THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

In the hands of John Foxe’s friend and ally, the former Carmelite friar, John Bale (1495-1563), the moral
interlude was severed from its increasingly weak Catholic doctrinal roots to become a vehicle for Protestant polemic.
Bale, an early protege of Archbishop Cranmer’s, was the author of some twenty-one plays, all of them written in the
years 1533-43. His Kyng Johan of c. 1536 is often claimed as the first English drama to be based on national history,
though it uses that history exclusively to make narrow propagandist points and it balances its gestures towards
presenting historically based characters with traditional enough embodiments of virtue and vice. King John, the
victim of papal displeasure in the early thirteenth century, is shown as a brave precursor of Henry VIII trying to free
‘Widow England’ from the oppressive grip of ‘the wild boar of Rome’. Bale's Three Lawes, and the plays that stem
from it, God’s
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Promises, John the Baptist, and The Temptation of Our Lord, all consider the human corruption of the divine scheme
of redemption. All four plays equate the distortion of the pure Law of Christ with the former triumphs of the papal
Antichrist, and all four look to individual repentance and general reformation as a means of restoring humankind to
grace. When, for example, Christ is tempted by Satan in the fourth play, his adversary approaches in the guise of a
dim-witted hermit who at first pretends not to recognize biblical quotations (‘We religious men live all in
contemplation: | Scriptures to study is not our occupation’). Once exposed for what he really is, he gleefully proclaims
to Jesus that his prime allies in his scheme to corrupt the Church will in future be popes.
Very little that indicates a particularly vigorous Catholic response to Protestant dramatic propaganda has survived.
Much of the acceptable drama performed or revived in Queen Mary’s reign suggests a tactful avoidance of contentious
issues. John Heywood (1497-?1579), a loyal Catholic who claimed to have achieved the difficult feat of making the
Queen smile, was prepared to expose the long-familiar peccadilloes of hypocritical pardoners and friars, but he chose
to do so in the form of untidy farces with tidily orthodox conclusions, such as The playe called the foure PP (which
ends with a declaration of loyalty to the ‘Church Universal’) and The Pardoner and the Friar (which arbitrarily
concludes with attempts by the parson and the constable to drive the hypocrites away). Nicholas Udall (1504-56), a
schoolmaster who, despite his earlier unconcealed Protestant sympathies, managed to find favour in the palaces of
Queen Mary and of her Lord Chancellor, Bishop Gardiner, concentrated on writing plays for the boys in his charge.
The comedies ascribed to Udall, most notably Ralph Roister Doister (c. 1552), suggest a writer, well versed in the
work of Plautus and Terence, who possessed a modest talent for finding English equivalents to the stock characters of
the ancients. The text of Ralph Roister Doister is divided, on the ancient model, into acts and scenes, but its
boisterous language, its songs, and its tediously rhymed doggerel are confidently those of modern London and not just
a dim reflection of ancient Rome. The influence of Terence also shows in the five-act structure of the anonymous
Gammer Gurtons Nedle, a comedy first performed at Christ’s College, Cambridge, probably in the early 1560s (it was
printed in 1575). The play’s ‘low’, rustic, and somewhat slight subject (the loss of Gammer Gurton’s needle during
the mending of a pair of leather breeches and its painful rediscovery when the owner of the breeches is kicked in the
backside) is decidedly unacademic (at least in the narrow sense of that term). Although its author was determined to
squeeze what entertainment value he could out of a series of trivial domestic crises, the very shapeliness of the play
suggests a degree of subtlety and structural sophistication new in English comedy.
English universities and many of the schools that fed them with literate students shared the pan-European vogue
for reviving and performing classical plays and for sponsoring new entertainments which would show of the
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proficiency of their authors and actors. Children’s companies, and notably the boys of the Chapel Royal in London,
remained a significant feature in the development of Elizabethan drama, but it was the revival of interest in classical
tragedy that proved decisive in the evolution of a distinctive national mode. Native English tragedy was distinctly
marked by the bloody, high-flown, and sombre influence of Seneca. Between 1559 and 1561 Jasper Heywood (1535-
98), the younger son of the author of The playe called the foure PP, published English translations of Seneca’s Troas,
Thyestes, and Hercules Furens. His enterprise was matched in the mid-1560s by workmanlike English versions of
four further tragedies, all by young graduates determined to demonstrate that the art of the heathen Seneca could
provide Christian England with a lesson in moral gravity and, equally importantly, with a salutary example of
dramatic decorum. His plays were seen as model structures, suggesting the serene workings out of divine justice and
revealing the effects of human vengeance; they dwelt on the vicissitudes of earthly fortune and they traced the tragic
falls of men of high degree; above all, they expressed pithy moral sentiments with an exaggeratedly rhetorical
flourish.
When Sir Philip Sidney claimed in his Defence of Poesie that Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville’s Gorboduc
was ‘full of stately speeches and well sounding Phrases, clyming to the height of Seneca his stile, and as full of