This play was entered in the Stationers’ Register in October 1639 as ‘A Tragedy called the Bloody Brother. by I: B:’ (Greg, 1939-59, 1.51) and published the same year under the title The Bloody Brother, A Tragedy by ‘B. J. F.’ A second quarto was printed at Oxford in 1640 as The Tragedy of Rollo Duke of Normandy, ‘Written by John Fletcher Gent.’ It seems to have been one of the most frequently performed pieces of the seventeenth century (Bentley, 1941-68, 3.407). The play is based on Herodian’s narrative of the rivalry between Geta and Antonine, sons of the emperor Severus. The action is shifted from ancient Rome to medieval France, and Geta and Antonine become Otto and Rollo. The brothers are named joint heirs of the kingdom, but Rollo kills Otto to become sole ruler. He in turn is killed for his tyranny.
The date of composition is uncertain. Rollo’s first recorded performance was in 1630 (Bentley, 1941-68, 3.401). It is generally agreed that Fletcher had a hand in it, giving us a terminus ad quem of 1625. It has been suggested that Neptune’s Triumph 56-64 (1624) is the source of a passage in 2.2, but the topos of the cooks’ elaborate creations was common and need not have come from Jonson (Bentley, 3.404). A more likely date is c. 1617. An allusion to making three thousand knights may be a reference to James I’s bestowal of honours in 1617, and the references to poisoning (in 2.2 and 3.2) seem like an allusion to the Overbury murder trial of 1615-16. The astrologers in 4.2 are La Fiske, De Bube, and Norbret, allusions to the fortune-tellers Fisk, Bubb, and Bretnor famous in 1616-18 (G. W. Williams in B&F , 10.155). However, the Norman King Rollo does not seem to have been depicted as a wicked tyrant before 1619, in which year André Du Chesne’s Historiae Normannorum Scriptores Antiqui (Paris, 1619) became the first history to represent him as a bloodthirsty villain. A plausible hypothesis is that a first version of the play was set in ancient Rome and was later revised, giving it a French location. The evidence concerning the date of composition is not conclusive, but if 1617 is accepted, it makes Jonson’s hand in the play seem less likely. He was not writing for the public stage between 1616 and 1624, and does not seem to have collaborated on such works after East. Ho! (Taylor and Jowett, 1993, 266).
Scholars of attribution have returned to the play repeatedly, but no consensus on authorship has emerged. It is generally accepted that most of the play is the work of Fletcher and Massinger, but which parts they wrote and who the other collaborators were is disputed. G. W. Williams calls the authorship problem ‘one of the most vexed of all such questions in the canon’ (Williams in B&F , 10.157) and Massinger’s editors write it off as ‘the impossible problem’ (Edwards and Gibson in Massinger, 1976, 1.xx). Among proposed co-authors are Cartwright, Chapman, Daborne, Field, Jonson, Middleton, Rowley, and Wilkins. Of these, Chapman and Field have emerged as the most likely contributors (Jump, 1947; Hoy, 1961; Taylor and Jowett, 1993). Jonson’s candidature peaked in the early twentieth century but has since been in decline.
The S.R. entry attributes the play to ‘I: B:’ and the first quarto to ‘B. J. F.’ The second quarto assigns it to John Fletcher. In the late nineteenth century, the initials ‘I: B:’ suggested to scholars that ‘Jonson, Ben’ was involved. Oliphant (1910-11) suggested ‘Jonson, Beaumont’ as the expansion, and that ‘B. J. F.’ might stand for ‘Beaumont, Jonson, and Fletcher’ (although in the same article he concedes the play is too late for Beaumont). In a later study he reiterates this opinion, but does not provide any further evidence, simply noting, ‘In my own view [Jonson] wrote part of the play, and this view has been confirmed by the striking parallels adduced by my friend Mr Charles Crawford’ (Oliphant, 1927,). Bullen’s biography of Fletcher in the old DNB (1889) suggests ‘Ben Jonson, Fletcher’ for ‘B. J. F.’. He contends, ‘A plausible view is that the ‘Bloody Brother’ was written in the first instance by Fletcher and Jonson, and that it was revised by Massinger on the occasion of its revival at Hampton Court in January 1636-7.’ Neither Oliphant nor Bullen offers evidence to support the attribution to Jonson, other than the initials.
The fullest case for Jonson’s involvement was built by Crawford (1905). He produced a list of passages from 2.1, 4.1, and 4.2 of Rollo with parallels in Jonson’s works. However, these are parallels of thought and ideas, rather than language. Many of them are ideas common to the educated seventeenth-century Englishman, derived mainly from classical sources. One has been mentioned already, the cook’s elaborate creation:
I have fram’d a fortification,
Out of rye paste, which is impregnable,
And against that for two long hours together,
Two dozen of maribones shall play continually (Rollo, 2.2.16-19)
A master-cook! Why, he is the man of men
For a professor! He designs, he draws,
He paints, he carves, he builds, he fortifies,
Makes citadels of curious fowl and fish;
Some he dry-ditches, some moats round with broths,
Mounts marrowbones, cuts fifty-angled custards,
Rears bulwark pies, and for his outer works,
He raiseth ramparts of immortal crust,
And teacheth all the tactics at one dinner. (Neptune, 56-64)
However, from Gifford’s time it was noted that the raising of fortifications in pastry was a commonplace (see Jump, ed. Rollo, 84). As has been noted by Taylor and Jowett, Jonson’s use of the lines in Neptune, unchanged in Staple (4.2.19-27), might make us think that Jonson was not disposed to extensive rewriting when he reiterated such an idea. The same Jonson masque also mentions Arion on a dolphin (133-5), referred to in Rollo, 2.2.22, but this legend was recounted in a great many classical sources. This scene in Rollo additionally alludes to a goose wanting to be eaten:
I’ll make ye a stubble goose
Turne o’th’toe thrice, do a cross point presently
And then sit downe again, and cry, come eat me.(Rollo, 2.2.26-8)
Oh, there are two vat pigs
A zindging by the vire, now by Saint Tony,
Too good to eat but on a wedding day;
And then a goose will bid you all, ‘come cut me’. (Tub, 3.1.48-51)
But Herford and Simpson point out this ‘was proverbial of the Land of Cockayne or Lubberland, and is quoted to that effect in Bart. Fair [3.2.59-61]’ (H&S, 10.294). Crawford also points out that we find praise of wine in this scene, as in Jonson’s occasional verse:
Wine works th’heart up, wakes the wit,
There is no cure gainst age but it.
It helps the headache, cough and tissick,
And is for all diseases physic. (Song, 5-8):
Wine . . .
’Tis the true Phoebeian liquour,
Clears the brains, makes wit the quicker,
Pays all debts, cures all diseases,
And at once three senses pleases. (‘Apollo Verses’, 12-18)
The most that can be said is that there is a parallel in the thought of wine being beneficial, but the thought is all that is in common. Athenaeus gathers commendations of it in Deipnosophistae 2, where he cites Panyasis, ‘Wine wards off all ills’, and Timothy, 5.23, was well known. Finally, Crawford points out the association of cooks and fire is found in 2.2, as in several of Jonson’s works:
Pant. But ’tis a damned sinne.
Cook. I never fear that,
The fire’s my playfellow. (Rollo, 2.2.156-7)
This has a parallel in Jonson’s Informations, 344-6: ‘A cook who was of an evil life, when a minister told him he would to hell, asked what torment was there. Being answered “Fire”—“Fire!” said he, “that is my playfellow”.’ Jonson also associates cooks and hell in several other places: Epigrams, 133.143-4, Alch., 3.1.17-21, Bart. Fair, 2.2.37. But Jump admits the link seems to have been a common one beyond Jonson. The modern phrase ‘hell’s kitchen’ to describe unbearable heat draws on the same associations.
It is also suggested by Crawford and others that Jonson wrote the first two scenes of Act 4. Much of the language in these scenes refers to ‘statecraft’, how power is usurped and maintained. The ideas and maxims were known to Jonson, but also to many other writers. Crawford notes parallels in Jonson that mention the use of cruelty in maintaining power:
These courses that he takes
Cannot but end in ruin, empire got
By blood and violence must so be held,
And how unsafe it is, he first will prove,
That toiling still to remove enemies
Makes himself more. (Rollo, 4.1.11-16)
Severity represseth a few, but it irritates more. The lopping of trees makes the boughs shoot out thicker; and the taking away of some kind of enemies, increaseth the number . . . But princes, by harkening to cruel counsels, become in time obnoxious to the authors, their flatterers and ministers, and are brought to that, that when they would, they dare not change them; they must go on, and defend cruelty with cruelty. (Discoveries, 835-49)
The thought comes from Seneca’s De Clementia, ‘repeated punishment, while it crushes the hatred of a few, stirs the hatred of all . . . just as trees that have been trimmed throw out again countless branches, and as many kinds of plants are cut back to make them grow thicker, so the cruelty of a king by removing his enemies increases their number’ (Basore, 1928-35, 1.8.6); ‘Hot upon the heels of such a man [cruel tyrant] follow loathing, hatred poison and the sword’ (1.25.3).
it is not now a brother,
A faithful counsellor of state or two,
That are his danger, they are fair dispatched,
It is a multitude that ’gin to fear
And think, what began there must end in them . . .
Princes may pick their suffering nobles out,
And one by one employ them to the block:
But when they once grow formidable to
Their clowns and cobblers, ware then guard themselves. (Rollo, 4.1.16-26)
While he [the prince] hath the people to friend, who are a multitude, he hath the less fear of the nobility, who are but few. Nor let the common proverb of ‘He that builts on the people, builds on the dirt’, discredit my opinion: for that hath only place where an ambitious and private person, for some popular end, trusts in them against the public justice and magistrate. There they will leave him. (Discoveries, 823-6)
The thought is found in Machiavelli’s Prince, ch. 9 (‘a prince can never make himself secure against a hostile people, there are too many of them’ (Bull, 1961, 31)) and Discourses, 1.5, where Machiavelli discusses whether a prince or ruler should rely on the people or nobles for support. As has often been shown, Machiavelli was widely read in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. In this same scene, we find the notion that villainy, if successful, can be called virtue:
Your counsels colour not with reason of state.
Where all that’s necessary still is just.
The actions of the prince, while they succeed,
Should be made good and glorified, not questioned:
Men do but show their ill affections
That –Aubrey What? Speak out.
Being thus entered, and slip no advantage
That may secure you. Let ’em call it mischief;
When it is past and prospered, ’twill be virtue. (Catiline, 3.3.12-16)
but we,
That draw the subtle and more piercing air
In that sublimèd region of court,
Know all is good we make so, and go on,
Secured by the prosperity of our crimes. (Mortimer, 1.1.15-19)
The topos of successful villainy being called virtue was common. Compare Machiavelli, The Prince, ch. 18: ‘in the actions of all men, and especially of princes, where there is no court of appeal, one judges by the result. So let a prince set about the task of conquering and maintaining his state; his methods will always be judged honourable and will be universally praised.’ Augustine records a pirate’s remark to Alexander the Great: ‘Since I do this with a little ship I am called a pirate. You do it with a great fleet and are called an emperor’ ( City of God, ed. Knowles, 1972, 4.4); a similar thought is found in Juvenal: ‘multi / committunt eadem diuerso crimina fato: / ille crucem sceleris pretium tulit, hic diadema’, ‘many commit the same crimes with diverse outcomes: this man gets the cross for his villainy; that man gets a crown’ (13.103-5).
Rollo, 4.1, also includes the portrait of a parasite or flatterer, a figure to whom Jonson returns more than once:
Bawd of the state . . .
Dar’st thou mention,
Affection or a heart that ne’er hadst any?
Know’st not to love or hate, but by the scale
As thy Prince dost before thee, that dost never
Wear thine own face, but put’st on his, and gather’st
Baits for his ears, liv’st wholly at his beck. (Rollo, 4.1.47-63)
These are flatterers for their bread, that praise all my oraculous lord does or says, be it true or false; invent tales that shall please; make baits for His Lordship’s ears; and if they be not received in what they offer at, they shift a point of the compass, and turn their tale, presently tack about, deny what they confessed and confess what they denied, fit their discourse to the persons and occasions. (Discoveries, 1128-32)
Oh! Your parasite
Is a most precious thing, dropped from above
. . . And yet
I mean not those that have your bare town-art,
To know who’s fit to feed ’em; have no house,
No family, no care, and therefore mould
Tales for men’s ears, to bait that sense . . .
But your fine, elegant rascal, that can rise
And stoop, almost together, like an arrow,
Shoot through the air as nimbly as a star,
Turn short as doth a swallow, and be here,
And there, and here, and yonder, all at once;
Present to any humour, all occasion,
And change a visor swifter then a thought. (Volpone, 3.1.7-29)
Again, such ideas are not unique to Jonson. The portrait of a flatterer or parasite is familiar from antiquity in works such as Plutarch’s Moralia, 1, and Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae, (6.3.67-81). The authors of Rollo might have found the sentiments in these classical works, or in Renaissance imitators.
This scene contains several other tropes on the nature of power, such as the question of whether a prince should aim to be loved or feared:
That sleep’st within thy master’s ear, and whisper’st
’Tis better for him to be fear’d than loved . . .
Mercy becomes a prince, and guards him best,
Awe and affrights they are no ties of love,
And when men ’gin to fear the prince, they hate him. (Rollo, 4.1.76-138)
This is also found in Jonson’s Discoveries, ‘No virtue is a prince’s own, or becomes him more than his clemency . . . the merciful prince is safe in love, not in fear . . . He is guarded with his own benefits’ (832-56). However, the love and fear trope is well known from Seneca in antiquity and from Machiavelli’s Prince, ch. 17 (entitled, ‘Whether it is better to be loved than feared, or the reverse’); it is taken up in, for instance, Thomas Heywood’s Rape of Lucrece, 793-805. On the same theme of fear and cruelty, in Rollo, 4.1, we find ‘They hate ill princes that make ’em so’ (line 90), which Crawford finds echoed in Jonson, Discoveries, 879-81: ‘No men hate an evil prince more than they that helped to make him such. And none more boastingly weep his ruin than they that procured and practised it.’ This is found in Pliny, Panegyricus, 44: ‘Scis et expertus es, quantopere detestentur malos principes etiam, qui malos faciunt’, ‘you know and have seen, how much even those men who made them wicked hate wicked rulers.’
Crawford also notes parallel use of image of the prince attaining power having unobscured vision:
We are now duke alone, Latorch secured:
Nothing left standing to obscure our prospect:
We look right forth, beside, and round about us,
And see it ours with pleasure (Rollo, 4.1.157-60)
The rise is made yet, and we now stand rank’d
To view about us, all that were above us!
Nought hinders now our prospect, all are even,
We walk upon a level. (Mortimer, 1-4)
Crawford adds Jonson’s Discoveries, 1504-5: ‘This is Monte Potiri, to get the hill. For no perfect discovery can be made upon a flat or level.’ However, this alludes to knowledge rather than political power, and comes from Bacon’s Advancement of Learning: ‘No perfect discovery can be made upon a flat or level’ (5.5). Herford and Simpson note that the image in Mortimer has an earlier precedent in Sejanus: ‘No tree that stops his prospect but must fall’ (H&S, 2.500). The lines in Rollo could be Jonson recycling himself, or another writer using his idea. Bertha Hensman (ed., The Bloody Brother, 1991, xxx) points out that Massinger borrowed from Jonson’s Roman plays in The Roman Actor, and frequently borrowed from other playwrights.
In all, Crawford assembles an impressive number of parallels between Rollo and the Jonson canon. However, many of these ideas come from authors who were well-known in the seventeenth century and which were in common circulation. Herford and Simpson were reluctant to admit any of Crawford’s passages might be from Jonson. Of 4.1 they say: ‘the verse is too fluid for Jonson; it has not his firmness of texture. On these grounds we reject the attribution of this scene to him’; and of 4.2: ‘the verse of this scene does not read like Jonson’s’ (H&S, 10.298). They note that many of Crawford’s parallels have sources before Jonson’s and ‘[s]ignificant as these parallels are, they are a slender link of evidence to prove the authorship of an entire scene’ (297). Herford and Simpson conclude their discussion saying, ‘There are borrowings from him, as Dyce noted, but these do not prove that he had a hand in the play’ (299).
Crawford’s case was supported by Garnett (1904-5), who argues that 4.2 ‘reveals an erudition greater than any contemporary dramatist can be supposed to possess’ (489; a claim also made by A. W. Ward, 1899, 2.734-5). This scene bears a striking resemblance to one in Querlous, a Latin play written in the late Roman empire. Garnett believes that only Jonson knew enough Latin to make such use of the ancient text. Further, the same scene shows detailed knowledge of astrology, a fact that Garnett takes as further evidence of Jonson’s authorship. Such arguments based on perceived learning have been thoroughly debunked over the last hundred years. As Herford and Simpson remark, ‘To suppose that Jonson was the only dramatist of his time who could use this technical jargon correctly is surely an extravagant claim’ (H&S, 10.298). Hensman shows that several early seventeenth-century authors could have written such a scene (ed., The Bloody Brother, xxxi).
Since Crawford and Garnett made their cases for Jonson’s hand in the play, little has emerged to support their position. W. Wells (1928) used verbal parallels to argue that Chapman had a hand in 3.1 and 4.3. Wells concurred with the attribution of 4.1 and 4.2 to Jonson by Crawford and Garnett, but did not offer any further evidence in support. Jump attributes 4.1 and 4.2 to Jonson and the rest to Massinger, Fletcher, and Chapman. In his edition, he reproduced many of the parallels first noted by Crawford. His book refers to his MA thesis in which he compared passages for metrical evidence of authorship. His metrical statistics and parallel passages ‘prove beyond reasonable doubt that Massinger and Fletcher, each of whom habitually signed his writing with his own favourite phrases, did in fact write the portions of Rollo here ascribed to them; and they make it very probable that the ascription of the remaining portions to Chapman and Jonson is also correct’ (ed., Rollo xxvii). His slight wavering over Jonson and Chapman is common among those trying to attribute this play. He does not reproduce any metrical evidence in his published edition of the play. Taylor and Jowett conclude, ‘Metrical evidence does not rule out Jonson; but nor does it compel us to rule him in’ (1993, 265).
The most rigorous study of the play was by Cyrus Hoy. He relied on linguistic evidence, comparing Rollo, 4.1-2 to Jonson’s five later plays, nothing his preference for ’hem over ’em, i’the over i’th, yo’ over ye or y’, h’has over h’as (for he has). All such contractions are evident in Rollo, but only in slight degree. One instance of ’hem occurs in 2.1. In 4.1, a scene frequently attributed to Jonson, we find yo’ for you in the phrase ‘Yo’have woon upon me’; this is a contraction Jonson uses more than any other dramatist who has been supposed to have a hand in Rollo. In this scene and the next we find single occurences of o’the, i’the, o’the, and three instances of ’ha. Hoy believes that these instance ‘not only serve to support, but, in their small way, to strengthen the arguments for Jonson’s authorship of these scenes’, but admits that overall the evidence for Jonson’s authorship is ‘pitifully slight’ (Hoy, 1961, 61). Against such attribution, Taylor and Jowett point out that w’yee occurs in 4.1: it is found nowhere in Jonson’s other work but is found four times in Nathan Field’s unaided plays.
Hensman has written about the play in three places. In her thesis (Hensman, 1947), she proposed Jonson as a co-author of 3.1 (not a scene attributed to him by other scholars). However, in her 1974 book, she drops Jonson and argues that Field was probably the author of this scene. In this monograph and her 1991 edition of the play she argues that the play was written in synchronic collaboration by Fletcher and Field and then revised by Massinger around 1629. She notes that Field was collaborating with Fletcher at the time the Rollo was probably first written. The vocabulary, regular pentameter rhythm, and grammatical structures are found to be characteristic of Field (ed., The Bloody Brother, 1991, xxix).
Like Hensman, Taylor and Jowett propose Field as the most likely co-author. They also give weight to the fact that he was collaborating with both Fletcher and Massinger at around this time. They suggest Chapman may also have had a hand in the work (1993, 260-71). However, there are problems with the attribution to Field. Brinkley’s 1928 study of Field was inclined to rule him out: the use of feminine endings and enjambment in 3.1 and 4.3 is greater than would be expected if they were by Field (Brinkley, 1928, 140-41). However, Taylor and Jowett point out that 4.3 and the non-Fletcherian parts of 3.1 do show a preference for end stops, and could be by Field. Jonson’s involvement in the play is considered unlikely by Taylor and Jowett. As mentioned, they note he was not collaborating or writing for the public stage at the supposed time the play was written and the metrical evidence is not positive for him. They conclude ‘of all the three candidates usually advanced [Chapman, Jonson, Field], Jonson’s claim is far and away the weakest . . . We are disposed to regard Jonson’s participation as unproven and relatively unlikely’ (265-68).
If the first quarto had not been registered as written by ‘B. J. F.’ one wonders whether Rollo would ever have been attributed to Jonson. The strongest assertions of Jonson’s involvement were by Crawford and Garnett in the early twentieth century. The tropes common to Jonson’s work and Rollo can no longer be considered evidence of authorship. Jump and Wells accepted Jonson’s hand in the play, but with less certainty. Hoy, Hensman, Taylor, and Jowett have cast very strong doubts on Jonson’s authorship of any part of this play. The cases for Chapman and Field, though strong, are not unproblematic. The case for Jonson’s involvement is very weak indeed.