Luke Shepherd’s verse satires rank among the most important produced in England between the writings of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, whose lyrics circulated under Henry VIII, and Gascoigne, whose verse collection A Hundred Sundry Flowers appeared in 1573. Although he is not widely known as a satirist, Surrey could give vent to satirical ire in verse. ‘Th’ Assyrians’ king, in peace with foul desire’, for example, possibly contains a thinly veiled allegation against Henry VIII, who appears in the guise of Sardanapalus, the legendary decadent Assyrian king. Another of his satires, ‘London, hast thow accused me’, describes the city as a latter-day Babylon, the prototypical biblical city of apocalyptic judgement. Surrey’s target here are those
Prowd people that drede no fall,
Clothed with falshed and unright Bred in the closures of thy wall.
George Gascoigne, who spent much of his career in search of patronage, is the most important Elizabethan poet active before Sidney and Spenser. Sundry Flowers
Disguises itself as a poetic anthology produced in the milieu of the royal court, but it offended the authorities and was suppressed (see Maslen and Pugh, Chapters 17 and 34 in this volume). Other mid-century verse satirists include Miles Hogarde, who affords virtually the only example of a popular Catholic propagandist under Mary I. John Heywood’s The Spider and the Fly (1556), an estates debate written in rhyme royal, also occupies a prominent place (see Hunt, Chapter 20 in this volume). Among these writers, Shepherd remains remarkably accessible and dynamic.1
Shepherd employs a vigorous, Skeltonic style and a series of complex, shifting narrative personas in order to deliver vituperative critique against traditional religious beliefs and practice. Janice Devereux, Shepherd’s modern editor, proposes 1547 as the date for some of his poems, all of which had certainly appeared by 1548.2 The skilful use of macaronic diction (burlesque, mixed English-Latin verse) expands the possibilities of the Skeltonic mode in these poems. His satires afford outstanding examples of the native verse complaint, written in the tradition of Piers Plowman, which was co-opted as Protestant propaganda (see Hadfield, Chapter 32 in this volume). Shepherd moved in reformist circles during the opening years of Edward’s reign, where he would have gained familiarity with writings by William Tyndale, John Bale, and other evangelicals. The wide-ranging targets of his critique include the practice of clerical celibacy, the failure of Catholic clergy to prioritize learned ministry over the ale pot, the feast of Corpus Christi, and above all the ritual of the Mass, which became illegal in England following the promulgation of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s Order of Communion in 1548 (MacCulloch 1996: 384-6). Both Corpus Christi and the Mass rite came under attack for their central emphasis on the doctrine of transubstantiation, in which worshippers venerated the Eucharistic host as the literal body of Christ. Protestant reformers rejected this tenet on grounds that it promoted idolatry, and in 1548 they banned the Corpus Christi celebration. Cranmer’s 1548 communion service anticipates the radical reversal prescribed in the 1549 and especially the 1552 Book of Common Prayer, which emphasize the Eucharist merely as a commemorative event. These years witnessed thoroughgoing Protestant reform under Protector Somerset and the explosion of propaganda that coincided with the repeal of Henrician censorship legislation under the new regime (J. King 1999:165-6).
The importation of Italianate modes of versification during the Elizabethan period, however, ushered Shepherd into long-standing neglect, from which he is still emerg-ing.3 Even though his biographical details are obscure, Shepherd enjoyed a lively
' Howard (1966: 85-7, lines 45-7). For an overview of Gascoigne’s career, see Ronald Johnson (1972). On Hogarde and Heywood, see J. Martin (1981); Holstun (2004).
2 Shepherd (2001:103). Shepherd’s eight verse satires include: Antipus, Comparison between the Antipus and the Antigraph, Doctor Double-Ale, John Bon and Mast Parson, Pathos, Philologamus, A Poor Help, and The Upcheering of the Mass. Two prose works are also attributed to him: Cautels Preservatory (STC2, 4877.2), edited in Shepherd (2001); and A Godly and Wholesome Preservative against Desperation (STC2, 20203.5), conjecturally assigned to Shepherd by STC2.
3 Shepherd receives no mention in Lewis (1954). He receives negative treatment in Simpson (2002:
342, 382).
Reputation during his own day. His satires, all of which are printed anonymously,74 tended to appear as inexpensive chapbooks printed in octavo format, in which each sheet of paper is folded three times to form gatherings. The low survival rate of most of his works points to these treatises simply being read to pieces. Substantive references to contemporary figures and events in these poems possibly indicate the poet’s intent to address a learned audience, which would have been familiar with developments at court and is known to have read and collected cheaply printed texts during this period (Watt 1991:1-2). At least one Shepherd satire was definitely read at court. Shepherd’s printer John Day was summoned before the Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Gresham, after printing John Bon and Mast Person, which had been reported as seditious. The courtier Edward Underhill defended the work on grounds that it was popular at court. He also gave Gresham a copy, who ‘reade a litle off [i. e. of] it, and laughed theratt, as it was bothe pythye and mery’ (Foxe 1859:172; Evenden 2008: 12-13). Shepherd’s prose builds upon the satirical tone of his verse, in his scathing prose commentary concerning strategies for preserving the consecrated Eucharistic host from decay (Cautels Preservatory).75
Far from offering merely ‘puerile anti-Catholic railings’,76 Shepherd’s verse satires require complex engagement on the part of readers, particularly in terms of their treatment of scriptural sources. Like many of his contemporaries, he enjoys invoking the ideal of a learned, Bible-reading laity. This ideal finds expression in Desiderius Erasmus, who recommends vernacular Bible-reading among commoners in his ‘Paraclesis’, the preface to his 1516 Greek-Latin edition of the Bible. ‘I would that even the lowliest women read the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles,’ Erasmus writes:
And I would that they were translated into all languages so that they could be read and understood not only by Scots and Irish but also by Turks and Saracens [...] Would that, as a result, the farmer sing some portion of them at the plow, the weaver hum some parts of them to the movement of his shuttle, the traveller lighten the weariness of the journey with stories of this kind! (1965: 97)
The figure of the learned ploughman undergoes expansion in Tyndale’s famous purported claim that his scriptural translation would enable the unlearned plough-boy to know more Scripture than a cleric (Foxe 1563: 2A5v). Shepherd incorporates the personified version of this Bible reader as a vehicle for anti-Catholic satire. In his attack on clerical ignorance and drunkenness, Doctor Double-Ale, for example, the title character, who represents Henry George, curate of St Sepulchre’s parish, performs divine service so badly that ‘yet could a cobblers boy him tell, | That he red a wrong gospell’ (lines 171-2). ‘Ye shuld fynde I am afrayde’, the anonymous narrator continues,
That the boy were worthy For his reading and sobrietie and judgement in the veritie Among honest folke to be A curate rather then he.
(lines 199-204)
George was a former Augustinian canon who persisted in offering Latin Mass even after its annulment; Shepherd identifies him by name in A Poor Help (lines 382-5).77 John Bon and Mast Parson, a forceful dialogue against the feast of Corpus Christi, likewise pits a self-righteous cleric against a witty ploughman, who questions the doctrine of transubstantiation on grounds that it is not reasonable.78 Satirical attack against this clerical interlocutor is compounded by the printer's inclusion of a title page woodcut showing a Corpus Christi procession in progress (Figure 15.1). This woodcut had earlier appeared in a Richard Pynson imprint titled Here Beginneth the Rule of Saint Benet (Shepherd 2001:109), but in Shepherd’s tract the illustration acquires new meaning. An accompanying poem, which vilifies the processors as ‘poore fooles’ who ‘beare a great God, which ye yourselfes made’, accents Shepherd’s views. Elsewhere, the anonymous narrator of The Upcheering of the Mass describes ‘plowmen smythes & cartars’ (line 28) as those who reject the Mass because it lacks apostolic authority. The lack of learning never prevents the humble artisans who occupy Shepherd's poems from challenging their clerical antagonists over the orthodox interpretation of the Bible.
Shepherd's reading of Scripture underpins his complex innovations to modes of biblical argument and satire throughout his verse. In this chapter, I wish to demonstrate how these poems enjoin particular strategies of Bible-reading in order to support Shepherd’s rejection of allegedly offensive doctrine. This approach challenges existing theories concerning the relationship between propagandists and the religious establishment during Edward's reign. It is tempting to equate the radical gospelling literature published during these years with the anti-Catholic bias of the government. Indeed, Shepherd's agenda for religious and social reform places him among the so-called ‘commonwealth' writers of social complaint, including Robert Crowley, Hugh Latimer, and Thomas Lever. The extent to which these men formed a ‘party’, or even shared a consistent programme, however, has been seriously challenged (Elton 1979; cf. Loach 1999: 62). Both Latimer and Lever preached before the King, and internal evidence may suggest that Shepherd wrote some of his work in conjunction with Cranmer’s abolition of the Mass. Nevertheless, allusion to biblical narrative in the satires does not always align Shepherd, the radical, with the Edwardian government's anti-papal position. At a time when some commentators hailed the young king as a latter-day David who would purge the nation of corrupt practices in the manner of his Old Testament royal prototype, Shepherd offers distinctive critique of traditionalism while refusing to conform wholly to the royal line. Comparison to Hugh Latimer's
Fig. 15.1 Title page of Luke Shepherd's JohnBonandMastPerson (1548?), showing a traditional Corpus Christi procession. The clergy carry a pyx; the dignity of the procession is undercut by Shepherd's mocking verse beneath.
Sermons is instructive in illuminating Shepherd’s position. In his first extant sermon preached before Edward, on 8 March 1549, Latimer argues that preachers possess spiritual authority that licenses them to instruct kings. Nevertheless, he defers to the royal will, provided that Edward conform himself to his ‘godly’ predecessors. ‘Let us learn to frame our lives after the noble King David,’ he enjoins. ‘Let us follow David [...] Let us pray for his good state, that he live long among us’ (1968: 56-7). In other orations before the King, Latimer voices the official position against clerical idleness and absenteeism and in favour of viewing the Eucharist as a commemorative event.9 Shepherd takes similar positions to these in his poems, but he is also unafraid to criticize the government and its representatives in print. Attention to Shepherd’s use of scriptural argument in his satires sheds light on how he represented and responded to changes in official policy. The Protestant belief in sola scriptura—that the Bible is the only source of doctrine—becomes for Shepherd a point of departure for addressing the establishment concerning its stewardship of the opportunity to realign religious belief and practice.10 In this way, Shepherd’s verse provides a window onto mid-Tudor literary composition and ironic method.
The attribution of the printing of seven of Shepherd’s ten surviving works to John Day (working alone or in partnership) provides essential context for analysing his deployment of scriptural argument. Day was a pre-eminent printer of vernacular Bibles; he also brought out works by prominent reformers such as Tyndale and Latimer. Although Shepherd's patronage connections are unknown, Day enjoyed patronage from both Katherine Brandon, Duchess of Suffolk, and William Cecil, the future Lord Burghley (Evenden 2008: 9-10,17-18). Day and William Seres together printed Shepherd’s Upcheering of the Mass and its companion piece, Pathos; or, An Inward Passion of the Pope for the Loss of his Daughter the Mass. The complex narrative structure of these works lodges heavily ironic critique of the Catholic Mass rite, in which a cleric and the Pope successively (and inadvertently) condemn the ritual while apparently attempting to defend it. Day and Seres also printed John Bon and Mast Parson. Its ingenious use of humour and clever employment of dialogue render it Shepherd's most accessible tract. Day printed Antipus single-handedly as a highly affordable single-sheet folio. It brings forward various paradoxes from Scripture as analogues to the doctrine of transubstantiation. Day also produced Shepherd's compendium entitled The Comparison between the Antipus and the Antigraph, which reprints the Antipus and an antagonistic reply, the Antigraphium, followed by Shepherd’s counter-reply, entitled Apologia Antipi. Shepherd may have written this apologia in response to Sir John Mason, a member of Edward’s Privy Council (Wheat 1951: 64-8). Day’s final Shepherd imprint is the prose satire Cautels Preservatory Concerning the Preservation of the Gods which are Kept in the Pyx.11
Shepherd’s satires form a centrepiece of the Protestant propaganda campaign that flourished during the late 1540s. They frequently employ radical tropes characteristic of Protestant interpretation of Scripture. Shepherd's name itself appears to emerge
9 See the sixth and seventh royal sermons in Latimer (1968).
10 On the challenges presented by sola scriptura in practice, see Betteridge (1999: 88-98).
" ‘Pyx’: vessel or box for keeping the consecrated Eucharistic bread.
From a scriptural source. It is likely a pseudonymous combination of St Luke, the gospel writer and physician, and the figure of Christ as the Good Shepherd. We know that Shepherd was a London physician, but his choice of pseudonym further aligns him with the voices of rural labourers who occupy his poems (J. King 2002: 191). In scriptural allusions within the works themselves, he often follows John Bale’s commentary on the book of Revelation, The Image of Both Churches (c. 1545), in describing the Mass rite as the personification of the whore of Babylon, a prototypical scriptural figure of wickedness. Protestants frequently interpreted her as a persona of the papal Antichrist. The speaker of The Upcheering of the Mass asks,
What did I call hir pore?
Naye some wyl cal hir whore And stireth a great uprore Some cal hir popes daughter.
(lines 143-6)
Genealogical descent of the Mass from the Pope recalls Bale’s proto-nationalist history play King Johan, where the Vice Sedition describes his own descent from his papal ancestor, via his father, Privy Treason, and his grandfather Infidelity. Paradoxically, Sedition both descends from and also upholds the papacy (Bale 1985, lines 212, 673-8). Shepherd may or may not have known Bale’s play, but his Pathos makes the Mass’s familial heritage a central organizing principle of the satire. Discomfited by the advance of Protestant doctrine in England, the papal narrator, who appears as the Mass’s own father, seeks aid from a variety of non-Christian sources, including Greek and Roman deities, Muhammad, and other Islamic thinkers. For Shepherd, the Mass’s descent from the Pope accompanies an equally inauspicious allusion to Cain, who first committed fratricide in the Old Testament (Gen. 4:1-8). As a prototype for the Mass, Cain is responsible for the violence she provokes: ‘Some sayes she made manslaughter’ (Upcheering, line 147). The Mass also descends from her grandfather Pluto, who affords a sardonic analogue for Satan (Pathose, lines 726-7).
Shepherd regularly develops satirical content from a scriptural source and subsequently departs from that source in a tendentious manner. Indeed, Shepherd’s treatment of the Bible defines the extent to which the poems function as propaganda. Ironically, those who defend the Mass proclaim its falsity:
For lowdly do they sounde That missa is not founde Within the byble boke.
(Upcheering, lines 195-7)
The failure of Catholic clerics to explain the scriptural origin of Mass doctrine obviously constitutes a major complaint of early Protestantism. Shepherd, however, expands and modifies existing approaches with a more complex exegetical method. In his prose treatise The Obedience of a Christian Man (1528), Tyndale had advocated the abandonment of the fourfold method of biblical interpretation employed by medieval scholastic theologians, which comprised comparative analysis of the literal, tropological, allegorical, and anagogical senses of the text. Tyndale instead enjoins readers to embrace only the literal sense (2000: 158-62). Shepherd and other early Protestant commentators, who followed Tyndale in emphasizing the primacy of a literal reading of the Bible, unsurprisingly based their rejection of the Mass upon its failure literally to appear within Scripture. Nevertheless, they constructed allegorical readings in which the Mass appears manifested in the figure of the whore of Babylon. For Tyndale, ‘the literal sense [rather than the allegorical sense] prove[s] the allegory and bear[s] it, as the foundation beareth the house’ (Tyndale 2000: 159). Protestant interpretation of Christ’s words of consecration, ‘Hoc est corpus meum’, fundamentally denied that this was Christ’s actual body and diverged from traditional Catholic doctrine in the process. These commentators denied the literal sense on this crucial point while broadly celebrating its primacy elsewhere. Shepherd’s views concerning the non-scriptural foundation of the Mass in Upcheering therefore take on considerable complexity when read against contemporary models of Protestant exegesis. They provide evidence of complex, nuanced differences among early Protestants concerning methods of Bible-reading and commentary. The poem explicitly tells how readers will search the Scriptures in vain for evidence concerning the Mass. Instead, they will discover the narrative concerning Meshach, one of three Hebrew youths who refused during the Babylonian captivity to worship the image of gold made by King Nebuchadnezzar (line 201; see Daniel 3). Meshach’s defiance typologically anticipates the resistance of Shepherd and others to the Catholic Mass rite. The approach to Scripture in The Upcheering of the Mass reminds us that early Protestantism in England was a fluid phenomenon characterized by evolving allegiances.
Pathos, one of Shepherd’s most vindictive satires, comprises the sequel to Upcheer-ing and expands its use of Scripture as a vehicle for criticism. The earlier poem concludes when its anonymous clerical narrator concedes victory and the Mass is sequestered to hell with other Babylonians (‘In regno plutonico |[...]| Cum cetu babilonico’; lines 378-80). The reference to Babylon as a type of banishment is common throughout Tudor religious literature.79 In Shepherd’s sequel, the Pope, who is literally based in hell, seeks help to restore the ailing Mass. He does so within an explicitly scriptural framework. The Pope’s appeal to Jupiter and other deities echoes Old Testament appeals for divine aid.
To you I call and crye
That are the goddes on hie
That ye will all applie
To send some remedye,
(lines 108-11)
He pleads. The Pope is sure that they will answer his prayer following his offer of divine sacrifice:
I offer here therfore Of oxen thre scoore Of Ramys as many more And gots no small store With pige and sowe and bore Of every birde a brode And washe them in their bloude To mytygate your moode.
(lines 120-7)
In this passage Shepherd sarcastically reverses Deuteronomic instructions for worship at the Mosaic Tabernacle in order disparagingly to associate the Mass with outdated Old Testament ritual. The papal prayer blasphemes by offering up pig, boar, and bird—creatures deemed unfit for sacrifice in Levitical law (see Lev. 1 and 11). The narrator’s subsequent appeal to Ceres, Roman goddess of the harvest, encapsulates the Protestant attack on transubstantiation as idolatry, since this papal spokesman explicitly describes the Mass as offered in her honour (lines 141-4). Similarly, Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, receives the Pope’s open idolatry:
Thou myghtest well behold How willingly we woulde The[e] worship as we shoulde Wyth wyne in cuppes of golde.
(lines 160-3)
In addition to delivering biting critique against clerical drunkenness, this passage recalls the Old Testament narrative concerning the Babylonian king Belshazzar (Daniel 5), who brought out the gold articles taken from the Hebrew Temple and offered them to deities of gold, silver, and iron. Shepherd shares with Bale the tendency to employ an explicit scriptural backdrop in order to personify the Pope as an open conspirator.
The papal narrator misreads the Bible in Pathos, with far-reaching consequences. In a derisive allusion to the doctrine of transubstantiation, the Pope tells of his habit of literally beating up Christ in the act of consecration. ‘Betwene my holy fistis’, he declaims,
I can not be debarde To handle hym softe or harde But if he be frowarde He shall fynde me waywarde.
(lines 179-83)
Papal loyalty to Christianity depends in this case upon Christ’s unlikely willingness to accommodate the Pope’s non-scriptural practices. The papal narrator characteristically misinterprets Christ’s entry into Jerusalem in anticipation of his crucifixion:
Howe porely dide he ride Upon a pore asse Was he a lorde, alasse On that fation to passe Into a noble cytie?
(lines 200-4)
Shepherd’s narrative source (Luke 19: 28-40) emphasizes Christ’s humility, but here the Pope amplifies his own pride. Given the Mass’s debilitating illness in Pathos, the Pope is no longer able to manipulate Scripture to cloak his deception, as he did when the Mass was new (lines 619-25). This portrayal of‘false’ religion as wilful deception rather than merely misguided devotion represents a popular motif in mid-Tudor religious literature.
Shepherd’s activity as a propagandist and biblical exegete at this moment of fervid literary activity, then, acquires layered meanings when closely examined. He is neither a writer of bald propaganda nor a maverick independent, but rather a spokesperson for competing perspectives within a broadly defined Protestant position. Internal references in the poems to the Edwardian injunctions of 1547, the dissemination of Cranmer’s Order of Communion (8 March 1548) and Catechism (June 1548), and the imprisonment of Bishop Stephen Gardiner80 provide clues to the dating of Shepherd’s works (see The Comparison between the Antipus and the Antigraph, lines 156-7; John Bon and Mast Person, lines 143-5; Doctor Double-Ale, lines 61, 326-30; A Poor Help, line 183; and Upcheering, lines 316-19; cf. Shepherd 2001: 114). John Bon and Mast Parson must have been current among members of the establishment, given its readership at court (mentioned above). Pathos also would have best been understood by a learned readership, since it contains a lengthy catalogue of Protestant reformers and their Catholic antagonists (lines 500-41), who are obscure in many cases. Nevertheless, a shared opinion on these matters between Shepherd and his superiors does not necessarily indicate Shepherd’s complete support of current policy. This slight discrepancy is overlooked in existing accounts of radical religious change under Edward and the Protestant propagandists who emerged, we are told, to support the changes (see, for example, Duffy 1992: 460). Available data suggests how Shepherd might have appealed to the Protestant intelligentsia, but intellectual agreement in principle does not preclude the possibility of subtle differentiation between positions. Shepherd's commitment to purity of worship grounded in Scripture diverges from the official position, for example. Cranmer had already produced an English litany under Henry VIII, and he would follow with a vernacular communion service in the 1549 Book of Common Prayer. Shepherd, though, banishes collects to hell along with other liturgical components of the Mass rite in Pathos (lines 747-8), despite the fact that these prayers would form a centrepiece of the new liturgy in Cranmer’s formulation (Rosendale 2007: 30-1, 209). When the Pope abandons the Mass at the conclusion of Pathos in order to
Shewe myne obedience To the prince infernal In derknes eternal,
(lines 790-2)
Shepherd may glance critically against blind acceptance of the royal supremacy. To some degree, Shepherd’s satires reveal the relationship between Crown and propagandist to be defined as much by nuance and negotiation as by polemic. This trend is ongoing from the previous reign, when the use of the press to disseminate propaganda responded to evolving policy (King and Rankin 2008: 54-5).
Shepherd’s satires do not specifically depart from a Cranmerian approach to divine service, but they do display ambivalence towards the changes. Cranmer released his translation of the Lutheran Nuremberg catechism, Cathechismus: A Short Instruction into Christian Religion, in June 1548. This work prompted Gardiner to question whether Cranmer’s views had become more conservative. ‘Bishop Gardiner, in his book against the Archbishop,’ writes Strype,
Takes advantage of two things in this Catechism against him, as though he himself, when he put it forth, was of the opinion of the corporal presence. The one was a picture that stood before the book, where was an altar with candles lighted, and the priest appareled after the old sort, putting the wafer into the communicant’s mouth. (1822: i. 227)
Cranmer insisted that the printer had obtained the woodcut from ‘the Dutch edition of the book’ and ‘afterwards caused the popish picture to be altered into a picture representing Christ eating his last supper with his disciples’ (Strype 1822: i. 227-8). Cranmer and Gardiner addressed both learned and unlearned readers by publishing their Eucharistic polemics in both Latin and English (Wilson 1990: 8-14), but Shepherd’s John Bon and Mast Parson anticipates the failure of official opposition toward the Mass in a distinctly popular voice:
But now the blessed messe is hated in every border And railed on & reviled, with wordes most blasphemous But I trust it wylbe better with the help of Catechismus For thoughe it came forth but even that other day Yet hath it tourned many to ther olde waye And where they hated messe and had it in disdayne There have they messe and matins in latyne tonge againe.
(lines 141-7)
These lines take on considerable irony, since Shepherd, speaking through John Bon, has already ridiculed the cleric’s illogical defence of Corpus Christi. This cleric’s spiritual blindness prevents him from realizing that Cranmer’s catechism is designed to bolster the Protestant position, not undermine it. At the same time, the vigorous opposition to the Mass in Shepherd’s critiques betrays his fear that official efforts towards reform maybe inadequate. Such satire depends for its effect on the prevalence in society of the subject being satirized, at least from the perspective of the author. Shepherd’s layered verse refuses to serve as unqualified propaganda.
As a self-appointed spokesman for radical change in religion, Shepherd claims poetic authority to speak on his own behalf from a perspective grounded in his view of Scripture and Protestant worship.81 That view is considerably playful and occasionally mocking. In Antipus, he delineates a scheme for Bible-reading within the specific confines of royal ecclesiastical authority, as he defines it on his own terms. From the viewpoint of the anonymous narrator, its nine scriptural paradoxes and the dubious doctrine of transubstantiation all lack reliability. Indeed, only the ‘kings commission’ can overcome the seditious preaching of thieves and robbers who would likely promulgate such fictions. This attack (lines 23, 29-30) constitutes ad hominem critique against William Layton (‘Leighton’), a prebendary of St Paul’s Cathedral who refused to conform to government injunctions to denounce the Mass from the pulpit (Chronicle 1852: 56). Recourse to royal authority constitutes a deus ex machina that restores order to biblical interpretation. Shepherd anticipates his contemporary Robert Crowley, who worked as a bookseller and propagandist from Ely Rents in Holborn. Crowley’s Philargyrie of Great Britain (1551) describes the predation of rapacious Protestant and Catholic landlords who impoverish the country (see Warley, Chapter 16 in this volume). It concludes with explicit deliverance arriving from the King, who
For fear gan spring Unto the Bible book,
And by and by
Right reverently
That sword in hand he took.
(2004, lines 1380-4)
The Bible as a symbol of royal authority constitutes a prominent theme elsewhere in contemporary Protestant literature, appearing, for example, on the title pages of vernacular Bibles published during the reign of Henry VIII (J. King 1989: 54-6). In addition to appearing in Antipus, this trope of clerical misuse of royal authority emerges in Doctor Double-Ale, where the title character ‘to sum mens thinking | Doth stay hym muche upon the kyng' by extorting illegal ecclesiastical payments (lines 140-50).
After reminding readers of the royal authority under which his polemic circulates unimpeded, Shepherd makes his case against transubstantiation in Antipus through a series of absurd interpretations of Scripture. They accord with the etymology of this poem’s title, which indicates oppositional polemic.82 In a series of deliberate ironies, the anonymous narrator reverses the narrative trajectory of his scriptural sources in order paradoxically to affirm biblical ‘truth’. This complex process requires readers to recognize the purported falsity of the stated interpretations; to identify those interpretations with Shepherd’s satirical target, the Catholic Church; and to reassert the contrary interpretation based on the Bible’s literal sense. ‘As verely as Adam created firste his God | So verely he tasted not, the fruite that was forbod,’ the narrator begins. ‘As verely as Abell, dyd kyll hys brother Kayn | So verely the shyppe made Noye this is playne’ (lines 1-4). The contradictions continue in similar fashion at the level of misread narrative. Just as Isaac supposedly begat Abraham, Sodom remains unburned; just as the Hebrews allegedly oppressed the Egyptians, Moses delivered the divine law to God; just as the lion slew Samson, Goliath purportedly killed David; and so forth. Roman Catholic Eucharistic doctrine joins these accounts as purportedly false. Readers have been trained to recognize the narrator’s decision to discard his ironic persona by the earlier manipulation of source texts. ‘As verely as bread doeth make and bake the baker,’ readers learn, ‘So verely these thefes the prestes can make their maker’ (lines 21-2).
Antipus provoked debate over the function of scriptural argument in Eucharistic polemic. This controversy reveals how Shepherd utilizes Scripture to define his position and demonstrates the potentially fraught nature of biblical exegesis among mid-Tudor Protestants. The reply to Antipus, the Antigraphium, survives only in Day’s compilation The Comparison between the Antipus and the Antigraph or Answer thereunto, with An Apology or Defence of the Same Antipus. And Reprehen[sion] of the Antigraph. The response to Antipus is apparently the work of Sir John Mason, a diplomat and member of the Privy Council. Evidence for attributing this poem to Mason appears in a pseudonymous reference to ‘Mason’ in Shepherd’s Apologia Antipi, the third item in the compilation (line 215), as well as in a passage from Shepherd’s Philogamus, which responds to another, lost work by Mason.83 Along with other mid-Tudor courtier-poets and dramatists, including John Heywood and William Forrest, Mason was a political survivor who endured shifts in religious policy under Henry VIII and his successors. He entered into controversy with Edmund Bonner during the 1530s over his alleged connections to Cardinal Reginald Pole, who antagonized Henry concerning the royal divorce. Mason may have carried a public reputation for conservatism, for he expressed sorrow over the execution of Sir Thomas More and John Fisher in 1535. Like many of the scholar-intellectuals who worked for the government during the 1530s, his precise beliefs are difficult to pinpoint: besides his apparent conservatism, Mason enjoyed the patronage of Thomas Cromwell, who oversaw many of the Henrician evangelical reforms of the 1530s (ODNB). His background makes him an interesting respondent to Shepherd. Their exchange supplies additional evidence of Shepherd’s influence within the government, in that a Privy Counsellor chose to respond to such an occasional piece as Antipus. This disagreement reveals the potential for diverse reactions among the ‘establishment’ to Edwardian religious changes.
In an attempt to reassert ownership over ‘proper’ exegetical method, Mason’s Antigraphium reverses Shepherd’s ironic biblical inversions from Antipus in line-byline fashion. Significantly, the text invites readers to encounter the literal sense of the scriptural source, even though Shepherd’s verse had surreptitiously affirmed the very same sense. ‘As verely as Adam was create[d] by God | So verely he tasted the fruite was forbode,’ its anonymous narrator reports. ‘As verely as Abel was killed of Cayn | So verely made Noy the ship, this is plaine’ (Comparison, lines 32-5). The Antigraphium accurately reprises seven of Shepherd’s dicta, but, at the same time, it departs significantly from the pattern of Antipus in its interpretation of particular scriptural texts. In one of his nonsensical sentences, for example, Shepherd refers to Simon Magus, who attempted to purchase divine power from St Peter: ‘As verely as Simon Magus the Apostels dyd confute | So verely the Apostels dyd princes persecute’ (Antipus, lines 15-16; Acts 8: 9-24). Mason ignores this item altogether, possibly because under its logical reversal, the notion of princes persecuting Apostles could be construed as providing ideological grounds to the reformers' stance against ‘false' religion. Shepherd’s ninth point concerns papal authority, and here the Antigraphium avoids the scriptural source entirely. In response to Shepherd's original claim, ‘As verely as the devyll hath perfecte love and hope | So verely goddes worde doth constitute the pope’ (Antipus, lines 17-18), the rebuttal declares, ‘As verely as the devel hath not perfecte love and hope | So verely consente not I to the falsenes of the pope’ (Comparison, lines 46-7). The logical correction to this contrived misstatement by Shepherd would admit that the Bible provides no evidence for papal primacy. Both Shepherd and Mason thus assert the literal sense while simultaneously taking its interpretation in conflicting directions. The Antigraphium cannot avoid a kind of interpretative incoherence, because the first seven corrections it makes to the Antipus ask readers to interpret the self-evident literal sense, and the eighth does not. Mason defends transubstantiation explicitly from the Bible on the basis of Shepherd’s avoidance of this subject: ‘verely by gods worde we consecrate our maker’, he writes (Comparison, line 51). However, the anonymous narrator of Antipus supplies apparently contradictory readings of biblical narratives in order to argue that the selfevident literal sense disproves those inconsistencies in the same way that it exposes the falsity of Catholic Eucharistic doctrine. These two texts shed light on the diverse interpretative possibilities provided by competing claims of ownership of the literal sense.
Approaching this controversy as a disagreement over scriptural argument sheds considerable light upon the relationship of literature to the government’s evangelical project. Protector Somerset and other patrons certainly employed satirists in their service (J. King 1982:106-13), but the Antigraphium explicitly confounds Shepherd’s profession of loyalty to the Crown, which he lodged in Antipus. Not only is Layton ‘A man well regardynge oure soveraignes commission’ (Comparison, line 63). Mason explicitly denounces radical propagandists like Shepherd, whose ironies threaten to redefine orthodox Bible-reading:
And you that call you Gospellers that in Ire do swell You are as fare frome the Gospell as heaven is from hell Amende your lives and folowe charitie Leave your presumptuouse and folishe vanitye
The misteries of God ye knowe thys is playne Ye cannot conceyve in your fantasticall brayne Commite your selfes to God, and the Kynge And folowe holy churche to your endynge For unto these three I wyll sticke And never regarde no false hereticke.
{Comparison, lines 64-73)
The Antigraphium here lodges its appeal that the teachings of ‘holy churche’ (the Church of Rome) be equated conceptually with both divine will and royal policy. In Mason’s formulation, the biblical texts underpin this triad of God, King, and Church. Shepherd, of course, disagrees. In his response, the Apologia Antipi, he criticizes Mason by alluding to the Parable of the Two Houses: ‘Without lyne or level, founda-cion ye laide | Wherfore it apereth, your worke muste decaye’ (Comparison, lines 90-1). In rejecting Mason’s exegesis as metaphorically lacking a solid foundation, Shepherd accuses him of misreading his source: ‘the trade of your trechery, shall sone be confounde’, his anonymous narrator declares. ‘To maynteyn your errours, the scripturs ye frame | So that ye muste be overthrowe with the same’ (Comparison, lines 95, 98-9). Although these passages lack manifest irony, Shepherd is being facetious in much of the Antigraphium by ignoring Mason’s reliance on the literal sense. Shepherd himself, in fact, has framed his scriptural sources in Antipus to make this very point. Much of the Apologia Antipi constitutes instruction in the proper reading of the Pauline epistles, Christ’s words of consecration, and other biblical proof texts.
After attempting to undermine Mason’s use of scriptural sources, Shepherd resorts to typological argument in order fully to dismiss him. Punning on his antagonist’s name, Shepherd associates him with the builders of the Tower of Babel, which Protestants interpreted as a type of the Church of Rome. By linking Mason with Nimrod, the legendary founder of Babylon, and Tubal-Cain, the prototypical craftsman, Shepherd again subjects his scriptural sources to his advantage:
The Mason first at Babilon began,
Byldyng of the towre that men cal Babel,
Though he be a Babilonite, Nemprothes [Nimrod’s] owne man.
That nowe raineth in Rome, it is no great marvaile Thubalkaim [Tubal-Cain] the first smyth, and graver of metell,
For antiquitie and frendshyp, must nedes stande hym by To forge him his toles, to buylde Idolatrie.
(Comparison, lines 215-21)
Nimrod’s association with the papacy emerges clearly enough in Shepherd’s account. Tubal-Cain, however, appears during the antediluvian period, whereas Nimrod and the Babel story post-date the Noachian deluge (Gen. 4: 22; 10: 8-10; 11: 1-9). The narratives are genealogically distinct, but Shepherd unites them. These prototypes appear to reveal the pointless loquacity of his opponent, whom Shepherd abandons
In knavery.
In heresy.
In baudry.
In popery.
Etcetera.
{Comparison, lines 236-40)
Nevertheless, the exchange has revealed both writers employing similar exegetical tactics. Shepherd frequently satirizes the Mass ritual even after the Edwardian regime proscribed it. The intensity of his distaste for this religious rite need not derive exclusively from his fear that conservative devotion maintained a stronghold in London. His concern could attend equally to the proliferation of competing methods of scriptural reading among Protestants.
Repeated recourse to methods of Bible-reading emphasizes this theme as a driving force in all of Shepherd’s verse. He accuses Richard Smith, for example, of fabricating pseudo-scriptural justification for ‘false’ doctrine. Smith, a defender of transubstanti-ation, held appointment as Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford under Henry VIII and would preach at the burning of bishops Latimer and Nicholas Ridley in October 1555. In a fine instance of Skeltonics, Shepherd accuses him of having
Caught at large
More then he could dyscharge Or fynde in text or Marge Concernyng Consecratyon And Transubstanciation Or all oure Transmutacion And Substaunce Alteracion Deniyng Veneracion And also Adoration In tyme of Ministration.
(lines 424-33)
Shepherd gravitates in this example towards Smith’s reliance upon printed marginal annotation as integral to reading. The passage appears in Philogamus, a biting and sarcastic refutation of a work of Mason’s against clerical marriage that does not survive. Smith emerges as one of Mason’s alleged associates and joins him in suppressing legitimate Bible-reading in churches. Accounts survive from this period concerning the disruptive reading aloud from the vernacular Scripture during Mass.84 Shepherd’s anonymous narrator rebukes Mason for interrupting these readings and
Endevouryng to dryve oute The reader in our queare That draweth to hym here Men commyng farre and neare.
(lines 415-18)
This apparently alludes to Mason’s tenure as royal visitor for Rochester for the enforcement of the government’s injunctions in 1547 (Shepherd 2001:167). If people flock to hear this unnamed reader of the unadorned text, Smith supplements both text and printed marginal note to suit his purposes. Reading only the bare Scripture is the preferred method of access for Shepherd, whose views towards the literal text continue to take him away from interpretations laid down by opponents. The poet reprints twenty lines of ungracious Latin that may derive from Mason’s original text. Here the hypothetical narrator addresses married priests as a ‘Genera Viperarum’ (line 122), or a ‘race of vipers’, thereby echoing Christ’s rebuke of the Pharisees in the same terms (Matt. 3: 7). Shepherd employs the exact scriptural trope in his response. He subdivides his rebuttal into segments that include ‘A Latten Clubbe, or Hurle Batte’, a sixty-line derisive reply, also in inelegant Latin, to the earlier Latin excerpt. Here, the unmarried Catholic priests receive contempt as a ‘Viperarum Genus’ who are ‘Dediti Incestibus’ (‘given to incest’) (lines 355-6). Shepherd echoes charges lodged by Bale in his Acts of English Votaries (1546) that Catholic clerics practised sexual deviancy. Within Shepherd’s satirical method in Philogamus, then, he establishes two models of Bible-reading (approaching the literal sense before appropriating it for satire) that help guide appropriate and inappropriate interpretation.
Shepherd’s most memorable satire, Doctor Double-Ale, relies upon similarly conflicting epistemological and exegetical patterns. The title character’s surname refers to the doubly strong beer that he regularly consumes. Shepherd’s anonymous narrator uses his subject as an occasion to criticize the entire clergy, who share in his naivety. England suffers when such clerics
Bring them to the gates Of hell and utter derkenes And all by stubborne starkenes Putting their full trust In thinges that rot and rust.
(lines 49-53)
Shepherd incorporates passages from the Sermon on the Mount to characterize the clergy as Pharisaical legalists who pay insufficient attention to spiritual things. He invokes divine instructions concerning avoiding the wide gate that leads to destruction and the injunction not to invest in temporary riches that decay rather than in spiritual riches. The passage applies these source texts as fuel for satire, since the scriptural writer concludes this section of Shepherd’s source with a report of Christ’s hearers praising his ability to speak with more authority than their own religious leaders (Matt. 7: 13; 6: 19-20; 7: 28-9). Shepherd’s narrator identifies Double-Ale and his fellows with the Hebrew Pharisees, those teachers whom Christ regularly chides for neglecting spiritual duties. For Shepherd, this particular kind of bad teacher carries more damaging connotations than the simple figure of a drunken priest.
Scriptural argument underpins Shepherd’s satire here as well as elsewhere. The anonymous narrator adopts a persona in mockery of the drunken cleric and delivers a mock-Latin diatribe in the cleric’s voice that serves as a sardonic apologia for priestly drunkenness. In a dismissive allusion to the doctrine of transubstantiation, the narrator-persona praises ale over Eucharistic wine and invites his hearer to drink with him (lines 400-3). In justification of his rebuke he quotes from the ‘De profundis’, one of the seven Penitential Psalms: ‘Quia apud | Te propiciacio’ (lines 405-6).85 The ‘satisfaction’ or ‘propitiation’ that the Psalmist experiences through divine meditation ironically comes to this cleric over a pint. The passage may allude to evangelical complaints against priests who recite parts of the Latin liturgy by rote but understand little scriptural meaning. The narrator sarcastically affirms that this cleric cannot work the miracle of consecration, and so his audience should beware his fraudulent abilities. According to the mock clerical monologue, this audience should shun Bible-reading in favour of traditional devotion.
Tu non potes facio
Tot quam ego
Quam librum tu lego,
Cave de me,
The narrator-persona opines (‘you cannot make as much as I can [referring to the consecration of Eucharistic elements], whatever book you read. Beware me’; lines 407-10). This audience’s hypothetical book points towards the Bible, but it ought not to persuade hearers to abandon clerical instruction. Of course, Shepherd has already destroyed this cleric's credibility as a reliable teacher, so these lines take on a double irony. They appear near the conclusion of the poem to offer counterpoint to the ‘right’ reading of Scripture by members of the laity modelled near the opening of the work.
Shepherd’s primary concern in his verse satires is twofold. He refuses to endorse unthinkingly the evangelical reforms of the Edwardian government. Instead, he employs scriptural argument within a broadly Protestant framework in order to champion the ideal of a learned laity while simultaneously cautioning authorities not to abuse the opportunity for reform or fail to take the Reformation to its conclusion. Perhaps more fundamentally, the satires provide a blueprint for ‘true' and ‘false' readings of the Bible. Shepherd insists that Scripture in its vernacular form should anchor any reformed commonwealth. He also reveals the damaging effects of irresponsible or even incorrect exegesis, in terms of both doctrine and devotion. These interpretative concerns help define Shepherd's satirical project. They take on a defining role in his employment of the full range of literary devices and modes throughout his work, including ad hominem attack, Skeltonics, the use of layered narration, and the sheer energy of the verse. Shepherd’s biblical arguments help clarify the flexible interaction between this radical Protestant writer and the equally, but not identically, radical Protestant regime under which he worked. Shepherd makes his source texts into malleable forms that they were not, at least in terms of contemporary Protestant discourse concerning the ‘immutable' divine word. If Protestants accused
Catholic writers of distorting Scripture in defence of ‘unwritten verities’, Shepherd parodies both accuser and accused. In the process, he generates, legitimizes, and sustains his own unique voice and attempts to persuade his readers to adopt his positions.
World History
