THE HYDE COPY
[TOMKIS, Thomas.]
Lingua: or, the Combat of the Tongue, and the five Senses for Superiority. A pleasant Comoedie.
London, Nicholas Okes for Simon Waterson, 1617.
Small 4to, pp. [80]; dampstains throughout, title-page browned, loss to upper corner of A1–2 affecting a few letters, stains to C2v, worming through all leaves (but not wrappers) affecting a letter or two per page in early gatherings and a couple of words per page thereafter, some direction lines trimmed but text otherwise intact; stab-stitched in later wrappers with title in ink and author’s name in pencil to front cover, remnant of red wax to inside of front cover, housed in a modern chemise and slipcase with title and author in gilt to spine; wrappers creased and a little soiled; ownership inscription of ‘J. Bailey. 1825’ in ink to title-page and label of Donald and Mary Hyde to inside of chemise, a few later annotations in ink and pencil to the text.
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Lingua: or, the Combat of the Tongue, and the five Senses for Superiority. A pleasant Comoedie.
Third edition, rare, of this allegorical Cambridge play, perhaps the earliest academic drama to achieve popular success.
Lingua, personified as a woman, argues against the five (male) senses for her right to be admitted as the sixth bodily sense – speech, as Raymond Lull had suggested. Denied this privilege by a court, she is furthermore accused of spreading knowledge to the common people by translating into the vernacular. To set the senses against each other she plots to serve them poisoned wine but is discovered and sentenced to a lengthy term in prison.
The implications are complex: though the play is written in the vernacular and ‘it is obvious that Tomkis intends to mock the academy and its concerns’, Lingua seems to ‘do the cultural work of putting the laity and women in their places, ultimately reminding them of the inaccessibility of the university’ (Ellerbeck, pp. 34–6). ‘Nowhere are the associations between discursive and sexual promiscuity more explicitly dramatized than in Tomkis’s 1607 Lingua’ (Mazzio, p. 210). The play also contains ‘one of the most delightfully comic depictions of the memory arts in the period’ in the exchange between Memoria and his servant Anamnestes (Engel et al., p. 336) as well as scenes in which the companion of Olfactus, Tobacco, speaks an ‘Indian’ tongue not yet classified by philologists and wins a famous elegy from the sense of Smell.
The play was likely written for performance at Trinity College, Cambridge, where the author was a student and Fellow. (His other dramatic work, Albumazar – also apparently performed at the university – was a satire on astrology thought by Dryden to be the model for Ben Jonson’s Alchemist and was spuriously attributed by some in the nineteenth century to Shakespeare.) Lingua was evidently popular: six editions were published between 1607 and 1657 and contemporary translations performed in Dutch and German.
Provenance: Donald (1909–1966) and Mary Hyde (1912–2003, later Viscountess Eccles), the great twentieth-century collectors of English literature, with their brown book label to the inside of the slip-case (one of four coloured labels indicating the season in which the book was acquired). Eccles’s sale, Christie’s, 14 April 2004, lot 73, $1434.
All early editions are very rare in commerce: only one other copy (Sotheby’s, 8 June 1931, lot 312) of this edition and two of earlier editions appear in auction records.
ESTC S118463, listing copies at six institutions in North America and six in the UK; Greg 239(c); STC 24106. See Ellerbeck, ‘The Female Tongue as Translator in Thomas Tomkis’s Lingua, or the Combat of the Tongue and the five Senses for Superiority’, in Renaissance and Reformation 32/1 (2009); Engel et al., eds, The Memory Arts in Renaissance England (2016); Mazzio, ‘Staging the Vernacular: Language and Nation in Thomas Kyd’s 'The Spanish Tragedy’, in Studies in English Literature 38/2 (1998).
