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.