Ignoramus (play)

Last updated

Ignoramus is a college farce, a 1615 academic play by George Ruggle. Written in Latin (with passages in English and French), it was arguably the most famous and influential academic play of English Renaissance drama. Ruggle based his play on La Trappolaria (1596), an Italian comedy by Giambattista della Porta (which in turn borrows from the Pseudolus of Plautus).

Contents

In Latin, ignoramus , the first-person plural present active indicative of īgnōrō (“I do not know”, “I am unacquainted with”, “I am ignorant of”), literally means “we are ignorant of” or “we do not know”. The term acquired its English meaning of an ignorant person or dunce as a consequence of Ruggle's play.

Performance

The play was first produced in Clare College, Cambridge on Wednesday, March 8, 1615, as part of the program of entertainments for a visit by King James I. James enjoyed the play so much that he returned to Cambridge to see it again on Saturday, May 13 of that year. [1] Contemporary John Chamberlain reported that "the play was full of mirth and variety with many excellent actors, but more than half spoiled by its extreme length of six hours."

Texts

Ignoramus was entered into the Stationers' Register on April 18, 1615, and was published later that year by the bookseller Walter Burre. Two subsequent editions were issued in 1630, and other editions followed in 1658, 1659, 1668, 1707, 1731, 1736, 1737, and after. John Sidney Hawkins issued an elaborately-edited text in 1787.

Several manuscripts of the play also exist. The MS. in the collection of the Bodleian Library, Tanner MS. 306, features a cast list of the amateur actors in the original production. [2]

Fernando Parkhurst translated the original into English in 1660, as Ignoramus, or the Academical Lawyer; Robert Codrington's translation followed in 1662. The English-language versions were presented onstage during the Restoration.

Satire

The play satirizes the college recorder, Francis Brackyn (also spelt Brackin), a "constant adversary of the university" [3] who is represented as the Ignoramus of the title. Brackyn was unpopular among the academics of the town as a "common lawyer" (they used a crude "law Latin" that the academics deplored); he had previously been ridiculed in the third of the Parnassus plays. In Ignoramus, Brackyn is given a romance of false loves; he is enamored of Rosabella and pays 600 gold pieces for her hand in marriage, but is tricked into being with the mannish Polla. Like Malvolio, who is supposed mad, he is suspected of being possessed and put through an exorcism before being carried off to a monastery to recuperate (and to stay away from the loves of the more worthy wits).

The lawyers who were the subject of the play's satire did not enjoy the work; Sir Edward Coke, the Lord Chief Justice, believed that he was a target of some of the barbs. The play provoked a quarrel between academics and lawyers. The lawyers responded with satirical poems and ballads, which inspired responses by the academics, to create a passionate controversy. Ruggle's play even had an influence in the reform of legal language in England. [4]

Author

George Ruggle (1575–1622) graduated Lavenham grammar school and matriculated at St. John's, Cambridge in 1589. He transferred to Trinity College, where he received his B.A. in 1593 and his M.A. in 1597. He became a fellow of Trinity the following year, and remained at the college until 1620.

Upon Ruggle's death, Nicholas Ferrar read a eulogy for the academic at a meeting of the Virginia Company; he referred to Ruggle as a "Brother of the Company" and revealed that Ruggle had worked for the Company for the last three years of his life. In his will, Ruggle left £100 for the Christian education of American Indian children in Virginia. [5]

Ruggle is reported to have written other plays; but none are extant. [6]

Related Research Articles

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1615.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nicholas Ferrar</span> English scholar, courtier and church innovator 1592–1637

Nicholas Ferrar was an English scholar, courtier and businessman, who was ordained a deacon in the Church of England. He lost much of his fortune in the Virginia Company and retreated with his extended family in 1626 to the manor of Little Gidding, Huntingdonshire, for his remaining years, in an informal spiritual community following High Anglican practice. His friend the poet and Anglican priest George Herbert (1593–1633), on his deathbed, sent Ferrar the manuscript of The Temple, telling him to publish the poetry if it might "turn to the advantage of any dejected poor soul." "If not, let him burn it; for I and it are less than the least of God's mercies." Ferrar published the verses in 1633; they remain in print.

Giles Fletcher was an English cleric and poet chiefly known for his long allegorical poem Christ's Victory and Triumph (1610).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas Nevile</span>

Thomas Nevile was an English clergyman and academic who was Dean of Peterborough (1591–1597) and Dean of Canterbury (1597–1615), Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge (1582–1593), and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge (1593–1615).

Ancrene Wisse is an anonymous monastic rule for female anchoresses written in the early 13th century.

Sir Walter Wilson Greg, known professionally as W. W. Greg, was one of the leading bibliographers and Shakespeare scholars of the 20th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edward Ravenscroft</span> English playwright

Edward Ravenscroft was an English dramatist who belonged to an ancient Flintshire family.

Dr Samuel Brooke (1575–1631) was a Gresham Professor of Divinity, a playwright, the chaplain of Trinity College, Cambridge and subsequently the Master of Trinity (1629–1631). He was known to be an Arminian and anti-Calvinist. In 1631 he was appointed archdeacon of Coventry.

Thomas Preston (1537–1598) was an English master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and possibly a dramatist.

Walter Burre was a London bookseller and publisher of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, best remembered for publishing several key texts in English Renaissance drama.

Academic drama refers to a theatrical movement that emerged in the mid 16th century during the Renaissance. Dedicated to the study of classical dramas for the purpose of higher education, universities in England began to produce the plays of Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca the Younger in the Greek and Roman languages, as well as neoclassical dramas. These classical and neoclassical productions were performed by young scholars at universities in Cambridge and Oxford. Other European countries, such as Spain and Italy adapted classical plays into a mixture of Latin and vernacular dramas. These Spanish and Italian adaptations were used in teaching morals in schools and colleges. The intellectual development of dramas in schools, universities, and Inns of Court in Europe allowed the emergence of the great playwrights of the late 16th century.

John Rhodes was a theatrical figure of the early and middle seventeenth century. He rose to a brief prominence in 1660 when the London theatres re-opened at the start of the English Restoration era.

Pathomachia, or the Battle of Affections, also known as Love's Lodestone, is an early 17th-century play, first printed in 1630. It is an allegory that presents a range of problems to scholars of the drama of the Jacobean and Caroline eras.

Thomas Tomkis was an English playwright of the late Elizabethan and the Jacobean eras, and arguably one of the more cryptic figures of English Renaissance drama.

Albumazar is a Jacobean era play, a comedy written by Thomas Tomkis that was performed and published in 1615.

The Eneados is a translation into Middle Scots of Virgil's Latin Aeneid, completed by the poet and clergyman Gavin Douglas in 1513.

Thomas Eden was an English jurist, academic and politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1640 to 1645.

The Trinity Homilies are a collection of 36 homilies found in MS Trinity 335 (B.14.52), held in Trinity College, Cambridge. Produced probably early in the thirteenth century in the Early Middle English period, the collection is of great linguistic importance in establishing the development of the English language, since it preserves a number of Old English forms and gives evidence of the literary influence of Latin and Anglo-Norman as well as of the vernacular used in sermons for lay audiences. The same manuscript, like that of the Lambeth Homilies, also preserves a version of the Poema Morale.

Ignoramus may refer to:

The Little Gidding community was an extended family and religious group based at Little Gidding, Huntingdonshire, England, in existence from the middle of the 1620s to the later 1650s. It gained attention in its time because of the interest Charles I of England showed in it. In the 19th century associated buildings were restored; T. S. Eliot was attracted to it as an examplar of religious life in the Church of England, and subsequently made it prominent by his poem Little Gidding, one of the Four Quartets.

References

  1. ↑ E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 Volumes, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1923; Vol. 3, pp. 475-6.
  2. ↑ Chambers, Vol. 3, p. 475.
  3. ↑ E. J. F. Tucker, "Ruggle's Ignoramus and Humanistic Criticism of the Language of Common Law," Renaissance Quarterly Vol. 30 No. 3 (Autumn 1977), pp. 341-50; see p. 341.
  4. ↑ Tucker, pp. 342-50.
  5. ↑ Edward D. Neill, "Nicholas Ferrar's Eulogy on the Author of Ignoramus," Notes and Queries, 4th Series Vol. 8 (1871), p. 490.
  6. ↑ Frederick S. Boas, University Drama in the Tudor Age, London, Oxford University Press, 1914; p. 325 n. 1.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.