This double literacy had huge advantages for the educated British. It meant that scholars from these islands could talk fluently with their counterparts across the European Continent; and it meant that they had access, directly, to the greatest of the classical writers now becoming more and more freely available in Renaissance Europe. But for poetry, it bred a problem. The educated poets were doused, pickled and marinated in Latin and Greek authors. They had been brought up to parse and translate Plautus, Livy, Ovid and Cicero. Their poetic models came from Imperial Rome and ancient Greece. Their minds were stocked, and over-stuffed, with stories from classical mythology. So when they turned to write in English, they naturally showed their proficiency by imitating the Greek and Roman classics. Sometimes they did this so well you barely notice: the early Shakespeare play The Comedy of Errors comes directly from Plautus. But often anthologies of British poetry from this time seem an endless procession of Roman nymphs and swains, busy copies of Ovid’s Metamorphoses or, as we saw earlier, versions of Horace’s odes. This is fine. It produces some highly enjoyable poetry. There is a lot of very, very clever writing, with bold and daring games, going on. But mostly it doesn’t tell us much about the Britain of the period. For that we have to go to less clever, less fashionable verse by people further down the social scale, or who have turned their backs on the enticements of ancient Rome. Thus, in what follows there will be rather less than in most verse collections of Edmund Spenser’s droll mimicries of medieval poets and Virgil – fewer Phoebes and Chloes, fewer Strephons – and more of the earthier, homespun verse of the ballads and the morality plays.
British theatrical traditions followed directly from medieval religious pageantry. Some, at least, of the great cycles of mystery plays, from York, Coventry, Wakefield and Chester, were still being performed in the first half of the 1500s, telling the stories of Noah, Cain and Abel, the New Testament and the saints in churches and marketplaces. Here was direct, simple, often funny drama which had to catch the attention of an illiterate peasant, or lose its audience. So long as the Catholic Church and the medieval guilds held on to their authority, these immensely popular and protracted (the York Cycle was composed of no fewer than forty-eight different tableaux) entertainments were an essential part of the religious education of millions of Britons, particularly in the north and Midlands of England.
But, like Christianity itself, religious theatre was changing fast, and by the 1540s there was a new kind of drama, equally didactic, in which vices and virtues appeared as characters in their own right. These morality plays, or ‘interludes’, went further in the representation of contemporary British people on the stage, albeit disguised as symbols. Vice, in particular, under many guises, represented the wickedness, lust, cruelty and arrogance that many in the audience would have recognised in the world around them. The young William Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon would have come across these plays – early in his life his father had the job of authorising performances in the town. The companies of players who took them around, travelling by cart and packhorse, enjoyed the protection of leading nobles, churchmen and sometimes the court itself; and the plays that have survived often have direct connections with the Tudor court, and were first performed there.
Henry Medwall, little known these days, was a crucial bridge between the medieval world and the Elizabethan stage. Often cited as the first known vernacular English dramatist, he was born in September 1461 in Southwark, then an anarchic and dangerous place, to a family of wool merchants and tailors. He had a relatively prosperous late-medieval upbringing, doused in Latin at a monastery before he went to Eton, and then to King’s College, Cambridge, for more Latin. Alongside all the studying, he threw himself into musical and dramatic entertainments for banquets and other high days. He helped devise Christmas dramas and learned about the importance of mingling music and stories. Later he would serve as a notary public, a kind of lawyer, under Archbishop Morton, hanging on to the edges of the royal court (of Henry VII), rather as Chaucer had a century earlier. For much of his life Medwall was based at Lambeth Palace, where plays were performed in the Archbishop’s Great Hall. It is suggested that Sir Thomas More himself may have acted in Medwall’s first play, Fulgens and Lucres, in around 1497.
Medwall had learned his craft from the medieval morality plays, and he too makes symbols of his characters, but as extracts from his second play, Nature, show, he was learning to root them in the realities of contemporary life. Here, for example, is Pride, describing his exuberant long hairstyle:
I love it well to have side here
Half a foot beneath mine ear
For evermore I stand in fear
That mine neck should take cold!
I knit up all the night
And the daytime, comb it to down right
And then it crispeth and shyneth as bright
As any peryld gold …
And as for his clothing, it’s the latest London look:
My doublet is unlaced before,
A stomacher of satin and no more.
Rain it, snow it, never so sore,
Me thinketh I am too hot!
Then I have such a short gown
With wide sleeves that hang down –
They would make some lad in this town
A doublet and a coat.
Gluttony, meanwhile, lurches in with a lump of cheese and a bottle of wine, announcing:
… Of all things earthly I hate to fast.
Four times a day I make repast,
Or thrice as I suppose,
And when I am well fed
Then get I me to a soft bed
My body to repose.
There take I a nap or twain
up I go straight and to it again!
Though nature be not ready,
Yet have I some meat of delight
For to provoke the appetite
and make the stomach greedy.
Envy tries to persuade Gluttony to arm himself for the wars – this was written just at the end of the Wars of the Roses – but Gluttony is having none of the weapons or armour. If he’s going to the wars he’s going to be a victualler, looking after the food and drink:
I was never wont to that gear.
But I may serve to be a Viteller,
and thereof shall he have store,
So that I may stand out of danger
of gunshot. But I will come no near(er)
– I warn you that before.
Now, no one is saying that this is great poetry, but it’s perhaps not surprising that scholars have wondered whether Shakespeare’s Falstaff is in some respects the child of Henry Medwall’s Gluttony. We don’t know if the great playwright saw this play when he was a boy, but it’s exactly the kind of thing he would have seen, alongside exaggerated and ludicrous tragedies of the kind he mocked in Hamlet.
A slightly later contemporary of Medwall, John Heywood, born in Coventry in 1497, was one of the most celebrated wits and playwrights at the court of Henry VIII – as we have seen, a dangerous place to be. A Catholic who eventually fell foul of Henry’s