Terminus et Non Terminus

Historical Records

Richard Lichfield, The Trimming of Thomas Nashe (1597)

According to his mock-biographer Richard Lichfield, Thomas Nashe, while a student,

florished in all impudencie toward Schollers, and abuse to the Townsmen; insomuch, that to this daye the Townes-men call euerie vntoward Scholler of whome there is great hope, a verie Nashe. Then being Bachelor of Arte, which by great labour he got, to shew afterward that he was not vnworthie of it, had a hand in a Show called Terminus & non terminus, for which his partener in it was expelled the Colledge: but this foresaid Nashe played in it (as I suppose) the Varlet of Clubs; which he acted with such naturall affection, that all the spectators tooke him to be the verie same... (Lichfield, Trimming, G3r).

Bodleian Library: MS Rawlinson Poet. 85

Former St. John's undergraduate Robert Mills, now a schoolmaster in Stamford, Lincolnshire, remembers his undergraduate career in a poem addressed to fellow St John's alumnus John Finet:

O what playes merimentes, conceytes, and pleasure abounded?

O what Musicale arte? and how manye plausible Antik Antiques?

Neuer a day did pass but good recreatione vsed.

Neuer a nyghte did pass but we good company haunted

Neuer an howre did pass but some toy still we deuysed

  [Marginal note:] certayne shewes / of his owne mak / ynge wherin hi[m] / selfe was princi / pall actor:

See how I sitt in royall Chayre enthronissed emprer:

Se how I frowne lyke a prince agaynste Lord Terminus Ireful:

Se how I smyll to see the Iestes of merye Doleta:

Goulden dayes, when Lord Non Terminus hyghly tryvmphed

Now for a scepter I wott I sway a twygg to my subiects

[Marginal note:] being school / maister at St< > / forde:

A Ferula for a sworde from for a crowne a bald grey [interlined] (nightcapp:

[Marginal note:] A / night / capp:

Like to Dionisius throwne downe from throane to a threshould.

(RP85, fol. 000: the poem has never been published in full).

Theatrical Provenance

Undergraduate entertainment at St. John's College, Cambridge, some time in the period 1586-88. Nashe completed his bachelor's degree in March 1586, and Lichfield's account suggests that Terminus & Non Terminus was probably staged some time shortly after then. Mills completed his BA in 1586/7. By 1588, the fellows of St. John's were looking to ban college drama, requesting "That noe lord of misrule, lottery, or salting be vsed in ye Colledge. Because there is nothing sought herin but disgrace, disfaming, & abuse of some persons" (Nelson, 318).

Probable Genre(s)

Satirical show (Harbage) Satirical comedy (Nicholl)

See Wiggins 782.

Possible Narrative and Dramatic Sources or Analogues

Other Renaissance dramas relating to the succession of the seasons, most obviously Nashe's own Summer's Last Will and Testament.

John Doleta, Straunge Newes out of Calabria Prognosticated in the Yere 1586, vpon the Yere 87. and what shall Happen in the said Yere: Praying the Lord to be Merciful vnto vs. The pamphlet prognosticates ten catastrophes for the succeeding year, including floods and flying dragons.

References to the Play

Possibly a passage in The Anatomy of Absurdity, where Nashe is attacking the opinionated ignorant in language which combines Term, Vacation, and Doleta:

Who made them so priuie to the secrets of the Almightie, that they should foretell the tokens of his wrath, or terminate the time of his vengeaunce? But lightly some newes attends the ende of euery Tearme, some Monsters are bookt, though not bred against vacation times, which are straight waie diuersly dispearst into euerie quarter, so that at length they become the Alehouse talke of euery Carter: yea, the Country Plowman feareth a Calabrian floodde in the midst of a furrowe, and the sillie Sheephearde committing his wandering sheepe to the custodie of his wappe, in his field naps dreameth of flying Dragons, which for feare least he should see to the losse of his sight, he falleth a sleepe; no star he seeth in the night but seemeth a Comet; hee lighteth no sooner on a quagmyre, but he thinketh this is the foretold Earthquake, wherof his boy hath the Ballet. (Nashe, Anatomy, 000).

Also, possibly, a passage in Strange News where Nashe refers to the controversy caused by Doleta's pamphlet. Here Nashe is attacking Gabriel Harvey, attempting to portray him not as a figure of gravity and responsibility, but as a fool. Nashe says of Harvey’s pamphlets:

…hee will haue at you with a cap-case full of French occurrences, that is, shape you a messe of newes out of the second course of his conceit, as his brother is said out of the fabulous abundance of his braine to haue inuented the newes out of Calabria (Iohn Doletas prophesie of flying dragons, commets, Earthquakes, and inundations.) I am sure it is not yet worne out of mens scorn, for euery Miller made a comment of it, and not an oyster wife but mockt it. (Nashe, 000).

Critical Commentary

The Trimming

The allusion in The Trimming of Thomas Nashe has been known about since at least the nineteenth century, although often misattributed to Gabriel Harvey. It has formed the sole basis for most subsequent discussions of this play.

The Trimming of Thomas Nashe is a pamphlet by Richard Lichfield, barber-surgeon of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a figure on the fringes of several pieces of Cambridge University satire. (For an overview, see McKerrow: for more detail on Lichfield himself, see Griffin). Early biographers of Nashe, often misattributing the pamphlet to Nashe's enemy Gabriel Harvey, tended to accept all of the details in the account as necessarily true. Indeed, some went further, asserting that, in spite of Harvey's not saying so, the play might actually have caused Nashe to be expelled from Cambridge.

Working solely from the Lichfield allusion, Nashe's biographer Charles Nicholl offered some guesses at the content of Terminus & Non Terminus:

the play was probably in Latin, and undoubtedly satirical. The title is puzzling, almost Beckettian: 'The End and Not the End'. One wonders who Nashe's 'partener in it' was, presumably the main author as he and not Nashe was expelled for it. Could it possibly be Everard Digby, the mutinous fellow of St. John's, who was indeed expelled in 1587?

RP85

Little is known about the life of Robert Mills. He matriculated in Lent Term 1582/3 as a pensioner at St. John's College, Cambridge. In 1584 he was elected to a Lady Margaret scholarship at St. John's, and in 1585 he was one of eleven scholars from the college to contribute Latin verses on a theme from Ecclesiasticus for a presentation manuscript. Among the other contributors to that manuscript was Nashe. Mills completed a BA in 1586/7, and moved to Stamford in Lincolnshire, becoming Master of Stamford Grammar School, in which capacity he is mentioned in parish records in 1592 and 1593. Mills has not been traced later than 1593. (All details from Steggle, pp.00-00).

Poems by Mills, including the one in question, are preserved in a manuscript now in the Bodleian Library, MS. Rawlinson Poetical 85 (hereafter, RP 85). RP 85 is a particularly rich anthology of lyric poems, "the best such miscellaneous collection in England between Tottel's in 1557 and England's Helicon in 1600 or the Poetical Rhapsody in 1603" (Lawrence Cummings, qtd in Marotti, 63-4), and studied for that reason in recent years by scholars including Hilton Kelliher, Arthur Marotti, Stephen May, Joshua Eckhardt, and Randall Anderson. The relevance of it here, though, is that Mills's poem provides an important new window on Terminus & Non Terminus.

Seasonal entertainments

Mills's allusions to Lord Terminus and Lord Non Terminus help to establish that the title does not mean "the end and not the end", but rather "Term and Vacation". The entertainment, then, seems to have dramatized the reign of Lord Terminus and his succession by Lord Non Terminus. Steggle compares the play to other Renaissance English dramas about the succession of the seasons, including the Induction to Michaelmas Term, and Nashe's own Summer's Last Will and Testament.

Doleta

Mills alludes to the entertainment having contained a character called "merry Doleta". As Stephen May observes, "Doleta" surely takes his name from the supposed author of a pamphlet printed in 1586 and attributed to a "learned man, named maister Iohn Doleta": Straunge Newes out of Calabria. The pamphlet predicts several disasters which will happen in the following year.

The ESTC comments that Doleta "may be a fabrication". In fact, he is certainly a fabrication. His prophecy had already enjoyed at least five pamphlet printings in Germany and Holland in the 1580s, under the name "Johannes Doleta", before the English version of 1587. Jonathan Green observes that most of the material in those Doleta pamphlets is actually from the Toledo Letter, an apocalyptic prophecy which had been circulating around Europe, in one form or another, since 1184. The Toledo Letter was sometimes attributed to Johannes of Toledo, and thus Doleta’s name is an anagram. Steggle traces numerous other allusions to Doleta in the works of Nashe and other writers through the period, in which Doleta becomes a byword for a foolish astrologer.

The varlet of clubs

Some scholars, working solely from Lichfield, have attempted to make something of Lichfield's description of Nashe playing "(as I suppose) the Varlet of Clubs". F. G. Fleay took this remark literally, and attempted therefore to connect Terminus & Non Terminus with another lost play, The Play of the Cards. More recently (and more cautiously) Alan Dessen has observed that "[o]ther pieces of evidence point to the existence of dramatis personae derived from the deck of cards", and suggested that Terminus & Non Terminus may have contained some kind of estates satire which alluded to a deck of cards. This is not impossible, although Lichfield's remark might equally well be purely metaphorical, a comic periphrasis for a role containing horseplay and violence.