Phoenissae

Thomas Goffe (c.1619)

Historical Records

Thomas Plume's notes on Ben Jonson

Bishop Thomas Plume records a conversation with Ben Jonson, in which Jonson, who had elsewhere noted Shakespeare's mistaken suggestion of a Bohemian coastline (Informations 157, CWBJ), appears to have noted a comparable error made by Thomas Goffe:

So Tom Goff brings in Etiocles & Polynices disc^ng of K. Ric. 2^d.

(Herford and Simpson, 1.185)

Theatrical Provenance

Christ Church, Oxford (?) (Harbage)

Probable Genre(s)

Tragedy (Harbage).

Possible Narrative and Dramatic Sources or Analogues

Seneca's Phoenissae.

References to the Play

This title is known only through the reference by Plumes.

Critical Commentary

For Norbert F. O'Donnell, Jonson's comment about Oedipus' sons suggests that Goffe adapted Seneca's Phoenissae. O'Donnell notes that there are clues in Goffe's other works that he was familiar with Seneca's Phoenissae:

His [Goffe's] Tragedy of Orestes (1633) and Courageous Turk (1632) both contain speeches translated from Seneca's play. More impresive, in The Courageous Turk, the speeches of a Turkish princess intervening in a quarrel between her sultan-father and her husband are liberally adapted throughout an entire scene (sig. G3^r) from Jocasta's outcries as she comes between her warring sons. (163)

Because Goffe's plays were written whilst he was a student at Christ Church, but were published posthumously from manuscript, O'Donnell implies that there is a possibility that not everything that Goffe wrote was published. It would be convenient if a lost play based on Seneca's Phoenissae, which would have to be from c.1619, could make sense of the Jonson quip recorded by Plume.

For What It's Worth

Eteocles and Polynices were apparently ready to grace the stage in the 1560s, which is much too early for Goff. Thomas Cooper, then Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, noted in a letter to Robert Earl of Leicester, that "We have also in readinesse a playe or shew of the destruction of Thebes, and the contention between Eteocles and Polynices for the gouernement thereof" (Chambers, "Four Letters", 146). The play was planned for a 15 May 1569 performance but it is unclear whether that performance ever took place.

Works Cited

Jonson, Ben. "Informations to William Drummond of Hawthornden". ed. Ian Donaldson. CWBJ. Cambridge: CUP, 2012. 5.359-91.

Herford, C. H., Percy and Evelyn Simpson, eds. Ben Jonson. Oxford, 1941.

Chambers, E. K., ed. "Four Letters on Theatrical Affairs" in Malone Society Collections 2, Part 2 (1923), 145-49. (Internet Archive)

O'Donnell, Norbert F. "A Lost Jacobean Phoenissae?" Modern Language Notes 69.3 (1954): 163-64.


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