- Summer's Last Will and Testament
"Summer's Last Will and Testament" is an Elizabethan era stage play, a
comedy written byThomas Nashe . Nashe's sole extant drama, it broke new ground in the development of English Renaissance drama: "No earlier English comedy has anything like the intellectual content or the social relevenace that it has." [G. R. Hibbard, quoted in: Terence P. Logan and Denzell S. Smith, eds., "The Predecessors of Shakespeare: A Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama," Lincoln, NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1973; p. 113.]Publication
The play was entered into the
Stationers' Register on October 28, 1600, and was published before the end of that year in a quarto printed by Simon Stafford for the booksellerWalter Burre . (Burre is best kown for his publication of first editions of the plays ofBen Jonson .) The 1600 quarto was the only edition of the play prior to the nineteenth century.Date and Performance
No external evidence indicates the date of the authorship or first performance of the play; but the text of the work is rich in allusions and references that bear upon the question of its date. The text refers to a progress through the English countryside by Queen Elizabeth I, and also to an outbreak of
bubonic plague and a severe drought that lowered the level of the RiverThames to an unusual extreme. Scholars agree that 1592 is the one year that best matches these references. [E. K. Chambers, "The Elizabethan Stage," 4 Volumes, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1923; Vol. 3, pp. 451-3.]The play was not performed by professional adult actors in one of the London theatres, which in any case were closed due to the plague epidemic in 1592. References and allusions in the play reveal that the drama was acted in
Croydon at the country house ofJohn Whitgift , theArchbishop of Canterbury . The cast was composed at least in part of amateurs, including boys who served as pages in the Archbishop's household; the cast may have been supplemented by experienced boy actors from the established London troupes, theChildren of Paul's or theChildren of the Chapel . The performance occurred "in this latter end of summer," probably in the second half of September or the first half of October 1592. [Logan and Smith, pp. 112-14.]Genre
Nashe developed "Summer's Last Will and Testament" out of the interlude form that was popular in the royal and noble courts of sixteenth-century England; and he anticipates the
masque that would evolved during the Jacobean and Caroline eras. The play can be seen as a bridge between the 16th-century interlude and the 17th-century masque; it features personifications of the four seasons, Summer, Autumn, Winter, and "Ver." Summer is the "king of the world," but now old and declining, and ready to make his will. First, all the officers and members of the kingdom are summoned to yield their accounts. The presences of Bacchus, satyrs, nymphs, hunters, reapers, maids and clowns and Morris dancers (complete withhobby horse ), give the play a stronglypastoral feeling.The term "summer" in the title has a double meaning: the play is introduced and presented by the figure of Will Summer, or Summers, the jester of King Henry VIII. Summers had an enduring reputation with the Elizabethan public; he would be brought back to the stage by
Samuel Rowley in "When You See Me You Know Me " (printed 1605). The clown-figure of Summers provides a level ofsatire to the morality-play styleallegory of the plot.In one view, Nashe produced his play by rewriting and expanding an earlier interlude by
John Lyly that was performed in 1591. [Michael R. Best, "Nashe, Lyly, and "Summers Last Will and Testament"," "Philological Quarterly" 48 (1969), pp. 1-11.] In the play, Will Summers embodies a reaction to the type of overly formal drama represented by Lyly. [G. K. Hunter, ed., "The Oxford History of English Literature: English Drama 1586–1642," Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997; pp. 136-40.]The play also contains a poem that later acquired independent fame, "Adieu, farewell, earth's bliss." The lyric "Spring, sweet spring" has also received attention from critics and anthologists.
Modern adaptation
In 1936 the English composer
Constant Lambert debuted a large-scale orchestral and choral setting of Nashe's play, which has sometimes been judged Lambert's greatest work. [Wilfrid Howard Mellers, "Between Old Worlds and New," Lewisburg, PA, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997; p. 226.] Lambert employed "Adieu, Farewell, earth's bliss" as the conclusion of his musical setting.References
External links
[http://www.elizabethanauthors.com/summ1.htm The play text online.]
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