THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Britain’ was an ideological convenience, one which expressed a humanly engineered and divinely blessed unity,
conformity, and order. The union of kingdoms was also taken to imply the existence of united customs, creeds, and
modes of expression.
The truth was not always as uniform and impressive as the contrived fiction. The sixteenth century witnessed
changes in national life as radical as any since the Norman Conquest. Henry VIII’s break with the Pope, his removal
of the English Church from its ancient allegiance to Rome, and his suppression of some eight hundred monastic
foundations began a process of religious reform which was later rigorously extended in the reigns of Edward VI and
Elizabeth. Although the reshaping of what was proclaimed to be a national Church in England was relatively
conservative (the parallel reform in Scotland proved far more radical), the process left the Church both impoverished
and subservient to its new royal Supreme Head. If the changes forced on the English Church in the sixteenth century
were by no means unique in northern Europe, Henry VIII’s reformation deprived the old Catholic order in Europe of
one of its major pillars and temporarily cut England off, politically, artistically, and religiously, from a European
mainstream. The state, outwardly a happy and harmonious union of the secular and the ecclesiastical, had in fact been
given a uniformity imposed from above, not gradually determined by multilateral consensus. Dissent from the new
status quo was at best rigorously discouraged, at worst bloodily suppressed. Although to some modern commentators
the ideology and machinery of the Tudor state seem to resemble those of a twentieth-century dictatorship, such
parallels are often based on loose and uncoordinated historical assumptions. Nevertheless, the literature which sprang
from, or was influenced by, the culture of the English court in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries
necessarily reflected the political and religious inclinations of a ruling elite. Much of the officially approved,
propagandist culture of Renaissance England can now be seen as a calculated attempt to create an illusion of ordered
compliance and national unity as a means of discountenancing internal and external opposition.
Poetry at the Court of Henry VIII
English culture was in a state of conspicuous flux in the early sixteenth century. It was actively and experimentally
coming to terms with imported novelties which were as much religious and intellectual as they were linguistic. The
advances in printing made since the establishment of Caxton’s first press at Westminster in 1476 had assisted in the
circulation of the pan-European ‘new’ learning but they had also stimulated a fresh interest in established vernacular
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classics. Though Latin remained the prime medium of educated communication and the essential acquirement of any
man or woman who pretended to learning, the inherited tradition of poetry in English was increasingly viewed with
nationalistic pride. That pride was, however, diluted by the awareness that the language, the conditions of writing,
and the very fabric of poetry were changing. In 1532 William Thynne, a gentleman in Henry VIII’s service, produced
a full edition of Chaucer’s works which he dedicated to his royal master. In the Preface to this edition a fellowcourtier,
Sir Brian Tuke (d. 1545), directs the attention of readers to the significance of human expression through
‘speche or language’ and singles out for praise those Englishmen who had ‘notably endevoyred and employed them
selves to the beautifyeng and bettryng of thenglysh tonge’. For Tuke, ‘that noble and famous clerke Chaucer’ was the
supreme national poet, a writer possessed of ‘suche frutefulnesse in wordes ... so swete and plesaunt sentences ...
suche sensyble and open style lackyng neither maieste ne mediocrite [moderation]’; he was also the eloquent master of
a language which now deserved an honoured place amongst other, generally more Latinate, Western European
languages. In the same year the printer Thomas Berthelet (or Berthelette) produced an edition of Gower’s Confessio
Amantis, also solemnly dedicated to the King. Crucial to his dedication was Berthelet’s patriotic stress on the
importance of the continued use of an established poetic vocabulary: ‘olde englysshe wordes and vulgars’, he insists,
‘no wyse man because of theyr antiquite wyll throwe asyde’. Modern writers, he complains, had begun to play with
neologisms and to introduce ‘newe termes ... whiche they borrowed out of latyne frenche and other langages’, an
unhappy process which might be reversed by a renewed interest in the study of Gower, a lantern who could provide
any true English poet with light ‘to wryte counyngly and to garnysshe his sentences in our vulgar tonge’.
To the most prominent and most senior of the early Tudor poets, John Skelton (?1460-1529), the language used by
Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate now had self evident disadvantages. In the character of Dame Margery, the narrator of
his poem Phyllyp Sparrowe (c. 1505), he complains of the impossibility of writing eloquently in his native tongue.
When Margery attempts to compose an epitaph for the dead pet sparrow, she is forced to admit that ‘Our naturall tong
is rude, | And hard to be ennuede [made fresh]’. It is a language ‘so rusty, | So cankered and so full | Of forwardes
[awkward words] and so dul’ that if she attempted to ‘write ornatly’ no terms existed to serve her mind. Dame
Margery finds Gower’s English ‘olde | And of no value’ and that of Lydgate ‘diffuse’. Even Chaucer, whose matter is