SOURCE: Salamon, Linda Bradley. “A Face in The Glasse: Gascoigne's Glasse of Government Re-examined.” Studies in Philology 71, no. 1 (January 1974): 47-71.

In this essay, Salamon contends that the play The Glasse of Government displays the values of Christian humanism.

Scholarly inattention to George Gascoigne's The Glasse of Governement (1575) is not surprising. As the work's first modern student, C. H. Herford, dryly remarked, “The poetry of penitence is rarely immortal.”¹ Set among the richer blossoms of Tudor drama, this first complete effort of Gascoigne's moral “reformation”—acknowledged a closet drama, for which no performance is recorded—does not attract notice. Early historians of pre-Shakespearian drama with a bent for completeness and categorization classify The Glasse, blithely named “A tragicall Comedie” by Gascoigne, as an “interlude,” offspring of the moralities and ancestor of the histories²; most general studies of the period ignore a work which never could have held the stage...