The Tudor court that Heywood worked within was a dynamic, bewildering organization. Its culture, as it developed during the early years of Henry VIII’s reign, was a disturbing mixture of formality and informality, freedom and constraint, desire and frustration. This juxtaposition of oxymoronic terms affected every aspect of court, including its regulation and regulations. The Eltham Ordinance, passed in 1526, were presented in public as a serious attempt to reform the court, although it is now recognized that they also had the effect of increasing the power of Thomas Wolsey (Guy 1988:103-4). The Ordinance is a set of rules designed to order every last detail of the court. They open with a typically Henrician claim that the reason reform is necessary is that Henry has been absent and that in his absence corruption has spread:
First, it is not unknowne how the King’s Highness soon after his first assumption of his crown [...] for the defence of the church, and for sundry other great and notable respects and causes, was enforced and brought unto the wars; wherein his Grace, not for any inordinate appetite or desire, but for the weale of Christendom [...] hath much travailed and been occupied; in such wise as many officers and ministers of his household being employed and appointed to the making of provisions and other things concerning the wars, the accustomed good order of his household hath been greatly hindered and in manner subverted; which by little and little is now come more and more unto an indirect course far from the good constitutions of old times [...] his Grace is [therefore] minded and determined to see a reformation of the said errors, and establish such an order, both in this household and chamber aforesaid, as the same being duly fulfilled and observed, all said errors shall in brief time be totally removed and extinct. (Collection 1790:137)
It is important to remember what this passage seeks to obscure. Henry had been monarch for seventeen years when the Ordinance was issued and therefore the argument that the court had become corrupt in his absence is nothing more than a convenient fiction. The Ordinance articulates a reform programme that is utopian in scale and ambition; the entire royal household and court was to be restored and held to an absolute order right down to the management of spent candles:
Cap 27—It is ordered that the King’s groom-porters and the Queen’s shall fetch no wax, white lights, wood nor coals more then reasonable ought to be spent, by the oversight of the gentleman ushers; and that the said groom porters do daily bring in the remain of the torches and other wax remaining overnight, by nine of the clock in the morrow; and for lack of doing thereof to loose for every time one week’s wages; the same to be overseen and executed by the clerk comptroller from time to time. (144)
At one level the Ordinance’s emphasis on controlling the remains of torches and candles reflects the extent to which in this period these were luxury items. This passage also, however, articulates a desire to order, in and through writing, every aspect of court—its organization and economy. Above all, the Ordinance is designed to impose a spatial decorum on the court. In the process, however, it conjures up two images of court: one in which everything is controlled, fixed, and managed, another marked by disorder and venality, a court teetering on the brink of a complete descent into chaos. For example, when in the Ordinance courtiers are forbidden from stealing doorknobs, tables, and cupboards, the image that is inevitably created is of a court in which it was common for people to purloin these items (145). Imagine a court in which doors can’t be properly opened or closed; a court from which people pilfer large items of furniture so that one moment a space is filled with a table, the next—empty.
Not surprisingly the Ordinance sought to proscribe what kinds of people should live and work at court:
Cap. 31—And, to the intent the King’s Highness may be substantially served in his chamber and household, by such personages as be both honest in their gesture and behaviour [...] considering also the great confusion, annoyance, infection, trouble, and dishonour, that enseweth by the numbers as well of sickly, impotent, inable, and unmeete persons, as of rascals and vagabonds now spread and remaining and being in all the court [...] the King’s Highness therefore hath given charge unto his vice-chamberlain [. . .] to make view, search and report of the sufficiency, ability, demeanour, and qualities of all such persons as be officers [...] and servants in the said household and chambers. (146)
Having servants who are honest in gesture and behaviour is an important element of the reform programme mapped out in the Ordinance. Consistently in the Ordinance morality is collapsed into transparency. Just as in More’s ideal commonwealth, the perfect court imagined in the Ordinance lacks any private spaces; sin would have no place to hide in Henry’s utopian court (Skinner 1987). In Heywood’s court drama, however, it is precisely in performance, in the gap between the meaning of words and their enactment, that the smooth embodied surface of the Henrician courtier and servant comes apart.
The impracticality of the utopian reform programme mapped out in the Ordinance is thrown into sharp relief by the collection of poems, ballads, and prophecies that make up the Welles Anthology, a manuscript collection assembled between late 1522 and 1534. This anthology contains a bewildering range of works, including possibly the first poem written by Heywood, ‘The Epitaph of Lob the King’s Fool’. In particular the Welles Anthology seems caught between endorsing courtly love as the norm of courtiership and articulating a cruder version of the relationship between the sexes. For example, the poem ‘O swete harte dere and most best belovyd’ is a traditional courtly lover’s lament:
Love causeth me a letter to make the last tyme that I departyd yow froo That that I have done ys for your sake when that my harte ytt was full [of] woo
Oftyn tymes full styll I goo and yet truly Soo cryst me spede I lett yo[u] wytt that ytt ys Soo Your bewtye maketh my harte to blede.
(Welles 1991: 214)
The last line is a refrain that echoes throughout the poem, emphasizing the extent to which the male narrator of this work is entirely and painfully in thrall to his love. ‘O swete harte dere and most best belovyd’ encapsulates the sense of courtly love as a kind of exquisite masochistic game in which the male lover writes out his pain in an act of self-abasement. The Welles Anthology, however, includes poems that depict the relationship between the sexes in very different terms. The poem ‘She that hathe a wanton eye’ is a witty misogynist text that works through numerous different types of women to prove that all are basically the same:
She that maketh ytt strange and quoynte and loketh as she were a seynte and wolde be woed aman may sey hur gentyll harte can nott say naye
She that hathe a wytte wandryng and all wey hur tong clattering and wyll abyd whysperyng yn the eyre hur tayll shulde be lyght of the stere.
(156,157)
Women who look like saints and those whose wits wander are basically the same underneath.
The poems collected in the Welles Anthology create an image of the court that is identical to that imagined in the Ordinance. At one level the court of these poems is a highly conventional and mannered place where lovers exchange longing looks across marbled halls, while at another it is a place awash with rampant sexual desire in which all women are ultimately nothing more than whores on the lookout for the next man to beguile.
Early Henrician court drama is equally split between order and disorder. In this period the management of court drama and entertainment more generally was becoming increasingly complex and professional, reflected in the creation of the Revels Office in 1545 (Streitberger 1985). At the same time the records of court drama that we possess reveal a situation in which the status of entertainments and interludes was constantly open to negotiation. In particular, as the accounts of court events that fill Hall’s chronicle clearly demonstrate, Henry was constantly prepared to disrupt the stately tenor of court dramas and plays with interventions whose force was predicated on their disordered and violent status (Dillon 2002). It would, however, be a mistake to see Henry as the only person possessing the ability or authority to create such moments of disruption. The court depicted in Heywood’s dramas is a decorous place in which civilized debates can be staged in front of an educated audience and a place in which sex and violence, wealth and poverty, good kingship and terrifying tyranny, all exist within the same space and time.
World History
