*** Welcome to piglix ***

Fulgens and Lucrece


Fulgens and Lucrece is a late 15th-century interlude by Henry Medwall. It is the earliest purely secular English play that survives. Since John Cardinal Morton, for whom Medwall wrote the play, died in 1500, the work must have been written before that date. It was probably first performed at Lambeth Palace in 1497, while Cardinal Morton was entertaining ambassadors from Spain and Flanders. The play is based on a Latin novella by Buonaccorso da Montemagno that had been translated into English by John Tiptoft, 1st Earl of Worcester and published in 1481 by William Caxton. The play was printed in 1512–1516 by John Rastell, and was later only available as a fragment until a copy showed up in an auction of books from Lord Mostyn's collection in 1919. Henry E. Huntington acquired this copy, and arranged the printing of a facsimile. The play is an example of a dramatised débat.

The source of the play is the Latin treatise De Vera Nobilitate (On True Nobility) by the Italian humanist Bonaccorso or Buonaccorso da Montemagno of Pistoia, written in 1438. This treatise had been translated into French by Jean Miélot as Controversie de Noblesse par Surse de Pistoye and printed by William Caxton's friend, Colard Mansion, in Bruges around 1475. The French version was later translated into English by John Tiptoft, 1st Earl of Worcester and printed by Caxton in 1481, on the last pages of Cicero of Old Age and Friendship. Medwall used Tiptoft's translation as his source.

De Vera Nobilitate tells how Lucretia, the daughter of the Roman senator Fulgentius, is wooed by the idle patrician Publius Cornelius and the studious plebeian Gaius Flaminius. Lucretia asks her father for advice, and Fulgentius asks the senate to decide on the matter. Each suitor then pleads before the senate. The senate's decision is not mentioned in the treatise.


...
Wikipedia

...