ABSTRACT
This is Amoretto' s page describing his master's behaviour in Part Two of The Return from Parnassus, a play performed at St John's College, Cambridge during the Christmas season of 1601-2. What emerges most conspicuously from this description is the importance of language to the fashionable image. Language here is an object almost as material as the books Amoretto holds upside down, to be picked up or cast off according to caprice. So socially desirable, apparently, is a knowledge of other European languages that Amoretto is portrayed as willing to waste substantial amounts of time looking at books he does not understand merely to impress the bystanders. And a verbal display is even more impressive than a silent one, where the gallant can produce it. Gullio, a character in the slightly earlier StJohn's play, The Return from Parnassus (1599-1601) boasts that
It is my custome in my common talke to make use of my readinge in the Greeke, Latin, French, Italian, Spanishe poetts, and to adome my oratorye with some prettie choise extraordinarie sayinges. (1134-7)
This is not an affectation specific to the Parnassus plays, with their university auspices, but one widespread in plays that cluster around 15991601, including especially the plays usually grouped together under the heading of the 'War of the Theatres', and written predominantly for the indoor, private theatres.2 The passage quoted from 2 Return from Parnassus above may in fact be alluding to an earlier play, Jonson's Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), where Cordatus says that Clove 'will sit you a whole aftemoone sometimes, in a booke-sellers shop, reading the Greeke, Italian, and Spanish; when he understands not a word of either: if he had the tongues, to his sutes, he were an excellent linguist' (3.1.29-32).3
Criticism dealing with the War of the Theatres plays up to now has tended to focus on identifying which individuals are supposedly targeted by particular characters and allusions. In the present context I am not interested in continuing this game of riddles, but in the self-evident fact that all of these plays manifest an obsessive interest in linguistic decorums, fashions and excesses, an interest which is marked by its difference from the nationalistic concerns dominating so many public-theatre plays of the late 1580s and 1590s and continuing to drive many of the Admiral's Men's productions at the Fortune after 1600.
