Events and Texts: The Prologues and Epilogues of the Arbury Plays

A compelling element of the four plays in Arbury 414 is their framing speeches. By contrast the revised, neater version of The Humorous Magistrate found in the Osborne collection contains neither prologue nor epilogue. Of the four plays in the Arbury collection, The Emperor’s Favourite includes only a prologue, while the other three plays feature both prologues and epilogues. Ghismonda and Guiscardo, a tragedy based on Boccaccio’s Decameron 4.1, contains an eighteen line prologue and a twelve line epilogue; The Twice Chang’d Friar, a comedy based on Decameron 4.2, contains a twenty-two line prologue and a fourteen line epilogue; The Emperor’s Favourite, a Roman tragedy that draws from Juvenal’s and Suetonius’s descriptions of Nero’s favourite Crispinus, contains a sixteen line prologue; and The Humorous Magistrate, an original comedy, features a twenty-four line prologue and a thirteen line epilogue.1 These speeches are reproduced in full in the appendix. Framing texts like those attached to the Arbury plays have garnered little critical attention. Recent scholarship has begun to reverse this neglect and has challenged traditional assumptions that framing speeches are merely uncomplicated introductions and conclusions to the only material of real interest. Douglas Bruster and Robert Weimann maintain that these speeches often go beyond the ‘conventional and supplicatory’2 and serve, in fact, as ‘interactive, liminal, boundary-breaking entities that negotiated charged thresholds between and among, variously, playwrights, actors, characters, audience members, playworlds, and the world outside the playhouse’.3 Tiffany Stern, studying the speeches in printed dramas that would have been performed in London on the stages of the commercial theatres, suggests that prologues and epilogues were a ‘temporary form’ that convey ‘just how local and detailed the critiques [of plays] could be’.4 In the most recent and comprehensive study of prologues and epilogues, Brian Schneider argues for the ‘extraordinary experimentation to which prologues and epilogues were