SOURCE: Gutierrez, Nancy A. “King Arthur, Scotland, Utopia and the Italianate Englishman: What Does Race Have to Do with It?” Shakespeare Studies 26 (1998): 37-48.

[In the following essay, Gutierrez looks at Baldwin's The Funerals of King Edward the Sixth, Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, and a speech by Queen Elizabeth I to demonstrate that there was a developing awareness of racial hierarchies in mid-sixteenth-century England.]

Exactly what does it mean that race is a category of analysis for early modern writings? In most cases, the word race suggests a “color”/whiteness binary, in which whiteness is privileged. However, in the first half of the sixteenth century, color was not yet the dominant “other” within the English culture. So the task of using race as a category of analysis in this early, early modern period means that configurations other than the color/whiteness binary should be explored, configurations, I would argue, that are contained within the emergence of English nationalism and Tudor hegemony. As a way into exploring this issue, I offer a kind of sideways preamble—three representative texts from three different moments within the Tudor period.

Sir Thomas Malory's Le morte d'Arthur, published in 1485, is a nostalgic view of a political and social ideal lost in past time. Sir Ector's lament for his dead brother, Sir Lancelot, provides a recital of the values that age held dear:

And thou were the courteoust knight that ever bore shield! And thou were the truest friend to thy lover that ever bestrode horse, and thou were the truest lover of a sinful man that ever loved woman, and thou were the kindest man that ever struck with sword. And thou were the goodliest person that ever came among press of knights, and thou was the meekest man and the gentlest that ever ate in hall among ladies, and thou were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.

(157)

The chivalric code exemplified by Lancelot's life shows us a social system based on an elaborate code of manners, both in battle and out—an exclusive and elitist “club” that only the highest-born men could enter. Certainly not the reality in the war-ravaged England of 1485, it nevertheless was an attractive paradigm that Henry VII utilized in his crafting of the Tudor myth as an overlay upon his pragmatic consolidation of political and economic power.

Seventy-five years later, in 1560, William Baldwin, an outspoken reformer and pamphleteer, published a poem entitled The Funerals of King Edward the Sixth. Written shortly after the death of the sixteen-year-old king in 1553, it depicts England as a kind of Sodom and Gomorrah, which God punishes by taking away its virtuous king. In this poem, England is put in opposition to “the maynland … With Mahometrie and Idol blud embrewed” and found to be even more depraved. Baldwin appeals to the people of England to change their ways so that God may again, by his “special grace / [Make England] his wurd and chosens resting place” and “[power] on it such store / Of welthy giftes as none could wish for more” (69). In the years since the publication of Le morte d'Arthur, the picture of an idealized England has shifted from an emphasis upon social relations among the aristocracy to that of a wished-for Protestant-shaped morality displayed by all classes of people. Further, this morality is provided a counterpoint by the introduction of the “other” of Moslem and idolatry.

In 1588, Queen Elizabeth reviews her troops before the onslaught of the Armada. She calls her people “faithful and loving,” in whose loyal hearts and goodwill is placed her chiefest strength. She asserts she is “resolved … to live or die amongst [them] all, and to lay down for my God and for my kingdom and for my people, my honour and my blood.” Elizabeth's words provide yet another view of England and its people: she depicts not a social system, not a moral order, but a united culture, with a common God, a common code of ethics, and a common polity.¹

Within this emerging national identity, as it is rendered in these three discursive “snapshots,” we can also chart an emerging awareness of racial difference. However, this difference rests not on differences of color, but on differences within the concept of “whiteness.” To begin exploring this idea, I would like first to call attention to three sites of debate within current scholarship. Whereas, prior to the early 1990s, the books and articles that addressed race as a category of analysis were scarce—and most started with the examination of the Moor as a character type in Renaissance drama—in the last several years, the situation has changed: one single-authored book and two edited collections, as well as numerous other articles in major Renaissance journals have appeared; the Modern Language Association and national and international conferences on Renaissance studies have featured sessions dedicated solely or partly to the topic; and conception of racial and race issues in early modern culture has extended itself beyond the figure of the Moor to representations of American Indians, Turks, Jews, and numerous peoples of Asian descent, as well as to an examination of “white” and “black” as ideological counterpoints in the culture. Issues of class and gender are recognized as important relatives to this research. Within the expanding inquiry of this topic, three questions concerning both content and methodology remain a constant presence:

1. A question grappled with in virtually every piece of scholarship on the subject, the interest in defining “race” itself as it has meaning in the early modern period cannot be neatly labeled, despite the disinterested scholar's desire to define terms clearly. Rather, this interrogation is a recurrent microcosm of our own culture's uneasiness with this particular aspect of difference. That race is a construct is a starting place for us all, and we all then “construct” what it is we mean by the term. One of the inherent ambiguities is the prevalent recognition that “race becomes more or less visible in early modern culture in the degree to which it is articulated through and articulates some other hegemonic category” (MacDonald 13)—such as gender, class, or nationality. If race is generally recognized only in relation to something else, exactly what is it we mean when we use the term? Kim Hall passionately argues that understanding such ambiguity and instability are as much a necessary aspect of our understanding of race in the early modern context as they are when we consider gender or class or any other category of analysis. While I am singularly attracted to this argument, it is important to remember that, as always, when flexibility rather than concreteness of idea is privileged, the category in question becomes susceptible to either erasure or appropriation.

2. We seem to have moved past the initial objection that race is a modern term that may not be anachronistically applied to early modern writing without an invalid reading. However, while we are, theoretically, aware that the construction of race includes the term whiteness as well as color, examination of whiteness in and of itself, without its binary of blackness or darkness, is absent. As Toni Morrison and others have persuasively argued, the category of whiteness must also be recognized and studied as the opposing other for racial categories. Substantial and excellent work is being done on the other in race issues in early modern culture, but, with certain exceptions, the dominant and the primary culture that can be represented by the term whiteness is an unexamined site, unless it is brought in to define and clarify the “other.”

3. A commonplace opening (or closing) for articles on the topic of race in early modern writings is a nod to critics' concentration on drama and, more specifically, on Shakespeare. Partly, this is due to the acceptance of the 1550s as the period when a discursive record about Africans in England first appears. While a scholar or two at times suggest alternatives to this time sequence, nevertheless, most students of the period find themselves mining works—and mostly dramatic works—written during the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries.

If we take seriously these three recurrent concerns in the scholarship about race in the early modern period—the indeterminacy of the term, the lack of attention to the racial question of whiteness, and the disproportionate attention on drama—I would suggest that an important next step in our collective intellectual enterprise is to contextualize and historicize the racialized texts in the Elizabethan period by foregrounding both Henrician and Edwardian discourse, especially humanist discourse. It is in the spirit of this re-examination that I spotlighted the three texts that opened this essay. Humanism as an intellectual movement was neither monolithic nor stable, so examining such texts using race as a critical term is fraught with minefields. However, humanism's importance as one of the significant cultural determinators for the period is critical, and therefore seminal, in the current effort to establish a scholarly discourse that addresses the racialized forces existing during the sixteenth century. The three texts I cited earlier—late medieval, mid-Reformation, and late Elizabethan—are interesting moments in the process by which the English nation began to consider itself a single collective: privileged (i.e., white), divinely blessed, and culturally and politically a unified entity.

While the discovery of the New World most manifestly inculcated an awareness of race in the English of the later-sixteenth century, its effect occurred within a world conditioned by the tenets of humanism in its variety of guises: as an educational regimen; as a return to origins, both biblical and classical; as a revaluing of public life and works. The elitism and conservatism of humanism in general meant that the few, rather than the many, were privileged, and this in turn resulted in a hierarchy closed to those who were not male, not educated, and not in the higher levels of society. Further, the rise of humanism was concurrent with a period of political and social flux in which feudal relationships were being redefined in terms of a centralized court and the nationstate. Such a world resulted in a discursive tendency to compartmentalize, to establish concrete identities, to build walls, to shut out. (Of course, the fact that this was also a period in which fluidity of movement characterized class structure serves only to reinforce this discursive evidence.) As the English began to be aware of themselves as a single entity with its own national identity, the culture simultaneously began to define anything “not-English” as dangerous and other. In other words, this world established itself as civilized, chosen—as white.

A cursory examination of seminal texts of this period reveal that the English national identity was being created in opposition to a series of threats to its culture, and these threats were presented both directly through polemic and indirectly through not-so-hidden fictions. As the English national identity was crystallized, the psychic boundaries of the people were also being circumscribed—against cultures, ideologies, even other national borders.

“The New Learning” of humanism, by its very name, puts into opposition forms of education and intellectual endeavor prevalent in England during the fifteenth century, especially prior to the accession of Henry VII, the first monarch to patronize fully those men who had been trained in the new philosophy. In counterpoint to the system of chivalry advanced in Malory's stories of King Arthur as elegant and courtly, the early humanists characterized the middle ages as barbarous and Gothic. As Roger Ascham said in his introduction to Toxophilus:

“In our fathers tyme nothing was red, but bookes of fayned cheualrie, wherin a man by redinge, shuld be led to none other ende, but onely to manslaughter and baudrye.”

(xiv)

After the Reformation, English humanists literally demonized the influence of Roman Catholicism on humanist learning.

“And yet ten Morte Arthures do not the tenth part so much harme, as one of these bookes, made in Italie, and translated in England. They open, not fond and common wayes to vice, but such subtle, cunnyng, new, and diuerse shiftes, to cary yong willes to vanitie, and yong wittes to mischief, to teach old bawdes new schole poyntes, as the simple head of an English man is not hable to inuent, nor neuer was hard of in England before, yea when Papistrie ouerflowed all.”

(231)

The Englishmen who are tempted to give in “to the inchantments of Circes, brought out of Italy” have this said of them:

“And so, beyng Mules and Horses before they went [to Italy], returned verie Swyne and Asses home agayne: yet euerie where verie Foxes with suttle and busie heades; and where they may, verie wolues, with cruell malicious hartes. A meruelous monster, which, for filthines of liuyng, for dulnes to learning him selfe, for wilinesse in dealing with others, for malice in hurting without cause, should carie at once in one bodie, the belief of a Swyne, the head of an Asse, the brayne of a Foxe, the wombe of a wolfe.”

(228)

In sum, this beast is not an Englishman: Englese Italianato, e vn diabolo incarnato, that is, “The Italianate Englishman is the devil incarnate.”

Proponents of the new learning were also able to exploit political or military events in such a way as to privilege English rule and righteousness against an “other” entity. The relations with Scotland provide several illustrations. In the early part of his reign, for example, Henry VIII made several moves to establish himself as one of the leading sovereigns of Europe, invading France in 1513 in order to reestablish England's claim on that country. This excursion into France was perceived by the larger European community as largely superfluous, and his minor victories at Therounne and Tournay in some ways damaged rather than improved his reputation as a great warrior king. However, a border skirmish with the Scots at Flodden Field while Henry was in France, a skirmish resulting in the death of King James IV and most of the Scottish aristocracy, became the occasion for Henry's paid publicists, his court humanists, to situate their monarch as a divinely appointed regent thwarting a vassal's treason. More important, the victory provided the opportunity to paint the Scots as uncivilized barbarians: John Skelton, for example, describes them as “rough-footed,” as “drunken,” as “ranke” (i.e., coarse, crude, wanton), as ultimately as “gups” (cart horses). The racist inflections in Skelton's several poetic diatribes against the Scots, with few exceptions such as a short essay by Valerie Allen, have generally received no comment, although Skelton repeatedly bestializes and demonizes the English enemy. While Skelton bestializes the Scots, his fellow humanists are even more chauvinistic. Peter Carmeliano vilifies James IV because he has violated a treaty with Henry, having entered England “veluti turcus / Saracenus / et Indus”—like a Turk, a Saracen, and Indian. In this case, the Scots, who look like the English and who speak the same language, are depicted as the most extreme “other.” Ten years later, when the duke of Albany invaded England and then withdrew in apparent apprehension and concern about the English army's potency, Skelton reiterated his abuse in a court-commissioned piece that was clearly written to influence prominent nobility and gentry, not only of English military might and readiness, but also of its exceptional divine favor.

Political advice books address Englishness as well, although perhaps not as flagrantly. In his 1516 Utopia, Thomas More depicts an island people so remote from the rest of the world that they are virtually unknown. An obvious analogue to England, the country of Utopia is ostensibly an ideal as presented by Raphael Hythlodaeus. Its isolation is the direct result of the action taken by Utopus, the country's conqueror and first king, who, immediately after his conquest, ordered a channel to be dug that would separate the land entirely from that of its neighbors: “the channels are known only to the Utopians, so hardly any strangers enter the bay without one of their pilots; and even they themselves could not enter safely if they did not direct themselves by some landmarks on the coast” (31). While there is a certain humor in the idea that the native sailors themselves have difficulty navigating the channels around their own island, More accurately identifies an inherent solipsism and cultural inward-lookingness that endangers any kind of sympathy and tolerance of other cultures. And indeed, Utopia is characterized by an extreme kind of solipsistic synergy: it enslaves its people who try to leave; it rewards conformity and compliance and punishes idiosyncrasy and individuality; it has no curiosity about other peoples or cultures. This fiction is England to the extreme, perhaps England only as it was in danger of becoming, but England nevertheless.

Once Henry VIII breaks from the Roman church in the 1530s, Protestant polemics continue the process of creating a reformed and divinely marked England, particularly by demonizing anything and anyone connected with the Catholic church. Hence, in one ribald polemic by Luke Shepherd, the Mass is personified as the granddaughter of Pluto, illegitimate daughter of the pope, and niece of Mohammed (The Upcheringe of the Messe, ca. 1548), “othering” the principal ritual of the Roman church by applying three different categories: pagan, Roman Catholic, and Moslem. In William Baldwin's Beware the Cat (1552), Ireland is the antithesis of right religion and civilized behavior, embracing superstition and heathen ritual; in fact, Baldwin's Ireland here parallels the England of his Funerals of Edward VI. Roger Ascham's well-known vilification of Italians, a part of which I quoted above, turns on the tendency of Englishmen to be corrupted and thus to lose their “Englishness.”

Later in the century, awareness that England was unique from other European countries in its lack of internal strife prompted numerous popular ballads and pamphlets to be printed, extolling England as God's chosen country. For example, in 1579, Thomas Churchyard published a work entitled The Miserie of Flaunders, Calamities of Fraunce, Misfortune of Portugall, Vnquietnes of Irelande, Troubles of Scotlande: And the blessed state of Englande. A series of tedious poems in fourteeners, the subject and theme of the work is manifest in its title. A consciousness of difference permeates the work, which ends with these lines:

Englande, thou art blest in deede,
Thy necke is free from yoke:
Thy armes are strong, thy body sounde,
And in good howre be spoke …
More blessed than thy neighbours all,
By proof thou art as yet,
More likely art thou by that cause,
In peace and reste to sit.

(sig. [Eii.sup.v])

Other like publications were precipitated by various crises in the reign, such as Elizabeth's excommunication from the Roman Church and the Ridolfi Plot in 1570, the Babington Plot in 1586, the Essex Rebellion in 1601, and, of course, the threat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, the latter of which precipitated Elizabeth's (possibly apocryphal) words, which I quoted earlier.

These various texts collectively depict whatever opposes the humanist regimen as monstrous, depraved, and treacherous. On the other hand, English identity is evinced as normal, virtuous, and loyal. Englishness is civilized and cultured; not-English is rude and barbaric. The cultural, ideological, and religious space in which humanist discourse situates Englishness, a space that relies on hierarchies of whiteness, is a precondition against which “race” as a construct may be defined. Such a consciousness of a national and cultural identity, even as it is in the process of being forged, shapes the construction of race we see in texts produced in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries.

We are currently experiencing a renaissance of sorts in scholarship on the reigns of the early Tudors. Perhaps sparked by John King's English Reformation Literature in 1982, which focuses on the literature written during King Edward VI's brief reign, we also now have available several books on the Henrys, but particularly Henry VIII: Alistair Fox's Politics and Literature in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII and Greg Walker's Plays of Persuasion: Drama and Politics at the Court of Henry VIII and Persuasive Fictions: Faction, Faith, and Political Culture in the Reign of Henry VIII, as well as edited collections by Alistair Fox and John Guy, by Daniel Williams, and by Peter C. Herman. Several books have focused solely on single authors, such as John Skelton (Walker's John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520's and Arthur Kinney's John Skelton, Priest as Poet), Thomas Starkey (Thomas Mayer's Thomas Starkey and the Commonwealth), and Thomas Wolsey (Peter Gwyn's The King's Cardinal), while others have examined discrete aspects of the culture of the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries: David Carlson's English Humanist Books and John King's Tudor Royal Iconography, to cite two particular examples. There have also been numerous books reconsidering the reformation in England: to name just a few, Anne Hudson's The Premature Reformation, Peter Lake and Maria Dowling's edited Protestantism and the National Church in Sixteenth-Century England, and Joseph S. Block's Factional Politics and the English Reformation, 1520-1540.

In very few cases do any of these books call attention to the production and reception of racial texts created during this earliest part of the early modern period. Roland Greene calls attention to how Petrarchism's intense interest in desire, domination, and conquest is paradigmatic of the colonial enterprise, thus contextualing Wyatt's lyrics within his native country's contacts with the New World; Thomas Mayer notices that, in his description of an ideal commonwealth, Thomas Starkey sets up binaries between a people who live “lyke wylde bestys in the woodys wythout lawys & rulys of honesty” and “a polytyke ordur of a multytude conspyryng togyddur in vertue & honesty” (120); Peter Gwyn notes how discourse in the early decades of the sixteenth century depicts the Irish and the Welsh as “wilde men,” uncivilized and barbaric in looks, language, and custom, and consequently separate from the English (237). However, these discussions are the exception. The various antithetical forces of the period have simply not been examined as examples of racialized or preracialized polarities. For example, the Tudor Myth, which espouses that Henry VII is the literal descendant of the legendary King Arthur, whose prophesied return was promised to ignite a British resurgence, also works to legitimize and celebrate the colonized natives of England in opposition to the rule of the Norman French. Further, while in apparent opposition to the humanist view of history as secular and human-centered, this “myth” contributed to the rise of Anglo-Saxon studies later in the century, which more firmly established the English national people as ancient and distinguished descendants of Germanic peoples, and as uniquely equipped to provide leadership to the various peoples of the world. These cultural ways demarcating the English cooperated with the efforts of the early reformers to mark themselves as followers of the one true church, but this antagonism, too, is not discussed as a kind of antecedent acknowledgment of racial difference. Likewise, the on-again, off-again battles between England and France, and England and Scotland, and the incipient threat of the Holy Roman Empire in the person of Philip II receive considerable attention, but again, not within the bounds of race analysis. If cultural reception has been the focus of race analysis of early modern texts up to this point, it is necessary to review cultural production as well, and not just cultural production at the moment of composition or of publication, but actual creation of the culture itself as much as it can be recalled and reconstituted.

The racialized discourse of the late-sixteenth century and later was not generated spontaneously, but was a constituent piece in a culture that had long been fraught with tensions between itself and “others” in areas of religion, politics, language, and custom. As hierarchies of whiteness were established, such as English/Scottish, English/Italian, and English/Irish, a kind of racial awareness began to emerge. How the more familiar concept of racial difference itself connects to these older tensions is a question that we have only begun to ask with any frequency. In asking and in finding answers to such a question, we continue to demarcate this fascinating and rather new (to us) aspect of the early modern period, and in the process, discover anew the world we think we know.

Note

1. Susan Frye has recently initiated a lively debate concerning the authenticity of this very famous speech (see both Frye and Green in Works Cited). Whether the speech is apocryphal or authentic, my principal point stands—and in fact, if the speech indeed was later invented and ascribed to the queen at this moment of national crisis, it makes all the more convincing my comments regarding the English national identity at the turn of the seventeenth century.

Works Cited

Allen, Valerie. “‘Scot’ as a Term of Abuse in Skelton's Against Dundas.” Studia Neophilologica 59 (1987): 19-23.

Ascham, Roger. The Scholemaster. 1904; rpt. Roger Ascham: English Works, edited by William Aldis Wright. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.

———. Toxophilus. 1904; rpt. Roger Ascham: English Works, edited by William Aldis Wright. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.

Baldwin, William. Beware the Cat: The First English Novel. Edited by William A. Ringler, Jr., and Michael Flachmann. San Marine, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1988.

———. Beware the Cat and The Funerals of King Edward the Sixth. Edited by William P. Holden. New London: Connecticut College, 1963.

Block, Joseph S. Factional Politics and the English Reformation, 1520-1540. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1993.

Carlson, David R. English. Humanist Books: Writers and Patrons, Manuscript and Print, 1475-1525. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993.

Carmeliano, Peter. “Epitaphium Iacoobi Regis Scotorum.” In “Print into Manuscript: A Flodden Field News Pamphlet (British Library MS Additional 29506).” By Nancy Gutierrez and Mary Erler. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 8 (1987): 189-229. [Carmeliano's poem appears on p. 229.]

Churchyard, Thomas. The Miserie of Flavnders, Calamitie of Fraunce, Misfortune of Portugall, Vnquietnes of Irelande, Troubles of Scotland: And the blessed State of Englande. 1579.

Fox, Alistair. Politics and Literature in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.

Fox, Alistair, and John Guy, eds. Reassessing the Henrician Age: Humanism, Politics and Reform, 1500-1550. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986.

Frye, Susan. “The Myth of Elizabeth at Tilbury.” Sixteenth Century Journal 23 (1992): 95-114.

Green, Janet M. “‘I My Self’: Queen Elizabeth I's Oration at Tilbury Camp.” Sixteenth Century Journal 28 (1997): 421-45.

Greene, Roland. “The Colonial Wyatt: Contexts and Openings.” In Rethinking the Henrician Era: Essays on Early Tudor Texts and Contexts, edited by Peter C. Herman, 240-66. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.

Gwyn, Peter. The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey. London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1990.

Hall, Kim F. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.

Hendricks, Margo, and Patricia Parker, eds. Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period. London: Routledge, 1994.

Herman, Peter C., ed. Rethinking the Henrician Era: Essays on Early Tudor Texts and Contexts. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.

Hudson, Anne. The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.

King, John N. English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982.

———. Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Kinney, Arthur F. John Skelton, Priest as Poet: Seasons of Discovery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.

Lake, Peter, and Maria Dowling, eds. Protestantism and the National Church in Sixteenth-Century England. London: Croom Helm, 1987.

MacDonald, Joyce Green, ed. Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Renaissance. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997.

Malory, Thomas. Malory: Le morte d'Arthur. (Pts. 7 and 8). Edited by D. S. Brewer. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974.

Mayer, Thomas. Thomas Starkey and the Commonwealth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

More, Thomas. Utopia. Translated and edited by Robert M. Adams. 2d ed. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1992.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Skelton, John “Agaynst the Scottes,” “A Ballade of the Scottysshe Kynge,” and “Howe the Douty Duke of Albany.” In The Complete English Poems, edited by John Scattergood. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguins Books, 1983.

———. “Chorus de Dys contra Scottos.” In The Latin Writings of John Skelton, edited by David Carlson. Studies in Philology, Texts and Studies, LXXXVIII, no. 4 (1991).

Shepherd, Luke. The Upcheringe of the Messe. Ca. 1548.

Walker, Greg. John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

———. Plays of Persuasion: Drama and Politics at the Court of Henry VIII. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

———. Persuasive Fictions: Faction, Faith, and Political Culture in the Reign of Henry VIII. Aldershot, Hants: Scolar Press, 1996.

Williams, Daniel, ed. Early Tudor England: Proceedings of the 1987 Harlaxton Symposium. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1989.