell me whether I have not dealt like a faithful friend by him, and as truly as Damboyse, and the Kings Brother did by each other in the Tragedy. Here are no Sycophantic tow’ring strains, nor have we flattered Lilly in hopes of reward, as he hath done so many to their ruine.”

This appears on the pages numbered 13-14 (it is a chaotically paginated pamphlet).

The allusion is to the scene at the end of Act 3 where Monsieur and Bussy tell one another exactly what they think – Monsieur denouncing Bussy as a slave to his own ‘cannibal valour’, Bussy telling his jealous patron that all the evil in the kingdom flows from his ‘political head’, and that he also has a breath that will ‘kill to that wall a spider’. It obviously struck people at the time, and rightly.