Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- A note on abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART I The art of memory
- PART II Rhetoric and poetics
- PART III Education and science
- PART IV History and philosophy
- PART V Religion and devotion
- PART VI Literature
- Introduction to Part VI
- POETRY
- PLAYS AND PROSE
- VI.11 Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller (1594)
- VI.12 William Shakespeare, selected works
- VI.13 John Webster, selected works
- VI.14 Thomas Tomkis, Lingua: or the Combat of the Tongue (1607)
- VI.15 Mary Wroth, Urania (1621)
- VI.16 John Earle, Microcosmography (1628)
- VI.17 John Jones, Adrasta (1635)
- VI.18 Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia, Urn-Burial (1658)
- VI.19 Anon., Crackfart and Tony; or, Knave and Fool (1680)
- VI.20 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress (1681)
- Index
- References
VI.14 - Thomas Tomkis, Lingua: or the Combat of the Tongue (1607)
from PLAYS AND PROSE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2016
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- A note on abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART I The art of memory
- PART II Rhetoric and poetics
- PART III Education and science
- PART IV History and philosophy
- PART V Religion and devotion
- PART VI Literature
- Introduction to Part VI
- POETRY
- PLAYS AND PROSE
- VI.11 Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller (1594)
- VI.12 William Shakespeare, selected works
- VI.13 John Webster, selected works
- VI.14 Thomas Tomkis, Lingua: or the Combat of the Tongue (1607)
- VI.15 Mary Wroth, Urania (1621)
- VI.16 John Earle, Microcosmography (1628)
- VI.17 John Jones, Adrasta (1635)
- VI.18 Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia, Urn-Burial (1658)
- VI.19 Anon., Crackfart and Tony; or, Knave and Fool (1680)
- VI.20 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress (1681)
- Index
- References
Summary
About the author
Thomas Tomkis (1580–1634) grew up in a prosperous middle-class family, his interest in drama probably fostered during his time at Shrewsbury school, famous for its theatrical performances. His reputation rests on two Cambridge University plays, Lingua and Albumazar: A Comedy (1615), an adaptation of Giambattista della Porta's Lo astrologo (1606).
About the text
Having gone through six separate printings before the Restoration and having been translated into Dutch and German, Lingua enjoyed great popularity for a seventeenth-century academic play but today wallows in obscurity. The dramatis personae consist of avatars of the mind's psychological faculties, who dwell in Microcosmus, a realm ruled appropriately enough by Queen Psyche. In the main action, the upstart Lingua – the tongue – seeks elevation to the status of the five outer senses, Microcosmus's noble peers, by hatching a plot to win the approval of three inner senses: Communis Sensus, the Vice-governor, and his two assistants, Phantastes and Memoria. The thesis that speech deserves recognition as the sixth sense had received serious treatment from Raymond Lull, but in Tomkis's play the feminised tongue spreads internal dissension, with her lying servant Mendacio becoming the butt of sexist jokes designed to appeal to an all-male student audience. Lingua is not the only source of strife in the intemperate Microcosmus. Reminiscent of Plautine comedy, many of the masters and their servants continually bicker and scheme to get the better of each other.
The arts of memory
This little-known play offers one of the most delightfully comic depictions of the memory arts in the period. It imagines friction between the master Memoria and his servant Anamnestes, transplanted denizens from The Faerie Queene's House of Alma. These two characters – the former slow and aged but brimming with wisdom and the latter quick and young but not always reliable – personify the Aristotelian relationship between memory as recorder of images and recollection as retriever of them. The first excerpt dramatises their mutual betrayal; the second mocks the court's neglect of memory; and the third puns on the kind of ‘places’ where the two characters often dwell.
Textual notes
Lingua, Or The Combat of the Tongue, And the five Senses For Superiority. A pleasant Comoedie (London: 1607), E3r, E4r-v, F1v.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Memory Arts in Renaissance EnglandA Critical Anthology, pp. 335 - 339Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2016