In Act 3 scene 3 of Respublica, a ‘merye entrelude’ performed first in 1553 and probably written by Nicholas Udall, the character People enters with the unforgettable first line ‘whares Rice puddingcake? I praie god she bee in heale’ (Udall 1952, line 636). ‘[W]ho? Rice puddingcake?’ responds a baffled Adulation, a Vice figure disguised as Honesty. It is hard not to have a little sympathy for Adulation. What exactly does ‘Rice puddingcake’ mean? Who is ‘she’? ‘[Y]ea alese dicts [alias diet, also called] comonweale’, People explains in his nearly impenetrable accent (line 637).1‘Rice puddingcake’ is People’s pronunciation of ‘Respublica’, and where the ‘widowed’ Respublica might be—figuratively, what is wrong with her—is the central question of the play. It is also one of the central questions of the period. The voluminous complaint literature of the Tudor period, notes Lawrence Manley, focuses particularly on ‘England’s condition’ by attempting ‘to establish new priorities of communal life, to refashion the corporate identity of what was coming to be called the “common weal” or “commonwealth” ’ (1995: 63). People begins his part in this refashioning by supplying a detailed list of things wrong in this respublica:
Key features of this accent include use of ‘v’ for ‘f’, ‘z’ for ‘s’.
Ther falleth of come and cattail/ wull, shepe woode, leade, tynne, Iron and other metall,
And of all [thjinges, enoughe vor goode and badde [...] as er we hadde. (lines 666-9)
‘[A]nd yet’, he exclaims, ‘the price of everye thing is zo dere | as thoughe the grounde dyd bring vorth no suche thing no where’ (lines 670-1). ‘In dede’, chimes in Respublica in her usual flat, monotonous tone (she has, in fact, been on stage all along, but Adulation works to keep People away from her), ‘I have enoughe if yt be well ordered, | but fewe folke the better yf I bee misordered’ (lines 672-3). What is the cause of Respublica’s misorder? Where, so to speak, is the common weal, the good of all? Or, as Adulation puts it to People, ‘who hathe wrought to youe suche extremytee?’ ‘Naie to tell how zo [so], passeth our captyvytee,’ People responds (lines 653-4). ‘Captyvytee’ is People’s malapropism for ‘capacity’ or ‘imagination’, but in some respects ‘captivity’ is a better word. Though he can detail the ills befalling him, he cannot explain them. Despite his suspicion of Adulation, People cannot finally say with certainty why prices are so high when there appear to be plenty of commodities. Something besides Adulation and other Vices holds People captive.
That something nowadays is usually called ‘history’. Caught in a matrix of forces he cannot understand, People exists in a social world whose broad structures he can never quite comprehend. In this sense People might be seen as representative of mid-Tudor literature generally. This literature has been typically neglected in large part because it seems to speak with such an impenetrable accent, seems incapable of understanding the grand historical shifts it sits inside, and seems (at best) like a momentary amusement that quickly grows tedious the longer one has to keep sorting out what it is saying. ‘[I]n literature as in politics’, remarks David Norbrook, ‘the age promised more than it performed’ (1984: 49). Stuck in the middle of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, from medieval to Renaissance, from Catholic to Protestant, from community to individualism, the literature of the period is unable, by and large, adequately to name the sources that shaped it.
Udall’s Respublica (1553) and Robert Crowley’s Philargyrie (1551) are two of the more notable literary texts in mid-century England. Of the two, Respublica has been more studied, largely as part of the prehistory of Shakespearean drama (see Marcus 2000; Walker 1998; Blank 1996; Bevington 1968). While Philargyrie gets regularly mentioned in surveys of Tudor literature, it has been closely considered very little; the card included in the copy at the Beinecke Library at Yale is representative of how the poem is generally treated: ‘Of this important poem attributed to Crowley and attacking excessive love of money only one other copy has been traced. It was printed at London in 1551.’ Why it is important, what exactly ‘excessive love of money’ might mean, or what the conditions of its printing were have only relatively recently become the subject of scrutiny (see J. King 1982; Graham 2005). One reason for this neglect is, no doubt, an inevitable nagging question: why should anyone read these poems at all? Are they anything more than curiosities from a tumultuous era, literary marking points recording the gradual move from medieval allegory to the emerging ‘modernism’ of Spenser and Shakespeare? The answer is not clear, at least to me, and recovering a literature that has been unjustly neglected runs the complementary risk of overstressing its importance.
However, if we take seriously the idea that poems are interesting because they help to divulge things that are otherwise invisible in the society in which they are made, that they are ideologemes that reveal the constitutive contradictions that create social structures, then perhaps there is some work for the literary critic as well as the literary historian.2Such an approach needs to be differentiated from a strictly historical reading—historical in the sense of the self-conscious debates in which people in the era participated. As far as I can tell, what Crowley and Udall thought is not especially unique. Though both Philargyrie and Respublica make relatively transparent criticisms of the Reformation (see Graham 2005; Walker 1998), most of the political and intellectual debates of the period are more subtly articulated in A Discourse of the Common Weale (1549), probably written by Sir Thomas Smith (Skinner 1978: i. 225; W. Jones 1970: 3). Instead, it seems to me that we need another justification for reading these works: that they are valuable as literature. They are valuable not because they are literary masterpieces (I certainly do not think they are), but because, as literary writing, they make available issues that are largely invisible to other sorts of writing (political, religious, and so on). As a result, I close-read these two works to get a grip on some of the elusive and odd social transformations that mark mid-Tudor existence, and in particular the vexing question of social relations. Crowley’s poem quotes Mark 4:11 after the preface ‘To the Reader’: ‘Unto suche as be yet wythoute | All thyngis shalbe spoken in | Parables’ (1980, lines 28-30). Both these texts remain, so to speak, ‘yet wythoute’. The truth they speak is never entirely clear. When, like People, they cannot explain the causes of their captivity, however, we get to the heart of the social transformations in which they exist.
World History
