Marring and Mending: Treacherous Likeness in Two Renaissance Controversies

Abstract

ive losers leave to speak is a proverb going back to the sixteenth century. In this essay I want to discuss two literary controversies of that century, paying attention to the way the losers speak. In controversies, attention generally focuses on the winners: we read Martin Marprelate much more readily than Mar-Marprelate, 1 Henry IVin preference to 1 Sir John Oldcastle; and of course the list could be extended: Nashe rather than Harvey, Pope rather than Theobald. We are assisted in this by the incorporation of the victorious works into a canon; but we need not see the canon as being created by an abstract and external power. Part of the debate is carried on internally, as the works themselves maneuver to exclude, to deprive, to push their way in. Here I intend to trace the intricate mechanics of literary quarrel in the Marprelate of 1588-90 and in the controversy that erupted after the production of Shakespeare's i Henry IVin 1596-97, both of them theatrical as well as ecclesiastical controversies. In particular I will propose a model of the problem of treacherous likeness encountered in controversy, by which I mean the tendency of a figure to be affectively contaminated by its resemblance to its logical or nominal opposite. Even the fact that two disparate phenomena can be considered within the same framework can work to the detriment of one or the other, as their proximity raises questions that would remain unmooted if the phenomena had been kept separate. One or the other is subject to the free-floating suspicion that mon semblable will turn out to be monfrere. In pursuit of these two controversies, this essay follows a threefold plan. First, because Martin Marprelate tends to get all the publicity, the Marprelate is here examined chiefly from the anti-Martinists' side, as I try to show how their effort was hampered by the strategies that led them to resemble their antagonists. I then leap forward ten years to the trouble over Oldcastle; again it is the response I am concerned with, the play written for the Admiral's Men in defense of the historical martyr and against Shakespeare. i Sir John Oldcastle represents, in its treatment of the minor character of Sir John of Wrotham, an