that care is taken that their performances shall stand with honesty, they have a function, not merely to delight in times of recreation, but also to further morals by ministering ensamples of virtue and goodness to be embraced, and of vice and filthy living to be eschewed. In his short chapter, Ferrarius makes use of two notions, which became commonplaces of Elizabethan dramatic criticism. Both are derived from classical sources. One is Horace's statement in the De Arte Poetica of the double object of comedy in the mingling of delight with profit;[1] the other the Plutarchan image of the bee sucking its honey even from noxious herbs, the honey of ethical precept from the herbs of wanton or foolish writings.[2] Even more famous, from its glorification in Hamlet, is a third passage which Ferrarius does not cite, and that is the definition of comedy, attributed by the fourth-century grammarian Donatus to Cicero but not discoverable in his extant works, as imitatio vitae, speculum consuetudinis, imago veritatis.[3]
There were, however, other humanists who may have shared the abstract ideal of Ferrarius, but who at any rate were sufficiently conscious of the extent to which the popular stage of their own day fell short of that ideal, and were in consequence led to condemn, or perhaps more often to ignore, it. Of such was Ludovicus Vives, who devoted to dramatic poetry a section of his work on the corruption of the arts, in which, while accepting the Horatian account of the end of comedy, he points out that, with the notable exception of the author of Celestina, the playwrights, having been driven by the resentment of the great against satire to find their material in love-intrigues and similar themes, had lamentably failed to justify themselves by a proper determination of their plots to the ends of salutary morals. Even for Vives, Plautus and Terence are necessary to education; but he would use his blue pencil, and is by no means so warm a champion of the Latin drama on its ethical side as his older and more famous contemporary Erasmus. In his formal writings on education
- ↑ Horace, De Arte Poetica, 343:
Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci,
lectorem delectando pariterque monendo.Horace's treatise was first translated into English by Thomas Drant in 1567; cf. O. L. Jiriczek, Der Elisabethanische Horaz (1911, Sh.-Jahrbuch, xlvii. 42).
- ↑ Plutarch, Quomodo adolescens poetas audire debet, c. xii.
- ↑ Donatus (ed. Wessner, i. 22), Excerpta de Comoedia; cf. Hamlet, III. ii. 23, also Gosson's criticism of Lodge's scholarship on this point in App. C, No. xxx.
