Martin Marprelate Research Articles

The Cavaliero Pasquil: An Anti-Marprelate Persona

Abstract: Broadly considered, the popular pamphlets written against Martin Marprelate in the months encompassing 1589–1591 are treated as pale imitations of their adversary, whose rhetorical and argumentative virtuosity earned him great notoriety. Considered as strenuous attempts to both counter Martinist aggression and also solve the rhetorical problems he presented, the aggressive Pasquil tracts (1589–1590) reveal how the adoption of an established satirical persona and mode allows a writer defending the Elizabethan bishops to both adopt and condemn the dangerous speech marking the Marprelate program. The tracts thus exhibit the self-generative and popular appeal characteristic of early print and pamphlet culture.

The Martin Marprelate Press: A Documentary History by Joseph L. Black

The Martin Marprelate Press: A Documentary History by Joseph L. Black

Joseph L. Black. The Martin Marprelate Press: A Documentary History. Tudor and Stuart Texts. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2020. Pp. 162. $21.95 (paper).

Joseph L. Black. The Martin Marprelate Press: A Documentary History. Tudor and Stuart Texts. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2020. Pp. 162. $21.95 (paper).

Paper Monsters: Persona and Literary Culture in Elizabethan England

Paper Monsters: Persona and Literary Culture in Elizabethan England

New Books across the Disciplines

New Books across the Disciplines

Nostalgia in Print and Performance, 1510–1613: Merry Worlds. Harriet Phillips. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. vii+239.

<i>Nostalgia in Print and Performance, 1510–1613: Merry Worlds</i>. Harriet Phillips. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. vii+239.

Spenser’s Blatant Beast: The Thousand Tongues of Elizabethan Religious Polemic

This article addresses the final two books of the 1596 edition of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, in which there arises a formidable adversary: the Blatant Beast. This monster, whose presence dominates the end of Book Five and a substantial portion of Book Six, represents the worst excesses of caustic and satirical rhetoric as manifest in the theological and ecclesiastical pamphlet disputes that erupted after Fields and Wilcox’s 1572 Admonition to Parliament. That these disputes were about serious and far-reaching matters is undeniable; it is also undeniable that the means by which these disputes were waged, especially in notorious cases like those of Martin Marprelate, caused significant intellectual, rhetorical, and religious anxiety among combatants and observers alike. Spenser’s heavily allegorized presentation of polemic and pamphleteering in the figure of the Blatant Beast—and the travails of the Knights of Justice and of Courtesy in bringing the beast to heel—can illustrate for students the full extent of that anxiety in Reformation England, as well as articulate Spenser’s call for the timely application of “well guided speech” as the solution to these reckless disputes.

The political function of Elizabethan literary celebrity

Anachronistic as the idea of ‘celebrity’ in the late sixteenth century may seem, what this brief study hopes to show is how one Elizabethan phenomenon, the Martin Marprelate Controversy, relied on ...

“Where’s Tarleton?”: The Contentious Chaucerian Afterlife of Elizabeth’s Most Famous Clown

By all accounts, Richard Tarleton was an extraordinary presence on the English stage. A writer and performer of ballad medleys, (1) Tarleton was celebrated for his extemporal clowning in an era when audiences expected and playwrights explicitly invited clowns to improvise comical riffs. (2) Also a private jester to Queen Elizabeth, he was famously knave whom Elizabeth required be escorted away for having me laugh so excessively when he fought against my little dog Perrico de Faldas with his broadsword and cane. (3) Tarleton performed as a playing clown with the Queens Men beginning in March 1582/83, and the Lord Chamberlains Men until his death on September 3, 1588. (4) As it happens, however, Tarleton left his most enduring legacy on English literature by dying, for his death left abandoned the role of Martin Marprelate, a character that he had created to mock down the Disciplinary cause. So important was Richard Tarleton's death that his vacant role prompted a revival of dramatic monologue written in the Chaucerian style. Some of these monologues entered into a politically charged conversation that, ridiculing Tarleton and his allies in the Episcopal hierarchy, centered seriously around the legal question as to what extent a claim of Chaucerian-style impersonation could serve as a defense against felony libel. Others employed the Chaucerian style to advance the more wittily phrased, polemically charged spiritual question Where's Tarleton?--a conceit that asked of the answerer whether Tarleton's satirically blasphemous challenge of the ecclesiastical government on the stage won the clown a place in heaven or hell. The Tarletonian Origins of Martin Marprelate The backstory to Tarleton's literary afterlife begins with the challenge of the Disciplinary movement to the Episcopal structure of the Church of England. According to Richard Bancroft, the English Disciplinarian movement was a Genevan import by way of Scotland. (5) On multiple occasions, the Disciplinarians pressed the English Parliament to pass legislation outlawing the episcopacy and the Lords Spiritual on the grounds that scripture authorized only four enduring offices in the Church: the elders to govern, the scholars to teach, the priests to administer sacraments, and the deacons to minister to the poor; (6) and that, as a consequence, bishops, lords spiritual, or any other type of ecclesiastical magistracy was an Antichristian vestige of papistry (7) that defied Christ's division of Caesars kingdom and His own. (8) Toward the end of implementing their agenda of eliminating the episcopacy from the English Church, the Disciplinarians took up residence in Oxford and Cambridge Universities to teach their doctrines, (9) they organized synods so as to influence the more learned sort of men, (10) and, to influence the commoners, they celebrated prophesyings--gatherings of parishioners who, under the leadership of a preacher of the cause, were led in the study of scripture and in devotional prayer. Disciplinarians were imagined dangerous. Edward Sandys, Bishop of London, complained as early as August 5, 1573 that, within his diocese, the Queen's proclamation against Thomas Cartwright's book was of no effect and that a conventicle or conspiracy of Londoners had sworn to defend Cartwright's book to the death. (11) Archbishop of Canterbury Edmund Grindal (c. 1519-July 6, 1583) nonetheless allowed the prophesyings to thrive unmolested. In a letter dated May 8, 1577, Queen Elizabeth ordered Grindal to suppress prophesyings whereby persons deprived of their benefices often railed against the Church hierarchy. (12) Grindal defied the Queen and was consequently put under house arrest. With prophesyings eluding formal correction, Disciplinarians continued to meet unlawfully, their aim to effect change in church government. Among the peaceful means proposed was to deprive England of parish priests until Parliament instituted the Presbyterian reforms. …

John Bridges, Martin Marprelate, and the Rhetoric of Satire

This essay argues that John Bridges's massive Defence of the Government Established in the Church of Englande for Ecclesiasticall Matters (1587) was not an insufferably pedantic justification of the English Church and thus an “easy target” for Martin Marprelate's satire but instead posed a serious threat to the legitimacy of the presbyterian campaign. Bridges was a playful and at times masterful prose stylist: he patiently, logically, and wryly deconstructed the presbyterian arguments for ecclesiastical reform, and in the process he undermined the presbyterians’ claims to scriptural authority. Bridges was thus not merely the “occasion” of the Martin Marprelate controversy but its catalyst. Martin responded more directly to Bridges than has yet been recognized: many of his colloquialisms, asides, and marginal notes were modeled on Bridges's own, and in certain respects Martin's satire was an exaggeration and refutation of Bridges's more subtle mockery. Finally, this essay argues that the relationship between Bridges's Defence and Martin Marprelate's explosively satirical pamphlets provides an instructive test‐case for the recuperation of the rhetorical aspects of English Renaissance satire. [E. D. V.]

JOSEPH L. BLACK (ed.), The Martin Marprelate Tracts: A Modernized and Annotated Edition.

JOSEPH L. BLACK (ed.), The Martin Marprelate Tracts: A Modernized and Annotated Edition.

The Martin Marprelate Tracts: A Modernized and Annotated Edition, ed. Joseph Black

The Martin Marprelate Tracts: A Modernized and Annotated Edition, ed. Joseph Black

Scurrilous Jests and Retaliatory Abuse in Shakespeare'sTroilus and Cressida

With its unexpected and relentless staging of verbal rather than physical violence, Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida reveals a deep engagement with late-Tudor conflicts over the appropriate uses of satiric discourse in the public field. In particular, the play reimagines the aggressive response of magistrates who seek to control and recast various species of abusive language, thereby politicizing the “sportive malice” enacted in the subplots of Shakespeare's late comedies. No—where is this official manipulation of satirical voices more insistent—and ultimately destabilizing—than in the libels devised by Ulysses. His repeated attempts to shame the retired warrior Achilles draw on recently popular early modern strategies of confessional escalation and abuse, which the Elizabethan bishops paradoxically promoted through their own polemical efforts to limit the fallout from the Martin Marprelate scandal of 1588–1589. Ultimately, as Ulysses extends the internecine strife initiated by Achilles' “scurril jests,”Troilus and Cressida comes to dispel the notion that such tactics can guarantee compliance with official policy. In the play's fragmentary final act, satire emerges as an especially corruptive source of dissension—the ancients' perverse legacy to an England deeply alarmed by yet fervently committed to verbal violence.

Christopher D'Addario, Exile and Journey in Seventeenth-Century LiteratureExile and Journey in Seventeenth-Century Literature. ChristopherD'Addario. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. v+199.

<i>Christopher D'Addario,</i> Exile and Journey in Seventeenth-Century Literature<i>Exile and Journey in Seventeenth-Century Literature</i>. ChristopherD'Addario. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. v+199.

The Martin Marprelate Tracts: A Modernized and Annotated Edition

The Martin Marprelate Tracts: A Modernized and Annotated Edition

The English Clown Tradition from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare (review)

Reviewed by: The English Clown Tradition from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare Peter Cockett Robert Hornback . The English Clown Tradition from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2009. Pp. xiii + 240. $95.00. The English Clown Tradition from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare is a fascinating book filled with important revelations about the significant functions clowning played in the religious and political discourse of early modern England. The book is historicist and materialist in approach, drawing together information from a wide range of sources to construct its arguments but deliberately distancing itself from the binary polemics of New Historicism. The result is a book that is admirable in its breadth of vision and its specificity and which challenges some long-held assumptions about the role of clowning and comedy in early modern England. Although the title implies a comprehensive approach to English clowning, the book is concerned primarily with the specific instances of clowns operating as "religio-political" satirists, more specifically: the use of blackface fools, the adoption of traditions of misrule by religious propagandists, the puritan as clown in pamphlet satire and on the stage, and the royal fool as evinced by the two editions of Shakespeare's King Lear. The famous clowns from the period, Tarlton, Kempe, and Armin play a central and yet strangely marginal role in the book. At times one feels that much is being inferred about their clowning from passing references in satirical texts while less attention is paid to the books and plays they authored or to roles we can be relatively sure they played on the stage. The role of Derrick in Famous Victories, a likely Tarlton role, for example, contains none of the religious satire Hornback argues characterized his clowning. There is much about the English clown tradition that is not explored in this book. That said, the specific investigations the book undertakes are impressive and their contribution to scholarship invaluable. The first chapter challenges the critical assumption that the use of blackface to represent fools is religious in origin, signaling the connection between folly and the devil. Hornback provides telling evidence connecting the performance practice with emergent racist discourse associating blackness with a lack of intelligence being used as justification for the slave trade. It is also proposed that the use of blackface for fools in plays and in Morris dancing forms a line of continuity with later antebellum blackface minstrelsy. In chapter 2, through an intensive exploration of documentary records, Hornback traces the manipulation of festive traditions of misrule to serve the propaganda of religious reformers and counter reformers through the reigns of Edward VII and Mary Tudor. He demonstrates that the objections of political-religious factions to festive practices arise only when the comic intention is directed at their party. In the third chapter, Hornback examines the satirical exploits of [End Page 354] Martin Marprelate and his detractors, developing connections between this satire and the professional clowns Tarlton and his successor Kempe. Hornback argues persuasively that Jack Cade and Dogberry, both likely parts played by William Kempe, would have been seen as puritan clowns by their original audiences. The fourth chapter argues that the two editions of King Lear offer contrasting but equally effective versions of the Fool. Counter to common arguments, Hornback argues that the Fool of the Folio is a natural fool and that the Fool of the Quarto is a bitter artificial fool. Here, Hornback relies on an unsustainable dichotomy between the natural and artificial fool, insisting that artificial fools are all bitter, natural fools sweet, and that playing bitter artificial fools was Robert Armin's specialty. The introduction to Armin's Two Maids of More-Clacke informs us to the contrary that the play was inspired by the popularity of his impersonation of local natural John of the Hospital, and the introduction to his Nest of Ninnies (1608) makes it clear that artificial fools, like Armin, imitate natural fools "liking the disguise."1 Hornback quotes this statement but fails to understand the deliberate confusion between artificial and natural folly that was central to Armin's art, and this undermines the dichotomy between Quarto Fool and Folio Fool attempted in this chapter...

Book Reviews: Théâtre élisabéthain, Saint Francis and the Sultan: The Curious History of a Christian-Muslim Encounter, the Martin Marprelate Tracts, Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare, the New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England, Shakespeare in Stages: New Theatre Histories, Shakespeare's Individualism, Dance, Spectacle and the Body Politick

Book Reviews: Théâtre élisabéthain, Saint Francis and the Sultan: The Curious History of a Christian-Muslim Encounter, the Martin Marprelate Tracts, Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare, the New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England, Shakespeare in Stages: New Theatre Histories, Shakespeare's Individualism, Dance, Spectacle and the Body Politick

The Martin Marprelate tracts: a modernized and annotated edition

Introduction Textual introduction The Martin Marprelate Tracts: 1. The Epistle 2. The Epitome 3. Certain Mineral and Metaphysical Schoolpoints 4. Hay any Work For Cooper 5. Theses Martinianae (by 'Martin Junior') 6. The Just Censure and Reproof of Martin Junior (by'Martin Senior') 7. The Protestation of Martin Marprelate.

The Martin Marprelate Tracts (1588–89) and the Popular Voice1

AbstractThe Martin Marprelate Tracts (1588–89), long regarded as some of the finest and most influential Elizabethan prose satires, have recently played a justifiably key role in discussions of pamphlet warfare, libel, late sixteenth‐century communication practices, and the development of an early modern English public sphere. This article argues that the primary aim of the Marprelate project was to create a polemic that would generate and legitimate popular discussion of controverted issues. Evidence that the project succeeded in this aim is more elusive, but local examples of ‘Martinism’ in action do exist, and the wave of hostile response they generated reveals that the Marprelate tracts shaped contemporary perceptions of both the dangers and the possibilities of a public sphere – even if that sphere might not yet have fully existed.

Disputing Good Bishop's English: Martin Marprelate and the Voice of Menippean Opposition

The affair, the most notorious polemical dispute in an age renowned for the quantity and intensity of its religious controversies, scandalized late-Elizabethan England by shifting the question of Church reform into the public domain.1 In seven abusively satiric pamphlets issued over a ten-month period in 1588-89, a syndicate of writers working under the pseudonym Martin Marprelate called for the replacement of England's episcopacy with a decentralized ecclesiology based on local church discipline.2 Marprelate' s enthusiasm for the Presbyterian model of Church governance was characteristic of the increasingly vocal reform movement, though his approach famously and emphatically was not.3 turned controversial writing of the day on its head and abandoned traditional modes of theological argument for a highly engaging, stylistically complex attack on the Elizabethan bishops. His aim was twofold: to humiliate the bishops and the entire ecclesiastical government by disclosing egregious instances of clerical hypocrisy and ineffectuality and to have fun while doing it. The Elizabethan magistrates were predictably displeased with the whole episode. Fearing public agitation, the bishops hired a contingent of professional writers to discredit and launched a nationwide manhunt to locate the mobile press from which the tracts were issued and the group responsible for their production an objective finally realized in August 1589. The public furor set off by the tracts guaranteed that their influence would extend well beyond the early modern religious sphere.4 Guided by Mikhail Bakhtin's influential study of Renaissance carnival, Kristen Poole has argued for a close relation between the literary experimentation of the pamphlets and the rise in anti-Puritan stereotyping during the period.5 She contends that the anti-Martinist poets recruited by the bishops to denigrate and, by extension, the Presbyterian