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“Moving Graces”: Forms of Religious Persuasion in Early Modern Drama

by

Jacqueline Wylde

A thesis submitted in with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Department of English University of Toronto

© Copyright by Jacqueline Wylde 2018 “Moving Graces”: Forms of Religious Persuasion in Early Modern Drama Jacqueline Wylde Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto

2018

Abstract

How does one reach the hearts of others? This thesis situates the question in early modern

England by investigating the activity of persuasion on the commercial stage, contending that, when plays sought to represent persuasion or be persuasive themselves, many of their tactics were borrowed from religious sources. The ongoing process of in required an investment in persuasive methods for the purposes of religious and conversion. Protestant reform may have instigated the persuasive practices, but the ensuing heterogeneity of enabled multiple confessional perspectives to compete for hearts and minds, creating a “ of persuasion” that profoundly influenced early modern modes of , including dramatic ones.

While strategies could not be reproduced directly on the stage, I claim that playwrights made use of the form of such strategies. Overlaying these various forms with content relevant to the , they capitalized on the persuasive meanings inherent in the forms without offending the censors or derailing the story. Chapter One begins with an investigation into the evangelical metrical . I argue that the shape, sound and meaning of a musical psalm reverberates in a drinking song in The Shoemaker’s , evoking an

ii exploration of the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in the creation of community .

In Chapter Two, the Duke’s interactions in the jail in Measure for Measure follow the same scripts as the private conferences associated with the Jesuits, prompting questions about the ethical limits of efficacious persuasion. Chapter Three explores the goodnight ballad, considering the appearance of one in Eastward Ho as central to the play’s ongoing negotiation between sincerity and satire. My historical formalist examination of theatrical appearances of now-unfamiliar forms of religious persuasion contributes to conversations about the operation of religious meaning on the stage and the role of the commercial theatre in a religious culture. When found in various theatrical guises on the stage, these forms retain their persuasiveness and act as dramatic agents of political, social, institutional and personal strategy, deployed both within the dramatic arc of the story and beyond to work on the of the audience.

iii Acknowledgements

This dissertation sometimes felt like a solitary endeavour, but in , its constant and final fruition was due to the help, intervention, and support of an incredible community of hearts and minds.

My was funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and by a University of Toronto Fellowship, and I am grateful to these for the financial support.

What a privilege it has been to work with my dissertation advisory committee. My supervisor, Lynne Magnusson, has been unflagging in her confidence in me and my work. She modelled intellectual rigor combined with a genuine generosity of , and I am grateful for her guidance, her challenging questions, and her eye for detail. Paul Stevens’ enthusiastic encouragement was as invaluable as his deep understanding of in early modern England, and Holger Schott Syme’s willingness to listen and ask penetrating questions, especially in the early stages of the project, helped open up and steer my thinking at critical junctures. I also thank Patricia Badir and Elizabeth D. Harvey for their thoughtful, tough, and engaging questions at the oral examination. Professor Badir’s external report sparked many for the next stages of the project.

Conversations with a broad community of scholars contributed to the development and enrichment of each chapter, especially in seminars at multiple Shakespeare Association of America conferences. Two of these seminars led to contributions in edited collections. Parts of Chapter One appeared as “Singing a New Song in the Shoemaker’s Holiday,” in and Drama in Early Modern England: The Performance of Religion on the Renaissance Stage, edited by Jane Hwang Degenhardt and Elizabeth Williamson. Chapter Three’s discussion of Eastward Ho appeared as “Singing in the Counter: Goodnight Ballads in Eastward Ho,” in Forms of : Literary Form and Religious Conflict in Early Modern England, edited by Jonathan Baldo and Isabel Karremann. I would like to thank all the editors for their guidance and acknowledge Ashgate Publishing and Manchester University

iv Press for providing permission to reproduce the material. Discussions and responses at Theatres of Conversion: Early Modern Cities, Courts, and Playhouses, a seminar run by the Early Modern Conversions project were particularly helpful to the development of Chapter Two. It was Paul Yachnin’s generous mentorship at McGill that first led me to the metrical psalms, planting the seeds of the project.

The English Department at the University of Toronto has been a collegial and stimulating intellectual home. I am particularly indebted to Suzanne Gregoire, for the years of commiseration and conversation about our projects, our lives, and things early modern, and to Katie Larson, who is a fount of both scholarly and institutional, a source of inspiration, and a dearly trusted friend. My graduate school compatriots gave me of their friendship, knowledge, encouragement, editing eyes, and , and for all this and more I thank Laura Stenberg, Marybeth Curtin, Ceilidh Hart, Emily Simmons, Alisha Walters, Darryl Domingo, Esther DeBruijn, Katherine McLeod, Rory McKeown, and Marilyn Simon. Andrew Theobald’s last minute editing help was greatly appreciated.

I have been blessed with a community of and friends who have provided me with care both emotional and practical. Jenny Thompson, Stephanie Donaldson, and Vanessa Dixon were part of my village, and made my work possible with their flexibility and willingness to help. It is my family that has been the most unfailingly supportive of my scholarly endeavours, even if the particularities of my work seemed far away from our everyday lives. I thank my brother Geoff, for his good humour and genuine inquisitiveness, and my sister Katie, for our ongoing, lifelong conversation about every possible thing. I do not have words to express the depth of my gratitude to my parents Barbara and Harry Wylde, who have made in my life and in my seem possible and even an adventure. They taught me to be curious, to ask questions, and to persevere. My children, Alexander, Talia and Clara, all of whom were born while this dissertation was in progress, made sure that the years of this project were among the most joyful of my life. Finally, I dedicate this work to my husband Michael Minialoff, whose faith in me has never wavered. My achievements are made possible by his steadfast and sustaining .

v Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ...... iv Table of Contents ...... vi Introduction ...... 1 I. Religious Forms, Theatrical Content and “The Turn to Religion” ...... 6

II. Forms of Religious Persuasion ...... 13

Chapter One: “Moved by the Concord of Sweet Sounds”: Playing the Singing of Metrical Psalms ...... 24 I. The Rise of the Metrical Psalms ...... 29

II. Strategic Singing in The Shoemaker’s Holiday ...... 49

III. Hanging up harps in The Merry Wives of Windsor ...... 65

Chapter Two: Duke, Friar, Jesuit, Spy: Private Conference and Public Persuasions in Measure for Measure ...... 78 I. “Catching in St. Peter’s Net”: Private Conference and the Jesuits ...... 82

II. “I’ll teach you how you shall arraign your ”: Confession and Persuasion in Measure for Measure ...... 100

Chapter Three: Singing from the Scaffold: Staging the Goodnight Ballad ...... 120 I. The Goodnight Ballad: Confessions and Conventions ...... 126

II. Misogonus and Popular Musical Imitation ...... 148

III. Singing Goodnight in Eastward Ho...... 156

Coda ...... 170 Works Consulted ...... 174

vi 1

Introduction

In 1 Henry IV, Falstaff famously questions the of when he is told by Prince Harry that he owes God a :

‘Tis not due yet. I would be loath to pay him before his day. What need I be so forward with him that calls not on me? Well, ‘tis no ; honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come on? How then? Can honour to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is honour? A word. What is in that word ‘honour’? What is that ‘honour’? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o’Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ‘Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon. And so ends my catechism.1

Falstaff calls his interrogative justification a “catechism,” but of course it is not really a catechism. The 1549 Book of Common Prayer’s catechism used the question and answer format to teach the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer and the sacraments. It was meant to instruct, examine and indoctrinate the young, using an interrogative method to ensure knowledge of Christian and particular confessional . Falstaff is using the form of the catechism with his questions and answers. This form is useful to him because it gives his a patina of and , providing him with the rhetorical structure to justify his move from “honour pricks me on” to “honour is a mere scutcheon.” Over the course of the “catechism,” he convinces himself that the price of honour—a mere word—is far too high.

The catechism was designed to propagate orthodoxy, but Falstaff uses it in order to explore and then convince himself of some unorthodox ideas. Catechism was an important tool of evangelism after the Reformation, used to inculcate children and ensure the continuation and

1William Shakespeare, “1 Henry IV” in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), 5.1.127-139.

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proliferation of reformed ideas. While the content of Falstaff’s speech is unsuitable to a catechism, the form makes his argument’s conclusion seem self-evident; he takes a religious form designed for individual or small group instruction with the aim of community-wide evangelization, and uses it for his self-persuasion on self-preservation. The ironies in this mismatch make for a rich interpretive field; pairing religious forms with theatrical content is significant, fraught, and not uncommon on the early modern stage. This project is about how the commercial theatre makes use of religious forms—particularly forms of religious persuasion. I investigate the ways in which individuals, communities, and institutions devised methods for convincing others to change, reinforce or further engage in particular faith-based beliefs, and how such persuasions create and convey meaning on the commercial stage in early modern England.

Falstaff drew explicit to his appropriation of the catechetical form, but because the censors did not allow direct representation of religious practices or doctrinal issues, religious forms were more likely to be borrowed without clear instructions for interpretation. I will argue in this thesis that the the theatre borrowed these forms of religious persuasion was that they were effective at doing persuasive things both in the worlds of the plays and in the houses of the theatres. Religious persuasion could take many different shapes because, as we will see, reformers adapted existing modes of communication to the evangelical cause. They pressed music, oral , printed books, ephemeral print, and dramatic re- enactments into service in order to develop specific communication forms that were doctrinally appropriate, persuasive, and sometimes quite enjoyable. These forms were then used on the stage because many of them came to be culturally meaningful and highly convincing. They were ubiquitous enough to be recognizable and powerful, even when their religious content was obscured by dramatic narrative.

Religious persuasion that was effective as well as theologically coherent was of great interest to early reformers, both on the continent and in England. While the Elizabethan settlement had brought a kind of national uniformity to official in what became a mostly Protestant country, the changes of the Reformation formed a legacy of ongoing negotiation between individual conscience, local practice and national faith. The preceding decades had

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witnessed compulsory religious conversion on a dizzying scale. Between 1537 and 1558, England’s rulers officially converted the nation three , beginning with Henry VIII’s first break with Rome (though Protestantism was not entirely adopted until the coronation of his son), reverting back to Catholicism with Mary (1553), and coming back to Protestantism again with Elizabeth. Even though Elizabeth’s long reign transformed the country from generally Catholic to generally Protestant belief and practice, the fragmentation of belief became a new . Those who strived for homogenous conformity, those who continued to be loyal to the old faith and those who were convinced of more radical interpretations of the new faith attempted to exert influence on both official policy and particular individuals.2 And even though Protestant forms of worship were mandated by the state, was antithetical to the spirit of Protestantism for which faith is foundational: faith replenishes the heart, the heart grows new affects and good works then follow. Forced conversion does not come through faith but through expediency, and there is no pathway from expediency to a renewed heart. William Perkins, for example, writes “When any man is conuerted, this worke of God is not done by compulsion, but he is conuerted willingly: and at the very time when he is conuerted, by Gods grace he wils his co[n]version.”3

In addition to theologically suspect, compelled conversions posed practical dilemmas. If outward conformity to does not correspond to an inward change of heart, then the cohesion of family, community and nation rests on potentially shaky ground.4 While could dictate the content of the services and make attendance mandatory, it was impossible to command feelings in the heart. To create a more stable Protestant nation, there

2 My understanding of the English Reformation is indebted to Peter Marshall’s recent and complex account, which includes detailed historical work on the particulars of conversion in the period. See Peter Marshall, Heretics and Believers: A of the English Reformation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). For a good resource on conversion later in the period see Michael Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580-1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 3 William Perkins, A reformed Catholike: or, A declaration shewing how neere we may come to the present Church of Rome in sundrie points of religion: and vvherein we must for euer depart from them with an advertisement to all fauouers of the Romane religion, shewing that the said religion is against the Catholike principles and grounds of the catechisme (Cambridge: Iohn Legat, 1598), 15. I first found this quotation in Scott Kastan, A Will to Believe (: , 2014), 102. 4 Thomas Cranmer provides a famous early example of the insecure results of forced conversion. While he was initially compelled to recant his reformed views upon the ascension of Mary on of death, he very publically recanted his recantation when it became clear that he was to be executed in any event, thereby embarrassing the authorities. See Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

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would have to be a way to expose large numbers of people to Protestant ideas and in appealing ways, to communicate the basic tenets of the religion and portray them as authentic, empowering and true while exposing differing as wrong-headed misinterpretations at best and deliberate of the truth for evil purposes at worst. This was done through a variety of religiously persuasive tactics which aimed to reach and appeal to as many people as possible, using all culturally meaningful tools available.5

In the early years of the English Reformation, one of these persuasive tactics was theatrical. The Tudor period saw the creation of a distinctly Protestant drama. Thomas Cromwell’s patronage of John Bale and his fellows between 1537 and 1540 had professional players travel extensively around England with Protestant plays such as King Johan.6 Professional troupes of travelling players played a significant role in promoting the new religious order around the country as supporters of the new religion wrote plays in order to capitalize on the community-building potential of the theatre. Despite the enthusiasm of the first generation of reformers in England for dramatic evangelism, such enthusiasm waned significantly during the latter half of the Elizabethan period when preachers lost their assurance in the positive benefits of playgoing. Meanwhile, other effective modes of communicating the Word more suited to basic Protestant principles such as public sermons, metrical psalm-singing, and cheaply printed, easily circulated religious songs and stories rose to persuasive prominence. The theatre became a flourishing all its own—some plays certainly could have religious or even evangelical aims in mind, but these were not the aims of the theatre as an institution. And while plays were not usually overtly persuasive of religious ideas, they certainly continued to be considered potentially persuasive of other , ideas and perspectives.7

5 It is important to note that this was not an especially centralized process. While some forms of persuasion were developed and disseminated by the authorities in a thoughtful and concerted way, much of the persuasive work was effectively outsourced with little oversight. Compare discussions of the development and function of metrical psalms and goodnight ballads, chapters 1 and 3. 6 Alexandra F. Johnston, “Protestant Drama and the state 1535-75,” European Medieval Drama 19 (2015): 1- 31. Paul Whitfield White, Theatre and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage, and Playing in Tudor England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 7. 7 Sally-Beth MacLean and Scott McMillin have shown that in the case of the Queen’s Men, the propagandistic political mandate of the theatrical troupe was strong until the turn of the seventeenth century; in the Essex rebellion, it appears that both the rebels and the Crown took seriously the subversive potential of Richard II.

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It is my contention in this project that when plays want to represent persuasion or be persuasive, many of the tactics used onstage are borrowed from religious sources. Of course, religion was not the only source of persuasive scripts available in the period; romantic, political, and commercial persuasions were all commonplace with their own codes, and structures. But in the wake of the ongoing shifts in belief and practice emerging from England’s Reformation, religious persuasions became some of the most widely recognized and effective persuasive strategies available. Protestantism may have been the instigator of the urgent and ubiquitous persuasive practices, but in a culture of persuasion all confessional perspectives—Catholic, Elizabethan Protestant, Puritan—were obliged to compete for the hearts and minds of each individual. My project will explore how persuasive strategies depicted on the stage and deployed by the stage emerge from a of a religious (and multi-confessional) culture of persuasion.8

Since the strategies used to attract and familiarize people with confessional beliefs, practices and communities, such as sermons or metrical psalms, could not be reproduced directly on the stage, playwrights would make use of the form of the sermon or the metrical psalm overlaid with content relevant to the play in order to capitalize on the persuasive meanings inherent in the religious form without offending the censors or derailing the story. For example, in Chapter One, I argue that behind the face of a drinking song in The Shoemaker’s Holiday lurks the shape, sound and meaning of a metrical psalm, while in Chapter Two, the Duke’s interactions in the jail in Measure for Measure follow the same scripts as private conferences associated with the Jesuits. I’m arguing here that playwrights harnessed the power of religious persuasion by using the forms the various persuasions took in the service of the dramatic narrative, leaving the religious content obscured but not necessarily denied, polluted or ignored. The particular forms that I investigate in the project are metrical psalms, private conference and goodnight ballads; in each case I examine how the forms do the work of persuasion, often by demanding the intellectual and emotional engagement of their

Sally-Beth MacLean and Scott McMillin, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 8 The phrase “culture of persuasion” comes from the work of Andrew Pettegree whose ideas will be explored later in the introduction.

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audience. When found in various theatrical guises on the stage, these forms retain their persuasiveness and act as dramatic agents of political, social, institutional and personal strategy, deployed both within the dramatic arc of the story and beyond to work on the emotions of the audience.

I. Religious Forms, Theatrical Content and “The Turn to Religion”

My argument takes a historical formalist approach in which I attempt to see my way through questions about the relationship between religion and the commercial stage in England by looking to religious forms at work in drama. Investigations into the relationship between religion and theatre in early modern England have created such a well-trodden path over the last fifteen to twenty years that they have their own phrase; Kenneth Jackson and Arthur Marotti called it a “turn to religion” in early modern literary studies in 2004.9 I would like to take a moment to see where and why these arguments started, where they have progressed and how they continue to develop as so much of my work grapples with the questions central to this religious turn: what is the place of the non-religious theatre in such a religious culture and how does religious meaning operate on the stage?

This “turn to religion” marked a surge of interest in thinking about religion on its own terms in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It marked a reaction against the general trend among New Historicists and cultural materialists in early modern studies through the 1980s and 90s to sideline the questions of religion or, when contending with religious issues, to treat them as cyphers for underlying economic, political and social conditions.10 The reinvigoration of religious interest was due in part to the opening up of interpretations of England’s move towards Protestantism. Revisionist historians of the 1980s and 90s challenged traditional

9 Ken Jackson and Arthur F. Marotti, “The Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Studies,” 46 (2004): 167-190. 10 Jackson and Marotti, 168. Jackson and Marotti acknowledge that the interpretation of religious , ideas, texts and contexts in Shakespeare never entirely disappeared. James Mardock points to Roy Battenhouse’s 1994 Shakespeare’s Christian Dimension and Frederic Jameson’s assertion in his article “Religion and : Political Reading of Paradise Lost” that religion is a “master code” to early modern culture in 1986. James D. Mardock “Introduction: ‘Reformation in a flood’”: The Religious Turn’s Second Wave” in Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England, eds. James D. Mardock and Kathryn R. McPherson (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2014), 7.

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narratives that emphasised the notion that widespread disillusionment with the led to an English population either at the forefront of or at least generally receptive to official movements towards toward Protestantism. Christopher Haigh, John Bossy and Eamon Duffy came to the conclusion that the shift towards Protestantism was not a straightforward business in England; and that for much of the sixteenth century and for many people, Protestantism was an imposition from the authorities above, and that Catholic culture had remarkable staying power.11 Patrick Collinson refined this view by asserting the Reformation in England occurred during the reigns of Elizabeth and James and explored the era as one of both continuity and profound .12 Such scholarship opened up a new avenue for early modern literary scholars to think about the meaning of religious resonances, particularly in the plays that emerged from the theatre scene and made ample space for the readings from the margins that thrive in New Historicist approaches.

A rethinking of what religious belief may have looked like during the years in which England underwent religious change ultimately revived some substantial questions for literary scholars about the sixteenth and seventeenth-century London theatre. What is it about Post- Reformation English culture that created an opportunity for such a vibrant and irreverent theatre scene to thrive? Why this theatre in this—religious—culture? What happens to faith in the theatre? Some explorations of these questions look to the ‘secularization thesis’ to create a compelling response.13 C. John Sommerville considers this in relation to the early modern period in The Secularization of Early Modern England: From Religious Culture to Religious Faith, and Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Montrose take up this position, making compelling arguments about the way in which the theatre appropriates the mystery

11 Christopher Haigh, English (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); John Bossy, in the West: 1400-1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Alters: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 12 Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Houndmills: MacMillan, 1988). 13 Theorists such as Steve Bruce, Rodney Stark and Charles Taylor have argued about whether and how the progression of societies inevitably diminishes the authority of religion in both private life and in the public sphere. Steve Bruce, God is Dead: Secularization in the West (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002); Rodney Stark, “Secularization, R.I.P.,” in Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion eds. Rodney Stark and Roger Finke (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Charles Taylor The Malaise of Modernity (Toronto: Anansi, 1991) and A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

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and of the abandoned Catholic for theatrical effect.14 Other critics, like Debora Shuger, Huston Diehl and Jeffrey Knapp, make powerful arguments against such claims, noting that they ignore the enormous influence, meaning and cultural capital of establishment Protestantism.15 In his influential book Hamlet in Purgatory, Greenblatt took seriously the importance of religious beliefs and practice with a sensitive investigation of Catholic purgatory and the physicality of the Catholic culture of death in contrast to a Protestant focus on the spirit. He made an influential assertion that the mystery and materiality of religion no longer thought to be efficacious was taken up, emptied out and secularized by the theatre. The theatre, in this view, fills the husk of religion with new life and, as the inheritor of the mysticism and spectacle repudiated by the new church, it secularizes all it touches.16 Greenblatt’s argument wrestles with the relationship between form and content and their mutual work on the stage. I will come to a different conclusion about how religious forms function onstage, but because Greenblatt’s argument is so important to this turn to religion, the relationship between religious form and theatrical content is tied to the secularization thesis in the minds of subsequent critics.

While Greenblatt’s contentions were part of what ignited a turn to religion, they also sparked a heated response. His notion that the “emptying out” of and of their religious content is part of the secularizing power of theatre has been debated and largely rejected by other scholars in the field who question the outsized role that theatre plays in the gradual decline of cultural religiosity.17 such as Greenblatt’s and those of some of his

14 John C. Sommerville, The Secularization of Early Modern England: From Religious Culture to Religious Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 15Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation and Theatre in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 9. Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Paul Whitfield White, “Theater and Religious Culture” in A New History of Early English Drama eds. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Debora Shuger, “Subversive Fathers and Subjects: Shakespeare and Christianity” in Religion, Literature and Politics in Post-Reformation England, 1540-1688, eds. Donna B. Hamilton and Richard Strier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 16 Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001). Parts of the ‘emptying out’ argument were previously articulated in his work on King Lear in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 17 See Sarah Beckwith, “Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet and the Forms of Oblivion,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33 (2003): 261-280; Brian Cummings, “’Dead March’: and Mimesis in Shakespeare’s ,” Shakespeare 8 (2012): 368-385.

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critics are part of what James Mardock has identified as the first of two waves in the turn to religion. Readings in this first wave sought to move beyond thinking of religion as a cypher for underlying political, economic or social issues; however, the tendency to view religious materials, and rituals in plays as decipherable codes remained, at times shifting instead to reading plays as sites of hidden religious affiliation. In such analyses, the playtext was read as containing hidden meanings for those with shared beliefs, and the scripts could therefore be decrypted to reveal the personal beliefs of the playwrights. With the increased understanding of Catholic belief and practice in relation to English literary and dramatic culture, there was much material to mine. Many critics made cases for the Catholicism (or sometimes Protestantism) of Shakespeare; Gary Taylor and Richard Wilson both wrote studies in which plays are mined for of Catholic , but as others have pointed out, such a narrow approach causes plays to be read for specific clues to the exclusion of all else. Alison Shell’s Shakespeare and Religion gently closes the door on this approach, as her research demonstrates that if Shakespeare were Catholic, there is no evidence to suggest that other Catholics considered his plays to be anything more than vaguely sympathetic to their plight.18

The last few years have seen critics largely turn away from attempting to ascertain the particular beliefs of playwrights based on their plays.19 Instead, scholars have generally shifted to investigating the kinds of religious habits of thought evident in playtexts and what and how they mean, marking Mardock’s ‘second wave’ of interest in religion in early modern drama. Authors beyond Shakespeare are the focus of studies as the frame widens

18 Gary Taylor, “Forms of Opposition: Shakespeare and Middleton,” English Literary Renaissance 24.2 (1994), 283-314; Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2004); John Cox, “Afterword” in Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England, eds. Mardock and McPherson, 264. Alison Shell, Shakespeare and Religion (London: J.C. Black for Arden Shakespeare, 2010). For explorations of the implications of Shakespeare’s connections with Catholicism, see the contributions to the collections Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare and Region, Religion and Patronage both edited by Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay and Richard Wilson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). 19 In their introduction to Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion (2015), David Lowenstein and Michael Witmore describe their book as an exploration of “Shakespeare’s creative engagement with early modern religious culture, but it does so without assuming that Shakespeare can himself be aligned with any specific doctrinal beliefs, religious group or confession.” David Lowenstein and Michael Witmore, “Introduction,” in Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion, eds. David Lowenstein and Michael Witmore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 1. David Scott Kastan in A Will to Believe is particularly forceful in his argument against the wisdom or possibility of discerning Shakespeare’s religious convictions from his plays.

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beyond particular religious affiliation and more to how religious thoughts, beliefs, artifacts, rituals and language mingle with theatrical forms and narratives in a playspace.20 While the scope of the field has widened and deepened both theoretically and methodologically, the twin questions of how to understand the work of the early modern theatre within the context of a deeply religious world, and how religion operated in a theatre that was not, in its purpose, religious, have proven provocative.21

Two camps have emerged that provide different responses to these two questions, one which attempts to reconcile the “secular and secularizing” theatre without denying the continuing power of religious doctrine, materials, rituals and when used in plays, and one which attempts to abandon the secularization thesis altogether. Anthony Dawson is a significant voice arguing for the former. He claims that the theatre takes up and examines the “rags and bones of culture,” some of which are religious, thereby permitting the theatre to appropriate the very real and ongoing meaning inherent in religious language and action.22 Religious language, activities and symbols lend power and meaning to the stage but their own significance changes when transcribed into a theatrical location. Dawson sees the theatre’s use of religion as central to an emerging , and that the theatre is one part of the movement of the culture at large towards an increasing secularization. He makes use of Sommerville’s claim that the inherent in Protestantism created a ‘secularizing religion’ with its multiple possible approaches to personal religious faith. The theatre is then part of this larger shift towards fragmentation, a product of both the old and the new, inhabiting a space in which religious language and ideas are respected and mined for their

20 Some collections in this vein are Ken Jackson and Arthur F. Marotti, eds, Shakespeare and Religion: Early Modern and Postmodern Perspectives (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011); Jane Hwang Degenhardt and Elizabeth Williamson, eds., Religion and Drama in Early Modern England: The Performance of Religion on the Renaissance Stage (: Ashgate, 2011); Jonathan Baldo and Isabel Karremann, eds. Forms of Faith: Literary Form and Religious Conflict in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017). 21 Brian Walsh, Unsettled Toleration: Religious Difference on the Shakespearean Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 22 Anthony B. Dawson, “Shakespeare and Secular Performance,” in Shakespeare and of Performance, eds. Paul Yachnin and Patricia Badir (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007), 84,86.

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power, but are dislocated and transformed to become artificial and provisional so that, ultimately, “theatrical belief replaces religious faith.”23

Another way to understand how religion functions on the stage and how the stage functions around religion is to look beyond the secularization thesis. Brian Cummings makes a forceful case for this position in Mortal Thoughts, wherein he interrogates the notion of humanity’s inevitable progression towards secular enlightenment, especially as it pertains to understanding Renaissance literature. He argues that our notion of historical secularism has been unduly influenced by modern secularism—we want to see ourselves and the ideas that we hold to be important in the past, especially in a past that we admire (like the works of Shakespeare)—and he is looking for an of early modernity that is not “in thrall to modern secularization.”24 Contending that moderns think of religion as the opposite of, or whatever is outside of, the secular, he proposes that perhaps religion and secularity had porous boundaries, as the realm of the religious included much of what we would consider secular: “the religious, perhaps, is not quite as ‘religious’ as we thought and intersects with the world in its totality, not in some hermetically sealed sphere all of its own.”25 Such an argument questions the notion that the early modern theatre hastened the progress of an emerging secularity by inheriting and transforming the mysteries, and transcendence of the medieval mystery plays and even the sacred rituals of the church in the playspace. It challenges us to think about ways in which the secular and the religious are not in opposition to or competition with one another, but are, in Cummings’ words, part of the “same cultural nexus.”26

Paul Stevens likewise finds the secularization thesis ahistorical when applied to the early modern period, pointing out that any sixteenth or seventeenth century Protestant would have found the that Protestantism could be considered a ‘secularizing religion’ utterly

23 Dawson, 97. 24 Brian Cummings, Mortal Thoughts: Religion, Secularity and Identity in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 4. 25 Cummings, Mortal Thoughts, 14. 26 Brian Cummings, Shakespeare and The Reformation: Shakespeare Lecture read at the British Academy 1 May 2012. https://www.britac.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Cummings-Shakespeare.pdf (accessed November 20, 2017), 5.

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baffling. 27 In his reading, Sommerville’s focus on the individualism inherent in Protestantism ignores other important parts of reformation that emphasize the very real presence of God and grace in the world, and that the ability for people to read the Bible themselves or hear the stories of God through expanding media options would hardly have made Protestantism secular or secularizing. Theatrical transcendence may not have always been considered as provisional as Dawson asserts if God’s ubiquitous presence was considered to be as alive in the theatre as anywhere else. While admiring Dawson’s perceptive reading of the secularity of Hamlet, Stevens makes the point that while Hamlet may question notions of providence and resist its own religious allusions, the theatrical space does not necessitate that all plays do the same thing when they use religious language and ideas. To illustrate this point, Stevens makes the case that in Henry VIII, Shakespeare and Fletcher sought to “produce a play in the commercial theatre that had something of the of liturgy, an act of emerging out of the flux of English history in which members of the audience might cease to be individuals and may be brought together in a godly unity” (240).28 Such an argument challenges the Bloomian notion of Shakespeare’s theatre radically thrusting us forward towards a modern secular , and suggests that plays could model multiple things, including a way of being in the world that suggests an absolute truth consonant with religious thinking.29 In this reading, the theatrical institution is not an engine of modernity or secularity that always pushes in a specific direction, but another space of contention where, for early moderns, humans and the grace of God co-reside. Cummings and Stevens provide a framework for my thinking about religious form and theatrical content outside the drive to secularization, for if the theatre, if not religiously driven, is still a space thought of as potentially filled with grace, then the non-religious content cannot always and necessarily secularize a religious form. The still powerful meanings of the form remain alongside, partnered with, possibly augmenting, and sometimes undermining or overtaking the theatrical content.

27 Paul Stevens, “Hamlet, Henry VIII, and the question of religion: a post-secular perspective” in Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion, eds. David Loewenstein and Michael Witmore (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015), 237. 28 Stevens, Hamlet, 240. 29 Stevens, Hamlet, 257.

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II. Forms of Religious Persuasion

In this project, I aim to think of the religious and the secular as part of a world in its totality—where theatre and religion can be considered part of the ‘same cultural nexus’—and where the playhouse was as potentially full of God’s grace as any other place. As Debora Shuger has established convincingly, if people thought in religious ways then the structures of religious thought, , prayer, worship and communication would have appeared in all media and in a variety of contexts, because they were the kinds of structures that shaped how people thought and understood their world.30 Of course such structures are to be found in the theatre too; plays made use of all kinds of forms, ways of organizing ideas, , props, characters, actors, and physical spaces, and each form brings its own meaning. At the same time, forms are multi-dimensional and open-ended in their potential for meaning and action, particularly when relocated. Caroline Levine makes this point very well in her recent re- of the possibilities of form. She thinks capaciously about what forms can be, noting that a form’s essential work is to make order. To articulate all of the many and sometimes contradictory things that forms can do, she borrows of “affordance” from design theory to describe the potential in forms, thinking of both what a form is doing and what it may be capable of doing in other circumstances across time and space.31

This way of thinking is helpful because the forms that I look at in this project, the metrical psalm, private conference and goodnight ballad, all share some affordances. Like all forms, they are portable, they are picked up from their homes and moved into the theatre because they are useful, and they are useful because of their affordance of persuasiveness. Using Levine’s term of “affordance” inserts a sense of the provisional into the work of these forms; their persuasiveness is but one of their potentialities. But what I find is that in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, some forms are so strongly associated with their

30 Debora Shuger has long maintained that the scaffolding of the Renaissance mind, what Shuger calls ‘habits of thought,’ were primarily what we would consider to be religious. Debora Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics and the Dominant Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 31 Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 3, 6.

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persuasiveness, the religious content so woven into the fabric of the form, that persuasiveness not only remained consistent when the form moved to a different home, but proved to be a dominant and even defining meaning. It is my argument that these forms can be found in drama, sometimes filled with utterly non-religious content, sometimes appearing more like their recognizable selves, but always communicating something persuasive. Even when their overtly religious content is absent, the forms retain their persuasiveness and act as dramatic sites of strategy and negotiation.

The or affordance of persuasiveness is significant because of its increasing importance as a tool of religious communication; after the Reformation, the notion of religious choice was something relatively new. Peter Marshall characterizes the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods as a time of choosing sides, noting that Campion’s statement on the scaffold, “you and I, we are not of one religion” emblemizes the process of confessionalization that was taking place, as first “Catholic” and “Protestant” and then newer, more precise terms of confessional identity became commonplace.32 The stakes of these religious conversations and disputes were high and there was no clear answer as to where on the confessional divide England would eventually find itself. Differences in religious beliefs could tear apart , ruin , create distrust within previously tight-knit communities, threaten livlihoods and personal safety, and most crucially, imperil the eternal status of the . Moreover, the confessional identity of the country as a whole changed enormously during Elizabeth’s reign, transforming it “from a nation reformed in name and law, to one that had become deeply culturally Protestant, or at least viscerally anti- Catholic.”33 This transformation required a sustained effort that went beyond legal compulsion. The creation of a front of persuasion was required, presented through a variety

32 Peter Marshall, “Choosing sides and talking religion in Shakespeare’s England” in Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion, 44. For a collection that looks at various dynamics of toleration in Early Modern England please see Nadine Lewycky and Adam David Morton, eds., Getting Along? Religious Identities and Confessional Relations in Early Modern England: Essays in Honour of Professor W.J. Sheils (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). 33 Marshall, “Choosing Sides,” 44.

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of media, filled with cultural, theological, emotional, and intellectual arguments both overt and covert.34

Because of the community-wide effect of religious choice, individuals, groups and institutions all invested in persuasion in an attempt to attain spiritual, familial, political, and communal . Andrew Pettegree argues that the Reformation in Europe instigated a “culture of persuasion,” in which existing modes of mass and private communication were re-formed to carry messages of religious persuasion that infiltrated all aspects of communication and community. He notes that, from a modern perspective, religious belief is considered a personal choice. But the early modern world was one where information was mostly communicated in public—in the church, the marketplace, the town hall, even the inn. If reformed ideas were to take hold in any significant way, they would have to work with the grain of the culture rather than against it, and any religious movement aiming for a large scale shift in belief would have to rely on persuasive forms that were likewise . It would be impossible to move an entire country towards a new religion by trying to reach each citizen individually, and Pettegree’s point is that such an approach would not make sense for an early modern culture in which one’s individual conscience and one’s community were deeply intertwined. The appropriation of existing collective culturally familiar methods of communication and their transformation into vehicles for reformed ideas made it possible to move the hearts and minds of whole communities.35 Regardless of whether the conversion efforts were conservative or radical, well-organized or haphazard, officially sanctioned or coming from the grassroots, successful persuasion tactics emerged from recognizable and proven communicative vehicles.

To this end, popular kinds of singing, early drama, and cheap print with illustrative woodcuts would play as much a role in religious persuasion as catechism, bible study and one-on-one

34 While the culture may have become ferociously anti-Catholic, Marshall points out that there was, paradoxically, plenty of evidence of every-day toleration and social interactions between neighbours of different , and from all appearances it seems that people did not necessarily avoid topics of religious beliefs and controversy, but sometimes tried to engage with and move one another. See Marshall, “Choosing Sides,” 47 for examples. 35 Andrew Pettegree, Reformation and The Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 8.

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discussions, or even sermons, scaffold displays (though these were notoriously difficult narratives to control), and polemical screeds. Religious forms of persuasion were popular forms of communication that were recast and transformed into something else more suitable for carrying religious messages. Once transformed, these forms become deeply associated with persuasion and were recast again in drama to carry persuasive messages. This characterization seems to make the boundaries between religious persuasion and other sorts of persuasion or characterization indistinct and permeable (which is part of the point); nevertheless I want to be clear about what I am considering to be a ‘form of religious persuasion.’ I am looking at forms with a goal of conversion from one confession to another, confessional strengthening, or a more general repudiation of sinfulness. Some forms are explicitly purposive in their persuasions, while others are more haphazard and incidental. For a movement as large as a full scale reform of a nation’s most deeply held beliefs, a wide variety of forms would have been necessary in order to appeal to a wide variety of people. Forms such as book-based dialectic, argumentation and polemic will reach some, but public sermons will reach more, and musical forms that can be easily memorized, sung in multiple locations in addition to being printed like metrical psalms or ballads will find a wider audience still. Woodcuts are a print-based form that can appeal to the non-literate and semi- literate as well as avid readers, and martyrologies promote appealing underdog narratives that are easily retold. Catechism is an educational form of persuasion that maintains and strengthens beliefs by indoctrinating another generation. Some forms, such as metrical psalms, are exclusively Protestant, while others, like martyrologies and private conference, are more flexible in their confessional adherence. Pettegree has rightly characterized the Reformation as an instigator of the culture of persuasion, but such a culture is necessarily multi-confessional; a culture of persuasion requires choice and heterogeneity while striving toward the goal of homogeneity. In such an environment, all perspectives must be engaged in the battle for hearts and minds.

Like literary forms, these forms of religious persuasion have conventions that make them recognizable and meaningful. ‘Form’ is a flexible term, as it refers to the shape and conventions of everything from daily practices to literary expressions to the way a room is organized. Marissa Greenberg argues that both literary and non-literary uses of form “have

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in common a triumvirate of interrelated characteristics that suggest the power of the concept in the early modern period as well as its value for current historical criticism: familiarity, expectation and efficacy.”36 Forms become recognizable through repeated exposure to its conventions via first or second hand, experience or text, and the growing familiarity with the form binds those exposed together through shared experience and understanding. Familiarity then breeds expectation as the conventions become so ingrained that the form’s contents and narrative arc are anticipated. Forms function and make meaning by simultaneously looking both backwards and forwards in time: “familiarity gestures backward to collective while expectation points forward to shared notions of formal possibilities, prospects and desires.”37 Forms could be fulfilled, frustrated, or a little of both if conventions were both adhered to and modified just enough to pose questions about the assumptions inherent in the form. Both adherence to and modification of the expectations of the form have consequences for the form’s efficacy.

This is a useful way of thinking about my forms when they appear on the stage. They would have been familiar, but because they could not appear as themselves, were not represented with their anticipated (religious) content, and were not used to make religious persuasions, expectations were already upended. The forms would leave a lot of space between familiarity and expectation that could never be fulfilled, making them full of potential for interpretive play and creation of meaning. Forms of religious persuasion were powerful because they were so familiar, and spectators, audience members, witnesses and participants knew how they would unfold. Even though the forms frustrated expectations with their content change when on the stage, the potential for persuasion remained strong.

While persuasive meanings of these religious forms remained constant across space, when moved from one location to another, these meanings were lost across time. Each of the forms that I identify would have been a common feature of early modern life, but unlike well-known and well-recorded literary forms such as sonnets or genres like , these

36 Marissa Greenberg, “Crossing from Scaffold to Stage: Execution Procession and Generic Conventions in The of Errors and Measure for Measure” in Shakespeare and Historical Formalism, ed. Stephen Cohen (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007), 128. 37 Greenberg, “Crossing from Scaffold to Stage,” 129.

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forms have been so transformed that they have lost their significance. My aim is to discover what the forms themselves would have meant in early modern life and what meaning they bring to the drama in which they surface. Stephen Cohen has argued for a historical formalism that insists on taking account of the historicity of literary forms, contending that the historical roots and functions of literary texts are based on their -specific forms and conventions as well as their extra-textual ideological content.38 Levine makes the point that while forms can emerge from a certain place and time, they are essentially portable.39 They outlive specific conditions and can be repurposed. This is perhaps the case with the forms that I am investigating here. The form of the metrical psalm continues in a way with the reverent congregational singing of hymns and perhaps even national anthems; while goodnight ballads may be a thing of the past, narrative songs that wrestle with criminality, redemption, hope and despair in the first person are not; the private conferences and meditative exercises of the Jesuits may not be part of popular culture but their form may be recognizable in modern meditative practice. While the forms may not be entirely gone, their specific conventions have been altered substantially by multiple translations. Our understanding of the forms has changed so much that not only can we not recognize them when they appears onstage, but we cannot understand the qualities (or perhaps affordances) that made them historically meaningful—in the case of my examples, that they are religious, and that they are persuasive. This is what I mean when I claim that such forms help us access the alterity of the early modern theatre, the way in which it is a site of negotiations that are sometimes hard for us to see. These forms are organic ways of shaping and harnessing human passions and help to animate the past.

The forms that I am investigating are ones brought together by what they aim to do in the world—by their shared goal of religious persuasion. In each chapter, I explore the and meaning of a different form of religious persuasion in early modern life and within a culture of religious change, upheaval and choice. I identify and analyze the conventions related to each form and consider how and why such a form emerged and why it

38 Stephen Cohen, “Introduction” in Shakespeare and Historical Formalism, 14. Of course, consideration of the importance and historical specificity of form need not be limited to literary form. 39 Levine, Forms,12.

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came to be considered so persuasive. I then explore what happens and what it means when the religious forms appear on the stage re-formed in a variety of ways, often stripped of any explicitly religious content and relocated from their natural homes in churches, markets, scaffolds, squares, or private homes onto the stage. In paying attention to what happens when the literary and/or theatrical form interacts with the form of religious persuasion, I think about how the historically situated meaning of dramatic, musical and conversational forms can be used and altered in their interactions with one another.

The opening chapter investigates the persuasive form of the metrical psalm. Metrical psalms were the words of the psalms, translated into English, versified, and set to music for the expressed purpose of communal singing. The chapter traces the development of the metrical psalms, charting the way they were both expressions of radical, participatory Protestant community and wildly successful of evangelism that brought communal participation through song to the English worship service. Their led to their wholesale adoption by the conservative institutions of the Crown and the church, as establishment forces sought to harness and appropriate their persuasive popularity. The musical appearance of a metrical psalm on the Elizabethan stage evokes layers of significance and associations—zealous religious evangelism, public participation, artisanal festivity, English national identity. The direct representation of a metrical psalm would not have been possible, so instead we find them disguised or woven into songs more suited to the stage. In Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday the psalm is disguised as a drinking song—certain situational, formal, and aural elements of the psalms are present but the content is entirely that of a raucous drinking song. In Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor the psalm is conflated with a popular love song, creating a musical hodge-podge. These songs are full of the persuasive, populist, nationalist, and evangelical associations inherent in the practice of metrical psalm- singing, as the melding of a metrical psalm and a popular drinking or love song brings the significance of a mainstream form of religious persuasion to the stage. In both readings, I find that the musical evocation of metrical psalms on the stage denote moments of exploration of the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in the creation of community identity.

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Chapter two considers the persuasive tactic of the private conference, which is a kind of formalized one-on-one conversation with the goal of conversion. While employed by would- be convertors in every confessional camp, the offered by private conference makes it available to Catholics who did not have access to the large-scale public and community- based forms of persuasion so central to Protestant evangelism. And while the form itself was not exclusively Catholic, it did became associated with the Jesuits in the popular imagination as members of the order deployed private conference to greatest effect (and were happy to publicize their successes after the ). While private conference can be tailored to individual situations, the Jesuits used and shared a conventional approach that proved to be effective, particularly in the right hands. The chapter looks at the conventions of the private conference, how Jesuits came to be so affiliated with it, and what private conferences could mean to a public generally wary of Jesuits and their tactics. Many plays on the London stage reference or even portray private conference, but Measure for Measure deals directly with the religious and even Jesuitical of the form. I explore how the disguised Duke’s use of private conference in order to surveil, persuade and manipulate adheres to some of the conventional structures of the Jesuitical practice; but unlike the Jesuits, the Duke repeatedly stumbles in his persuasive efforts. In this reading, the play appears to be experimenting with private and public forms of persuasion and asking how communities can change for the better, what the ethical limits should be for leaders of those communities, and whether positive change can be brought about by manipulative or ethically dubious means.

The third chapter looks at a form of religious persuasion that does not seem very religious at all. Goodnight ballads were the subjective, often first-person accounts of crime, and remorse that were purported to have been written by criminals and sung from the scaffold, though most appear to be the work of anonymous ballad writers. In this section I argue that the ballads combined popular music, catchy rhymes, and salacious stories in order to make persuasive moral, religious or even confessional cases without resorting to divisive . The form differs from the metrical psalms and private conferences in that the persuasive aim is not one of explicit conversion, but more of a strengthening of belief; they persuade by reinforcing particularly Protestant ideas, embedding them in the very conventions that distinguish them from other types of broadside ballad. Because goodnight

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ballads are not liturgical nor are they part of any official evangelical strategy, they can be represented on stage with ease, and in this chapter I turn to two staged parodies of the same goodnight ballad: “I wail in woe, I plunge in pain.” While Misogonus is a simplistic 1577 Cambridge play and Chapman, Jonson and Marston’s Eastward Ho a rollicking and well- known 1605 satire, in both plays the goodnight ballad suits the prodigal son narrative, and the ballad’s persuasiveness aurally illustrates the problem of how to convincingly portray sincerity in an entertaining way. In Eastward Ho in particular, the interaction between the form of the goodnight ballad and the play’s satirical genre addresses the work’s ongoing negotiation between sincerity and satire.

Even though the various forms share the goal of religious conversion, they work in very different ways: metrical psalms were designed or at least adapted early in their life for Protestant evangelical work and sought to transform individuals within their communal context; private conferences, by contrast, were formalized interactions designed to persuade and deepen spirituality, but their effectiveness was limited by the scope of the individualistic nature of the form and the skill of the conference leader; goodnight ballads were first and foremost, and they persuaded through confirmation , reminder and reaffirmation of belief. The chapters begin with the form most purposively designed for religious persuasion to the least, moving from forms that were explicitly used for their evangelical power to forms that had more mixed messaging. But strongly persuasive forms are undercut by a problem of representation. Because the most liturgical and purposive forms of religious persuasion can only be staged obliquely, the chapters are also in order of the forms least directly represented and recognizable on stage (metrical psalms where only the form remains), to the most (goodnight ballads that are highly recognizable with some minor alterations). In each case, the significance of the form is affected by the tension between the kind of work the form does in the world and its representative possibilities on the stage.

The three forms that I have chosen for analysis prove to be powerful ones, but I am leaving out some of the most important evangelical tools available at the time. The most absence is that of preaching, which was probably the most influential form of religious

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persuasion, but other more literary forms like books of meditations or books of polemic also made their mark. Both Protestantism and Catholicism devised many strategies to change or intensify beliefs and culture, but I chose metrical psalms, private conference and goodnight ballads because of their difference from each other, their ubiquity at the time and their distance from modern life. These are historical forms of persuasion—they are no longer recognizable. They were chosen as pathways to the period’s alterity, in an attempt to understand what may have been important cultural touchstones or ways of thinking, feeling and understanding in a culture where faith was integral to every aspect of life.

In many ways my argument echoes elements of the theory of theatrical emptying out of doctrinal meaning—it is an investigation of what happens when forms of religious persuasion contain theatrically significant content on the stage. But in my focus on form, I find these forms of religious persuasion to have been robust: the forms themselves had meaning, and that meaning was not easily transformed or wholly appropriated by a content and location change. This is not to say that these forms were static or not affected by variations in content or by of expectation. Of course they were, and the meaning of a form is affected by its various uses.40 But the theatrical uses of these forms did not seem to overtake their religious functions. In some ways, the theatrical borrowing bolstered the power and meaning of the forms rather than rendered them sullied by the secular interaction. Even though The Shoemaker’s Holiday hides a metrical psalm in a drinking song, the borrowing is sensitive and does not tarnish, undermine or secularize the psalms. The play’s argument for Protestant community-building supports the aims of the metrical psalms themselves. In Measure for Measure, the repeated failure of the Duke to live up to the ethical standards of private conference lends credibility to the Jesuit techniques. While the Jesuit approach may still be considered ripe for manipulation, it is the Duke who twists the practices to suit his own needs and they subsequently fail to be effective. The problem is not the Jesuit-like private conference—it is the Duke’s selfish use of it.

40 Again, I do not want to imply that their meaning is fixed—Elizabethan theatre is more likely to use metrical psalms for moments of persuasion, while years later in Jacobean and Carolinian theatre they are generally a Puritan signifier, though the persuasive significance remains. See Chapter 1.

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Instead of thinking of these forms as emptied out, perhaps it is better to think of them as overlaid or even wrapped by the secular content. With secular content enwrapping the forms, a form could be used for its persuasiveness while being insulated from a kind of exposure or pollution that would irreparably undermine its sacred meanings. Moreover, these religious forms had significance for an early modern audience that could not be ‘drained’ or even secularized by a location or content change. They are used on the stage because they are powerful and meaningful, and their power and meaning is derived directly from their pivotal role in the high stakes evangelical arena and from their connections to God’s will, word and grace. What I find is that these forms of persuasion were alive and thriving, useful, engaging, powerful, meaningful and religious—both on and off the stage.

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Chapter One: “Moved by the Concord of Sweet Sounds”: Playing the Singing of Metrical Psalms

In Abraham Cowley’s last pre-Restoration play, (1641), which was privately performed before King Charles at Trinity College, Cambridge, are mercilessly mocked and either shamed or converted to the cavalier way of life. The climax of the play centres on a moment of musical , during which the cavalier Cutter (who has faked a conversion to Puritanism in order to seduce and marry the pious Tabytha) begins to show his true colours as he sings to his new wife:

CUTTER: I tell thee, Spouse, thou shalt be a mother thy self, within these nine months. Come to my bed, my dear; my dear come to my bed: For the pleasant pain, And the loss with gain, Is the loss of a maidenhead. TABYTHA: Is that a Psalm, brother husband, that you sing?41

Tabytha’s musical and sexual experience is limited and she does not appear to understand the suggestive implications of the lyrics. When she hears the music, she assumes that her ‘religious’ husband is singing the only kind of song that she is familiar with—a metrical psalm.

The English metrical psalms are the psalms of David translated into English, set to rhyming metre and sung in English church services from the Elizabethan period through to the eighteenth century. They were a popular sensation when they first burst into general public in the mid-sixteenth century, particularly with the publication in 1562 of The whole book of Psalmes, collected into Englysh metre by T. Starnhold I Hopkins & others

41 Abraham Cowley, “The Guardian” in The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Abraham Cowley, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1967), V.vi.3-10.

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(popularly known as Sternhold and Hopkins).42 The metrical psalms were one of the most effective evangelizing tools of the Reformation; they spread the Word in the vernacular, introduced a participatory element to the service through congregational singing, and were one of the only innovations from the liturgy of the Genevan exiles to be adopted into standard English worship. In a culture of persuasion, the metrical psalms were a powerful tool, engaging people in the service and compelling them to feel a part of a faith community. They also translated well to popular culture and were sung at home in four-part harmony, in taverns and at work, thereby increasing evangelizing possibilities by spreading the Word through the English world.

The conversion song in the Cowley play capitalizes on the persuasive implications of the metrical psalms, as Cutter hopes the song will be a catalyst for Tabytha’s conversion from pious Puritan maid to sexually experienced wife; but Cowley is also interested in mocking the psalms and by extension, the Puritans. By the time of The Guardian, the psalms were firmly entrenched in the English service and were part of the fabric of mainstream English religious practice. They had also been taken up by some of the more radical Puritan members of society advocating for political change. The anti-Puritan play makes numerous mocking references to the quality of the psalms and to the Puritan penchant for constantly singing them exclusively and inappropriately. Cutter, for example, tries to deflect the criticism of the pretty, puritan Tabytha when she claims he “mocked and fleet’d at us as we sang the Psalm last Sunday night” by blaming his constantly rhyming friend Dogrel and mocking the unsophisticated poetry of the English metrical psalms: “That was that mungrel Rhymer; by this light, he envies his brother Poet honest John Sternhold, because he cannot reach his heights.”43 In the final scene in which Cutter reveals his raunchy, cavalier self, he sings the bawdy song which Tabytha confuses for a psalm. The joke may be on Tabytha’s naïveté, but it also makes a mockery of psalm-singing; the pious, religiously persuasive psalm is conflated with and undermined by a bawdy, sexually persuasive wooing song about the impending loss of a maidenhead. But Cowley’s overt ridiculing of Puritans through the metrical psalms is an aberration on the early modern stage.

42 Hereafter referred to as The Whole Book of Psalmes (London: J.Day, 1562), STC 2430. 43 Cowley, “The Guardian,” 1.1.56-60.

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The practice of referring to metrical psalms in order to denote Puritanism on the stage seems to have started early in James’ reign. For example, in The Winter’s Tale, the Clown describes some of the shearers at the feast as “three-man-song-men all and very good ones; but they are most of them means and bases; but one Puritan amongst them and he sings psalms to horn-pipes.”44 The joke here is that the Puritan has a high tenor voice (Puritans were typically ridiculed for having high-pitched, nasally voices for both singing and speaking), and that he is only willing to sing pious psalms to impious hornpipes. The result is a ridiculous sound, a three-man-group with a limited repertoire and a possibly hypocritical Puritan. The Duchess of Malfi includes a similar reference to the stereotypically high voices and enthusiastic singing of the Puritans. As the duchess is beset by the music and dancing of madmen, the mad doctor mentions his rogue apothecary who “makes alum of his wife’s urine, and sells it to Puritans, that have sore throats with over-straining.”45 In the Caroline period, Jasper Mayne’s The Citye Match has the Puritan Dorcas sympathizing with “The Brethren” as “such poore zealous Saints/ As earne five groats a week under a stall/ By singing Psalmes.”46

The Guardian is, however, exceptional in its mean-spirited use of the metrical psalms, not just toward Puritanism but toward the psalms themselves. Dramatic references to psalm- singing may have poked fun at the musically monotonous Puritans, but they never denigrated the actual psalms. With the growing antipathy between the Puritan movement and the theatres in London throughout the seventeenth century, culminating in the closing of the public theatres under the Commonwealth and Protectorate, the stock, hypocritical Puritan character became a favourite stage dupe. Given the well-known Puritan penchant for psalm- singing to the exclusion of other musical , one would expect to find plenty of instances that connect psalm-singing and the Puritan character as well as mockeries of the psalms on the stage. Surprisingly, this does not appear to be the case, as none of the mid-

44 William Shakespeare, “The Winter’s Tale,” in The Norton Shakespeare, IV.iii.42-45 45 , “The Duchess of Malfi,” in Renaissance Drama: An Anthology of Plays and Entertainments, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), IV.ii.83-86. 46 Jasper Mayne, The Citye Match: A Comoedye Presented to the King and Qveene at White-Hall. Acted Since at Black-Friers By His Maiesties Servants (Oxford: Leonard Lichfield, 1639), II.i.29-31.

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seventeenth century plays that specifically and most famously skewer the Puritans even mention psalm-singing. Plays like Bartholomew Fair, The Family of Love, The Puritan or the Widow of Watling Street, and The Alchemist create as much as draw on the tradition of the stage Puritan and in none of these plays are there references to or examples of psalm- singing.

This is because the metrical psalms were popular with the theatre-going public. They were one of the most successful modes of Protestant evangelism in the sixteenth century and by the mid-seventeenth century they were a well-loved, enduring part of the Reformed service.47 While there was ample room to satirize the Puritans who wished to close the theatres, it would not have been effective to mock them based on their inclination towards singing communal metrical psalms because, as we will see, everyone else sang them too. The desire to only sing psalms could be laughable, but as a point of satire it would generally backfire amongst an audience who still bought the Sternhold and Hopkins psalmbook more than almost any other single publication and who still sang the psalms at every parish church service. Even Cowley appears to recognize the limited effectiveness of psalm-based satire. He was able to get away with his mockery of the psalms in front of a private, royalist audience; on the public stage, however, psalms needed to be treated with much more caution and consideration. When rewriting The Guardian as Cutter of Coleman Street for public consumption after the Restoration, Cowley excised many of the remarks about the psalms, including the song/psalm in the final scene.48

The Jacobean references to psalm-singing on the stage make the tangential connection between psalms and their persuasive implications: Puritans sing constantly at least in part out of a desire to convert the general public to stricter Protestant adherence. By contrast, the

47 George Wither discovered just how enduring the Sternhold and Hopkins songs were when he published some original hymns in “The Hymnes and Songs of the Church “(1623) with tunes written by , which he intended for church use. The book had a few reprints in the first two years but was no competition for the enduring Sternhold and Hopkins psalter. Wither apparently claimed that the Stationers Company discouraged of the book. See Peter Le Huray, Music and the Reformation in England 1546 – 1660 (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1967), 391-392. 48 See Abraham Cowley, A Critical Edition of Abraham Cowley’s Cutter of Coleman Street, ed. Darlene Johnson Gravett (New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1987).

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Elizabethan examples of onstage psalm-singing directly deploy the persuasive, evangelical meanings of the psalms, conveying moments of persuasion within the plays and even appealing directly to the audience. These Elizabethan examples see the psalms appear on the stage in musical form rather than just in passing references found in the examples above. The psalms are disguised, however; the censors made direct representation of the scriptural psalms impossible. Interestingly, while representing a metrical psalm directly was problematic, it was perfectly acceptable to combine it with a non-religious song. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, we find part of a metrical psalm inserted into the words and music of a popular wooing song, while in The Shoemaker’s Holiday, the psalm is cloaked in the sounds of a drinking song. In each case, it is not that the easily identified poetic form of the popular, well-known metrical psalm is simply filled with the words and music of drunken or lovesick songs, rather, the metrical psalm commingles with another song. In the Dekker play, the words and sounds of the drinking song are surrounded by the circumstances and activity of a metrical psalm. The situation is reversed in the Shakespeare play: here, the metrical psalm content is present within the form of another song and much meaning is to be found in the absence of the form. Such combinations bring the persuasive, populist, nationalist and religious associations inherent in the practice of psalm-singing to bear on the dramatic moments in which they are sung, and the evangelical implications of the songs can be heard through the non-religious words and music on the stage. By using these musical fusions to represent but not depict the metrical psalms, playwrights are able to capitalize on what the psalms do and mean. The signifying force of the songs is found in their activity which, while religious, is not sacred; it in their cultivated associations with the creation and of the English, Protestant community.

This chapter will begin with an investigation into why and how metrical psalms were such compelling and effective forms of persuasion, and will ask what they signified and how they changed when heard on the stage. Readings first of Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday followed by Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor will explore how the grafting of a metrical psalm onto a popular secular song creates a musical site of interpretive significance in which the meanings associated with the metrical psalms are imported onto the stage. The psalms are layered with complex associations due to the history of their

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integration into English culture, but primarily they were known as wildly successful forces of Protestant evangelism that brought communal participation through song to the English worship service. Far from just being signifiers of Puritanism or opportunities to mock psalms and their singers, the musical appearance of metrical psalms on the Elizabethan stage harkens the sound of myriad complex associations: zealous religious evangelism, public participation, artisanal festivity, English national identity. Most of all, they repeatedly convey a powerful sense of community—a community that is, on the stage at least, less defined by the Reformed confession of faith, and more by a shared communal engagement in the English Protestant nation. Unlike the later Jacobean practice of using psalm references to denote Puritanism, the musical representation of metrical psalms on the Elizabethan stage signifies moments of communal participation and provides an opportunity to explore the dynamics of inclusion, exclusion and the role of persuasion in the creation of the identity of a community. The dramatically represented psalms act as musical sites of strategy that harness the persuasive imaginative force of communal religious practice in Early Modern England in order to created nuanced visions of national community.

I. The Rise of the Metrical Psalms

Because this chapter contends that the forms of the metrical psalms are to be found on the early modern stage, I would like to begin with a brief exploration of the formal conventions of the metrical psalms, followed by a longer section on how the psalms came to develop the persuasive meanings that hold radical and establishment views in tension. The poetic form of the metrical psalm is quite straightforward. While they do appear in a variety of metres, they overwhelming adhere to what came to be known as Common Metre (CM)—an abcb rhyme scheme (though later psalms were sometimes abab) with alternating lines of eight and six syllables (8,6,8,6). Beth Quitslund calls it a “transitional form between fourteener couplets and iambic quatrains.”49 The metre is easy to sing, and with so many psalms in a standardized metre only a small variety of tunes would be needed in order for many psalms

49 Beth Quitslund, The Reformation in Rhyme: Sternhold, Hopkins and the English Metrical Psalter, 1547-1603 (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2008), 71. Henceforth referred to as RR.

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to be sung. Common metre came to be known as ballad metre as it is used by many popular ballads, but it has been noted that ballads in this metre did not appear until after the 1540s. The metre was most likely adapted from courtly poetry and was popularized by Sternhold’s psalms themselves.50 The language of the metrical psalms tends towards use of linguistic archaisms in order to invoke the authority and solemnity of the word of God.

In this project I am conceiving of form as a collection of organizing principles beyond poetic metre and language, and a primary organizational of the psalms is that they were sung congregationally. While other kinds of songs can be sung in groups, the metrical psalms are the musical form most associated with congregational singing. Groups of people singing together in common metre were usually singing metrical psalms. Another organizing principle of the psalms is one of timing or circumstance. Psalms were sung in particular situations, places or times of day, many of which will be explored in this chapter. There were days on the associated with services at which particular psalms would be sung, they were to be found at particular times of the service, or sometimes before or after open air sermons. They were often heard in churches, churchyards, places where sermons were often given, but also in the home perhaps in place of a prayer, and at particular places of work. A common metre song with archaic language on the stage may not be enough to signify the form of a metrical psalm. If, however, such a song were sung on a particular day of the calendar, with a group of people or in a yard after a speech, the song would recall the metrical psalms and all the complex and at times conflicting things that the psalms could convey.

The following section will explore what the psalms meant to the Elizabethan public and how the musically-set psalms of David—the evangelical tools of militant continental Protestantism—came to be associated with mainstream English nationhood and community. The meaning of the metrical psalms changed dramatically from the time that they first appeared in England in the 1540s up to the end of the Elizabethan period, moving from

50 Nicholas Temperley, Music of the English Parish Church (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979), 26. Hereafter referred to as MEPC. Edward Doughtie, Lyrics from English Airs (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1970), 17.

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personal courtly Protestant exhortations and , to congregational expressions of community in exile, to populist expressions of Protestant participation and evangelism, to court-sanctioned expressions of solidarity in the Protestant nation. Throughout these changes, however, they maintain their persuasiveness.

Thomas Sternhold and his Legacy

The psalms as they came to be first made their appearance on the English scene with Thomas Sternhold, a groom of the robes in the court of Edward IV. In 1547 he published Certayne Psalmes chose[n] out of the Psalmes of Dauid, and drawe[n] into Englishe Metre by Thomas Sternhold grome of ye kynges Maiesties Roobes, a book of biblical poetry composed of nineteen versified psalms.51 The creation of metrical versions of the psalms of David in English was not Sternhold’s innovation; the writing of the psalms in poetic verse was a courtly trend also famously followed by Wyatt, Surrey, and Sidney. The literary trend could possibly be considered an English counterpart to the fashionable metrical psalm versifications by Clement Marot in the French court of Marguerite de Navarre.52 Sternhold appears to have written the psalms with a royal audience in mind, and critics have argued that his psalms betray Protestant motives for writing and publishing his work. The English metrical psalms may have begun life as persuasive pieces in a nascently Protestant court culture of favour and exchange, but there was little hint of their future congregational use.

Although Sternhold’s psalms were to form the basis of the text used for English congregational song for the next hundred and fifty years, at the outset, the courtly and

51 Thomas Sternhold, Certayne Psalmes chose[n] out of the Psalmes of Dauid, and drawe[n] into Englishe Metre by Thomas Sternhold grome of ye kynges Maiesties Roobes (London: Edouradus Whitchurche, 1549), STC 2419. 52 Hannibal Hamlin and Rivkah Zim both situate the Sternhold versifications in the context of the English tradition of psalm translation. Zim considers Sternhold’s work in relation to that of Wyatt, Surrey, and the Sidney/Pembroke collaboration; she also contemplates the possible connections between Marot and the English psalm versifiers (Sternhold in particular). Hamlin takes a broader look at how the tradition of psalm translation contributes to the literature of the period and interrogates the literary status of the psalms. His work on the Sternhold and Hopkins psalter foregrounds his larger argument, while Zim compares Sternhold to his psalm translating counterparts. See Rivkah Zim, “Chapter Four: ‘Holye Songes of Veritie’” in English Metrical Psalms: Poetry as Praise and Prayer, 1535-1601 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 112-151; and Hannibal Hamlin, Psalm Culture and Early Modern Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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poetical tradition of psalm versification appears to have emerged quite separately from the movement toward congregational singing in the Reformation. Martin Luther self- consciously deployed popular, communally-sung songs in the militant evangelical fight for the faith of the people in the early days of the Reformation. In both England and on the continent, pre-Reformation participation in services was limited. Mass would have been conducted by the priest to a plainsong rite and while parishioners may have sung in festivals, congregational singing played no role in the regular mass. Cathedrals, urban churches and aristocratic chapels maintained choral foundations, but in rural parish churches there was likely little music beyond plainsong. Luther’s adoption of congregational singing during services was a heady and potent call to prayer; he capitalized on the already present German tradition of popular hymn singing by writing pro-Reformation lyrics and setting them to folk- like tunes to make them as accessible as possible.53 By contrast, Jean Calvin was stricter about the use of song. In the first edition of the Institutes, he allowed for congregational singing before and after the Eucharist. By rejecting originally composed hymns in favour of taking only the word of God as the lyrics for song, he sought to maintain a musical distinction between secular and sacred tunes: “It must always be looked to that the song be not light and frivolous but have weight and majesty, as Saint Augustine says, and there is likewise a great difference between the music one makes to entertain men at table and in their homes, and the psalms which are sung in the Church in the presence of God and his Angels.”54

The separate traditions of composing vernacular metrical psalm verses at court and of congregational singing in services dovetailed in the late 1530s and 1540s when Calvin began to compile a French metrical psalter and discovered the courtly versions by Marot while in

53While is it well known that Luther capitalized on popular musical styles for his originally composed hymns, there is a debate regarding the degree to which Luther made use of secular music. Rebecca Wagner Oettinger exemplifies the traditional stance in her comment that “for Luther and his followers, even the most worldy ballad could offer up a melody that would spread the Word.” Robin Leaver agrees that Luther had extensive knowledge of popular folk melodies and that some of the melodies inspired and can be found in tunes from the Wittenberg hymnal, but that Luther did not uncritically support the use of all kinds of popular music for music in the church. See Rebecca Wagner Oettinger, Music as Propaganda in the German Reformation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2001), 207; and Robin A. Leaver, Luther’s Liturgical Music: Principles and Implications (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2007), 12-18. 54 Jean Calvin, “La forme des priers et chantz ecclesiastiques” in Oliver Strunk (ed.), Source Readings in Music History, ed. Leo Trietler (New York and London: Norton, 1998), 365.

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Strasbourg. In 1539, Calvin published a collection of psalms that used 13 of Marot’s verses, and by 1542 they had become such a popular Protestant sensation that Marot had to leave France to escape prosecution by Catholic authorities. Unlike the German hymns, which made use of popular tunes, the French tunes were based on newly composed plainsong melodies that were simple, modal and free of the pollution of secular associations.

But while Marot’s work was being sung communally and liturgically thanks to Calvin’s efforts on the continent, there is no indication that the psalms were sung in anything but private, domestic or courtly settings in England. There were other ways in which the liturgy was growing increasingly accessible to the general population in England: Archbishop Cranmer substituted the vernacular for Latin in the processional of 1544 and published English forms of the Latin texts in primers for private use; and in 1552 the latest version of the Book of Common Prayer significantly increased congregational responses in the service. Still, while the 1540s saw significant musical innovation in congregational singing on the continent, the church authorities in England stopped short of integrating congregational singing into the service and there is no indication that Sternhold was writing for this purpose.

The initial persuasiveness of Sternhold’s work appears to have been directed at an audience of one rather than many. It directly addresses the king regarding issues of public and religious import. In the preface to Certayne Psalms, Sternhold writes about his hopes for the effect of the psalms on the young monarch:

Seeyng furthre that youre tender and Godly zeale doethe more delight in the holye songes of veritie than in anye fayned rimes of vanitie, I am encouraged to trauayle further in the sayed boke of psalms, trusting that as your grace taketh pleasure to heare them song sometimes of me, so ye wyll also delyghte not onlye to see and reade them for your selfe, but also to commaunde them to be song to you of others.55

55 Certayne Psalmes, sig. A3.

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The tone here is suitably complimentary and self-effacing but at the same time, Sternhold frames his work as being particularly virtuous and edifying; he is gently but pointedly encouraging the young monarch to continue using this pious, didactic and Protestant work in the future. Beth Quitslund argues that Certayne Psalmes is a kind of public declaration with a distinctly Protestant agenda shown not only through the fact of psalm translation into the vernacular but also because the particular psalms that make up the collection musically propose that kings “owe obedience to God’s law, and that they can only serve him by disregarding the worldly advice of bad counsellors who seek to dismiss the stringent requirements of his commandments.”56 She supports her argument through close readings of the psalms chosen to be in this collection, all of which are of a public nature. Certayne Psalmes sought a wider audience through publication, hoping to capture readers and converts by that the young king enjoys Protestant psalm versifications.

The publication of Sternhold’s text appears to have been quite successful considering its publication first in 1547, and again in 1549. Sternhold died in 1549 and by the end of the year John Hopkins had added several additional psalms of Sternhold’s as well as some of his own to publish Al such psalms of Dauid as Thomas Sternhold late grome of (the) Maiesties Robes, didde in his life time draw into English Metre.57 This work seems to have been aimed at a wider audience; it includes more psalms versified by Sternhold on a wider variety of subjects, making it less of a direct address to the king and more suited to being a psalter for personal use. The popularity of Sternhold’s work can be deduced by the fourteen editions of Certayne Psalms and Al Such Psalms published between 1547 and 1554 (more reprints than any other text (excluding ecclesiastical publications) in Edwardian England, according to Quitslund).58 Moreover, many psalm versifiers in the late 1540s and early 1550s either pay homage to or attempt to exploit the popularity of Sternhold’s psalms, either referencing Sternhold directly in the prefatory material, referring to his title in their own or imitating the metre that he favours overwhelmingly in his psalms.59 Sternhold’s psalms appear to have

56 Quitslund, RR, 32. 57 Al such psalms of Dauid as Thomas Sternhold late grome of (the) Maiesties Robes, didde in his life time draw into English Metre (London: E Whitchurch, 1549), STC 2420. 58 Quitslund, RR, 59. 59 For numerous examples, see Quitslund, RR, 72

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become the most popular and well-known of all the English metrical psalm versions published up to Edward’s death and the accession of Mary. It is little wonder then that Sternhold’s metrical psalms were the ones chosen by the Marian exiles when congregational participation in the liturgy began to move in new, musical directions.

The Marian Exiles

The metrical psalms took on new meaning and associations in the Marian period, when they were transformed from courtly songs or modes of domestic devotion to important congregational activities essential to the worship service. The Marian metrical psalms were tailored to fit the new worship service and were focussed more on articulating the experiences of the exiles than on persuading others in England to join the cause. When imported back to England upon the accession of Elizabeth, the psalms brought with them the flavour of exile and a unique sense of militant Protestantism, and victimhood.

Upon leaving England after the death of Edward and the accession of Mary, the exiles landed in various Protestant cities on the continent. The congregations were influenced by the German, French and Dutch reformed churches and quickly introduced the practice of communal metrical psalm-singing to worship; but it was the group from Frankfurt and later the more radical splinter group in Geneva that had the greatest impact on the legacy of psalm-singing.60 Reformers settled in Strasbourg, Frankfurt, Zurich, Emden, Wesel and later in Basel, Geneva and Aarau. In general, the exiles were free to practice their religion without too much interference from city officials or oversight from any centralized body.61 With such freedom, the first Frankfurt community held discussions over whether to adapt the 1552 prayer book:

60 Robin Leaver, in Goostly Psalmes and Spirituall Songes: English and Dutch Metrical Psalms from Coverdale to Utenhove, 1535-1566 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) meticulously documents psalm-singing evidence in the different exiled communities. 61 English reformers still did have to apply to city authorities for permission to worship and often shared church space with a different exile community. In the case of the Frankfurt group, they shared a church with Poullain’s Walloon church and the Frankfurt officials stated that there should be a kind of consensus between the two groups. For the English, this was a chance to adopt more radically Protestant practices than were permitted in the 1552 prayer book. See Leaver Goostly Psalmes, 215-226.

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At length the englishe order was perused and this by generall consente was concluded that the answeringe alowde after the Minister shulde not be used, the letanye, surplice, and many other things also omitted for that in those reformed churches the thinges would seeme more then strange. It was farther agreed upon that the Minister in place off the Englishe Confession shulde use an other bothe off more effecte and also framed according to the state and time/tune. And the same ended, the people to singe a psalme in meetre in a plaine tune as was, and is accustomed in the frenche, dutche, Italian, Spanishe, and Scottishe churches.62

In this quotation the reformers generally seem most interested in making omissions from the too-traditional prayer book, but the metrical psalms are singled out as a welcome innovation to be adopted from other national Protestant churches. The debates regarding the prayer book in Frankfurt led to a rupture between reformers who wanted to maintain the implicit sense of hierarchy and national character represented by the English prayer book and those who saw their time on foreign soil as an opportunity to push toward greater scriptural purity. Eventually, the debate resulted in a schism and the more radical faction, including William Whittingham and John Knox, broke from Frankfurt and moved to Geneva.

It was in Geneva that the metrical psalms became a well-documented and integral part of the worship service. They rejected the 1552 prayer book and instead created The forme of prayers and ministration of the Sacraments, &c. vsed in the Englishe Congregation at Geneua (1556), which attempted to cultivate a more communal approach to worship wherein the community itself took over the ritual utterance of worship from individual priests and ministers. The psalms vocally enact this shift towards a collective investment in the direction of worship. For this Genevan group, the activity of psalm-singing played a central and meaningful role in the construction of a new Protestant community.

62 William Whittingham, A brieff discours off the troubles begonne at Franckford in Germany Anno Domini 1554 Abowte the booke off off [sic] common prayer and , and continued by the Englishe men theyre/ to thende off Q. Maries raigne, in the which discours, the gentle reader shall see the very originall and beginninge off all the contention that hathe byn, and what was the cause off the same (Heidelberg, M. Schirat, 1574), STC 25442, 6-7 (sig. A4v-B).

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This said, the words of the psalms continued to be important to the reformers. William Whittingham wrote more psalms to add to the existing Sternhold and Hopkins translations, tailoring them to reflect the needs of his congregation in exile. The result, to be found inside The forme of prayers, is the One and Fiftie Psalmes of David in Englishe metre, wherof, 37 were made by Thomas Sterneholde, and the rest by others: co[n]ferred with the Hebrewe, and in certeine places corrected, as the text and sens of the Prophete required (STC 16561). Beth Quitslund has done some fine close readings of the specific psalms of Whittingham’s translations, also paying close attention to the changes he made to the original Sternhold and Hopkins texts. She argues that Whittingham began to craft a psalter of exile by choosing to versify such psalms as 137, the famous psalm about the experience of the Israelites in Babylonian exile from Jerusalem, and psalm 23, in which God provides strength and comfort to a fraught community.63 Quitslund makes a similar argument regarding Whittingham’s revisions of the Sternhold and Hopkins texts. She notes, for example, that Whittingham repeatedly introduces the word “chosen” to describe God’s people (“thy chosen Israel” rather than “thy Israel”) in order to underscore the election of God’s people, like the exiles themselves.64 These changes are important because they became integrated into the standard book of psalms that was sung in churches, homes and public places in England for the next hundred and fifty years. The three different metrical psalters published in Geneva between 1556 and 1558 provided John Day with ample material for The Whole Book of Psalms.65 The Genevan experience of exile was smuggled into mainstream English through the psalms.

While the Marian exiles borrowed the practice of psalm-singing from their fellow Protestants on the continent, evangelism was less of a focus. Persuasion was entirely the point for Luther, who set his appealing hymns to a familiar of music in order to lure the public away from unholy entertainments to holy ones; meanwhile, Calvin’s use of Marot’s

63 See Quitslund, RR, 142-153. 64 Quitslund, RR, 163-164. 65 Day evidently made use of the 1556 One and Fiftie Psalmes since the versions of Sternhold’s psalms found in The Whole Book of Psalms are Whittingham’s.

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fashionable poetry and tuneful melodies augmented the appeal of the psalms.66 Although the exiled English community must have been aware of the persuasive potential of the psalms, it seems as though they were more immediately interested in reflecting and reworking the existing English tradition for the needs of the community in exile. Accordingly, the Anglo- Genevan psalm tunes are not particularly tuneful.67 Temperley hypothesizes that the tunes in the 1556 and 1558 Anglo-Genevan psalters could have been derived from courtly songs and dances from the Henrician and Edwardian periods, but that the shape of the tunes may have been lost when deprived of accompaniment. The result is a collection of tunes that have very little structure or memorability and Temperley calls most of them a “dreary waste.”68 The immediate focus of the Genevan exiles was on crafting an appropriate and complete set of devotional works for use in the church that both reflected the experiences of the community and enacted the communal and anti-hierarchical ideals of radical Protestantism in worship. These aims were fulfilled through the expansion and publication of the metrical psalms, and when the psalms came to England they brought with them the flavour of exile.

“The People did sing”: Metrical Psalm-Singing in Elizabeth’s England

On September 21, 1559 Henry Machyn made note of a curious new musical fad: there “be- gane the nuw mornyng prayer at sant Antholyns in Boge-row, after Geneve fassyon,—be- gyne to rynge at v in the mornyng; men and women all do syng, and boys.”69 Machyn’s comment constitutes the first recorded instance of communal psalm-singing in England, and he makes his soon after the exiles had begun returning from the continent. 70 What appears to be particularly worthy of note for Machyn is that, in the Geneva fashion, the

66 In the preface to the Wittenberg Hymnal Luther states: “And these songs were arranged in four parts to give the young—who should at any rate be trained in music and other fine arts—something to wean them away from love ballads and carnal songs and to teach them something of value in their place, thus combining the good with the pleasing, as is proper for youth. “Preface to the Wittenberg Hymnal” (1524) in Luther’s Works: Liturgy and Hymns trans. Paul Zeller Strodach, ed. Ulrich S. Leopold (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1965), 315-316, 316. 67 Temperley, MEPC, 33-37. Certayne Psalmes and All Such Psalms were printed without tunes so we cannot compare the earlier psalm tunes to their Anglo-Genevan counterparts. 68 Temperley, MEPC, 34. 69 Henry Machyn,'Diary: 1559 (July - Dec)', The Diary of Henry Machyn: Citizen and Merchant-Taylor of London (1550-1563) (1848), 202-221. < http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=45524>. 70 There is a recorded instance of communal psalm-singing in the Dutch stranger church during the Edwardian period but it does not seem to have influenced English practice. For more on Dutch psalm-singing in Edwardian England, see Robin Leaver, Goostly Psalmes, 142-174.

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congregation appears to sing rather than the choir. He jots down another example of psalm- singing again on March 3rd 1560: “The sam day dyd pryche at Powlles crosse the nuwe byshope of London master Gryndall, in ys rochet and chyminer; and after sermon done the pepull dyd syng; and ther was my lord mayre and the althermen, and ther was grett audience.” And again a week later on March 17th at Paul’s Cross: “and after the sermon done they songe all, old and yong, a salme in myter, the tune of Genevay ways.”71 Machyn associates the novel practice with the exiles, calling communal singing of psalms in metre “Geneva fashion” or “Geneva ways.” Such a name reflects the flavour of diasporic Protestantism and radical novelty associated with psalm-singing in the early days of Elizabeth’s reign. But the practice of psalm-singing did not remain long on the radical fringes of English society; it spread quickly from the exiles to larger and less radicalized segments of the population. John Jewel, in a letter to Peter Martyr in March 1560, gives us some sense of the rapid spread of the practice of metrical psalm-singing:

Religion is somewhat more established now than it was. The people are everywhere exceedingly inclined to the better part. Church music for the people has very much conduced to this. For as soon as they had once commenced singing publicly in only one little church in London, immediately not only the churches in the neighbourhood, but even in distant towns, began to vie with one another in the same practice. You may now sometimes see at Paul’s Cross, after the service, six thousand persons, old and young, of both sexes, all singing together and praising God. This sadly annoys the mass priests, and the devil. For they perceive that by these means the sacred sink more deeply into the minds of men, and that their kingdom is weakened and shaken at almost every note.72

Jewel’s letter gives us some idea of the infectiousness of the psalms and of the speed with which they spread across the country. It appears that the psalms did not catch on solely

71 Henry Machyn, 'Diary: 1560 (Jan - June)', The Diary of Henry Machyn, 221-239. < http://www.british- history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=45525> 72 Hastings Robinson, Zurich letters 1558 – 1579: Comprising the Correspondence of Several English Bishops and Some Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1842), 71. For more on the proselytizing role of the metrical psalms in England, see Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, and for a broad treatment of the development and spread of the metrical psalms throughout Europe, see Andrew Pettegree, Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion.

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because they were Protestant. They were popular for other too: they were enjoyable to sing, they were found in a highly useful and affordable printed volume, and they gave parishioners the opportunity to participate directly in worship services.

With their infiltration into the musical repertoire of people across the country, the psalms brought with them a certain interpretation of Protestantism, as the ‘sacred discourses’ that people committed to musical were the words of Sternhold and Hopkins, modified by Whittingham. As both Luther and Calvin had discovered in the previous decades, communal singing was one of the most effective ways of spreading the Protestant faith, a fact that was not lost on those less keen on widespread Protestantism. Even as late as 1616, the Catholic Thomas Harrab complains of the persuasive effectiveness of the psalms:

There is that hath drawne multitudes to be of therir Sects so much, as the singing of their psalms, in such variable and delightfull tunes: there the souldier singeth in warre, the artisans at their worke, wenches spinning, and sewing, apprentices in their shoppes, and wayfaring men in their travaile, little knowing (God wotte) what a serpent lyeth hidden under these sweete flowers, what venome is in this pleasant liquor, and what is in this Sirens songe: this craft and subtility did olde Heretikes use. These divine psalms are by them transported out of the Church, into the dwelling howse, out of the Quire into the shoppe, and as absurd it is for a shoomaker sowing his shooe, to sing one of these psalms, as it is to sing Miserere mei, or De profundis in his to God Almightie. 73

Harrab’s complaint that the psalms refuse to remain in the Church and spill into the home and the workplace is a testament to one of the reasons that the psalms were so evangelically effective: they appear to have been, especially in the early years, a pleasurable activity. Nicholas Temperley has done exhaustive work on the tunes of the English metrical psalms, and he notes that in John Day’s reworking of the Anglo-Genevan psalter, newer Elizabethan tunes were added to the not-as-artful Anglo-Genevan stock (at least half of the Anglo- Genevan tunes were replaced and rejected). The memorability of the music is essential to the overall persuasiveness of the psalms, and the Elizabethan tunes found in The Whole Book of

73 Thomas Harrab, Tesseradelphus: or The Foure Brothers (?: Birchley Hall Press?, 1616), STC 12797, D2v.

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Psalmes had structural features that made them easier to remember. Temperley claims that the tempo at which the psalms were sung was likely lively at first and they could have sounded similar to the popular ballads of the day. At least in the early days of psalm-singing, Sternhold’s hope that his pious psalms ‘of veritie’ would replace the ‘songs of vanity’ would have been quite possible.

While the official psalm tunes may have been lively in 1560s, the psalms seem to have gradually slowed down over the latter half of the sixteenth century, likely because during communal singing, the process of congregants listening for each other gradually slows the tempo.74 By the end of the sixteenth century, the official psalm tunes may not have resembled popular ballad music very much at all. However, Temperley claims that more accessible tunes would have been in use by this time. In addition to the official tunes in the psalm book, there seem to have been unofficial tunes, or what Temperley calls ‘common tunes’ that appear to have been shorter, faster, and generally more popular in style. The psalm tunes in The Whole Book of Psalmes were generally in Double Common Metre (8,6,8,6,8,6,8,6) and eight lines long. The new tunes were only four lines long (half the length of the ‘official tunes’) and likewise in common metre.

Evidence of the short tunes can be found in Thomas East’s The whole booke of psalms: with their wonted tunes, as they are song in churches, composed into foure partes: all of which are so placed that foure may sing ech one a several part (1592; STC 2482) wherein East asserts that in “this booke the Church Tunes are carefully corrected, and other short Tunes added, which are song in London, and other places of this Realm” (in the 1594 edition of this work, Thomas East corrects himself to say that the short tunes were sung “in most churches of this Realm”, perhaps reflecting the increasing popularity of this type of tune).75 Moreover, according to East, these short tunes are widely used but not printed in the traditional psalm book: “And I have not onely set downe in this booke all the Tunes usually printed heretofore,

74 Temperley, MEPC, 64. 75 Thomas East (ed.), The whole booke of psalms: with their wonted tunes, as they are song in churches, composed into foure partes: all of which are so placed that foure may sing ech one a several part (London, 1592), STC 2482, sig. A2v; Thomas East (ed.) The whole booke of psalms (London, 1594), STC 2488, sig. A2v. (Italics mine).

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with as much truth as I could possibly gather among divers of our ordinary Psalme books, but also have added those, which are commonly song nowadayes, and not printed in our common Psalme books with the rest.”76 The common tunes both reflect broad-scale popular use and encourage the further spread of psalm-singing through the deployment of easy, memorable music. Timothy Duguid notes that it is unclear how many common tunes there may have been. While East records four such tunes, John Cosyn recorded forty-one in his Musike of Six, and Fiue partes, while Allison recorded ten in his 1599 psalter. Duguid speculates that English practice could possibly have reflected all three of these options and everything in between. The variety of tunes used would have varied depending on location, class, interest of the particular clergy, abilities of those at the church or in the congregation.77 Even though only a few of the tunes seem to have become the core of popular English psalmody, the lack of variety was made up for by their ease of use, particularly for the semi-literate and illiterate populations.78

The simplicity and familiarity of the psalm tunes contributed to the approachability of the reformed religion. At the same time, however, the gradual slowing down of the psalms undercut the sense of radicalism and popular appeal, as over the years the psalms became slow, staid, and part of the establishment. The tunes aurally illustrate the negotiations inherent in the English church—a church where the national, established religion is founded on a basis of and unmediated individual relationships with God.

John Day and The Whole Book of Psalmes

In addition to musical simplicity and repetitive metre, John Day’s printed volume of The Whole Book of Psalms likewise contributed to the appeal of the psalms and to their longevity. John Day secured the patent to print psalms in metre in 1559 and it was on the basis of this

76 East, The Whole Book of Psalms sig. B1. 77 Timothy Duguid, Metrical Psalmody in Print and Practice: English ‘Singing Psalms’ and Scottish ’Psalm Buiks,’ c. 1549-1640 (Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2014), 189. 78 Hannibal Hamlin does a close analysis of the structure, rhythm, and harmony of the psalm tunes to make the argument that the tunes of the Sternhold and Hopkins psalms contribute significantly to their widespread and enduring popularity. He concludes that the popularity of the psalm tunes was based on “non-literary criteria.” Hamlin, Psalm Culture, 50.

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monopoly that he built his fortune.79 In 1562 he published The whole booke of Psalmes, collected into Englysh metre by T. Starnhold I. Hopkins, & others: which included versifications of all one hundred and fifty-one psalms, as well as twenty-one hymns and canticles. This body of work became the English metrical psalms.

This complete psalter drew on the unfinished Anglo-Genevan efforts, but Day made some important changes to ensure that the volume would be tailored to the more mainstream Elizabethan market.80 There are seventy-seven new psalm additions or replacements in the 1562 Psalm book that differ from Anglo-Genevan versions, as well as the many new tunes.81 Moreover, the addition of canticles and hymns mitigated the fervent Geneva-style Protestantism affiliated with psalm-singing. Metrical versions of Veni Creator and other such canticles make the prayer book a suitable companion for the Book of Common Prayer, while the original hymns move the psalm book away from a strictly Calvinist approach to communal song.

Despite these changes, Day preserved the basic Anglo-Genevan form of the psalter, keeping intact the exiles’ arguments, glosses and verse numbers that colour the interpretations of the psalms. He also retained a good representation of Genevan versifications by Whittingham and Kethe. The result is a volume that had broad market appeal: it pleased the hotter sorts of Protestants by maintaining the more radical interpretations of the Genevan exiles, but was simultaneously a suitable companion to the more conservative Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer. The Whole Book of Psalmes was designed to communicate and foster multiple modes of Protestantism.

79 He first published Psalmes of David in Englishe metre, by Thomas Sterneholde and others: conferred with the Ebrue. . .Newly set fourth and allowed, according to the order appointed in the Quenes Majesties Injunctions (STC 2427) in 1560. The edition included 65 psalms and 7 canticles and throughout the next year he published further versions, each with more psalms. His other money making patent involved The ABC with Little Catechism. 80 Beth Quitslund surmises that while Day certainly used early versions of the Anglo-Genevan psalter in his own Whole Book of Psalms, it would appear that he did not have access to its latest editions and in many cases had John Hopkins and Thomas Norton retranslate psalms that had already been versified already by Whittingham or Kethe. Quitslund, RR, 206. 81 If there were two versions, it appears that Day generally favoured the London version (meaning that Kethe’s famous Old Hundredth is not actually in the original 1562 Whole Book of Psalms, but was added later).

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We can be sure of the success of The Whole Book of Psalmes because of the printed evidence that remains. While we must take John Jewel’s word for it that the psalms spread quickly from parish to parish, the numbers of published editions can give us an idea of how quickly and firmly the psalm book established itself as an essential English text. Ian Green examined the STC to find approximate numbers of editions published throughout the reigns of Elizabeth, James and Charles (though Green also reminds us that by the early seventeenth century the psalm book may have been continuously reprinted). From 1562 to 1569, nine editions were printed, and every subsequent decade recorded a significant increase. Approximately a million volumes were printed between 1560-1640. 82

Green observes that the number of published editions increased fivefold during Elizabeth’s reign, and concludes that the book must have spelled financial success for John Day and likely corresponded to a steady increase in the prevalence of psalm-singing. The market for these psalters was potentially quite broad. Collegiate chapels and cathedrals likely purchased them for their choirs, and parish churches would have bought a small number for their ministers and clerks; schoolmasters and pupils were another revenue source, and eventually a significant customer base was likely comprised of pious and literate adults who wanted copies for their own domestic use.83 Green also finds that if a certain format of a bible or prayer book sold well, then a matching version of the psalm book would be printed in order for them to be stitched together in one marketable and appealing package. Many surviving editions of The Whole Book of Psalmes are to be found in combination with other texts, so the pious consumer may have had multiple psalm books in different formats combined with

82Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 509. For additional treatments of the print history of the metrical psalms please see Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety,1550-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), and John King, “John Day: Master Printer of the English Reformation,” in The Beginnings of English Protestantism, ed. Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 180-208. 83 Green finds that many of the early editions of The Whole Book of Psalms were published in larger formats such as folio and quarto, making them suitable to be read from a church lectern or from a desk. In the early seventeenth century, however, there was a noticeable shift toward the production of editions in smaller formats, indicating an increasing market for domestic and personal use. Green, Print and Protestantism, 512; Quitslund adds that the move toward smaller formats can be seen in the later years of the sixteenth century (Quitslund, RR, 242).

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different texts, each designed for different uses.84 While the psalms themselves may have begun life in England with the sound of Geneva, their packaging in John Day’s The Whole Book of Psalmes allowed for a certain degree of interpretive or practical flexibility as the volume permitted its readers to use the psalms in a variety of ways, the psalms to be at once associated with the radical exiles, evangelical English Protestants, and standard— even conservative—English liturgical practice.

Singing Together and Praising God: The Power of Communal Song

With their catchy tunes and their well-marketed printed volume, the metrical psalms were persuasive because they were enjoyable. Christopher Marsh argues that metrical psalmody was an important part of sixteenth-century life, and that people loved to sing. Timothy Duguid imagines that singing in a group with several hundred others would be a powerful experience regardless of one’s musical ability.85 Moreover, this enjoyable activity was now a part of standard in English worship. Because metrical psalm-singing relied on parishioner participation in the worship service, they were effective communicators of Protestant values, encouraging each individual to sing to God during the service in English. As Beat Kümin puts it, “one of the most distinctive innovations of Elizabethan worship [. . .] was the fact that parishioners became active performers themselves, for they now had the opportunity [. . .] to sing metrical psalms.” 86 Far from demanding passive of a liturgy in a foreign language from its congregants, the Protestant parish service provided a musical opportunity for the congregation to be active and essential to the worship service. The singing of metrical psalms enacted the grassroots and inherently oppositional or protest-oriented aspect of Protestantism and particularly of the espoused by the exiles. It made Protestantism an enjoyable, collective experience, capable of granting parishioners of even the lowest rank a sense of empowerment and belonging. The flexibility of the psalms also

84 Green, Print and Protestantism, 515. For example, a psalter combined with the Geneva Bible would have ideological implications distinct from one combined with the Book of Common Prayer. 85 Christopher Marsh, Music and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 435-453; Duguid, Metrical Psalmody, 182. 86 Beat Kümin, “Masses, Morris and Metrical Psalms: Music in the English Parish, c. 1400 – 1600,” in Music and Musicians in Renaissance Cities and Towns, ed. Fiona Kisby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 79.

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allowed for multiple communities to be created by song: individual parishes could be strengthened by congregants meeting to sing; pious families could come together at home with their psalters (perhaps even in four-part harmony for the more musically literate); groups of workers or guilds like the weavers could be identified by singing particular psalms at their work; sermon-going folk could leave their own parishes and sing psalms at places like Paul’s Cross; and the nationwide uniformity of the psalms in English even brought a sense of a national Protestant community created through song. 87 Because they depend on the willing participation of individuals, the communities created were at times multiple, organic, heterogeneous, loosely organized, and not necessarily imposed by clergy or Crown. This is part of what Jonathan Willis calls the “uniquely democratising” effect of congregational song and particularly the metrical psalms, which were “unlike any other religious practice, for the transition from congregation to chorus vitiated , class, age and through singing and hearing, a universal process of constructive and receptive aurality.”88

It would be little wonder that the ruling classes appeared to be unenthusiastic about congregational psalm-singing. The Royal Injunction for Religion of 1559, which made the singing of metrical psalms in the service a possibility in the forty-ninth article, is hardly a ringing endorsement:

And that there be a modest and distinct song so used in all parts of the common prayers in the church that the same may be plainly understood as if it were read without singing. And yet nevertheless, for the comforting of such as delight in music, it may be permitted that in the beginning or in the end of common prayers, either at morning or evening, there may be sung an hymn or such like song to the praise of Almighty God, in the best sort of melody and music that may be conveniently devised, having respect that the sentence of the hymn may be understood and perceived. 89

87The weavers were particularly known for singing psalms as they worked, and many were immigrants from the Protestant Low Countries. Falstaff refers to this common knowledge: “I would I were a weaver; I could sing psalms or anything.” William Shakespeare, “1 Henry IV,” 2.4.119-120. 88 Jonathan Willis, Church Music and Protestantism in Post-Reformation England: Discourses, Sites and Identities (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 211. 89 Paul L. Hughes and James Francis Larkin (ed), Tudor Royal Proclamations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), vol. II, 129-130.

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Scholars of English church music have commented on the ambiguity of this injunction.90 The word ‘psalm’ is avoided in favour of the ambiguous “hymn or such like song,” and there is no explicit endorsement of metrical psalm-singing. We know that psalm-singing was permitted before and after morning prayer, but it also quickly became customary to sing psalms before and after the sermon.91 The lack of explicit direction allowed for a certain degree of negotiation in their formal adoption into the service.

The Queen’s own feelings regarding the metrical psalms are hard to decipher. According to the Journal of the , the Queen appears to have sat and listened to the psalm before leaving the church “orderly on foot” during the church service immediately following parliament in 1562, indicating at the very least a tacit to or tolerance of the practice.92 While a large part of the appeal of the metrical psalms lay in their ability to engage individual congregants in the activity of ritual and worship, this participation was only made possible by the acceptance of the metrical psalms by the authorities and their integration into the official English worship service. Though the psalms were perhaps not initially enthusiastically supported by the ruling authorities, neither were they reviled.

This ambivalence changed by the 1570s, by which time they had become firmly embedded in the worship service. The authorities began to recognize the persuasive potential of the psalms and they were put to work in the service of the Crown. In 1578, the official service for Elizabeth’s Accession Day celebration ends with “the xxi. psalm in meter before the

90 At the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, there was little money for music in parish churches; organ usage was consequently in decline and choirs were generally relegated to collegiate and royal chapels, cathedrals and perhaps large, wealthy city churches. The metrical psalms were a cheap, easy way to maintain music in the church. For more on the role of metrical psalms within the spectrum of early church music, see Peter Le Huray, Music and the Reformation in England; Kenneth R. Long, The Music of the English Church (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1972). 91 There are numerous records of sermons at Paul’s Cross beginning and ending with the singing of a psalm from as early as Machyn’s examples quoted later in the chapter. There is also evidence, from the inclusion of hymns like “A Thanksgiving” in The Whole Book of Psalms, that there may have been singing during communion in certain parishes. 92 “Journal of the House of Lords: January 1563,” The Journals of all the Parliaments during the reign of Queen Elizabeth (1682), 57-68. British History Online. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=43664.

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sermon, unto the end of the vii. verse. And the c. psalm after the sermon.”93 By 1580, the revised Accession Day service included three newly composed metrical hymns that derived from the metrical psalms and shared their tunes but with language revised to suit a celebration of Elizabeth and England. 94 Elizabeth’s appropriation and reimagining of the metrical psalm to celebrate her reign was a deliberate effort to poach the popularity, grassroots appeal and participatory engagement affiliated with psalm-singing. The communally sung psalms and hymns bolstered the sense of communal engagement in the national holiday of Accession Day, helping to create the sense that it was not just a day for Elizabeth, but for England and the English.

England is then celebrated by the singing of metrical psalms and closely related hymns throughout the sixteenth century; there are accounts of public psalm-singing after a Catholic plot against the Queen was foiled in 1586 and after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.95 When James accedes to the throne, metrical psalms continue to be sung both in and out of the standard worship service. Numbers of editions of The Whole Book of Psalms continue to increase every year, people continue to sing the psalms, and they are still sung in parliament and in other official capacities. Unlike Elizabeth, however, James does not have a dedicated metrical psalm rewritten to celebrate his accession. More tellingly, the metrical psalms are not a part of the gunpowder plot festivities: special sermons are commissioned, a service is crafted, bonfires dazzle and bells ring out, but no metrical psalms are tailored to the occasion. James relies on other tactics to celebrate and persuade his subjects of his throne- boosting narrative. Perhaps by the seventeenth century they had become too mainstream, too ubiquitous, too familiar, too Protestant, too entrenched in the hands of everyman to carry powerful new persuasive messages on behalf of the authorities.

93 Church of England, A fourme of praier with thankesgiuing to be vsed euery yeere, the 17 of Nouember, being the day of the Queenes Maiesties entrie to her reign (London: Christopher Barker, 1578) STC 16479.5, sig. B1v. 94 The hymns were ‘The Thankgiving’ set to psalm 81, ‘An Anthem or prayer for the preservation of the Church, the queen’s majesty, and the realm’ and finally, ‘A song of rejoicing for the prosperous reign of our most gracious sovereign lady Queen Elizabeth. Made to the tune of the twenty-fifth psalm.’ A comparison of psalm 81 and ‘The Thanksgiving’ can be found later in the chapter. 95 For example: “But upon the discovery of this dreadful plot, and the taking up of these rebels and bloody- minded traitors, the city of London made extraordinary rejoicings, by public bonfires, ringing of bells, feastings in the streets, singing of psalms, and such like” (607). John Strype, Annals of the Reformation and Establishment of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1824), III, i, 607.

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By the end of the Elizabethan period, the metrical psalms conjured a variety of different associations—from courtly musical to radical diasporic Protestantism to the power of congregational participation to mainstream English nationalism. The psalms could be customized and recalibrated to convey different meanings and motives, and such interpretive flexibility comprised a large part of their persuasive effectiveness. But beyond the particular associations of the psalms, the activity of metrical psalm-singing was a significant communicator of persuasive values in sixteenth-century England. The metrical psalms were so effective because their form and content worked symbiotically towards the same goal. The carefully chosen words, the printed volume, the music and the activity of singing in the service cohered to create a consistent message: that Protestantism is accessible, that it is a religion for the individual singer and that the individual singer is part of a community. The coordination of the various elements involved in making the psalms a sustained success show how powerful this form of persuasion can be—a power that is apparent in the use of metrical psalms on stage.

II. Strategic Singing in The Shoemaker’s Holiday

Because of their persuasive and communicative power, and because their variety of associations present a rich and flexible interpretive field, the metrical psalms were put to representative use on the Elizabethan stage. When found in a play, the metrical psalms have two different ways of meaning: they resound with echoes of courtly persuasion, radical Protestantism, exile, participation in worship, exploitation and adaption by the Crown, and communities comprised of guild, parish, family and nation; at the same time, the activity of psalm-singing on stage does something and particularly something persuasive, beyond calling certain associations to mind. Psalm-singing on stage acts as a convertor, enactor or persuader, perhaps of Protestant values, but not necessarily. An instance of psalm-singing both signals and creates a moment of persuasion, either within the activity of the play, or even beyond the play as the playwright makes a case to the audience. Additionally, psalm- singing in a play acts as a creator or delineator of community. In England, the psalms initially created Protestant communities in exile, then Protestant communities in England; they were

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corralled by the Crown to create a national community, and were used by local groups to create microcommunities. On the stage, the act of singing a psalm likewise delineates the shape of community within the playworld, whether creating one or drawing attention to its conspicuous absence; it can also attempt to draw the lines of community around the audience, seeking to persuade them to involve themselves in creating a kind of congregation of likeminded theatregoers.

Both ways of meaning, through association and through activity, are at work during the appearance of a metrical psalm (or at least a psalm-referring song) in the final scene of The Shoemaker’s Holiday by Thomas Dekker. The psalm is cloaked in the sounds of a drinking song entitled “The Second Three-Man’s Song.” By evoking the singing of religious metrical psalms and hymns on Elizabeth’s Accession Day, The Second Three-Man’s Song recalls the sounds of zealous religious evangelism, public participation, artisanal festivity and English national identity to the play. The song enacts the persuasive qualities of the psalms to mount arguments about the shape of English communities both within the world of the play and beyond it.

At first, the Second Three Man’s Song in no way resembles a metrical psalm. It is a raucous drinking song that boisterously exhorts shoemakers to drink at every possible musical interval; it also celebrates a saint (Saint Hugh, the patron saint of shoemakers), if anything giving the song more of a Catholic flavour than a Protestant one. The song’s psalmic resonance emerges when it is placed in the holiday-making context of the play. The climax of the play takes place during Shrove Tuesday, after the shoemakers proclaim their own holiday and name the day after the patron saint of shoemakers, Saint Hugh: “every Shrove Tuesday is our year of jubilee: and when the pancake bell rings we are as free as my Lord Mayor. We may shut up our shops and make holiday. I’ll have it called ‘Saint Hugh’s Holiday.’”96 The song is a part of the celebrations as it champions memorializing “Saint Hugh’s soul” through drinking and singing while the lyrics evoke the sense of a holiday from

96 Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, ed. R. L. Smallwood and Stanley Wells (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979), xviii.221-225. All subsequent references to the play will refer to this edition and will be cited parenthetically.

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the harsh world, as shoemakers “troll the jolly nut brown bowl” while acknowledging the wind and rain of everyday life (p. 80, ln. 13).97

The holiday and its celebrations have been at the forefront of critical debates about The Shoemaker’s Holiday. David Kastan, in his influential 1991 article, discusses the discrepancy between the reality of 1590s London life and the fantasy presented by Dekker in the play, saying of the play that “History is turned into holiday, its tensions refused rather than refuted, recast into an ameliorative fantasy.”98 Marta Straznicky responds that the holiday in the play does not ahistorically dissolve tensions, but is a historicized celebration that is “vitally engaged in the delineation and management of political and economic tensions”; in her view, the holiday “may embody rather than eliminate the conflicts that shape the play.”99 Stephen Maynard agrees with Straznicky, arguing that the holiday in Dekker’s play is a material one rather than a metaphysical construct and that it “locates the particular holiday it is about in history,” while Brian Walsh maintains that the play “more pointedly asserts that holiday and festivity do not deny time and its contingencies, but rather take place in time amid contingency.”100

The material celebrations of the holiday are indeed significant, and the shoemakers’ appropriation of Shrove Tuesday festivities and proclamation of Saint Hugh’s holiday introduces another layer of festive meaning to the play: L. D. Timms was the first to note the relationship between Dekker’s use of Saint Hugh’s Holiday, traditionally celebrated not on Shrove Tuesday but on November 17th in the Catholic calendar, and Elizabeth’s Accession Day, which was celebrated with much fanfare throughout the country on November 17th.101

97 Because the Second Three Man’s Song is not located within a scene, when citing it I will refer to the page number on which it is situated in the Smallwood and Wells edition. 98 David Scott Kastan, “Workshop and/as Playhouse: The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599),” in Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, ed. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 159. 99 Marta Straznicky, “The End(s) of Discord in The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” Studies in English Literature, 1500- 1900 36 (1996): 357-358. 100 Stephen Maynard, “Feasting on Eyre: Community, Consumption, and Communion in The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” Comparative Drama 32 (1998): 329; Brian Walsh, “Performing Historicity in The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 46 (2006): 335. 101 L. D. Timms, “Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday and Elizabeth’s Accession Day,” Notes and Queries 32, no. 1 (1985): 58.

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Roy C. Strong charts the cultural melding of Saint Hugh’s Day and Accession Day in the minds of the English in the late sixteenth century, quoting an entry for bell-ringing at Bishops Stortford in Hertfordshire, “Where two shillings and eightpence were expended in 1575 on ‘bred, drinck, and cheese for Ringing on St. Hewes daye in reioysing of the queens prosperous Ragne.’”102 David Cressy discusses the extent to which the memory of the Catholic calendar—and particularly Saint Hugh’s Day—was still very much on the minds of the English well into the seventeenth century, in part because of the success and uniqueness of the Accession Day festival. Cressy describes the Accession Day celebrations as being much like those of Shrove Tuesday, replete with bell ringing and bonfires, while Strong finds that in the early days of Elizabeth’s reign, the festivities were not based upon government legislation but rather on local traditions, interests and sympathies (whether Catholic or Protestant).103 In 1576, official government control over the festivities was instituted by way of a special service for the day and only then did the holiday broadcast a uniformly Protestant, nationalistic message throughout the country. By January 1st 1600, when The Shoemaker’s Holiday was performed before the Queen, Accession Day celebrations had become thoroughly institutionalized. While Shrove Tuesday fostered carousing and feasting to empower the apprentices, Accession Day was, in the words of Straznicky, “primarily a political festival, imposed from the top down and designed to evoke in English subjects a sense of unique national and religious identity” through special church services and propagandistic sermons.104

It is through these layers of festivity that I hear the Second Three-Man’s song: the meanings associated with the disorder of Shrove Tuesday, the latent Catholicism of Saint Hugh’s Day, and the imposed Protestant nationalism of Accession Day fruitfully enact the conflicts of the play while the musical modes of celebration overlap. The Second Three-Man’s song is then more than just a bit of musical entertainment in the play; it is a mobilization of the material celebrations of Shrove Tuesday/ Saint Hugh’s Day/ Accession Day. While the drunken

102 Roy C. Strong, “The Popular Celebration of the Accession Day of Queen ,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 21, (1958): 89. 103 Strong, “Celebration of Accesion Day,” 91; David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 104 Straznicky, “The End(s) of Discord,” 359.

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exhortations to Saint Hugh clearly connect the song to Shrovetide and Saint Hugh’s Day celebrations, the association with Accession Day singing runs deeper. Along with bellringing and bonfires, communal singing had its place in the holiday celebrations; the 1578 Accession Day service called for several metrical psalms to be sung at the end of the service, and the 1580 service heard the lyrics of the psalms changed to reflect the Accession Day celebrations. Psalm 81 was one of the psalms chosen to be reworked into the Accession Day hymn “The Thanksgiving.” The light, triple time tune remains the same, and while the hymn begins with the familiar lyrics of the psalm, as it progresses the words are changed in order to suit a particular “Happie Day”: 105

Psalm 81 The Thanksgiving

Be lyght and glad, in God reioyce Be light and glad, in God reioyce, Which is our strength and stay Which is our strength and stay: Be ioyfull and lyft up your voyce Be ioyfull and lift up your voice, to Jacobs God, I say. For this most happie daye. Prepare your instrumentes most mete, Sing, sing, O sing unto the Lorde, Some ioyfull psalme to syng: With melody most sweete: Stryke up with harp and lute so sweet, Let heart and tongue in one accorde, On every pleasant stryng.106 As it is iust and meete. 107

By channelling the evangelizing metrical psalms into patriotic hymns, the Crown usurps the power of communal song in order to lend imaginative force to the Accession Day services, re-forming the messages of Protestant participation and persuasion to entreat singers to participate in and endorse Elizabeth’s England. This nationalistic appropriation of the potentially seditious, grassroots, Protestant proselytizing tool is both a testament to the power and ubiquity of communal psalm-singing and a testament to the ease with which its populist meanings could be commandeered by the Crown.

105 This tune was, incidentally, one that Temperley notes as being particularly singable, indicating that the Crown was interested in choosing the tunes that were most appealing to the general population. 106 The whole booke of Psalmes, 301. 107 Church of England. A fourme of prayer with thankes giuing, to be vsed of all the Queenes Maiesties louing subiects euery yeere, the 17. of Nouember, being the daye of the her Highnesse entry to her kingdome. Set forth by authoritie (London: Christopher Barker, printer to the Queen’s Majesty, 1580), STC 16481, sig. C4v.

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By the time The Shoemaker’s Holiday was performed in 1599, communal songs praising Queen Elizabeth were an integral part of the Accession Day soundscape and likely would have been memorized by many of the audience members. The communally-sung song in praise of Saint Hugh on Saint Hugh’s holiday aurally echoes the metrical hymns in praise of Elizabeth on her November 17th Accession Day. This festive reverberation is underscored by the metrical similarities in rhyme and metre between the Second Three-Man’s Song and the first of the Accession Day hymns, “The Thanksgiving.”

Second Three Man’s Song The Thanksgiving

Cold’s the wind and wet’s the rain Be light and glad in God reioyce, Saint Hugh be our good speed. Which is our strength and stay: Ill is the weather that bringest no gain Be ioyfull and lift up your voice, Nor helps good hearts in need. for this most happie daye. Troll the bowl, the jolly nut-brown bowl, Sing, sing, o sing unto the Lorde And here, kind mate, to thee. with melody most sweete: Let’s sing a dirge for Saint Hugh’s soul, Let heart and tonge in one accorde, And down it merrily. (p. 80, ln. 1-8) As it is iust and meete.108

Both pieces share common metre and an abab rhyme scheme; both begin with exhortations to find strength in God/St. Hugh and end with exhortations for the singers to continue singing. Psalm 81/”The Thanksgiving” was sung to a relatively light tune in triple time, making it one of the more ballad-like psalm tunes. The correlation between Accession Day and Saint Hugh’s holiday superimposes the idea of communal metrical psalm-singing over the Second Three-Man’s song, and the communally sung three-man’s song would aurally echo the Accession Day hymn.

There is thus a triple musical mapping onto the Second Three-Man’s song. The song at once resounds with: 1) the drunken disorder of the Shrove Tuesday holiday as the shoemakers drink each time they repeat the second verse; 2) the grassroots, polemical, populist common metre music associated with the metrical psalms, aimed at encouraging public participation in the previously closed liturgy, and persuading the masses to believe and join in the

108 Church of England. A fourme of prayer with thankes giuing, sig. C4v.

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Protestant faith; and 3) the Crown’s appropriation of communal musical forms to further its nationalist aims and, taking a cue from the tactics of early evangelizing Protestants, persuasively deploy the metrical hymns to give the public a sense of participation and pride in the English nation.

The multiple meanings of the song are exploited to the greatest effect when the Second Three Man’s Song is sung in the final scene where the populist artisans and the authoritative King commingle in the festive celebration of Saint Hugh’s Day/ Shrove Tuesday/ Accession Day. There is, however, no explicitly defined performance home for the Second Three Man’s Song; instead, the lyrics of two three-man’s songs are found on A3v and A4 of publisher Valentine Sims’ original 1600 text. They were apparently intended to be performed in the play but the text provides no specific performance location, only a cryptic parenthetical note following the title of the Second Three-Man’s Song: “(This is to be sung at the latter end)” (80). In this case, the meaning of “the latter end” remains unclear. Revels editors R. L. Smallwood and Stanley Wells have commented that this direction could variously indicate that the song could be intended for the very end of the play, the last few scenes of the play, or even at the end of a scene.109

While editors of the play have been interested in these puzzling songs, critics have tended to ignore them because their indeterminate location undermines our ability to read them in light of the discussions of xenophobia, commercialism, nationalism, holiday-making and class negotiations that have dominated critical debates surrounding Dekker’s play. The Shoemaker’s Holiday, however, invites us to think about these songs as more than insignificant textual embellishments. The play brims with music: the shoemakers sing the little refrain “Hey a down-derry” while they work in scene xiii; Firk is worried that his voice is not up to scratch when singing with his work mates; Lacy announces his introduction to the play as Hans the Dutch shoemaker by singing a drinking song in stage ‘Dutch’; and Simon Eyre, as Lord Mayor of London, sings the refrain of a popular ballad. The play also deploys musical metaphors to illustrate significant issues: Firk puns on his singing part (the

109 See R. L. Smallwood and Stanley Wells, eds., The Shoemaker’s Holiday, by Thomas Dekker (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979), 80n.

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mean, or middle part of a three-man’s song) to defend his social status; and the King calls the eventual social harmony between the aristocratic, bourgeois and artisanal classes the ending of “discord,” musically declaring that the play’s dramatic and social tensions are resolved in a harmonious final cadence (xxi.121). The songs are crucial to the larger issues underpinning the play and the Second Three-Man’s song in particular is a locus of the work’s social, political and religious tensions.

My argument for the song’s significance rests on it having a specific location in the play. Though definitive for the home of the Second Three-Man’s song is impossible to determine, editors have offered three possibilities. David Bevington suggests that it may belong in scene xiii as the scene starts with shoemakers Hodge, Rafe, Firk, Hans and a Boy singing “Hey down, a-down, down-derry” and the Second Three-Man’s song includes a similar conventional refrain (xiii.1).110 Though the lyrics of the song fit with the language of the scene, the purpose of the song jars with the action of the scene. The Second Three-Man’s song demands that the chorus of “troll the bowl” should be sung “as often as there be men to drink,” as each singing shoemaker takes his turn drinking during the chorus (p.80). This exhortation to drunken festivity seems at odds with scene xiii, where the music is employed to rouse the shoemakers to work “pell-mell,” not to drink themselves into a stupor (xiii.3). Moreover, Firk complains that his voice is sore “for want of liquoring” (xiii.10). Since the men are clearly not drinking (though Firk apparently wishes that he was), it seems unlikely that the Second Three-Man’s song would be performed here. The second to last scene of the play (scene xx), during Simon Eyre’s feast for the shoemakers, is a more plausible position; there is plenty of drinking, the scene is near the end of the play, and the boisterous drinking song complements the scene of rowdy fellowship and holiday. The nineteenth century editor Ernest Rhys suggests this placement and many other editors, including Smallwood and Wells, agree with the suggestion.111

110 David Bevington, “Introduction to The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” in English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology, ed. David Bevington, Lars Engle, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Eric Rasmussen (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002), 483-486. 111 Ernest Rhys, ed. “The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” by Thomas Dekker, in The Best Plays of the Old Dramatists: Thomas Dekker (London: Vizetelly & Co. 1887), 79.

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Robert Gilford Lawrence and Anthony Parr propose a more dramatically satisfying location for the song, recommending that it be performed at the very end of the work. The stage directions indicate that all the shoemakers are on stage, including Hans (now transformed to Lacy), Hodge, Firk, Rafe and “more Shoemakers,” and a drinking song is consistent with the revelling that continues after the last lines are spoken (xxi.136-137).112 Parr notes that “probably the instruction about ‘the latter end’ should be taken literally; coming at the very end of the play, the song recalls the audience to the everyday world in a manner reminiscent of Feste’s song at the end of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.”113 Smallwood and Wells agree about the literal meaning of the phrase ‘the latter end’: “The phrase the latter end was regularly used of the conclusion, the very end, the final moments (O.E.D.) and is so used by Bottom in M.N.D. of a song in a play: ‘I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the Duke’ (IV.i.18-10).”114 But, ultimately, Smallwood and Wells discount this hypothesis because the song has “none of the characteristics of an epilogue.”115 I propose, however, that this direction end should be taken literally. If located at the end of the play, the song becomes a dramatization of the ongoing banqueting holiday and a way for the shoemakers to claim the last word of the play. More importantly, locating the Second Three-Man’s song at the end of the play—during the time of holiday celebration and with almost all of the characters present on the stage—lends both the song and the play the most signifying force.

Singing a song of shoemakerly pride before the King conjures the chaos and misrule of Shrove Tuesday but equally as evocatively it recalls the populist drive to participation found in the metrical psalms. With the song, the shoemakers are performing their civic participation: the song enacts their challenge to the ruling classes through their ability to declare a holiday, rise to the office of Lord Mayor, and participate in governance. The shoemakers harness the popular, persuasive and evangelical sounds of the metrical psalms, persuading their listeners, and particularly the King, of their worth, their benevolence, and their power. As Alison Chapman, who has written extensively on the imaginative power of

112 Robert Gilford Lawrence, ed., “The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” by Thomas Dekker, in Early Seventeenth Century Drama (London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1963); Anthony Parr, ed., The Shoemaker’s Holiday, by Thomas Dekker (London: A&C Black, 1990). 113 Parr, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, 7n. 114 Smallwood and Wells, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, 80n. 115 Smallwood and Wells, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, 79n.

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shoemakers in Early Modern literature contends, by invoking the erased Saint Hugh’s Day the shoemakers present a “tacit challenge to the Accession Day” and the imposed, nationalistic it demands.116

This is, however, only one aspect of the song’s strategy. The King’s presence is not only required during the song because of the challenge mounted by the shoemakers, but because of the legitimation that the King can bestow upon artisanal aspirations. Simon Eyre entreats the King to “Yet add more honour to the Gentle Trade:/ of Eyre’s banquet, Simon’s happy made” (xxi.188-189). That the King assents to and even endorses the shoemakers’ song by partaking of Simon Eyre’s banquet is vital, as it demonstrates his approval of the participation of the craft. The shoemakers paradoxically claim their authority both from their challenge to the traditional order and from their newfound association with the King.117 Like the populist metrical psalm that was rewritten as a metrical hymn to channel the participatory Protestant enthusiasm of the masses into expressions of nationalistic and monarchical devotion, the Second Three-Man’s song can be read as the moment in which the shoemakers are fully inscribed into the existing monarchical and national order; their expressions of praise for Saint Hugh morph into for the King: “Sim Eyre and my brethren the Gentlemen Shoemakers shall set your sweet Majesty’s image cheek by jowl by Saint Hugh” (xxi.6-8).

The King’s acceptance of Simon Eyre’s invitation (and with it, the singing of the three- man’s song) is as complex as the shoemakers’ own paradoxical musical declaration. Like Elizabeth’s lukewarm endorsement of metrical psalm-singing, the King is making a statement by allowing and even encouraging the communal songs to be sung. By embracing the “jolly Gentlemen Shoemakers” as artisans transformed to gentlemen who can and should

116 Alison Chapman, “Whose Saint Crispin’s Day is it? Shoemaking, Holiday Making and the Politics of Memory in Early Modern England,” Renaissance Quarterly 54 (2001): 1479. 117 In this chapter, I primarily discuss the relationship between the shoemakers and the Crown and only briefly mention the threat and opportunity posed by the rising merchant class and the aristocracy. For more in depth discussions of the myriad class negotiations in The Shoemaker’s Holiday, see David Scott Kastan, “Workshop and/as Playhouse” and Paul S. Seaver, “The Artisanal World,” in The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London, 1576 –1649, ed. David L. Smith, Richard Strier and David Bevington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 87-100.

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participate in governance, the King benefits from the refracted joy and popularity granted by the shoemakers’ holiday, just as Elizabeth benefitted from annexing the metrical psalms (xx.1). In a potentially risky but calculated move, the King employs the same tactics as Elizabeth, exploiting the persuasive quality of participation by endorsing the singing and declaration of holiday, thus encouraging in the shoemakers a sense of pride, and engagement in the English nation—which comes with support for the monarchy and the war against France. While he accepts the power of the shoemakers to designate holiday, the King retains the power of interpretation and reframes the holiday as less a local day off from work for artisans and apprentices than an occasion for refreshment to reinvigorate the English men in the wars against France: “Come, lords, a while let’s revel it at home. / When all our sports and banqueting are done, / Wars must right wrongs which Frenchmen have begun” (xxi.194- 196). The song then musically dramatizes a mutually beneficial relationship between the artisans and the Crown—each gaining legitimacy from association with the other—that is simultaneously underwritten by the potential for mutual usurpation.

Through the Second Three-Man’s song, theatregoers hear the sounds of Protestant evangelism morph into the sounds of evangelism for rival versions of Englishness. Because Protestantism was at once a critical platform for royal English independence from the Popish continent and a potentially rebellious source of grassroots religious movements empowered by religious participation and wary of governmental control, the final song’s invocation of the persuasive Protestant metrical psalms elicits competing accounts of English identity. The song (and the play) celebrates the shoemakerly version of Englishness marked by guild fellowship, increased participation in government and the potential for social mobility at the same time as it affirms the King’s top-down version of Englishness characterized by military engagements with England’s European and Catholic neighbours. But while Protestantism seems an essential ingredient in all the various versions of Englishness in the play, the simple equation between Englishness and Protestantism or indeed, any easy definition of English identity in Dekker’s work is problematized by the presence of a foreign Protestant shoemaker in the play, and particularly by his participation in the final song.

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The play’s foreigner is Hans the ‘Dutch’ shoemaker (really the aristocratic Roland Lacy in disguise) and he is perhaps the most fantastic element of Dekker’s play. Critics have struggled to account for the shoemakers’ easy acceptance of Hans because of the difficulty of staging such a display of tolerance before a 1590s London audience consisting of potentially bigoted, underemployed artisans. England may have claimed to be the world’s defender of Protestantism, but not all Protestants were welcome in England. David Kastan brings our attention to the London riots of 1593 and 1595 that were fuelled by concerns that foreign workers (and particularly Dutch shoemakers) were usurping jobs as rent and food prices skyrocketed. Peter Mortenson asserts that Londoners, with their increasingly mercantilist values, saw the Dutch as trade competitors and outright thieves of fish from English waters rather than fellow Protestants deserving of refuge, thus fanning the xenophobic flames of anxiety regarding the Dutch presence in the city.118 Dekker, however, seems determined to employ a likable Dutch character even at the risk of alienating his audience. His source material, Thomas Deloney’s The Gentle Craft, includes a Dutch journeyman in Simon Eyre’s shop by the name of Haunce, but this character is a potential bigamist who seeks to steal an English maid from a good English lad through trickery and .119 Dekker’s decision to transform this suspect figure into an amiable ‘Dutch’ hero would appear to be an entirely deliberate move.

The disjunction between the audience’s likely expectations for a foreign character and Dekker’s characterization has led critics to presume that Dekker dramatically deploys the Dutch foreigner to make some persuasive point. Julia Gasper claims that Dekker prioritizes religion in The Shoemaker’s Holiday and, through the character of Hans, attempts to educate his audience about Protestant fraternity. David Bevington reads Dekker’s tolerant portrayal of Hans as rooted in the shoemakers’ view of themselves as belonging to an “international brotherhood” of shoemakers/artisans in opposition to employers and other competing commercial forces.120 In contrast, Andrew Fleck questions whether Hans is sympathetically

118 Kastan, “Workshop and/as Playhouse,” 152; Peter Mortenson, “The of Joy in The Shoemakers’ Holiday,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 16 (1976): 245. 119 Thomas Deloney, The Gentle Craft, ed. Simon Barker (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007), 50-53. 120 Julia Gasper, The Dragon and The Dove: The Plays of Thomas Dekker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 25; Bevington, “Theatre as Holiday,” 110.

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portrayed at all, arguing that the community of shoemakers is enriched by Hans not because of his inclusion, but his exclusion.121 He interprets Lacy’s reappearance without Dutch clothes or language in the final scene as the Dutchman’s banishment from the English stage and asserts that such a banishment speaks to Dekker’s nationalistic dramatic project which strengthens English unity through the exclusion of outsiders.

Fleck’s argument that Hans’ eventual erasure leads to an exclusive definition of Englishness is a compelling and provocative one, but if the play ends with the Second Three-Man’s Song that recalls a metrical psalm, then the participation of Lacy forcefully recalls Hans to the stage and gives the song another important dimension of signification. Even though Lacy has returned to his English, noble self in the final act, it would make good dramatic sense for him to join the final three-man’s song because this scene takes such to ensure that his allegiance to the shoemakers continues. He has been pardoned by the King because of Eyre’s intercession, and Eyre refers to “my fine journeyman here, Roland Lacy,” combining Lacy’s continued status as a shoemaker with his reinstated aristocratic and English name (xxi.123-124). Because the notion of Lacy as a journeyman embodies the play’s fantasies about “gentlemen shoemakers,” his participation in the song during the final moments of the play would be essential to the expression of the hopes, the power, and the fellowship of the shoemakers’ holiday (xx.1).

Lacy’s vocal participation as a shoemaker inevitably invokes his foreign shoemaking alter ego, with significant interpretive repercussions. Hans, I contend, is not replaced by Lacy; he remains a part of the improved Lacy, and his presence is called to the stage when Lacy reinforces his shoemaking connections by singing the Second Three-Man’s song. When Lacy sings the song at the end of the play, he aurally recalls an earlier song in the play through which Hans introduces himself to the stage in scene iv:

Der was een bore van Gelderland, Frolick sie byen;

121 Andrew Fleck, “Marking Difference and National Identity in Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 46 (2006): 359.

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He wass als dronck he could nyet stand, Upsee al sie byen; Tap eens de canneken, Drincke, schone mannekin. (ix.42-47)

(There was a boor from Gelderland, merry they are. He was so drunk he could not stand; drunk they all are. Fill up the cannikin; drink, fine mannikin).122

This musical introduction identifies Hans as a foreigner, mocking his Dutch tongue and stereotypically heavy drinking habits. At the same time as it underscores his foreignness, the song also demonstrates his potential to fit into the shoemaking culture of music and drink. When Hans enters the stage singing, Firk immediately identifies the foreign singer as a shoemaker presumably because of his song, even though the words are in an incomprehensible language: “Master, for my life, yonder’s a brother of the Gentle Craft!” (iv.48-49). Firk can make such an assessment because the ‘Dutch’ song is reminiscent of the shoemakers’ own Second Three-Man’s song; Hans (like the shoemakers) sings about drinking and he does so in common metre. The sound of the common metre again creates an echo of the Protestant metrical psalms, and though this echo is more distant than in the Saint Hugh’s Day/ Accession Day Second Three-Man’s song, it can be heard because of the play’s insistence on the connection between Hans/Lacy, shoemaking and Protestant conversion. In two different scenes early in the play, both Lacy and his likely Catholic uncle comment that Lacy learned the shoemaking trade in Wittenberg.123 As the birthplace of Protestantism (and as a town known more for religious reform than shoemaking), Wittenberg is loaded with religious implication and Dekker’s repeated insistence on naming the town as the geographical origin of Lacy’s conversion from aristocratic layabout to honest tradesman is a none-too-subtle signifier of the character’s conversion to Protestantism.124 While in Wittenberg he learned to sing participatory songs in common metre—both the drinking songs of shoemakers as well as the pious songs of evangelical Protestantism—and this first song

122 ‘Dutch’ translation by Smallwood and Wells, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, 106n. 123 See The Shoemaker’s Holiday, i.27-28; iii.20-21. 124 Gasper remarks on the connection between Lincoln’s name and the notoriously Catholic region of England as well as his preference for Catholic Italy over Protestant Wittenberg. She also notes that this addition of Wittenberg (a detail not found in Deloney’s The Gentle Craft), “gives Lacy and his trade the right Protestant resonance from the start” (Dragon and the Dove, 21).

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instantly declares Hans’ singing ability, shoemaking background, religious sympathies and therefore his potential to be a fellow in Simon Eyre’s English shop.

The promise Hans shows by singing a common metre drinking song early in the play is realized when Lacy sings the Second Three-Man’s drinking song in English with the community of shoemakers—an opportunity only available in the final moments of the play.125 Since the final song recalls the earlier Dutch ditty and its shoemaking singer, the memory of Hans is resurrected on the stage in the person of Lacy, but the previously Dutch Hans is unrecognizable. He has been transformed, assimilated and even converted from Dutchness to Englishness, a process that is at once exemplified and enacted by the singing of the inclusive, celebratory and persuasive three-man’s song.

The Second Three-Man’s song invokes an association with conversion through its affiliation with the persuasive metrical psalms; it also goes beyond a mere recollection of conversion because the singing of the song enacts the cultural conversion of the foreigner to Englishman. The song encodes the meanings of conversion and persuasion inherent in the metrical psalms and hymns, as the psalms persuaded singers of the value of Protestantism and Englishness by granting them a sense of inclusion and participation in the service, and in the case of Accession Day hymns, Elizabeth’s England. When Lacy/Hans participates in the song, it is an aural and visual exemplar of the method by which Hans was converted to Englishness— through inclusion in Simon Eyre’s shop, and participation in English shoemaking culture. There are two sides to Hans’ triumphant conversion. It is not enough for him, as a promising and even elect foreigner, to wish to engage in the English shoemaking world; in addition, the community must grant him an opportunity to participate and a chance to sing. Dekker therefore does seem to advance a national social argument through the character of Hans as critics have claimed, but he does not appear to be advocating for either an international Protestant allegiance or the expulsion of all foreign elements for the betterment of London and England. Instead, he mounts a persuasive argument that flatters the nationalist

125 In the penultimate scene, the song could be sung around line 40 during the drunken festivities of the shoemakers, and before Lacy (still dressed as Hans) enters the scene. The focus of the scene shifts upon Lacy’s arrival from the festivities to Simon Eyre’s ability to intercede with the King on behalf of Lacy, making this half of the scene less suited to a boisterous drinking song.

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sensibilities of his London audience by at once mocking foreigners and simultaneously contending that the inclusion of certain, Protestant, effectively elect foreigners eager to assimilate to superior English culture would not just benefit the aliens, but would increase the health and wealth of English society. After all, in Dekker’s imaginary London it is Hans’ inclusion and participation that transforms Eyre the shoemaker into a gentleman, and Lacy the lazy, disloyal, potentially Catholic aristocrat into a hardworking, Protestant, loyal gentleman shoemaker.

Marta Straznicky observes that class differences are not erased in Dekker’s play, but that the work instead celebrates “the inclusion of socially and politically disadvantaged groups within a newly expanded notion of nobility.”126 I would propose that this statement can be widened to encompass a newly expanded notion of Englishness. The festive Second Three-Man’s song retains the religiously evangelistic force of the Protestant metrical psalms, but like the Accession Day hymns that capitalize on the popular value offered by the metrical psalms, the song’s force of Protestant evangelism is re-formed into a more complex force of evangelism for Englishness. The Second Three Man’s Song offers competing messages of both top- down, royally defined Englishness (like those of Henry V’s St. Crispin’s Day speech, Elizabeth’s Accession Day ceremonies, or Rafe’s conscription) and a more grassroots, participatory, artisanal definition of what it is to be English and who belongs in an English community (as demonstrated by Shrove Tuesday festivities and the workaday rituals of the shoemakers). These definitions may be discordant, but Dekker orchestrates a kind of polyphonic fantasy in which both definitions rely on and are enriched by such fruitful discord. The Second Three-Man’s song continues to expand and further complicate the concept of Englishness with the inclusion of Lacy/Hans, but the play does not eradicate national difference in an idealized fantasy of international artisanal solidarity or a Protestant brotherhood without borders. Instead, Dekker offers a pragmatic argument that acknowledges the of a socially and economically fluctuating London in which foreigners appear to be inevitable given the growing commercial trade culture and the religious divisions of Europe. Because it is couched in the mockery of foreigners and a

126 Straznicky, “The End(s) of Discord,” 361.

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of English superiority over foreign cultures, Dekker’s proposition to assimilate and convert those elect foreigners who are already effectively English under their clothes may have proved palatable for his sceptical audience.127

The persuasive meanings of the metrical psalms/songs, then, are not limited to the action within the play, but are mobilized in the final moments to reach into the audience. I previously noted that editors Smallwood and Wells asserted that the Second Three-Man’s Song had none of the characteristics of an epilogue. In one way, this is true: the song at once continues the festival and completes the play in a manner in keeping with the themes of the work. The complexity of the play is not adequately articulated if the King speaks the last word about wars against Frenchmen. By closing the play on the note of the song, both the voices of the shoemakers and Crown are heard. The harsh realities of the King’s war are acknowledged (“Cold’s the wind and wet’s the rain”) but countered by the healing properties of holiday and community. But in another way, the song is like an epilogue when sung at the end of the play; the fourth wall breaks down as the Second Three-Man’s Song launches its persuasive nationalistic and religious sounds beyond the characters of the play and directly to the audience, making a persuasive, pro-English case for tolerance of the Dutch. Dekker’s drama depicts a changing world in which both the traditional guild fraternities and the authority of the governing classes are destabilized by the rise of a commercial mercantilist system and the influx of foreign workers. The Second Three-Man’s song becomes a direct appeal to the audience—whether the popular audience in the commercial theatre or the more refined audience of the Queen’s court—to think about how their shared London or even English community of guilds, Kings, Protestants and fellows can adapt to survive a cold, rainy, and inevitably changing world.

III. Hanging up harps in The Merry Wives of Windsor

127 Little is known about Thomas Dekker’s personal history, but Julia Gasper and the Dictionary of National Biography speculate that it is possible, based on his last name, that he is of Dutch ancestry. If true, this may in part explain his sympathies towards the Dutch and those of Dutch descent who consider themselves English. See Julia Gasper, The Dragon and the Dove, 20; and John Twyning, “Dekker, Thomas (c.1572-1632),” in Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online ed. Lawrence Goldman, January 2008, https://doi- org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1093ref:odnb/7428

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My argument in this dissertation rests on the idea that the forms of religious persuasion remain intact, decipherable and meaningful on the stage when carrying dramatic content. This assertion is particularly interesting when it comes to the metrical psalms, since the ‘purity’ of their content—that they are the word of God—is so important. Despite this, I have found that the cultural activity of psalm-singing comes to mean more than the specific words of the psalms themselves. I argue that even a drinking song in The Shoemaker’s Holiday can echo with a metrical psalm because the form of the psalms is more than just an arrangement in common metre; it is comprised of who sings, when they sing and why they sing.

But in The Merry Wives of Windsor (MWW), there is actually a line of metrical psalm text. As in Dekker’s play, the metrical psalm is hidden by another song, but this time it is the content—the words themselves— that point to the metrical psalm. This would seem to undermine my argument that metrical psalms cannot be directly represented and that only their forms are available to the stage. But in MWW, the metrical psalm is likewise not directly represented. It is just one line found inside a popular ballad, possibly even sung with the wrong notes. It is a reversal of the situation found in The Shoemaker’s Holiday, where the words of a drinking song the form of a metrical psalm. In this case, the metrical psalm content is found in the form of a popular love song. The single line floating in another song illuminates what is lacking: the absence of the form of the metrical psalm recalls the absence of community and highlights a sense of exile and exclusion, a sense magnified by the specific diasporic content of psalm 137. The noteworthy absence of the communal metrical psalm form in MWW elicits questions about what and who creates, constitutes and defines community—questions that go to the heart of the play.

The metrical psalm line makes its appearance not in a group musical number, but as one character sings distractedly to himself. Sir Hugh Evans is a Welsh parson who has been challenged to a duel by the even more foreign Dr. Caius. Both men are outsiders and of a higher social standing than the citizens of Windsor, making them sources of good-natured ridicule in the play. As Sir Hugh prepares for the duel, he reveals that he is “full of cholors”

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and “trempling of the mind,” exclaiming, “How melancholies I am!”128 To soothe his agitated soul he begins to sing some internal verses from “A Passionate Shepherd to his Love” by Christopher Marlowe:

[Singing] To shallow rivers, to whose falls Melodious birds sings madrigals. There will we make our peds of roses, And a thousand fragrant posies. To shallow—

Mercy on me! I have a great dispositions to cry.—

[Singing] Melodious birds sing madrigals.— Whenas I sat in Pabylon— And a thousand vagram posies. To shallow (etc.) (III.i.13-22)

While the rest of the song is vaguely derived from Marlowe’s song, the line “Whenas I sat in Pabylon” is from the first line of the metrical version of psalm 137 found in The Whole Book of Psalmes.129 Only that single line of the metrical psalm weaves its way into Evans’

128 William Shakespeare, “The Merry Wives of Windsor” in The Norton Shakespeare, III.i.8-10. All subsequent references will be made parenthetically. 129 Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins, The Whole Book of Psalmes, 350-352. The full psalm text is as follows: Whenas we sat in Babylon, the riuers rounde about: And in remembraunce of Sion the teares for grief burst out. We hanged out harps & instruments, the willow trees vpon, For in that place men for their vse, had planted many one.

Then they to whom we prisoners were, sayde to vs tauntingly: Now let vs heare your Ebrue songes, and pleasant melody. Alas (sayd we) who can once frame, his sorowfull hart to syng: The prayses of our louing God, thus vnder a straunge kyng

But yet if I Ierusalem, out of my hart let flyde: Then let my fingers quyte forget, the warblyng harp to guyde. And let my tong within my mouth, be tyde for euer fast: If that I ioy; before I see, thy full deliueraunce past.

Therfore (O Lorde) remember now, the cursed noyse and cry: That Edoms sonnes againste vs made, when they razed our citie. Remember Lorde theyr cruell wordes, when as with one accorde.

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melancholy mind before his return to some approximation of the Marlowe lyric. David Landreth claims that Sir Hugh likely sings in order to relax himself before his potentially violent fight, but the Marlowe wooing song is a strange choice since it is unsuited to his situation or his internal state. Instead, Landreth asserts that Sir Hugh’s mind wanders unconsciously to the famous psalm of exile that emerges mid-ballad because it is more reflective of the mental anguish that the parson feels before his potentially life-ending duel.130

The effect here is one of absence. The metrical psalms are sung by a congregation, brought together by faith, interest, family or location. But when the line of the psalm appears in an unrelated love song, lacking its expected forms and circumstances, we are reminded of what a metrical psalm should mean and do, but in this case, will not. The meanings of persuasion and community-building are evoked, but are conspicuously lacking. In The Shoemaker’s Holiday the song is an act that declares holiday, creates a community and negotiates between the shoemakers and the authorities. The appearance of the psalm/song in MWW acts somewhat similarly. Sir Hugh (whether consciously or not) deploys the metrical psalm in order to attempt to do something. In this case, he tries to soothe his frayed nerves through singing popular music, to comfort himself with a familiar religious psalm, to persuade himself to be brave and potentially to rouse himself to fight with the psalm of exile that ends on a violent note of vengeance.131 Both the Marlowe song and the metrical psalm are songs of persuasion. “A Passionate Shepherd” is a wooing song, as the singer attempts to use the of the music and the picture painted by the words to persuade the listener to prove all of life’s pleasures with him; and while the words of psalm 137 are a lament, the singing of metrical psalm is itself a persuasive activity. But rather than persuading himself to feel brave

They cryed, on sack, and raze their wals, in despite of theyr Lorde.

Euen so shalt thou (O Babilon) at length to dust be brought: And happy shall that man be calld, that our reuenge hath wrought. Yea blessed shall that man be calld, that taketh thy children yonge: To dash theyr bones against hard stones, whiche lye the streates amonge. 130 David Landreth, “Once More into the Preech: The Merry Wives' English Pedagogy,” Shakespeare Quarterly 55.4 (2004), 420-449, 431. 131 The final verse of the metrical version of psalm 137 is gruesome with its call for the dashing of the bones of the children of Babylon against “hard stones” (The Whole Book of Psalmes, 151-152).

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and supported by God and his congregation, the appearance of the psalm reminds the audience and himself of his exile, foreignness and outsider status.

This sense of loneliness—of singing apart from the congregation—is reflected in the indecorous fusion of the psalm and the Marlowe song. While the two songs that Sir Hugh nervously sings may be linked through a strategy of self-persuasion, Marlowe’s song seems comically unsuited to his situation—he is neither a wooer nor a lover and his distress is not conveyed by such a light tune in triple time—and this sense of indecorum is compounded by the insertion of the psalm intertext. While the psalm itself may be more suited to his frame of mind (and that it comes to mind is not surprising given his clerical profession), the thematic incongruity between it and the Marlowe piece is so egregious in tone, tune and subject matter that the parson flirts with blasphemy. The discord continues beyond the thematic to the musical. The two pieces would have sounded entirely strange together. The Marlowe tune was sung to a 3/4 time with dotted rhythms, making for a jaunty tune, whereas psalm 137 was likely sung to a much slower pace in 4/4 time. Psalm 137 is in common metre, so while the line “Whenas I sat in Pabylon” may fit into the Marlowe ditty with eight syllables, Sir Hugh could not really continue singing the psalm since the next line would only have six syllables (not eight like the madrigal). While Sir Hugh attempts to assuage his fears by calming himself with music, the appearance of the inappropriate psalm tune lament in the midst of cheerful wooing music reveals his disordered state of mind and the degree to which the music fails to soothe his soul.132 This failure is essential to the comedy of the scene as the

132 This is not the first time in this play that a popular wooing song mingles with a psalm tune in this play. As Mistress Page and Mistress Ford discover that Falstaff is attempting to woo them with the very same scripted words in the previous act, Mistress Ford says of Falstaff: “And yet he would not swear, praised women’s modesty, and gave such orderly and well-behaved reproof to all uncomeliness that I would have sworn his disposition would have gone to the truth of his words. But they do no more adhere and keep place together than the hundred and fifty psalms to the tune of ‘Greensleeves’ “(II.i.50-55). Mistress Ford deploys the radically ridiculous example of the psalms being sung to the popular love song tune of Greensleeves to illustrate the fundamental indecorum of Falstaff’s words and disposition. Both because of the slow, more pious mode of singing, and the weighty religious subject matter, the idea of singing the psalms to the popular, wooing love tune of Greensleeves is laughable – just as Falstaff’s words seem so heartfelt while his disposition reveals him to be anything but. His attempt at romantic persuasion backfires because he lacks a sense of decorum (and because he makes the mistake of wooing both ladies at once). This ridiculous idea of singing the psalms to a popular wooing song is vocalized in the next act, as the psalm of exile is grafted onto the tune and words of Marlowe’s popular wooing song. Both instances that mingle psalms and songs can be read as scenes of failed persuasion.

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humour is derived from the exposure of Sir Hugh’s anxiety and the radical incongruity between the love ditty and the psalm lament.

Given the aural differences between the two songs, there must have been some reason for Sir Hugh to drift from one to another. Landreth notes that the hinge between the two texts is the word ‘rivers.’ Sir Hugh begins by singing “To shallow rivers, to whose fall/Melodious birds sings madrigals” but “the scrap of psalm that bobs up into Evans’s consciousness doesn’t itself include ‘rivers.’”133 The word ‘rivers’ emerges in the next, omitted line: “When we did sit in Babylon/ The rivers round about/ Then in remembrance of Zion/ The tears for grief burst out.”134 If the love song and the religious psalm are bridged by a river in Sir Hugh’s mind, then perhaps he thinks of the psalm because the river in ‘Come live with me’ evokes for Sir Hugh another bridged river – the Severn— that both divides and is shared by his native Wales and his adopted England. The segue to psalm 137 then makes sense because the first song reminds him of the river that divides him from his homeland, which in turn leads his mind to the psalm of exile.

The psalm originally refers to the exile of the Jews in Babylon after Nebuchadnezzar sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the first temple in 587 BCE. Hannibal Hamlin notes that 137 is unique in the psalter because of its historical specificity, but despite its direct reference to an historical event, it is one of the most interpretively flexible of the psalms for both Jews and Christians.135 James Kugel comments that first century Jews allegorically read Babylon as Rome to draw comparisons between the destruction of the first temple and the destruction of their own second temple.136 This historical association was remarkably convenient for the Protestant psalm singers. The allegorical reinterpretation of the psalm grants a sense of power and tradition to those who considered themselves oppressed, a tradition seized by the Protestant Marian exiles.

133 Landreth, “Once more into the Preech,”431. 134 The Whole Book of Psalmes (1652), 150. 135 Hannibal Hamlin, Psalm Culture, 218. 136 James Kugel, In Potiphar’s House: The Interpretive Life of Biblical Texts (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 173-174. See his chapter “Psalm 137” (chapter 7) for more on psalm 137 and the history of biblical exile and Hamlin’s chapter “Psalm 137: Singing the Lord’s Song in a Strange Land” (chapter 7) for a literary take on the psalm and the history of exile.

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Sir Hugh calls on psalm 137’s tradition of interpretive flexibility and by evoking the image of the river, personalizes the psalm to refer to his own exile from his native Welsh land. This sense of Welsh exile is reinforced by the next unsung verse of the psalm: “We hanged our harps and instruments/ the willow trees upon:/ For in that place men for their use/ had planted many one.”137 The image of the Israelites hanging their now silent harps on the trees by the river is perhaps the most powerful image of loss and exile in the psalm, but, as a Welshman, it would have particular resonance for Sir Hugh. The harp was one of the traditional instruments of Wales; it was popularly associated with Welsh music and particularly with the uniquely bardic courtly oral culture of the late medieval period. Sally Harper, in Music in Welsh Culture before 1650, states that that indigenous ‘craft of the string’ (cerdd dant ) “has international significance as one of the last repertories of orally (and aurally) transmitted music in the west. This was high-status ‘bardic’ music for harp and crwth, conceived within the context of the noble household and functioning as an essential adjunct to sophisticated vernacular poetry.”138 This tradition can be traced back as early as the tenth century and harp playing was such an important part of court culture that it was codified in law.139

Even though the great bardic harp practice deteriorated as the wealthy, landowning Welsh increasingly moved to England over the sixteenth century, there remained a connection between the Welsh and harp music in the popular imagination. In I Henry IV, the very Welsh Glendower responds to the hard-headed and impolitic Hotspur by asserting that his ability to communicate in English is superior because of his Welsh harp training: “I can speak English, lord, as well as you;/ For I was trained up in the English court,/ Where, being but young, I framed to the harp/ Many an English ditty lovely well,/ And gave the tongue a helpful ornament.”140 According to Glendower, the Welsh harp complements English ditties,

137 The Whole Book of Psalmes (1652), 150. 138 Sally Harper, Music in Welsh Culture before 1650: A Study of the Principal Sources (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2007), 2. 139 According to Harper, three ‘legal harps’ were acknowledged within the court, belonging to the king, the chief bard (pencerdd) and nobleman (each came with their own tuning horn). This tradition can be traced back to the of Hywel Dda, whose written sources date from 1250. The presence and importance of poet- musicians, and their reliance on the harp is noteworthy (Harper, Music in Welsh Culture, 33-40). 140 “1 Henry IV,” III.i.118-122.

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underscoring his assertion that an alliance with Wales and the Welsh could benefit England. The connection between Wales and the harp was fixed in the seventeenth century with the codification of Welsh harp music by one of the most famous and last of the itinerant harpists in Wales, Robert Ap Huw (1580-1665); a poem by Huw Machno names him as a musician of King James I and his harp bore the silver arms of the king.141

By singing psalm 137, Sir Hugh evokes the image of him hanging up his Welsh harp and song, effectively putting away his Welshness on the English side of the Severn River. The images that he only alludes to in his one-liner – the river and the harp – give this song significant personal resonance for Sir Hugh, as the psalm not only reveals his melancholic state, but bases the reason for his melancholy on his defining dramatic feature: his Welshness. But Sir Hugh’s sense of victimhood and cultural alienation is complicated by his singing of the psalm as much as it is illuminated by it. While the Israelites hang up their harps and refuse to sing their beautiful Hebrew songs under a strange king in a gesture of defiance aimed at strengthening their culture and resolve, Sir Hugh’s choice to sing—and particularly to sing in English—demonstrates the loss of or his abandonment of his own Welsh culture and community. Unlike Shakespeare’s other singing Welsh character, Lady Mortimer, Sir Hugh sings in Welsh-accented English rather than his native tongue, even when seeking to soothe his chaotic thoughts. His song choices inscribe him further into Englishness while the psalm points to his outsider status.142 Sir Hugh first sings a popular love tune, showing that he has thoroughly imbibed English popular culture. Then his mind wanders to an English metrical psalm.

To the Welsh, the metrical psalms could be considered yet another form of cultural imposition. The Reformation came to Wales at the same time as in England but without the same level of grassroots support. In 1587, Edward Dunn Lee, Job Throckmorton and John Penry (a famous Welsh Anglican later executed for allegedly playing a role in the Marprelate controversy) submitted a to Parliament begging that the gospel be preached in Wales

141 John Harper, "Robert ap Huw," in Grove Music Online: Oxford Music Online, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/subscriber/article/grove/music/01084. 142 See “1 Henry IV,” III.i.240.

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in the Welsh language. Penry in particular was concerned that the Welsh clergy were so deficient and poorly skilled in Protestant doctrine that the of the Welsh flock were in peril. It was not until 1621 that the Book of Common Prayer (which included a few metrical psalms) was translated into Welsh.143 That Sir Hugh’s mind subconsciously wanders to the metrical psalm may indicate his familiarity as a parson with the rituals of the Protestant church, but also it draws attention to the degree of English linguistic domination in Welsh religious institutions. So much of the power of metrical psalms is wrapped up in its accessibility, its participatory nature and its communicative power. Since the metrical psalms were not available to the Welsh in their native tongue, they became symbolic agents of English supremacy, thereby mitigating some of their populist associations.

The sense of English dominance and Welsh assimilation is further emphasized by Sir Hugh’s specific choice of psalm 137. Of all of the psalms, the metrical translation of psalm 137 insists on its own historical moment of versification during the exile of the English Protestants on the continent during Mary’s Catholic reign in England. It was not part of Sternhold’s original collection, neither was it in Hopkins’ expanded edition of 1549. Instead, it was one of the psalms that William Whittingham paraphrased in Geneva and remained in The Whole Book of Psalmes. The resulting versification evokes the exile of the English in a strange land while their Jerusalem is overtaken by Rome. Whittingham records the historical moment for posterity in the psalm in verse four. Coverdale translates this line as “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” while Whittingham interprets it as:

Alas said we, who can once frame His sorrowful heart to sing: The praises of our loving God, Thus under a strange king? 144

143 For accounts of the Reformation in Wales, see: Glanmor Williams, Recovery, Reorientation, and Reformation: Wales c.1415-1642, volume II in The History of Wales, ed Glanmor Williams (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Glanmor Williams, The Welsh and their Religion (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991), 138-172. 144 The Byble in Englyshe that is to saye the content of all the holy scrypture, both of ye olde and newe testament, truly translated after the veryte of the Hebrue and Greke textes, by ye dylygent studye of dyuerse excellent learned men, expert in the forsayde tonges (London: Rychard Grafton and Edward Whitchurch, 1539), STC 2068, sig. DD2; The Whole Book of Psalmes (1562), 151.

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Beth Quitslund points out that ‘king’ is not used in any of Whittingham’s possible sources, and evokes interpretive possibilities not present in Coverdale’s ‘strange land’. She asserts that the ‘strange king’ could on the one hand refer to Charles V and thus to the literal banishment of the English to the continent, but more provocatively, it could refer “to a change of regime that destroyed the figurative Zion of true religion in England, and particularly to the new foreign—and Catholic—king of England, Philip.”145 By reminding singers of a recent and powerful memory of exile, the metrical psalm (even more than the prose translation) conveys a highly charged political and propagandistic message of true, national, geographically-centered religion. The metrical version is so very English in its language and its historical specificity that it evokes a strong sense of English Protestant nationalism at the same time as it conveys Sir Hugh’s sense of exile. While Sir Hugh may be playing on the tradition of reinterpretation and personal application of psalms to illuminate his own sense of exile, he cannot escape the nationalist implications of the metrical version of psalm 137.

Like the Severn river—the border that mixes English and Welsh—Sir Hugh is a liminal figure; he mixes song, language, religion, national characteristics and allegiance as he lives on the edge of two cultures. Just as there is a fundamental problem of decorum in the way in which his mind combines musical selections, Sir Hugh is himself a kind of indecorous figure: his enthusiasm to share in the fairy shaming does not fit with his role as a Protestant parson (and was exactly the kind of indulgence in pagan beliefs that Penry feared when he complained of the Welsh clergy); he is not at home in England with his Welsh-accented English that is repeatedly the subject of mockery, but neither is he comfortable enough with his Welshness to sing in his mother tongue when under pressure. His song choice in a moment of distress reveals his separation from his native culture and community and his inability to fit into his adopted home.

This sense of and exclusion explains Sir Hugh’s slight change of the metrical psalm lyric. While the Whittingham version opens with “Whenas we sat in Babylon,” Sir

145 Quitslund, RR, 149.

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Hugh changes the words slightly by singing “Whenas I sat in Pabylon.” Apart from the ‘Welsh’ pronunciation of Babylon as “Pabylon,” the most striking change is from the communal ‘we’ to the individual ‘I’. This change is significant because it aurally exemplifies Sir Hugh’s sense not of communal exile—like that of the Israelites in Babylon, the Marian exiles in Geneva, or even of an expatriate Welsh community in early modern England—but instead of solitary and individual exile, in which he alone is alienated from both his birth country (as he does not even sing in Welsh) and his adopted home (where he makes “fritters of English”) (V.v.136). That Sir Hugh barrels back into the Marlowe song after one line of the psalm suggests that the troubling psalm of exile was barely noticed by the oblivious singer, but the disorder hinted at in the psalm lingers in the rest of the blithe ballad. In the line following “Whenas I sat in Pabylon,” he slips back into the Marlowe song but forgets “fragrant posies” and instead substitutes “vagram posies.” His mind still dwells on his vagrancy and homelessness (III.i.21).

Sir Hugh’s lyrical mistakes and substitutions, funny Welsh accent and indecorous musical mash-ups make for much comic material, but how gentle is the laughter? Like Hans, Sir Hugh is assimilated into English culture, but while the shoemakers are persuaded to accept Hans into their community, the other characters in Merry Wives do not hear Sir Hugh’s song and his music does not endear him to the audience. The songs convey his foreignness and sense of exclusion to the audience without providing a compelling reason to identify with him or see him as anything more than a humorous and pathetic character. The slip into the metrical psalm seems to reflect an unconscious state of mind—it does not show the audience a compelling spark of self-awareness that would give them access to his inner life. In a way, Sir Hugh’s song/psalm does create a kind of community based on shared sentiments, but he is not part of it. Jonathan Willis argues that the metrical psalms build communities in both inclusive and exclusive ways. If congregational music is a democratizing force, then it is also a means of subversion and discord. He notes that the conservative distaste for, Catholic opposition to and Puritan appropriation of the metrical psalms caused friction in local parish communities.146 A community or congregation could be forged by either standing for or in

146 Willis, 225.

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opposition to the metrical psalms. In MWW, the cohesion of the audience is likewise strengthened through the exclusion of Sir Hugh. As Londoners, they would be well- acquainted with both the Marlowe madrigal and the pious psalm and all would be able to laugh together at Sir Hugh and his incompetent, goofy, Welsh-inflected musical butchery.

Indeed both Caius and Evans, with their foreignness, their aristocratic leanings, and the utter ridiculousness of their decision to settle a dispute with a duel, reinforce the superiority of the English middling sort that triumph in The Merry Wives of Windsor. This said, the very fact that Evans reaches for something so English and so middle class as a metrical psalm in his hour of need must mean something. If the psalms are a part of the scaffolding of his mind, how alien could he be? Even though his particular psalm choice underscores his outsider status, its very presence still indicates a knowledge of and desire to be a part of the Windsor community. And by Act 5, Windsor appears capacious enough to draw him into the fold; there is no sense that Evans is excluded from the community because of his differences. Neither Caius nor Evans are harmed, Sir Hugh still leads (and is lead by) his flock and at the end of the play the community of Windsor celebrates itself and its good sense, including those who would otherwise be outsiders. While the play laughs at the parson’s expense, he remains part of Windsor.

The tension between the present content and the absent form of the psalm parallels some of the tensions at work in the play; the Welshman singing the English metrical psalm reminds us of national and institutional imposition, loss of community and sense of personal alienation. Sir Hugh’s differences are never erased in the play—he cannot renounce his , his mother tongue or his cultural background—but he is considered part of the Windsor community at the end of the play, despite his differences. Even if he sings the psalms with a funny accent, he still sings them with everyone else in his congregation. Protestant evangelism is about more than the conversion of an individual; it is also about creating a godly community. The open-hearted acceptance of converts from all humanity— all nations, all walks of life—may work in an ideal faith-based model, but grafting such acceptance onto a community grounded in a class-based nation with its own history and political imperatives proves fraught. Dekker’s work makes an argument for community

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acceptance of converts, deploying the metrical psalms as one of his persuasive tools directed at the audience. Shakespeare uses the metrical psalm not to persuade the audience but to draw attention to the problems inherent in persuasion, assimilation and conversion, exposing the tension inherent in the ways in which communities are created and strengthened by both inclusion and exclusion.

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Chapter Two: Duke, Friar, Jesuit, Spy: Private Conference and Public Persuasions in Measure for Measure

Harebrain, the ridiculous, jealous husband in Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters, is consumed by thoughts and fears about his wife’s chastity. Upon sequestering her away from mixed company and removing her romantic reading material, he decides that a virtuous, knowledgeable woman would be a suitable companion and influence. Unbeknownst to him, the companion he chooses is a courtesan whose expertise in presenting a cover of false modesty will help his wife conduct a clandestine affair:

HAREBRAIN: Do, labour her prithee; I have conveyed away all her wanton pamphlets, as Hero and Leander, Venus and Adonis; oh, two luscious mary-bone pies for a young married wife. Here, here, prithee take the Resolution and read to her a little. COURTESAN: She’s set up her resolution already sir. HAREBRAIN: True, true, and this will confirm it the more. There’s a chapter of hell, ‘tis good to read this cold weather. Terrify her, terrify her; go, read to her the horrible for itching wantoness, the pains allotted for adultery; tell her her thoughts, her very dreams, are answerable, say so; rip up the life of a courtesan and show her how loathsome ‘tis.147

Harebrain appears to believe that literature is highly affective and persuasive, so while leaving his wife alone to consume erotic, romantic or suggestive reading material would make her more sexually permissive, providing appropriate and instructive material will have the opposite effect. The book that he recommends is The Book of Resolution, a popular book of meditations designed to lead readers through an examination their own , meditate on the ramifications of and bring them closer to God. The book, by the Jesuit father Robert

147 Thomas Middleton, “A Mad World, My Masters,” in A Mad World, My Masters, and Other Plays, ed. Michael Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), I.ii.44-54.

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Persons, was based on the spiritual exercises performed by the Jesuits and formed a significant part of the conversion strategy of the order. The book was then popularized by a Protestant minister who amended some of the more Catholic portions but retained the central, participatory meditations on Hell and its many pains, on personal sin, and on the perfection of Christ.148

In addition to wishing to control what his wife reads, Harebrain also wants to control how she reads. Reading alone is potentially suspect; it is possible to misinterpret the text or fail to pay sufficient attention. The descriptions of hell in the book would not, according to Harebrain, be evocative or terrifying enough to persuade her to live a pious and, more importantly for him, chaste life. He feels that she needs a spiritual, behavioural guide to set her on the path to and to help her to correctly understand, interpret and respond to the meditations found in the book.

The notion that a courtesan could be a suitable leader for the kind of religious meditations found in The Book of Resolution may be funny, but it was commonplace enough to seek a suitable guide for book-based meditations, prayer or personal introspection. These types of private consultations fostered spiritual community, provided personalized support and were also an essential part of the conversion process for many. They helped people to move away from sin or to travel from one confessional home to another. Such consultations were typically referred to as private conferences.

In sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, the term ‘private conference’ generally implied something more formal, more specific than just any conversation or talk that took place in the protective safety of a private space. The word ‘conference’ carried a range of possible meanings: it could have been applied to political, theological or academic events that were less formal than public debate or disputation, or it could have meant a one-on-one interchange. When the conference is specified as being ‘private,’ the term refers to a somewhat formalized private counsel or exchange. Given that private conferences involved

148 Robert Persons S.J., The Christian Directory (1582): The First Book of The Christian Exercise, Appertayning to Resolution, ed. Victor Houliston (Leiden: Brill, 1998).

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granting or receiving counsel, one of the members usually holds some kind of authority (a priest, a king, a father). We see this power dynamic at work in 1 Henry IV, for example, when King Henry IV requests: “Lords, give us leave; the Prince of Wales and I/ Must have some private conference” in order to impart some harsh words to his son.149 Likewise, in Bacon’s New Atlantis, the father of Salomon’s House grants a “private conference,” to the narrator, so that the elder may pass down knowledge to the younger admirer.150

The term is very commonly used in religious contexts as a counterpoint to public religious forms of communication. Alec Ryrie notes that for Protestants after 1560, private conference supported preaching, and could be an opportunity for study, collective prayer, or spiritual counsel. It could be used “as a venue for repeating sermons or recapitulating catechesis. This might be done as a formal discipline in a group that met regularly, whether recalling a sermon they had just heard or reheating an old favourite; it might be an exercise for a pious schoolboy to repeat to his betters, for his own education and edification. It might happen ad hoc.”151 refers to it as one of the places where one may hear and contemplate a sermon: “For the temptations with which a good man is beset, and the ways which he used to overcome them, being told to another, whether in private conference, or in the Church, are a Sermon.” 152

Inasmuch as private conferences were not solely religious or rigidly structured, they certainly were a recognizable, and fairly universally-used, form of religious persuasion. Indeed, private conferences, where counsel could be personally tailored to the listener and the recipient could participate in the conversation, were ideally suited to persuasive religious activities. Alexander Nowell and William Day call their discussions with Edmund Campion in the a “disputation, or rather private conference.”153 In the 1650s, private

149 William Shakespeare, “ 1 Henry IV,” III.ii.1-3. 150 Francis Bacon, New Atlantis a work unfinished (London: SN, 1658), Wing B307, 25. 151 Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 395. 152 George, Herbert, A priest to the temple, or, The country parson his character, and rule of holy life (London: T. Maxey for T. Garthwait, 1652), Wing H1512, 142-143. 153 Alexander Nowell and William Day, A true report of the disputation or rather priuate conference had in the Tower of London, with Ed. Campion Iesuite, the last of August.1581 (London: Christopher Barker, 1583), STC 18744.

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conferences were a significant part of Richard Baxter’s ministry; he claims that “God Blessed my private conference to the conversion of some, who remain firm and eminent in holiness to this day,” and explained that much of his success relied on working directly with individual families: “Two days every week, my assistant and myself took fourteen families between us, for private catechising and conference. . . I spent about an hour with each family, and admitted no others to be present; lest bashfulness should make it burthensome, or any should talk of the weaknesses of others.”154 Stephen Gosson acknowledges the persuasive potential inherent in the one-on-one interaction, noting that watching a play in public and hearing it positively discussed in private are both potentially corrupting. He counsels that to guard oneself against the siren call of dramatic plays, “whensoever you heare that playe againe, or any man els in private conference commend Playes, consider not, so much what is spoken to colour them, as what may bee spoken to confounde them.”155 There is something possibly dark, dangerous or suspect about private conferences; the privacy that allows for personalized approaches, freedom to explore ideas, and the space for self-examination without the worry of public appearances also creates a space that is unverifiable and beyond the reaches of the authorities. The secrecy of the private conference is why multiple faith perspectives have access to the form. Protestants and Catholics alike used private conferences often in their ministry and evangelism.

No confessional camp had a monopoly on the use of private conference, but Catholics had few alternatives. And of the Catholics, it was most effectively deployed, most associated with, and most exclusively used by the Jesuits during the Elizabethan English mission. One- on-one interaction away from grandstanding and public scrutiny permitted the authentic conversation and soul-searching necessary for an opening of the heart; it could also permit a manipulative or at least seductive conversationalist to overcome a listener’s defenses in the absence of those who could provide a balancing or counter-voice. In drama, private conferences—these semi-formal private discussions between a counsellor and a listener—are very often marked as persuasive moments. Some of the most famously

154 Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, or, Mr. Richard Baxters narrative of the most memorable passages of his life and times (London: T. Parkhurst, J. Robinson, F. Lawrence and F. Dunton, 1696), Wing B1370, 84- 85. 155 Stephen Gosson, Playes confuted in five actions (London: 1582), STC 12095, sig. G2v.

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persuasive scenes in Shakespeare’s works, like Richard III’s of Anne or Iago’s persuasion of Othello, are private conferences. This is not to say that these scenes are persuasive in an exclusively religious way; indeed, much has been written on the classical rhetorical strategies at play in these persuasive scenes. But in these scenes, the participatory and guided nature of the persuasions combined with the visioning of hell and sin used to steer participants towards certain outcomes, evoke the kinds of private conferences used to great effect by evangelical actors in the service of religious persuasion. But while many plays use private conferences in persuasive ways, Measure for Measure directly gestures to the religious, and particularly Jesuitical, nature of these tactics. In this chapter, I will examine the private conference as a form of religious persuasion and look at how the Jesuits mastered the form and became associated with it in the public imagination. I then turn to Measure for Measure—a play that is deeply interested in notions of conversion and change—to look at how the disguised Duke attempts to use private conference in ways reminiscent of Jesuit practices, except that he uses the techniques to surveil, persuade, and manipulate with varying degrees of success. Such a reading leads us to see the play as experimenting with private and public forms of persuasion, and, more generally, as exploring forms of communication and knowledge acquisition through a lens of political . How do communities change for the better? What are effective methods of community improvement and does it matter if the means are manipulative and misrepresentative if the greater good is served? Measure for Measure makes use of Jesuit-influenced forms of persuasion in such a way that raises questions about the potential and problems of conversion, as well as the efficacy and of persuasion.

I. “Catching in St. Peter’s Net”: Private Conference and the Jesuits

Private conference is a form of communication marked by privacy, the giving and receiving of counsel, a weighty subject matter, an asymmetrical power dynamic, and often some kind of persuasive intent. Under the Jesuits, private conference takes on a more specific form designed around persuasive principles. In addition to sharing the characteristics listed above, Jesuit private conference was always interactive: the rhetorical strategy was primarily interrogative (at least at first) and focussed on leading questions to help bring participants to

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certain topics and conclusions; it employed texts that focussed on meditations and visualizations; and it used disguise—both in dress and conversation—to shape expectations and responses. It was the primary evangelical tactic of the Jesuits and since they were not afraid to use a little manipulation, the practice became shaded with potentially dark undertones in the public imagination—an association mined by Shakespeare in Measure for Measure. To understand how and why this form developed and what it meant in early modern England, I begin with some background on the Jesuits in England.

The Society of Jesus in England

The Society of Jesus was founded by Ignatius Loyola, a Spanish soldier who experienced a spiritual conversion during a period of convalescence. During this period of solitude and prayer he composed The Spiritual Exercises, a roadmap for turning the heart and mind toward a closer following of Christ. By 1534, he and six followers made the retreat prescribed in the Exercises in Paris and took vows of poverty and chastity; by 1540, the Pope had approved the organization of the order. The Society grew rapidly and as it became an important part of the counter-Reformation, its members became highly involved in education and scholarship. Within months of the founding of the order, Ignatius sent Saint Francis Xavier (one of the original six companions) and three others to the East for work. Unlike earlier medieval orders, the Jesuits discontinued regular penances or fasts, a common uniform, and the choral recitation of the liturgical office, but the order was well-organized with centralized and regional authorities. Such innovations made the Jesuits well suited to missionary life, as the flexibility of daily activities made it easy to mingle and work with members of the community and adapt to local customs, while still maintaining the contact and hierarchy necessary for spiritual uniformity and sense of religious community. 156

For years after its founding there was no connection to any of the English religious upheavals and the Jesuits played no role at all in Catholic Marian England. Significant numbers of Englishmen entered the Society only after Elizabeth’s accession, as exile on the Continent

156 John O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1993), 23-37; Thomas Worcester, “Introduction,” in Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1-11.

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exposed them to new Catholic ideas and innovations. The Society of Jesus was growing in influence on the Continent, and after missionary priests began to enter England in 1574, trained for the English mission by the English College in Douai, Arnold Pritchard finds that college founder William Allen began to exert pressure on the Jesuits to join the mission, perhaps seeing their missionary success in other parts of the world.157 Soon after the English Seminary in Rome was placed under the control of the Jesuits in 1579, the first Jesuit priests, Robert Persons and Edmund Campion (and lay brother Ralph Emerson) were sent to England, landing in 1580.158

The surrounding their arrival caused such concern in the English government that the mission made things much worse for English Catholics almost immediately. In 1581, anti-Catholic laws were strengthened by parliament in response to the perceived threat. Campion made matters worse for himself by writing an explanation of his arrival known as A Challenge to the Privy Council or, more popularly, Campion’s Brag. Campion and the two companions who were executed with him were the first Catholic to be widely celebrated in England and provided the foundation for an extensive Elizabethan Catholic martyrology. Robert Persons left England just before Campion’s execution and became instrumental in organizing the ongoing English mission, educating priests, and working with William Allen on the political and military plans leading up to the Spanish Armada campaign of 1588. Persons devoted much of his energy to setting up new English Catholic colleges and by the 1590s, the Jesuits controlled every English Catholic educational institution on the Continent. The Jesuits had enormous influence on the English Mission and the education of new English Catholic priests; their approach was so different from and arguably more effective than that of the secular clergy that a sizable rift grew in the English Catholic community. The division of pro-Appellant versus pro-Jesuit camps, inflamed by The Wisbech Stirs and the Arch-Priest Controversy meant that the English Catholic community

157 Arnold Pritchard, Catholic Loyalism in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 74. 158 See also Thomas M. McCoog, S.J. The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England, 1589-1597: Building the Faith of Saint Peter upon the Kind of Spain’s Monarchy (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012); Robert E. Scully, S.J. Into the Lion’s Den: The Jesuit Mission in Elizabethan England and Wales, 1580-1603 (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2011).

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was not only under stress from the Protestant rule of law, but from internecine strife.159 The narrative of the evil and manipulative Jesuit came not just from Protestants, but from those in the English Catholic community who saw the Jesuits as an obstacle to the success of the English mission.

That there were multiple authors writing against the Jesuits from multiple confessional perspectives helps explain why the Jesuits had such resonance in the popular imagination. William Watson, a secular priest known for his vociferous attacks on the Jesuits, accused the order of gross moral , pointing to their use of The Spiritual Exercises to win converts, and claiming that they targeted wealthy young men who will give up their lands and inheritances to the order:

When the Iesuits find one fit for their turne: they insinuate themselues into him, keepe him company, vse him with all kind of sweet behauiour and courtesie: & pretend to haue an especiall care of his well doing in al things, but principally how he may attaine to be in high fauour with God. . . Thus after they haue layd these grounds, no maruell if the party so cunningly and kindly caried on, do fall into their traps . . . So as when the poore soules (as rauished with a desire to attaine vnto the said meanes or exercise so highly commended: and so necessary for all that truly thirst after the kingdome of God and ioyes of heauen) do intreat the holy fathers, that they may be receiued into that happy and blessed exercise: their motion at the first in that behalfe, the good fathers seeme little to regard: . . . If the party thus caught be of great possessions, wealth or parentage, they are much the sooner intreated to admit him to this exercise.

Father was singled out for his particularly effective proselytizing and ability to gain wealth for the Jesuit order (and perhaps even himself): “I could here recite many cousening parts plaid by sundrie of them, through the of giuing this holy exercise: but I will only enlarge my selfe with a few golden threedes of Fa. Iohn Gerrards web, worke and weauing . . . he was the man that caused Henry Drurie to enter into this exercise; and

159 Appellant priests were generally those who were distrustful of Jesuit influence. They were a group of priests who protested against the appointment of an Arch-Priest for England who had Jesuit sympathies and they took their appeal to Rome. The term ‘secular priest’ refers to priests who are not monastics or members of a religious institute.

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thereby got him to sell the Mannor of Lozell in Suffolke, and other lands to the value of 3500. pounds, and got all the mony himselfe.”160

Thomas Bell, a Protestant polemicist, takes up the accusations leveled by the secular Catholic priests themselves to use as ammunition against the Jesuits, calling them treasonous, swindling liars:

Here the Iesuites play their parts, and shew themselues not onely egregious lyars and most cursed deceiuers, but also (as the priests write of them,) the most wicked men that liue vpon the earth: it was not without great cause, that the learned Papists in France published a booke against them, which they named the Iesuites Catechisme: in which booke shew at large, that the further a Iesuite goes, the louder he lyes. An other booke, intituled, the Franke discourse, affirmeth constantlie, that the Iesuits neuer harboured in their heartes any other proiect, but the subuersion of States, disauthorizing of Magistrates, & seducing of subiects from their allegeance. The aforenamed Catechisme, saith in another place, that the whole processe of Iesuits is nothing else, but a particular cozening of our priuate families, and a generall villanie of all the countries, where they inhabite.161

There was much written about them, most of it negative, but the Jesuits themselves were not shy about propagating their own point of view. Campion set the tone with his published mission statement soon after his arrival on English soil. He was already a known English figure, having earned the patronage of William Cecil and the Earl of Leicester in his youth, and the audacity of his publication combined with the of his martyrdom made the Jesuits and their mission part of popular knowledge. Indeed, in spite of the secrecy that was necessary in order to evade detection by the authorities while in England, many Jesuits were formidable evangelists with the kinds of personalities that suited public engagement: Robert Persons was a famous polemicist, but he also wrote The Christian Directory (otherwise known as The Book of Resolution), which was extremely effective in leading young men to

160 William Watson, A decacordon of ten quodlibeticall questions concerning religion and state wherein the authour framing himfelfe a quilibet to euery quodlibet, decides an hundred crosse interrogatorie doubts, about the generall contentions betwixt the seminarie priests and Iesuits at this present (1602) STC 25123, 86-87, 89. 161 Thomas Bell, The Popes funerall Containing a plaine, succinct, and pithy reply, to a pretensed answere of a shamelesse and foolish libell, intituled, The forerunner of Bels downfall. Which is nothing else indeede, (as the indifferent reader shall preceiue by the due peruse thereof,) but an euident manifestation of his owne folly; with the vtter confusion of poperie, and all popish vassals throughout the Christian world (London: Thomas Creed for William Welby, 1605), STC 1825, sig. C3r-v.

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Catholic thinking; William Weston was famous for his ; Henry Garnet, as the Jesuit Superior, created a clandestine press; John Gerard was a well-known proselytiser and debater who published the story of his years in the English mission. And of course, the Jesuits had their place cemented in the public imagination (though not positively) through the involvement of Henry Garnet and Oswald Tesimond in the story of the gunpowder plot.

So while much of the publicity surrounding the Jesuits saw them as scheming plotters and manipulators, aiming to rip apart families, seize assets, destabilize the monarchy, and actively agitate for a foreign Catholic takeover of the country, the Jesuits fought back by publicizing their own position through polemic, published memoirs and especially in martyrdom accounts where there was apparently public for priests like Campion and Garnet. Both detractors and boosters wrote about the precise proselytizing techniques of the Jesuits in much detail, in order to either warn readers to be on the lookout for such tactics, or to demystify their practices and show the evidence of their argument. Inasmuch as the Jesuits were considered shady agitators, they were also considered learned, authoritative and convincing. And being convincing was an important part of their spiritual mandate. Their mission was one of conversion, not just ministering to the existing Catholic population, and they were heralded and feared as consummate proselytisers.

Among modern historians, however, there is a debate regarding the effectiveness of the conversion strategies of the Jesuits and the overall success of their mission. John Bossy and Caroline Hibbard both contend that the Jesuit Society was more suited to the English mission than the secular clergy, while revisionists like Christopher Haigh have argued that the Jesuits and secular clergy alike failed at any kind of national evangelical mission by fleeing to aristocratic hideouts and avoiding ordinary people.162 The mission was claimed to be narrow in scope, only ever aimed at schismatics or church papists, not at genuinely converting Protestants to Catholicism. Michael Questier takes on revisionist claims by arguing that conversion itself is a complex issue, and that the Jesuits were effective because their

162John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570-1850 (London; Longmans, 1975); Caroline Hibbard, “Early Stuart Catholicism: Revisions and Re-Revisions,” Journal of Modern History 52 (1980): 1-34; Christopher Haigh “From Monopoly to Minority: Catholicism in Early Modern England,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 31 (1981): 129-147.

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“programme and ethos tapped into different sorts of conversion—and that this was the case because their understanding of change of religion was more wide-ranging than that of the seculars.”163 Indeed, he contends that the rift with the secular clergy was the natural outcome of the Society’s constant proselytising and more flexible approach to religious change.

From Conversing to Converting

But while modern historians debate the overall success of the proselytising strategies of the Jesuits, seventeenth-century writers seemed to have no doubt regarding their coercive powers, and it appears from contemporary writings that they were at once admired, reviled and feared for their abilities. Accounts of their tactics by those hostile to the Society, and by the Jesuits themselves, shaped the popular idea of who the Jesuits were and what they did.

Their overwhelming use of private conference in bringing people towards conversion was in part a theological choice, but as one of the few means of persuasion widely available to them, it was equally a practical one. As long as there was a Jesuit present on the ground in England, he could talk to people. The large scale, communal and public approaches that characterized Protestant evangelism—the open air sermons, the psalm-singing and balladry—were unavailable to the secretive and illegal Jesuits, who had to avoid detection by the authorities. In fact, before engaging in any kind of proselytising it was important to understand the sympathies of the audience, as revealing oneself as a Jesuit too soon or in the wrong context could prove uncomfortable, dangerous or fatal. Private conference allowed for the time to feel out the circumstances, understand the audience and retreat if necessary. Even when the participant was willing and eager, it was still the safest procedure for both members of the conversation, away from prying eyes and ears.

Catholic texts were also an important part of the proselytizing project, and they tended to dovetail with private conference. While there were clandestine Catholic presses in England

163 Michael Questier, “’Like Locusts Over All the World’: Conversion, and the Society of Jesus in Late Elizabethan and Jacobean England,” in T.M. McCoog, ed. The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1996), 269.

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and many on the Continent that could provide books to be smuggled in, the power of the English presses dwarfed the number and selection of Catholic texts. Much Catholic writing was of the polemical variety. Robert Persons, for example, wrote prolifically on everything from of Catholic recusancy, to fiery anti-Protestant invective, to anti-appellant treatises, to rebuttals of Foxe’s view of English history.164 Such writings were helpful in buttressing the beliefs and sense of community of Catholics, but even Persons himself questioned the ability of divisive polemic to incite any kind of spiritual or religious change. In the preface to the first edition of his Christian Directory (1582) he writes that books of controversy

Albeit in thes our troublesome and quarrelous times be necessarie for defence of our faithe against so manye seditious innovations. . . yet helpe they litle oftentymes to good lyfe, but rather do fill the heades of men with a spirite of contradiction and contention, that for the most parte hindereth deuotion, which deuotion is nothing eels, but a quiet and -ble state of the sowle, endewed with a iuoyful promptness to the diligent execution of all thinges that appartayne to the honour of God. 165

Persons’ well-known devotional book, The first book of the Christian exercise, appertaining to Resolution (popularly referred to as The Christian Directory or The Book of Resolution) was known to be a powerful devotional work. Persons based it on the first week of the Spiritual Exercises, asking his readers to contemplate death, judgement, hell and heaven with vivid descriptions in order to reorient the soul towards an amendment of life through contemplation and imagination of the moment of death. George Birkhead, the future Archpriest, wrote in 1584 that the Book of Resolution “has borne immense fruit; the number of conversions of heretics to faith by reading it can scarcely be believed,” and John Gerard, the prominent Jesuit evangelist called it “a most useful and wonderful book which I believe has converted more souls to God than it contains pages.”166

164 Victor Houliston, Catholic Resistance in Elizabethan England: Robert Person’s Jesuit Polemic, 1580-1610 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007). 165 Persons, The Christian Directory, 5. 166 Questier, “Like Locusts,” 279; John Gerard, The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, trans. Philip Caraman (London: Longmans, 1951), 2.

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Persons himself was converted after completing the Spiritual Exercises. The Exercises were designed as a kind of private conference—with a guide and a exercitant. Persons recognized that in the current religious climate in England, access to an appropriately Catholic spiritual guide may be limited, therefore making The Exercises themselves difficult if not impossible to undertake. He used The Exercises as an inspiration but modified it for the situation in England. “Persons, accordingly, invites his readers to ponder the four last things—death, judgement, hell and heaven—much as the exercitant is required to do in the first week of The Spiritual Exercises.”167 The devotional rather than polemical focus of this book even led to it famously being ‘Protestantized’ by Edmund Bunny in 1584, who carefully removed all references to purgatory and (amongst other changes) but kept most of the original text intact. Unfortunately for Persons, Bunny’s version became wildly popular, and probably steered more souls towards Protestant devotional interpretations rather than Catholic ones through sheer exposure.168

But while devotional and polemical tracts could change people’s spiritual minds, it often seemed to take direct human contact to change the heart. Even when exposed and convinced by something like The Christian Directory, private conference after textual exposure was often required to give potential converts the strength to convert. George Gilbert wrote what is considered to be the “principle document” that outlines the Jesuit approach to proselytising.169 In his Jesuit conversion manual A way to deal with persons of all sorts so as to convert them and bring them back to a better way of life—based on the system and methods used by Fr. Robert Persons and Fr. Edmund Campion, he comments that heretics through ignorance (the low-hanging fruit of potential converts) are converted through a two- part process that requires initial exposure through Catholic stories and books followed by conversations: “persecutions, martyrdoms, disputations and books proposes to them and injects into their doubts, scruples and fear, and this causes them to demand and

167 Houliston, Catholic Resistance, 164. 168 Victor Houliston, “Why Robert Persons would not be pacified: Edmund Bunny’s theft of The Book of Resolution” in The Reckoned Expense, 159-178. 169 Questier, “Like Locusts,” 165.

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seek out the truth and to be anxious to have discussions with Catholics.”170 Francis Walsingham (a young relative of Sir Francis Walsingham), in A Search Made into Matters of Religion, wrote that he had undertaken extensive reading of Catholic and Protestant writings and had been convinced intellectually of the errors in the Protestant writings and the soundness of judgement in the Catholic ones; still, he confessed that he was ‘fearfull to make any change in Religion for many respects . . . I felt such a war between my understanding, will, and affection, as I could not tell well what to do.”171 His solution was initially to read still more books, but in private conference with a “Catholic old man” he was counselled that while there was nothing wrong with reading more books, “your reading will serve to fill your head full of doubts at least, though not so soundly to resolve as will be needful to the settling of your understanding and judgment, which God will supply afterward, I doubt not, by some other way.”172 Later that night Walsingham came to understand that to find resolution, he would have to follow the old man’s counsel “that the principal difference between a Catholic and an heretic is this, that the one embraces. . . that which is delivered unto him by the authority and succession of the church, and not invented of himself, as the heretic doth.”173 Walsingham eventually finds his way to the Church by turning to the Church fathers variously interpreted by both Catholics and Protestants, and by making The Spiritual Exercises with his guide. It is the collaboration between textual study and private conference with the “Catholic old man” that finally leads to his change of heart.

While the Jesuits were known for their use of private conference in the service of conversion, their particular approach to the practice has unique hallmarks and is part of the order’s spiritual and practical identity. According to contemporary accounts, their successes appear to have hinged on decidedly non-confrontational approaches in private settings, and on engaging the direct participation of the proselytes in their own conversion. Finding a kind of common ground between Catholics, schismatics, Church papists, Protestants and Puritans, rather than first and foremost staking out points of division appears to be central to the Jesuit

170 George Gilbert, “A way to deal with persons of all sorts so as to convert them and bring them back to a better way of life—based on the system and methods used by Fr. Robert Persons and Fr. Edmund Campion,” in Letters and Memorials of Father Robert Persons (London: J. Whitehead, 1942), 334. 171 Francis Walsingham, A Search Made into Matters of Religion (Ilkley: Scolar Press, 1976), 487. 172 Walsingham, A Search, 495. 173 Walsingham, A Search, 496.

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persuasive strategy. According to Questier, this tactic of starting with commonality is the result not just of meticulously researched persuasive practice, but stems from the very concept of conversion according to the Jesuits. For the Society of Jesus, conversion was primarily a process of evangelical change—a repudiation of sin and regeneration of the will—and the political outcome of the change towards Rome was more of a natural by- product rather than the explicit goal. As Questier states:

Change of ecclesiastical institution is only one aspect of change of religion understood as the central practical expression of the theology of grace— repentance and regeneration, assurance and perseverance. . . Though change of religion in the sense of abandoning the Church of England might be an important part of conversion [for the Jesuits], the essence of that conversion was not contained in a movement between one ecclesiastical institution and another. It was principally a matter of progress in grace. Jesuit Proselytisers, therefore, were interested in sin as much as in heresy. Their converts not only recanted Protestantism but made general confessions, which Jesuits envisaged as part of a process of evangelical change.174

In addition to being an appropriate theological fit for the Jesuits, the persuasive strategy that relied on covert consensus building paid practical dividends. Private conferences are social interactions, and they are more likely to succeed when both conversation partners feel at ease. Rather than beginning with the conversational equivalent of a polemical attack, Jesuits strove to test the waters with neutral subject matter and non-confrontational situations and environments because it was more effective to bring potential converts around very slowly to the issues at hand.

Jesuit Private Conference: A Participatory Form

174 Questier, “Like Locusts,” 273-274. While Jesuits were often criticized by historians for only attempting to convert schismatic Catholics, John Gerard comments that it is at times easier to convert hot Protestants because they are more open to the evangelical process. Indeed, there are certain similarities between the Jesuits and Puritans that at once helped and hindered their respective causes, one being the similar emphasis that both factions placed on the doctrines of grace over the primacy of the structures of the institutional Church.

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Jesuit private conference took on a specific form. It was personal, participatory, theatrical and meditative, with flavours of manipulation or at least covert persuasion. It was initially marked by a need for secrecy or caution that was both practical and strategic. Key to not announcing oneself as a Jesuit priest was the use of disguise. Priests who were part of the English mission could hardly wander around in public dressed in a soutane if they were at all concerned for their own safety. George Gilbert prescribes an elaborate but evidently necessary ruse: The priest should be “dressed as a gentleman with various kinds of get-up and disguises so as to be better able to have intercourse with people without arousing suspicion; and he should also frequently change his name, his dress, his horse, and not come needlessly to places where a search is being made for him, and still less tell anyone, without due consideration, especially other people’s servants or even his own.”175 But the lay disguise had an equally persuasive application. John Gerard writes “my dress was always that of a gentleman of moderate means. It was thus that I used to go about before I became a Jesuit and I was therefore more at ease in these clothes. Besides, I had to move in public and meet many Protestant gentlemen, and I could never have mixed with them and brought them slowly back to a love of the faith and a virtuous life had I dressed in any other way.”176 His manners had to mimic his lay clothing, and Gerard was particularly successful because of his genteel upbringing. The wife of Sir Everard Digby, upon learning of Gerard’s true identity, apparently exclaimed “Why, the man lives like a courtier. Haven’t you watched him playing cards with my husband—and the way he plays, he must have been at the for a long time. And he’s been out hunting with my husband, and I’ve heard him myself talking about hunting and about hawking, and he never trips in his terms. No one could do that without being caught out unless he was thoroughly familiar with the sport.”177 Civilian clothing helped the priests blend in, be unobtrusive, slowly test the spiritual waters and either bid a hasty retreat if safety were an issue or press ever further into the territory of spiritual conversation.

175 George Gilbert, “A way to deal with persons,” 331. 176 John Gerard, The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, trans. Philip Caraman (London: Longmans, 1956), 17- 18. 177 Gerard, Autobiography, 165.

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The disguise could also serve another persuasive purpose. John Gerard was well practiced in the use of clothing to heighten the theatrical effect of conversion. In the case of one man in the midst of conversion to Catholicism, the sudden and dramatic effect of Gerard’s transformation into a priest provided a spark to the conversion process:

As I was anxious to strike while the iron was hot, I began to explain to him how he should prepare for confession—I did not want him to know yet that I was a priest, and therefore I said that I would instruct him just as a priest had instructed me. He made his preparation, then waited for a priest to be brought to him. His brother and I both told him it would have to be done at night, so he sent away the servants who waited on him in his dressing room and went up into the library. There I left him at his prayers, telling him that I would return almost immediately with a priest. Downstairs I changed into my soutane and returned completely transformed. He was speechless with amazement—no such thing had crossed his mind. His brother and I explained that I had to act in this way both for safety’s sake, and still more to trick the devil and snatch souls from his grasp. It was the only way I could have conversed freely with him and men of his rank, and unless I did this I could never bring them back to the Church, particularly if they were ill-disposed to it. 178

The inconspicuous dress of the priests was matched by the innocuous conversation topics they deployed when initially engaging potential converts. John Gerard often made use of his knowledge of sport to open conversations with unsuspecting prey: “From talk about the trouble we were taking in pursuing a poor animal I brought the conversation around to the need of seeking an eternal prize and the way to lay hold of it, and all the toil and pains that were required. The devil, I said, never rested but was always trying like a hound to bring us to bay—the man, you see, was more of a schismatic than a heretic and a little controversy was needed. But it was only after much talking that I made any impression on his will. . .On the fourth day he gave in and became a Catholic.”179 This is effective not only because of the slow and casual way that serious subjects are introduced, but because Gerard used a very personalized approach; since private conference is by its very nature a one-on-one

178 Gerard, Autobiography, 20-21. 179 Gerard, Autobiography, 37-38.

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persuasion, the convertor is free to use whatever methods or topics may engage the particular mind of his subjects.

The Jesuits were well-attuned to the notion that the catalyst for conversion was something rooted more deeply in personal experience than the rational acceptance of intellectual arguments. Inasmuch as polemical writings piqued the interest of potential converts, a directly confrontational and even rational approach was rarely considered to be effective— something or someone had to move the heart more than the brain. George Gilbert ponders the limitations of argumentation, particularly in the conversion of those whom he calls ‘true heretics’: “The heretical spirit is so much given to pride that few of them are converted by argument, because they object to being beaten; and God is not wont to give his grace to such as these, because they are not capable of receiving it, for the Holy Spirit only enters a heart that is humble; and so it is necessary to find some means whereby to make them more inclined to humility and submission, such as the consideration of their own worth, contempt of the world and such-like thoughts.”180 The Jesuitical approach emerged from Ignatius Loyola himself, who believed that gentle and gradual preaching was more effective than direct confrontation.181

Private conference gave space for the kind of introspective persuasion. The Gilbert handbook detailing the persuasive practices of Persons and Campion makes it clear that the preferred strategy was psychological. It advises using the surrounding environment and conditions –the rainy and bleak state of the weather, for example, as a kind of conversational entrée leading to spiritual topics (not unlike Gerard’s use of hunting above). But Gilbert goes further by advising to try to induce a particularly open, retrospective, and melancholic mood in the potential convert that leaves them receptive to spiritual ideas. For example, the

180 Gilbert, “A way to deal with persons,” 334. Questier likewise comments that religious polemic, though sometimes cited as the reason for conversion, was limited in its persuasive effect: “The impression is that reasons for changing religion which are phrased by reference to polemic are simply ex post facto rationalisation of whatever it was that really induced the conversion.” Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 35. 181 This is not to say that Jesuits did not engage in direct disputation and polemic, just that it was not considered as central to their evangelical project as private conference. See Thomas M. McCoog, SJ “Playing the Champion”: The Role of Disputation in the Jesuit Mission” in The Reckoned Expense, 119-140 and “Ignatius Loyola and Reginald Pole: A Reconsideration,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 17 (1996): 257-273.

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Catholic should “make use of certain methods and of times that are propitious—as for instance, if he should see him in a fit of melancholy or desolation of the soul, he will then be able, under the pretext of consoling him, to speak about human misery. . . telling him that we shall have no rest until we are united with God in heaven; that the soul of man is often in desolation because, sharing as it does in the divine nature, it cannot be contented and find rest in these things below.” Or the Jesuit may take advantage of a certain time of day that naturally lends itself to introspection and contemplation of mortality: “the evening, after the Ave Maria, is the time most apt to make a man receptive and adopt a reflective mood, because then there is quietness everywhere and repose; the world appears to be deserted and lonely; . . . the adornments and pleasures of the daytime are in abeyance, and the sun has fled to other regions, and the earth has been clothed in darkness, the image of death and the end of the world.”182

Such an emphasis on the importance of the state of mind of the proselyte caused the Jesuits to capitalize on situations where death seemed dangerously close, as those facing the possibility of death are more inclined towards considered introspection. Gerard considers Sir Everard Digby’s illness a promising opportunity: “his illness gave me the opening I wanted. From the uncertainty of human life and the certainty (unless we guarded against it) of suffering both in this world and the next I showed how here we have no abiding city, but must look to a heavenly one.”183 The Jesuits were likewise known to be very effective in the prisons and John Gerard also gives several accounts of emotional deathbed conversions, childbed conversions and subsequent conversions of skeptical fathers. John O’Malley notes that Jesuits considered deathbed ministry, especially in hospitals and prisons, to be particularly appropriate for them “because in no other circumstance was need more obvious or more urgent.”184

From these openings, Gerard would engage his potential convert directly. Much of the effectiveness of the Jesuit technique relied on listening more than lecturing, encouraging

182 Gilbert, “A way to deal with persons,” 334-335. 183 Gerard, Autobiography, 166. 184 O’Malley, The First Jesuits, 175.

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subjects to participate in their own conversion. Bombarding listeners with information and arguments was insufficient. Gerard’s methods involve not just asking questions of his subjects, but negotiating the conversation so that at the beginning they are the ones who often hold the reins of the , maximizing the potential converts’ participation as the conversation gradually shifts to Gerard slowly speaking and preaching more. Gerard gives the example of a woman whose only fault was “her persistence in heresy.” She “did not in the least mind listening to Catholics, even priests, for she enjoyed a keen argument with them, but she would follow no one’s advice but her own.” He arranged for a private conversation: “As soon as I thought she realized I was a Catholic. . . I slowly introduced the subject of religion. At first I said very little, but what little I said was to the point and she seemed lost for an answer. Then I left her. I did not want to press home my advantage; it was enough to make her want to hear more.” A few days later he tried again,

We joined issue and the advantage, so it seemed to her, shifted to and fro. We went on for an hour or two, at the end of which she listened to me without interruption for two or three hours more, and though she answered little, she would not admit herself defeated. . . Clearly she was moved, or rather, changed in heart, for she ran at once to my hostess. . . ‘Who’s this man you brought to me? Is he what you said he was?’ . . . The next day God confirmed what He had begun in her. She surrendered at discretion and I gave her a book to help her prepare for confession.185

The preparation for and indeed the auricular confession itself is a profoundly participatory part of the persuasive process for the Jesuits. It is not just the goal signifying the end of conversion but more of a milestone on the long road of spiritual change. The act of participating in an auricular confession was significant for the convert, considering the transformation that confession underwent during the Reformation. Sarah Beckwith charts this change in the theory and practice of confession as the Catholic one-on-one confession of sins to a priest transformed in the Protestant model into a private direct communication with God combined with public recitation of general confession in the reformed liturgy.186 The act of preparing for and then making confession to a priest is a statement regarding behaviour

185 Gerard, Autobiography, 189-190. 186 See Sarah Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011).

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and belief—one that has both spiritual and practical ramifications. Gerard comments that his converts considered the making of confession to be tremendously important – something to both anticipate and perhaps even fear. While most of his proselytes eagerly anticipated making their confessions, some betrayed the meaning of the act through their anxiety: “I have often found that some people have great difficulty in making their confession when they are received into the Church. Some work themselves up to the point of feeling sick and almost faint.”187

For most, however, confession was something to look forward to and directly engage in—a tangible link to spiritual cleansing, a lifting of the spirit, an accountable, participatory and scripted interaction with an authoritative spiritual medium and through him, God. Confession was held as something to anticipate, prepare for, engage and look forward to—part of the experiential process of spiritual change—and an important part of the Jesuit persuasive process.188 O’Malley comments that the Jesuits “conceived of themselves as engaging in a ministry of consolation” in which the sacrament of penance and the activity of confession played a very significant role in the ministry and mission.189 John Gerard tells an anecdote of a man who after much delay and complacency, suddenly, in the middle of the night, came to him , “For the love of God I beg you to hear my confession.”190 The act of auricular confession and the certainty of its power to cleanse and Catholicize the soul drove this man towards a desire for conversion and Gerard had to convince him to wait a few days to suitably examine his conscience. The confession was a way of accessing grace through an authoritative and verifiably correct conduit, and as such it presented an attractively certain path to salvation for potential converts. As much as it was a milestone, however, auricular confession itself did not signify the end of the journey of spiritual change; it was but one step in a gradual, progressive change of heart. Auricular confession as administered by the English Jesuits was an attractive, participatory sacrament of passage, guided by authentic stewards of God’s grace (the Jesuit fathers themselves) and as such, was an integral part of their overall evangelical approach.

187 Gerard, Autobiography, 190-91 188 Questier, Conversion, 175, 181. 189 O’Malley, The First Jesuits, 19-20. 190 Gerard, Autobiography, 175.

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In addition to confession, Jesuits made ample use the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola in the service of conversion. The Spiritual Exercises were not originally intended to be evangelical tools; they are a series of meditations aiming to re-orient the self away from the world and toward God—but of course, such meditations fit very well into the evangelical project.191 The Exercises are a type of regimented private conference; there is a director and an exercitant and they are ideally performed on a private thirty day retreat, during which the exercitant learns to discard disordered worldly attachments and reorder life toward God. The first week focuses on purifying the soul and purging it of its attachment to sin. The five exercises performed daily include the examination of the conscience, the precise contemplation of various personal sins, sins of the Angels, of Adam and Eve, and the record of all the sins committed in life. The meditations in this first week engage the imagination: one imagines the physical place where Jesus Christ is, calls to mind the sins of the angels, and uses the five senses to conjure a vision of hell. The exercitant imagines the “length, breadth and depth of hell,” sees “the huge fires and, so to speak the souls within the bodies full of fire,” hears “the wailing, the shrieking, the cries, and the blasphemies against our Lord and all his saints,” smells “the smoke, the sulphur, the filth, and the rotting things,” tastes “tears, sadness and the worm of conscience,” and finally feels “how the flames touch the souls that burn them.”192 The Exercises are intended to spark a dark night of the soul and force practitioners to live through hell in order to turn away from improper attachments to the world, and then to reorder the self towards God. The second, third and fourth weeks focus more on opening the soul to a participation with Christ in his Kingdom, and on allying the self with the and joys of Christ in his perfection.

There is nothing exclusively Catholic about any of these meditations. Despite, or because of its lack of strident insistence on one doctrinal camp over another, The Exercises were used by

191 According to John O’Malley, the spiritual exercises were designed to only be given to “believing Catholics” and were not explicitly promoting any confessional viewpoint, simply assuming the practitioners to be Catholic. But Victor Houliston claims that The Exercises were not merely “part of the discipline of the Society of Jesus but also. . . an instrument of conversion” and notes that Father Persons himself was converted by means of The Exercises. Houliston,“Why Robert Persons would not be Pacified,” 164. 192 The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius. Trans. George E. Ganss, S.J. (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1992), 46-47.

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the Jesuits as an evangelical tool on those who were waffling somewhere on the journey between England and Rome.193 With a Jesuit director, The Exercises, particularly those of the first week, proved most effective in bringing waverers to wholly embrace Catholicism or bringing weaker Catholics to more fervency, even to the point of joining the Jesuits themselves. Walsingham’s reading of polemic had convinced his mind but his heart turned only after he performed the first week of The Spiritual Exercises. John Gerard used The Spiritual Exercises regularly in his conversions and apparently to great effect—often just the first week, but sometimes the whole retreat: “I was able to give the Spiritual Exercises to many people in this house, both to people who were living there and to visitors, and in every case the result I wanted was produced.”194

The strategies that the Jesuits deployed to lure potential converts were, in some ways, just as deceptive as their detractors claim. The use of disguise, the efforts to induce a psychologically reflective mood in their potential converts or to capitalize on personal struggles like death, illness, sorrow, childbed—all were effective, legitimate (if somewhat sneaky) approaches. But the Jesuits managed to turn the sacrament of penance and the devotional text that formed the basis of their order into attractive incentives and activities that invited potential converts to participate directly in their own change of heart. For the Jesuits, evangelical opportunities were everywhere, woven into the fabric of the religion that they lived and preached. This is why they were at once admired and feared for their skill and passion; their order fused to notions of manipulative evangelization in the popular imagination.

II. “I’ll teach you how you shall arraign your conscience”: Confession and Persuasion in Measure for Measure

While Jesuits were known to be consummate persuaders and adept at a variety of conversion tactics, many of their strategies appeared to border on the ethically ambiguous. The well-

193 Questier, “Like Locusts,” 274. 194 Gerard, Autobiography, 193.

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publicized use of equivocation, disguises and psychological manipulation, while unproblematic for the Jesuits given the focus of their mission on the evangelical outcome of such tactics, gave the enemies of the Jesuits—Protestants and Catholics alike—much fodder for criticism of the collective ethical compass and general untrustworthiness of those associated with the order.

This question of how to make an ethical conversion or change is a central one in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. The play asks whether elaborate conceits and outright manipulations are justified in the service of positively transforming a community. What ends justify what means? Critics have long taken note of the pattern of substitution that runs through Measure for Measure; A.D. Nuttall calls it “the principal idea” of the play, while Alexander Leggatt considers it “virtually a chain reaction.”195 There is also a pattern of potential conversions and, indeed, the play’s first substitution is in the service of conversion: Angelo substitutes for Duke Vincentio in order to convert Vienna from a debauched city to a virtuous and law-abiding one. This is only the first of many potential conversions in the play, each one incited by a persuasion—some of which are successful, most of which have ambiguous outcomes at best. In this play, the link between persuasion and successful conversion may be tenuous, but examples of the ways they interact abound: Lucio persuades Isabella to intercede on Claudio’s behalf; Isabella attempts to persuade Angelo to grant her brother a reprieve and inadvertently spurs the deputy’s conversion from icy Puritan to licentious sinner; Angelo seeks to convince Isabella of the virtue of his absolutist approach to crime and punishment and then to convert her from virginal nun to one who would yield her “body up to ” in exchange for her brother’s life; the Duke/friar attempts to persuade Claudio to accept death with peace; Claudio attempts to persuade Isabella to agree to Angelo’s proposal; Isabella and the Duke persuade Mariana to be a body double; the Duke persuades the Provost to substitute Barnardine for Claudio; he then attempts to persuade Barnardine to die; and finally seeks to persuade Isabella to convert from nun to wife.196 In many instances, it is not enough to change someone’s opinion; the goal is to change who they

195 A.D. Nuttall, “Measure for Measure: Quid Pro Quo?” Shakespeare Studies, 4 (1968): 232. Alexander Leggatt, “Substitution in Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 342. 196 William Shakespeare, “Measure for Measure” in The Norton Shakespeare, I.iv.58; 2.4.104. All subsequent references to the play will be cited parenthetically.

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are. Such a list shows a play repeatedly rehearsing persuasive techniques, testing the connection between persuasion and conversion and asking how it is possible for one person to effectively change another—change their mind, their soul, their entire self. Is it through words, actions, “prone and speechless dialect”, fear, reputation (I.ii.181)? How do you change society, others you care about, or yourself for the better, and where does the authority to decide what is best come from? Even when motives are pure and change is necessary, how can the desired outcome be ensured? Measure for Measure asks questions about the potential and problems of conversion as well as the morality of persuasion, inquiring how to communicate, teach and change minds about and for the self, the community, and its institutions.

Duke Vincentio is at the centre of much of the play’s persuasive activity and his disguise as a friar allows him to conduct covert surveillance on his subjects. Sarah Beckwith argues that “as friar, the Duke can procure the secrets of the soul so that they become fully available to the sovereign state. The Duke and the state now have access to the interior forum and are privy to the secrets of the confessional.”197 In addition to surveillance, the disguise empowers him to experiment with the kinds of persuasive tactics available to ministers, permitting him access to private, religious ways of communication—like confession—perhaps not available to a head of state. He asks Friar Thomas to “supply me with the habit and instruct me/ How I may formally in person bear/ Like a true friar” (I.iii.46-48). The duke has to learn to look, talk, act, comfort, confess and persuade like a friar, and he uses this disguise to full advantage in the prison, consoling convicts while learning about his successor Angelo’s approach to crime and punishment in an out-of-control Vienna.

Of all of the Catholics, the Jesuits were the most potent in their prison work.198 When the Duke dons a friar’s garb and skulks around a prison, ministering to its wretched and soon-to- be executed, the logical connection in England in 1604 would have been to see the Duke as a kind of Jesuit figure. Some critics who have noted this resemblance use it to buttress their

197 Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness, 73. 198 For detailed first person accounts of Jesuit prison ministry see William Weston’s book An Autobiography from the Jesuit Underground, trans. Philip Caraman (New York: Farrar Straus and Cudahy, 1955). See also O’Malley, 175.

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arguments for the Catholicism of Shakespeare and/or his plays. Peter Milward, for example, contends in his book, The Catholicism of Shakespeare’s Plays, that “in the terms of the play Lodowick is a Franciscan Friar, but in contemporary terms of Elizabethan England he is rather a Jesuit.” James Ellison, in an article that argues that Measure for Measure is informed by the execution of Catholics by Puritans in 1604, comments that the Duke’s “activities in Vienna’s jail may have reminded Shakespeare’s audience of the Catholic priests and convertisseurs who profited from imprisonment to convert felons facing the death penalty.”199 Peter Lake makes a different kind of argument, contending that the play imagines a world under a strict Puritan government, but he likewise sees a contemporary Jesuit/priestly connection to the Duke: “In the friar/duke we have a priest haunting the jails, reconciling convicted felons to their fate, mitigating the demands of human .”200

There is good reason for these critics to look to Measure for Measure for religious perspectives. The opposition between the religious ‘types’ of characters is clearly demarcated: the “precise” puritan Angelo, the convent-dwelling and rule-bound Isabella, the friar/priestly Duke. Angelo and Isabella are both extreme examples of rigid adherence to faith. Such characters seek to impose their visions of justice on others in the play and it is logical and necessary for critics to relate the play to the contemporary debates regarding religion and politics that clearly inform the work. In addition to Milward and Ellison’s Catholic arguments, David Beauregard also sees a pattern of Catholic sympathy in the positive depiction of nuns and friars in the play. Claire Griffiths-Osbourne considers the ways in which the play thinks about pre-and post-Reformational forms of confession, while Huston Diehl sees the play as an experiment with Protestant on the stage. Debora Shuger argues that the play is an exploration of Christian—but mostly Anglican—forms of penitential justice, and in Peter Lake’s reading, the play stages a kind of nightmare of Puritan rule.”201

199 Peter Milward, The Catholicism of Shakespeare’s Plays (Southampton: Saint Austin Press, 1997), 29; James Ellison, “Measure for Measure and the Executions of Catholics in 1604,” English Literary Renaissance, 33 (2003): 58, 70. 200 Peter Lake, “Ministers, Magistrates and the Production of ‘Order’ in Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Survey 54 (2001):168. 201 David N. Beauregard, Catholic Theology in Shakespeare’s Plays (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 58-69; Claire Griffiths-Osborne, “The terms for common justice”: Performing and Reforming

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To my mind, the reading of the Duke as a Jesuit-like figure is an interesting one, but not because it sets up an opposition between a coded Jesuit Duke and a Puritan Angelo, thereby supporting an argument about the pro- or anti-Catholic leanings of the play and, by extension, its playwright. Measure for Measure undoubtedly wrestles with complex debates regarding different confessional approaches and their impact on the governance of the state, but I do not see the play as making value on issues like confession, or endorsing particular confessional perspectives. Instead, my sense is that this notoriously inconclusive play is an exploration of various available forms of knowledge and communication—forms that happen to be religious. Just as he sets up Angelo as a kind of Calvinist/Puritan experiment in governance, the Duke’s experiment with a habit in the prison is a Jesuitical exploration, in which he makes use of a series of Jesuit persuasive techniques that are recognizable and known to be effective, covert and at once associated with authority and considered ethically suspect. Seeing the Duke’s actions through a Jesuit lens illuminates the way in which his various attempts at prison ministry relate to one another, and shines a light on how and why they fall short. Such a reading also offers an interpretation of the relationship between the Duke’s actions in the privacy of the prison and the public trial on the city limits in Act V.

The location of the prison is central to Duke Vincentio’s first forays into Jesuit-style private conferences and persuasions. Using the pretext of spiritual consolation, the Duke seeks information from the various inmates, but the tradition of prison ministry went far beyond simple ministerial consolation. Clergy helped prisoners prepare themselves for execution by converting hope for reprieve into acquiescence to justice, converting lust for life into acceptance of death, converting lawbreaking sinners into penitents. But in a post- Reformation world, the precise of redemption offered by the clergy was of utmost importance. Would his or her last dying speech be one of religious resistance or one that bolstered the justice system in a Protestant nation? Peter Lake and Michael Questier assert

Confession in Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare, 5.1 (2009): 48; Huston Diehl “’Infinite Space’: Representation and Reformation in Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Quarterly 49 (1998): 393-410; Debora Kuller Shuger, Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England: The Sacred and the State in Measure for Measure (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 131; Lake, “Ministers, Magistrates,” 168.

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that prisons were one of the most dynamic sites of evangelical work in early modern England. Prisons provided a wealth of potential converts and were venues for public disputations between Protestants and Catholics as well as for trials of spiritual strength on the gallows: “where Catholics were involved the drama of conversion took on an overtly confessional aspect, as Catholics and Protestant ministers competed to convert felons to their brand of evangelical Christianity.”202

While prison ministry may have been a part of the proselytizing strategies of both Catholicism and Protestantism, according to Lake and Questier, Catholics tended to have the upper hand in the battle for the souls of the prisoners. This was because Catholic priests had the ‘advantage’ of already being in prison. “They set to with a will to exploit this unintended consequence of official policy for their own confessional ends, demonstrating the truth and spiritual power of their religion through the conversion of the lost souls they met in the jails to a true Catholic repentance.”203 This was especially true for the Jesuits, whose risky English mission landed many of them in prison and on the scaffold, in part because of the evangelical focus of their mission. Protestant and even Puritan ministers and authorities likewise recognized the evangelical opportunities available in prison ministry, although they were forced to play a bit of catch-up to the Catholics who had made much proselytizing hay of their communal incarceration. Indeed, Lake and Questier argue that because of the decentralized nature of the English prison system in which governing authorities were not always able to assert strict and consistent control, the Protestant authorities were unable to uniformly constrain evangelical shows of Catholicism in prison or on the scaffold. Instead “they were forced to fight fire with fire, and confront the Catholics with their own spiritual, evangelical and performative weapons. As with the scaffold and the conventions of the last dying speech, the prisons and the procedures of prison evangelism represented an arena and genre that were open to manipulation by more than one party.”204 Both sides placed a decidedly confessional on the road from penal punishment to redemption.

202 Peter Lake and Michael Questier, “Prisons, Priest and People,” in England’s Long Reformation 1500-1800, ed. Nicholas Tyacke (London: UCL Press, 1998), 196. 203 Lake and Questier, “Prisons,” 213. 204 Lake and Questier, “Prisons,” 216.

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However, the success or failure of the competing prison ministries had implications beyond the eternal spiritual welfare of individuals and the strength of different confessional positions—there were also political ramifications for the state. Prisoners who had converted to Catholicism rejected the Protestant ministers who were sent by authorities to comfort them.205 Their final scaffold declarations would have been both speeches of contrition and repentance and public displays of political defiance. On the other hand, Protestant governors used the scaffold to bolster not just the cause of the religion, but also the authority of the Protestant state, and acquiescence and acceptance of the justice of the punishment and expression of hope for the supported the judicial process and the activity of state governance. Prison ministry had multiple possible agendas, as ministers sought to prepare individual souls, publicize the efficacy of their own religion (as well as their own personal ministerial skill), and bolster or undermine the state.

The Duke in Prison

Duke Vincentio begins experimenting with his newfound ministerial power in the prison by using the technique of private conference to practice changing minds and to unearth valuable information. His first attempt at private conference is a scene of auricular confession with Juliet, Claudio’s very pregnant lover.206 By acting as a confessor, the Duke is committing a serious breach of but he seems untroubled by or even unaware of the ethical conflict. Moral dubiousness aside, he begins promisingly in his initial approach with Juliet, mirroring Jesuit techniques of engagement and participation through teaching rather than lecturing: “I’ll teach you how you shall arraign your conscience, And try your penitence, if it be sound/Or hollowly put on,” in order to move her towards contrition and penitence (II.iii.22). Elizabeth Hanson notes the problem with the Duke’s presumption here, observing that whatever the state of Juliet’s soul may be, it is the Duke’s disguise as a confessor that is “hollowly put on.”207 For the Duke, the value of the disguise is not so much to extract

205 Lake and Questier, “Prisons,” 214-215. 206 For various interpretations of this scene as one of auricular confession, see Elizabeth Hanson, Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press ,1998); Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 138-141. 207 Hanson, Discovering the Subject, 67.

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information covertly—there is little that he learns from Juliet about Claudio that he could not have gleaned from other sources—but also to change people in ways that were previously impossible. Juliet provides him with the perfect opportunity to make a difference—to comfort, reconcile, move and teach—and yet he finds his work mostly done. She speaks simply and directly, answers his questions, openly confesses and repents her sin. As Jennifer Flaherty puts it, “in his attempt to ‘teach’ Juliet the difference between a false and true repentance, the duke finds that Juliet’s responses come more readily than his own questions.”208

It is not long before the Duke abandons his promise to teach her how to assess her own conscience, meandering into an off-topic abstract lecture based on an elaborate grammatical construction:

DUKE: ‘Tis meet so, daughter, but lest you do repent As that the sin hath brought you to this shame, Which sorrow is always toward ourselves, not heaven, Showing we would not spare heaven as we love it, But as we stand in fear- JULIET: I do repent me as an evil And take the shame with joy.209 (II.iii.32-38)

It is hard to know what the duke is even saying here; we never learn what the main clause of the initial sentence may have been because Juliet interrupts him and brings him back to her own particular situation, insisting that the Duke’s flights of rhetorical fancy are less relevant than her actual repentance. Juliet’s straightforward repentance seems to frustrate the Duke since he is more interested in saving her soul than that her soul be saved. Finding his work infuriatingly complete, he punishes her serenity by telling of her lover’s imminent death without any sort of preface and then fails to remain to provide comfort. For the Duke, the state of the confessional subject’s soul is secondary to his experience. He is in the prison to

208 Jennifer Flaherty, “Heaven and Earth: Confession as Performance in Hamlet and Measure for Measure,” Theatre Symposium 21 (2013): 84. 209Stephen Greenblatt parses the ambiguity of Juliet’s repentance and particularly the phrase “take the shame with joy.” Shakespearean Negotiations,138-141.

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change people, to change Vienna, and he needs to practice; the individual spiritual needs of his subjects are subordinate to his political conversion project.

With Juliet’s lover Claudio, the Duke launches another ministerial persuasion, this time aimed at reconciling the young man with his imminent death. Again, he begins promisingly by claiming to teach Claudio the principles of de contemptu mundi, a tradition that views life itself as a prison and death as a release, a fitting contemplation for a prisoner with an execution order. While some early critics like J. W. Lever considered the speech to be contrary to Christian belief, what with its allusions to pagan philosophers, Phoebe Spinrad calls the speech “Lucretius filtered through Christian homiletics,” noting that Pope Innocent III in his De Miseria Condicionis Humane, an influential text in the de contemptu mundi tradition that had resonance in both Roman Catholic and Protestant Ars Moriendi (or Arts of Dying), “used many of the figures and analogies that the Duke uses: that baseness of the flesh, the revolt of the organs of the body, and the afflictions that torment all living creatures regardless of age, class, or virtue.”210 De contemptu mundi was traditionally only the first part of the larger Ars Moriendi tradition, which involved a larger contemplation not just of the miseries of the world, but of sin and hell, all of which provided a pathway to repentance. A cultivation of contempt and weariness for the vanities of the world formed an important part of the first week of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, and Jesuits considered De contemptu mundi writings to be useful supplementary materials while performing the first week of meditations.211

In order to teach Claudio the art of self-consolation, Duke Vincentio speaks to the abstract concept of Life in the voice of Claudio. To do this he uses what Andrew Gurr calls the

210 Phoebe Spinrad, The Summons of Death on the Medieval and Renaissance English Stage (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987), 165. J.W. Lever ed., The Arden Shakespeare: Measure for Measure, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012). 211Norwegian Counter Reformation figure Jesuit Father Laurentius Nicolai Norvegus was recognized by Rome as an exceptionally effective leader of The Spiritual Exercises and was asked to transcribe his experiences and recommendations. Two of Norvegus’ choices for reading material for the first week of the exercises were Pope Innocent II’s De contemptu mundi (1534), and De arcta via salutis ac mundi contemptu (1533) by the Carthusian monk Dionysius de Rijckels. Maximilian Von Habsburg, Catholic and Protestant Translations of the Imitatio Christi 1425-1650 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 185; Martin E.Palmer ed., On Giving the Spiritual Exercises: The Early Jesuit Manuscript Directories and the Official Directory of 1599 (Boston: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1996), 156.

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‘literary thou’ (a use of the already more obscure second person singular pronoun that evokes a higher poetic style and is conventionally used in invocations of gods, muses or abstract ideas) to invoke Life, and speaks as though he is Claudio: “Reason thus with life./ If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing/ that none but fools would keep” (III.i.6-8).212 The “thee” here refers to Life, while the duke uses the “I” as though he is Claudio in an attempt to explicitly walk the prisoner through the correct thought process.

As the speech progresses, however, the Duke appears to confuse the purpose—does he wish to teach Claudio how to reconcile himself to his own death or instead directly convince him to accept death? This change can be tracked by following the Duke’s use of the second person singular: the ‘thou’ through the speech. While it refers to ‘Life’ at the beginning of the speech (“If I do lose thee”), by the middle of the speech the ‘thou’ also seems to refer specifically to Claudio (the ‘thou’ standing in front of him): “Thou’rt by no means valiant,/ For thou dost fear the soft and tender fork/ Of a poor worm. . . Thou art not thyself/ For thou exist’st on many a thousand grains/ that issue out of dust” (III.i.15-21). These lines still could be addressing Life, but they also make sense if a specific corporeal manifestation of Life—Claudio’s particular physical life—fears “the soft and tender fork/ Of a poor worm.”

The confusion of the speech’s addressees appears complete when the Duke claims: “Friend hast though none,/ for thine own bowels, which do call thee sire,/ The mere effusion of thy proper loins,/ Do the gout, serpigo, and the rheum,/ For ending thee no sooner” (III.i.38-42). The ‘thou’ here no longer seems to refer only to an abstract concept; it instead appears to refer specifically to Claudio by alluding to his own personal reason for incarceration and his most immediate for living. Here the Duke is directly dissuading Claudio from wanting to live to meet his unborn child—the fruit of his love for Juliet and the reason for the discovery of his transgression. He claims that the ingrate of a child will wish him dead in his old age anyhow, so why live to see disappointment. The Duke’s speech aims to be a demonstration that involves his listener but he lapses into controlling habits, telling Claudio what to think rather than showing him how to think. The

212 18 Andrew Gurr, “You and Thou in Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” Essays in Criticism, 32 (1982): 13.

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false friar asks no questions, gives no tools or guidance, and does not demonstrate how to repent for sins, look forward to heaven, or understand the justice of the sentence. The Duke’s confusion over his intended addressee reveals his eagerness to inform Claudio’s thinking—he does not have the patience to lead Claudio to draw his own conclusions, and as a result, his insufficiently participatory lesson turns into an unpersuasive lecture. In his rush to persuade, the Duke is unconvincing: Claudio still hopes for a pardon.

The Duke’s most urgent prison persuasion is also his most definitive failure. Barnardine refuses to die, refuses to be sober, refuses to even listen to the friar who has come to advise, comfort and pray for him. But the Duke has another agenda; in addition to consolation and confession he has also come to persuade the prisoner to die a little earlier than scheduled in order to substitute Barnardine’s severed head for that of Claudio. In his interview with Barnardine, the Duke’s need for control is displayed even more explicitly than in his two earlier ministerial attempts; he fails to employ any persuasive techniques that Friar Thomas may have taught him or even show a bit of interest in his conversation partner. He asks no questions of Barnardine. Instead, the Duke baldly states his to advise and comfort the prisoner, and then speciously explains that his own are “induced by my ,” all before even finding out what the man might want or fear. The Duke’s stunning lack of interest in his ministerial charge makes clear that any persuasion or reconciliation is more in the service of the Duke and his own motives than out of concern for the state of Barnardine’s soul. Barnardine seems to understand this when he asserts “I swear I will not die today, for any man’s persuasion” (IV.iii.52).213

Alexander Leggatt notes that Barnardine is not necessary to the plot of the story, since the coincidentally dead Ragozine’s head is substituted for Claudio’s anyway. Leggatt surmises

213 Barnardine claims to be impervious to any persuasive efforts but the line can be read in explicitly religious terms. If we take ‘persuasion’ to mean “a form or system of religious belief” then another meaning emerges. Barnardine swears that he will not die for any man’s particular religion—he will not take up the religion of the persuasive Catholic priest who now stands before him in order to proclaim Catholicism in a final gesture of resistance on the gallows, neither will he endorse the religion of any previous, competing visitors who would similarly wish to bolster their spiritual authority through his conversion. Drunken Barnardine seems to understand that the Duke wants him to die for the Duke’s cause and on the Duke’s terms. “persuasion, n,” OED Online. (Oxford University Press, November 2016).

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that the character makes an appearance to make the point that no human is expendable.214 In my argument, Barnardine is present in order to repeat the pattern that the Duke shows through all of his ministerial attempts. With Juliet and Claudio the Duke attempts to engage his subjects, but his tendency (as a magistrate) to exert control over his speaking partners repeatedly overcomes his more recent ministerial training. This pattern is magnified in the instance with Barnardine, as the Duke fails even in the attempt at ministerial participation as he seeks to control a situation that is not within his ability or authority. Barnardine is not persuaded to die earlier than scheduled and the Duke as friar has no authority to order such a thing.

Private Conference, Public Stage

What happens to these lessons of private conference—lessons of participation and engagement which seem only superficially absorbed by this point—when the Duke leaves the prison? The fifth act is full of persuasions and confessions but they are public and theatrical, orchestrated by the Duke for maximum dramatic impact on both the players and the spectators. The contrast between the private conversations and confessions of the prison and the trial-like exposition at the gates of the city that evoke a kind of judgment day has been noted by many critics. Sarah Beckwith calls the contrast between the secrecy of the former and the publicity of the latter a provocative juxtaposition.215 Huston Diehl and Claire Griffiths-Osbourne read the contrasting methods of confession on display as a kind of commentary on the confessional divide, pitting the and downfalls of private auricular confession against those of public, communal confession, thereby reading the play as making statements about nostalgia for Catholic methods or investment in Protestant methods of understanding. While they come to opposite conclusions, both critics pit one type of experimental confession against the other, but it is the experimentation with the various religious forms that is the point.

214Leggatt,”Substitution,” 350. 215Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness,77.

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While Diehl agrees with Steven Mullaney that the suppressed Roman Catholic practice of auricular confession is a “specter” that haunts Measure for Measure, she rightly questions the efficacy of the play’s depiction of auricular confession in changing hearts and minds. She considers the final scene as the staging of a kind of confession that is far closer to Calvinist than to Roman Catholic confessional ritual. Calvin, she explains, places a privilege on the individual’s private confession of sins to God, but in his vision of a Protestant community, such a private reckoning would be followed by a voluntary and public confession. The community is made stronger by members publicly acknowledging their sins and rehearsing their shame before one another. “Far from being eliminated from Protestant confessions, then, shame is understood to be shared, and its rehearsal in public is believed to be salutary, arousing the desire for an absolution that no human can confer, nurturing a continual process of self-reflection and repentance, and fostering a sense of community.”216 According to Diehl, the final scene of the play “stages just such a public rehearsal of shame” in which many characters—Angelo to be sure but also Escalus, the Provost, Isabella, and even the Duke—confess their sins (which vary widely in severity) and publicly plead for forgiveness, thereby cultivating a Calvinist sense of community founded on the universality of sin.217 But even with this public and shared confession, the reformation of the characters and of Vienna is incomplete.

Claire Griffiths-Osbourne questions the spontaneity of the confessions that Diehl reads in the final scene, finding many of them more coerced and manipulated than open-hearted. Indeed, she sees the play as an explicit exploration of forms of confession, and thinks about the efficacy of confession not in terms of immediate persuasive change in the confessional subject, but as a way of acquiring knowledge to make correct moral judgements, thereby saving lives and restoring the community to health. In contrast to my own readings, she considers the scenes of Duke-led auricular confession in prison as successful because they lead to knowledge of events that help to steer the course of justice later in the play.218 Griffiths-Osbourne agrees with Diehl that the final scene has echoes of post-Reformation

216 Diehl, “‘Infinite Space,’”409. See also: Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 217 Diehl, “‘Infinite Space,’”409. 218 Griffiths-Osbourne, “The terms for common justice,” 42.

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confessions, but she questions the reading of the confessions as a communal and cleansing public rehearsal of shame since many characters are unsatisfied and ambivalent about the outcomes. She concludes that because knowledge derived from the Duke’s practices of auricular confession “ultimately ensured providential outcomes,” while the individual methods of self-examination and communal confessions prove inadequate, the play must be making explicit comparisons between Protestant and Catholic forms of confession, self- evaluation, and community restoration. Ultimately, she finds that “it is in the last scene that examination of the principles of judgment culminates, and it is here that, in the combined figure of the Duke confessor, auricular confession is found authoritative and seen to be the ultimate means of securing the knowledge with which to restore communal relations and perform measured justice.”219

Griffiths-Osbourne’s essay considers the play to be concerned with judgmental ethics and truth-seeking, but narrowly focusses on how to acquire knowledge to make the right choices. While the Duke does discover information during his stint as a confessor, he does not change hearts and minds the way he wants or needs for his plans to unfold the way he envisions. To my mind, the play is not just interested in how to discover secret and acquire correct knowledge, but also how to bring about positive change for individuals and communities in an ethical way. How is it possible to acquire the knowledge to make the right choices, and then how do you share that knowledge with others in your congregation? There are some very real ethical dilemmas regarding the Duke’s use of auricular confession for purposes of information extraction. Sarah Beckwith points out more forcefully than most critics that the Duke’s disguise and use of the confessional as a form of surveillance is an utter betrayal—an absolute abuse of trust.220 Moreover, while the information that he learns in the privacy of the jails is useful, Vincentio’s technique is highly flawed and he doesn’t appear to achieve many of his practical, pastoral or persuasive goals.

Both Diehl and Griffiths-Osbourne helpfully situate the contrast between the private confessions in the prison and the public ones at the city gates within contemporary religious

219 Griffiths-Osbourne, “The terms for common justice,” 48. 220 Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness, 73.

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discourse, but I do not believe that the purpose of the stark contrast between the two models is to highlight a value judgment of the efficacy of auricular versus communal confession—or, put another way, between pre- or post-Reformation ways of wrestling with sin and acquiring intimate knowledge—thereby pronouncing the play either nostalgic for a past Catholic form or fully embracing of a Protestant penitential ethic. Instead, I see the play as experimenting with different ways of acquiring knowledge about the self and others, and how such forms may be used, exploited and distorted, for both the good and the detriment of individuals and the community.

To begin with, the final public trial scene is not so much an absolute contrast to the earlier forms of private confession as a kind of of them. The Duke brings with him his Jesuitical experience of using confession as a form of persuasion to the public confession of Isabella, melding his orchestration of public confession with some techniques gleaned from auricular confession. The Jesuitical influence is most clearly seen in the very first confession of Act V, one that the audience knows to be false. Immediately upon Isabella’s entry before the undisguised Duke, Angelo and retinue, she follows the instructions given to her by the supposed Friar Ludovic: “Justice, O royal Duke! Vail your regard/ Upon a wronged—I would fain have said, a maid” (V.i.21-22). Isabella’s confession of fornication is central to her accusations against Angelo; it is essential that Angelo believe that she is telling the truth in order to expose his thorough hypocrisy. Interestingly, however, Isabella’s confession of her own supposed sin comes well before she manages to accuse Angelo of anything. Indeed, her loss of virginity is the very first thing that she mentions, without giving any kind of context, thereby tarnishing her reputation and undermining her credibility before even making her accusation. As a persuasive rhetorical strategy this makes little sense. But for Isabella, the false confession of fornication is the shocking, difficult work, not the accusation of . In her speech she is sinning by lying and then exposing herself to public shame over the sexual sin that she finds most abhorrent.

For the Duke too, I would argue that orchestrating Isabella’s false confession is as much the point as her accusation of Angelo. Critics often read his stage management of Isabella in this scene to be a kind of dismantling and re-education of the novice nun. Peter Lake calls the

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scene one of “spiritual education” in which the false confession and public exposure breaks her “chastity based spiritual pride.”221 This is a helpful way of thinking about what the Duke’s machinations do to Isabella, and my sense is that the theatrical confession can further be understood as a concerted, pre-meditated effort to convert Isabella from novice nun to a public person suitable as a wife and partner in governance. In this reading, the Duke draws on his prison experiences and directs Isabella to participate unknowingly in her potential conversion from novice nun to wife, making his proposal to her at the end of the play not a shocking turn of events but the point of the various machinations. By compelling Isabella to confess publically to abandoning her chastity in exchange for her brother’s life, the Duke is directing Isabella in an immersive imaginative experience not unlike The Spiritual Exercises. Here, Isabella is imagining and acting out what it would be like to have had her virginity stolen by the man who killed her brother, and then broadcasting her shame to the entire community. She is forced to live the sin that she most abhors and embrace the shame of the whole performance in front of a community that formerly held her to be something “enskied and sainted.” For Isabella, this is an experience of hell, just as much or more so than a meditation on the flames and of the body that more typically accompany the immersive meditations of the first week of The Spiritual Exercises. The purpose of these exercises is to reorient the self towards God (in a particularly Catholic way), which is why they are such an important part of the persuasive toolkit developed by the Jesuits; the Duke combines the Jesuit tradition of The Exercises with the Calvinist tradition of the public unburdening of the soul, making Isabella’s immersion into her own kind of hell a way to reorient her away from the private realm, and towards the public one.

By publicly, though falsely confessing to fornication and lying in order to do so, Isabella is living the repercussions of one sin while actually engaging in another. Such an experience cultivates empathy for the plight of someone like Mariana. It also forces her to confront her own capacity for sin, her own , and the potential for confusion between the boundaries of sin and virtue—in this play, excessive virtue leads to inhumanity, while lying exposes the truth. Her public exposure causes her to experience and enact subjection and

221 Lake,“Ministers and Magistrates,” 177, 178.

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power, judgment and . Such an imaginative exercise is a rehearsal for life as a public person under scrutiny, a kind of training for the wife of a magistrate. It not only molds her into a more suitable wife for the Duke, but makes her already unsuited to life in the cloister; after such a public display, she is a public person. Even before she can make her own choices about the next steps in her life, she is already changed.

By mixing the immersive, imaginary experience of The Spiritual Exercises with the public, communal rehearsal of shame, the Duke draws on some of the most participatory—and indeed, persuasive—elements of Protestant and Catholic traditions of confession, arguably making his conversion of Isabella from novice nun to wife his most persuasive attempt of the whole play, one that overshadows in importance all others. And indeed, for the first time, he steps back and permits events to unfold until his identity is revealed, allowing Isabella to participate in her own choices regarding justice and mercy with less interference than in his early persuasive attempts. But ultimately, when it comes to his most high stakes conversion, the one that most reveals his vulnerability—the persuasion of Isabella to take his hand in and give up life in the convent—he is not able to take the risk of public humiliation. He springs the proposal on her when she is still in shock over her brother’s survival, and does not even ask for her hand, but demands it: “Give me your hand and say you will be mine” (V.i.495).

It may be that Isabella’s public confession forces her to face a future outside the convent, but deciding against convent life and choosing to become the Duke’s wife are two very different propositions; while the confessional participation in public justice may have persuaded her of the former, the Duke forestalls her participation in his proposal and, famously, Isabella does not respond verbally to his offer of marriage. If, as I have argued, successful conversion tactics require participation, how could Isabella be converted from nun to wife if she does not participate in the basic speech act required to seal the engagement? Indeed, the Duke appears unconverted from his old habits of rule, which saw him attempt to control the speech of others in risky situations. His inability to trust in his subject’s full participation in her own conversion jeopardizes the very conversion that he has worked so hard to orchestrate.

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While Isabella’s conversion from nun to wife remains incomplete without her participation in an affirmative speech act at the end of the play, what do we make of the Duke’s other major conversion project—that of Vienna itself? The city has been forced to participate in an enormous and transformative experiment, as Angelo’s rule compels people and businesses to relocate outside the city limits and previously unenforced laws suddenly find unsuspecting citizens facing the death penalty. This level of participation goes beyond the exercise of imagining hell, as the community (and particularly members like Claudio) are forced to live through an actually hellish experience. Stacey Magedanz reminds us of the example of Cesare Borgia, who brought in a horrendously harsh ruler in his absence only to then ‘rescue’ his own city by theatrically executing his appointee in order to leave the people, as Machiavelli puts it, “satisfied and amazed.”222 While, as Magedanz notes, the Duke is hardly a ruthless Borgia character, both seem to approach governance as inherently theatrical, as the act of substitution and subsequent rescue is designed to instill gratitude and in subjects. But is such a theatrical manipulation enough to create a lasting change in behaviour amongst Vienna’s citizens? The face of the city has clearly changed, but is Vienna better off after Duke Vincentio’s experiment? As in the case of Isabella’s reaction to the marriage proposal, we do not really know. Many of the problem-causing characters have been punished, pardoned, and contained through marriage, but countless commentators have noted that of all the marriages at the end of the play, only Claudio and Juliet’s is based in mutual, consenting love; the rest are forced, or ambiguous at best. Is this any way for a healthy, law- abiding community to change for the better?

Measure for Measure explicitly sets up a contrast between religious traditions—ones that focus on the practice of confession. But given the ambivalent note of the end of the play, I am unpersuaded by arguments which come to totalizing answers about the Protestantism or Catholicism of the entire play. The play does overtly contrast different kinds of confession used for persuasive purposes and invites comparisons between Catholic and Protestant, but it is difficult to say which approach yields the ‘best’ results. In this chapter I have looked mostly at Jesuit persuasive tactics, especially the use of confession as persuasion, but the

222Stacy Magedanz,“Public Justice and Private Mercy in Measure for Measure,” SEL 44.2 (2004): 329.

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persuasion that appears most compelling in this play is that of Isabella, which marries the participatory Jesuitical techniques of The Spiritual Exercises with the more public and codified approach favoured by Calvin. But even this hybrid persuasion is manipulative and its outcome is ambivalent, unfinished and certainly not unqualifiedly successful. Instead of considering one persuasive mode or structure as superior in the play—thereby leading to a reading of the play that interprets a religious perspective as authoritative or primary, I would argue that the play is asking about the limits of such interpretive forms and structures.

Both private conference and public confession contain within them the promise of positive persuasion, potentially moving people and communities towards peace, moral choices and good government. But these forms are not themselves sufficient to solve the problems of Vienna. Each of these techniques, forms or even entire religious approaches are only as persuasive and effective as their operator is adept at understanding and using them. The Duke learns some new Jesuit-influenced approaches to deploy in the prison, and then makes use of a more Calvinist communal spectacle of confession. For him, these approaches are simply strategic and do not signify a true and consistent change of heart—religious, spiritual, moral or otherwise—hence the ease with which different and even opposite readings are possible of the religious messaging of the play. The religious techniques used in this play are just that—techniques. They represent forms by which change can happen, but are themselves just forms; they alone cannot solve the problems of Vienna. The hand at the wheel, the governor, interpreter and deployer of the forms makes the difference by interpreting the material and interacting with the people who are affected by the changes.

And while the intentions of the Duke and his desire to improve Vienna and the lives of its people may be fair, his need for control interferes with his ability to invest and believe in the forms that could really help him make the changes he desires. For the Duke, perhaps a real investment and belief in either a Catholic or Protestant approach could indeed provide a way forward for both him and Vienna, but he would have to let himself be governed by the beliefs behind the forms, and not always insist on his mastery and control of the situation. But at the end of the play, while many characters appear changed by their various ordeals, the Duke himself is unable to change at the point at which it matters most—when proposing marriage.

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In the rest of this dissertation, I have discussed all of the ways in which forms of persuasion move and shape people and communities, but this reading of Measure for Measure explores the limits of such forms, positing that while forms can change hearts and minds, they fall short in the hands of those who cannot fully subscribe to what they represent. Forms of persuasion need people to deploy and receive them, and while the receiver may be skeptical, the giver must believe in the forms and what they stand for, working with an open heart. Such forms are not endlessly, inherently persuasive in this play, as they are not in life—it is not as though if only the right communication technique can be found that hearts will open, minds will change and peace will come. Forms of persuasion are tremendously important to successful communication strategies; they have the potential to change people and communities, but they still need principles, beliefs and ideas to bring them to life.

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Chapter Three: Singing from the Scaffold: Staging the Goodnight Ballad

On March 25, 1573, George Saunders (or Sanders), a London merchant, and John Beane, a servant from Woolwich, were attacked on Shooters Hill in Kent by George Browne. Browne had known that the two men would be traversing the hill that day because Mrs. Anne Drury of London provided him with the information. In exchange for his violent services she paid him twenty-six pounds and promised to make a marriage between him and the newly widowed Mistress Anne Saunders. Unfortunately for Browne, Beane survived his wounds long enough to make a statement to the authorities. Three days later, Browne was arrested and implicated Mrs. Drury and Mrs. Saunders in his full confession. Though both women pleaded not guilty to being an accessory to murder, they were condemned; they later confessed and were executed on May 13th.

This story is familiar to scholars of early modern drama as the subject of A Warning for Fair Women (1599), but it inspired more than just a play.223 Something about this crime caught the public’s attention in the 1570s and continued to resonate for at least the next thirty years, retold on a variety of platforms: Arthur Golding’s A Briefe Discourse of the late murther of master George Saunders, first published in 1573 (reprinted in 1577) is the most thorough treatment of the story (and the likely source material for the play); the story is recounted in Anthony Munday’s View of Sundry Examples Reporting Many Stranger Murders (1580), Stow’s The Annales of England (1615) and Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1577 edition); there is also a ballad entitled “The Wofull Lamentacon of Mrs. Anne Saunders” (1573?); and finally, some 26 years after the original crime was committed, the play was published.224

223 A Warning for Fair Women: A Critical Edition, ed. Charles Dale Cannon (The Hague: Mouton, 1975). 224 Arthur Golding, A briefe discourse of the late murther of master George Saunders, a worshipfull citizen of London and of the apprehension, arreignement, and execution of the principall and accessaries of the same (London: Henry Bynneman, 1573), STC 11985; Anthony Munday, A vievv of sundry examples Reporting many straunge murthers, sundry persons periured, signes and tokens of Gods towards vs. What straunge and

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The Saunders crime was not the only dramatized case of domestic violence: Arden of Faversham (1592), the lost Jonson and Dekker collaboration Page of Plymouth (1599) and A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608) are all ‘true crime’ dramas. As in the case of A Warning, the crimes were well known because of the chronicles, pamphlets and ballads that had circulated the stories before the stage versions emerged. Frances Dolan, in an article that focuses solely on petty treason (or cases in which wives have been convicted of murdering husbands), notes that while there are plenty of examples of domestic murder, the vast majority of cases are documented by only a single record (one court document, or a single mention in a pamphlet). Some cases, however, seem to capture the public imagination and are retold in a variety of storytelling forms.225

One of these forms is the ballad: each one of the dramatized narratives is also fictionalized through the ballad form. And while not every balladed murder became a play, every dramatized murder was also a ballad. A Warning (1599) was anticipated by “A Lamentacon”(1573?). The tale of Eulalia Page, recounted in the 1599 Page of Plymouth is most famously told through three ballads, two from the perspective of Mistress Page, and a

monstrous children haue of late beene borne: and all memorable murthers since the murther of Maister Saunders by George Brovvne, to this present and bloody murther of Abell Bourne Hosyer, who dwelled in Newgate Market (London: J. Charlewood for William Wright, 1580), STC 18281; John Stow, The annales, or a generall chronicle of England, begun first by maister Iohn Stow, and after him continued and augmented with matters forreyne, and domestique, auncient and moderne, vnto the ende of this present yeere 1614 (London: Thomas Dawson, 1615), STC 23338, 674; Raphaell Holinshed, The firste [laste] volume of the chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande (London: John Hunne, 1577), STC 13568b, 1865-1866; “The wofull lamentacon of mrs. Anne Saunders, which she wrote with her own hand, being prisoner in newgate, justly condemned to death” in Old English Ballads 1553-1625: Chiefly from Manuscripts, ed. Hyder E. Rollins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), 340-348. The dating of the Anne Saunders ballad is unclear; Rollins reprints it from a manuscript (Sloane MS 1896, fols. 8-11) and he calls the original MS in which it is preserved “contemporary with the murder,” but notes that any precise dating is impossible, especially given that the Stationers’ Registers for the years 1571-1576 are lost (it is also impossible to know if other ballads may have been written on the subject). There is a Thomas Lodge quotation from 1596 that mentions a ballad regarding Anne Saunders, which would date it (or some other ballad on Saunders) at the very least earlier than the 1599 play. 225 Frances Dolan, "Tracking the Petty Traitor across Genres," in Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500-1800, ed. Patricia Fumerton and Anita Guerrini (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 149-171. Dolan speculates that stories that were eventually dramatized could have been chosen for theatrical treatment because of the local prominence or social status of the characters rather than the particular details of the murder.

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third from the perspective of her lover, George Strangewidge.226 A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608) appears to have been preceded by the now lost ballad “A ballad of Lamentable Murther Donne in Yorkeshire by a gent vppon 2 of his owne Children sore wounding his Wyfe and Nurse” (1605).227 In the case of Arden of Faversham (1592) there is a ballad that appears in 1633, well after the play.228 The Arden case aside, ballads tend to emerge more quickly than plays because they are cheaper and easier to produce. Such differences in production and audience allow for a kind of formal interplay between plays and ballads, as the popularity of the story in one form could bolster the fortunes of the other.

These ballads are unlike the pamphlets and chronicles which scholars consider source material for plays. Instead of being salacious third person accounts of true crime, the ballads associated with these domestic tragedies are generally known as goodnight ballads (also called ‘neck verses’ or ‘the last goodnight’): they are subjective, first person accounts of crime and repentance told in the voice of the murderer.229 Though they purport to be

226 “The Lamentation of Master Page’s wife of Plimmouth, who being enforced by her parents to wed him against her will, did most wickedly to his murther, for the love of George Strangwidge; for which fact she suffered death at Barstaple in Devonshire,” The Roxburghe Ballads, ed. William Chappell (1869; reprint New York: AMS Press, 1966), 1:555; “The Lamentation of George Strangwidge, who, for consenting to the death of Master Page of Plimmouth, suffered Death at Barnstable,” The Roxburghe Ballads, 1:559; “The Sorrowfull complaint of Mistris Page, for causing her husband to be murdered for the love of George Strangewidge, who were executed together,” The Roxburghe Ballads, 1:561. The dating of these three ballads is unclear. According to William Chappell, Payne Collier reprinted “The Lamentation of Master Pages wife of Plimmouth” in 1868 from a 1591 edition. Only this ballad of the three bears the initials ‘T.D’ (presumed Thomas Deloney). The Pepys copy was printed in 1609 and asserts that the ballad was written by Mistress Page herself. The other two ballads could be dated from 1591 or slightly later. All three ballads are set to the tune of ‘Fortune My Foe.’ 227 For a discussion on the date and authorship of the play see the Introduction to A Yorkshire Tragedy, ed. A.C. Cawley and Barry Gaines (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 1-33. “A ballad of Lamentable Murther donne in Yorkeshire” was entered into the Stationer’s Register by Thomas Pavier on July 3 1605. , ed., A Transcropt of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London: 1554-1640 (London: 1875-1895), 3:295. 228 “The complaint and lamentation of Mistresse Arden of Feversham in Kent, who for the loue of one Mosbie, hired certaine Ruffians and Villaines most cruelly to murder her Husband; with the fatall end of her and her Associats.” (London: printed for C.W.), The Roxburghe Ballads 3.156-157. And while Arden of Faversham the play was first printed in 1592 (over forty years after the date of the original crime), the English Broadside Ballad Archive (henceforth referred to as EBBA) estimates the ballad printing from 1610-1638. Dolan dates the ballad from 1633, around the date of the third reprinting of the play, and could have been inspired more by the play than the original event. 229 The term “goodnight ballad” is now used quite uniformly to describe the particular kind of ballad described here by current scholars like Patricia Marby Harrison and Christopher Marsh. Pioneering scholars in the field of sixteenth and seventeenth century balladry, like Hyder E. Rollins, likewise identify this type of ballad as a “‘good-night’ or last farewell.” This term comes from sixteenth-century descriptions of and terms for ballads of

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composed by the prisoners themselves, most appear to have been penned by anonymous ballad writers. The resulting songs could combine familiar music, catchy rhymes and the drama of the scaffold to make persuasive moral, religious or even confessional cases—but in such a way that eschewed divisive polemic in favour of inculcating religious values. These ballads were not only interested in the narrative of events but in the psychological underpinnings of the repentance process, not just in the crime itself, but in the personal, spiritual, familial and communal aftermath of such a tragedy. Plays and goodnight ballads share a chance to explore the subjective psyche, and both have the potential to manipulate the emotions of the audience more subtly and effectively than the blunt force of the condemnatory social warnings found in the pamphlets of the time.

But while certain similarities can be drawn between these domestic tragedies and the ballads that often anticipate them, the goodnight ballads are far more constrained by length, specific , and distinctly persuasive aims than their more intricate, expansive and expensive dramatic counterparts. Indeed, the tightly scripted nature of the goodnight ballad is part of what makes it an effective tool of persuasive social, political, and particularly religious messaging. This chapter will begin by examining the goodnight ballad as a distinct subgenre of the broadside ballad, complete with its own identifiable set of conventions—conventions that contribute to or constitute how and what the songs communicate—and which create a very persuasive and participatory musical medium. While scholars have noted the political coerciveness of the goodnight ballads, I will contend that the ballads are surprisingly religious, indeed pointedly Protestant in their emphasis on the dramatic, unearned descent of God’s grace.

While the goodnight ballads are forms of religious persuasion like the metrical psalms or private conferences, they differ in significant ways. To begin with, they are not explicitly organized and controlled by any authority. There is no authoritative text on which to base the ballads like The Whole Book of Psalmes or The Spiritual Exercises. Goodnight ballads

repentance sung on the scaffold; there is, for example, a ballad composed on the death of the Earl of Essex entitled: “Essex’s last Goodnight: A Lamentable new Ballad upon the Earle of Essex his Death” The Roxburghe Ballads, 1.571.

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registered with the Stationers Company could not have printed anything explicitly treasonous, but because they were written by any number of anonymous ballad writers, they were not always precisely orthodox.230 The ballads broadcast similar persuasive messages not because religious leaders self-consciously decided to repurpose them for evangelistic reasons, but because the formal conventions that developed organically from other traditions promoted a Protestant : they are in the first person, they describe a descent into sin, they dwell less on the crime than on the epiphanic moment of repentance, they contain a warning for listeners and a direct address to God. Additionally, the form of the goodnight ballads also includes the circumstances of their consumption and performance conditions. While the conventions of the goodnight ballad are already religiously persuasive, much of their success relies on the social interaction of the performance. Unlike polemical rhetoric which demonizes competing confessional positions, or sermons which could be dull and uninspiring, the goodnight ballads are widely appealing and are able to subtly reinforce religious and particularly Protestant ideas by burying them in the forms and conventions that make them recognizable and generically distinct from the many other kinds of ballads that crowd the peddler’s pack.

Because the goodnight ballads bolster Protestant thought and belief without a more specific evangelical agenda, they have more options for theatrical reproduction. The goodnight ballads are not liturgical, do not contain the word of God, and are not promoted by any centralized authority. While the metrical psalms were masked with drinking and love songs, and the private conferences were slightly more recognizable yet not explicitly named, the goodnight ballads retain a good amount of identifiable content on the commercial stage. The language is somewhat altered—addresses to God are generally directed to some generic higher power or someone else with the power to pardon and bestow grace. But the staged songs do follow the goodnight ballad conventions quite closely, mirror the language and even use the same tunes. While their forms on stage are still filled with dramatic content, that content more closely mirrors their usual content than any other form we have looked at thus far.

230 Of course, ballads were cheap, ephemeral and not all licensed and registered. See Tessa Watt, Cheap Print, 47.

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In this chapter I look at two very different plays that each feature a performance based on the same goodnight ballad. Both the anonymously-authored 1577 Cambridge play Misogonus, and the well-known satire Eastward Ho (1605), by Chapman, Jonson and Marston, are prodigal plays (Eastward Ho is a satire, however), and both include an imitation of a famous goodnight ballad known as “A sorrowfull sonnet, made by M. George Mannington, at Cambridge Castle. To the tune of Labandala Shot” (1576) (or more popularly by its opening line, “I wail in woe, I plunge in pain”).231 Both plays draw on the goodnight ballad’s role in religious/moral/political persuasion to provide evidence of the sincerity of the singer on the stage, but in Misogonus, the song is sung in a private moment of reflection, while in Eastward Ho much of the ballad’s meaning derives from the publicity of the performance. The Misogonus ballad effectively demonstrates its singer’s sincerity because of the lack of artfulness, but it seems contrary to the performative spirit of the goodnight ballads. By contrast, in Eastward Ho, the public performance of the goodnight ballad is what establishes the singer’s sincerity—and it is a communicative and engaging show—but such an emphasis on the self-consciously persuasive display of authenticity can call the singer’s genuine motivations into question. This tension between sincerity and performance is then explored and exploited by the play itself.

A comparison of the two dramatic works will track the changing meanings associated with the ballad and different things that forms can mean at different times. I will speculate that the persuasive (and particularly religiously persuasive) meanings inherent in the structure of the goodnight ballad are not as evident in the earlier Misogonus parody since the goodnight ballads were not yet a fully realized and recognized generic form. The song is more of an homage to a particular ballad, or perhaps a few select ballads, rather than something that wishes to or is able to capitalize on the meanings of an established musical form. In my introduction, I discussed the ways in which the forms that I investigate travelled well over space from their original context to the theatre, but did not remain intact over time, making

231 “A sorrowfull sonnet, made by M. George Mannington, at Cambridge Castle. To the tune of Labandala Shot” A Handful of Pleasant Delights (1584), by Clement Robinson and divers others, ed. H. E. Rollins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924), 65-68.

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them useful pathways to the alterity of early modern English life. The forms were culturally meaningful in their own time, but grew and changed and eventually became unrecognizable to us. The Misogonus example illustrates the importance of time to formal significance. In 1577, goodnight ballads were on the cusp of being culturally meaningful and effective as a public performance of religious persuasion. By 1605 in Eastward Ho, the climax of the entire play depends upon wide audience recognition of the goodnight ballad form and of the performatively coercive nature of these songs, as the goodnight ballad at once exemplifies and catalyses the important conversions of the work. My investigation into the ballads will shed light on the satire and persuasive intent of the final ballad of Eastward Ho, which leads to a reading that addresses the play’s delicate negotiation between sincerity and satire.

I. The Goodnight Ballad: Confessions and Conventions

Like other ballads, the goodnight ballads were popular forms of public entertainment, heard in myriad public places and seen on broadsides in peddler’s packs or tacked up on walls for inexpensive home decor. Ballads are strophic solo songs with a narrative text and, according to Christopher Marsh, they could be heard and found everywhere in early modern England; it has been estimated that up to 4,000,000 ballad sheets may have been printed by 1600.232 They were generally written anonymously, though there were some ballad writers (such as Martin Parker or John Deloney) whose names were listed for purposes. The songs were then brought to market by ballad singers who drew crowds in public spaces, travelling from place to place to sing and sell their wares. Some were chapmen or chapwomen who carried a few songs among their other products, while others were ballad specialists, perhaps those with good voices.233 The subjects of the ballads were many and varied, and catered to a popular audience by mixing issues of politics and religion with tales of won and lost, thieves executed and babies born with three heads.

While Christopher Marsh investigates the historical and musical significance of ballads in early modern England, Bruce Smith thinks broadly about their cultural function. He

232 Marsh, Music and Society, 226. 233 Marsh, Music and Society, 232.

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contends that the ballad is more than a genre and more than a medium, but can rather be considered “a complete system of communication, involving certain people in certain kinds of situations communicating certain kinds of experiences in certain kinds of ways. . . that is to say, they interact in highly volatile ways with the physical body, with soundscapes, with speech communities, with political authority, with the singer’s sense of self. Although in print we may never be able to specify just where ballads belong, we can approach that site via these intersecting horizons.”234 Smith makes the important point that simply reading the text of a ballad will not provide sufficient interpretation and they must be imagined more broadly. He asserts that ballads have implications and meanings that are physiological and physical through the act of singing; they are social in the way that they figure in the exchange of news and create certain kinds of communities through singing, participating and listening; they are political in their statements about the object of ballad and in their performance of different and widely varied subject positions; they are psychological in their investigation of the subjecthood of another, or in the opportunity to become another person by assuming their voice.

Goodnight ballads fit well into Smith’s assessment as they operate at the intersection of the political, religious, psychological, and emotional; they manage to create communities though participation and inclusion as well as through delineation and exclusion. To my mind, the goodnight ballads are something of a hybrid of the godly ballad (some of which focus on repentance or the moments before death) and the popular news ballad (wherein crimes were declaimed, disseminated and interpreted via memorable musical medium, usually in the third person). They were a popular variety of ballad and would have been among the selection hawked by a ballad monger; in the seventeenth century, many goodnight ballads could be found in the collections of compilers such as Pepys.235 Sung from the perspective of the convicted and repentant criminal, the ballads claimed to be the last words of the condemned.

234 Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 172-3. 235 Because ballad collecting became popular in the seventeenth century, our knowledge of pre-seventeenth century ballads is comparatively scant. For more on ballad collecting, the limits of our ballad knowledge, and the problem of dating ballads see Angela McShane, “Ballads and Broadsides” in Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660, Volume 1 in The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, ed. Joad Raymond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 339-362.

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The repentant text could have been transcribed from a last dying speech, interpreted from a news pamphlet or just wholly fabricated by an anonymous writer who was taking advantage of a hot news topic. 236 In Looke About You (1600), Block gives us an idea of how a goodnight ballad may have been generated:

I have another peece of worke in hand; I heare say Redcaps father shall bee hanged this after noone, Ile see him slip a string though I give my service the slip; beside my Lady bad me heare his examination at his death: Ile get a good place, and pen it word for word, and as I like it, set out a moornefull Dittie to the tune of Labandalashot, or rowe well ye Marriners, or somwhat as my muse shall me invoke.237

Even though the ballads were figured as straight news, an examination of the competing accounts and narratives that often contextualize the goodnight ballads reveal that more poetic license was unleashed by the ballad writers than Block is willing to admit in his assertion that he will “pen it word for word.”

Conventions

While every goodnight ballad deviates somewhat from the conventions, most follow a highly recognizable script. The subject often begins with a brief introduction that gives some personal detail to make the singer/criminal seem like an ordinary yet interesting person, and often proceeds to describe a kind of chain of sin or the descent from innocence to anti-social behaviour, to petty crime, to increasingly desperate actions that culminate in something terrible like murder. For example, in the ballad “John Spenser, a Cheshire gallant” (1626?), Spenser’s shooting ability, skill at drumming and agility on the dance floor are attractive and amiable qualities in moderation but they appear to have gone to the man’s head. The song

236 There are a few examples of multiple, competing ballads written from the first person perspective of the same criminal. See two extant versions of Alice Davis’ tale in A Pepysian Garland: Black-letter Broadside Ballads of the years 1595-1639 chiefly from the collection of Samual Pepys, ed. Hyder E. Rollins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), 283-287 and 288-292. 237 A Pleasant Commodie called Looke About You: A Critical Edition (New York: Garland Publishing, 1980), viii.1455-1461. As I will discuss later, ‘Labandala Shot’ was a tune associated with goodnight ballads and ‘Row Well Ye Mariners’ was associated with moralizing ballads.

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describes him beginning to dress in silk and satin, leaving his wife in penury while he spends their money on women and fashion, and generally “Ryoting” with many young women until he mistakenly kills a friend in a drunken quarrel.238 Ballads then usually proceed to describe the crime in brief terms. In “A Warning for All Desperate Women” (1628), for example, the singer anticipates the crime for several stanzas, but the act itself is described bluntly and quickly: “And then I tooke a little knife/ and stab’d him in the heart. Whose Soule from Body instantly,/ my bloody hand did part.”239 In the case of the trio of ballads that concern the murder of a Master Page of Plymouth by his wife and lover, the murder is only obliquely referred to in one of the three ballads; instead, all three ballads focus on providing an explanation of motivation and the expressions of repentance.

By glossing over the gory details, ballads are free to emphasise the psychological process of conversion and repentance; the tension in the songs typically peaks at the lengthy description of the moment of repentance and spontaneous change of heart. There is then usually an apology to the convict’s own family or community for disappointing them and bringing shame. Such an apology is an opportunity to tug on heartstrings, as a son apologizes to his “mother milde, and dame so deer” in Mannington’s ballad, or especially as mother addresses her soon-to-be-orphaned children.240 Following this window into the personal life and emotional attachments of the convict’s life, there almost always follows a warning for god- fearing folks not to follow in the footsteps of sin. Most ballads end with a plea to God for forgiveness.

Such narrative conventions are similar to those found in crime ballads, but the goodnight ballads distinguish themselves from their news-reporting counterparts by their formal conventions, and these formal conventions in particular help grant the songs their persuasive power. The goodnight ballads are most prominently defined by the use of the first person perspective, a narrative technique that makes stories intimate and invites listeners to

238 Thomas Dickerson (?), “John Spenser a Chesshire Gallant, his life and repentance, who for killing of one Randall Gam: was lately executed at Burford a mile from Nantwich. To the tune of In Slumbering Sleep,” in A Pepysian Garland, 256-262. 239 “A Warning for All Desperate Women,” in A Pepysian Garland, 288-292, 290. 240 Mannington ballad, ln. 33.

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imaginatively participate in the inner life of the speaker.241 The singer becomes the ballad’s protagonist. In Bartholomew Fair, Nightingale claims that his new ballad “A Caveat against Cutpurses” is “made as t’were in mine own person, and I sing it in mine own defense” (but of course, Nightingale is not the one who needs protection from cutpurses).242 Bruce Smith insists, “The ‘I” of a song invites imaginative complicity even more insistently than a play with its diversity of characters and points of view.”243 In the ballad, the only point of view available becomes the singer’s own. The excitement derived from participation in news is amplified in the case of the goodnight ballad because the singer has a chance to become the Earl of Essex, Sir Walter Raleigh, a common cutpurse, or a murderous wife.244

The focus in the goodnight ballads, as Joy Wiltenburg has noted, is on the inner life of the criminal, “both in examination of the path to crime, and in reflections on a misspent life.” She notes that English ballads are unique in their preoccupation with the interiority of the sinner; in German crime ballads the victim’s voices are heard rather than those of the perpetrator. The English seem particularly interested not just in the horrific and salacious news of the crime, but in the psychological processes that led up to the commission of it, and perhaps even more interestingly, the internal journey to repentance.245 The audience response to such an intimate identification with the convict could be varied and layered: one could feel a sense of superiority and edification, experience the vicarious thrill of law-breaking, fear the consequences of sin, or be reassured by the grace of God.

One of the other distinguishing features of the goodnight ballad is that the speaker almost always switches addressees at some point in the ballad. The songs begin by speaking directly

241 Some ballads, such as “John Spenser, a Cheshire Gallant” are in two parts: the first part is a third person descriptive crime ballad, while the second part is written in the first person perspective of the prisoner. See “John Spenser, a Cheshire Gallant” in A Pepysian Garland, 252-262. 242 , “Bartholomew Fair” in The Alchemist and Other Plays, ed. Gordon Campbell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), III.v.38-39. 243 Bruce R. Smith, “Reading lists of plays: Early Modern, Modernist, Post-Modern,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 141. 244 See “Sir Walter Rauleigh his lamentation: Who was beheaded in the old Pallace at West-minster the 29 of October. 1618. To the tune of Welladay,” in A Pepysian Garland, 89-95; “A Lamentable Ditty composed upon the Death of Robert Lord Devereux, late Earle of Essex, who was beheaded in the Tower of London, on Ashwenesday in the morning, 1600,” in The Roxburghe Ballads 1:564. 245 Joy Wiltenburg, “Ballads and the Emotional Life of Crime,” in Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500- 1800, 176.

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to the crowd, but by the end the ballad is addressed more specifically. In many cases, the speaker apologizes to his or her family for the pain that they have caused; this is nearly always followed by a direct plea to God or Christ. So while the narrative conventions may create a sense of insincerity born of the repetitive adherence to certain accepted scripts, the formal conventions convey the personal, individual humanity of the convict by allowing him or her to speak (in the first person) directly to God immediately before death. These direct addresses to God vary widely in their emotional impact, but are generally the most moving moments of the ballad. Some protagonists, like Anne Davis in A Warning for All Desperate Women, address God in familiarly repentant language at length: “Now great Iehovah I thee pray,/my bloudy sinnes forgiue,/ For on this earth most wretched I/ vnworthy am to liue. Christ Iesus vnto thee I pray, and vnto thee I cry,/ Thou with thy blood wilt wash my sinnes/ away, which here must dye.” In “The ballad of Ned Smith,” the emphasis is entirely on the repentance and the direct exhortations to God rather than on the details of the crime. There is little indication of what his sins may have been and almost half of the ballad addresses Jesus directly, repenting and requesting grace and comfort. By contrast, in “Anne Wallen’s Lamentation,” only one line directly addresses God at the very end of the ballad: “In burning flames of fire I should fry,/ Receive my soul sweet Jesus now I die.” 246

Publicity and performativity is another significant formal factor. The goodnight ballads would often be sung by a balladeer, performing the role of convict, who is performing his or her repentance for the crowd, the law, the family, and for God. While they may be read, looked at or sung alone to oneself, the goodnight ballads come alive in a social environment: they conjure the final moments on the scaffold in which the song is sung by the convict, imparting the final words of the wisdom acquired before death to the crowd of witnesses; they are sung in the market to broadcast news and publicize the wares of the ballad monger; they are repeated in the tavern, at work, with family in the home. This social audience/singer interplay is built into the conventions of the ballad, as the songs address the audience directly

246 “The wofull lamentation of Edward Smith, a poore penitent prisoner in the Iayle of Bedford, which he wrote a short time before his death,” ( London: C. W. Pepys, 1624), Magdalene College: Pepys 1.59, EBBA http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/20038/xml; “Anne Wallens Lamentation, For the Murthering of her husband Iohn Wallen a turner in Cow-lane neere Smithfield; done by his owne wife, on satterday the 22 of June. 1616. Who was burnt in Smithfield the first of July following,” in A Pepysian Garland, 84-89.

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with specific warnings before the turn away from the worldly listener to the divine one. They perform repentance and re-enact the moment that God’s grace is received by a sinner.

Singing Along

The persuasion works because of the ways the performer invites the participation of the audience. When delivered in the first person and addressed directly to the listener, both the singer and the auditor are drawn to imaginatively participate in the inner world of the condemned. Marsh calls balladry “recreational in a literal sense and well supplied with crudely memorable characters.”247 These ballads present an opportunity to be a murderer or a traitor, for a man to be a woman and a woman to be a man, for a peasant to be the Earl of Essex, for a gentleman to be a merchant’s wife who had finally had enough with her drunken, abusive husband. While the opportunity for role-play is available with many kinds of ballads, the goodnight ballads depict people at the extremes of human : love, hate, passion, anger, greed, regret, repentance. It is understandable that people wanted to participate in the performance of the ballad of a fearless knight or a lovelorn maiden, but in the case of the goodnight ballads, buyers were participating in the story of a murderer who had been dispatched by society. Do the moralistic litany of regrets make the singer or the listener (who have their own sins to contend with) feel superior and edified? Is it fun to pretend, however briefly, to be a convict and to break moral, legal, ethical and sexual rules? Is there something profoundly emotionally moving and satisfying about living a journey from abject sin to wholehearted repentance, through the extremes of human experience?

With their adherence to the “I” subject rather than a more condemnatory third person narration, the goodnight ballads provide an opportunity for people to imagine themselves at society’s limits, performing acts beyond their and then experiencing the internal and external aftermath of crime. The ballads involve the imaginations and emotions of participants, and as we have seen in previous chapters on both the metrical psalms and private conference, participation is key to the persuasive success of any medium. The more

247 Marsh, Music and Society, 285.

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participatory the form, the more persuasive it is. The “I” subject of the goodnight ballads goes a long way towards engaging the minds and emotions of the singers and listeners.

In addition to the first person perspective of the goodnight ballads, music likewise invites participation in their activity. The participation starts with the performance of the ballad, when listeners would crowd around the ballad monger to hear the song in a public place. Just as the first person narration demands a degree of empathy and psychological identification, the music of the ballads is designed to incite a deep and direct form of audience participation. The tunes of the ballads were not printed on the top of the broadsheet in musical notation. Instead, tunes were named in the title: “Murder upon Murder, Committed by Thomas Sherwood, alias, Countrey Tom: I Elizabeth Evans, alias, Cambrye Bess. . . To the tune of Bragandary downe” (1635).248 As eventually became the case with the metrical psalms, naming instead of notating the tune increased the likelihood that laypeople and ballad mongers of limited musicianship could easily sing the tune from memory.249

There is a kind of assumed knowledge when the tune is named, a reliance on previous musical and aural experiences. Many of these tunes were used repeatedly and were well known to the public. The more common the tune, the more likely buyers would stop, listen to the story and then purchase the piece because of the ease with which it could be sung again by the consumer. Marsh makes note of scientific studies that chart the way in which the human brain is particularly adept at processing familiar music, making humans better able to discern a recognized melody over a new melody amid the cacophony of the market.250 By making repeated use of a common clutch of tunes and then referring to them by associative name rather than musical notation, the ballads are able to maximize their participatory

248 “Murder upon Murder, Committed by Thomas Sherwood, alias, Countrey Tom: I Elizabeth Evans, alias, Cambrye Bess. . . To the tune of Bragandary downe” reprinted in Blood and Knavery: a Collection of English Renaissance Pamphlets and Ballads of Crime and Sin, ed. Joseph H. Marshburn and Alan R. Velie (Rutherford, N.J: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 1973), 67. 249 Sometimes the name of the tune is derived from the ballad with which it was originally or most famously associated (as seems to be the case with ‘Fortune my Foe’) while in other cases the origination of the tune name is less clear. 250 This is something to which every musician can attest, from the contemporary artists for whom works from the previous album receive tremendous response at a concert while new songs fall comparatively flat, to classical musicians who craft concert repertoires that sandwich lesser-known gems between familiar and audience-drawing blockbusters.

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potential, making it as easy as possible for consumers to hear the music, enjoy the tune and join in the song.251

Because many of these tunes are repeatedly used for more than one ballad, a web of musical associations begins to build for each melody. Some popular tunes become so widely and indiscriminately used that it is difficult to track the potential associations.252 It is more common, however, for tunes to hold some kind of thematic coherence, or at least a dominant cultural association. ‘Fortune my Foe’ is one such tune; it was extremely popular and, according to Claude Simpson, is one of the most “familiar in ballad music, so frequently has this tune been coupled with solemn or lugubrious accounts of murders, natural disasters, warnings to the impious, deathbed confessions, and the like.”253 The tune takes its name from a ballad of a lover bemoaning the loss of his lady’s love which opens:

251 Sometimes this transition from passive to active participant does not even need to wait for the consumer to buy the ballad. Many ballads include repeated singalong refrains to further engage the audience immediately in the work. These refrains do not require listeners to have prior knowledge of the tune; a few verses are all it takes for a listener to be familiar enough with the tune and words to join. For example, Bartholomew Fair’s “A Caveat for Cutpurses” includes the phrase “Youth, youth, thou hadst better been starved by thy nurse,/ Then live to be hanged for cutting a purse.” The phrase is repeated in the song a few times by Nightingale before Cokes begins to sing too. It is partly due to the distraction provided by this musical participation that allows Cokes’ purse to be picked from his pocket at the end of the song. Goodnight ballads tend not to have singalong refrains, since they likely interfere with the sense of gravitas. 252 A good example of a tune with a certain thematic promiscuity is ‘Packington’s Pound,’ the tune used in the A Caveat for Cutpurses. For a complete discussion of the associative potential and musical history of ‘Packington’s Pound’, see Claude Simpson, The British Broadside Ballad and Its Music (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1966), 564-570. 253 Simpson, The British Broadside Ballad, 225.

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Fortune my foe, why dost thou on me And will thy favour never better be? Wilt thou I say, forever breed my pain, And wilt thou not restore my joys again?254

Simpson notes that there is ample evidence of the song’s prior to 1590, and it possibly dates as early as 1555-1556. The tune is in the sombre Dorian mode, underscoring its serious, solemn nature, and while the name retains the flavour of the original song about lost love, subsequent uses of the tune recalibrate its meaning. While many of the ballads set to ‘Fortune my Foe’ were generally about death and disaster, goodnight ballads in particular become deeply associated and entwined with the tune starting from at least the late - early 1590s, if not earlier. The trio of ballads relating to the 1590 execution of Eulalia Page all appear to be set to the tune, as was a lost ballad licensed in July, 1592, “The Lamentacion of John Parker whoe for consenting to the murder of John Bruen was hanged in Smithfield the 28 of June 2 yeres after the fact was committed to the tune of fortune.” Other well-known examples include “Anne Wallens Lamentation, For the Murthering of her husband. . . 1616,”

254 Music and words reproduced from Simpson, The British Broadside Ballad, 225.

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and “The godly End and Woeful lamentation of one John Stevens” (1633).255 The tune’s association with goodnight ballads became so entrenched that, by the sixteen thirties, the Poet in Rowley’s The Noble Soldier could only have ‘Fortune my Foe’ in mind:

The king! Shoo’d I be bitter ‘gainst the King, I shall have scurvy ballads made of me, Sung to the Hanging Tune.256

While ‘Fortune my Foe’ was not the only tune used for goodnight ballads, it was the tune most closely and popularly associated with the form, and one that made it very easy for everyone—even those with only the most elementary musical literacy—to participate in singing the latest execution ballads.257

Coercion from the Scaffold

In previous chapters I have found that the forms I investigate are persuasive because their organization demands participation: metrical psalms are designed for congregational participation; Catholic devotional modes require individuals to participate in their own conversion process. In the goodnight ballads we find an affecting, emotional, narrative medium that is deeply participatory, though historically they have been considered more politically rather than religiously coercive as their representation of spectacular execution scenes could reinforce conformity to the ideology and values of the state.258 Many critics have considered the goodnight ballads to fall under the rubric of the spectacle of the scaffold outlined in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, treating them as musical versions of the last dying speeches which exemplified the role that public execution could play in reinforcing

255 “The godly end, and wofull lamentation of one Iohn Stevens, a youth, that was hang'd, drawne, and quartered for High-Treason, at Salisbury in Wiltshire, vpon Thursday being the seuenth day of March last 1632. vvith the setting vp of his quarters on the City gates. To the tune of Fortune my foe” (London: H. Gosson,1633) The Roxburghe Ballads, 1.490-491. 256 Samual Rowley, The Noble Sovldier, Or, A Contract Broken, justly reveng’d: a tragedy (London: Nicholas Vavasour, 1634), STC 21416, sig. D4v. 257 Other tunes often used for goodnight ballads include: ‘Bragandary downe’ (now lost), ‘The Ladies fall’ (otherwise known as ‘In Peascod time’), and ‘Welladay’. 258 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979); J.A. Sharpe, “‘Last Dying Speeches’: Religion, Ideology, and Public Execution in Seventeenth- Century England,” Past and Present, 107 (1985): 144-167.

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conformity to state ideology. J. A. Sharpe contends that by giving the speeches, the condemned were “willing central participants in the theatre of punishment, which offered not merely a spectacle, but also a reinforcement of certain values. When felons stood on the gallows and confessed their not only for the offence for which they suffered death, but for a whole catalogue of wrongdoing, and expressed their true repentance for the same, they were helping to assert the legitimacy of the power which had brought them to their sad end.”259 Such speeches, “were of obvious advantage to the state and the state church; they legitimized not only the punishment being suffered by the individual felon, but also the whole structure of secular and religious authority.”260 When the speeches were then turned into more popular and infectious ballads, Stuart Kane asserts that the circulation of such ballads among the lower classes “very likely had an instrumental or instructional effect, encouraging the lower classes to internalize these broader cultural anxieties about them, and potentially to reproduce these anxieties in their own daily lives. In this way, the ballads functioned as one element in a consensual self-regulation by the lower classes, men and women alike.”261

While last dying speeches (which were often dictated by ministers to the condemned and perhaps even rehearsed prior to the final spectacular moment of death) fit well into Foucault’s , critics such as Patricia Marby Harrison have rightly noted that ballads are not speeches; the more fluid, reproducible, unstable musical form of the ballads has the potential to resist and disrupt authoritative narratives as much as bolster them. Unlike last dying speeches, ballads are not necessarily created by any authorities—indeed, their provenance, as well as their intended audience, is essentially unknowable—and they are often sung and sold by ballad mongers stereotypically operating on the edges of the law. She contends, like Bruce Smith, that readings of the goodnight ballads have to take performance

259 Sharpe, “‘Last Dying Speeches,’”156. 260 Sharpe, “‘Last Dying Speeches,’” 163. 261Stuart Kane, “Wives with Knives: Early Modern Murder Ballads and the Transgressive Commodity,” Criticism 38 (1996): 232.

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conditions into consideration, and submits that depending on the delivery of the ballad, the work could call attention to the attempts at control as much as foster them.262

Other critics have questioned the Foucauldian account of the stage of execution in early modern England. When Peter Lake and Michael Questier look at last dying speeches and the history of gallows scenes, they find that while the state did make an effort to have criminals repent and broadcast their contrition on the scaffold in order to reinforce the ideological legitimacy of the state, it does not necessarily follow that religious belief in general and the expression of repentance in particular is always and easily manipulated by authorities. They point out that an insistence on innocence in a last dying speech could undermine the legitimacy of the justice system because the stakes of not confessing one’s sins before death were so high; only a true innocent or completely depraved reprobate would risk eternal damnation simply to falsely protest their innocence. The stalwart convict could stir the sympathies of the crowd and create a sense of doubt in the fairness of the state and its justice. Religious belief here is not simply a tool imposed on the masses in order to create a climate of self-regulation. It is something sincerely believed and sufficiently separated from the aims of the state that it can cause the populace to question the wisdom of their earthly governors.263 Debora Shuger takes the critique further by questioning whether we have misunderstood the aims of stage-managed public executions. She posits that the goal of these public executions was not to encourage obedience but to “affirm the Christian character of English justice by making visible, both as ritual and text, its work of reconciling sinners, saving souls, offering mercy to even the most ungodly.”264

There is room for the scaffold to be a space of more than state-backed ideological control in Lorna Hutson’s exploration of the limits of Foucault’s model for understanding early modern dramatic narrative.265 Hutson argues that the spectacle of the scaffold, in which the body of

262 Patricia Marby Harrison, “Religious Rhetoric as Resistance in Early Modern Goodnight Ballads” in Crossing Boundaries: Issues of Cultural and Individual Identity in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Sally McKee (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), 107-125. 263 Peter Lake and Michael Questier, “Prisons, Priest and People.” 264 Debora Shuger, Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England, 129. 265 Lorna Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 65-66.

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the convict must display intense physical pain in order to reaffirm or recompense the harm done to the body of the King and the body politic, is part of a “specific system of evidence evaluation” that is unrelated to the English understanding of evidence or truth evaluation. Under the Roman Canon system, the verdict is decided in secret by professional judges who weigh different kinds of evidence, one of which would be the confession that is extracted under ; the tortured body that is produced on the scaffold is then the publically displayed proof of confession.266 Hutson explains that the English jury system is based on a public trial with witnesses giving evidence before a jury comprised of local citizens. The evidently tortured body is not necessary for the public verification and legitimation of the judicial findings because the public has already had a chance to witness the case against the accused. In this system, the climax of public and state justice is in the moment of the verdict and the sentencing; the execution, though absolutely public and organized by the state, is not the sole or even primary opportunity for public legitimation of the proceedings as it is under the inquisitorial system examined by Foucault. The scene of execution is then not necessarily exclusively about the state and its punishment; there is also room for it to be a still public yet personal moment of repentance between the convicted individual and their God.

If the scene on the scaffold has the potential to be a moment as personal as it is public, then the religiosity of the scene has the potential to be far more than a straightforward display in the service of the state. And because the scaffold makes not just death, but the human response to impending death so public, it provides an opportunity to illustrate, explore, display and comment on ideas such as repentance, forgiveness and grace. Likewise, when the goodnight ballads enact the relationship between the repentant sinner and God in the moment before death, the religious and political aims of the persuasive medium are deeply entangled and at times contradictory.

Goodnight Ballads and Religious Persuasion

266 Lorna Hutson, “Rethinking the ‘Spectacle of the Scaffold’: Juridical and English Revenge Tragedy” Representations 89.1 (2005): 34.

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Goodnight ballads are a persuasive medium; they are affective, emotional and the music causes people to reiterate, remember and internalize words and ideas in ways that speeches and sermons cannot. My argument here is that while the religious and political messaging of the songs may be intertwined, the goodnight ballads can be considered forms of religious persuasion because the political, moral and social aims of the songs are achieved through a formal and narrative framework that is a product and producer of Protestant ideas, approaches and assumptions. Moreover, the development of such a framework can be understood as emerging out of a tradition of balladic religious evangelism and the goodnight ballads represent a kind of straddling of overtly godly ballads and secular populist offerings.

Ballads (but not yet goodnight ballads) were considered by early reformers to be an effective persuasive medium and were therefore used to further the cause of Protestant reform in England during the movement’s early years. Between the 1550s and 1570s, many newly composed ballads could be considered ‘religious,’ deployed by reformers to spread the Protestant Word and decry Catholicism by capitalizing on the popular musical pastime and on pre-Reformation cultural forms. Some ‘godly’ ballads were directly moralized or Christianized versions of secular ballads, seen in the cascade of godly tunes that parodied the song ‘Row Well ye Mariners’: such as ‘Roo well ye marynors moralyzed’, ‘Row well, Godes Mariners’, and ‘Row well ye Christes Mariners.’267 Others were religio-political—virulently anti-papist screeds or warnings about the dangers of the political pope or Catholicism in general. Some worked to help with the transition to bible/book-based religion, while still others taught the tenets of Protestantism (like the salvation through Christ alone) or gave musical opportunities to showcase prominent Protestants who would discuss such ideas.268

In the early years, reformers made use of the ballads for two primary reasons: firstly, they provided an opportunity to spread new Protestant ideas as widely as possible by pressing older, existing forms of entertainment, communication and persuasion into reforming service; additionally, they could replace bawdy secular songs with something more godly in content,

267 Simpson, The British Broadside Ballad, 619. 268 For a thorough treatment of godly ballads, see Tessa Watt, “Chapter 2: A godly ballad to a godly tune,” in Cheap Print, 39-73.

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but still widely appealing, familiar and fun to sing. But while ballads appear to have been an important weapon in the persuasive arsenal of the early English Protestants, they began to fall out of favour with reformers closer to the end of the sixteenth century. Although precise numbers are difficult to ascertain, Tessa Watt has attempted to chart the percentage of ballads that could have been considered religious in this period. She finds that in the earlier Elizabethan period, from 1560-88, a minimum of over one third of ballads produced could be considered ‘godly ballads,’ but for the period between 1588 and 1625, the number drops to approximately 19 percent.269 This finding accords with Patrick Collinson’s theory that posits a shift in English religious thought taking place about 1580 from ‘iconoclasm’ to ‘iconophobia,’ or moving from an attack on specific images to a general hostility towards all images or forms of communication that seem somehow contaminated with Catholicism or immorality.270

Although Watt’s findings support Collinson’s thesis in that the number of newly composed godly ballads decline after the 1580s and beyond, she also discovers that existing religious ballads have a certain staying power. She identifies the year of 1624-1625, in which a syndicate of ‘ballad partners’ registered 128 ballads on December 14, 1624. Unlike most previous registrations of ballads, those in this ‘stock’ were not newly composed but were old ballads that were re-registered in order to allow their printers the right to print and distribute them. These ballads were primarily Elizabethan and fully one-third of them can be considered religious or godly. Watt notes the importance of the high religious component of the stock, “Before this, the Registers yield a picture primarily of the new ballads written in any given year, not of ballads being reprinted and still circulating.”271 She makes the point that while religious ballads comprised a smaller percentage of the whole trade by the 1620s, it is possible or even likely that for each godly ballad included in the 1624 stock the output

269 Because of the low survival rate of sixteenth century broadsides, Watt looks to the titles recorded in the Stationer’s Register, which appear to have recorded about 65% of extant ballads. Since Watt only has access to the titles and not to the content of the ballads, she categorized a ballad as ‘religious’ if it mentioned God, religion, the pope or papists. This of course causes a certain ‘loss’ of religious ballads, as sometimes titles such as ‘Northumberland Newes’ belie the rabidly anti-Catholic nature of its content (goodnight ballads would not be counted as religious according to this criteria). Watt, Cheap Print, 47. 270 Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England, 94-126. 271 Watt, Cheap Print, 47.

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was much higher than when they were originally written: “The print runs were probably larger, distribution was better organized, and the greater emphasis on woodcuts and tunes meant that the ballads were reaching more people on the fringes of literacy. The seventeenth-century stock ballad tells us little about the situation at the cutting edge of Protestant reform, but perhaps much more about the religious tastes of the wider public.”272 So while religious ballads had fallen out of favour with those on an evangelical mission, they had not necessarily fallen out of favour with the public. People apparently enjoyed moralizing ballads, ballads that warn of the spiritual repercussions for profligate behaviour, examples of godly living and repentance, or ballads that recount popular tales from the bible. They enjoyed them enough to continue buying them for years and years.

It is not surprising, then, that the goodnight ballad seems to rise just as newly composed, explicitly godly ballads are on the wane. Though the lack of records make precise dating difficult, goodnight ballads that conform to the formal and narrative conventions identified earlier in the chapter seem to appear around the mid-1570s with ballads such as those of Anne Saunders (1573?) and Mannington (1576). These new ballads likely exploited a kind of religious appetite as they contain all the ingredients that made godly ballads appealing: meditations on the wages of sin, tales of repentance and salvation, examples of the good death, familiar and singable tunes. For example, in The Complaint of Mrs. Page for causing her Husband to be Murthered, for the love of George Strangwidge, who were executed together, the ballad assumes a certain familiarity with the well-publicized crime in which a young woman and her lover are convicted of murdering the old wealthy husband her parents had forced her to marry. The ballad is one of three on the subject—two from the perspective of the young woman, Mrs. Page (or Eulalia) and the other in the voice of her lover, George Strangwidge—and each ballad is something of a psychological investigation of the motivations behind the crime and the feelings of repentance. Accordingly, Mrs. Page addresses God directly in three distinct stanzas, and the ballad peaks in the final stanza: “And now O Christ to thee I yield my breath,/ Strengthen my faith in bitter pangs of Death:/ Pardon

272 Watt, Cheap Print, 82.

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my faults and follies I thee pray,/ And with my blood wash thou my sins away.”273 While the ballad makes use of the familiar trope of Christ’s blood washing away her sins, the turn to Christ at the end of the ballad is not an afterthought—it is personal, forceful and anguished. The ballad may foist the from the perpetrators to the parents for ignoring true love in favour of wealth, but it also models a relationship between the dying self and God with its acceptance of death, acknowledgement of sin, and hope for redemption.

Since Watt’s research shows that the appetite for popular moralizing songs that touch on important religious ideas such as repentance and salvation continued to be strong after the 1580s, that appetite could be satisfied in part by the goodnight ballad. Patricia Marby Harrison provides evidence that these ballads were widely regarded as religiously motivational works. She quotes an anecdote related by Thomas Lodge in 1596 regarding the interpretation of the ballad of Anne Saunders. Lodge reveals that the woman had posted the ballad up in her house, saying “Shee will reckon you vp the storie of Mistris SANDERS, and weepe at it, and turne you to the Ballad ouer her chimney, and bid you looke there, there is a goodly sample.”274 This ordinary woman considered Anne Saunders to be an exemplar, and likely not because of her extreme retaliation to her husband’s brutality. As Marby Harrison rightly notes, the woman is responding to the story emotionally and appears to find Anne a ‘goodly sample’ worthy of tears because she is a model of heartfelt and religious repentance.275 The musical example of a murderer serene in his or her own salvation overwhelms the moralizing or political message that warns regular folks to remain law- abiding lest every-day sins lead to heinous crimes. Instead, the ballads remind those who commit small, daily sins of the importance of faith, repentance and of God’s capacity for grace and forgiveness.

273“The sorrowful complaint of Mistris Page for causing her husband to be murthered for love of George Strangwidg, who were executed both together,” in The Shirburn Ballads 1585-1616, ed. Andrew Clark (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), 111-113. 274 Rollins, Old English Ballads, 341; Marby Harrison, “Religious Rhetoric,”112. 275 There is a tradition in which the repentant condemned are considered closer to God because of their imminent death. During the eight months between her trial and execution, Elizabeth Caldwell converted prisoners and offered spiritual advice to many people who came to visit. See Gilbert Dugdale, A true discourse of the practises of Elizabeth Caldwell, Ma: Ieffrey Bownd, Isabell Hall widdow, and George Fernely, on the parson of Ma: Thomas Caldwell, in the county of Chester, to haue murdered and poysoned him, with diuers others Together with her manner of godly life during her imprisonment, her arrainement and execution, with Isabell Hall widow, (London: James Robert for John Busbie, 1604), STC 7293.

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The connection between the goodnight ballads and religious sentiment can be discerned from Abraham Holland’s satire on the public’s affection for balladry:

As in North-Villages, where every line Of Plumpton Parke is held a work divine. If o’re the Chymney they some ballad have Of Chevy-Chase, or of some branded slave Hang’d at Tyborne, they their Mattins make it And Vespers too, and for the Bible take it.276

The goodnight ballads are particularly singled out by Holland as substituting for religion among the uneducated masses, mocking the notion that the emotionally wrought last words of a recently hanged convict could possibly supplant the example of the crucified Christ. While this satirical verse almost certainly vastly overstates the case, it is no accident that goodnight ballads are the religious supplanters as opposed to ballads of miraculous births or the story of lovers. Goodnight ballads, considered to be religious or at least morally instructive, shared a certain gravitas with religious song, and the musical associations demonstrate that goodnight ballads were considered to be in the same ‘religious’ category as more obviously godly ballads. Tunes that were previously associated with godly ballads migrated to goodnight ballads. In the quotation from Looke About You above, Block wanted to set his goodnight ballad to either ‘Labandala Shot’ (a tune well known for its connection to the goodnight ballad about Mannington that will be investigated later in the chapter) or ‘Row well ye mariners,’ (which had so many ‘godly’ variations that it likely became a tune associated with godly ballads more than anything else).277 The quotation shows a kind of associative migration between the godly tune and the hanging tune—both are serious and weighty subjects that concern issues of God, death, and salvation.

276 Watt, Cheap Print, 39; Abraham Holland, “A continued inquisition against paper-persecutors,” in John Davies, A scourge for paper-persecutors, or papers complaint, compil’d in ruthful rimes, against the paper- spoylers of these times (London: H. Holland and G. Gibbs, 1625) STC 6340, sig. A2v. 277 There is no record of any goodnight ballad set to ‘Row well ye mariners’—as far as we know it was predominantly associated with godly ballad. Claude Simpson surmises that this quotation is evidence that there must have been goodnight ballads set to this tune that did not survive. Simpson, The British Broadside Ballad, 618.

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Moreover, not only were ‘godly’ tunes associated with goodnight ballads, but the tunes traditionally connected to goodnight ballads were considered appropriate for more religious song. John Rhodes’ The countrie mans comfort. Or religious recreations (1588) suggests some musical and religious pastimes for pious people. His book includes a metrical version of the Lord’s Prayer and Ten Commandments, as well as versified graces and prayers, carols for Christmas and songs on eternal salvation versus temporal pleasure. He set his verses to ballad tunes traditionally associated with either religious song or goodnight ballad: ‘Fortune my Foe’ and ‘Labandala Shot’ both make appearances in his work.278 This kind of intermingling between grotesque accounts of the death of convicts and religious song is exactly the reason that reformers moved away from ballads and ballad tunes in their evangelical work, but in the minds of many, godly ballads and goodnight ballads seem to have been considered categorically similar.

This is not to say that goodnight ballads were composed with the same religiously persuasive aims as the godly ballads from the previous generation. They tend to have no fixed authorship and it is difficult to assign any motivation for their aside, perhaps, from the financial. However, the inherent persuasiveness of the form is strong. Christopher Marsh notes that broadsides acted as a musical platform for the rehearsal of current debates, but he claims that “there is little point in seeking to categorise the ballad as either a tool of oppression or a weapon of resistance. It was both and neither. Most fruitfully, we might regard it as an instrument of negotiation.”279 Marsh’s comments apply directly to the discussion of the goodnight ballads. They are still deeply persuasive and widely considered to be serious and religious in flavour, but their precise aims and goals are unstable and difficult to unilaterally categorize. Some are more political, others religiously traditionalist, some overtly Protestant; some are sympathetic to the convict while others relish the justice of the sentence. There are some explicitly evangelically Protestant goodnight ballads, like the

278 John Rhodes, The countrie mans comfort. Or Religious recreations fitte for all well disposed persons. Which was printed in the yeere of our Lord 1588. And since corrected, amended, and enlarged by the same author (London: M. Dawson, 1637) STC 20961. 279 Marsh, Music and Society, 281.

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ballads of martyrdom discussed above. There is even a Catholic example of a goodnight ballad of martyrdom, but it is only to be found in manuscript form.280

While they may be among the inheritors of the religious ballad, the goodnight ballads are not generally—as a body of work—written and conceived with overtly confessional aims; they instead articulate a more generic approach to repentance and salvation. The uniformity of the ballads comes from their recognizably conventional form, and it is my contention that the inherent and even religious persuasiveness is determined by the formal conventions of the goodnight ballads. The religiosity can be found buried in the very conventions of the ballad. When the intimate, participatory, and affective ‘I’ subject turns his or her voice to address God directly, asking for forgiveness and displaying repentance in deeply personal language, as is conventional in almost all goodnight ballads, the ballad enacts a direct, personal and unmediated relationship between the self and God. The singers who participate directly in the ballad and inhabit the subject position of the convict then re-enact this relationship, practicing it for themselves and repeatedly displaying it for listeners. The participatory drive of the first person perspective makes the ballads that much more persuasive; the ballads do more than model a Protestant spiritual relationship, they provide an opportunity to repeatedly rehearse one.

There is also a notable absence of any intermediaries referred to in the ballads—God or Christ is the only confessor mentioned—even when we know that ministers were integral to the conversion and repentance of the convict. The role of intercessors and the importance of ministering third parties in the penitence process is erased in the ballads, thereby magnifying the sense of the individual’s unobstructed relationship with God. Anne Saunders, for example, was famously spiritually tended to by several ministers (including one who fell in love with her). Her ballad makes no mention of any assistance. Instead of demonstrating the work that ministers did in moving the convicts towards confession and contrition, the ballads often depict the moment of conversion from evil murderer to repentant sinner as an immediate, dramatic and soul-destroying change of heart that occurs upon the commission of

280 “True Christian hearts, cease to lament” claims to be the final words of John Thewlis, a priest executed at Lancaster in 1616. “True Christian hearts, cease to lament,” in Old English Ballads 1553-1524, 79-86.

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the crime or apprehension and incarceration, thereby following the Calvinist model of divine grace at work in the sinning soul. The moment that God’s grace descends is the dramatic climax of the ballad, rather than the murder itself. In “The Unnatural Wife,” Alice Davis stabs her husband in the heart and then immediately runs out of the house “quite undon,” whereupon she confesses to her neighbours. She repents immediately, even before the constables could take her away: “Life faine I would haue fetcht againe,/ but now it was too late,/ I did repent I him had slaine,/ in this my heavie state.” 281 The process of repentance is described as sudden, dramatic and involving a kind of loss of composure appropriate to the gravity of the act as well as to a sudden dissolution of the sinning soul and subsequent reconstruction of a believing penitent in a newly “heavie state.”

The reception of God’s grace is likewise dramatized in “The woefull lamentacon of mrs. Anne Saunders” discussed at the opening of this chapter. This ballad is primarily addressed to God and Christ and dwells on Anne’s sin, the state of her soul and her sorrow. The multiple stanzas that detail Christ’s sacrifice lead up to her formal declaration “my Sines I doe Repent,” illustrating that Christ and his forgiveness catalyzes her repentance, not the other way around. She is deeply assured of her salvation in Christ. Here God’s grace is utterly unmerited, bestowed upon the worst of sinners. This is not the stuff of sophisticated theological argumentation; these ballads spread Protestant in a simple, demonstrative way. They inculcate an understanding of repentance, grace and salvation that may, after repeated listening, have laid the groundwork for a possible conversion, or more likely, for casual believers to reinforce their faith. With the constant repetition of such ideas in popular culture, they begin to become part of received wisdom, whether doctrinally precise or not.

Even though they are not purposively and didactically evangelical, the goodnight ballads remain effective modes of religious persuasion; but what and how they communicate are essentially different from sermons, pamphlets, private conversations or even metrical psalms.

281“The unnaturall Wife: Or, The lamentable Murther, of one goodman Davis, Lock-Smith in Tutle-streete, who was stabbed to death by his Wife, on the 29 of June, 1628. For which fact, She was Arraigned, Condemned, and Adiudged, to be Burnt to Death in Smithfield, the 12 of July 1628” in A Pepysian Garland, 284-287.

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Sermons and pamphlets could often be polemical, aiming to persuade by either inciting fear at the radical ideas of the opposing side or seeking to shift the poles of the conversation to include more extreme positions by preaching primarily to the converted; metrical psalms were written, adopted, published and integrated into the service with deeply Protestant and evangelical goals in mind. By contrast, as a body of work, goodnight ballads were not self- conscious, purposeful vehicles of Protestant doctrine aimed at converting the masses. Sometimes, individual ballads may mix religious belief, folk tradition and superstition. However, because their form emerges from certain received Protestant habits of thought, each iteration still reinforces, reflects, magnifies, revitalizes and propagates these same ideas regardless of the particularities of individual ballads. The ballads build the experience of conversion or of finding and communicating with God into the form of the song so that singers and listeners can vicariously experience the turn to God, reminding them of their own faith and reinforcing their own beliefs, arguably as potently and as repetitively as any sermon. Such an imprecise method of persuasion could be effective in creating generations of people with ingrained assumptions about spiritual interiority, grace and repentance, cultivating a receptivity to more precisely Protestant ideas.

II. Misogonus and Popular Musical Imitation

While the goodnight ballads do tend to have a generally Protestant affiliation, the particular confessional bent of the goodnight ballads is peripheral to the point that I am making here. This chapter investigates how the ballads function as a form of religious persuasion, how their very structure is integral to what and how they persuade, and how such persuasive methods translate onto the early modern stage. I will explore these ideas by looking at two very different plays: Misogonus, a Cambridge school play of uncertain authorship likely dating from the later 1570s that went unpublished and unnoticed by scholars until a manuscript emerged in the nineteenth century; and Eastward Ho, the well-known satire collaboratively written for the Blackfriars playhouse by Chapman, Marston and Jonson in

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1605 that was so public it landed two of its authors in jail.282 Despite their differences, the two works share the template of the prodigal play and contain parodies of the same goodnight ballad: Mannington’s “I wail in woe, I plunge in pain.” It is not surprising to find goodnight ballads in prodigal plays. In addition to sharing themes of repentance, both forms revel in the portrayal of a multitude of sins only to safely resolve such enjoyment by bolstering established religious and moral codes. In addition to injecting a bit of musical entertainment into the dramatic action, the staged goodnight ballad is deployed in both plays in an attempt to demonstrate the sincerity of the singer’s repentance, proof of which is important to the dramatic narrative.

Even though Misogonus is an obscure school play rather than something written for the commercial stage, I want to contrast it with Eastward Ho because it demonstrates how forms have cultural significance in time. The direct comparison between the treatment of the same ballad in plays of similar genres shows far different uses and expectations of the dramatized ballad. When Misogonus was being performed in Cambridge, the playwright employed a popular local ballad that had both serious and sensationalist flavours. In 1577, the Mannington ballad was newly available, but it is not clear that there were very many other ballads of the same, recognizable type. So while the ballad in the play follows many of the conventions of the goodnight ballad, it possibly does so out of fidelity to the Mannington ballad rather than an adherence to an entire genre. Thirty years later, Eastward Ho capitalizes not just on a single ballad, but on an entire tradition.

Without a formal tradition to give the song a meaningful framework, the Misogonus ballad is reflective and illustrative, but it does not do very much in the play. The primary purpose of the privately sung ballad is to convey the singer’s completely sincere repentance in the face of utter disappointment and debasement. It is persuasive in a simple and representative way, in that it persuades the audience of the authenticity of a character’s feelings, but not in an active, self-conscious way, in which the persuasion does something in the drama. The ballad

282 Lester E. Barber, editor of Misogonus, dates the composition of the play from between 1564 at the very earliest to 1577, the date listed on the manuscript. The fact that the play contains an imitation of “I wail in woe” dates at least that section of the play, if not the whole work to the latter date of 1577, since the ballad appears only in 1576. Lester E. Barber, “Introduction,” Misogonus (New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1979), 1-81.

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is a peculiar dramatic choice because goodnight ballads are never spontaneous, unself- conscious, heartfelt confessions; they are always self-conscious, public performances of imagined confessions. This distinction would seem to work against my argument that forms of persuasion were usually doing something persuasive when deployed on stage. But this argument relies on widespread cultural meaning of the forms; when the form itself is only just developing, so too are its persuasive implications. Instead of doing something broadly persuasive, the ballad in Misogonus is more narrowly used—it serves to solve the problem of how to convincingly represent private internal confession in a self-consciously Protestant play.283

The question of confessional representation would have been an issue after the Reformation, considering that the restructuring of the sacrament of penance transformed the practice of confession. Sarah Beckwith charts this transition in Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness, particularly considering the effects of the abolition of auricular confession. After outlining the links between the external judicial forum and the internal sacramental forum of pre-Reformation confession, Beckwith contends that without auricular confession, post-Reformation confessions in England become both more private and more public. They were more private because in the reformed doctrine of justification, no particular human action could mitigate human sin. Christ alone justifies the faith of the undeserving sinner. Priests, who previously heard confession, therefore had no authority to bestow or convey forgiveness and penitential actions are ineffective. Confession became entirely private: an unmediated airing of the conscience, heard by God alone. Before the Reformation, the internal confessional forum could stave off social problems before they became matters for the public authorities, but after the Reformation, the only place for sins to be heard and judged by human ears was in public: “sins that previously may have been adjudicated in the interior forum of the confessional now found their way into the public juridical setting of the ecclesiastical courts. . . the internal, sacramental forum disappeared but the external judicial structure remained.”284 So in the place of the private but mediated auricular confessions,

283The play’s Protestant tendencies are revealed in such characters as the drunken and corrupt priest. 284 Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness, 50.

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more public confessions—particularly in the cases of criminal or social wrongdoing— became the norm.

Such solidification of the lines between public and private has implications for the representation of private confession on the public stage. If confession has become either public, juridical and theatrical or deeply personal, quiet and private, then how do post- Reformation playwrights represent the internal repentance to God on a public stage without a ritualized structure like auricular confession and in a way that is still interesting for an audience to watch? For Misogonus, the Mannington ballad—a performance of private confession—seems to offer a solution, but because in the late 1570s the form was likely not fully developed, its dramatic utility is limited. By contrast, Eastward Ho makes use of the social dynamic inherent in goodnight balladry in order for the singer to self-consciously plead his own sincerity to the stage audience; the personal confession to God becomes part of the artifice inherent in his performance and it is the performance that makes for a more effective persuasion. Some of the differences between the use and meaning of the goodnight ballad parodies can be attributed to the obvious generic and quality differences between the two plays, but my sense is that they are also reflective of the ballad’s evolution from an intriguing and not firmly defined publically sung representation of confession that drew on popular subjects to a recognizable, conventional form that was a heady mix of performativity, religiosity, participation and voyeurism. While in Misogonus the song reflects and communicates a change of heart, in Eastward Ho, the ballad attempts to enact and prove such a change.

Given the subject of goodnight ballads, one would expect that the ballad in Misogonus to be sung by the newly reformed son at the end of a prodigal play. Instead, it is the father of the wayward youth, Philogonus, who sings a parody of a famous goodnight ballad after he is publically humiliated by his son Misogonus. After trying and failing to reform his reckless child, Philogonus finally threatens to disown Misogonus for constant drinking, carousing, whoring and flagrant disrespect. Misogonus publically scoffs at the threats, claiming “Let him say what he will, I’ll do what I list/. . . I’ll never strive with him more./ His lands are

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mine as sure as a club knave, let the world wag.”285 After bemoaning his situation and contemplating death, Philogonus’ friend Eupelas reminds him to trust in Jesus. Philogonus dismisses his friend and when entirely alone onstage, launches into the ballad “Oh mighty Jove, some take/ On me, poor wretch, for Christes’ sake.” The miserable father begins his ballad with a plea for succor, addressing Christ as “my only aid,” and then continues by confessing the sin of sparing the rod and spoiling his only child: “‘Tis I, ‘tis I, that am to blame. Myself, myself, deserveth shame.” In a subsequent stanza he claims that he could bear the loss of anything else in his life – his lands, his wealth, even the death of his son – more than his child’s own spiral toward self-destruction. He then addresses imagined parental listeners, offering himself as an example of poor parenting: “A good example here you see./ All parents, oh take heed by me. If you detest unquietness/ Or if you love true ,/ Nurture your youth in awe and fear.” He finally addresses God again, pleading to Him for pardon and help.286

This song is not a goodnight ballad—Philogonus does not think that he will die for his sin of parental laxity—but it is an imitation of the Mannington ballad. Philogonus’ song evokes Mannington’s in its metre, its style and diction, the subject of repentance and his warning to others to learn from his example and not to make the same mistakes. Perhaps the most obvious signal that Philogonus’ ballad is a parody of Mannington’s goodnight ballad is that it appears to have been set to the same tune; in the play, the directions call our attention to “The Song, to the Tune of ‘Labondolose Hoto.’” The tune is generally known as ‘Labandala Shot,’ and the Misogonus reference could just be a kind of approximate transliteration of the foreign-sounding tune name, or a purposeful, even humourous corruption. 287 In any event, scholars of ballads and early modern folk music agree that ‘Labondolose Hoto’ and ‘Labandala Shot’ must refer to the same tune.288

285 Misogonus, ed. Lester E. Barber (New York: Garland Publishing Inc, 1979), II.ii.378-381 286 Misogonus, II.ii.416-476 287 The origin of both the tune and name “Labandala Shot” appear to be continental but Simpson notes that there is no satisfactory explanation of the tune name, and there are no known continental antecedents of the tune to help solve the case. In 1906 J.S. Farmer advanced a theory that perhaps the Misogonus name was closer to the original than the tune name given in the Mannington ballad, arguing that “Labondolose Hoto” is a rendering of La bonne douloureuse hauteur, but this is just one of several unsubstantiated theories. Simpson, 420. 288 See Simpson, The British Broadside Ballad, 420; Rollins, A Handful, 65.

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Labandala Shot is a sixteenth century dance tune that can be found in several manuscript lute books, but it is overwhelmingly associated with “A woefulle ballade made by master George Mannygton an houre before he suffered at Cambridge castell 1576,” first registered by Richard Jones on November 7 1576. While there is no extant copy of the broadside, the ballad was reprinted in A Handful of Pleasant Delites (1584) and it appears to have been well-known before its appearance in that collection.289 Certainly by the seventeenth century the ballad was firmly woven into popular consciousness. References to the opening line “I wail in woe, I plunge in paine” can be found all over popular literature and drama: it is sung by the pedant Aminidab in How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad (1602); in Samuel Rowlands’ Good Newes and Bad Newes (1622) a maid sings on her virginals “I wail in woe, my Knight doth plunge in paine”; the bigamist Chartley in Thomas Heywood’s The Wise-Woman of Hogsdon (printed 1638) chastises his second wife Luce saying “Come, come, away with this wailing in woe./ If thou putst finger in the eye a little longer,/ I shall plunge in pain too, presently”; in Match at Midnight (attributed at least partially to William Rowley and printed 1633), Randall sings “her wail in woe, her plunge in pain.”290 For all of the song’s popularity, we know very little about George Mannington himself. The Eastward Ho reference to him as a highwayman who decapitated a horse with one blow is our sole indication of what his precise sin (and profession) may have been, indicating that perhaps Mannington was at least somewhat notorious and well-known for some time after his death (perhaps because of the ballad). We also do not know why this particular goodnight ballad was so popular for so long.

289 By 1580, before the printing of A Handful, John Heyricke gives us a sense of the ballad’s popularity in a letter written to his brother, asking him to send “one hundred of ballits, as many of shocking of the shits [shaking of the sheets] as yow cane get and as many of mannington.” Why Heyricke was in the market for so many ballads at once is a bit of a mystery but Christopher Marsh guesses that he wanted to provide them as entertainment for his labourers. Marsh, Music and Society, 258. 290 Thomas Heywood?, A pleasant conceited comedie, wherein is shewed, how a man may chuse a good wife from a bad As it hath bene sundry times acted by the Earle of Worcesters seruants (London: Printed by T. Creede for Mathew Lawe, 1602), STC 5594, sig. Ev; Samual Rowlands, Good Newes and Bad Newes (London: Henry Bell, 1622), STC 21382, sig. Bv; Thomas Heywood, The vvise-woman of Hogsdon A comedie (London: M. P[arsons] for Henry Shephard, 1638) STC 13370, sig. I; William Rowley, A match at mid-night A pleasant comoedie (London: Aug. Mathewes, for William Sheares, 1633), STC 21421, sig. I4v.

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The play’s use of ‘Labandala Shot’ would have made the imitation instantly recognizable to an audience of Cambridge schoolboys familiar with the musical rendering of a recent, well- publicized, and very local execution. The tune evokes the spectre of the gallows and links the prodigal son’s deviant downward spiral to his father’s humiliation, so that the musical form of the father’s repentance foreshadows the possibility of his wayward’s son’s execution. By emulating the Mannington ballad, Philogonus can import a sense of dramatic seriousness and authenticity to his confession. With no stage audience to perform for, Philogonus appears utterly artless, as though the song of repentance just pours forth from the heart without any thought to how it would be heard by anyone except God.

The song conveys a sense of prayerfulness, religiosity and guilelessness, as though crafted by the playwright to seem uncrafted by the character, all of which convinces the audience of the sincerity of the character’s self-knowledge and repentance. But is this necessary? Is the audience not already persuaded of Philogonus’ genuine repudiation of his lenient childrearing practices by the first two acts of his sorrowful moaning? Perhaps, like the goodnight ballads generally do, the song bolsters and reinforces ideas already introduced and understood. The musical moment just goes further than his earlier conversations, signifying the lowest point of self-blame and the instant when he gives up trying to fix his son or his situation, relying on God alone. This is important to the plot because the desperate musical prayers to God set the stage for the prayers to be answered in the next act. The song at the end of Act II is less a complex persuasive moment and more a plot explanation, providing a reason for the timing of the sudden miraculous reappearance of the long lost son in Act III.291

This usage feels strange for a goodnight ballad. They are usually so performative; balladeers perform a convict’s performance of repentance and reception of grace. The goodnight ballads are compelling because of their combination of public and private, of overt performativity and personal expression. They are not spontaneous, private expressions, but

291 In another reading the use of a goodnight ballad makes Philogonus’ distress somewhat ridiculous as his sin pales in comparison to the sins of murderers and highwaymen Could this moment of sincerity be tinged with gentle mockery of Philogonus’ inflated sense of abandonment and persecution by his use (or misuse) of a ballad of last resort? The text feels more straightforward than this interpretation but it could be played this way in performance.

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fictionalized public repentances. Without the stage audience so vital to the context of the goodnight ballad, there is no such negotiation in Philogonus’ song; instead of a deeply participatory negotiation in which the fate of the singer’s soul and public memory hangs in the balance, the song is simply used to establish and convey sincerity to the theatre audience.

The incongruousness of this choice could be attributed to the immaturity of the likely student dramatist, but my sense is that the Misogonus song charts an earlier moment in the evolution of the goodnight ballad. In the late 1570s, it appears that goodnight ballads were only beginning to widely emerge. Hyder Rollins considers the Mannington song to have set much of the template for subsequent goodnights ballads, claiming that “it was regarded as a “goodnight” or last farewell, par excellence,” and points to the apology to parents (“my friend and parents, where euer you be/ Full little do you thinke on me”) and address to the audience (“You students all that present be,/To view my fatall destinie”) that were reiterated in various forms for years to come.292 It is difficult to find other goodnight ballads that date back quite as early as the Mannington example, but sixteenth century ballads were generally not well recorded and many of them have been lost, a knowledge gap compounded by the missing stationers records from 1571-1576 (the Anne Saunders ballad, as discussed, could date from 1573, but it could also have emerged some years later). While the Mannington ballad seems to have been one of the earlier examples of the goodnight ballad, it seems unlikely to have been the first of its kind. There were likely a few others but not so many as to be a recognizable balladic sub-genre.293

Considering the Misogonus ballad to be an imitation of a song whose form was in emergence could help to explain why such a public and self-consciously persuasive musical form is used for an exclusively private moment in the play. In the late 1570s, the goodnight ballad was in the process of becoming, but the persuasive and performative associations may not have been so strongly entrenched. The goodnight ballad may have seemed to be a good choice for portraying a private confession on the stage: such a scene could combine the personal

292 Mannington ballad, ln 31-32, ln 51-52. 293 In Misogonus, Philogonus’ ballad deviates from ‘I wail in woe’—by turning to address God—in ways that align with goodnight ballad conventions, indicating that the song could possibly be reflecting other confession ballads or poems beyond Mannington. It is also possible that such deviations reflect other forms of confession.

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repentance of private religious confession with some very current and entertaining music. But while the ballads may have been more significantly malleable at this point, they were also less representationally powerful when dramatically reproduced. By the time of Eastward Ho, however, the goodnight ballad is an established, persuasive type of ballad with distinct conventions and the satirical humour of the play relies on the audience’s familiarity with the goodnight ballad genre. It seems more likely that, by the turn of the seventeenth century, goodnight ballads on stage would be performed in a fictional public setting and would be actively deployed with more complex and persuasive aims in mind. And this is exactly what we find in Eastward Ho.

III. Singing Goodnight in Eastward Ho

Written by Chapman, Jonson and Marston and performed at the Blackfriars in 1605, Eastward Ho is a sharp satire aimed at the prodigal plays popular in public theatres. The play (and its satirical humour) comes to a climax with a ballad entitled “Repentance,” performed with gusto by the prodigal Quicksilver. In comparison to the example from Misogonus, this goodnight ballad demonstrates the increased awareness of the social and persuasive value of the goodnight ballad by the seventeenth century; the song is sung in a communal setting and is self-consciously deployed by Quicksilver with persuasive intent. Quicksilver himself identifies his ballad’s indebtedness to George Mannington’s popular and well known precursor claiming that he wrote it when his “spirits were oppressed” and that it is “in imitation of Mannington’s: he that was hanged at Cambridge, that cut off the horse’s head at a blow.”294 There is good reason for Quicksilver to have death in mind. At the prodigal’s hearing, Touchstone forecasts the younger man’s ride to Tyburn, summarizing the felon’s downward spiral by predicting a slide towards death: “of sloth cometh pleasure, of pleasure cometh riot, of riot comes whoring, of whoring comes spending, of spending comes want, of want comes theft, of theft comes hanging; and there is my Quicksilver fixed”(4.2.315-319).

294 , Ben Jonson, John Marston, Eastward Ho, ed. R.W. Van Fossen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979), 5.5.35, 37-38. All subsequent citations for the play will be found in textually embedded parentheses.

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These pronouncements give Quicksilver a plausible reason to psychologically prepare for death by using a goodnight ballad to publicize his sentiments.

The sincerity of Quicksilver’s conversion is a central critical issue in Eastward Ho, as his final sincerity or insincerity changes the satiric message of the notoriously slippery play. Some critics consider Quicksilver’s performance evidence of the insincerity of his conversion from spendthrift social-climber to thankful, thrifty, hardworking Protestant. Brian Gibbons claims that Quicksilver’s public singing implies hypocrisy “simply by the fact that he expresses [his repentance] in Puritan jargon.” C.G. Petter, editor of the New Mermaids edition of Eastward Ho, contends that “Quicksilver’s repentance is more expedient than sincere” and Linda Phyllis Austern characterizes the performance as “magnificently insincere.”295 The play is too universally satirical for the ending to be played straight and Quicksilver’s piety is too overdrawn and subscribes too closely to the conventions of the conversion narrative to be genuine. He must therefore be ‘converting’ in order to dupe his mentor Touchstone and others into releasing him from prison.

Other interpretations have glossed over the satire of the play when it comes to the final prison conversions. David Nicol, in his review of the 2002 Royal Shakespeare Company’s performance of Eastward Ho, claims that the production “took the ending at face value, and Quicksilver’s repentance song was not represented comically. . . the absurdities (of the lyrics) were obscured in favour of focusing on the beauty of the music, so as to emphasise sentiment over satire.” Nicol’s comment underscores the centrality of the ballad to the play’s satire.296 While the latter interpretation is obviously problematic for a satire, the former approach creates a mean-spirited interpretation if the flawed but generally goodhearted Touchstone is gullibly converted by the prodigal’s false act of contrition. As much as Eastward Ho has fun at the expense of the taste of the attendees of public theatres, such a reading impoverishes its

295 Brian Gibbons, Jacobean City Comedy: A Study of Satiric Plays by Jonson, Marston and Middleton, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 11; C.G. Petter, ed., Eastward Ho, by Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston (Kent: Ernest Benn Limited, 1973), xxxvi; Linda Phyllis Austern, “Musical Parody in the Jacobean City Comedy,” Music and Letters, 66.4 (1985): 363. 296Nicol’s point also emphasizes the importance of musical performances to the interpretation of the ballads. David Nicol, "Review of Eastward Ho! performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Swan Theatre," Early Modern Literary Studies 8.2 (2002):22.1-12. http://purl.oclc.org/emls/08-2/eastrev.html

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more broadly aimed satire. Paul Stevens nicely articulates the duality at the heart of Eastward Ho by calling Quicksilver’s embrace of Touchstone’s ethos of thrift “difficult to take. . at face value” given the audience makeup and the “self-reflexive and anti-mimetic style” typical of the Blackfriars theatre in 1605. Quicksilver’s scripted, rehearsed, and reproduced musical repentance, he claims, calls the sincerity of the repentance into doubt as the whole performance may be mere artifice, and yet “the reality of the need for grace is not in doubt.”297

The ballad at the end of the play is at the centre of the debate regarding Quicksilver’s sincerity; the final act’s conversions, reconciliations and recognitions hinge on its persuasive success. In Eastward Ho, we hear the ballad play a much more social role than in Misogonus, thereby adding a layer of self-conscious performativity that invites the play audience to question Quicksilver’s motives and evaluate his sincerity for themselves. The other significant difference between the two parodies of the Mannington ballad is that by the seventeenth century the theatregoing public is familiar with the goodnight ballad genre and its social meanings. Such an audience would be able to recognize Quicksilver’s adherence to, and deviations from, not only the Mannington ballad but from the goodnight ballad tradition in general. Contrary to the critics who find Quicksilver’s version of his conversion too conventional to be sincere, the persuasive force of the goodnight ballad is to be found embedded in its conventions (the ‘I’ subject, the pleas to the audience, the warnings, the direct addresses to God) and his song can only be convincing by adhering to them.

Inasmuch as artifice can simulate sincerity, it can also facilitate, communicate and even help to create it. Quicksilver’s personal religious conviction and transformation is, in a way, impossible to discern because the screens of conventional actions become more important than the emotions that should drive them; but while this issue may be worthy of satire, the capacity for conventions to give shape, meaning, and even to create such honest emotions should not be discounted. In Eastward Ho, an understanding of the public use and

297Paul Stevens, “The New Presentism and its Discontents: Listening to Eastward Ho and Shakespeare’s Tempest in Dialogue,” in Rethinking from Shakespeare to Milton, eds. Ann Baynes Coiro and Thomas Fulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012),155,156.

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persuasive power of the conventional goodnight ballads sheds light on the satire and coercive intent of the final song; instead of dwelling on a debate regarding the sincerity and agenda of a single character, such a reading favours a larger commentary on how style, form and convention can simultaneously and uneasily both facilitate and subsume sincerity and honesty.

For Quicksilver, the ballad is not the only performance of his newfound piety, but it is the most public, powerful and persuasive one; it is the culmination of a series of devout performances, aimed at displaying and proving his conversion to his fellow prisoners, his jailer, his friends and co-workers, and most importantly, his employer. Like in Misogonus, the ballad is a kind of final proof of sincerity, a powerful culmination of a series of repentances or repentant acts that demonstrate the singer’s change of heart. The song’s effectiveness is heightened when prefaced by pious actions and religious signals. In Eastward Ho, instead of a dramatized epiphanic moment of conversion, the audience is subject to a series of reported pieces of evidence, so that the audience, like Touchstone, is slowly introduced to the idea of a reformed Quicksilver and is prepared to be persuaded by the time the ballad is performed. While goodnight ballads are effective persuaders, as discussed earlier, they are not generally catalysts of spiritual epiphanies and sudden conversions. Instead, they persuade successfully because they build on, solidify and remind listeners of religious and political arguments already introduced in other arenas. The ballads entrench and reinforce ideas, making them part of received wisdom and infiltrating the way people think. Quicksilver’s goodnight ballad works in a similar way. In order to be affected, his listeners need an introduction to the ideas presented in the song.

The first hint of Quicksilver’s change of heart comes from Wolf (the keeper of the prison), who visits Golding and Touchstone with letters of supplication from his prisoners. Wolf claims that he was persuaded to bring the letters because he was “never so mortified with any men’s discourse or behaviour in prison; yet I have had all sorts of me i’the kingdom under my keys, and almost of all i’the land, as Papist, Protestant, Puritan, Brownist, Anabaptist, Millenary, Family o’Love, Jew, Turk, Infidel Atheist, Good Fellow etc” (V.ii.31- 37). He describes Quicksilver as the most self-denying penitent ever hosted, evidenced by the

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prisoner’s absolute refusal of and comfort for himself. In addition to acts of self- sacrifice, Quicksilver also loudly demonstrates his new-found religious zeal by singing psalms all night, “edifying the whole prison,” and by reciting all of the stories from the Book of Martyrs and the Sick Man’s Salve from memory (V.ii.51-52). While such examples of piety may soften Touchstone’s heart, they are also humourous for the audience. Quicksilver’s newfound religion keeps the entire prison awake at night (including Wolf) and the keeper may well be supporting Quicksilver’s story of conversion because he wants the annoyingly enthusiastic convert pardoned and out of the prison as soon as possible. And while the humourous extremity of Quicksilver’s religion is not in itself cause to doubt his sincerity, there is something performative in all of the evidence cited by Wolf. Quicksilver indulges in classic outward displays of piety and conversion, performed with such gusto and then reported so breathlessly that it is hard to take his performance seriously, especially when acts such as psalm-singing were linked to hypocritical stage Puritans in the seventeenth century.

Indeed, questions about the legitimacy or nature of Quicksilver’s conversion are raised by Wolf’s subsequent anecdote, submitted to Touchstone as evidence of the prisoner’s change of heart. Wolf asserts:

He has converted one Fangs, a sergeant, a fellow could neither write nor read; he was called the Bandog o’the Counter, and he has brought him already to pare his nails, and say his prayers, and tis hoped he will sell his place shortly and become an intelligencer. (V.ii.67-72)

There is a long history of prisoners cementing their newfound religious authority created by their own conversion and their proximity to the afterlife (while awaiting their execution in prison) through the conversion of others; this tradition is part of what informs and lends persuasive authority to the goodnight ballads. Such a conversion would have been considered a powerful indication of a prisoner’s spiritual reformation, but inasmuch as the example confirms Quicksilver’s authentic conversion, it simultaneously calls it into question. The phrase ‘tis hoped’ indicates that the rest of the prison perhaps also wishes for Fangs, with his

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ferocious reputation, poor and general coarseness to leave the prison for their own sakes rather than Fang’s personal betterment. That Quicksilver may have a practical, ulterior motive for converting Fangs undermines the sincerity of his own conversion.

In addition to raising questions about the sincerity of Quicksilver’s conversion, the transformation of Fangs interrogates the nature of conversion itself. Fangs’ conversion requires a position more suited to his newly pious state, but the career choice of intelligencer is not exactly a religious one. The line is primarily aimed at the intelligencers in the audience, but it also recalls that intelligencers are often tasked with seeking out rogue Catholics and particularly Catholic priests—a role that may appeal to a sergeant who had been recently convinced of the kind of Protestantism broadcast by Quicksilver’s psalms.298 Perhaps such a career change in fact indicates that Fang’s personality has not undergone a dramatic shift; instead of jailing common criminals, he now jails Catholics. So while this line is a joke, it also asks interesting questions about conversion. How much change is possible or even desirable in a conversion? Do people just become believing, faithful versions of their former selves who may behave just a little better?

Such questions anticipate issues raised in the final ballad, and hint at a response to the critical debate about the importance of Quicksilver’s sincerity. And indeed, the ballad is central to understanding and evaluating Quicksilver’s sincerity, both for the characters in the play and for the audience beyond the stage. Wolf’s reports prime listeners to be prepared for a changed Quicksilver, but it is the ballad itself that does much of the work of conversion. His repentance is performed less through his words and more through the performer-audience dynamic and the expectations of repentance that inhere to the conventions of the form. When it comes to the goodnight ballads, conventionality does not detract from persuasiveness and the of sincerity, but rather constitutes it.

298 Gibbons, Jacobean City Comedy, 75. This line is a joke about the level of and sophistication of intelligencers. According to Brian Gibbons, intelligencers were known to be in the audiences at the Blackfriars and likely played a role in the official of Eastward Ho.

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Quicksilver meticulously observes all of the conventions of the goodnight ballad in his attempt to perform and prove his conversion. To begin with, he conforms to performance expectations. His stage audience is comprised of fellow prisoners (which secretly includes his Master Touchstone). They gather around him as listeners might in a public square and there is a sense of social engagement and interaction between performer and audience as Quicksilver seeks to ‘sell’ his story.299 Like many goodnight ballads, Quicksilver’s “Repentance” is autobiographical. He tells us where he lives and what he does for a living; he valorizes Touchstone (his “master good and kind”) who warned him of the consequences of bad behaviour (V.v.54). He details his descent to increasingly reckless behaviour, beginning with his penchant for dressing and acting above his station in ‘silks and satins gay’ paired with “false manners”; and his sins become more serious as he begins scorning his master, drinking, whoring, and investing in a plan that would have seen him leave England and his debts forever on an ill-fated ship (V.v.66-67).300

Quicksilver’s recounted moment of epiphany is likewise entirely conventional, and he has to rewrite his own narrative to better adhere to ballad expectations. Ballad conventions dictate that conversion be a sudden change of heart, but Quicksilver’s conversion appears to be more of a process. It begins during a speech in which he acknowledges the justness of the scuttling of his ‘wicked’ nautical hopes (IV.i.73) after he washes up on shore at the ominous location of Wapping (a well-known execution spot of pirates). Despite his growing sense of unease, he makes a final stab at criminality through counterfeiting. His eventual conversion from scheming rogue to penitent Protestant likely occurs after he has been hauled off to prison and has some time for further contemplation, for it is from the keeper of the prison that we hear tales of Quicksilver’s newfound and exemplary piety.301 In the song, however, there is little sense of this gradual loss of self-confidence; he describes his moment of conversion as being suitably sudden, occurring after the wake-up call of ill-luck and incarceration:

299 Throughout his song, prisoners are constantly commenting and interrupting the song, and we overhear conversations between listeners about the ballad. 300 For a chronicle of a similar descent into sin, see, for example, “The Sorrowful Complaint of Susan Higges,” (London: H.G, 1630?), Magdalen College: Pepys 1.113, EBBA, http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/20002. 301 Quicksilver appears before Golding the new deputy Alderman in IV.ii but aside from a few declarations of ‘O God,’ gives little indication of the pious transformation reported in the next act.

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Still ‘Eastward Ho’ was all my word; But westward I had no regard, Nor never thought what would come after, As did, alas his youngest daughter. At last the black ox trod o’ my foot, And I saw then what longed unto’t; Now cry I, ‘Touchstone, touch me still, And make me current by thy skill.’ (V.v.81-88)

R.W. Van Fossen notes that the ‘black ox’ trodding over one’s foot is a proverbial meaning indicating adversity, so it appears that according to Quicksilver, he never thought of consequences to his actions until the first sign of ill luck, whereupon he immediately saw that his sin caused his downfall.302 Quicksilver’s clarifying moment of truth in the prison seems conveniently drawn up for the ballad and it makes for better, more convincingly repentance material than a description of his waffling, unsure state. The performance of the repentance eclipses the repentance itself as Quicksilver contorts his story to fit into the recognizable narrative.303

Quicksilver continues his adherence to ballad conventions when he changes addressees in his song. These stanzas are the most persuasive aspects of Quicksilver’s ballad, as the audience overhears his more private thoughts and conversations (mirroring the most religious and emotional portion of the goodnight ballad); but these two stanzas are also the most

302 This is typical of the repentance narrative in the ballads. The moment of repentance occurs suddenly and often either right after the felony has been committed or immediately following incarceration. In “The Unnatural Wife” quoted earlier, Alice Davis repents immediately after the crime, but very often, such as in “John Spenser his Repentance in Prison, Written with his owne hands as he lay in Chester Castle,” the moment of repentance and conversion only comes in prison (as the title indicates) when the depths to which the convict has sunk become clear. 303 Quicksilver also makes sure to include a typical warning, wherein he cautions Cheapside and his “dear fellow prentices” to learn from his fall to: “Shun usurers, bawds, and dice, and drab; Avoid them as you would French scabs. Seek not to go beyond your tether, But cut your thongs unto your leather; So shall you thrive by little and little, Scape Tyburn, Counters and the Spital.” (V.v.124-129) Such a warning is almost universal in goodnight ballads. Quicksilver’s warning is unusual in that while he tells his fellow apprentices to avoid whoring, thieving, and other varieties of typically immoral behaviour, the heart of his message is that citizens should not seek to “go beyond their tether.” Striving beyond one’s station hardly falls in the same category as killing one’s husband, but such a message fits with the values of the play.

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incompetent, uncomfortable, and comical sections of the song. In the first instance, he turns not to God to ask for forgiveness as would be expected, but to Touchstone. This makes sense as it is Touchstone who has the power to drop the charges, but Quicksilver goes too far: “Touchstone, touch me still,/ And make me current by thy skill” (V.v.87-88). Quicksilver intimates that Touchstone has the alchemical power granted by his goldsmithing to reconvert the penitent back to his pure state, portraying the goldsmith as a God or Christ-like figure able to bestow forgiveness and life upon his subjects. The comparison of Touchstone to Christ makes both Quicksilver and Touchstone the more laughable—the former for getting caught up in his own rhetoric and the latter for being flattered by it. Quicksilver’s conflation of Christ and Touchstone may be incompetent in that the poetry is terrible and he makes a mess of the tradition of addressing God with humility, but it remains a winning persuasion tactic. Here “Repentance” achieves its goal of successfully persuading Touchstone, who is unrefined enough to be moved by excessive and inappropriate to free the imprisoned balladeer.

The subsequent stanza changes addressees again; but rather than being addressed to God the stanza addresses Mannington, the famous murderer and ‘author’ of the repentance ballad:

O Mannington, thy stories show, Thou cutt'st a horse-head off at a blow. But I confess I have not the force For to cut off the head of a horse; Yet I desire this grace to win, That I may cut off the horse-head of Sin, And leave his body in the dust Of sin's highway and bogs of lust, Whereby I may take Virtue's purse, And live with her for better, for worse. (V.v.99-108)

Quicksilver takes an intimate climax that is typically the most moving, most persuasive moment of the song and instead belabours an extended, awkward metaphor about Virtue and the ‘horse-head of Sin’ that contradicts the very notion of repentance. Mannington’s many transgressions apparently included equine decapitation; by claiming to cut off the horse-head

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of Sin, Quicksilver offers to excise sin by committing sin. Likewise, his assertion that he will ‘take Virtue’s purse’ proposes to steal virtue in order to become more virtuous. The appropriated lines from the marriage service hardly convey his lifelong commitment to virtue, but instead suggest that virtue has been stolen and forced into a marriage where the emphasis is on the worse rather than the better. His metaphors raise doubts as to the authenticity of his conversion, or at least paint him as a hilariously and enthusiastically incompetent penitent and poet. If the connection between Christ and Touchstone is awkward but practically effective, allying God and a convicted murderer goes beyond inadequate to potentially blasphemous. But this incompetence is precisely what is so funny. The scene mocks Quicksilver for creating and performing such drivel, mocks Touchstone and the prison audience for being in the thrall of such an overblown performance, mocks ballads themselves for their valorization of murderers like Mannington and for their emotional and artistic simplicity, and it even mocks the prodigal drama that imitates the process of repentance and grace.

The inappropriate metaphors bolster the reading of Quicksilver as an insincere manipulator. His desire to obtain virtue by theft certainly raises doubts as to the authenticity or depth of his conversion, and while the prison audience may be deceived by his appeals to Mannington, the display of contrition to a convicted murderer could be read as a self- conscious joke on the gullible Touchstone. Quicksilver is so detailed and personal in the catalogue of his transgressions that the song appears to relish the criminal details. Moreover, conventions of the goodnight ballad are so closely followed, but coupled with such inappropriate content, that the ballad becomes a hypocritical outward display of piety that has little connection to an internal state of grace.

But such a reading is at odds with the rest of the play. If Quicksilver is insincere in his conversion then the satire is directed at Touchstone, disregarding the sins of the social climbing, law-breaking miscreants. Throughout the production, Quicksilver is an exemplary prodigal—he embraces sin while rejecting honest labour, fulfilling every convention of a young man on a downward spiral. Despite his many moral failings, his enthusiasm and energy make him an appealing and sympathetic character. His conversion is likewise

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hilariously overblown—from the loud and unceasing psalm-singing, to the displays of self- sacrifice—but for him to transform into a sober, contemplative, quiet penitent would betray his personality. The play already has such a pious and worthy character in Golding, and he is likewise subject to gentle mockery for excessive thrift when he and his betrothed insist that leftovers are all that are necessary for their wedding ‘feast.’ Quicksilver’s conversion seems to further the argument raised with Fangs, which posits that conversions (even successful ones) do not change the essentials of a personality. Quicksilver is an archetypal, over-the-top rake who converts into an archetypal, over-the-top penitent. Somewhat ironically, his conventionality makes his conversion more authentic and sincere, not less so.

In this reading, Quicksilver honestly that singing a goodnight ballad is the most effective and convincing way of conveying the sincerity of his repentance—and in the world of the play, he is right. The language and narrative of his ballad matters less than the fact that he is singing one at all: listeners gloss over the ridiculous content because they expect to be convinced by the inherently persuasive form. As is the case with the goodnight ballads, Quicksilver’s song does not transform his listeners from sceptical unbelievers into enthusiastic converts. Instead, his song cements, displays and reflects his conversion, which in turn convinces his listeners of his sincerity by reinforcing that which they were already predisposed towards believing. Even in the case of Touchstone, the ballad is more of a reminder of his basic and belief in conversion narratives than a rational argument that sways his mind. Touchstone perceives himself as being susceptible to persuasion and having too much faith in the goodness of others. He does not want to receive the prisoners’ letters from Wolf because “I find mine own easy nature, and I know not what a well-penn'd, subtle letter may work upon it” (V.ii.4-6) and after Wolf’s tales of Quicksilver’s penal piety Touchstone bemoans “No more; I am coming already. If I should give any farther ear, I were taken. Adieu, good Master Wolf. — Son, I do feel mine own weaknesses; do not importune me. Pity is a rheum that I am subject to; but I will resist it.” (V.ii.73-77). Touchstone converts because of his personality, his personal investment in his former apprentice and perhaps most of all because believes himself to be a kindhearted, piteous, and important individual and he wants to fulfill his role as forgiver in the conversion narrative that Quicksilver has artfully delivered. The familiar ballad sequence has meaning to Touchstone,

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and his familiarity with the conventions precipitate his conversion, rather than any argument or demonstration in the ballad itself. My argument is somewhat similar to Stevens’ claim that in Eastward Ho, “artifice effects grace.” Stevens points to the artifice of the scene which Golding manages and directs, in order to encourage Touchstone to witness Quicksilver’s repentant song and subsequently forgive him. The whole charade may be a parody, but artifice, convention and even parody itself can lead to real change and indeed, grace.304

But while artifice may effect grace, Touchstone’s uncritical acceptance of Quicksilver’s ridiculous goodnight ballad remains problematic. Instead of only taking satirical aim at particular characters and types, Eastward Ho directs some of its sharpest sting at those who are seduced by forms, conventions and style, all but ignoring content (a sin of which all of its characters are somewhat guilty). Alexander Leggatt makes this point when he notes that “the parody of the prodigal story becomes simply the vehicle for a deeper satire on those who see life in terms of theatrical conventions.” 305 He cites Gertrude, who wants her life to proceed as a rags to riches fairy tale, and Touchstone, who wants his workshop to emulate the plays that he has seen, casting Golding as the theatrical citizen-hero and Quicksilver as the fictional prodigal. This satire culminates in the ballad and Touchstone’s swooning reaction in which he pronounces himself “ravished” for artistic rather than moral reasons. The ballad is a moment of the ‘deepest satire,’ when content matters less than form. Quicksilver has taken the persuasiveness inherent in the structure of the goodnight ballad too far: the performance of the convention itself has done the persuading, rather than the honesty and sincerity that should fill the conventional form with compelling and authentic content. This does not make Quicksilver self-consciously deceitful or insincere, just enthralled, like everyone else, in the production of repentance. And while being under the spell of a conventional production is part of the problem, it is also part of the solution—such a ridiculous performance can lead to sincere change, even if sincerity did not motivate the performance in the first place.

304 Stevens, “The New Presentism,” 159. 305 Alexander Leggatt, Citizen Comedy in the Age of Shakespeare (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 52.

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While the satire makes a mockery of the conventional dramatic and musical tastes of the citizenry, it compliments the Blackfriars’ audience on their preference for well-written content over the slavish adherence to convention. Such a compliment aims to seduce the audience into continuing their monetary support, and it persuades much like the goodnight ballads—by fortifying and reiterating beliefs already firmly held by the spectators. Eastward Ho is a running joke on the crudeness of citizen theatrical (and I would argue, musical) tastes. It is ultimately a conservative play: nearly every character is eventually put in their ‘rightful’ place, not ‘beyond their tether.’306 The mockery of the prodigal conventions continues to the play’s final moments, with an epilogue that esteems commercial values over moral ones. The fourth wall is broken in an appeal to the audience to return to ensure a long run.

But in this play the satire is on constantly shifting ground; at the same time as the ending fortifies the audience’s feelings of comfort and self-satisfaction, it also challenges them. Quicksilver insists on retaining his prison garb as he walks through the streets after obtaining his freedom “as a spectacle, or rather an example, to the children of Cheapside” (V.v.216- 217). In the epilogue, Quicksilver looks directly out at the audience:

“I perceive the multitude are gather'd together to view our coming out at the Counter. See, if the streets and the fronts of the houses be not stuck with people, and the windows fill'd with ladies, as on the solemn day of the Pageant!” (Epilogue, 1-5)

The Blackfriars audience has been transformed into the multitude of Cheapside, curiously eager to see a repentant prodigal offering up his shame for public consumption. This move seems to undermine the class-based satire of the play, implying that the tastes of the ‘sophisticated’ coterie audience and the more coarse inhabitants of East London are not so different. While the audience may laugh at the predictability and conventionality of forms like those of the prodigal play and goodnight ballads, narratives of sin and repentance are

306 Quicksilver’s sin appears to be located in part in his desire to live a life full of the trappings of a class beyond his reach. Golding, by contrast, does very well financially but within the sphere of his class.

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undeniably universal and moving, as is the more prurient interest in the spectacle of shame. At the same time, however, it is entirely in keeping with the satire of the play that everyone is lampooned, everyone is the target of good humoured mockery—including the audience. So while the play mocks pedestrian citizen tastes and reinforces popular assumptions, it also gently suggests that the spectators perform a little self-examination. In the very final moments, Eastward Ho continues to perform its persuasion of the audience.

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Coda

“Heaven give thee moving graces” (II.ii.46), the provost whispers aside as Isabella prepares to plead with Angelo on her brother’s behalf in Measure for Measure. I chose “Moving Graces” as my title to capture something of the link between faith and persuasion in the early modern period, underscoring the notion that the power to move, change and persuade others is a from God. Isabella’s moving graces are not limited to her articulate speeches and rhetorical abilities, but also include the elegant and virtuous way she inhabits her physical body—her moving graces. Angelo is indeed touched, but more by her piety, her beauty, her rhetorical ability and emotional investment than by the actual substance of her plea. He is changed by the form of her body and her character rather than the content of her argument.

Isabella’s moving graces may affect Angelo, but the scene in Act II is not her most moving scene in the play. That moment comes in Act V, when she has sacrificed her reputation and the perception of her purity to publically accuse Angelo of fornication, deception, and profound corruption. Here she is at her most exposed, heartfelt and raw, without the pride and sense of virtue that gave order to her life. Here her words are heartrending, longing for the Duke’s justice and grace. This is the moment that moves her, where she relinquishes the pride that gave her life structure, meaning and a sense of personal virtue. I argue in Chapter Two that the structure of the public accusation forces her to perform her humiliation in the service of fighting injustice, and it is this activity that transforms her.

Isabella’s participation in her own conversion is emblematic of what I have found throughout this project. Persuasion works best through participation. People have to do the work of personal change themselves, so the most effective methods of persuasion build participation into their forms, introducing and buttressing complex religious ideas through activities that require engagement. Participation is the primary moving grace—the most persuasive God- given gift that changes, alters, moves and provokes an emotional response.

Building participation into the form of persuasion often ensures that participants become intimately knowledgeable of the content; they memorize the words of the sung psalms and

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recite meditations. Perhaps more importantly, participatory forms foster community, and this strengthening of community is essential to their persuasive success. The metrical psalms are influential because they provide an opportunity for a congregation to participate in the worship service through song. The collective activity of singing together creates cohesion and a shared, active purpose. When the spiritual exercises are undertaken one joins a spiritual community, linked through the text to those who have already undertaken them, especially to those who have practiced under the same spiritual guide. Goodnight ballads perform sin and repentance, creating a sense of empathy for the sinner; they act as a reminder to remain in the community of the righteous and a refresher on the basics of Protestant belief. These forms of religious persuasion are designed to maximize individual engagement in a faith community, and indeed, the strength of the faith community becomes an essential part of the persuasion. It feels good to belong.

I chose these particular forms because of their distance from modern life. They grant access to the ways that early moderns thought and understood the world around them, allowing us to see how something on stage that feels utterly secular had a strong and recognizable connection to an expression of faith. My aim here has been to show how effective they would have been on the early modern stage. And while such forms may be unfamiliar to modern audiences, they are not entirely dead. Just as they emerged from earlier forms of communication, they too have their own offspring. Metrical psalms and goodnight ballads were unique to the post-Reformation period, but forms of persuasion change depending on available technology, the subject matter at hand, philosophical ideals and community norms. Some things, however, stay the same. The insight that effective persuasive forms are designed to maximize participation and investment in community should not be confined to the early modern period.

We only have to look at the dominant persuasive structures in our early 21st century lives to see the impact of participatory forms of persuasion, as communication through social media is based on principles of community and participation. , for example, is a social media platform complete with its own rules and conventions: first a one-hundred-and-twenty and now a two-hundred-and-forty character limit, hashtags to link to other topical conversations,

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@responses to have public conversations, retweets to share articles or the comments of others. Such conventions promote brevity as well as participation and public conversation, thereby building communities connected by shared interests or ideas. And while a form like Twitter has been used as a political tool to circumvent the intervening and interpreting media, the genuine political persuasiveness of a tweet is up for debate. Political language on Twitter has usually been shown to be more effective in rallying believers rather than actually converting the undecided.307 In some ways Twitter is akin to the goodnight ballads in that it is less about new converts and more about reinforcing and even intensifying existing ideas. Both forms are also difficult for authorities to control and therein lies some of their appeal. While goodnight ballads, which were written and circulated by a mostly anonymous group of writers, tended to stay within a generally mainstream message, there was not much supervision over ill-suited or doctrinally incorrect statements. Tweets can come from the authorities, but once released there is little control over what happens to them—who retweets them, comments on them, or turns them into a clever .

Twitter is perhaps most persuasively promising when it comes to marketing consumer products. While in post-Reformation England the subject of much persuasive language was religious, in our own age it is predominantly commercial. Daina Middleton, a marketing consultant and CEO, writes that traditional persuasion no longer works on consumers: a perfectly-wrought marketing campaign that tells a compelling, entertaining, and aspirational story, but which ultimately relies on people to passively absorb the message is insufficient. Instead, she argues that in the social media age consumers want to build relationships around the things that are important to them. In this line of thinking, persuasion is thought of as a one-way communication, and therefore should be superseded by what she calls participation marketing, enabled by the technological changes that have brought new, more interactive forms of communication to the public. According to the principles of participation marketing, it is not even desirable to craft a perfectly formed campaign, but instead the aim is to cede some of the control to the consumer and the public to have some say in shape or direction of

307 Researchers Marion R. Just and Christina Holtz-Bacha find that “like other social media, Twitter is not necessarily a tool for converting undecided voters. Rather, candidates mainly find it handy for communicating with activist followers and raising money.” Marion R. Just and Christina Holtz-Bacha, “Introduction” in Twitter and Elections Around the World: Campaigning in 140 Characters or Less (New York: Routledge, 2017), 2.

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the messaging. The goal is to create a feeling of engagement and investment in the product rather than try to create a convincing argument for why one would want or need it.308

While Middleton may be right when it comes to current marketing strategies, the characterization of persuasion and participation as being two competing concepts is narrow. Persuasion is not just a form of marketing; it is an essential mode of human interaction. In order to make our way in the world, we have to convince others to do things for our own benefit and for the benefit of those we love. The use of participation can be a tactic of persuasion, and, I would argue, a highly effective one, but the end goal is still a persuasive one. And while new technology creates opportunity for new forms of communication, the notion that people need to engage in their own changes in belief and behaviour is hardly revolutionary. Indeed, we have seen examples of this all over early modern drama. When seeking to further engage audiences and convince them to invest in the theatre as an enjoyable, entertaining, and even edifying place to patronize, playwrights borrowed tactics from the evangelical experts. These religiously persuasive forms were familiar things—they were activities that people regularly took part in, recognized and understood.

What we persuade each other changes depending on the age we live in and the particularity of our own lives. The forms our persuasions take change too; they depend on particular subject matter, the technology available, the laws of the land and the ways that people congregate. But the desire to invest and engage in one’s own growth, change and transformation is fundamental to how humans make sense of and attempt to take control of their own lives and the lives of others in their community. Whether the goal is to persuade people to change religions, become increasingly politically active or emotionally invest in a certain brand of toothpaste, forms of persuasion that are built around participatory activities have been effective at changing hearts, minds and spending habits for a long time.

308 Daina Middleton, Marketing in the Participation Age (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2013), 3-9.

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