English faculty

3.2. Early and Mid-Sixteenth-Century Drama

The most important effect of the Tudor Reformation on contemporary writing was in many ways the result of its increasingly secular, as opposed to devotional, emphases. The official ideology that preached that Church and Nation were constitutionally linked in the sovereign state and that God was best served in the world and not in the cloister was echoed, parroted, or merely tacitly accepted in a broad range of the literature of the period. The stress on the secular is particularly evident in the prolific development of vernacular drama during the sixteenth century. Protestant suspicion, allied to the disappearance of its old sponsors-the monasteries, the chantries, and the guildsgradually uppressed local traditions of popular religious drama (though in some towns morality cycles flourished until the 1570s). In London, civic intolerance and government censorship, banning plays which conflicted with authorized religion or which suggested any degree of profanity, steadily determined a shift away from a drama based on sacred subjects. Even given the number of play- texts that survives, any attempt to chart the rise of a secular theatre in the period is hampered by the often random selection of printed volumes, manuscripts, and records which have come down to us. Certain plays or interludes, written to commission or for specific festivities in royal, noble, or institutional halls, were probably regarded as ephemeral pieces while others which circulated as printed texts were neglected or destroyed as theatrical and literary fashions changed. Skelton’s only surviving play, the ‘goodly interlude’ Magnyfycence, was probably written at some point between 1515 and 1523. Although it is an entertainment ostensibly shaped, like the earlier Mankind, as an externalized battle between Virtues and Vices for the human soul, its moral concerns seem to be specific rather than general. Magnyfycence treats the importance of moderation in the affairs of a great Someone, not the general virtue of circumspection in the life of an Everyman. Very much in the manner of the humanists, it offers indirect advice to a princely figure by warning against pride, corruption, profligacy, and folly. If, as some commentators suppose, the protagonist’s situation offers an allegorical reflection of Cardinal Wolsey’s extravagant splendour, the play proceedsto represent the stages of a political and moral collapse. ‘Magnificence’, laudable enough in itself, here is distorted by pride; pride leads to false magnificence, and the decline into false values provokes a fall from both grace and prosperity. In the hands of John Foxe’s friend and ally, the former Carmelite friar, John Bale 1495-1563, the moral interlude was severed from its increasingly weak Catholic doctrinal roots to become a vehicle for Protestant polemic. Bale, an early protege of Archbishop Cranmer’s, was the author of some twenty-one plays, all of them written in the years 1533-1543. His Kyng Johan of c. 1536 is often claimed as the first English drama to be based on national history, though it uses that history exclusively to make narrow propagandist points and it Bale's Three Lawes, and the plays that stem from it, God’s Promises, John the Baptist, and The Temptation of Our Lord, all consider the human corruption of the divine scheme of redemption. All four plays equate the distortion of the pure Law of Christ with the former triumphs of the papal Antichrist, and all four look to individual repentance and general reformation as a means of restoring humankind to grace.When, for example, Christ is tempted by Satan in the fourth play, his adversary approaches in the guise of a dim-witted hermit who at first pretends not to recognize biblical quotations (‘We religious men live all in contemplation: | Scriptures to study is not our occupation’). Once exposed for what he really is, he gleefully proclaims to Jesus that his prime allies in his scheme to corrupt the Church will in future be popes. Very little that indicates a particularly vigorous Catholic response to Protestant dramatic propaganda has survived. Much of the acceptable drama performed or revived in Queen Mary’s reign suggests a tactful avoidance of contentious issues. John Heywood 1497-?1579, a loyal Catholic who claimed to have achieved the difficult feat of making the Queen smile, was prepared to expose the long-familiar peccadilloes of hypocritical pardoners and friars, but he chose to do so in the form of untidy farces with tidily orthodox conclusions, such as The playe called the foure PP (which ends with a declaration of loyalty to the ‘Church Universal’) and The Pardoner and the Friar (which arbitrarily concludes with attempts by the parson and the constable to drive the hypocrites away) [24,316-320]. Nicholas Udall 1504-56, a schoolmaster who, despite his earlier unconcealed Protestant sympathies, managed to find favour in the palaces of Queen Mary and of her Lord Chancellor, Bishop Gardiner, concentrated on writing plays for the boys in his charge.The comedies ascribed to Udall, most notably Ralph Roister Doister (c. 1552), modest talent for finding English equivalents to the stock characters of the ancients.The text of Ralph Roister Doister is divided, on the ancient model, into acts and scenes, but itsboisterous language, its songs, and its tediously rhymed doggerel are confidently those of modern London and not just a dim reflection of ancient Rome. The influence of Terence also shows in the five-act structure of the anonymous Gammer Gurtons Nedle, a comedy first performed at Christ’s College, Cambridge, probably in the early 1560s (it was printed in 1575). The play’s ‘low’, rustic, and somewhat slight subject (the loss of Gammer Gurton’s needle during the mending of a pair of leather breeches and its painful rediscovery when the owner of the breeches is kicked in the backside) is decidedly unacademic (at least in the narrow sense of that term). Although its author was determined to squeeze what entertainment value he could out of a series of trivial domestic crises, the very shapeliness of the play suggests a degree of subtlety and structural sophistication new in English comedy.English universities and many of the schools that fed them with literate students shared the pan-European vogue for reviving and performing classical plays and for sponsoring new entertainments which would show of the proficiency of Royal in London, remained a significant feature in the development of Elizabethan drama, but it was the revival of interest in classical tragedy that proved decisive in the evolution of a distinctive national mode. who drive before them a king and a queen ‘who had slaine their owne children’; in the last,‘drommes and fluites’ are succeeded by armed men ‘in order of battaile’ who march about and (again anachronistically) noisily discharge their firearms. Despite the presence of what might strike a twentieth-century reader as an excess of both pomp and pomposity, the text of Gorboduc can be seen as setting a standard against which later Elizabethan dramatists had to measure their theatrical ambitions [ 25,205].