Robert Crowley: A Tudor Gospelling Poet

Abstract

Robert Crowley has received only minor mention in the history of English literature, chiefly for editing The Vision of Pierce Plowman, the first printed edition of the medieval satire. But his prolific career as a radical poet deserves closer attention. By turns a pamphleteer, stationer, poet, and clergyman, Crowley cultivated an audience in London's growing middle class and among pious aristocrats for his biblical poetry, theological tracts, anti-Roman Catholic polemics, and editions of Langland's riddling poem, which was written in the archaic dialect of the fourteenth-century midlands. Although he eventually became an adherent of the fledgling Puritan movement that emerged out of the Elizabethan vestiarian controversy, he refused to participate in the attack on poetry and fiction that was often associated with the Puritan faction. Despite his radical Protestant fervour, Crowley wrote as a medieval poet. But instead of simply restating Langland's medieval ideal of the Christian commonwealth, Crowley adapted that ideal to the religious, political, and economic crisis of Edward VI's reign (i547-53). Contrary to our stereotyped view of sixteenth-century taste, Crowley's somewhat oldfashioned prophetic poems and satires were far more popular than the Petrarchan love songs of the courtier poets. Crowley typifies the popular native traditions of the middle sixteenth century, and the conventionality of his verse is valuable to the literary historian because it represents something close to a norm for Edwardian poetry, one of the lesser known areas of Renaissance literature. Crowley's poems provide a relatively objective standard for measuring the accomplishments of the truly major figures who flourished towards the end of the century. With enthusiasm and wit, Crowley turned out a body of verse that, for sheer bulk and variety, is extraordinary at a time when dully prolix theological tomes crowded the bookstalls surrounding St Paul's Cathedral. In An Apologiefor Poetrie (c. 1583), Sir Philip Sidney defined divine poetry as the highest kind of verse: