Mike Pincombe - The Anatomy of Tudor Literature: Proceedings of the First International Conference of the Tudor Symposium (1998)

Edited by

MIKE PINCOMBE

First published 2001 by Ashgate Publishing

Reissued 2018 by Routledge

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Copyright Mike Pincombe and contributors, 2001

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A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 00066516

ISBN 13: 978-1-138-70455-8 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-1-315-20262-4 (ebk)

Mike Pincombe

Peter Happ

Gillian Day

Andrew Hiscock

Jill Barker

Tom Betteridge

Gareth Roberts

Katherine Wilson

Regina Schneider

Jonathan Gibson

Natasha Distiller

Efterpi Mitsi

Swen Voekel

Anthony Martin

Mara ONeill

Carol Banks

Stefani Brusberg-Kiermeier

Tracey Hill

My thanks to all who made the conference such an enjoyable experience. Rowena Bryson made sure we had plenty of good food and drink; and Janie Mills helped with refreshments. Fiona Griffiths provided secretarial assistance; and two successive Deans of Arts at Newcastle, Jerry Paterson and Eric Cross, have been very supportive towards the Tudor Symposium in general. My thanks also to Erika Gaffney of Ashgate for devising such an apt and illuminating title for this volume and to Pat FitzGerald and Tom Norton for preparing camera-ready copy and the index.

But my main debt of gratitude is towards the members of the conference themselves. It was very satisfying to gather together so many clever and delightful people from all over the world in the homely surroundings of the Percy Building. Sadly, this was the last time I saw Gareth Roberts before his untimely death early in 1999. Gareth was a model of humanitas: learned, urbane, convivial. We will all miss him very much; and to him this volume is dedicated.

I have tried to impose a certain degree of uniformity on the presentation of the essays which follow. Where old-spelling texts have been used, they have been normalised: i/j and u/v have been modernised; contractions have been expanded; proper nouns have been deitalicised. These are all changes which do not alter the literary signifance of the words as they were originally written or printed. Titles, however, appear in modern spelling. References to primary sources are keyed by line, page, folio, signature, etc., to a list included at the end of each essay. References to secondary sources are keyed by name, year, and page number to a general list at the end of the volume.

MIKE PINCOMBE

It is customary for introductions to volumes which contain collections of essays, or, as in this case, the proceedings of a conference, to provide a brief summary of each piece of work, and, often with great ingenuity, to offer an overview of the collection as a whole. However, since the papers delivered at the first international conference of the Tudor Symposium in April 1998 were so diverse indeed, they were intended to be very various it seems a futile exercise to follow the usual procedure. Instead, I wish to take occasion, as Convenor of the Tudor Symposium, rather than as editor of the present volume, to make a few remarks on what I perceive to be one of the most important items on its critical agenda: the overthrow of the prejudice against mid-Tudor literature amongst modern literary academics, including some specialists in Renaissance or early modern studies. I place the blame for this prejudice very squarely on the shoulders of C.S. Lewis in his magisterial volume for the Oxford History of English Literature: English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (1954). Lewis famously dismissed the literature written between the end of the reign of Henry VIII to the late 1570s as Drab. Of course, this was not intended as a dyslogistic term (p. 64). Lewis concedes that some of the work produced in these three decades and more is neat and temperate. However, we may suspect some disingenuousness on Lewiss part here; certainly his words have had a devastating effect on the study of mid-Tudor literature. Everybody knows that the Drab Age is one to be passed over quickly before you get to the Golden Age which Lewis (as most other critics) likes best. But it is my view that the literature of this period is not so much drab as tarnished. If it seems dull, it is because it has not been used enough. Handle it more frequently, and it will soon recover its true shine. I will return to the ordinary purpose of an introduction to a volume such as this a eulogy of its contents later in this essay; but let me proceed by explaining the origins of the Tudor Symposium in a general revolt against the post-Lewisian condition of sixteenth-century studies.