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The Isle of Pines
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Arthur Neuendorffer
May 25, 2016, 8:02:36 AM5/25/16
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Neville_%28died_1615%29
<<Sir Henry Neville (1564 – 10 July 1615) was an English courtier, politician and diplomat, noted for his role as ambassador to France and his unsuccessful attempts to negotiate between James I of England and the Houses of Parliament. In 2005 Neville was put forward as a candidate for the authorship of Shakespeare's works.
In December 1584 Neville married Anne Killigrew (died 1632), the daughter of Sir Henry Killigrew (died 1603) and Catherine Cooke, sister-in-law of William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, by whom he had five sons and six daughters:[12]
Sir Henry Neville (II), 1588[1]–29 June 1629, married Elizabeth Smyth; among his children were Richard Neville (soldier) and Henry Neville (writer).>>
--------------------------------------------------------
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Neville_%28writer%29
<<Henry Neville (1620–1694) was an English politician, author and satirist, best remembered for his tale of shipwreck and dystopia, The Isle of Pines published in 1668.
In 1651, he was elected to the English Council of State, where he played a part in foreign policy. Later, he was in opposition to Oliver Cromwell, against whom he wrote some political pamphlets.>>
--------------------------------------------------------
http://www.thehistoryblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Nevill.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/jxoje8f
--------------------------------------------------------
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Isle_of_Pines
<<The Isle of Pines is a book by Henry Neville published in 1668. It has been cited as the first robinsonade before Defoe's work. An example of arcadian fiction, the book presents its story through an Epistolary frame: a "Letter to a friend in London, declaring the truth of his Voyage to the East Indies" written by a fictional Dutchman "Henry Cornelius Van Sloetten," concerning the discovery of an island in the southern hemisphere, populated with the descendants of a small group of castaways.
The book explores the story of these castaways—the British George Pine and four female survivors, who are shipwrecked on an idyllic island. Pine finds that the island produces food abundantly with little or no effort, and he soon enjoys a leisurely existence, engaging in open sexual activity with the four women.
Each of the women gives birth to children, who in turn multiply to produce distinct tribes, by which Pine is seen as the patriarch. One of the women, a black slave girl, gives rise to a tribe called the Phills, who increasingly reject the impositions of laws, rules, and Bible readings which are established in an effort to create some form of social order. Eventually one of the Phills tribe rapes a woman from the stark tribe, starting a civil war. At this point some Dutch explorers arrive, bringing with them guns which are used to quell the uprising.
The narrative is written from the viewpoint of the Dutch explorers and begins with their arrival and the discovery of a primitive white English-speaking native race. The explorers discover that the islanders are the grand and great-grandchildren of George Pine, and that in just three generations the islanders have lost the technological and industrial advantage of their British origins. They later discover that they possess an axe which lay blunt and never sharpened. The island itself is so productive in terms of food and shelter that the islanders leave newborn babies exposed to the elements with no harm.
While the island is bounteous and abundant the narrative raises questions concerning the morality of idleness and dependence on nature. Questions also exist over the status of the piece as utopian literature; elements of utopian writing are apparent, but there are inversions of the usual pattern. Instead of finding an advanced society from which the travellers can learn, the explorers discover a primitive island race in need of rescue from the brink of civil war. Although the island initially seems a paradise of sexual freedom and idyllic plenty, the story is one of dystopia, a devolution into a primitive and crucially unproductive state. The lack of creativity and industry are heightened by the fact that the islanders themselves reproduce in great numbers, leaving in three generations a large population with no scientific or artistic development.
Some critics have pointed to the possibility of Pines deriving from an anagram of penis, alluding to the sexual preoccupation of the early settlers.
The book also has political overtones. Neville was an anti-Stuart republican, and as a political exile he was clearly conscious of the socio-political concerns of the end of the early modern period. The island narrative is framed by the story of the Dutch explorers who are more organized and better equipped than the English voyage of three generations earlier, and who are needed to rescue a small English colonial nation-state from chaos. It is interesting to note that the book was written at the end of the Second Anglo-Dutch War.
--------------------------------------------------------
http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/33585
Rare Shakespeare first folio found in French library
Wednesday, November 26th, 2014
<<One of only 233 known copies of the First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays has been discovered in the library of Saint-Omer, a small town in northern France 30 miles south of Calais. Rémy Cordonnier, director of the medieval and early modern collection, found it this September when looking through the library’s stack for materials that would suit an upcoming English literature exhibition. Missing its telltale title page, the volume was wrongly classified as an 18th century edition, but Cordonnier suspected the missing pages might be making a secret identity as one of the rarest and most sought-after books in the world.
He contacted Eric Rasmussen from the University of Nevada, an expert on Shakespeare’s First Folio who spent 20 years cataloguing all known copies and who happened to be visiting the British Library. Last Saturday he took the Eurostar train to France too see the work in person. He authenticated it almost at first glance. The paper, its watermarks and certain errors that were corrected in later editions immediately identified it as the 233rd First Folio, the first new one discovered in a decade. Printed in 1623, just seven years after Shakespeare’s death, by his friends and fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell, the First Folio contains 36 of Shakespeare’s 38 plays, and is the earliest, most reliable extant source for half of them.
There are differences between this copy and the 232 other ones known to survive. The printers made corrections and alterations throughout the original print run of around 800, so each First Folio is a unique work. In addition to the printing differences, the Saint-Omer copy is also missing the entire text of Two Gentlemen of Verona; the pages were deliberately torn out. There are also annotations that suggest the volume was used for performances. Some of the words are replaced with more modern language, and a character in Henry IV is changed from “hostess” to “host” and from “wench” to “fellow” with utter disregard for iambic pentameter.
The library has had the book in its stacks for 400 years, thanks to its arrangement with the now-defunct college of Jesuits in Saint-Omer which used the city library’s Heritage Room as its own library. Saint-Omer is a small town now, but in the Middle Ages it was an important city with the fourth greatest library in Western Europe. The Jesuit college was founded in the late 16th century when Catholics were forbidden by law to attend college in English. They could just cross the Channel and get an education in France instead, and Saint-Omer was well attended by English Catholics.
One particularly intriguing note is the name “Nevill” written on the first page of The Tempest (also the first page of the book entire since the title pages are gone). It could be the explanation of how the folio got to Saint-Omer since there is only one other known copy in the whole country. Neville was a name adopted by several members of the Scarisbrick family, a prominent Catholic family of landed gentry with a pedigree stretching back to the 1200s. Edward Scarisbrick (Neville), born in 1639, was educated at the Jesuit college of St. Omer, and, following in the footsteps of others in his family, became a Jesuit in 1660.
There’s some speculation that the find may be relevant to the question of whether William Shakespeare was a secret Catholic, but I don’t see how. Shakespeare was dead and gone when this book got to Saint-Omer. It could be relevant to how Catholics read and performed his plays in the 17th century; I doubt it goes beyond that.
First Folios are of course very valuable. One sold at Sotheby’s in 2006 for $5.2 million, but this copy would not be so expensive because of its missing pages. It doesn’t matter anyway, because there is no way the library is selling it. As Rémy Cordonnier notes succinctly: “It is an inalienable property that cannot be sold, like all the works of the library.”
It will be conserved for a while and then put on display some time next year. There are also tentative plans to scan it and make it available on the library’s website.>>
--------------------------------------------------------------
http://shaksper.net/current-postings/354-2015/february/30624-tls-a-gift-from-poetry
TLS: A Gift from Poetry
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 26.065 Friday, 13 February 2015
From: Hardy Cook
Date: February 12, 2015 at 2:10:41 PM EST
Subject: TLS: A Gift from Poetry
A gift from Poetry
The newly discovered First Folio in Saint-Omer
By Jan Graffius
The announcement by Dr Rémy Cordonnier in November last year that a previously unknown Shakespeare First Folio had been identified in the Salle de Patrimoine of the Bibliothèque de Saint-Omer raised some intriguing questions. Evidence suggests that it was once the property of the English Jesuit College, founded in Saint-Omer in 1593 under the protection of Phillip II to provide a Catholic education for boys that was forbidden on their native soil. The town was then part of the Spanish Netherlands and a major thoroughfare for English recusants crossing the Channel. St Omers College – the College name was anglicized very early in its history – flourished on the Continent for just over 200 years, numbering, at its height, some 150 boys aged between eleven and eighteen, and offering a rigorous humanist education in line with the principles laid down in the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum, centred on Latin, Greek, Philosophy, History and Rhetoric. It was also, in common with its Jesuit counterparts elsewhere, renowned for its dramatic productions. In 1620, the school had four music rooms and a theatre; by 1685 it possessed a Wardrobe for the Stage, Music-schools, a Great Theatre, a Little Theatre and a Common Magazine of the two Theatres in addition to a substantial drama library, highly necessary as a resource for the College’s prodigious dramatic output. (Nearly 300 St Omers manuscript dramas from the 1620s to the late eighteenth century survive in the archives of Stonyhurst College.)
Drama was an art form in which the Jesuits excelled and with which they were associated almost as soon as they opened their first educational institutes. Jesuit drama, for the most part in Latin (there are some 500 printed volumes of plays and declamations at Stonyhurst), rapidly evolved to become synonymous with ostentatious productions, huge casts, complex scenery and costume, sophisticated technical skills, and music and ballet to rival court and public productions. Jesuit masters used plays to train memory, instil confidence, enhance musical ability, and encourage gentlemanly accomplishments such as dancing and deportment in their young charges. The memorizing of Latin drama fostered the understanding of the language, as well as of Classical history. The Jesuit Spiritual Exercises, which underpinned the boys’ religious formation, require the candidate to locate himself within the gospel narratives using a mental composition of place to engage Christ in conversation. Such skills were naturally transferable to the stage, allowing a deeper absorption into character and situation. In addition, plays were devised or adapted to react to local religious circumstances; a most effective way of furthering the Jesuits’ missionary aims.
The English Jesuits of the seventeenth century were fully integrated into this European cultural mainstream and also in touch with the distant exploits of their missionary brethren. Among the lists of St Omers plays we find works of 1624 and 1642 dramatizing Gonsalvo Silveira, martyred in South Africa in 1561, the Nagasaki Jesuit martyrs of 1597 and an undated piece entitled Montezuma sive Mexici Imperii Occasus. But in addition English Jesuits were acutely aware of cultural and political developments in their native land and took a lively interest in pre-Reformation British history, an area of bitter contention between Protestant and Catholic theologians.
Scholars have known for some time that the St Omers College library possessed a Quarto copy of Shakespeare’s Pericles by 1619, and that the English Seminaries at Valladolid and Douai owned Second Folios in the seventeenth century. Shakespeare’s eclectic mixture of history and tragedy clearly appealed to English Catholic institutions in exile. The clandestine performance of Pericles for the recusant Sir John Yorke at Gowlthwaite Hall, Nidderdale, by the Cholmeley Players on Candlemas in 1610 suggests that Catholics living in England saw in Shakespeare a means of sustaining their outlawed religious identity through metaphor, similar to their use of coded Jesuit emblem books. Bearing in mind the tightly-knit nature of the English recusant community, it is not impossible that this performance of Pericles was connected with the arrival of the Quarto at St Omers.
The Saint-Omer Folio has been annotated and is missing some thirty pages, which implies frequent and less than respectful usage. The images of the few pages which have so far been made public occur in Henry IV Part I. In Act 3, scene 3, Falstaff’s references to a bawdy song and a bawdy house have been excised; the Hostess, Mistress Quickly, has been replaced by a Host in Act 2, scene 5 (the Jesuits prohibited the portrayal of female characters on their college stages). Speeches have been cut, and stage directions added in English. Without having had the opportunity of examining the complete text it is not possible to offer more than conjecture, but these few glimpses provide strong evidence of a play being made fit for performance in an English Jesuit school for boys and young men.
If there was a First Folio at the College, how and when did it find its way there? The book was published in November 1623 at the steep cost of one pound per volume. There was a significant movement of books to and from England through Saint-Omer at this time, and particularly through the College. The St Omers Press, founded in 1608, produced a wide number of spiritual titles intended mainly for the underground English Catholic market. Unbound books were smuggled to England via Antwerp and distributed through secret Catholic networks. It was not a one-way traffic; College accounts of the late seventeenth century mention quite large sums paid for books bought from England as well as from Europe. So frequent was this traffic that the Jesuits used the phrase “parcels of books” to refer to the illicit Channel crossing of pupils, being less likely to arouse suspicion with the English authorities if the letters were intercepted. A book such as the First Folio could, therefore, quickly and easily have found its way from England to St Omers.
The Folio carries an apparent ownership inscription, “Nevill”, on the first page of the The Tempest. College pupils and English Jesuit priests habitually used aliases for security; sifting out the likely candidate from the dozen or so alumni who took the name of Neville is problematic. One suggestion which has been put forward as the donor of the Folio is Edward Scarisbrick, alias Neville, but there are difficulties with this. Scarisbrick attended St Omers as a pupil, arriving, aged fourteen, in 1653, and leaving in 1660 to join the Jesuit Order. In 1675 he returned briefly to St Omers as Prefect of Studies before returning to the missions in Lancashire. Francis Clarke’s Innocentia, for which, as we have seen, he needed access to a Folio,was produced in 1654. If the donor was indeed Scarisbrick, he must have acquired this expensive book as a young boy and deposited it in the library on arrival – a slightly unlikely scenario.
A more plausible candidate to have donated the Folio is Edmund Sale, alias Neville, another English Jesuit priest. Sale had been a pupil at the College, leaving in 1621 at the age of seventeen to seek ordination in Rome. In 1629 he spent a year on the missions in England, moving to St Omers as Master of Poetry in 1630 and returning in the same capacity in 1632. The post of Master of Poetry refers to the teaching, not of literature, but of a specific year-group of seventeen-year-old boys. (Jesuit classes are traditionally named from the acquisition of skills in language – Elements, Figures, Rudiments, Grammar, Syntax, Poetry and Rhetoric.) Each year group was expected to produce one or two performances annually, their complexity depending on the boys’ age and ability, but Poetry invariably put on the annual end-of-year showstopper, written and produced by their teacher. This was such an arduous task that as early as 1586 the Ratio Studiorum regulations for Jesuit education appealed for common sense to prevail: “this project, troublesome and laborious enough in itself, becomes well-nigh intolerable when the many details of the work fall to the lot of the professor of Poetry. He ought rather to be considered as having done his part in composing the play”.
The location of the library between 1762, when the empty College was taken over by English secular clergy, and 1792 when it was seized and turned into a Military Hospital, is unknown. The books of all religious communities in the town were sequestrated in 1792, and stored haphazardly in the confiscated Abbaye St-Bertin near the town centre. In 1799 the present Bibliothèque was founded and the various collections of books were moved there. During more than thirty-five years of chaos the College library had lost its integrity and its books have largely gone unidentified for 200 years, a situation now being addressed by Dr Cordonnier. The cataloguing project which unearthed the Folio will, it is hoped, lead to other significant finds from the English Jesuit library.
For the moment, there is much to be explored in the Saint-Omer Folio, and scholars keenly anticipate the imminent release of the fully digitized book. Its discovery will shed further light on Shakespeare’s significance for the Catholic world, on the riches of English and European Jesuit drama, and on the cultural life of exiled English communities in the seventeenth century.>>
----------------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Neville_%28died_1615%29
<<Sir Henry Neville (1564 – 10 July 1615) was an English courtier, politician and diplomat, noted for his role as ambassador to France and his unsuccessful attempts to negotiate between James I of England and the Houses of Parliament. In 2005 Neville was put forward as a candidate for the authorship of Shakespeare's works.
In December 1584 Neville married Anne Killigrew (died 1632), the daughter of Sir Henry Killigrew (died 1603) and Catherine Cooke, sister-in-law of William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, by whom he had five sons and six daughters:[12]
Sir Henry Neville (II), 1588[1]–29 June 1629, married Elizabeth Smyth; among his children were Richard Neville (soldier) and Henry Neville (writer).>>
--------------------------------------------------------
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Neville_%28writer%29
<<Henry Neville (1620–1694) was an English politician, author and satirist, best remembered for his tale of shipwreck and dystopia, The Isle of Pines published in 1668.
In 1651, he was elected to the English Council of State, where he played a part in foreign policy. Later, he was in opposition to Oliver Cromwell, against whom he wrote some political pamphlets.>>
--------------------------------------------------------
http://www.thehistoryblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Nevill.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/jxoje8f
--------------------------------------------------------
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Isle_of_Pines
<<The Isle of Pines is a book by Henry Neville published in 1668. It has been cited as the first robinsonade before Defoe's work. An example of arcadian fiction, the book presents its story through an Epistolary frame: a "Letter to a friend in London, declaring the truth of his Voyage to the East Indies" written by a fictional Dutchman "Henry Cornelius Van Sloetten," concerning the discovery of an island in the southern hemisphere, populated with the descendants of a small group of castaways.
The book explores the story of these castaways—the British George Pine and four female survivors, who are shipwrecked on an idyllic island. Pine finds that the island produces food abundantly with little or no effort, and he soon enjoys a leisurely existence, engaging in open sexual activity with the four women.
Each of the women gives birth to children, who in turn multiply to produce distinct tribes, by which Pine is seen as the patriarch. One of the women, a black slave girl, gives rise to a tribe called the Phills, who increasingly reject the impositions of laws, rules, and Bible readings which are established in an effort to create some form of social order. Eventually one of the Phills tribe rapes a woman from the stark tribe, starting a civil war. At this point some Dutch explorers arrive, bringing with them guns which are used to quell the uprising.
The narrative is written from the viewpoint of the Dutch explorers and begins with their arrival and the discovery of a primitive white English-speaking native race. The explorers discover that the islanders are the grand and great-grandchildren of George Pine, and that in just three generations the islanders have lost the technological and industrial advantage of their British origins. They later discover that they possess an axe which lay blunt and never sharpened. The island itself is so productive in terms of food and shelter that the islanders leave newborn babies exposed to the elements with no harm.
While the island is bounteous and abundant the narrative raises questions concerning the morality of idleness and dependence on nature. Questions also exist over the status of the piece as utopian literature; elements of utopian writing are apparent, but there are inversions of the usual pattern. Instead of finding an advanced society from which the travellers can learn, the explorers discover a primitive island race in need of rescue from the brink of civil war. Although the island initially seems a paradise of sexual freedom and idyllic plenty, the story is one of dystopia, a devolution into a primitive and crucially unproductive state. The lack of creativity and industry are heightened by the fact that the islanders themselves reproduce in great numbers, leaving in three generations a large population with no scientific or artistic development.
Some critics have pointed to the possibility of Pines deriving from an anagram of penis, alluding to the sexual preoccupation of the early settlers.
The book also has political overtones. Neville was an anti-Stuart republican, and as a political exile he was clearly conscious of the socio-political concerns of the end of the early modern period. The island narrative is framed by the story of the Dutch explorers who are more organized and better equipped than the English voyage of three generations earlier, and who are needed to rescue a small English colonial nation-state from chaos. It is interesting to note that the book was written at the end of the Second Anglo-Dutch War.
--------------------------------------------------------
http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/33585
Rare Shakespeare first folio found in French library
Wednesday, November 26th, 2014
<<One of only 233 known copies of the First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays has been discovered in the library of Saint-Omer, a small town in northern France 30 miles south of Calais. Rémy Cordonnier, director of the medieval and early modern collection, found it this September when looking through the library’s stack for materials that would suit an upcoming English literature exhibition. Missing its telltale title page, the volume was wrongly classified as an 18th century edition, but Cordonnier suspected the missing pages might be making a secret identity as one of the rarest and most sought-after books in the world.
He contacted Eric Rasmussen from the University of Nevada, an expert on Shakespeare’s First Folio who spent 20 years cataloguing all known copies and who happened to be visiting the British Library. Last Saturday he took the Eurostar train to France too see the work in person. He authenticated it almost at first glance. The paper, its watermarks and certain errors that were corrected in later editions immediately identified it as the 233rd First Folio, the first new one discovered in a decade. Printed in 1623, just seven years after Shakespeare’s death, by his friends and fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell, the First Folio contains 36 of Shakespeare’s 38 plays, and is the earliest, most reliable extant source for half of them.
There are differences between this copy and the 232 other ones known to survive. The printers made corrections and alterations throughout the original print run of around 800, so each First Folio is a unique work. In addition to the printing differences, the Saint-Omer copy is also missing the entire text of Two Gentlemen of Verona; the pages were deliberately torn out. There are also annotations that suggest the volume was used for performances. Some of the words are replaced with more modern language, and a character in Henry IV is changed from “hostess” to “host” and from “wench” to “fellow” with utter disregard for iambic pentameter.
The library has had the book in its stacks for 400 years, thanks to its arrangement with the now-defunct college of Jesuits in Saint-Omer which used the city library’s Heritage Room as its own library. Saint-Omer is a small town now, but in the Middle Ages it was an important city with the fourth greatest library in Western Europe. The Jesuit college was founded in the late 16th century when Catholics were forbidden by law to attend college in English. They could just cross the Channel and get an education in France instead, and Saint-Omer was well attended by English Catholics.
One particularly intriguing note is the name “Nevill” written on the first page of The Tempest (also the first page of the book entire since the title pages are gone). It could be the explanation of how the folio got to Saint-Omer since there is only one other known copy in the whole country. Neville was a name adopted by several members of the Scarisbrick family, a prominent Catholic family of landed gentry with a pedigree stretching back to the 1200s. Edward Scarisbrick (Neville), born in 1639, was educated at the Jesuit college of St. Omer, and, following in the footsteps of others in his family, became a Jesuit in 1660.
There’s some speculation that the find may be relevant to the question of whether William Shakespeare was a secret Catholic, but I don’t see how. Shakespeare was dead and gone when this book got to Saint-Omer. It could be relevant to how Catholics read and performed his plays in the 17th century; I doubt it goes beyond that.
First Folios are of course very valuable. One sold at Sotheby’s in 2006 for $5.2 million, but this copy would not be so expensive because of its missing pages. It doesn’t matter anyway, because there is no way the library is selling it. As Rémy Cordonnier notes succinctly: “It is an inalienable property that cannot be sold, like all the works of the library.”
It will be conserved for a while and then put on display some time next year. There are also tentative plans to scan it and make it available on the library’s website.>>
--------------------------------------------------------------
http://shaksper.net/current-postings/354-2015/february/30624-tls-a-gift-from-poetry
TLS: A Gift from Poetry
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 26.065 Friday, 13 February 2015
From: Hardy Cook
Date: February 12, 2015 at 2:10:41 PM EST
Subject: TLS: A Gift from Poetry
A gift from Poetry
The newly discovered First Folio in Saint-Omer
By Jan Graffius
The announcement by Dr Rémy Cordonnier in November last year that a previously unknown Shakespeare First Folio had been identified in the Salle de Patrimoine of the Bibliothèque de Saint-Omer raised some intriguing questions. Evidence suggests that it was once the property of the English Jesuit College, founded in Saint-Omer in 1593 under the protection of Phillip II to provide a Catholic education for boys that was forbidden on their native soil. The town was then part of the Spanish Netherlands and a major thoroughfare for English recusants crossing the Channel. St Omers College – the College name was anglicized very early in its history – flourished on the Continent for just over 200 years, numbering, at its height, some 150 boys aged between eleven and eighteen, and offering a rigorous humanist education in line with the principles laid down in the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum, centred on Latin, Greek, Philosophy, History and Rhetoric. It was also, in common with its Jesuit counterparts elsewhere, renowned for its dramatic productions. In 1620, the school had four music rooms and a theatre; by 1685 it possessed a Wardrobe for the Stage, Music-schools, a Great Theatre, a Little Theatre and a Common Magazine of the two Theatres in addition to a substantial drama library, highly necessary as a resource for the College’s prodigious dramatic output. (Nearly 300 St Omers manuscript dramas from the 1620s to the late eighteenth century survive in the archives of Stonyhurst College.)
Drama was an art form in which the Jesuits excelled and with which they were associated almost as soon as they opened their first educational institutes. Jesuit drama, for the most part in Latin (there are some 500 printed volumes of plays and declamations at Stonyhurst), rapidly evolved to become synonymous with ostentatious productions, huge casts, complex scenery and costume, sophisticated technical skills, and music and ballet to rival court and public productions. Jesuit masters used plays to train memory, instil confidence, enhance musical ability, and encourage gentlemanly accomplishments such as dancing and deportment in their young charges. The memorizing of Latin drama fostered the understanding of the language, as well as of Classical history. The Jesuit Spiritual Exercises, which underpinned the boys’ religious formation, require the candidate to locate himself within the gospel narratives using a mental composition of place to engage Christ in conversation. Such skills were naturally transferable to the stage, allowing a deeper absorption into character and situation. In addition, plays were devised or adapted to react to local religious circumstances; a most effective way of furthering the Jesuits’ missionary aims.
The English Jesuits of the seventeenth century were fully integrated into this European cultural mainstream and also in touch with the distant exploits of their missionary brethren. Among the lists of St Omers plays we find works of 1624 and 1642 dramatizing Gonsalvo Silveira, martyred in South Africa in 1561, the Nagasaki Jesuit martyrs of 1597 and an undated piece entitled Montezuma sive Mexici Imperii Occasus. But in addition English Jesuits were acutely aware of cultural and political developments in their native land and took a lively interest in pre-Reformation British history, an area of bitter contention between Protestant and Catholic theologians.
Scholars have known for some time that the St Omers College library possessed a Quarto copy of Shakespeare’s Pericles by 1619, and that the English Seminaries at Valladolid and Douai owned Second Folios in the seventeenth century. Shakespeare’s eclectic mixture of history and tragedy clearly appealed to English Catholic institutions in exile. The clandestine performance of Pericles for the recusant Sir John Yorke at Gowlthwaite Hall, Nidderdale, by the Cholmeley Players on Candlemas in 1610 suggests that Catholics living in England saw in Shakespeare a means of sustaining their outlawed religious identity through metaphor, similar to their use of coded Jesuit emblem books. Bearing in mind the tightly-knit nature of the English recusant community, it is not impossible that this performance of Pericles was connected with the arrival of the Quarto at St Omers.
The Saint-Omer Folio has been annotated and is missing some thirty pages, which implies frequent and less than respectful usage. The images of the few pages which have so far been made public occur in Henry IV Part I. In Act 3, scene 3, Falstaff’s references to a bawdy song and a bawdy house have been excised; the Hostess, Mistress Quickly, has been replaced by a Host in Act 2, scene 5 (the Jesuits prohibited the portrayal of female characters on their college stages). Speeches have been cut, and stage directions added in English. Without having had the opportunity of examining the complete text it is not possible to offer more than conjecture, but these few glimpses provide strong evidence of a play being made fit for performance in an English Jesuit school for boys and young men.
If there was a First Folio at the College, how and when did it find its way there? The book was published in November 1623 at the steep cost of one pound per volume. There was a significant movement of books to and from England through Saint-Omer at this time, and particularly through the College. The St Omers Press, founded in 1608, produced a wide number of spiritual titles intended mainly for the underground English Catholic market. Unbound books were smuggled to England via Antwerp and distributed through secret Catholic networks. It was not a one-way traffic; College accounts of the late seventeenth century mention quite large sums paid for books bought from England as well as from Europe. So frequent was this traffic that the Jesuits used the phrase “parcels of books” to refer to the illicit Channel crossing of pupils, being less likely to arouse suspicion with the English authorities if the letters were intercepted. A book such as the First Folio could, therefore, quickly and easily have found its way from England to St Omers.
The Folio carries an apparent ownership inscription, “Nevill”, on the first page of the The Tempest. College pupils and English Jesuit priests habitually used aliases for security; sifting out the likely candidate from the dozen or so alumni who took the name of Neville is problematic. One suggestion which has been put forward as the donor of the Folio is Edward Scarisbrick, alias Neville, but there are difficulties with this. Scarisbrick attended St Omers as a pupil, arriving, aged fourteen, in 1653, and leaving in 1660 to join the Jesuit Order. In 1675 he returned briefly to St Omers as Prefect of Studies before returning to the missions in Lancashire. Francis Clarke’s Innocentia, for which, as we have seen, he needed access to a Folio,was produced in 1654. If the donor was indeed Scarisbrick, he must have acquired this expensive book as a young boy and deposited it in the library on arrival – a slightly unlikely scenario.
A more plausible candidate to have donated the Folio is Edmund Sale, alias Neville, another English Jesuit priest. Sale had been a pupil at the College, leaving in 1621 at the age of seventeen to seek ordination in Rome. In 1629 he spent a year on the missions in England, moving to St Omers as Master of Poetry in 1630 and returning in the same capacity in 1632. The post of Master of Poetry refers to the teaching, not of literature, but of a specific year-group of seventeen-year-old boys. (Jesuit classes are traditionally named from the acquisition of skills in language – Elements, Figures, Rudiments, Grammar, Syntax, Poetry and Rhetoric.) Each year group was expected to produce one or two performances annually, their complexity depending on the boys’ age and ability, but Poetry invariably put on the annual end-of-year showstopper, written and produced by their teacher. This was such an arduous task that as early as 1586 the Ratio Studiorum regulations for Jesuit education appealed for common sense to prevail: “this project, troublesome and laborious enough in itself, becomes well-nigh intolerable when the many details of the work fall to the lot of the professor of Poetry. He ought rather to be considered as having done his part in composing the play”.
The location of the library between 1762, when the empty College was taken over by English secular clergy, and 1792 when it was seized and turned into a Military Hospital, is unknown. The books of all religious communities in the town were sequestrated in 1792, and stored haphazardly in the confiscated Abbaye St-Bertin near the town centre. In 1799 the present Bibliothèque was founded and the various collections of books were moved there. During more than thirty-five years of chaos the College library had lost its integrity and its books have largely gone unidentified for 200 years, a situation now being addressed by Dr Cordonnier. The cataloguing project which unearthed the Folio will, it is hoped, lead to other significant finds from the English Jesuit library.
For the moment, there is much to be explored in the Saint-Omer Folio, and scholars keenly anticipate the imminent release of the fully digitized book. Its discovery will shed further light on Shakespeare’s significance for the Catholic world, on the riches of English and European Jesuit drama, and on the cultural life of exiled English communities in the seventeenth century.>>
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Art Neuendorffer
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