Disputation In and Around Medwall's "Fulgens and Lucres"

ENG331: Drama to 1603

Professor Matthew Sergi

Daniel Iannucci - #997542057

Disputation In and Around Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres

In her article, “Tudor Interlude at Court”, Ae Gyung Noh writes that displayed on the title page of the extant copy of Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres is the sub-title “The Disputacyon of Noblenes”.  Fulgens and Lucres is structured around its indeterminacy in regard to disputation; characters will often makes statements that are later negated or neutralized.  The play functions as a medium for debate.  It is not only the subject matter that is important, but also the act of disputation that encompasses them.  Several moments in Fulgens and Lucres highlight the play’s use of disputation in both plot and theme; these moments, when read jointly with Ae Gyung Noh’s historicist examination of the play provide an insight into the literary qualities of Fulgens and Lucres that reflect and dispute those historical indeterminacies.  These indeterminacies can range from the play’s place as an ‘interlude’, to its moral stance on what constitutes nobleness.  Noh and her article take a historicist approach to analyzing the text, saying drama, “calls for the equal assessment of the factors outside a written script related to its performance” (537).  These factors can be politically, socially, or even theatrically influenced.  Therefore, I will use her examination of the extra-textual factors of Medwall’s play to examine the literary aspects of it.

            As I have suggested, and as Noh asserts on numerous occasions, the characters in Fulgens and Lucres mirror the extra-textual concerns of the play.  Its model of disputation is driven in opposing directions by both the plot and characters.  This speaks to the construction of the action, and the characters that guide that action (most notably the characters A and B).  Noh notes that many of A and B’s contradictory opinions in regard to nobleness are used to, “relieve the offensiveness of the subversive reordering of social hierarchy suggested in the play” (526).  Noh’s cited passage is used superficially to reaffirm the historical position the play takes, but unfortunately she disregards the literary aspects that can deepen and expand her research.  At the beginning of the play, when A and B are debating the nature of nobleness, A says, “Let them convey and carry clean then” (I.138).  Immediately, A (with the inclusion of B) establishes a division between himself and them to ‘convey and carry clean then’.  However, it is not made entirely clear to whom A is referring.  A could simply be referring to the characters like Lucres who are asked to decide what constitutes nobleness, or A could be indicating that the spectators inside the court have their own inferences to make in regard to nobleness.  Regardless, we later see in the play that the two characters invaluably become part of this debate.  The subversive theme of the play is suggested to the audience, but humour in this passage insulates Medwall and the subject matter from criticism.  A and B explain that “…he will repent that this play began” (I.140).  This statement breaks the fourth wall of the play and calls attention to its own construction.  The dispute does not just consume the debate within the play, but even disputes whether or not the play should exist.  The conflict is taken further when A and B, contemplating their place in the play, say “For why? In this matter we have nought to do! (I.146).  The two characters try to completely remove themselves from the plays thematic subject matter.  This becomes paradoxical because the characters are undetacheable from a narrative that they are sutured into.  By trying to separate themselves from the theme they are in fact reinforcing their position in revealing it.  A and B have everything to do with the ‘matter’.  Although they appear as supporting characters, A and B are present in the plot more than any others.  Noh writes that their ‘subplot’ “…dominates more than 70 percent of the whole script” (Noh, 526).  Therefore, their attempt at separation becomes more outrageous when the text is quantifiably examined.  A and B are the first and last characters to appear in the play and their effects are always felt.

Shorty after A’s remarks, B also explains that, “We? No, God wot, nothing at all, / Save that we come to see this play” (I.148-149).  This passage also considers questions of spectatorship and performance.  A and B are observers who are eventually going to place themselves within the action of the play.  What becomes most interesting about their statement is that they take on the role of both spectator and performer.  A and B invert the spectator-performer dichotomy by placing their observations upon the audience.  Noh writes that in the interlude, there was a “…convention of actors’ abrupt entrance to the stage” (Noh, 531).  A and B would have stepped out of the crowd of diners and proceeded to mark the opening stages of the play.  This aspect of the play is also a kind of dispute on what constitutes where a performance begins and ends.  As an interlude, Fulgens and Lucres is also somewhat indeterminate in its temporal position.  The performance takes place in two parts, between two meals. 

             The final section of Fulgens and Lucres operates as both a textual and physical space for disputation.  The setting becomes transformed into a courtroom, with Lucres acting as judge to the litigating Gaius and Publius.  Lucres says, “That I should this question of noblesse define, / It is a great matter which, as seemeth to me, / Pertaineth to a philosopher or else a divine.” (II.418-420).  Lucres’s suggestion that the question should actually be posed to a philosopher comically proposes that more questions should be asked of the matter.  There is a humourous indeterminacy when considering that a direct answer lies in the merit of one man’s opinion.  Lucres continues in a dispute with herself and her two suitors when she remarks:

“Lo, this wise I mean and thus I do intend:

That whatsoever sentence I give betwixt you two

After mine own fantasy, it shall

not extend

To any other person.  I will that it be so…” (II. 425-428). 

Lucres’s use of the word fantasy implies a certain sense of escapism taking place in and outside of the play.  Her decision will not extend beyond to any other man, and is locked into the diegesis of the play.  The fantasy is something that is illusory; it is unreal by prospect.  The structure of Lucres’s lines from 425-428 emphasizes her decision that there will be no extension of her choice in reality; so much so that that the words not extend are given their own line within the stanza.  Why have these words been singled out?  ‘Not extend’ physically interjects itself into the middle of the stanza, engaging in a feud at a textual level.  This also creates a dispute between the play and its historical setting.  Lucres’s comments extend outside of the text because of the play’s relation with Medwall’s patron, John Morton.  Noh writes that there was a new set of “fortunate commoners who had emerged due to the newly available social fluidity under the rule of Henry VII” (Noh, 523).  One of these well-known ‘fortunate commoners’ was Morton.  Medwall, although quite progressive through his style, is careful not to ascribe an absolute legitimacy to the commoner as a true nobleman.             

Though historically rich and well researched, Noh’s article “Tudor Interlude at Court” too often leaves aside the possibility for literary analysis.  My goal has been to demonstrate through, and alongside with, Noh’s historical recounting of the ‘scenes behind the scenes’ of Medwall’s play, how Fulgens and Lucres invokes a kind of disputation in its narrative position and role as an interlude.  The play from beginning to end is pulled in many different directions; A and B.

Works Cited

Medwall, Henry. "Fulgens and Lucres." The Broadview Anthology of Medieval Drama. Ed. Christina Marie. Fitzgerald and John T. Sebastian. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2013. 392-435. Print.

Noh, Ae Gyung. "Tudor Interlude at Court: Reconstructing the Scenes behind the Scenes of Henry Medwall's 'Fulgens and Lucres'" English Language and Literature 58.3 (2012): 519-39.