Bonduca

"Bonduca" is a Jacobean tragedy in the Beaumont and Fletcher canon, generally judged by scholars [Cyrus Hoy, Ian Fletcher, Denzell S. Smith; see references.] to be the work of John Fletcher alone. It was acted by the King's Men c. 1613, and published in 1647 in the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio.

The play is a dramatization of the story of Boudica, the British Celtic queen who led a revolt against the Romans in 60-61 A.D. Critics, however, have classified "Bonduca" as a "historical romance," rather than a history play comparable to those written by Shakespeare; historical accuracy was not Fletcher's primary concern.

"Bonduca" has a two-way relationship of influence or borrowing with other plays before and after it. Arthur Sherbo discovered a range of parallels and commonalities between the play and Christopher Marlowe's "Tamburlaine, Part I" (c. 1587). In the opposite chronological direction, S. W. Brossman identified borrowings from "Bonduca" in John Dryden's "Cleomenes" (1692). [Logan and Smith, pp. 35-6.]

A list of the cast members survives from the original production of "Bonduca" by the King's Men. The list includes: Richard Burbage, Henry Condell, John Lowin, William Ostler, John Underwood, Nicholas Tooley, William Ecclestone, and Richard Robinson.

In addition to the 1647 printed text, the play exists in manuscript form. The manuscript was written by Edward Knight, the "book-keeper" or prompter of the King's Men, probably c. 1630. In a note appended to his transcript, Knight explains that the original prompt-book that supported the stage performances had been lost, and that he had re-copied the author's "foul papers" into the existing manuscript. [Halliday, p. 69.] Knight, however, was unable to transcribe the entire play (he had to summarize the first two and a half scenes in Act V), because the set of foul papers from which he worked was itself incomplete — a useful demonstration of the difficulties in textual transmission that plagued English Renaissance theatre. [Ioppolo, pp. 76-8.] (The missing scenes are present in the 1647 printed text, though their order, as Knight describes it, is reversed: his V,i comes second and his V,ii comes first.)

Notes

References

* Fletcher, Ian. "Beaumont and Fletcher." London, Longmans, Green, 1967.
* Halliday, F. E. "A Shakespeare Companion 1564–1964." Baltimore, Penguin, 1964.
* Hoy, Cyrus. "The Shares of Fletcher and His Collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon," "Studies in Bibliography," VIII-XV, 1956-62.
* Ioppolo, Grace. "Dramatists and Their Manuscripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Heywood: Authorship, authority and the playhouse." London, Routledge, 2006.
* Logan, Terence P., and Denzell S. Smith. "The Later Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists: A Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama." Lincoln, Nebraska, University of Nebraska Press, 1978.