Lady Jane, a 17-year-old put on the throne for nine days in an attempted coup in
1553, is also a heroine in the vividly partisan Book of Martyrs (1563) by John Foxe
(1516–1587).As an act of state propaganda, a copy of Foxe, illustrated with lurid
woodcuts, was placed in English churches on the lectern, next to the Bible. Foxe
reports that the last words of Hugh Latimer, burnt at the stake under Mary, were (to
a fellow-martyr): ‘Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man: we shall this
day light such a candle by God’s grace in England as, I trust, shall never be put out.’Drama
The spiritual and cultural trauma of the Reformation may account for the fact that
the major literature of the period 1540–79 was in the translation of religious texts.
The proceeds of the suppression of the monasteries and their schools did not go into
education. As England lurched from Luther to Calvin to Rome to her own compro-
mise, the Crown was an unsafe patron. But poets needed patrons. Before the
Elizabethan theatre opened, there was no paying profession of writing. University
men tried vainly to bridge the gap between uncommercial ‘gentle’ status and scrib-
bling for a tiny market. At the end of this fallow period commercial drama began:
the English liked plays.
The Mystery and Morality plays (see p. 65) continued, the Mysteries until
Shakespeare’s day; his Falstaff and Shylock owe something to the antic Vice in the
Mysteries, who entertained the audience until dismissed. As guilds clubbed together
to buy pageant-wagons and costumes, Mysteries became dearer. The civic link slack-
ened; companies of players travelled between inns and great houses (as in Hamlet).
The Mysteries were Corpus Christi plays, played in June on the feast of the Body of
Christ.A new kind of play, the interlude, was also playe d between courses at feasts
held in big houses at Christmas and Easter.
A moral entertainment, the interlude involved debates similar to the one Thomas
More reports in Utopia,set in the household of Cardinal Morton, where More had
been a page. Morton’s chaplain Medwall wrote the first interlude we have,Fulgens
and Lucrece, played at Christmas 1497 before the ambassadors of Flanders and
Spain;Lucrec e has two suitors, a nobleman and a comic servant. Roper’s Life tells us
that,as a page,More would ‘suddenly sometimes step in among the players, and
never studying for the matter, make a part of his own there presently among them’.
Drama became a family habit: More’s brother-in-law John Rastell(?1470–1536)
had a stage in his garden in Finsbury Fields, London. He printed Fulgens on his own
pr ess;also his own interlude The Four Elements,with the first printed music. Rastell’s
daughter married John Heywood(c.1497–1580), author of the farcical interlude The
Four Ps. In this, a Palmer, a Pardoner, a ’Pothecary and a Pedlar compete to tell the
biggest lie;the Palmer wins by claiming that he had never known a woman lose her
temper.
Roman comedies by Plautus and Terence were adapted by humanist schoolmas-
ters for their pupils: the first English comedy to survive,Ralph Roister Doister, was
written by Nicolas Udall(1504–1556), headmaster of Eton in the 1530s; it crosses
Plautus with popular tradition. (The Pyramus-and-Thisbe interlude in A
Midsummer Night’s Dream borrows from Udall a literacy joke based on a systematic
use of mispunctuation.) At Christmas, university students appointed a Lord of
Misrule, and put on plays in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, and the hall of
Christ Church, Oxford.Gammer Gurton’s Needle, performed at Christ’s, Cambridge,90 3 · TUDOR LITERATURE: 1500–1603
interlude(Lat.
‘between’+‘game’) A moral
play offered between courses.