|
Article Excerpt
William Bullein's Dialogue against the Fever Pestilence (1564) is widely recognized as one of the most successful literary experiments of its period. This chapter sets the book in the context of Bullein's work as a Protestant writer, physician, and social reformer. It identifies dialogue as a major Tudor genre, giving voice to a range of otherwise voiceless social classes and competing ideological positions at a time of fierce controversy over politics and religion. And it proposes that Bullein meant his medical dialogues to be instrumental in healing the body of the English commonwealth from the ills brought on by social and religious corruption.
**********
A Dialogue ... against the Fever Pestilence (1564) by the physician William Bullein is substantially different from any other dialogue written in the sixteenth century. There are more interlocutors, the scene shifts more often and more widely, and the variety of narrative forms towards which the text gestures is vastly greater than in any other conversation piece that has come down to us. And its tone--a deft fusion of wit, terror, and pious lyricism, punningly advertised on the title page as making the text 'bothe pleasaunte and pietifull'--is as subtly varied as its form. It is, in fact, a one-off experiment: one of the many eccentric yet brilliant experiments in literary prose during the mid-Tudor period that never did and perhaps never could spawn any close imitations. (1) These vigorous mutants occupy a crucial place in the history of English prose fiction, and perhaps of drama too; yet they have never been granted this place, precisely because of their unclassifiable oddity. I should like here to begin to consider the question of why Bullein's dialogue takes the form it does, and where it stands in relation to Tudor literature as a whole. (2)
Bullein's assumption of the role of experimenter was a gradual one. His first book, a medical treatise called The Government of Health (1558), announces its debt to one of the major innovators of the early sixteenth century, the scholar, politician, and amateur physician Sir Thomas Elyot. (3) Bullein's title fuses the name of Elyot's The Castle of Health (1537), the first substantial medical textbook written in English, with those of his political treatises The Book Named the Governor (1531) and The Image of Governance (1541); so it seems to declare Bullein's ambition to intervene in national politics as well as in healthcare. And the dialogue form of Bullein's book recalls that of Elyot's boldest political works, two dialogue-satires of 1533 entitled Pasquil the Plain and Of the Knowledge that Maketh a Wise Man, both of which set their debates in the context of a historical tyranny that bears a close resemblance to the reign of Elyot's volatile master, Henry VIII. One might expect, then, that Bullein's dialogue too would have some political content, especially given his opposition to the pro-Catholic policies of his own monarch, Mary Tudor, which he made very public when he resigned from his position as a parish priest soon after the Queen's accession.
Yet Bullein's treatise, which consists of a light-hearted exchange about medicine between a fun-loving patient called John and a sober physician called Humphrey, seems to have little or no political dimension. Admittedly, the dedication includes an extended analogy between poor government and poor health (sig. A3r), which might be construed as a sly dig at the Marian administration. And at the beginning of the dialogue, the patient John is described as a spiritual follower of the Roman emperor Heliogabalus (sig. B1r), an epicurean with a scandalous sex life--a link that implies that John's personal misconduct may have its roots in the misconduct of his social superiors. The allusion might have summoned up in the minds of Bullein's first readers the extended attack on Heliogabalus in Thomas Elyot's The Image of Governance, a fictionalized biography of the Roman emperor Alexander Severus, whose exemplary conduct contrasted so starkly with that of King Henry. (4) But apart from these two sallies into satire, the political implications of Bullein's title were not borne out in its pages, and his anti-Catholic readers had to wait until the publication of his second treatise, Bullein's Bulwark, some years after Mary's death, in order to hear his views expressed at large.
The dialogue form of The Government of Health is thoroughly conventional and can be summed up in the words of another writer Bullein admired, the physician and geographer William Cuningham. In the preface to his treatise The Cosmographical Glass (1559) Cuningham explains:
That the preceptes myghte seme the more facile and plaine, I have reduced it into the forme of a Dialoge [...] In which Spondaeus (reprasenting the Scholer) maketh doubtes, asketh Questions, objecteth, yea, and some tyme, digresseth not from the fonde imaginations of the grosse witted. Unto which, Philonicus (suppliyng the office of a teacher) answereth to all th'objections, and giveth praeceptes. (sig. A6r-v)
The sometimes obtuse questioner and the patient instructor are stock characters in Tudor scholarly dialogues, and Bullein continued to exploit them in his second book and in the medical sections of A Dialogue ... against the Fever Pestilence. (5) But there are moments even in this first text when John succeeds in acquiring a character more complex than that of the admiring pupil; and in Bullein's later works the relationship of questioner to instructor is repeatedly brought into question. This is in large part because of his insistence that the poor and the ignorant have a great deal to teach the learned, and that, conversely, the privileges of the ruling elite--learning and riches--may be vastly more damaging when abused than misdirected ignorance. The bulk of Bullein's questioners range themselves alongside the poor, not the wealthy--even the prosperous citizen Civis in Fever Pestilence acknowledges his humble class origins in Northumberland--and they steadily accumulate confidence and eloquence as his own confidence as a writer develops in successive texts.
Bullein's interest in the poor man's perspective was shared by another author he admired, the physician and wit Dr Andrew Borde. Borde's work includes travelogues, medical manuals, tracts on diet and domestic healthcare, and jestbooks, such as Merry Tales of the Mad Men of Gotham (c. 1540) and the hugely influential Scoggin's Jests (c. 1540). (6) For Borde, as a devout follower of Hippocrates, mirth or humour played a vital role in preserving his patients' health and lengthening their lives; and the equal availability of humour to rich and poor meant that this branch of therapy could be as safely entrusted to ploughmen, craftsmen, and servants as to physicians. William Bullein shares Borde's high opinion of the therapeutic value of mirth. In The Government of Health Humphrey transforms his celebration of the three doctors Diet, Quiet, and Merryman into a disquisition on class, associating cheerfulness specifically with the lower orders:
the miserable ragged beggar called Irus, was more happier in his povertie with quietnes and mirth, than was the gluttonous beast, and monstrous man king Sardanapalus, with all his golden glorie, court of ruffians, and curtizans which came to a shamefull ende [...] What is mirth honestly used? [...] A great lordship to a poore man, and preserver of nature. (sig. 37r-v)
In conformity with this celebration of the therapeutic value of cheerful poverty, The Government of Health compares the physician to a 'botcher' or clothes-mender, whose labours 'do help to repaire thinges that fall into ruine or decay' (sig. A7r), thus both aligning him with the humblest of craftsmen and identifying that craftsman with the process of repairing or reforming the decayed English state. In his next publication, Bulleins Bulwark of Defence against all Sickness, Soreness, and Wounds that do Daily Assault Mankind (1562), Bullein extends his operations as a reforming botcher from the bodies of his patients to that of the commonwealth. And one of the chief instruments he deploys in his political repairs is the poor...
|
