Out of Bounds

In the fourteenth-century romance of Gamelyn, Sir John of Boundys wills that the greater part of his land should pass to the youngest of his sons, Gamelyn, defying the convention of primogeniture. After his father’s death, Gamelyn is forced to flee to the greenwood and take up life as an outlaw. This chapter examines this narrative as it plays out in Gamelyn and in Gamelyn’s literary successors. Gamelyn was adapted by Thomas Lodge, who used it as the basis of his prose romance Rosalynde; Rosalynde in turn served as the source for Shakespeare’s play As You Like It. I argue that this line of adaptation forms a ‘testamentary fiction’: a narrative about legacies and bequests that uses the idea of inheritance to frame itself as an object of transmission. I also argue that this tradition ultimately serves to celebrate a quasi-sovereign will exercised through the possession of landed property.

A taste for art in colonial Queensland: The Queensland Art Gallery Foundational Bequest of Thomas Lodge Murray-Prior

This study arose from an encounter with some paintings (still lives, Madonnas and other religious or genre scenes of mainly seventeenth-century Northern European origin) at the Queensland Art Gallery in 2012. They were intriguing because they were part of a bequest by squatter and colonial parliamentarian Thomas Lodge Murray-Prior (1819–92), which formed the nucleus of the original Queensland Art Gallery collection when it opened in 1895. Little is known about them, but they raise questions: What part did they play in the life of the donor? Did he collect them merely to burnish his reputation? Were they hung in a town house or in the bush? How did they enter the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery and what reception did they receive? What subsequent use has been made of them? This article examines the collection and the role it played in Murray-Prior's life, arguing that it is a coherent collection of Northern European art and more than a status symbol. Furthermore, it has much to say about a period that saw the development of art collecting and exhibiting. As such, it is the perfect foundation for an art gallery in colonial Australia.

From Sovereignty to the State

The enthusiastic series of receptions of Philip Massinger’s 1623 play The Bondman by royalists and republicans alike has puzzled critics: Why did audiences from Prince Charles, to republicans resisting the possibility of Charles II’s return, to the spectators of the Restoration all respond to the play enthusiastically despite their disparate political vantage points? This essay argues that the play appealed to disparate constituencies by displacing focus from the sources of sovereignty onto the stability of the state. Drawing on Stoic philosopher Seneca’s De clementia, which Thomas Lodge had newly translated in 1614, The Bondman centers both generically and politically on clemency. Clemency infuses the play’s mode of tragicomedy and presents a vision of politics that prioritizes the general welfare of the state over any particular form of rule.

Catholic Translation and Protestant Translation: The Reception of Luis de Granada's Devotional Prose in Early Modern England

Through a survey of the translations produced by Richard Hopkins, Francis Meres, Thomas Lodge, and others, this essay investigates the various audiences Luis de Granada's writings had, and the different ways in which they were both received and rendered into English. The translators’ aims, and, in particular, their attitudes to the doctrinal positions they found his writings to espouse, are examined. This involves asking how Granada's works were modified for audiences of different religious persuasions within the general context of Anglo-Hispanic relations in this period, and more particularly of the place of Catholic texts in a no longer Catholic England.