Latin Drama and Leveller Ideas: Pedagogy and Power in the Writings of Richard Overton

Abstract

IThe Presbyterian cleric Thomas Edwards has been awarded the title of 'first discoverer of the Levellers'. The 'prime targets' of the third part of Edwards's voluminous heresiography Gangraena (three parts, 1646) were 'the men who were later to be recognized as the leaders of the Leveller party' - John Lilburne, William Walwyn and Richard Overton - and his summary of their constitutional radicalism anticipates fairly accurately the contents of the first Agreement of the People (3 November 1647).1 By attacking the political theories of the future Leveller leaders within the genre of the heresiography, Edwards explicitly linked political radicalism with religious heterodoxy. Lilburne, Walwyn and Overton had a history of religious activism and involvement in separatist congregations: the three men appear in the first and second parts of Gangraena as prominent heresiarchs as well as in the third part as political radicals or 'civil heretics'. Most scholars have concurred with Edwards's connection between radical religious belief and Leveller ideas, even if they cannot agree over the nature and importance of that connection.2 For Edwards, the seditious political opinions of men such as Lilburne, Walwyn and Overton confirmed the anarchic consequences of allowing the laity to engage openly in religious speculation. The multitude of 'Errors, Heresies, Blasphemies and pernicious Practices' infecting England in the 1640s was a consequence of allowing 'illiterate Mechanick persons' to debate theology and voice opinions 'both unsound and weak, fit to take women and weak people, but not to satisfie any scholar'.3There might appear to be a curious contradiction in Edwards's characterization of the radicals as 'illiterate'. He frequently quotes from heretical books in the margins of Gangraena and explicitly connects the usurpation of the university-trained clergy by 'illiterate Mechanick persons' with Parliament's failure to enforce both its 1645 Act against lay preaching and its Licensing Act of 1643.4 However the apparent contradiction in Edwards's simultaneous accusation of illiteracy and citation of radical texts is the effect of an anachronistic understanding of terms. In the early seventeenth century 'literate' and 'illiterate' largely retained the medieval sense of their Latin roots, litteratus and illitteratus. These terms denoted 'two educationworlds: literate, the education-world of Latin and the cleric . . . illiterate, the education-world of the vernacular and the lay person'.5 It is literacy in Latin, not in the vernacular, that Edwards erects as a boundary between clergy and laity. Christopher Hill, the most influential historian of seventeenth- century English radicalism, has repeated these hostile contemporary claims about the lowly educational background of the radicals but from a positive and sympathetic Marxist perspective: 'the eloquence, the power of the simple artisans who took part in these disputes is staggering'.6 Edwards uses the charge of ignorance to disqualify radical voices from being heard, whereas Hill celebrates the conditions in which ordinary people were free to engage openly in religious and political speculation. Like Edwards, however, Hill sees radical ideas and writings as an authentic expression of popular beliefs that evolved outside the institutional educational and cultural structures of early modern England:[P]ersons (including women) who had no university education, often no grammar school education even, found no obstacles to publication . . . [s]o in the interregnum discussions there was no longer a shared background of classical scholarship; the rules of logic which structured academic controversy were ignored. University scholars treated the newcomers with contempt, and this in turn fuelled opposition to the universities as such. The whole classical curriculum and the conventions of academic argument were called in question.7As this extract indicates, Hill does not identify radical ideas exclusively with the oral culture of the illiterate; such a position would be untenable given his total reliance on printed sources for evidence of those ideas. …