Tudor Literature

John Skelton is a central literary figure and the leading poet during the first thirty years of Tudor rule. Nevertheless, he remains challenging and even contradictory for modern audiences.

This book aims to provide an authoritative guide to this complex poet and his works, setting him in his historical, religious, and social contexts. Beginning with an exploration of his life and career, it goes on to cover all the major aspects of his poetry, from the literary traditions in which he wrote and the form of his compositions to the manuscript contexts and later reception. Contributors: Tom Betteridge, Julia Boffey, John Burrow, David Carlson, Helen Cooper, Elisabeth Dutton, A.S.G. Edwards, Jane Griffiths, Nadine Kuipers, Carol Meale, John Scattergood, Sebastian Sobecki, Greg Waite

In The Body in Mystery, Jennifer R. Rust takes the political concept of the mystical body of the commonwealth, back to the corpus mysticum of the medieval church. Rust argues that the communitarian ideal of sacramental sociality had a far longer afterlife than has been previously assumed. Reviving a critical discussion of Ernst Kantorowicz’s masterwork, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (1957), Rust brings to bear the latest scholarship, and expands the representation of the corpus mysticum through a range of literary genres as well as religious polemics and political discourses. She reclaims the concept as an essential category of social value and historical understanding for the imaginative life of the major literature of Reformation England. The Body in Mystery provides new ways of appreciating the always rich and sometimes difficult continuities between the secular and sacred in early modern England.

The very title of John Heywood’s interlude A Mery Play between Johan Johan, the Husband, Tyb  his Wife, and Sir Johan the Priest (in print by 1533) suggests a fabliaux-like, farcical intrigue, which can be enacted by three characters only: a hen-pecked husband, a shrewish wife and a parish priest, i.e. the wife’s lover. The play centres on the motif of eternal triangle, Tyb being at the heart of the whole intrigue and responsible for disrupting order within the household. This paper examines how the official ideology of household is subverted in the play, deals with carnivalesque empowerment of the female character which results from this subversion, shows how female rebellion is counterattacked with misogynist implications of the play, and, finally tries to hint at political implications the interlude might have had despite its entertaining and comic qualities.

This article surveys the modern reception of the first English tragedy "Gorboduc," examining references in popular print and literature and then in performance. For a long time in the popular press, the play formed part of a framework of cultural knowledge that educated people were assumed to have or desire. Productions of "Gorboduc" grew out of that context. Implicitly hearkening back to the Renaissance ethos of ‘teach and delight’, they offered audiences an appealing way to reinforce their awareness of English drama. Beyond this dominant trend in the play’s reception, "Gorboduc" has circulated in another way – as a work that not only represents the past but which also speaks to contemporary times. While the play once represented general information that educated people ought to know, clearly this is no longer the case. Considering this fact, this article suggests that it is possible to rehabilitate the play by building on presentist understandings of the play already present in its modern reception in popular print and performance – that is, to emphasise why Gorboduc continues to be relevant by more explicitly framing it and other Tudor plays in relation to topics that dominate the sixteenth century and matter now, such as tyranny, counsel, and territorial disunion.

This paper scrutinises an early polemical tract  Simon Fish’s A Supplication of Beggars (c.1528/ 29)  to ascertain the ways in which political and religious arguments were being remodelled along pragmatic and executable lines to propose a new power equation, namely, absolutist monarchy. The shift involves a realignment of religious, regional and political allegiances along territorial lines and the emergence of the modern nation state.
Religious vindication takes a backseat as Fish promises actual worldly benefits to lure Henry VIII to overthrow papal rule. The secular and materialist ambience of this ‘religious’ tract marks a significant departure from the stylistic, narrative and rhetorical strategies of medieval tracts of similar import, which tended to locate their arguments within a predominantly theological framework. Fish comprehends the shifting priorities of a transitional age and moulds the opportune convergence of three separate interests into a single, mutually convenient focus - lay anti-clericalism; the heretics’ attempt to overthrow a repressive Church and Henry VIII’s growing impatience with the delay in his divorce.
Although ostensibly directed at the sovereign, Fish’s harangue has a dual audience in mind - the king and the people. Popular consent is manipulated in favour of a new hierarchic order that is apparently more homogenised. He plays upon the implicit notion of ‘commonwealth’  a notion crucial to Henry’s post-Reformation propaganda  to elicit mass support for the establishment of a new status quo. The ruler and the ruled constitute a democratic forum for joint action against the ‘wrongful’ usurpers of their ‘common wealth’. Burgeoning nationalistic rhetoric creates a space where Henry’s economic and religio-political aspirations merge with the image of a patriotic monarch fighting for ‘English’ honour and independence. More anti-clerical than heretical, Fish provides a tangible enemy (and a fortune ready for the taking) to facilitate reform. But by pointing to the ‘enemy within’, Fish splits the nationalist discourse down the middle, positing ‘true’ Englishmen against their renegade counterparts whose allegiance transgresses regional borders. He thus anticipates the ideological parameters of the absolutist nation state, its hegemonic control over people’s social, political and religious commitments, and its fractured rhetoric of inclusiveness well before the advent of the Henrician Reformation.
Fish’s polemical enterprise is an embryonic testimony to the massive re-organisation of human relations and power structures occurring at the time. The formerly ‘included’ and ‘empowered’ clergy are peripheralised as the threatening Other and attention is diverted from the emerging acquisitive forces precipitating inequality. More important, it offers the beleaguered populace the spurious satisfaction of belonging to a well-ordered polity and an equally false sense of empowerment at the expense of the hitherto powerful. However, the idea of social inversion implicit in the call for dismantling clerical hegemony could and did induce the lower orders to demand a transference of power beneficial to themselves, as the 1536 and 1549 rebellions testify. Also, Fish’s expertise in playing upon the king’s psyche denotes the growing confidence of the ‘citizen’ participating in national destiny and hints at a disturbingly unorthodox master-subject relationship.

Machiavelli’s work is a commentary on the power politics that frame Shakespeare’s tragedies and histories, and Shakespeare’s villains bring to life the inherent dangerousness of Machiavelli’s philosophy.  Because their writings appear to illuminate each other in this way, because they constantly remind us of each other, several questions arise: what did Shakespeare know about Machiavelli?  What did he think of Machiavelli’s philosophy as it’s normally construed, that is, as a kind of completely unscrupulous political realism?  To what extent had the figure of the Machiavel already been articulated within the Elizabethan literary world when Shakespeare got a hold of it?  Was the Tutor sense of Machiavelli’s thought accurate?  If not, what was the pervasive sense of Machiavelli in Shakespeare’s culture?

For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love is the biography and select poetry of John Donne.

This publication is as much a stand-alone publication into the life of a Tudor Poet as it is, a part of a forthcoming book.

This book is exclusively digital and a prologue/chapter​ from the forthcoming book 'The Devil's Servant', the Dark Conjurer of Batcombe.

Though he did not originate them, Gerald of Wales helped disseminate powerfully derisory tropes about the Irish in his twelfth-century Topographia Hibernica (The Topography of Ireland) and Expugnatio Hibernica (The Conquest of Ireland) so as to justify conquest. These tropes were relentlessly recycled in early modern descriptive and historical prose justifying renewed English authority and celebrating the English nation. The charged deployment of Gerald sparked passionate rebuttals defending the nation in early seventeenth-century Counter-Reformation prose in Latin and Irish. Yet an earlier Irish response to Gerald can be detected in work by professional poets from at least a generation prior that seeks to vindicate Irish civility against charges of barbarity, and, in so doing, contributing to the emergence of a discourse of national consciousness.

This research paper was prepared for magazine publication hence no footnotes. However it collates a great deal of material on the Bohemian, Orthodox Jewish engineer Joachim Gaunse (Chaim Gans) who was employed by Elizabeth I's minister Sir Francis Walsingham to establish lead mines in the Lake District of North-west England. Several German Jewish minining engineers joined him, at a time when it was officially illegal for Jews to reside in England. Later in his amazing life Gaunse went on to join Sir Walter Raleigh's expeditions to the new world and thus become the first Orthodox Jew to live in North America.

Since the first voyage was so successful financially, and because Anglo-Spanish relations had worsened further, Hawkins' second and third slaving voyages were semi-official ventures, with Secretary of State William Cecil clearly involved in overseeing them. In addition to backers from the city, three privy councillors invested in the second voyage: Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester; Henry Herbert, Earl of Pembroke; and Edward Clinton, the Lord High Admiral. Hawkins also had Queen Elizabeth's support since he chartered the old and leaky 700-ton Jesus of Lubeck from her and sailed under the royal standard. Queen Elizabeth I, was a shareholder in the third voyage too, supplying the Jesus for a second time and another old 300-ton vessel, the Minion, though no list survives of the other investors in this voyage. Though the Spanish ambassador protested about the planned expedition, through playacting and camouflage on the part of the government about its true purpose, the voyage departed. Having captured enough West Africans to assemble a cargo of slaves, Hawkins then headed West across the Atlantic. Here he ran into serious trouble, because having completed his business with the colonists and while in San Juan de Ulúa repairing the Jesus for the voyage home with what he believed was Spanish acquiescence, they attacked his fleet. Only two ships, the Judith, captained by Drake, and the Minion survived, but then Drake left for England in the Judith with all the provisions onboard, leaving the Minion, leaking and without supplies, to struggle home alone. Hawkins and Drake undertook three slaving voyages together, in 1562-63, 1564-65, and 1567-69. On the first voyage, Hawkins reported that he captured "at the least" 300 African slaves in Sierra Leone through a campaign of destruction and violence; it is likely that he also attacked Portuguese ships for their cargo of slaves, ivory,

Available free on Oxford Handbooks Online: http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935338.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199935338-e-141

This article examines how English texts register expansive geographical encounters in the period up to the death of Elizabeth. Voyages of discovery and their accounts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have rarely been considered in the context of periodizing ideas of “medieval” and “early modern.” Though once such voyages are read not with the hindsight of the twenty-first century but from within the tradition of prior travel, the newness of the New World emerges as a modern construct with limited historical purchase. Texts and maps that verbalize voyages beyond the boundaries of what was known are situated as much in individual experience as in collective perspective; they are often more invested in their own reception than in measurable objects and dateable events.

Abstract
This article argues that Henry Savile’s widely admired Tacitus of 1591 should not be read as an implied call for a more aggressive English stance against Spanish advances on the Continent (as one recent article suggests), but precisely for a more restrained and prudential approach. Secondly, it calls into question the generally accepted view that Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex played a prominent role in the
composition of the book. It argues that in reconstructing the work's original intellectual context and especially that of the supplement The Ende of Nero and the beginning of Galba, the main emphasis should not be on Essex's political and military career but on that of his stepfather Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. The article provides an investigation (as far as the surviving information allows) of the background in Continental politics and political thought in relation to the text of The Ende, which suggests that it should primarily be read from the perspective of the unsuccessful English intervention in the Low Countries in 1585-1588.

This chapter surveys the reception of Senecan tragedy in sixteenth-century England, particularly in the 1560s. The chapter addresses traditions of transmission and translation, the place of Seneca in mid-sixteenth century literary culture, approaches to translation and adaptation, critical reception, and the influence of the mid-sixteenth century translations on later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century dramatists.

This  note  introduces  three  new  life  records  for  the  poet  John  Skelton.  These  documents  shed  light  on  his  life  between  1512  and  1516,  and  they  show  that  Skelton  remained  in  Diss  in  Norfolk  into  1514,  and  left  Nor-folk  at  or  shortly  before  the  beginning  of  1516.  All  three  documents  are  plea  entries  from  the  Court  of  Common  Pleas.  In  the  first  record,  Skelton  sub-mits  a  plea  of  debt  against  the  goldsmith  John  Page  of  Bury  St.  Edmunds  in  Hilary  Term  of  1514,  and  in  the  second  two,  the  poet  appears  as  a  defendant  in  two  suits  of  debt  dating  from  Hilary  Term  1516,  filed  by  the  executors  of  Sir  William  Danvers.  Sebastian  Sobecki  reproduces,  transcribes,  and  translates  all  three  documents  in  this  note.

This paper briefly proposes that Edmund Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland should be read from the perspective of Tudor dialogue. Relying on the Irish context of the work and on more recent results in the study of Tudor dialogues, the paper highlights certain formal features of the work which seem to be determined by the convention of Tudor dialogues.

This article reconsiders the under-examined technology of dry point (inkless impressions made with a stylus) by way of three Tudor manuscripts: British Library Additional MS 17492 (the Devonshire Manuscript); British Library Additional MS 18752; and Folger V.b.280 (the Dowland Lutebook). Aside from its use for ruling pages, this technology was previously unrecorded in both British Library manuscripts. Discoveries introduced here include a new poem and marks on or beside 54 of the estimated 194 other works in Devonshire. Dry point, I argue, is best understood as a technology of discretion, a means for scribes and their overseers, as well as readers, owners, copyists, compositors and casual annotators in manuscripts and printed books, to write, signal, or comment without marring the appearance of the page. 'Secret Writing or a Technology of Discretion?' suggests that historical references to dry point have been widely misunderstood, and it demonstrates the ways in which this technology can provide guidance to modern editors and critics. I argue that the relative invisibility of dry point may have disproportionately affected our understanding of the women who read and collected writing in this era. Obscured by modern lighting in libraries and by a limited awareness of its use, dry-point writing exists in many archives today, undiscovered in plain sight.

Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603) had an enduring reputation for musicality; her court musicians, Thomas Tallis and William Byrd, even suggested that music was indispensable to the state. But what roles did music play in Elizabethan court politics? How did a musical image assist the Queen in projecting her royal authority? What influence did her private performances have on her courtships, diplomatic affairs, and relationships with courtiers? To what extent did Elizabeth control court music, or could others appropriate performances to enhance their own status and achieve their ambitions? How could noblemen, civic leaders, or even musicians take advantage of Elizabeth's love of music to present their complaints and petitions in song?
This book unravels the connotations surrounding Elizabeth's musical image and traces the political roles of music at the Elizabethan court. It scrutinizes the most intimate performances within the Privy Chamber, analyses the masques and plays performed in the palaces, and explores the grandest musical pageantry of tournaments, civic entries, and royal progresses. This reveals how music served as a valuable means for both the tactful influencing of policies and patronage, and the construction of political identities and relationships. In the late Tudor period, music was simultaneously a tool of authority for the monarch and an instrument of persuasion for the nobility.

[Early modern counsel.] Royal counsel in Tudor England has been a central historiographical theme for over twenty years. This review offers a critical assessment of the state of the field. It appraises historical and literary scholarship on both the theory and practice of royal counsel. Among other themes, it discusses the concepts of evil counsel and arcana imperii. The review concludes by suggesting priorities for future enquiry, including the need to think more carefully about which areas of English government still required royal decision-making, and therefore counsel, in this period. The article also charts the rise of conciliar ‘government under the king but not by the king’ and shows that Tudor counsel often happened the wrong way around: the monarch advised the privy council on the direction of state policy. It calls for a new administrative history in early modern studies, with a renewed focus on institutions and their procedures, to complement existing strengths in the fields of political culture and political thought.

This article argues that Henry Medwall’s early interlude Nature (c. 1495) reworks the typical staged allegory of the morality play, staging a struggle not over the fate of man’s soul, but over two competing interpretations of Aristotelian physics. Medwall finds in theater the perfect way of investigating the role that allegorical drama can—and must—play in understanding not only how our ideas about nature are intimately connected to ideas such as causality, responsibility, and the place of the human within the natural world, but also how staged allegory might be used to engage in debates about nature.