The Sources of Massinger's Emperour of the East

An inquiry into the sources of Massinger's tragicomedy The Emperour of the East (1632) is made difficult by the abundance and variety of historical literature which contains the principal elements of the plot. On the one hand, the ready availability of the story in Byzantine chronicles has led students of Massinger to search for the sources exclusively in the histories; on the other, the variety in the content of these has made selection virtually impossible, for though many of the histories provide long accounts of the story of Theodosius and Eudoxia, none contains all the details which Massinger introduced in his tragicomedy. As a result, various scholars have proposed interesting, though unsatisfactory, combinations. Langbaine refers his reader to no fewer than five histories; Coxeter, the first editor of the plays, selects the first two of the sources cited by Langbaine, namely Socrates and Theodoret, but he admits that there may be others; Mason, the next editor, repeats Coxe-ter's note; and Gifford in his standard edition is even more vague than his predecessors. But to balance his inconclusive remarks he appends a note provided by his friend Dr. Ireland offering as the main sources Cedrenus and Theophanes, principally because they include the quarrel of Theodosius and Eudoxia; and a second note, this one by Gilchrist, another literary friend, who hazards the opinion that Massinger based his plot on two passages in the Anatomy of Melancholy, in which Burton relates briefly the marriage of Eudoxia and the famous episode with the apple. All of these are unacceptable, however, as both singly and in their sum they leave out of account significant details present in the play. A more satisfactory study of the sources was produced in 1897 by Emil Koeppel, whose conclusions were confirmed three years later by Wolfgang von Wurzbach.