Locrine — Text and Context

Revenge as Structural Engine

The excerpts show revenge driving the plot more consistently than any Briton-specific theme. Ate's prologue explicitly frames the action as punishment: 'In pœnam sectatur & umbra' (the shade pursues in punishment). Humber, the Scythian king, invokes 'you ugly sprites that in Cocitus mourn' and calls on 'fierce Erinnis' to torment Locrine. The ghost of Albanact appears twice, crying 'Revenge! revenge for blood!' and 'Vindicta, vindicta.' This relentless invocation of infernal powers—Cocytus, Lethe, Phlegethon, Tartarus—places the play firmly in the Senecan tradition, where vengeance is a cosmic imperative rather than a political one.

Classical Allusions Over British History

Despite the catalog subject 'Britons -- Drama,' the excerpts show the play reaching constantly for classical rather than native British reference points. Ate's second prologue compares Locrine to Hercules yielding to Omphale: 'Stout Hercules… Yielded his valiant heart to Omphale, / A fearful woman void of manly strength.' Humber wishes he had landed where 'Poliphemus and the Cyclops dwell' or where 'the bloody Anthrophagie / With greedy jaws devours.' The geography is Mediterranean, not British. Even the river Humber is explained through a classical lens: the stage direction specifies 'the river, afterward the Humber,' as if the name derives from the play's events rather than pre-existing geography.

The Clown Subplot and Generic Instability

The excerpts include a character named Strumbo, listed as 'a clown,' with a wife Dorothy and a man Trumpart. This comic presence—complete with rustic characters Oliver, William, and Margery—sits oddly alongside the high tragic rhetoric of Ate and the ghosts. The play's full title calls it 'The Lamentable Tragedy of Locrine,' yet the inclusion of a clown subplot suggests a hybrid form closer to the tragicomedies of the 1590s. The catalog subject 'Tragedies (Drama)' may therefore misrepresent the work's actual texture, which mixes Senecan revenge with broad comedy in a way that challenges simple generic classification.

Readers approaching Locrine expecting a straightforward British history play will find instead a curious amalgam: classical revenge tragedy, chronicle material, and clowning. The catalog subjects offer a starting point, but the excerpts reveal a work more interested in mythological allusion and Senecan fury than in coherent national narrative. Pay attention to the dumb shows and the role of Ate—they are the play's true structural spine.

I found myself thinking of how Locrine juggles its revenge plot with a clown’s uneasy laughter, the tragedy never quite settling into a single shape. That same restlessness came back to me while pondering Salomé: A Tragedy in One Act — Inside the Classic, whose heroine’s terrible kiss lingers like an unclosed book. Perhaps every play hides another beneath its staging, waiting for a quiet reader to notice.