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...of them created under the auspices of Thomas Cromwell's propaganda campaign of the late 1530s--are lost, we know nonetheless that throughout the Tudor Reformations schoolmasters of reformist bent, ranging from the renowned Nicholas Udall of Eton College and William Hunnis of St. Paul's to Calvinist Thomas Ashton of Shrewsbury, employed school drama, and especially comedy, (2) to promote the evangelical cause. We know further that it was under Henry VIII, in 1538, that Protestant schoolmaster Ralph Radcliffe, singled out for praise by the zealous John Bale, converted a former Carmelite monastery into a theater for the use of his Hitchin Grammar School. Radcliffe's students performed evangelical plays he himself had written, among them The Burning of Sodom and Lazarus and Dives. (3) Similarly, in 1536, schoolmaster Thomas Wylley of Suffolk wrote to Cromwell seeking patronage for plays such as Agaynst the Popys Counselerrs. (4) The hints of evangelical zeal registered here are underscored by Wylley's appeal for aid on the grounds that other priests held him in contempt since he portrayed the pope's counselors as the clownish vices "Error, Colle Clogger of Conscience, and Incredulity." Another of Wylley's plays, Sydney Anglo notes, featured "six children representing Christ, the word of God, Paul, Augustin, a child, and," in a comic turn, "a nun called 'Ignoransy.'" When the avowedly "forsaken" Wylley appealed for assistance, "that I may preach Christ," (5) the fact that comedy was part of his evangelism is clear enough. Wylley's and Radcliffe's drama thus challenges the prevailing interpretation that "even ... in Henry VIII's late years, schoolboys' drama ... [was] devoid of polemical slant" and that school drama under Henry "preferred a safe distance from theological controversy." (6) This view reflects centuries-old critical assumptions about emergent Protestantism that contributed to the previous overlooking of godly theater generally. Such assumptions also enable a continuing denial of the extent to which the zealous impulses promoted by Cromwell's circle did not inhibit, but rather spurred, the development of Tudor comedy. That is the case in critical responses to Thersites (1537), a Henrician farce believed to be the work of grammar-school author Nicholas Udall, (7) the "father of English comedy." (8)
We must recognize at the outset that Tudor evangelical reformers were far from averse to exploiting comedy for propagandistic ends. With varying degrees of wit--with "Bilious Bale" at one end (9) and Cromwell's other "divers fresh and quick wits," (10) such as amusing rhymester-propagandist William Gray, at the other--many humorous writers were drawn to seek Cromwell's patronage. He "retained [such wits] unto him" as "helpers and furtherers," "as he was most studious of himself in a flagrant zeal to set forward the truth of the gospel, seeking all means and ways to beat down false religion and to advance the true." (11)
Though this encouragement of "flagrant zeal" by any means, particularly comic ones, has largely been overlooked in analyses of Tudor comedy, we should not be surprised to find that another "fresh and quick wit," the reform-minded Udall, was patronized by Cromwell and drawn into the latter's iconoclastic campaign. After all, hints of Udall's own iconoclasm surface in details from his biography more familiar to scholars, including even his later patronage by Mary I. Consider the frequently noted 1554 warrant of the queen that directed her Master of Revels to supply whatever was needed for preparing entertainments to "our well beloved Nicholas Udall." We also learn, in a long-ignored, less loving detail, that Udall "myndeth hereafter to showe, his diligence in setting foorth ... Enterludes before us." (12) Consider, too, his 1541 dismissal from Eton in the wake not just of his oft-cited "confess[ion] that he did commit buggery" but also his involvement in the iconoclastic theft of silver images, church plate, and ornaments from the chapel. (13)
Prior to his dismissal, and again after the accession of Edward VI, Udall's reformist credentials were considered spotless. Long before he was granted sole permission to publish (cum privilegio ad imprimendum solum) works including "the byble in Englysshe" by Edward's Privy Council, (14) made canon of St. George's Chapel at Windsor Castle (December, 1551), (15) and, just prior to Edward's death, appointed absentee rector of Calborne, Isle of Wight (a position that granted Udall an extraordinarily lucrative yearly income of "between three and four hundred pounds"). (16) Under Henry, even well before he is said to have written "Comoedias plures" or "many comedies" for Henry's last wife, devoutly Protestant Queen Catherine Parr, (17) Udall had written "dites" (ditties) and "interludes" with fellow evangelical John Leland for the 31 May 1533 coronation of Henry's second wife, the forward Protestant Anne Boleyn. (18) He had earlier still been suspected of heresy for reading Tyndale's New Testament in English and other evangelical works in 1528 while studying at Corpus Christi, Oxford, (19) where "he was probably among those ... forced to file past a bonfire throwing onto it their heretical books." (20) At Oxford, Udall had also befriended propagandist Richard Morison. (21) As Cromwell's secretary, Morison advocated plays written against the "most wicked pharao of all pharaos, the bysshop of Rome," in a Cottonian manuscript entitled A Discourse Touching the Reformation of the Lawes of England (1535):
Howmoche better is it that those [Romish] plaies shulde be forbodden and deleted and others dyvysed to set forthe and declare lyvely before the peoples eies the abhomynation and wickednes of the bisshop of Rome, monkes, ffreers, nonnes, and suche like ... Into the commen people thynges sooner enter by the eies, then by the eares: remembryng more better that they see then that they heere. (22)
Udall was an especially good choice for such a project as he pioneered lively vernacular comedy that adapted the conventions of Roman and neo-Latin plays in works such as Jack Juggler (ca. 1549-51), Ralph Roister Doister (ca. 1552-53), and, my subject here, Thersites.
That the kind of iconoclastic drama his colleague Morison had proposed might be found in Udall's pre-Marian repertoire is evident in an entry in Cromwell's accounts indicating that on 2 February 1538 "Woodall, the scolem[aster] of Eton," received [pounds sterling]5 for having presented before Cromwell (23) a grammar school play, often thought to be Udall's lost biblical play Ezechias. Some critics have speculated about a later date for this play, however, based on Udall's allusion to the biblical figure Ezechias in a preface to The Paraphrases of Erasmus (1545) addressed to the ailing Henry VIII: (24)
his hyghnesse beyng our Ezechias, by the providence of God ... sent to be the destroier not onely of al counterfait religious ... but also to roote up al Idolatry doen to dead images of stone and tymber as unto God ... And in this blindnes had England still continued, had not God of his infinite goodnes and bottomles mercy raised up unto us a new Ezechias to confound al idols, to destroy all hillalters of supersticion ... and to restore ... the sincere preaching of gods word. (25)
Ezechias could thus actually have been authored as late as the mid-1540s, though the degree to which it was a "holy" comedy equally suited to the heyday of Henrician evangelicalism was later attested to when the play was revived for Queen Elizabeth upon her visit to King's College, Cambridge, in 1564. One in attendance, the Puritan Nicholas Robinson, reported that
[f]rom this sacred fount Nicholas Udall drew as much as he thought fitting for the proper magnitude of comedy, put it entirely into English verse, and gave it the name of Ezechias. It was truly amazing how much wit there was in it, how much charm in a subject so solemn and holy. (26)
As this response reveals, by the 1560s, godly comedy was already becoming a matter for wonder at the wit, charm, and colorful vernacular that had characterized all of Udall's comedies.
Modern scholars have apparently shared such amazement, since criticism has been reluctant to notice what I term "godly comedy" as a category at all. Frederick S. Boas, to cite one example, insistently referred to Ezechias as a "tragedy" and seemed incredulous that "Robinson ... even calls the Ezechias a comedy," rationalizing that "lighter matter must have been mixed with the more solemn episodes." (27) Boas also found...
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