Note 67 — Chapter I · ROMAN PLAYS IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY (continued 2)

Professor Ward calls attention to the stage direction(Act iii.): “Enter Sylla in triumph in his chair triumphant of gold, drawn by four Moors; before the chariot, his colours, his crest, his captains, his prisoners; ... bearing crowns of gold and manacled.” This, he points out, seems a reminiscence of the similar situation in Tamburlaine II., Act iv. sc. 3.: “Enter Tamberlaine drawn in his chariot by the Kings of Trebizon and Soria, with bits in their mouths, reins in his left hand, and in his right hand a whip with which he scourgeth them.” From this Professor Ward infers that Lodge’s play belongs approximately to the same date as Marlowe’s, possibly to 1587. It may be so, but there are some reasons for placing it later. The mixture of rhyme and prose instead of the exclusive use of blank verse would suggest that the influence of Tamburlaine was not very immediate. It has some points of contact with the Looking Glass which Lodge wrote along with Greene. It has the same didactic bent, though the purpose is political rather than moral, for the Wounds of Civill War enforces on its very title page the lesson that Elizabethans had so much at heart, the need of harmony in the State. Like the Looking Glass it deals rather with an historic transaction than with individual adventures, for it summarises the whole disastrous period of the conflict between Marius and Sulla. And like the Looking Glass it visualises this by scenes taken alike from dignified and low life, the latter even more out of place than the episodes of the Nineveh citizens and peasants in the joint work. In so far one is tempted to put the two together about 1591. And there is one detail that perhaps favours this view—the introduction of the Gaul with his bad English and worse French. In Greene’s James IV. (c. 1590) the assassin hired to murder Queen Dorothea is also a Frenchman who speaks broken English, and in that play such a personage is quite in keeping, violating the probabilities neither of time nor of place. It is, therefore, much more probable that, if he proved popular, Lodge would reproduce the same character inappropriately to catch the applause of the groundlings, than that Lodge should light on the first invention when that invention was quite unsuitable, and that Greene should afterwards borrow it and give it a fit setting. In the latter case we can only account for the absurdity by supposing that Lodge carried much further the anachronism in Cornelia of “the fierce and fiery-humour’d French.”