Preface &c. to Fobes edition & trans ation of Christophersons Jephthah (Newark: Univ.

Mary and Press, 1928*), pp. 1-30, inc uding an introduction by Wi bur Owen Sypherd.

Wi bur Owen Sypherd, Jephthah and His Daughter, De aware Notes 12 (1939), pp. 7-24.

Geo. Char es Moore Smith, Review of Fobes Christopherson in Review of Eng ish Studies Vo . 6, No. 21 (Jan. 1930), pp. 96-98.

Howard B. Nor and, Christophersons Jephthah, in his Drama in Ear y Tudor Britain, 1485-1558 (Linco n: Univ. Nebraska Press, 1995), pp. 306-318.

Pau

D. Streufert, Christopherson at Cambridge: Greco-Catho ic Ethics in the Protestant University, in his and Jonathan Wa kers (edd.) Ear y Modern Academic Drama (Farnham & Bur ington: Ashgate, 2008) pp. 45-63.

John L. Thompson, Exegetica Corre ates** in Sixteenth-Century Dramas, in his Writing the

Wrongs: Women of the O d Testament Among Bib ica Commentators from Phi o Through the Reformation (Oxford: OUP, 2001), pp. 165-169.

* **

Reproduced in a separate pdf. [...to Lutheran and other treatments...]

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R. E. S., VOL. 6, 1930 (N9 21, JAN.)

sympathy. It was probablyone of Thomas Cromwell's" clerks" " who translatedthe " Dialogue of Pilgrimages in which Erasmus describesa visit he paid with Colet to Canterbury 1514 and an in earlier pilgrimagethat he made with Robert Aldridge, afterwards Provostof Eton and Bishop of Carlyle,to the shrineof Our Lady of Walsingham. The fifth and last of the colloquies reprinted by Professor de Vocht, entitled " Diversoria,"has the more general and interest that it was used freely by CharlesReadein TheCloister the Hearth and by Scott in Anne of Geierstein. It contrasts the friendlinessand comfort of the inns of Burgundyand Lyons with the coarsenessof those of Germany. Professorde Vocht's introduction and notes are a model of completenessand compression. His linguistic notes are particularlyinterestingfor their idiomatic parallels,Latin and English. He wins our gratitudealso for trusting us with a faithfultext unmodifiedeitherin spellingsor punctuation.
A. W. REED.

Jephthah. By JOHN CHRISTOPHERSON.The Greek Text Edited and Translated into English by FRANCIS HOWARD FOBES, Professor of Greek in Amherst College, with an Introduction
by WILBUR OWEN SYPHERD, Professor of English in the Newark, Delaware.
1928.

University of Delaware. The University of DelawarePress,

Pp. viii +I57.
$2.

IT is well known that, under the influenceof humanism,the acting and writing of Latin plays was an importantfeature in the college life of our universitiesin the sixteenthcentury. Playsin Greekwere undoubtedlyrarer,and perhapswere hardlyknown afterthe middle of the century. But we hear of the acting of Aristophanes' Plutus at Cambridge 1536,and of his Pax about I546. The only original in Greek play known to us is the Jephtha of John Christopherson, written probablyin I544 1 and acted, if at all, either soon after its composition (presumablyat St. John's) or in 1554-5 at Trinity 2 after Christopherson become Mlaster the College. One may had of wide knowledgeof Greek doubt, however,if there was a sufficiently
1 Boas' University Drama, p. 47. Dr. Boas gives an admirable appreciation of the play. 2 The College accounts show a payment in that year for " or r . . . hys shew."

REVIEWS

97

at Cambridgeat this time to provide an audience for the public of performance a Greekplay. There are two extant manuscriptsof Christopherson's play, one in Trinity College,dedicatedto WilliamParr,Earlof Essex, the other (unfortunatelyunknown to Dr. Boas when he wrote his book) in St. John's College, dedicated to Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of Durham.1 The text here given is based on a careful collation (from rotographs)of these two manuscripts,which in the editor's opinionare in the same hand, though neitheris directlycopied from the other. It is preceded by excellent Introductions by both editors. The translation,printed opposite the text, though rather more free and less pointed than one would like, is on the whole a satisfactory renderingof the original. At 1. 5, however, the translator
overlooks the antithesis in rTc tEv LE'vos Kal ro
TraXoS (I do not

correct Christopherson's accentuation), as at 11.I28, I29 that between and acraAXEs. At 1. 207 he turns an imperfect into an E'rtnaraAEs imperative. L1. 270-272, " Against this course my heart is firmly set; Give way to him," should, I think, rather run: " His spirit keeps the strong from such a course: To this he yields." At There is some want of taste in translating K'p (1. 332) by " Death's is angel." At 1. 355 Kp,vOV gh8wop 1Edowv loosely rendered " Give sufferings." At 1. 381 " melt his frozen spirit " seems to me more natural than " Dissolve the winter of our fear." At 1. 465 the return home of one who has long been absent is, I think, " sweeter by far than return was wont to be," not " sweeter by far than love." (The sentence has a curious nominative absolute.) At 1. 539 the Greek means, I think, " yet their conduct to our land was unjust," not " Yet must I do our own dominion justice;" and at 1. 540 Jephtha bewails, I think, not his own fortune, but the fortune of " these fools." At 1. 605 the blessed man is not he " who in battle stands with God," but" who makes God the mainstay of the battle."
1 The dedication to Tunstall suggests a relation between him and Christopherson which has perhaps hitherto passed unnoticed. Christophersonwrites that he chose to dedicate his work to the Bishop because the latter had deigned

1. 295, o0v roZlatl Lvov means, I think,"

Not only to his brothers."

ear," while at 1. 365 Mlrt3v KAhE appears as " Behold thy people's

first to urge him to such studies and then to relieve his poverty with no mean assistance. He signs himself "Tuae D[ominationis] scholasticus et assiduus Orator." Christopherson had clearly had the costs of his University education largely defrayed by Tunstall, and had been in this sense the Bishop's " scholar."

98

R. E. S., VOL. 6, 1930 (N9 21, JAN.)

KTadVELS

becomes" how trivial the effort thou dost use to slay," but for this the verse-formis some excuse. The stage-directions inserted by the editor, especially the additionof " right " or " left " to exits and entrances,are, I suppose, to be taken merely as suggestions. The editorsdo not describethe stage as they conceive it. One would suppose that Jephtha'shouse was represented,and that when he went to meet his parents,1. 469, he went into the house, from which he emergedat 1. 471. The publication as a whole is one for which we can sincerely expressour thanksto the editor'sand to the trusteesof the University of DelawarePress, whose assistancehas made it possibleto produce a very charmingly printed book. It is at least of double value. It gives us a sixteenth-century dramain which the author,guided by in Euripides' IpAhigenia Allis, treats a scripturalstory with great feeling-Buchanan here, as Dr. Boas has shown, comes far short of Christopherson. It also shows us the level attained by Greek students at Cambridge in the middle of the sixteenth century. of is Christopherson's vocabulary " a gallimaufry phrases,not merely from the dramatists,but from Homer, the Orators,the Anthology and even the Septuagint" (Boas). He seems to use ov and Lrj without distinction. He uses the subjunctive,as in Latin, for the optative. He avails himself of a liberty, which would have been very welcome to many of us who tried our hand at Greek iambics in our youth, of inserting " a'" at any convenient point in the sentence. Anldyet how few Greekscholarsof a latertime who have acquireda more accurateknowledgeof the syntax of the language, have been fired with the desire to write an original Greek drama! I-lasour modernteachingbeen afterall less stimulating thanCheke's?
G. C. MOORE SMITH.

There is an excess of verbiage when (1. 730) CLS patwsw

Shakespeare, Jonson, and Wilkins as Borrowers. By PERCY

ALLEN.

Cecil Palmer.

I928.

Pp. 236. Pp. 280.

7s. 6d. net. 7s. 6d. net.

Shakespeare and Chapmanas Topical Dramatists. ByPERCY

ALLEN. Cecil Palmer. I929.

IN the first of these two books Mr. PercyAllen seeks to demonstrate by means of parallel passages, how Shakespeareborrowed from himself in successiveplays and how Jonson borrowedor commented

]ephthah's Daughter and Sacrifice

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(he says) returned after two months sheerly out of pious zeal, implying that someone of weaker character might have procrastinated or fled. Like Vermigli, Spangenberg finds a twofold rationale for the annual commemoration for Jephthah's daughter: to mourn her death, but also to forewarn other parents against such an imprudent and ignorant vow. Exegetical Correlates in Sixteenth-Century Religious Dramas As amply documented by Sypherd, the sixteenth century witnessed a spate of literary output plays and poems, both Latin and vernacular that retold and recast the story of Jephthah, his vow, and his daughter. 279 Given Sypherd's remarkable ambition to chronicle all of the nontheological works that consider the story, it is telling that his list begins, for all practical purposes, with the sixteenth century. Only a handful of items dates earlier. 280 The sixteenth century, however, boasts of over two dozen literary treatments (including several ballads) of Jephthah's daughter. Of these, several were dramatic re-creations composed by acquaintances or adherents of the theologians and exegetes of the day. Thus, in the early 15405, George Buchanan, an eventual acquaintance of Calvin's successor in Geneva, Theodore Beza, wrote one such play. Bishop John Christopherson dedicated a play, written in Greek, to Henry VIII in 1544. Joseph de Acosta wrote Jephte filiam trucidante, one of at least five sixteenth-century Jesuit plays, in 1555. The same year, Hans Sachs, celebrated Lutheran poet and playwright of Niirnberg, wrote a vernacular play, Der Jephte mit seiner tochter. Bruno Seidel studied at Wittenberg and was deeply impressed by Philip Melanchthon; he went on to teach medicine at Erfurt and write Jephta in 1568. And two other Lutherans of the century, both preachers and theologians, also composed plays about Jephthah's daughter: Johannes Pomarius of Magdeburg, in 1574; and Georg Dedeken of Lilbeck and later Hamburg, in 1594.281 These dramatic interpretations range, in Sypherd's estimate, from the "simple" and moralistic play of Hans Sachs, which stands fully in the tradition of medieval mystery plays, through the mixture of low humor and moralism found in some of the Jesuit and Lutheran plays, to the "deep human emotion and lofty philosophical reflection" that characterizes Christopherson's writing for the stage. As tragedies, these plays give full rein to the grief distributed all round; some highlight the role of the devil in the proceedings; and a few also depict the girl's mother so absent from Scripture as a significant character, sometimes opposing Jephthah or debating with him, and sometimes as having the last word, whether of lament or submission
279

Sypherd, Jephthah and His Daughter, pp. 13-43,131-44. Sypherd's chronological list specifies eight items, but these include separate entries for Pseudo-Philo and Abelard, as well as a collective entry for works of biblical paraphrase; see Jephthah and His Daughter, pp. 129-31. A cursory discussion of these earlier works (apart from Pseudo-Philo and Abelard) appears on p. 10 of Sypherd's book. 281 Most of the information in this and the following paragraph depends on Sypherd (Jephthah and His Daughter, pp. 13-43, 47~5^> 131~44)> wno wa rr >s that there was another Lutheran preacher named Johannes Pomarius in Magdeburg at this time. For an English translation of Christopherson's play, see John Christopherson, Jephthah, trans. Francis Howard Fobes (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1928)
28(1

166 Writing the Wrongs to the evident will of God. Our attention, however, will be limited to the earliest of these works, one that influenced several of these others by being variously imitated, adapted, plagiarized, or just translated into French, Italian, German, Hungarian, and Polish even before the end of the century. Although he later openly aligned himself with Reformed Protestantism, George Buchanan was probably at most a Protestant sympathizer when he wrote Jephthes sive votum tragoedia. His interests lay with Erasmian humanism, and his acquaintances here included the elder Scaliger, Muret, Ronsard, and others including Beza. Buchanan's play is interesting for a number of motifs and issues it highlights. Sypherd calls attention to the central place given over to the underlying theological issues and judges Buchanan's work to be too disputative and distracting to make for effective drama. Shuger, on the other hand, underscores the play's emphasis on the unquestionable love of the father for his daughter: after depicting the moral and mental agonies of Jephthah in a pair of debates between Jephthah and a priest and between Jephthah and his wife (named Storge), Buchanan depicts Jephthah as deciding to offer himself as a victim in his daughter's stead. Yet it is at this point in the play that the daughter actually overrides her father's decision, upstaging him for the play's duration and effectively moving out from under her father's authority to take on a public role of her own.282 Clearly, Buchanan is not out to change the outcome of the biblical story, but to explore and humanize it. However, his exploration and interest grows out of potentially conflicting commitments: as "the first Renaissance biblical drama modeled on Greek tragedy" (namely, Euripides's Iphigenia in Aulis), his play probably testifies more to Renaissance humanism's fascination with the classics than it does to Buchanan's exegetical curiosity.283 Buchanan's biblical play can serve our own explorations in two ways. First, Jephthes sive votum can help establish the boundary or, perhaps, the no-man's-land between literature and commentary literature. That Buchanan is engaged by the sheer pathos of the story of Jephthah's daughter is undeniable, yet however much one may read his play as a comment on Judges 11, he still offers more an extrapolation of previous commentary than original invention. The point may be illustrated from a consideration of the play's purpose. As a school play, Jephthes was originally written for the instruction of French schoolboys "who in all likelihood," Shuger observes, "would not be very interested in daughters per se." What would be of interest to them, though, is the way his portrait of Jephthah's daughter might mirror for them the uncertainties of growing up in a context where families were often riven by the religious conflicts of the Reformation in France. Her destiny sacrifice at her father's hands might very well become theirs: "Sacrifice, in other words, is the female equivalent of war. . . . The play projects the boys' anxieties about having to die for their country or their faith and, by ennobling the sacrificial daughter, consoles these fears holding out the promise, as it were, of displacing their own fathers by risking death for the Father/fatherland."284 Jephthah's daughter is thus an exemplar
For the discussion of this play I am indebted not only to Sypherd, but also to Shuger, Renaissance Bible, pp. 145-55; an d to Sharratt and Walsh's introduction to George Buchanan: Tragedies, pp. 13-20. 285 Shuger has expertly dissected some of the competing pagan undercurrents of the play in Renaissance Bible, pp. 15666. 284 Shuger, Renaissance Bible, pp. 151,155.
282

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for Buchanan's pupils indeed, she is clearly intended to stand as a type of Christ. But Buchanan is not the first to style Jephthah's daughter as a type of Christ (Shuger notwithstanding), 285 any more than he is the first to make of her an exemplar. One might argue a similar case on behalf of many of the commentators surveyed so far: Jephthah's daughter was certainly an exemplar for Ambrose's religious recruits, for Abelard and Heloise, and for all the parents and children who might be imagined among the beneficiaries of sixteenth-century commentaries. By the same token, one might argue that the pervasive moralisms of other sixteenth-century Jephthah plays whether Lutheran or Jesuit are also and essentially the recycled moralisms of earlier commentators. By common consent, fictive or theatrical reconstructions of biblical stories not only have greater freedom to fill in the silences of the text with feeling and pathos, they have that as their raison d'etre. The playwright or poet thus enjoys a luxury that most commentators deny themselves, and one may well wonder if such an unspoken ethos helps to explain not only the neglect of Abelard's planctus but also the contempt with which Calvin seems to have regarded some of Luther's more expansive outbursts (as seen in the preceding chapter). Indeed, Luther's effusions may seem aberrant by comparison with other commentators, but the question of genre must be considered with care. Poets are charged to inscribe depth of feeling. Commentators may well share such feeling, but the exegetical genre or ethos may inhibit its expression. Moreover, given that biblical commentaries are often constructed of so many bits of exegetical lore, passed along from writer to writer as if from hand to hand, perhaps we need the aberrant outburst say, that of Rupert of Deutz to signal how much may be going on under the surface. In other words, commentary literature may seem prosaic, but sometimes that may be, literally, a superficial judgment. 286 Buchanan's portrait of Jephthah's daughter can also serve our own explorations in a second (and secondary) way, as a window through which we might glimpse how the various sixteenth-century interpretations of Judges 11 reflect ongoing religious and exegetical conflicts. In particular, Shuger has drawn a comparison between Buchanan's Jephthes and Beza's 1550 play about the binding of Isaac, Abraham sacrifiant, convinced as she is that Beza offers, in effect, "a deliberate rewriting of
'Shuger, Renaissance Bible, pp. 155-56; cf. n. 147 and p. 153, in this chapter. It could be argued, however, that Buchanan is the first to cast Jephthah's wife as a type of the Virgin Mary, the mother of Christ (see Shuger, p. 151). Utterly absent from the biblical account, Jephthah's wife is almost always absent also from the commentaries with Augustine as the sole exception. The sixteenth-century playwrights typically add a multitude of characters, often including a mother for Jephthah's daughter and often coining names for both. Even in Buchanan's case, however, the wife is not the reconstruction of a biblical character but a clever allegory. As the priest represents the dictates of right reason, so does the wife represent the claims of human affection (axopyri). What is particularly compelling in Buchanan's depiction of Jephthah's wife is her transformation, at the end of the play, from an allegory of storge into a type of the Virgin Mary, in whom the sorrows of maternal affection arc divinely transformed. 286 That the contrast between how a commentator and a playwright approach the biblical text can be drawn from sixteenth-century examples may not, in fact, be accidental. In a related discussion, Shuger argues that while Buchanan's play did not of itself precipitate the emergence of "subjectivity" in Renaissance literature (as opposed to the literature of devotion, where such expressions were traditional), it certainly signals that some such shift was underway, whereby "the language of introspection, desire, and inner struggle migrates from devotional praxis, from the monasteries and the confessional, to literature" (Renaissance Bible, p. 165).
28

168 Writing the Wrongs

Buchanan's tragedy, a Calvinist response, as it were, to the neoclassical daughter."287 Her comparison of Buchanan and Beza, however, is actually a link somewhere in the middle of a grander chain of argument that attempts to probe Renaissance apprehensions of sacrifice. Thus, earlier in her analysis, she pondered why it was that exegetes after Lyra, "particularly Protestant ones," were inclined to argue for the daughter's survival:
The overt motive for this shift is to get rid of the embarrassing fact that the Epistle to the Hebrews mentions Jephthah among the Old Testament heroes of faith a tribute seemingly incompatible with infanticide but one also suspects deeper discomforts with blood sacrifice motivating this attempt to restrict paternal power to the sexuality of the daughter. The important early seventeenth-century biblical scholar Louis Cappel offers the sole Protestant critique of this sanitized reading. But Cappel himself was almost certainly influenced by Buchanan's play.288

One of the most interesting corollaries that emerges from Shuger's speculation suggests that Protestant survivalist readings of Jephthah's daughter may be symptomatic of a more general hostility to the ostentatious ceremonialism of medieval Catholicism, particularly with respect to the eucharistic sacrifice.289 Without a doubt, Shuger keenly analyzes the Renaissance perceptions of sacrifice, but her judgment here seems oddly counterintuitive. While Protestant hostility to ceremony is a well-established fact, it is far from clear that the line dividing sacrificial from nonsacrificial interpreters coincides so neatly with the gulf that divided sixteenth-century Protestants from their Roman counterparts. One would expect Protestant exegesis in particular to resist styling this exemplary daughter as a "protonun"290 an expectation corroborated by the careful qualifications added by both Brenz and Pellican in arguing for a nonsacrificialist interpretation. But the line Shuger seeks to draw between Protestants and Catholics of the day is further erased by a more thorough polling of commentators. Assuredly, Cappel does not offer "the sole Protestant critique," for many sixteenth-century Protestants subscribed to the sacrificial reading, including Luther, Calvin, Bucer, and Vermigli, as well as the later Lutherans examined here: Spangenberg, Strigelius, and Heling. A still more trenchant challenge to such an easy stratification comes from the playwrights themselves, for all of the sixteenth-century plays not just Buchanan's, but the Lutheran and Je287 Shuger, Renaissance Bible, p. 160. It is crucial to note her language here, for despite his later profession of the Reformed faith, Jephthes is not written from that perspective but out of Buchanan's humanist commitments and interests. For Beza, see Theodore de Be/e, Abraham Sacrifiant, ed. Keith Cameron, Kathleen M Hall, and Francis Hignian (Geneva: Droz, 1967), esp. pp. 15-17, where the editors suggest that the play expressed Beza's newfound Protestant convictions, and that both his conversion and his play were shaped by the challenging account of Abraham's faith and obedience that he found in Calvin's Petit traicte, monstrant que c'est que doit faire un homme fidele congnoissant la verite de I'evangile, quand il est entre les papistes (CO 6:570). 288 Shuger, Renaissance Bible, p. 137. 289 Shuger, Renaissance Bible, pp. 162-63. 290 Sharratt and Walsh, Buchanan: Tragedies, p. 17, briefly note two sixteenth-century Roman Catholic writers (Godfrey Tilmann and Claude d'Espence) who happily reiterate this traditional line, and a third (Charles de Bovelles) who cites Jephthah's daughter to illustrate more generally the rights that parents have over their children.

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suit plays alike presuppose the daughter's tragic death. Indeed, what may be an option for exegesis is surely determined with finality by the demands of stagecraft: after all, how much food for tragedy is to be found merely in a daughter's consecrated survival? That the Lutheran Brenz and the Zwinglian Pellican can argue for the daughter's consecration despite the obvious polemical risks for a Protestant in countenancing a vow of celibacy probably says more about their willingness to trust Kimhi's analysis of Hebrew grammar than it does of their adherence to any supposed party line. The source of Vermigli's opposition to the "survivalist" interpretation, on the other hand, seems to lie in his commitment to the letter of the text, a commitment that is only underscored by his refusal to disallow Augustine's argument from silence, despite his strong impulse to do so. One suspects that virtually all of these exegetes, including those of the sixteenth century but also their predecessors, walk a line strung tightly between their perception of the literal or historical shape of Judges 11, replete with its pregnant silences, and their underlying desire to extract some sort of moral sense from this dismal story a desire to find if not a happy ending, at least a cautionary tale. Looking toward the Seventeenth Century Such is the path and pattern that would be followed well beyond the end of the sixteenth century. Long after the Reformation, this mixture of cryptic textual facts and unresolved moral dissonance continued to provoke deliberation over the morality of Jephthah's vow and to fuel debate over whether his daughter was really killed. The specific positions taken by critics over the next half-century or so may be culled and tabulated from the exegetical compendia of John Pearson or Matthew Poole,291 or gathered directly from a plethora of commentaries and sermons. Either way, the divisions do not fall along any "denominational" lines. On one side, the moderate Calvinist Johannes Drusius, the Puritan William Perkins, and the fugitive Arminian and Catholic sympathizer Hugo Grotius all believed Jephthah's daughter was not sacrificed. On the other side, the moderate Calvinist Louis Cappel, the Puritan Richard Rogers, the Jesuit Cornelius a Lapide, and the nonconformist Presbyterian Matthew Poole all believed she was. The scope of this study does not allow a detailed sojourn into the seventeenth century, but it is worth a quick foray across the border to compare two virtual kinsmen of the earliest decades William Perkins and Richard Rogers, both Englishmen, both students of Christ's College (Cambridge), and both conforming Puritans, yet on opposite sides with respect to the sacrifice of Jephthah's daughter. Perkins preached a long series of sermons on Hebrews 11 that were edited after his death and published in 1607. A few years later, in 1615, Richard Rogers published over a hunJohn Pearson (in Critic/ Sacri, 9 vols. [London: C Bee (et al.), 1660], 2:2066-88) furnishes excerpts on Judges 11 from Drusius, Cappel, Lapide, and Grotius, along with several earlier writers, including Isidore Clarius, Vatable, Minister, and Sebastian Castelho. Matthew Poole's Synopsis criticorum (5 vols. [third ed ; London. C. Bee, 1669-76], 1:1143-55) also offers extracts from Cappel and Lapide, but appears to give the last word to Vermigli.
291