Among the most staunchly Protestant plays of the early Elizabethan period is the Norwich Grocers’ Pageant of Paradise (1566), which uses the story of the Fall to teach a lesson about divine election and salvation by faith. At the same time, the surviving documentation concerning the play’s final performance on a pageant wagon in the Norwich city centre in 1566 reveals that it also was a clever piece of commercial opportunism. For the array of exotic fruits—‘Orenges, fyges, allmondes dates Reysens, preunis, & aples’—which decorated the Tree of Knowledge and gave splendid colour and appeal to the staged paradise were precisely those imported goods which the Grocers’ Guild sold to the townspeople watching the play (Galloway 1984: 43; Norwich 11-18; Pound 1988: 57). And it was the trafficking in these pricey wares that made the Grocers among the richest and most prestigious trades in Norwich. However, this was more than a brilliant marketing ploy tacked on to a religious play. The Grocers had a reputation for piety as well as prosperity that dated back to the early Tudor period, and the play implicitly links the guild’s commercial success to Protestant religious zeal (P. White 2008: 77-88).
The Grocers’ Pageant of Paradise shows all the features of an early Elizabethan Protestant interlude, though it is rarely, if ever, identified as such (for more on these features, see below). And yet no other surviving interlude of the same time period, to my knowledge, positively conjoins economic prosperity with godliness. At least among guild plays, there must have been others like it in this respect, especially now that Ann Lancashire has firmly established that many of the greater and lesser trade companies of London (including the Grocers) during the Reformation era featured plays in their feast-day entertainments (Lancashire 2002). Moreover, the notion that God materially rewards those who combine diligence with righteousness, and indeed signifies his favour through prosperity, is traceable to the earliest of extant Protestant plays in England: John Bale’s Three Laws. By the late sixteenth century, England’s mercantile prowess is celebrated as evidence of God’s providential favour in a number of plays, notably first in Robert Wilson’s The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London (1590), about which more will be said later.
And yet, during the period in between, and especially in the decades immediately following Elizabeth’s accession when London in particular experienced unprecedented growth and rapid expansion of trade, the preponderance of extant Protestant religious drama is deeply distrustful of commercial practices. Representative of this highly critical attitude towards commerce is a series of printed plays that specifically target economic issues. They are The Cruel Debtor (1565), The Trial of Treasure (1567), Like Will to Like (1568), Enough Is as Good as a Feast (1570), The Tide Tarrieth No Man (1577), and All for Money (1578). Identified today as ‘moral interludes’ (and indeed four of the six are called such on their title pages), these plays are essentially religious in purpose, present characters who are part allegorical abstraction and part social type, and appeal to popular audiences. As I will argue, they were written in response to what early Elizabethan preachers and play-makers saw as the widespread practice of fraud, oppression, and injustice arising from a surge in the growth of commerce and wealth. Emphasizing the spiritual implications of economic ill-doing, these interludes were part of a print propaganda campaign led by the advanced Protestant wing to outlaw usury and to reduce rent-racking and other forms of economic exploitation. Indeed, it was not that long ago that scholars assumed that these plays were merely print propaganda, that they never made it onto the stage. However, as the discussion below will reveal, they are quite sophisticated and entertaining ‘performance texts’.
World History
