Campaspe (play)
Campaspe is an Elizabethan era stage play, a comedy by John Lyly. Widely considered Lyly's earliest drama, Campaspe was an influence and a precedent for much that followed in English Renaissance drama.
Performance and publication
Campaspe is known to have been performed at Court before Queen Elizabeth I, most likely on 1 January, 1584 (new style); it was also acted at the first Blackfriars Theatre. The company that performed the play is open to question: extant records assign the Court performance to "Oxford's boys," and the Blackfriars production to the Children of Paul's, Lyly's regular company, and the Children of the Chapel. One resolution for the conflicting assignments is the theory that the play was acted by a combination of personnel from the Paul's and Chapel companies as well as from the troupe of boy actors maintained in the 1580s by the Earl of Oxford.
Campaspe was first published in a 1584 quarto printed by Thomas Dawson for the bookseller Thomas Cadman. Q1 exists in three different "states" or impressions, with slight differences among them. The first, Q1a, titles the play A moste excellent Comedie of Alexander, Campaspe, and Diogenes.In the subsequent impressions, Q1b and Q1c, the play's title is shortened to Campaspe. The running title of all three impressions (printed along the tops of the text's pages) is A tragical Comedie [sic] of Alexander and Campaspe. (Editors and scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries generally referred to the play as Alexander and Campaspe; their twentieth-century counterparts tend to prefer the shorter title.)
Campaspe
Campaspe (/kæmˈpæspiː/; Greek Καμπάσπη), or Pancaste /pæŋˈkæstiː/, was a mistress of Alexander the Great and a prominent citizen of Larissa. She was painted by Apelles, who had the reputation in Antiquity for being the greatest of painters. The episode occasioned an apocryphal exchange that was reported in Pliny's Natural History: "Seeing the beauty of the nude portrait, Alexander saw that the artist appreciated Campaspe (and loved her) more than he. And so Alexander kept the portrait, but presented Campaspe to Apelles." The biographer Robin Lane Fox describes this bequest as "the most generous gift of any patron and one which would remain a model for patronage and painters on through the Renaissance."
Apelles also used Campaspe as a model for his most celebrated painting of Aphrodite "rising out of the sea", the iconic Venus Anadyomene, "wringing her hair, and the falling drops of water formed a transparent silver veil around her form".
No Campaspe appears in the five major sources for the life of Alexander. Fox traces her legend back to the Roman authors Pliny (Natural History), Lucian of Samosata and Aelian's Varia Historia. They would have it that Campaspe was a prominent citizen of Larissa in Thessaly; Aelian surmised that she initiated the young Alexander in love.
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