The spider, the fly, and the commonwealth: Merrie John Heywood and agrarian class struggle

ELH - English Literary History

Volumn 71, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 53-88

  Holstun, James ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO   (United States)

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EID: 53849135819     PISSN: 00138304     EISSN: 10806547     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/elh.2004.0017     Document Type: Review

References (184)

1. For the epithet "good duke" applied to Somerset, see John Foxe, The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, ed. Rev. George Townsend, 8 vols. (1837-1841; reprint, New York: AMS Press Inc., 1965), 6.292, 293, 296;
2. John Ponet calls Somerset the "good duke" and Northumberland "theambicious and subtil Alcibiades of England" in A Shorte Treatise of Politike Power (n.p., 1556), 13r.
3. For the liberal view, see A. F. Pollard, England Under Protector Somerset: An Essay (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd., 1900)
4. and W. K. Jordan, Edward VI, The Young King: The Protectorship of the Duke of Somerset (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1968). Dudley became Earl Viscount Lisle in 1542, Earl of Warwick in 1546, and Duke of Northumberland in 1551. I will call him "Northumberland."
5. M. L. Bush, The Government Policy of Protector Somerset (Montreal: McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, 1975).
6. Jordan, 306, 415;
7. for Somerset's bequest, see 2&3 Edw. VI c. 12, in The Statutes of the Realm, from Magna Carta to the End of the Reign of Queen Anne, 11 vols. (1810-1828; reprint, London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1963), 4:54-55.
8. On John Hales, see Jordan, 417-24, 428-32;
9. Tudor Economic Documents, ed. R. H. Tawney and Eileen Power, 3 vols. (London: Longmans, 1924), 1:39-46;
10. and Discourse of the Common Weal of This Realm of England, ed. Elizabeth Lamond (1893; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1929), xxxix-lxvii; Somerset quoted in Bush, 46.
11. See Anthony Fletcher and Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Rebellions, 4th ed. (London: Longman, 1997), a good brief guide to the subject, with a thorough bibliography.
12. Ethan H. Shagan, "Protector Somerset and the 1549 Rebellions: New Sources and New Perspectives," English Historical Review 114 (1999): 55.
13. Shagan provides a full text and analysis of Somerset's long-neglected responses (34-63).
14. For the ensuing discussion, which highlights the differences between revisionist and post-revisionist Tudor historiography, see Bush, "Protector Somerset and the 1549 Rebellions: A Post-Revision Questioned";
15. G. W. Bernard, "New Perspectives or Old Complexities";
16. and Shagan, "'Popularity' and the 1549 Rebellions Revisited," English Historical Review 115 (2000): 103-12, 113-20, 121-33.
17. Troubles Connected with the Prayer Book of 1549, ed. Nicholas Pocock, Camden Society, new series, 37 (Westminster: Nichols and Sons, 1884), 58-59.
18. Foxe, 6:290-91.
19. For Robert Kett's life and the record of his property holding, see L. M. Kett, The Ketts of Norfolk: A Yeoman Family (London: Mitchell, Hughes and Clarke, 1921), 53-59.
20. At the Dissolution, Henry gave Westwade Chapel to Northumberland, who sold it to William Kett, Robert's brother, in 1545; in March 1546, Northumberland obtained a license to alienate the Hospital of Burton St. Lazarus, Leicester to Robert Kett (Kett 26, 55).
21. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Capital 3, vol. 37 of Collected Works (New York: International, 1998), 783-88.
22. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London: Penguin, 1999), 126.
23. Also published as The Boy King: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (New York: Palgrave Press for St. Martin's Press, 2001).
24. S. T. Bindoff, Kett's Rebellion, 1549 (Historical Association Pamphlet, 1949), 9. Bindoff's is still the best short account.
25. See also the brief account in Fletcher and MacCulloch (64-80, 144-48);
26. Frederic William Russell, Kett's Rebellion in Norfolk (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, & Roberts, 1859);
27. and The "Commotion Time" in Norfolk: Kett's Rebellion of 1549 (http://virtualnorfolk.uea.ac.uk/kett/, accessed 7 December 2003), which contains most of the material in Russell along with the most important contemporary narratives and a wealth of additional material, much of it never previously published.
28. On Heywood, see A. W. Ward's entry in the Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1953);
29. Robert W. Bolwell, The Life and Works of John Heywood (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1921);
30. A. W. Reed, Early Tudor Drama: Medwall, the Rastells, Heywood, and the More Circle (London: Methuen, 1926);
31. Robert Carl Johnson, John Heywood (New York: Twayne, 1970);
32. Philip C. Kolin, "Recent Studies in John Heywood," English Literary Renaissance 13 (1983): 113-23;
33. Richard Axton's and Peter Happé's introduction to Heywood's The Plays of John Heywood (Woodbridge, Eng.: D. S. Brewer, 1991), 1-10;
34. Edmund M. Hayes, "John Heywood (1497?-1580?)," Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 136: Sixteenth-Century British Nondramatic Writers, Second Series, ed. David A. Richardson (Detroit: Gale Research, 1994), 206-13;
35. and Greg Walker, The Politics of Performance in Early Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), 76-116.
36. On Heywood's wit, see the anecdote about his nimble performance at the table of Northumberland, later the Spider of Heywood's poem, in George Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie (1589; facsimile reprint, Menston, England: Scolar Press, 1968), 230-31.
37. On Heywood's acquisition of property, see Bolwell, 10, 32-33, 42, 61;
38. and Reed, 34-35, 50-51.
39. Heywood, The Spider and the Flie: A Parable of the Spider and the Flie, Made by John Heywood (London: Thomas Powell, 1556).
40. John S. Farmer modernizes spelling and punctuation in The Spider and the Fly Together with an Attributed Interlude Entitled "Gentleness and Nobility" (1908; reprint, Guildford, England: Charles W. Traylen, 1966).
41. The Spenser Society's superb edition modernizes type, but preserves spelling, punctuation, lineation, and page layout and reproduces the woodcuts with fanatical, near-photographic fidelity (1894; reprint, New York: Burt Franklin, 1967). Hereafter abbreviated S and cited parenthetically; rather than use the frequently baffling signature designations of the original, I indicate the original chapter numbers (or "P" and "C" for "Prologue" and "Conclusion"), then the modern page numbers added to this edition. I've checked the (very accurate) text against the edition published in Early English Books Online (http://80-eebo.chadwyck.com), which is based on the Huntington Library copy. I follow original spelling and punctuation for the most part, but I distinguish u and v, I and j, and expand abbreviated m and n.
42. Capital 3 contains Marx's most important discussion of the mode of production as a historically specific form of surplus-extraction (777-78).
43. For these debates, see Social Change and the Revolution in England, 1540-1640, ed. Lawrence Stone (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965);
44. The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, ed. Rodney Hilton (London: New Left Books, 1976);
45. The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, ed. T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985).
46. For an excellent introduction and contribution to the debates, see Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London: Verso, 2002).
47. See also chapter 4 of my Ehud's Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (London: Verso, 2000).
48. Thomas More, Utopia, ed. David Harris Sacks, trans. Ralph Robynson (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999).
49. See Alexander Neville, De Furoribus Norfolciensium Ketto Duce (London, 1575), trans. Richard Wood as Norfolkes Furies, or A View of Ketts Campe (London, 1615), H4r, K3r.
50. On popular fantasies, see Depositions Taken before the Mayor & Aldermen of Norwich, 1549-1567, ed. Walter Rye (Norwich: Agas H. Goose, 1905), 58;
51. on Somerset's petition to the people, see Acts of the Privy Council. 1547-1549, ed. John Roche Dasent (1890; reprint, Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1974), 330-31;
52. on Somerset's execution, see Foxe, 6:292-95.
53. More, 101;
54. Rye, 22.
55. On "merry," see Charles Hobday, "Clouted Shoon and Leather Aprons: Shakespeare and the Egalitarian Tradition," Renaissance and Modern Studies 23 (1979): 63-78.
56. Hobday notes, "Robin Hood's men were merry, not because life in Sherwood was one long round of practical jokes, but because they lived in freedom" (69).
57. For criticism of the poem, see Ward's introduction to the Spenser Society reprint (Spider, i-xxiii);
58. Bolwell, 136-53;
59. David R. Hauser, "The Date of John Heywood's The Spider and the Flie," Modern Language Notes 70 (1955): 15-18;
60. Johnson 58-68;
61. and Judith Rice Henderson's fine essay, "John Heywood's The Spider and the Flie: Educating Queen and Country," Studies in Philology 96 (1999): 241-74, which argues persuasively that the poem is a sort of prince book for Mary. I differ in emphasizing Heywood's engagement with agrarian class conflict, his topical reflection on particular persons, and his affinities with the Commonwealthsmen. I can't read German, so I've only been able to poke at Jakob Haber's The Spider and the Flie: Ein Kulturbild aus dem 16. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Emil Felber, 1900)
62. and I've been unable to read Alice Price, "A Study of John Heywood's The Spider and the Flie," unpublished Johns Hopkins University M. A. thesis (Baltimore: 1923).
63. William Harrison, The Description of England: The Classic Contemporary Account of Tudor Social Life (1968; reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1994), 338;
64. Thomas Warton, History of English Poetry, ed. W. Carew Hazlitt (London: Reeves and Turner, 1871), 85;
65. Haber, 3;
66. John Berdan, Early Tudor Poetry, 1485-1547 (New York: Macmillan, 1920), 103-4;
67. Johnson, 67.
68. Heywood's punctuation becomes less troublesome when one sees that modern usage would render his colons as commas, or as brief unpointed pauses.
69. Berdan, 106;
70. Haber, 63-65.
71. Fletcher and MacCulloch, 17-20, 120-22.
72. Bolwell, 143-44;
73. Henderson, 245.
74. Reed, 21, 26, 54.
75. See R. W. Hoyle, The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Politics of the 1530s (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001).
76. Bartilmew Butterfly sneers at those flies agitating to string up Antony Ante by calling them "a sort of captayne coblers," referring to the shoemaker Nicholas Melton, who led the Pilgrimage outbreak at Louth (Spider, 56.234;
77. Fletcher and MacCulloch, 22-23). Haber first noted the reference (40). Bolwell gets the date wrong when he says Melton participated in the 1549 rebellions (144).
78. See MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1996), 295-323.
79. In A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called The Metamorphosis of Ajax (London 1596)
80. Sir John Harington says that Heywood "scaped hanging with his mirth," for Henry was "truely perswaded, that a man that wrate so pleasant and harmlesse verses, could not have any harmfull conceit against his procedings; & so, by the honest motion of a gentleman of his chamber, saved him from the jerk of the six stringd whip" (27-28).
81. See Bolwell's discussion of the conflict, his identification of Thomas Cranmer and the Spider, and the text of Heywood's recantation (35-41, 143-45, 160-62).
82. For the last, see also Foxe, 5:528-29.
83. MacCulloch, Cranmer, 554-608.
84. Heywood's student and assistant, Thomas Whythorne, preserved some lines of this interlude. See Axton and Happé, 8;
85. Heywood, Plays, 309.
86. On the Oak, see Neville, C3v, D4r-v.
87. For the first group, see Park, as cited in Ward's introduction to Heywood (Spider, vii);
88. Axton and Happé, 9;
89. Hayes, 213;
90. Walker, 189-90;
91. and John N. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982), 252.
92. For the second, see Ward (Heywood, Spider, xvii);
93. Bolwell, 137;
94. Rupert de la Bère, John Heywood, Entertainer (1937; reprint: Folcroft Library Editions, 1970), 110-11;
95. Whitney R. D. Jones, The Mid-Tudor Crisis, 1539-1563 (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 144;
96. and Henderson, 243.
97. Compare the secularized estates debates in Heywood's Henrician plays. In Play of the Wether, he quickly takes Jupiter/Henry VIII offstage, leaving his emissary Mery Report (Merrie John Heywood?) to debate the various secular estates (in Plays, 183-215).
98. Similarly, in Gentleness and Nobility, he presents a debate between a Plowman, a Knight, and a Merchant (not a priest). See Three Rastell Plays, ed. Richard Axton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, Roman and Littlefield, 1979), 97-124.
99. Buz thus resembles More's rigorously anti-customary Raphael Hythloday (96-97) less than he does E. P. Thompson's eighteenth-century commoners. See "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," Customs in Common (New York: New Press, 1991), 185-258.
100. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (1912; reprint, New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 47.
101. See also Tawney's discussion of the mixed blessing for copyholders of the early modern decline in customary rights (54).
102. On this proverb, see Pollard, 233.
103. On Thomas Elyot and Heywood, see Reed, 53.
104. See also book 1, chapter 2 of Elyot's Book Named The Governor (New York: Dutton, 1962), entitled "That One Sovereign Governor Ought to Be in a Public Weal. And What Damage Hath Happened Where a Multitude Hath Had Equal Authority without Any Sovereign" 6-12.
105. Paradoxically, by claiming the power of monarchical rule, the Spider himself ventures into the "usurpation" he has condemned (S 27.127), while the poem's conclusion suggests the compatibility of strong monarchical rule and popular freedoms. Heywood consistently associates " usurpation" not with popular revolt, but with aristocratic encroachment on monarch or commons (Spider, 21.98, 99; 27.127; 37.165; 44.190, 192; 53.222; 65.299, 300; 88.413; 99.421, 423; 92.429; 95.442).
106. On Heywood as Londoner, see Reed, 45-46.
107. Sir John Cheke, The Hurt of Sedicion Howe Greveous It Is to a Commune Welth (1549; reprint, Scolar Press: Menston, 1971), Clr;
108. William Wager "The Longer Thou Livest" and "Enough Is as Good as a Feast," ed. R. Mark Benbow (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1967), 1075-76;
109. Robert Crowley, The Select Works of Robert Crowley, ed. J. M. Cowper, Early English Text Society, extra series, 15 (1872; reprint, Millwood, NY: Kraus Reprint Co., 1975), 47, 142-43.
110. On the price controversy, see Jones, 141. Contrast the fly with Thomas Smith's Doctor, who feels sympathy not for wage laborers but for "all noblemen, gentlemen, and all other that live either by a stinted rent or stipend," and who cannot raise prices or rents.
111. See A Discourse of the Commonweal of This Realm of England (1549), ed. Mary Dewar (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1969), 80.
112. J. Christopher Kendrick, in "The End of the Smallholding Utopia: The Discourse of the Commonweal and the East Anglian Rebellion," forthcoming in Modern Philology, argues brilliantly that Smith's fictional dialogue of 1549-presented in the wake of one of Hales's commissions of inquiry-constitutes an agrarian capitalist "anti-camp."
113. More, 199-200. More's lawyer praises "that straight and rigorous justice which at that time was there executed upon felons, who as he said, were for the most part twenty hanged together upon one gallows" (98), while Heywood's Spider refers to hanged thieves who "totter twenty togyther" (Spider, 15.76).
114. On the relation between Utopia and Heywood's Spider, see Haber, 111-12;
115. and Johnson, 67-68.
116. On "covetousness," see Hugh Latimer, Sermons by Hugh Latimer, ed. George Elwes Corrie, 2 vols. (1844; reprint, New York: Johnson Reprint, 1968), 1:239-81;
117. and Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), 23-57.
118. In the Geneva Bible, St. Paul asks, "But what saith the answere of God to him? I have reserved unto my selfe seven thousand men, which have not bowed the knee to Baal" (Rom 11:4), and the gloss adds, "Baal signifieth as much as Master or patrone, or one in whose power an other is, which name the idolaters at this day give their idoles, naming them patrones and patronesses or Ladies."
119. Ward first noted this glitch in the argument that the flies represent Catholics (Spider, xvi). Even earlier, we see Heywood aligning spiders with Catholicism, flies with Protestantism: while awaiting the debate of Antony and Bartilmew, "The spider: streighte into his house stepte stoutely, / The fly: fell on kneeze to his booke devoutely," and the illustrations reinforce this divide between their ancestral-manorial and godly-devotional inclinations (Spider, 32.149, 33.151).
120. Heywood, Gentleness, ed. Axton, 485-86.
121. The attribution to Heywood is controversial. In Authorship and Sources of Gentleness and Nobility: A Study in Early Tudor Drama (Raleigh: Thistle Press, 1941)
122. Kenneth Walter Cameron argues plausibly that Heywood wrote the body of the play, but I'm not convinced by his argument that the stylistic gap between the body of the play and Phylosopher's afterword requires us to suppose a contribution by Rastell. Most critics of this play have devoted their time to determining its authorship and to taming its astonishing radical Humanist energy. For instance, Cameron struggles to dissolve Heywood's work in a broth of sources and deny its fundamental sympathy with the Plowman. In the process, he helps us appreciate afresh why New Critical lips curled when uttering the word "historicism." Even if Heywood didn't write the play, it seems clear that he read it carefully before writing The Spider and the Flie.
123. Fletcher and MacCulloch, 145.
124. There was no functioning servile status in Tudor England, but its vestiges had become an absolutist property to be farmed out to courtiers who could require a substantial fine from peasants longing for formal manumission. See Christobel M. Hoare, "The Last of the Bondmen in a Norfolk Manor," Norfolk Archaeology 19 (1917): 9-32.
125. Walker, quoted in Russell, 8;
126. Burnham, quoted in Rye, 18;
127. Northumberland, quoted in Neville, K4r.
128. On ruling-class terrors of the multitude, see Christopher Hill, Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1975), 181-204.
129. Neville, K3v.
130. Neville, K4r-v.
131. The Norfolk body counts vary widely. In saying that 5000 flies died in battle, Heywood may be drawing on the same account followed by Charles Wriothesley in A Chronicle of England During the Reigns of the Tudors, from A.D. 1485 to 1559, ed. William Douglas Hamilton, 2 vols. (London: Camden Society, 1875/1877), 2:21.
132. The Norwich trial records of the ensuing years repeatedly show the same recalcitrant and even defiant quietism. See Rye, 18-20.
133. "Blank" and "crank" suggest "void of result, unsuccessful, fruitless" and "rank, lusty, vigorous, in good condition" (OED).
134. Neville, K3v;
135. Russell, 151.
136. 3&4 Edw. VI c.3, in Statutes, 4:103.
137. Sermons, 1:248-49.
138. Heywood himself may mock it, as we will see, when he advises Mary to choose a council "satisfide with sufficiencie" (Spider, 92.431).
139. Henderson, 253-54.
140. The Saying of John Late Duke of Northumberlande Uppon the Scaffolde, at the Tyme of His Execution. The. XXII. of Auguste Anno. 1553 (London, 1553), no pagination.
141. This passage feels structurally parallel but also ethically preferable to Edmund Spenser's late-Tudor public relations job in book 5, canto 9 of The Faerie Queene, which creates plausible deniability for Mercilla (Elizabeth) in the execution of Duessa (Mary Queen of Scots).
142. Foxe, 6:591-740 and 7:3-752.
143. Henderson, 263.
144. These judgments may refer to particular Marian acts. 1 Mariae, St. 2. c. 12 (Statutes, 4:213-14) frequently echoes 3&4 Edw. VI. c. 5 (Statutes, 4:104-8), written in the wake of Kett's Rebellion, which specifies in minute detail the numbers of persons, their activities, and the lengths of times they may assemble before they can be deemed seditious and subject to immediate execution. 2&3 P.&M. c. 2, titled An Acte for the Reedyfieng of decayed Houses of Husbandrie, and for thencrease of Tyllage, tried to roll back Northumberland's attempts to encourage enclosure (Statutes, 4:269-74).
145. On the demands of the campmen for a return to the rates of 1485, see items number 4, 5, and 14 of "Kett's Demands Being in Rebellion," reprinted in Russell (48-56) and in Fletcher and MacCulloch (144-46).
146. For Somerset's response, see Shagan, 53-55.
147. Carolly Erickson, Bloody Mary (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978), 304, 440-43, 315, 471-72. Thanks to Chris Fitter for these references.
148. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Edward VI, 1547-1553, ed. C. S. Knighton, rev. ed. (London: HMSO, 1992), 126.
149. Van der Delft to the Emperor on 19 July 1549;
150. Calendar of Letters, Despatches, and State Papers Relating to the Negotiations Between England and Spain, Preserved in the Archives at Vienna, Simancas, and Elsewhere . . . Vol. IX. Edward VI. 1547-1549 (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1912), 405.
151. MacCulloch, "Kett's Rebellion in Context," in Rebellion, Popular Protest and the Social Order in Early Modern England, ed. Paul Slack (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), 76.
152. See also MacCulloch, Suffolk and the Tudors: Politics and Religion in an English County 1500-1600 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 309-10.
153. Foxe, 8:126.
154. On these petitions, see MacCulloch, The Boy King, 123-24;
155. and Shagan, "Protector," 51.
156. For a text of the second, see Foxe, 8:121-30.
157. Jones, The Tudor Commonwealth 1529-1559 (London: Univ. of London and Athlone Press, 1970), 24-29.
158. See also Neal Wood, The Foundations of Political Economy: Some Early Tudor Views on State and Economy (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1994);
159. and for an influential argument denying that there was anything like a commonwealth party, see Geoffrey R. Elton, "Reform and the 'Commonwealth-Men' of Edward VI's Reign," The English Commonwealth 1547-1640, ed. Peter Clark, Alan G. R. Smith, and Nicholas Tyacke (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1979), 23-38.
160. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1922; reprint, Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1975), 260;
161. see also 151-54.
162. Tawney provocatively calls Marx the "last of the Schoolmen," modestly overlooking himself (48).
163. A serious return to Tawney, with his focus on the Protestant and Catholic social gospel resisting capitalism, could provide a welcome third term to recent revisionist and post-revisionist arguments about the Reformation, which sometimes threaten to revive rather than analyze the sectarian controversies of the time. In Reformation Europe, 1517-1559 (New York: Harper & Row, 1966)
164. Elton delivers an oblique, half-mad tribute to the power of Tawney's book, saying it "greatly assisted in the decline of Protestant self-confidence and the consequent revival of Roman Catholicism, in the reaction against capitalism as an economic system, and even perhaps in the West's increasing inclination to relinquish world leadership" (315).
165. de la Bère, 108.
166. See also Heywood's nervous, witty, and strategically loyalist Elizabethan epigrams, "Of turnying" and "Of Rebellion," in John Heywood's Works and Miscellaneous Shorter Poems, ed. Burton A. Milligan (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1956), 217, 229.
167. John Christoferson, An Exhortation to All Menne to Take Hede and Beware of Rebellion (London: 1554), Aa2r-v.
168. Cheke, F5r-v, B6r, C7r, G8v-H1r.
169. Cranmer, The Works of Thomas Cranmer, 2 vols., ed. John Edmund Cox (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1846), 2:197.
170. John Calvin, An Epistle both of GoDLy Consolacion and also of Advertisement (London: 1550), A6r, C3r, D7r. Somerset himself translated Calvin's French.
171. Philargyrie, Crowley's tyrannical Henrician giant, exchanges a thievishly Wolseyan Catholic counselor named "Hypocrisie" for a thievishly Cromwellian Protestant counselor named "Philaute," who may also figure the Protestant plunderers of Northumberland's Council, until a Crowleyesque Truth counsels the negligent King to remove them. See John N. King's edition and commentary in "Philargyrie of Create Britayne by Robert Crowley," English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980): 47-75.
172. Heywood also resembles his Protestant friend Nicholas Udall, whose faith was as flexible as Heywood's, but who also maintained the ideals of the Commonwealthsmen during Mary's reign. See Respublica: An Interlude for Christmas 1553 Attributed to Nicholas Udall, ed. W. W. Greg (London: Early English Text Society, 1952).
173. Udall clearly praises Mary and attacks Reformation plunderers, but Respublica, one of his Mary figures, hopes "to restore tholde welth to this nacion," while Nemesis, the other, proposes to squeeze the Protestant character Avarice (who seems to be modeled on Northumberland) "that he maie droppe ought teverye man hys lotte, / to the utmooste ferthing that he hath falslie gotte": "to this nacion" and "teverye man," not to the Church (720, 1904-5).
174. Thanks to Anne-Marie Schuler for discussions of Udall's play.
175. See The Diary of Henry Machyn, Citizen and Merchant-Taylor of London, from A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1563, ed. John Cough Nichols (London: Camden Society, 1848), 206, 374.
176. Tawney, Agrarian, 194. Sir Philip Sidney [ed. and with additions by Mary Sidney and Sir William Alexander], The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1977), 383.
177. Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, Hiroshi Yamashita, Toshiyuki Suzuki, and Shohachi Fukuda (Harlow, England: Longman, 2001), 2.9.16 ("gnats"), 2.11 (Malegar), 5.2.49 (Artegall and the Giant);
178. Muioptomos, in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1989), 406-30.
179. I'm not convinced by Isabel E. Rathborne's argument that The Spider and the Flie directly influenced Spenser. See "Another Interpretation of Muioptomos," PMLA 49 (1934): 1050-68.
180. Berdan, 115-16.
181. For a related argument, see James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), vol. 2 (1350-1547) of the Oxford English Literary History, ed. James Simpson (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002).
182. Simpson groups Heywood's Gentleness and Nobility with a vibrant, late medieval literature exhibiting an anti-hierarchical complexity largely lost in the high Renaissance (551-53).
183. Amid the general Marian dearth of Catholic literary and political writing, Heywood's achievement in The Spider and the Flie looks even more impressive. See Robert Tittler, The Reign of Mary I, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1991), 38-47.
184. But neither the literature of commoning nor dreams of monarcho-populism disappeared. More than any other late Tudor or early Stuart dramatist, William Shakespeare offers an oblique and despairing but sympathetic meditation on the mid-Tudor crisis, perhaps because his recusant heritage enabled him to avoid the master narratives of militant Elizabethan Protestantism and nation formation. See my "Damned Commotion: Riot and Rebellion in Shakespeare's Histories," in A Companion to Shakespeare, Volume II: The Histories, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (London: Blackwell, 2003), 194-219.