Victorian poetry and religious diversitythe Elizabethan court were subject. As Gary Waller writes: "The Court...
appropriated poetry as one of the many practices by which it tried to
exercise cultural dominance." 3
There was, of course, a degree of religious diversity in sixteenth-century
England despite the dominance of Anglican literary and religious culture.
While there was no significant Jewish community in Renaissance England -
since all Jews had been expelled from England in 1290, and were not to
return until 1656 when Oliver Cromwell held power as Lord Protector -
there were other religious groups who did not profess allegiance to the
Church of England. In this respect, the most obvious group was the Roman
Catholics who defied Henry VIII's Act of Supremacy. In addition, there
were Dissenters (often termed Puritans) - including Baptists, Independents,
and Presbyterians - who argued for a more thorough reform of the English
Church. Whereas Henry VIII had changed certain aspects of authority and
Church practice from Roman Catholicism, his reform nevertheless main-
tained many of the rituals and hierarchies of Church authority that
Dissenters sought t o transform even more radically.
If, however, there was a variety of Dissenters in Elizabethan England,
their literary efforts remained largely outside the literary institutions linked
to the court, and were therefore far less likely to have been preserved in
later historical periods. In this respect, it is useful to observe that, although
Sidney's Defence of Poetry is a canonized essay, the work that galvanized
Sidney's critical discussion was the Dissenter Stephen Gosson's School of
Abuse (1579), which declared that "the whole practice of Poets, either with
fables to show their abuse, or with plain terms to unfold their mischief,
discover their shame, discredit themselves, and disperse their poison
through all the world." 4 Needless to say, Gosson's Puritan criticism has
rarely been seen as a representative voice in English literary history.
Instead, the literary canon has tended to focus, until quite recently, on men
- such as the poets John Donne, George Herbert, Christopher Marlowe,
and Edmund Spenser - who were, like Sidney, educated in Anglican
institutions in preparation for holy orders (though not all chose to take that
professional route). The literary opinions of the non-Anglican minorities
were, when the threat of civil revolution loomed in the seventeenth century,
increasingly dangerous to hold. The political and religious chaos that came
with Mary's brief reign as a Roman Catholic monarch, and the later
revolution by Cromwell and the various Puritan groups aligned with him
indicate that religious diversity was often understood as a threat to the
political stability of England.
When we turn our attention to the nineteenth century, significant
contrasts immediately emerge in relation to both literary and religious
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