Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-xtgtn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T00:16:48.841Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Ruggle's Ignoramus and Humanistic Criticism of the Language of the Common Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

E. F. J. Tucker
E. F. J. Tucker*
Affiliation:
Virginia Military Institute
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

According to contemporary observers, George Ruggle's Ignoramus, first staged at Cambridge in March 1614, enjoyed an immense success, or notoriety, both at the university and at “Whitehall while it sent shockwaves through the Inns of Court and infuriated Sir Edward Coke, Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench. The comedy was apparently conceived as an attack upon Francis Brackyn, Recorder of Cambridge and constant adversary of the university, but because of its brilliant and merciless satire of legal jargon, the play achieved a universality which aided James I and the civilian lawyers in their jurisdictional struggles against Coke and the common law bench.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1977 , pp. 341 - 350
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1977

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Thomson, Elizabeth, ed., The Chamberlain Letters (New York, 1956), pp. 132–133 Google Scholar; and Forbes, M. D., ed., Clare College, 1326-1926 (Cambridge, 1928-30), II, 528 Google Scholar.

2 For an account of the town-gown dispute and Brackyn's part in it, see Moore-Smith, G. C., ed., Club-Law: A Comedy (Cambridge, 1906), pp. xii-xxxiGoogle Scholar.

3 Clubb, Louise G., Giambattista Della Porta: Dramatist (Princeton, 1965), pp. 284ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 For those unfamiliar with the play, I offer the following brief summary: The central dilemma of the comedy concerns the plight of young Antonius whose inability to raise sufficient cash to satisfy the pander Torcol jeopardizes his chances of marrying Rosabella, Torcol's ward and supposed niece. Two complications threaten this love affair: first, Theodorus, the hero's father, decides to send Antonius to London to effect the reunion, after nearly twenty years, of their family by escorting his mother Dorothea, his twinbrother Antoninus, and his sister-in-law Catharina back to Bordeaux; second, Torcol's resolution to marry Rosabella to Ignoramus, an English lawyer on business in Bordeaux. The wily servant Trico smuggles his master off the ship and initiates a series of schemes, with the help of the parasite Cupes and a degenerate friar Cola, to dupe Torcol and Ignoramus. Further difficulties pose a constant menace to the success of Trico's artifices, including the sheer persistence of Ignoramus, the ever-present danger that Theodorus will discover what is going on and the unexpected arrival of the family from London. After Cupes and Cola drag Ignoramus off to a monastery to be exorcized for demonic possession, Theodorus discovers his son's treachery, but everything turns out well for the plotters when the miraculous discovery is made that Rosabella is Catharina's longlost sister Isabella, who had been stolen by pirates and who had been betrothed to Antonius in infancy. Finally, all the slighted parties are reconciled in a scene of feasting and merriment.

5 Levack, Brian P., The Civil Lawyers in England 1603-1641 (Oxford, 1973), pp. 131–134 Google Scholar. For a general discussion of the lawyers’ training in rhetoric, see Schoeck, R. J., ‘Rhetoric and Law in Sixteenth-Century England,’ SP, 50 (1953), 110–127 Google Scholar; and Bland, D. S., ‘Rhetoric and the Law Student in Sixteenth-Century England,’ SP, 54 (1957), 498–508 Google Scholar.

6 Maitland, F. W., English Law and the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1901), pp. 6–7 Google Scholar. For the early development of Law-French from its Anglo-Norman roots, see Schoeck, R. J., ‘Law French: Its Problems and the Status of the Scholarship,’ Kentucky F-LQ, 6 (1959), 132–139 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and valuable references.

7 Holdsworth, W. S., A History of English Law (London, 1909), II, 399–401 Google Scholar.

8 Sir Pollock, Frederick, A First Book of Jurisprudence (London, 1929), p. 302 Google Scholar. Note that the passage cited cannot possibly be attributed to the great Dyer who died some fifty years before the skirmish at Salisbury. The case is reported in George Treby's edition of Dyer's Reports (London, 1688), 188b.

9 Schoeck, R. J., ‘The Study of Law-French in the Inns of Court during the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,’ Kentucky F-LQ, 11 (1964), 226–234 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 i.iii: ‘If John a Nokes enfiefs John a Stiles of Black-Acre and John a Stiles takes Black-Acre and White-Acre, in this case all is void, all, everything.’ All further passages are cited from Ignoramus, Comoedia Scriptore Georgio Ruggle, ed. John Sidney Hawkins (London, 1787), with act, scene, and translation where necessary furnished within the text.

11 KB 27/1094, m. 30v: ‘London Be it noted that at another time, namely in Michaelmas term last past, John Holygrave appeared by William Blackwell his attorney in the presence of our lord the king at Westminster and at that time brought here in the Court of our lord the king his bill against Henry Knightsbridge, clothworker, in the custody of the Marshall, etc. for a plea of trespass upon the case and there are pledges for the prosecution namely John Doe and Richard Roe, the same bill being sued in these words.’

12 Quoted from Baker, J. H., An Introduction to English Legal History (London, 1971), p. 307 Google Scholar: ‘Then summon by good summoners twelve free and lawful men from the vicinity of N. that they be in the presence of our justices at the first assise when they come into those parts, prepared by the sacrament to recognize if W. the father of the aforesaid A. was seised in his demesne as of fee of one messuage and one virgate of land with the appurtenances in N. on the day he died.’

13 ‘Pimpillos’ are probably pin-pillows; the remaining words seem obvious enough.

14 More excludes the legal profession from his ideal world altogether, the laws of Utopia being written simply enough for citizens to be able to conduct their own litigation. See Utopia, ed. H. V. S. Ogden (New York, 1949), pp. 60-61.

15 The Book Named The Governor (i.xiv), ed. S. E. Lehmberg (London, 1962), p. 51.

16 Herrtage, S. J., ed., England in the Reign of King Henry the Eighth: A Dialogue between Cardinal Pole and Thomas Lupset, ed. J. M. Cowper, EETSES, 32 (London, 1927), p. 193 Google Scholar.

17 MS Royal 18.A.50, fol. 6v.

18 Plucknett, T. F. T., ‘The Place of the Legal Profession in the History of English Law,’ Law Quarterly Review, 48 (1932), 328–340 Google Scholar.

19 Waterhous, Edward, Fortescutus Illustratus (London, 1663), pp. 539–546 Google Scholar.

20 Levack, , The Civil Lawyers, pp. 131–134 Google Scholar.

21 Ed. L. Alston (Cambridge, 1906), II, 8; III, 8; III, 9.

22 Sir Bacon, Francis, The Learned Reading of Sir Francis Bacon … Upon the Statute of Uses (London, 1642), C3v-C4Google Scholar.

23 Braithwaite, Richard, A Spiritual Spicerie (London, n.d.), pp. 426–429 Google Scholar, and see numerous further references in Prest, Wilfred R., The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts 1590-1640 (Totowa, N. J., 1972), pp. 138–143 Google Scholar.

24 Prest, , Inns of Court, p. 142 Google Scholar.

25 Lyons, Hastings and Block, Herman, Edward Coke: Oracle of the Law (Boston, 1929), p. 24 Google Scholar; Foss, Edward, The Judges of England (London, 1857), VI, 108, 115 Google Scholar.

26 Sir Edward Coke, Reports, ed. E. J. Thomas and J. F. Fraser (London, 1826), x, I33a-b.

27 Holdsworth, II, 401.

28 Tucker, Edward F. J., ‘ Ignoramus and Seventeenth-Century Satire of the Law,’ HLB, 19 (1971), 314–330 Google Scholar.

29 (London, 1588), Q3v.

30 For medieval satire of the legal profession, see Yunck, John A., The Lineage of Lady Meed (Notre Dame, 1963), pp. 143–170 Google Scholar and passim; Owst, G. R., Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (London, 1961), pp. 338–349 Google Scholar; Mann, Jill, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 86–91 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ives, E. W., ‘The Reputation of the Common Lawyer in English Society, 1450-1550,’ University of Birmingham Historical Journal, 7 (1960), 130–161 Google Scholar. For classical influences upon the writings of Inns of Court writers, see Finkelpearl, Philip J., John Marston of the Middle Temple (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), pp. 70–80 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Morison, Persuasion to the King, MS Cotton Faustina C2, xi, fols. 11v-12.

32 The Overburian Characters, ed. W. J. Paylor (Oxford, 1936), pp. 45-46.

33 Micro-cosmographie, ed. Gwendolen Murphy (Waltham St. Lawrence, Berks., 1928), p. 54.

34 Picturae Loquentes (Oxford, 1946), p. 34.

35 Holdsworth, 1, 223, and II, 394.