The Reformation had a particularly devastating effect on church music. The intricate, polyphonic liturgical music of the pre-Reformation Church, which had been admired throughout Europe, all but disappeared from English parishes from the mid-sixteenth century, although it survived in much of its old glory in the cathedrals and the Chapel Royal. Singing of the psalms was the only concession to religious music that most reformers would make, and even then the melody must be subservient to the Word: ‘that the same may be as plainly understanded as if it were read without singing’.34 At least with the singing of the psalms the whole congregation was encouraged to participate. Before the Reformation any singing in the service had been confined to the clergy and choristers.
The reformers’ attack upon ‘carnal’ practices extended well beyond the trappings of formal worship. Corpus Christi plays, St George processions, May games, and a whole host of ceremonial and festive activities that traditional religion had sustained or at least tolerated, either petered out in many places during the reigns of Edward and Elizabeth or were suppressed. It was nostalgia for this vanished world of good cheer that gave rise to the myth of Merry England. All in all, the Reformation left a void at the heart of the English religious and social experience that Protestantism at first found very hard to fill. Beer (like traditional English ale but brewed with hops) and alehouse sociability may have helped plug the gap in some measure. It was said in the 1540s that beer, a ‘naturall drynke for a Dutche man’, was ‘of late … moche used in Englande to the detryment of many Englysshe men’.35
Yet the triumph of the Word was by no means a total cultural disaster. The Protestant assault on religious art served to channel talent and patronage into more reformer-friendly media, helping to stimulate an artistic renaissance under Elizabeth in which literature held centre stage. Having dropped the curtain on the old religious plays, the reformers eagerly co-opted drama to promote the new religion. Elizabeth and several of her courtiers patronised troupes of players that toured the country during the 1560s spreading the Protestant message. However, as plays became more secular in content during the 1570s, and began competing with sermons and prayer for people’s leisure time, so they too became a target for the godly. ‘Wyll not a fylthye playe, wyth the blaste of a Trumpette, sooner call thyther a thousande, than an houres tolling of a Bell bring to the Sermon a hundred?’, fulminated one godly minister: ‘… I will not here enter this disputatio[n], whether it be utterly unlawfull to have any playes, but will onelye ioyne in this issue, whether in a Christia[n] common wealth they be tolerable on the Lords day, when the people should be exercised in hearing of the worde’.36 Puritan preachers warned that ‘the cause of plagues is sinne, if you looke to it well: and the cause of sinne are playes: therefore the cause of plagues are playes’.37 This providentialist syllogism might convince London’s godly governors, but not the entertainment-hungry court – the show would most definitely go on. In 1576, a hundred years after William Caxton had set up his printing press in Westminster, the London businessman James Burbage built the first commercial playhouse: The Theatre, in Shoreditch. Other playhouses soon followed, most of them in London’s suburbs, the city council having banned theatres from the capital itself. Denounced by the Puritans as ‘a shew place of al beastly & filthie matters’, the early theatre was a bit like horse-racing today – slightly downmarket, but a major crowd-pleaser that attracted everyone from lords to labourers.38 It would not be until the 1620s that plays became respectable literature.
The 1580s through to the 1620s were the golden age of English drama. Settling in London gave the acting companies a huge target audience, for the capital’s population had soared to 200,000 by 1600, putting it among the five largest cities in Europe. Playing to the same crowd, however, and competing with other companies, required a constant stream of new and exciting productions to keep the punters happy. This artistic and commercial challenge was answered in particularly innovative fashion by Christopher Marlowe (1564–93) and his followers Thomas Kyd (1558–94) and Shakespeare (1564–1616). They broke new literary ground for lesser playwrights, blending classical themes and medieval theatrical forms into something rich and strange. By the 1590s, drama had transcended its traditional, moralistic remit to explore imaginary new worlds, rewrite the nation’s history, stir patriotic feeling, and, controversially, to offer thinly veiled political commentary. ‘Playing’ gave voice to the angst of sixty years of religious turmoil, and a new vocabulary in which to express it. Shakespeare and his competitors and collaborators (Elizabethan and Jacobean plays were often joint efforts) coined many of the thirty thousand new words that entered the English language between 1570 and 1630 – more than in any period before or since. The theatre also challenged foreign perceptions of England as a cultural wasteland, which the Reformation had undoubtedly reinforced. ‘Playing’, claimed the playwright Thomas Heywood, ‘is an ornament to the City, which strangers of all nations, repairing hither, report of in their countries, beholding them here with some admiration.’39 The coming of the Word, for which Tyndale had been burned at the stake in 1536, had spawned an entertainment industry in which the godless Marlowe could declare: ‘I count religion but a childish toy, And hold there is no sin but ignorance.’40
Outrageous piracies
The London theatre was not all that foreigners admired about the Elizabethans. In the early 1590s, the Italian political philosopher Giovanni Botero described the English as ‘marvellous expert in maritime actions, then whom at sea there is not a valianter and bolder nation under heaven. For in most swift ships, excellent well furnished with ordnance (wherewith the kingdome aboundeth) they goe to sea with as good courage in winter as in sommer, all is one with them … Two of their Captaines [Sir Francis Drake and Sir Thomas Cavendish] have sayled round about the world, with no lesse courage then glorie.’41 Seadogs such as Drake and Cavendish, and their exploits against the Spanish, would convince future generations of English people that it was somehow their God-given right to rule the waves. But in the 1580s this was a very novel feeling indeed. Until the 1560s, English mariners had rarely ventured beyond their coastal waters, and knew little about deep-sea navigation. Meanwhile, of course, the Spanish had been establishing colonies around the world; their ships plying back and forth across the Atlantic, crammed on the homeward journey with bullion from the silver mines of Potosí, in Peru. What changed in the 1560s, above all, was a shift in English relations with the French, or at least with that large Calvinist minority in France known as the Huguenots. England’s ancestral enemies had become endangered fellow Protestants. With technical assistance and encouragement from the Huguenots, the English would take to the high seas in increasing numbers from the 1560s, and turn Protestant piracy into a global enterprise.
England was already a formidable naval power by the time the Huguenots had appeared on the horizon. One of Henry VIII’s more sensible reactions to the isolated and precarious position he had found himself in after breaking with Rome had