Sir Clymon and Sir Clamydes (full title: The History of the Two Valiant Knights, Sir Clyomon Knight of the Golden Shield, Son to the King of Denmark, and Clamydes the White Knight, Son to the King of Swabia) is an early Elizabethan stage play, first published in 1599 but written perhaps three decades earlier (c. 1570). It is often regarded as a characteristic example—perhaps the best surviving example—of the type of drama that was extremely popular in the early Elizabethan period. The work "best represents the characteristics of pre-Greenian dramatic romance."
Publication
Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes was first printed in 1599, in a quarto issued by stationer Thomas Creede. The title page makes no attribution of authorship; it does state that the play was "sundry time" performed by Queen Elizabeth's Men. That playing company originated in 1583; if the play is as old as some commentators judge it, the company's version must have been a revival.
Genre
The play has been called a "comedy, or, more properly, tragicomedy", though it falls securely into the category of romance, an enormously popular genre in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
Clyomon and Camydes is an extravagant example of stage romance. In his Defense of Poetry, Sir Philip Sidney generally defended the poets and poems of his era from their critics; but in a famous and often-quoted passage he also ridiculed the fanciful and wild romances then common on the popular stage, in which:
...you shall have Asia of the one side, and Affrick of the other, and so many other under-kingdoms, that the player, when he commeth in, must ever begin with telling where he is, or else the tale will not be conceived. Now you shall have three ladies walk to gather flowers, and then we must believe the stage to be a garden. By and by, we hear news of shipwreck in the same place, and then we are to blame if we accept it not for a rock. Upon the back of that comes out a hideous monster, with fire and smoke, and then the miserable beholders are bound to take it for a cave. While in the meantime two armies fly in, represented with four swords and bucklers, and then what hard heart will not receive it for a pitched field?"
A quick summary of the physical locations in this play confirms and even accentuates Sidney's description: the drama opens in Denmark, "and passes successively to Swabia, to the Forest of Marvels on the borders of Macedonia, to the Isle of Strange Marshes twenty days' sail from Macedonia, to the Forest again, to the Isle again, to Norway, to the Forest, to the Isle, to the Forest, to a road near Denmark, to the Isle, to Denmark."
Verse
The play is composed in the rhymed fourteener or heptameter verse that was popular in its era. When the heroine Neronis (daughter of Patranius, late King of the Isle of Strange Marshes) enters the Forest of Marvels in male disguise, she speaks this:
As hare the hound, as lamb the wolf, as fowl the falcon's dint, So do I fly from tyrant he, whose heart more hard than flint Hath sack'd on me such hugy heaps of ceaseless sorrows here, That sure it is intolerable, the torments that I bear.
The meter has a jog-trot rhythm to a modern ear, but poets like Sidney and Arthur Golding employed it for works of serious intent.
Authorship and Origin
There is no evidence from the Elizabethan era to indicate the author of Sir Clymon and Sir Clamydes. Scholars and critics have proposed George Peele, Thomas Preston, Robert Wilson, and one Richard Bower. No convincing case has been made for any single candidate.
The source for the basic story is the Roman de Perceforest, an extensive prose romance that has come down to us in four manuscripts dated to the fifteenth century. As medievalist Sylvia Huot sums it up and documents, "Perceforest is the undisputed source for the Elizabethan play Clyomon and Clamydes, composed about 1576–77 and printed in 1599."
Influence
Clyomon and Clamydes is thought to have had an influence on several of Shakespeare's plays. Most notably, Rosalind in As You Like It disguises herself in male clothing and flees courtly life for residence among simple shepherds—just as Neronis does in her play. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the playlet of the mechanicals in Act V bears a resemblance with Clyomon and Clamydes, though in this case the resemblance is clearly in a spirit of parody. And the late romance Cymbeline bears a significant relationship with Clyomon and Clamydes. Shakespeare uses a personified figure of Rumour as a Chorus at the start of Henry IV, Part 2; the same figure appears in Clyomon and Clamydes.