Uses and Abuses: John Bunyan, Philip Stubbes, and the Ambiguity of Literary Influence

Abstract

The following essay will postulate that John Bunyan, the tinker, Reformed preacher and author of The Pilgrim's Progress, drew upon The Anatomie of Abuses by the Elizabethan author Philip Stubbes. If this is the case, it is a debt not only unacknowledged by Bunyan himself, but unrecognised by subsequent generations of readers and scholars.Building upon the intuition of formal and rhetorical correspondences between two sets of texts, my most immediate objective is to enquire whether Bunyan, despite his claims to the most limited and selective reading, was, or might have been, directly familiar with Stubbes's Anatomie, a popular, quasi-Reformed critique of theatres and other perceived excesses which was first published in 1583.1 This question bears closely on our understanding of Bunyan as a reader and as an author, for Bunyan was forceful and precise in his claims, after his conversion, to the most limited, godly reading. Furthermore, a work to which he was extensively and avowedly indebted - The Plaine Mans Path-way to Heaven, by Arthur Dent - itself owed much to Stubbes, amongst other sixteenth-century authors of moral dialogue; we might thus assume that Dent is the conduit of any literary contact between Stubbes and Bunyan.2 If, however, Bunyan encountered The Anatomie independently of Dent, our assumptions about his reading habits; our credence of what Bunyan tells us about them; and our understanding of his place within popular, literary, and rhetorical traditions will require reassessment.How might one verify an intuition of literary influence - let alone establish something approaching proof? Where a Reformed author (Bunyan), and an ostensibly Reformed author (Stubbes) are concerned, the mere postulation of a demonstrable source is fraught with methodological and critical difficulties. Is it possible to trace influence objectively when both authors are situated within a vast field of interconnected literary and spiritual traditions? Is it possible, moreover, to establish the sheer fact of proof through a critical discipline which deals in linguistic nuance and operates, almost by definition, between the lines? Or does a different kind of evidence lie precisely - and paradoxically - within areas of ambiguity?IAs his own writings and numerous secondary studies have demonstrated, Bunyan drew on a range of literary traditions which became closely associated with puritanism in the later-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Reformed writing throughout this period was characterised by popular and didactic genres: the pastoral dialogue, the trial narrative, the judgement story, the spiritual biography or autobiography, to name but a few. While such traditions - both literary and oral - defined the spiritual and congregational context within which he believed and wrote, Bunyan only occasionally makes explicit acknowledgement of his debt to works of puritan piety.3 With the exception of Arthur Dent, Samuel Clarke, the Bible, and a handful of other godly texts - Foxe's 'Book of Martyrs', Luther's commentary on the Book of Galatians, and Lewis Bayly's Practice of Pietie - he is otherwise at pains to emphasise his lack of formal education and reading.4 Despite being 'put to School' by his humble but conscientious parents, he tells us in his spiritual autobiography,to learn both to Read and Write; the which I also attained, according to the rate of other poor mens children, to my shame I confess, I did soon loose that little I learned, even almost utterly, and that long before the Lord did work his gracious work of conversion upon my Soul.5Bunyan's acknowledgement of the popular romances and chapbooks that he devoured in his youth forges an emphatic distinction between his unconverted and converted selves. His recollection - or conceptualisation - of his unregenerate reading preferences is absolutely at odds with the very notion of godliness or, for that matter, moral improvement:the Scriptures thought I, what are they? …