SOURCE: Hilliard, Stephen S. “Nashe's Orthodoxy.” In The Singularity of Thomas Nashe, pp. 25-61. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986.

Approached in isolation from their historical context, Nashe's works seem more modern and “themeless” than they do when they are cross-referenced with the works that make up their “background.” That historical background, like the life of the author, is in part our construct, built by selecting texts that support our theses about the Elizabethan period. Moreover, as in a painting, the foreground defines the background: Nashe's literary career shapes an attitude toward the Elizabethan literary scene. It invites us to see Elizabethan orthodoxy as an ideology in need of defense, rather than as a comfortable set of beliefs. This impression is confirmed by the career of Nashe's first patron, Archbishop Whitgift, who was an ideologue, if that term fits any Elizabethan. Another modern term, propagandist, describes Nashe's role in the anti-Martinist campaign. Even the festive entertainment he wrote for the archbishop, Summer's Last Will and Testament, has an ideological function. Later in his career Nashe departed from orthodoxy, although he continued to profess allegiance to it, but his early works are firm in their support of the dominant system of conformity promoted by the archbishop.

When Nashe arrived in London in 1588, two events symbolized the precarious situation of the Elizabethan government: the defeat of the Spanish Armada off the southern coast and the clandestine printing of the first Martin Marprelate tract just outside London. The fortunate destruction of the Armada seemed to Elizabethans only the first encounter in a long struggle against an international Catholic threat. The sense of danger was exacerbated by an indigenous Catholic population, both an old guard and newer malcontented converts. Many of these recusants remained loyal to the queen, although they had been officially absolved of that duty by the Papal Bull of 1570. The Marprelate tracts were an extreme expression of danger to the Elizabethan compromise from radical Protestantism. Puritan asceticism and the new morality represented by Stubbes's Anatomy of Abuses were the popular arm of a Puritan movement that was also political. Although the Puritans sought only ecclesiastical reform, particularly the elimination of the office of bishop, their campaign seemed seditious to the Anglican establishment. The defensive stance of orthodox Anglicanism was a response to real dangers, not paranoia.

An official version of the “natural truth” about social life was actively promulgated by the government, and opposing views were as vigorously suppressed. Through patronage and the silencing of dissent, Elizabethan institutions were kept within a framework of acceptable beliefs (Hurstfield, 63-70). Literature and publishing were not exempt: books favorable to the Elizabethan social system were promoted, others discouraged or censored (Bennet, 56-86; Rosenberg, 3-18). When Nashe's works seemed to support the system of conformity, they were encouraged; when their exposure of abuses and outspoken singularity implicitly questioned the system, they were ignored or censored. Nashe's depiction of the discrepancy between the ideal and the actual dynamics of London life was too sharp to be tolerated for long. Elizabethan society's idealized self-image shrank from too strong a light.

This ideological justification of Elizabeth's government was well argued and has continued to color subsequent evaluations of her reign, in part because the system does seem superior to much that went before or came afterwards, but the very need for vigilant defense is evidence that the government's control of ideas was imperfect. Compared to the thought control in modern totalitarian states, the ideological programs of the Elizabethans were very much an amateur effort. The queen herself allowed rather un-Machiavellian sentiments like religious piety to blunt her political shrewdness. Her council displayed a mixture of loyal service, political contrivance, and personal ambition—often tendencies uneasily combined in a single councillor like Leicester or Raleigh. There was no agreement about what policies would best insure domestic tranquility. Elizabethan government, like the society as a whole, was a mixed bag of conflicting loyalties and beliefs, barely contained by an ideological framework that was in constant need of adjustment.

Fortunately we do not need to untangle the whole complex system of beliefs or trace its historical origins to understand its importance to Nashe's career (see J. Allen; Morris; E. Smith; Talbert). He himself accepted the orthodoxy of his day without questioning its origin, and his pamphlets do not deal with political questions. Nashe's belief in conformity led him away from any examination of existing social institutions; reform for him was a matter of encouraging people to live up to the ideals of society rather than changing anything. Vernacular printing and the popular stage should function as means of socialization, bringing the common person into line with Tudor values, not as vehicles for reexamining values. In spite of such traditional beliefs, Nashe could not contain himself within the orthodox system. In particular, his inchoate conception of individuality, both as he attacks it as a form of presumption and as he embodies it in his own singularity, can be understood in terms of the ideological insistence on obedience and the subjugation of the self.

THE IDEOLOGY OF CONFORMITY

As a student in the 1580s Nashe encountered the increasingly bitter division between those who supported the Elizabethan religious settlement and those who wished to reform it further (Collinson, 122-30; Curtis, Oxford and Cambridge, 165-226; Hibbard, 4-8). The reformers, who were unsystematically lumped together as Puritans, thought the ecclesiastical structure of the church hindered the spiritual restructuring of the minds of the people. Nashe's own college, St. John's, was at the center of the Puritan campaign to replace the hierarchical governance of the church with a system of community control. At issue in this presbyterian or “disciplinarian” movement was the nature of the social order. Although most Puritans never intended to question the political order, they had a limited respect for the effectiveness of the traditional social hierarchy as a form of social control. Order must be maintained, but the willfulness of the individual could best be channeled into useful social behavior by local supervision (Hill, 219-58). In particular Puritans questioned the office of bishop, the means by which Elizabeth and her government tried to control the life and thought of local parishes.

The court itself was divided on the issue of further reform. In the late 1570s Archbishop Grindal had refused to carry out the queen's wish that he suppress the “prophesizings,” or local Bible study groups, which were precursors of a presbyterian organization. In anger she deprived him of power, although she could not remove him from office. The theocratic tendencies of the movement were unacceptable to her; she could not tolerate a system where she and her magistrates would be subject to ecclesiastical correction. Several members of her Privy Council were either less perspicacious about the dangers or willing to take the risk; Leicester, Walsingham, Knollys, and at times Burghley were sympathetic with the reformers. The House of Commons also became a battleground over proposed changes in the established church, but the queen adamantly opposed further reformation, particularly if it might in any way abridge her prerogative or weaken the social hierarchy of which she was the head (Neale, 1559-1581, 417-20; Neale, 1584-1601, 198-99, 216-32).

The vociferousness of Puritanism during Grindal's enforced sequestration suggests the importance of the office of archbishop to Elizabeth's control of the church. Upon Grindal's death in 1583, she found a willing instrument for her policy in her choice of John Whitgift as the new archbishop of Canterbury. His success in suppressing the early stages of the Puritan movement at Cambridge recommended him for the appointment. He was the adversary of Thomas Cartwright, the leading spokesman for the reformers, and as master of Trinity and vice-chancellor of the university had used his power of passing on appointments to discourage those unsympathetic with the established church. He was an ideal choice from the queen's point of view, since he was an able administrator who relentlessly opposed Puritanism without being vituperative or vindictive. He soon became the queen's agent in an inflexible and at times cruel campaign against the Puritans. When the inquisition-like rigor of his High Commission was opposed by Burghley and other members of the Privy Council, he reminded them forcefully that his authority came directly from the queen (see Collinson, 243-48; Dawley; Read, 294-98; Strype).

Whitgift figures prominently in the career of Nashe. As the former master of a college, influential past vice-chancellor, privy councillor, and archbishop, Whitgift remained a major force in the political and intellectual life of Cambridge. Through his own writings and his patronage of religious writers like Richard Hooker, he sustained and toughened the ideology that justified the existing religious, political, and social order (Almasy; Little, 135-47). He defended that order by controlling the press and by driving dissenters out of the colleges and church. Whitgift's double-edged program of strengthening the dominant ideology while discrediting and at times destroying opposition would have powerfully influenced Nashe's thought, even if Nashe had never become directly involved with the archbishop's campaign against Martin Marprelate.

As an undergraduate at the notorious St. John's, Nashe might well have become a Puritan; instead he aligned himself with the humanist tradition at St. John's and supported the existing order (Caspari, 132-56). Ascham, Cheke, and the other Cambridge humanists of the mid-century were his heroes rather than the more radical and contentious contemporaries who set the tone at the Cambridge of the 1580s. His early works are quite explicit in their rejection of the Puritans and like-minded educational reformers. He rejects Ramism, because Ramus's devaluing of Ciceronianism undercut the conception of office or duty and the accompanying formal rhetoric that legitimized subservience to a central authority. Ramism was popular with the Puritans because it simplified rhetoric and because it made the order of the commonwealth more a matter of human agreement and less a reflection of universal order (Kearney, 46-70). Nashe was no Hooker and would probably have been hard pressed to defend his beliefs, but he was nevertheless passionate in his devotion to humanism and the traditional order it supported.

His humanism was the English strain fostered during the Henrician period and given a somewhat rigid cast during the social and political upheavals of the mid-century (Kearney, 34-45). Cheke and Ascham were pragmatic in their approach to government service; the Puritans were heirs to the more independent, idealistic elements of earlier humanism. Such court humanism stressed obedience to the monarchy and other institutions of government. It valued persuasive skills more than philosophic inquiry; the development of speaking and writing skills and the cultivation of an engaging personal presence would secure a courtier or civic servant a position and render him an effective agent of authority. Success as an instrument of power could lead to rapid advancement, as Tudor history so often witnessed. A person like Nashe, without background or personal fortune but with a university education and rhetorical skills, could hope for such advancement, particularly with the help of a patron. The probabilities of success were perhaps slim, but the appeals of government service outweighed those of the major alternative, the humble life of a clergyman such as Nashe's father had lived.

The court humanism supported by Whitgift and espoused by Nashe advanced a pattern of conformation rather than the pattern of reformation favored by the Puritans (Little, 147). Its central doctrine was obedience, obedience not so much to personal authority as to the traditional institutions of society. The queen and her magistrates were also circumscribed by duty and law. The value of such a doctrine to the government is so obvious that one could make the mistake of seeing it as political expediency, but it would not have worked if it had been a cynical ploy. The doctrine of obedience offered the subject security from political disorder and economic deprivation in an age when the margin for survival was slim. He or she was obedient not because authority could not be wrong but because a private person's judgment was worth little and could be dangerous. In this way the doctrine was linked to the Christian ideal of humility and the abhorrence of pride, the primal sin. Subjects were frequently reminded of Saint Paul's dictum: “Let everie soule be subject unto the higher powers: for there is no power but of God: & the powers that be, are ordeined of God” (Geneva Bible, Romans 13:1; see E. Smith, 19). Puritans and Anglicans differed over what the proper external authority should be, but both sides denounced the egalitarianism and anarchy they thought had prevailed during the domestic peasant rebellions and Continental Anabaptist uprisings.

Post-Burckhardtian students of the Renaissance often see the age as one of emergent individualism and a new bourgeois ethic, but the age itself saw such tendencies as undesirable. Singularity, presumption, ambition, and arrogance were all destructive branches of pride. Individualism, as a code of values centered on the private person, did not yet exist; individuation, in the sense that people experienced themselves as alone and particular, did, and it was frightening to the person as well as threatening to society. Some tension between the individual and society is characteristic of all human cultures; the all-encompassing community of the Middle Ages is probably a nostalgic myth. Still, the Reformation, the emergence of the centralized modern state, and the urbanization of London exacerbated the sense of isolation, at least among the audience for whom Nashe wrote. The Puritans recorded their misgivings about their own pride in their diaries and tracts, but their fear of themselves was shared by the Anglicans and secular-minded as well (Bercovitch, 1-34; see also Esler). Marlowe comes close to affirming a value in individuality, but his fear of his own boldness finds eloquent expression in the anguish of Dr. Faustus and in Edward II's tragic loss of self.

The doctrine of obedience was promulgated incessantly, both as a matter of government policy and as an expression of the belief of particular authors. A succinct statement of it can be found in the notes for a sermon delivered by Whitgift on the Queen's Accession Day in 1583, shortly after he became archbishop. Grounding his argument on the Bible, he complained that obedience was particularly necessary “in these our corrupt days, so full of disobedience; in the which they that preach obedience to princes are counted men-pleasers and time-servers!” (Whitgift, 3:586). Obedience frees the subject from fear of the anarchy that would prevail without magistrates. When every man does what he lists, confusion follows. Moreover, “equality of persons engendereth strife; which is the cause of all evil” (588). The disobedient are divided into three classes: “papists, anabaptists, and our wayward and conceited people.” The third group are the Puritans, who set themselves up against the authority of the bishops and are thus “wayward and conceited fellows who do not ‘condemn’ magistrates, but ‘contemn’ and despise magistrates” (593). They are contentious and slanderous for all that they profess faith and purity. “All evil-speakers are contentious persons. Contentious persons are disobedient” (595). Obedience must take precedence over any inclination a subject might have to be critical of authority.

Obedience was more than an abstract injunction; in practice it was subdivided and formalized into a complex system of duties and functions. Whitgift reminded his audience that “the rule of obedience, that is betwixt the magistrate and the subject, holdeth betwixt the husband and the wife, the father and his child, the master and the servant” (590). The potentially dangerous ego of the Elizabethan was circumscribed by a network of familial, occupational, social, civic, and religious obligations and expectations. The self was secure only when it was a subject, obedient to God by being obedient to the queen and the social order she headed. The formal nature of the order was emphasized in the complex system of laws, the rituals of church and civic life, and the requirements of decorum. That decorum extended to the clothes one wore and the language one used. Sumptuary legislation and censure by preachers attempted to prevent people from dressing in the manner reserved for higher classes (Baldwin, 192-247; Hooper). Nashe was just one of many writers, including Shakespeare and Jonson, who ridiculed the attempt of the common people to dress, speak, write, or live in a style appropriate to their betters. Elizabethan England was not a caste society—the laws and ridicule would not have been necessary if everyone had kept to his or her station—but social mobility and private space were a source of distrust and fear.

That distrust and fear centered on certain stereotypes: the prodigal apprentice, the masculine woman, the atheist or epicure, but especially on the masterless man and the malcontent (Lyons, 17-21; Walzer, 9-13, 199-204). The masterless man could be a rogue or a vagabond, and he was likely to be a malcontent, although a malcontent could also be a person dissatisfied with his social role because of ambition, melancholy, or underemployment. Such people were potentially seditious; moreover, their very existence called into question the good order of the commonwealth. Often malcontents were in effect underground masterless men, who pretended to love and duty while scheming for personal gain. For Whitgift and Nashe, Puritans were malcontents who pretended to idealistic values in a hypocritical fashion. They were motivated by envy of those who had the power and status they coveted. The self-proclaimed “Church millitant heere upon earth” is, Nashe wrote, “a company of Malecontents, unworthy to breath on the earth” (1:22). Like Whitgift, Nashe emphasizes that the Puritans are contentious, malicious, and given to backbiting. Ultimately they are treasonous, since their program of “reforms” threatens the traditional order of society.

Conformity was also sought through a skillful appeal to nationalistic sentiments. The pope's anathematizing of the queen and the defeat of the Armada created a patriotic fervor that was used to discredit the recusants and the aspirations of the Puritans. Central to this promotion of nationalism was the growth of printing and the spread of literacy (Ebel; Eisenstein, 1:117-18; 358-67). Along with court rituals, pageantry, drama, and sermons, printed books in the vernacular contributed to the dominance of the court, in part by promoting Tudor mythology. When the potential utopia was threatened, either by the recusants and Jesuits or by the Puritans, printing became a front-line defense of the commonwealth. Throughout Elizabeth's reign the presses were kept busy publishing religious controversy, views opposing the government's often being published abroad or by clandestine presses (Bennett, 74-86, 113-29). These tracts and pamphlets tried to win adherents to their cause by the skillful deployment of rhetoric. The religious controversies of the Reformation were the crucible of modern prose, even if their influence has not been studied as closely as that of classical rhetoric.

Nashe's rhetorical approach and his personal style were derived more from these vernacular predecessors than they were from classical or Continental models. I have argued that The Anatomy of Absurdity is an imperfect amalgamation of the courtly style of Lyly with the polemical concerns of Phillip Stubbes, even though it was written when Nashe was still a student, presumably immersed in the study of Latin literature. The works written after his arrival in London reveal even more clearly their native roots. In particular, his style was forged by his involvement in the Marprelate controversy. That famous battle of the wits was his postgraduate education as a pamphleteer, as well as the reason for his association with Whitgift. The Puritan movement was anathema to Nashe, but he used it both as a point of reference to define his orthodox beliefs and as a source for the style that made him famous.

THE MARPRELATE CONTROVERSY

Nashe's actual role as a propagandist for Bancroft and Whitgift is unknown, but later tradition held that he played an important role in “quelling” Martin Marprelate, and Nashe's own comments substantiate that he was an anti-Martinist. It is uncertain whether the propagandists recruited by Richard Bancroft to counter Martin's popularity worked as a group or subdivided the task. A convincing case has been made, though, that Nashe wrote An Almond for a Parrot, the penultimate pamphlet in the anti-Martinist series (Hibbard, 36-48; McGinn, “Nashe's Share”). His actual role is less important than the influence of the controversy, including Martin's tracts and those of his adversaries, on Nashe's career. Martin gave Nashe the rhetorical stance and repertory of devices that enabled him to link wit and style to an ironic persona in imaginary oral discourse (Summersgill). From the anti-Martinists he learned how to make reductio ad absurdum into a continuous rhetorical strategy that ridiculed an opponent in an almost nihilistic fashion. Their dramaturgical use of rhetoric undercut Martin's serious purpose just as he had undercut the preeminence of the bishops.

The short career of Martin Marprelate is an abstract and brief chronicle of an ideological conflict that led to civil war and the end of the English Renaissance (Carlson; McKerrow, 5:34-65; Pierce). Whoever wrote the Marprelate tracts was driven to assume his pseudonymous fool's coat by Whitgift's success at checking the growth of Puritanism. Progress in Parliament had been stymied by Whitgift and the queen, Puritan ministers were being deprived of their livings by Whitgift's oath of supremacy, and Whitgift's High Commission was hounding the leaders of the movement into silence, prison, or exile. Those who helped Martin—John Penry, Job Throkmorton, Robert Waldegrave, and the others—had failed on different fronts of the movement. Penry, whom the author of An Almond for a Parrot thought to be Martin, was one of a number of articulate pamphleteers and preachers who had argued for reform only to find their words suppressed or confuted in what seemed to them unfair attacks on their integrity. Throkmorton, who probably was in fact Martin, had been unable to get legislation favorable to the Puritans through the House of Commons (Carlson). Waldegrave had printed tracts by Penry, Udall, and others, and for his pains had his type defaced and his presses smashed.

Such was the group that began clandestinely printing pamphlets in 1588, shortly after the defeat of the Armada. The argument against episcopal church government was not new, nor were the Marprelate tracts the first Puritan works printed anonymously and in secret. What was new was the Martin Marprelate persona and the colloquial satiric style, which used imaginary scenes of oral discourse as a way of involving the reader and ridiculing the bishops. Martin is imagined in a variety of ironic roles, arguing with one or another of the bishops in front of an assembled audience of his readers. Although he changes his stance, sometimes playing the fool, sometimes a rustic clown, his various selves all seem facets of one flexible personality. Martin cleverly uses asides, either incorporated in the text or in the margins, to create the effect of oral give-and-take. He also uses slang and grotesque imagery to make his opponents seem venal pigmies, masquerading in the pompous robes of ecclesiastical office. Martin's satire is functional to his purpose and integral to his Calvinist view of the fallen nature of humanity. The self-mockery of his assumed name—a martin was an ape—and his own lack of stylistic pretension contrasted sharply with the claimed dignity and preeminence of the bishops (Anselment, 33-60; Coolidge).

Although the tracts present three personas—Martin himself and his two sons Martin Senior and Martin Junior—all were presumably created by a single author, so they are treated as a single phenomenon. Martin is self-consciously in the tradition of popular buffoonery associated with fictionalized figures like Scogan and Will Summers and with comedians, particularly Richard Tarlton. Like these antecedents, Martin makes a profession of irreverence, arrogating to himself the traditional license of the Lord of Misrule and the professional jester. By presenting himself theatrically in a variety of roles he manages to suggest that the office of bishop is also a kind of performance.¹ Aylmer or Whitgift is presented as playing at being the doughty bishop, just as the unknown author plays at being Martin. The byplay between Martin and his sons adds to this theatrical effect. This approach has barbed implications, since the traditional defense of weak bishops and uneducated ministers was that the role was greater than the imperfect individual who filled it.

Seen as exercises in frustration and as belated contributions to the tedious debate about episcopacy, the Marprelate tracts are often dismissed as by-products of history, a failed attempt to revitalize a defeated cause. They did not affect policy and discredited the Puritans more than they helped them. The presbyterian movement ceased to be a central part of Puritanism in the 1590s; when it did return in the seventeenth century, the memory of Martin played a minor role. Martin Marprelate was a failure in terms of his own goals: his press was seized, his confederates were arrested and tortured, and he himself was discredited. If Martin was Job Throkmorton, he had enough influence to escape physical punishment, although he was troubled with an indictment and published abuse. Martin's own misgivings about the wisdom of his proceedings gives a special poignancy to the last tract, The Protestation. He remains defiant, but he had been defeated in the mad game of words he played with the bishops.

The causes of his failure suggest his importance as a figure in the cultural history of the period. He had hoped that his bold persona and lively style would win adherents to his cause. His defaming of the bishops both as a group and as fallible individuals was intended to discredit their office and destroy their argument for preeminence. Such tactics left him open to the charge of dealing in personalities rather than issues. From an orthodox point of view, Martin was a symbol of presumption, of a private person daring to set his fallen understanding of what the world should be against the traditional wisdom of society. His attack on the private persons who filled the office of bishop was proof that he saw society from a dangerously individualized perspective, rather than as a system which was perhaps arbitrary and historically contingent but to be preferred over the anarchy of human willfulness. Martin seemed to substantiate the Anglican fear that the limited goals of the Puritans were a prelude to sedition, revolution, and anarchy (Anselment, 54-60).

The Marprelate tracts began as an answer to John Bridges's Defense of the Government Established in the Church of England (1587), a long-winded installment in the controversy over the existence of bishops. Seizing on Bridges's occasional resorts to invective, Martin claims his satiric answer is a response in kind: “‘May it please you’ to give me leave to play the dunce for the nonce, as well as he; otherwise dealing with Master Doctor's book, I cannot keep decorum personae” (Marprelate, 17). Martin will treat the bishops and their supporters with the same lack of respect they have shown the Puritans. “I jested because I dealt against a worshipful jester, Dr. Bridges, whose writings and sermons tend to no other end than to make men laugh” (118). This is Martin's excuse for mixing ridicule of the bishops in with his serious arguments against episcopacy. Bridges and a few notoriously venal bishops made easy targets.

In their first responses to Martin, the bishops refrained from lowering themselves to his level. There is some scorn but little levity in Bishop Thomas Cooper's Admonition to the People of England: Wherein are answered, not onely the slaunderous untruethes, reprochfully uttered by Martin the Libeller, but also many other Crimes by some of his broode, objected generally against all Bishops … (1589). The aging Cooper, who was probably picked to answer Martin because of his accrued dignities, gives us an unzealous picture of how the controversy appeared to the supporters of the Elizabethan religious compromise. He concedes that the common people are disdainful of religion: “When I call to my rememberance, the loathsome contempt, hatred, and disdaine, that the most part of men in these dayes beare, and in the face of the worlde declare towarde the Ministers of the Church of God, aswell Bishops as other among us here in Englande my heart can not but greatly feare & tremble at the consideration thereof” (sig. B1r). Many ministers are in fact “farre from that rule that Christian perfection requireth,” but people should respect priests in spite of the weakness of some people who fill the office.

Cooper thus grounds his criticism of Puritan arrogance on a pessimistic rather than an idealistic portrayal of the social order. Catholicism has been weakened, but the Reformation has barely taken hold; in such a volatile political situation the Puritan attack on the bishops cannot be well-intentioned:

If right zeale, with conscience and detestation of evil, were the roote of these invectives …, surely, the same spirit would moove them to breake out into like vehement lamentations against the evils and vices, which shew themselves in a great nomber of the Realme: I meane, the deepe ignorance and contempt of God in the midst of the light of the Gospell, the heathenish securitie in sinne and wickednesse, the monstrous pride in apparell, the voluptuous riot and sensualitie, the excessive buildings and needelesse nestes of mens treasures, which bee as cankers consuming the riches of this Realme.

(sigs. D3r-D3v)

In such a disordered time, obedience to what order does exist takes precedence over reform. Martin and other Puritan pamphlet writers contribute to disorder by “distracting the mindes of the Subjects,” which helps divide them into factions and increases “the nomber of Mal-contents, and mislikers of the state” (sig. F2r). Given that “the schoole of Epicure, and the Athiests, is mightily increased in these days,” the church needs to preserve a united front. The attacks of the reformers have discredited religion as well as church government. Cooper is a conservative pragmatist who wants to shore up the church as it is, not undertake major repairs in the face of secular indifference and hostility.

In his specific criticisms of Martin Marprelate, Cooper struck the note that was to dominate the anti-Martinist campaign: Martin is a libeller motivated by envy rather than zeal. What pretends to be a limited call for ecclesiastical reform is a prelude to an assault on the civic order as well. Cooper sees this in Martin's style as well as in his programs: “When there is seene in any Common wealth such a loose boldenesse of speech, against a setled lawe or State, it is a certain proofe of a loose boldnesse of minde. For, Sermo est index animi. that is, Such as the speech is, such is the minde.” Boldness and contempt like Martin's are “the very roote and spring of discorde, dissention, uprores, civill warres and all desperate attempts” (sig. F2v). Martin's program is no more misguided than that of his predecessors, but his method of arguing—the use of a persona and personal attacks on the bishops—was a dangerous innovation. He was a model of arrogance in a society already prone to presumption.

Martin defended himself in Hay Any Worke for Cooper, the title of which puns on a London street cry. His style is not evidence of a disorderly mind, but a strategy:

I am not disposed to jest in this serious matter. I am called Martin Marprelate. There be many that greatly dislike my doings. I may have my wants I know, for I am a man. But my course I know to be ordinary and lawful. I saw the cause of Christ's government, and of the Bishops' anti-christian dealing to be hidden. The most part of men could not be gathered to read anything written in the defense of the one and against the other. I bethought me, therefore, of a way whereby men might be drawn to do both; perceiving the humours of men in these times (especially of those that are in any place) to be given to mirth.

(Marprelate, 238-39).

But it would be a mistake to see Martin's style as merely a rhetorical strategy, a decorum personae, since his character is closely related to the programs he advances. Because of his Protestant interest in the private person, Martin was willing to deal in personalities and exploit the comic persona he invented for himself. The Puritans were painfully aware of human shortcomings, but they nevertheless wanted to shift the focus to the individual soul. Martin thought of himself, his readers, and the bishops as private persons rather than in terms of traditional social roles (Richmond).

Martin's presentation of his own unorthodox role in heroic terms has been part of his enduring appeal. Partly in an effort to protect his coconspirators, he claims, “I am alone. No man under heaven is privy, or hath been privy, unto my writings against you. I use the advice of none therein” (246). With joking bravado, he mocks the fact that he is a hunted man in danger of the gallows. It is hard not to admire his courage: “Whether I be favoured or no, I will not cease, in the love I owe to her Majesty, to write against traitors, to write against the devil's bishops” (256). In the last tract, after his main press had been seized and many of his supporters arrested, Martin pauses to examine his own motives in good Puritan fashion: “These events I confess do strike me and give me just cause to enter more narrowly into my self to see whether I be at peace with God, or no” (397). He concludes that he is and that he is willing to be martyred for the truth as he sees it. “And as for myself, my life, and whatsoever else I possess I have long ago set up my rest” (404-5).

The anti-Martinists did not, however, find this stance heroic or appealing. Bishop Cooper had looked foolish trying to answer Martin seriously; Bancroft's propagandists focused instead on responding in kind to Martin's persona. Modern critics, sympathetic with Martin, have faulted the anti-Martinists for avoiding the substantive issues to indulge in invective, but the anti-Martinists felt that the libel and scurrility began by Martin had to be met with the same weapons. Whitgift, Bridges, Cooper, and others had long since mounted an official answer to the presbyterian arguments; what was new was Martin's introduction of personality into what had been a theological and political debate. The authoritarian and orthodox anti-Martinists were reluctant to deal with ecclesiastical issues in any case; rather, their task was to expose Martin as a seditious hypocrite. Their own resort to invective bothered some of them and was criticized by neutral observers, but slandering a renegade like Martin was of a different order than slandering a bishop.

The anti-Martinist tracts proper are those published under pseudonyms and without a publisher's name, in imitation of Martin's own procedure. Presumably all were written by the popular writers recruited by Bancroft and were sponsored unofficially by the government. Another group of subsidiary publications continued the theological debate with the Puritans. The pseudonymous anti-Martinists all adopt belligerent personas who in one way or another challenge Martin to combat, often using metaphors of physical violence. All resort to innuendo, suggesting that Martin is covertly seditious, greedy for church wealth, envious of the bishops' status, and even lecherous. Martin is also used as a brush to tar the whole Puritan movement; the term “Martinist” is bandied about as if it were the name of an actual sect. The humor of the pamphlets is, as is often charged, scurrilous: in particular their delight in the prospect that Martin will be tortured and executed offends a modern sensibility.

The doctrine of obedience is a central tenet of the anti-Martinist creed. In one of the secondary tracts, Leonard Wright reduces it to a rather naked, if traditional, formula: “Whoever resisteth power, resisteth the ordinance of God” (sig. D3v). Pasquil, the most theoretical of the anti-Martinist personas, sees religion as essential to the maintenance of political order. It is not power that keeps the people obedient to the queen, but the legitimization of her rule provided by religion. “If we search it till the worlds end, we shall find no other cause of this sweet harmonie of peoples harts, that remaine faithful and flexible to the shaking of her princely finger, but only this, the Religion of the Land” (in McKerrow, 1:78). A subsequent comparison of Martin with Savonarola as described by Machiavelli shows that Pasquil is thinking in political rather than theological terms. He reminds his readers “howe inclinable the simpler sort of the people are to rowtes, ryots, commotions, insurrections, and plaine rebellions, when they grow brainsicke, or any new toy taketh them in the head: they neede no Travars nor Martin to encrease their giddines” (81). Pasquil's conclusion epitomizes the anti-Martinist position: “Therefore I would wysh the whole Realme to judge unrightly, who deserves best to be bolstred and upheld in these dangerous times, either they that have religiously & constantly preached obedience to her Majesties loving people, or they that with a maske of Religion discharge them of theyr obedience?” (82). The answer is obvious: the hierarchical structure of the church is “a thing glorious in gods eyes, because he is the GOD of order” (91).

From such a perspective Martin must needs appear a mad dog or charlatan. Marphoreus, the author of Martin's Month's Mind, sees Martin's focus on the personalities of the bishops as seditious: “And to be short, never better lawes, nor wiser Magistrates; yet never such libertie in speaking, impudencie in writing, nor mischiefe in working, both privatelie against particuler persons (and those of the best) for their defacing, and publiquelie for the undermining of the Church, and overthrowe of the common wealth as now” (sigs. A4r-A4v). All the Elizabethan anxiety about disorder is focused on Martin as Marphoreus waxes eloquent in a long sentence:

But verie fitlie have they taken their name of Marring; that professe nothing else but marring: both the names of men, and quiet of the common wealth, and peace of the Churche, and livings of the Church, and Churches themselves: and the rewards of learning, and places of learning, and degrees of learning, and learning it selfe: and the lawes of the land, and the authoritie of the Prince, and last of all (for what can be lefte after for the Divell himselfe) sacrements, Ministers, praiers, yea the Lordes praier; and so set their brasen faces against heaven, and bend their forces against the Lord himselfe.

(sigs. C3r-C3v)

Given this extreme view, Marphoreus is unsparing in his grotesque account of the hoped-for death and funeral of Martin Marprelate.

The anti-Martinists attempted to discredit Martin by exposing his envious motives and seditious goals and by separating the comic persona from the real person who was risking his life. In the tracts Martin manages to make a buffoon of himself without compromising his serious intent; by reducing the controversy to mere buffoonery the anti-Martinists try to make Martin seem only a clown. This is the tactic used by John Lyly, whom we know to be the author of Pap with an Hatchet. Like Marphoreus, he emphasizes the ludic element in the Marprelate tracts to suggest they are a mere game or rhetorical contest. Apologizing for the abusiveness of his pamphlet, he says of his opponents, “Seeing then either they expect no grave replie, or that they are settled with railing to replie; I thought it more convenient, to give them a whisk with their owne wand, than to have them spurd with deeper learning” (Works, 3:396). Accordingly, Pap with an Hatchet is an exercise in invective and scandalous innuendo. If the whole Marprelate controversy sometimes seems to degenerate into a tongue-in-cheek flyting or mere war of words, it is not because of Martin, who is clearly in earnest for all his japes, but because the anti-Martinists deliberately ignore Martin's sincerity.

Lyly uses the metaphor of role playing, introduced into the controversy by Martin in order to discredit the bishops, as a way of suggesting that Martin's objectives are as much playacting as his style and comic devices. Throughout his pamphlet, Lyly reminds us that his railing, for all its nastiness, is a performance: “Now comes a biting speach, let mee stroake my beard thrice like a Germain, before I speak a wise word” (406). His theatrical persona shifts roles constantly, clowning like Martin, swaggering outrageously, pontificating. Lyly, the professional dramatist and wit-about-town, advises Martin, “If thy vain bee so pleasant, and thy wit so nimble, that all consists in glicks and girds; pen some playe for the Theater, write some ballads for blinde David and his boy, devise some jestes, & become another Scogen” (412). If Martin sets himself up as a clown to make the bishops seem clownish, Lyly dramatizes himself as a belligerent ruffian in an attempt to make Martin seem arrogant. Such a dramatic use of a fictive persona is no innovation for the creator of Euphues.

Pap with an Hatchet was criticized by Gabriel Harvey because of the potentially disruptive effect of its theatricality. Harvey's “An Advertisement for Pap-hatchet and Martin Mar-prelate” was written in 1589 to answer an insult directed at him in Lyly's pamphlet, although it was not published until 1593 as part of Pierce's Supererogation. Harvey understands that Lyly's raillery is intended as a response in kind to Martin but does not think this excuses “the carrion of thy unsavory, and stinking Pamflett” (sig. I4v). The deliberately arrogant style will appeal “onely to roister-doisters, and hacksters, or at-least to jesters, and vices” (K1r). Though Lyly's persona is like a Lord of Misrule intended to bring order to the disorderly, Harvey fears that Lyly is merely reinforcing the bad example set by Martin. “If the world should applaude to such a roisterdoisterly Vanity, (as Impudency hath beene prettily suffered to sett-upp the creast of his vaineglory:) what good could grow of it, but to make every man madbrayned, and desperate; but a generall contempt of all good order, in Saying, or Dooing; but an Universal Topsy-turvy?” (sig. K2v). Lyly's theatricality is the problem. “He hath not played the Vicemaster of Poules, and the Fool master of the Theater for naughtes; himselfe a mad lad, as ever twangd, never troubled with any substance of witt, or circumstance of honestie” (sig. R4r). Harvey accuses Lyly of fabricating scandalous anecdotes of Puritan concupiscence, then presenting them as fact. The anti-Martinists have joined Martin in subverting the social order by suggesting it is a theatrical fiction and by encouraging the sort of egocentric belief and assertive behavior that dare challenge that fiction.

Cutbert Curry-knave, who was probably Nashe himself, combines the tactics of Martin and the previous anti-Martinists in An Almond for a Parrot. His persona is as belligerent as Lyly's, although not as obsessively abusive. Like Marphoreus and Lyly, he accentuates the theatricality of the controversy, particularly in his mock dedication to “that most Comicall and conceited Cavaleire Monsieur du Kempe, Jestmonger and Vice-gerent generall to the Ghost of Dicke Tarlton” (Nashe, 3:341). At the same time he is like Pasquil in his attempt to join issue seriously with the Puritans. And he is like Martin in his style and in his use of journalistic facts, in this case, to expose the hypocrisy of the Puritans. By the time An Almond was published in 1590, Martin's main press had been seized and most of the assistants arrested, so the work broadens its attack into a general indictment of the Puritan movement. As in The Anatomy of Absurdity, the hypocrisy of the Puritans particularly incenses the author; this is the implicit excuse for the work's resort to scandalmongering. Unlike the allusive and probably fictive libel of Pap with an Hatchet, the accounts of Puritan misdeeds in An Almond are specific and often documented.

Like Martin himself, Cutbert Curry-knave wants to expose his opponents as knaves pretending to sanctimony for selfish motives. This muckraking can be amusing, as when that champion of Puritan asceticism Phillip Stubbes is accused of trying to seduce a widow with the pledge of a Geneva Bible. John Penry is traduced in an extended mock biography that depicts him as an arrogant man who espouses unorthodox opinions in an effort to aggrandize himself. Evidence is gathered to suggest that Penry is Martin. He embodies the singularity of the Puritans, their tendency to value and promote their private opinions to the detriment of good order in the commonwealth. Cartwright is accused of being the source of such presumption: “What childe doth not see into the pride of his heart, that first entertained the impudency of controlling antiquity, and preferd the poison of his owne perverse opinions before the experience of so many Churches, counsails, and fathers?” (3:60). Once introduced, Puritanism has attracted a host of malcontents and hypocrites: “I am more then halfe weary of tracing too and fro in this cursed common wealth, where sinfull simplicitye, pufte uppe with the pride of singularity, seekes to perverte the name and methode of magistracy” (358).

Cutbert Curry-knave's account of Puritanism adheres to the official view of Whitgift and Bancroft. He extolls obedience in the name of Christian humility and decries arrogance as the child of Satan. Puritanism has caused “the utter impoverishing of allegeance of the communality” and has promoted treason in the name of reform. As for Martin himself, how could anyone believe “this myrie mouthed mate a partaker of heavenly inspiration, that thus aboundes in his uncharitable railings?” (347). Cutbert sees himself as a champion fighting Martin in single combat. “Thou art the man, olde Martin of Englande, that I am to deale withall, that strives to outstrip all our writers in witte, and justle our government forth of doores with a jest” (349). Martin's new-forged weapons of controversy are turned against him with a vengeance.

Marphoreus and Lyly easily outdid Martin in railing because for him railing was secondary to a serious purpose while for them it was the essence of the controversy. Their reduction of the dispute to a shouting match was effective at making Martin seem contentious but at the expense of making the anti-Martinists and their sponsors seem petty and contentious as well. The author of An Almond keeps to a slightly higher road by discussing substantive issues, but his attempts to expose the hypocrisy of the Puritans through specific attacks on their peccadilloes makes him seem spiteful and mean-spirited also. Moreover, his focus on the discrepancy between the pretensions and the private lives of the Puritans, like Martin's similar account of the bishops, threatened to make the whole religious and social order seem a theatrical contrivance. Cutbert's attempt to outclown Martin suggested that both parties in the dispute were playing out an irreverent comedy.

This is the point of Francis Bacon's objection to “this immodest and deformed manner of writing lately entertained, whereby matters of religion are handled in the style of the stage” (76-77). A theatrical role is artificial and assumed by a performer, but a social role in a traditional society is intended to have a reality of its own and be greater than the fallible human who fills it. The legitimacy of the ecclesiastical hierarchy was particularly important, since it legitimized so many other social institutions. Lyly's quip “Well, either religion is but policie, or policie scarce religious” was dangerous to the extent that the Elizabethan church was a matter of policy (Lyly, 3:407; see also J. Allen, 178-81). Martin undermined the political and social order by shifting attention from the performance to the actor. If the bishop of London was only greedy John Aylmer, a dwarfish thief in giant's robes, what might follow about Lord Burghley or the queen? The Puritans denied any such implications, but subsequent history shows that they questioned more than the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

The number of anti-Martinist works projected but never published, the apologetic tone of Pasquil's last tract, and the comments of observers like Bacon and the Harveys show that the pseudonymous campaign against Martin was cut short because it reflected badly on the government and encouraged the dissension it was intended to suppress. Puritan leaders publicly disowned Martin's method of arguing; the bishops could not long condone the use of the same methods by the anti-Martinists, even in secret. The ideological position of Lyly, Nashe, and the others was militantly orthodox, but the fictitious spokesmen they invented and their employment of invective meant that their appeal to readers was closer to that of Martin than that of the dignified bishops. They were trapped between two decorums: the requirement that they write a style in accord with the gravity of the topic and their desire to fight Martin on his own terms and reach the readers he delighted. They erred in tacitly granting that the controversy was a theatrical performance in which they themselves, Martin, and, by implication, the bishops all played roles like actors.

These radical implications of the Marprelate controversy would have been rejected by most Elizabethans, including the participants in the quarrel. But Nashe was to continue to explore the theatrical metaphor with its implication that social roles were artificial. In the pamphlets he published during the next decade he adapted Martin's use of a persona to his purposes and mastered the colloquial style Martin popularized. He continued to reject the arrogance of the Puritans, but his own writings became more singular as he drifted away from orthodoxy. Writing itself was increasingly a performance and rhetoric not a tool but a contrivance. Martin lost his battle against episcopacy, but in the case of Nashe and probably many others, he undercut naive faith in the social order. From a traditional point of view his effect was insidious, since it induced a basic shift in perspective even among his opponents. The efforts of the Harveys to link Nashe and Martin reflect a truth: Nashe may have helped “quell” Martin, but Martin destroyed Nashe's innocence and set his literary career on an unknown course away from orthodoxy.

Note

1. In a little-known tract, Nashe's adversary Phillip Stubbes advanced a similar argument, ostensibly against Roman Catholic bishops: “And in this playerly manner doth this hystrionical bishop play his part amongst the rest, making the temple of the Lord a stage or theater, themselves players, and the people stark fooles in beholding their fooleries” (Theater, sig. E2r).

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