SOURCE: Clemen, Wolfgang. “Gorboduc.” In English Tragedy Before Shakespeare: The Development of Dramatic Speech, translated by T. S. Dorsch, pp. 56-74. London: Methuen & Co., 1961.

In the following essay, originally published in German in 1955, Clemen examines the rhetorical style and thematic purpose of Gorboduc.

The history of rhetorical tragedy in England opens with Gorboduc. In this play the genre Drama has assumed a very strange garb; it is so stiff in movement and so full of elaborate set speeches that it is difficult for us nowadays to appreciate it as drama at all. Yet Gorboduc exerted an unusually powerful influence on English drama. It must have been accepted as a model not only by the literary theorists, but even by the playwrights. We must not, therefore, in trying to set it into historical perspective, start from any preconceived notion of Drama per se, or judge it according to any...