Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-cfpbc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T18:35:16.367Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - Literature and the court

from 2 - The Tudor era from the Reformation to Elizabeth I

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
William Sessions
Edited by
David Loewenstein  and
Janel Mueller
David Loewenstein
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Janel Mueller
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
Get access

Summary

The dynamics of literature in the early Tudor court

In the summer of 1537 Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, was imprisoned by order of the King. This was the first of four such occasions (from the last, in the Tower, he would not return). ‘The most folish prowde boye that ys in Englande’, the 21-year-old heir to the greatest title outside the royal family, was boxed in. If his punishment was mild – confinement in Windsor Castle, silent without the court’s activity, where walls without tapestries returned ‘a hollow sound of plaint’ – Surrey’s dilemma was not. In his stanzaic poem beginning ‘So crewell prison’, the longer of two texts he wrote to dramatise his situation, Surrey’s speaker is losing his ‘freedom’, a pun ambiguously situated between ‘liberty’ and ‘blood-nobility’. In actual fact, Henry VIII had sequestered his cousin, and the personal humiliation for the stylish aristocrat was worse than the public. Accordingly, in conversation, the courtier George Constantyne answers the attack on Surrey as a ‘prowde’ show-off by responding: ‘What then? he ys wise for all that’ and ‘no mervell though a yonge man so noble a mans sonne and heyre apparante be prowde’. The courtier on the lower rung identifies the very public place Surrey held in the stratified space – physical and cultural – called the court in 1537.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature , pp. 229 - 256
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Askew, Anne, The Examinations of Anne Askew, ed. Beilin, Elaine V., New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Askew, Anne, The First Examination of Anne Askewe Lately Martyred in Smithfelde by the Romysh Popes Upholders, with the Elucydacyon of Johan Bale, Marburg [Wesel: D. van der Straten,] 1546. 6th edn, 1560.Google Scholar
Baldwin, William, The Canticles or Balades of Salomon, Phraselyke Declared in English Metres, London: W. Baldwin, 1549.Google Scholar
Bevington, David, Tudor Drama and Politics: A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Braudel, Fernand, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Sian Reynold, 2 vols. (London: Collins, 1972–3), 2:7.Google Scholar
Collinson, Patrick, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Basingstoke: Macmillan, and New York: St Martin’s, 1988.Google Scholar
Duffy, Eamon, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Edward, VI, The Chronicle and Political Papers of King Edward VI, ed. Wilbur, K. Jordan, London: Allen & Unwin, and Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966.Google Scholar
Edward, VI, Literary Remains of King Edward the Sixth, ed. Nichols, John Gough, 2 vols., Roxburghe Club, London: J. B. Nichols & Sons, 1857.Google Scholar
Greenblatt, Stephen, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Guevara, Antonio, The Golden Boke of Marcus Aurelius, trans. Bourchier, John, Berners, Lord, London: T. Berthelet, 1535.Google Scholar
Hall, Vernon, Renaissance Literary Criticism: A Study of its Social Content, Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1959.Google Scholar
Herman, Peter C. (ed.), Rethinking the Henrician Era: Essays on Early Tudor Texts and Contexts, Chicago and Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey, ‘So crewell prison’, line 51, in Poems, ed. Jones, Emrys (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964).Google Scholar
Howard, Henry, Earl, of Surrey, Poems, ed. Jones, Emrys, Oxford University Press, 1964.Google Scholar
King, John N., English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition, Princeton University Press, 1982.Google Scholar
Latimer, Hugh, Selected Sermons of Hugh Latimer, ed. Chester, Allan G., Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1968.Google Scholar
Lewis, C. S., English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954. Rpt, 1962.Google Scholar
Luke, Mary, The Nine Days’ Queen: A Portrait of Lady Jane Grey, New York: W. Morrow, 1986.Google Scholar
MacCulloch, Diarmaid, Thomas Cranmer: A Life, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Marotti, Arthur, Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric, Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Miller, Helen, Henry VIII and the English Nobility, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986.Google Scholar
More, Thomas, Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation, ed. Martz, Louis L. and Manley, Frank, Complete Works, vol. 12 (1976).Google Scholar
More, Thomas, The History of King Richard III, ed. Sylvester, Richard S., Complete Works, vol. 3 (1963).Google Scholar
Muir, Kenneth, Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt, University of Liverpool Press, 1963.Google Scholar
Puttenham, George, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Willcock, Gladys Doidge and Walker, Alice, Cambridge University Press, 1936. Rpt, 1970.Google Scholar
Strong, Roy, Holbein and Henry VIII, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967.Google Scholar
Tottel, Richard, Tottel’s Miscellany (1557–1587), ed. Rollins, Hyder Edward, 2 vols., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928–9. Rev. edn, 1965.Google Scholar
Wall, Wendy, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Wyatt, Sir Thomas, The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, ed. Rebholz, R. A., London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975. Rpt, Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin, 1978.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×