Kathryn Kerby-Fulton's Books under Suspicion traces a long history in late medieval England of engagement with religious controversies once thought confined solely to the Continent. Further, it identifies the strategies by which “suspicious” material could come to be disseminated and preserved in England under the ever-present threat of retribution by religious authorities. While Kerby-Fulton's study of the censorship and transmission of controversial Catholic religious thought in medieval England may not seem immediately to speak to students of the early modern English period, in fact Kerby-Fulton's work provides a valuable history of the origins of literary form as a relatively safe medium for contentious communication, a topic vitally important to any understanding of early modern literary culture.
Kerby-Fulton's recovery of a textual history of censorship and its evasion in preprint times provides an important new context for assessing the later development of literature under similar conditions in the print era. Similarly, her detailed analysis of the key role the visionary genre played as a medium for communicating potentially dangerous matter in medieval England helps to illuminate the strategies Tudor and Stuart authors employed in evading censorship. It was in fact a medieval-style dream vision of just the sort that Kerby-Fulton studies that occasioned perhaps the earliest and certainly the most public articulation in the Tudor period of the protections that literary form could offer to writers of controversial material. A case study of the debate surrounding this dream vision (of the sort Kerby-Fulton herself employs in Books under Suspicion for studying the reception of Piers Plowman) can help to reveal both the continuities and the discontinuities between the medieval and early modern uses of the visionary to convey controversial content.
In the year 1551, an evangelical Protestant poet named Thomas Churchyard released a broadside poem entitled Dauy Dycars Dreame.Footnote 1 Churchyard modeled his work upon the closing lines of Passus VI of the B-text version of Piers Plowman, as it had been printed by Robert Crowley in the previous year. Churchyard appropriated from Langland's poem the character of Dawe the Diker (“Dauie the Dyker” in Crowley's spelling) to serve as the speaker of his work, and he borrowed the distinctive “when-then” structure of the prophecy that foretells Dawe the Diker's death in constructing his own dream vision.Footnote 2
Through a series of lines beginning with the word “when,” Churchyard's poem foretold that the “dreadfull dayes” currently afflicting the English people would come to an end only when a host of ongoing social abuses were abolished. Most of Churchyard's lines handled only long-standing social ills of the sort frequently denounced in early reformist writings, namely, vices such as greed, bribery, flattery, and oppression of the poor. The last of Churchyard's so-called whens, however, was unique, and it was precisely this line that earned Churchyard the public censure he soon faced. In its final “when,” Churchyard's poem declared that England would find happiness only when “Rex doth raigne and rule the ro[a]st, and weedes out wicked men.” Read in the context of current politics, Churchyard's last “when” could well be construed as a piece of daring political protest. At the time Churchyard composed Dauy Dycars Dreame, England's King Edward VI had just entered his teenage years. In their minor king's name, a collection of privy councillors led by John Dudley, earl of Warwick, ruled the nation, a group many believed to be engaged in covertly robbing the English church and in oppressing the poor for their own benefit. In their hatred of Dudley and his allies, evangelical Protestants in particular longed for the day when the highly idealized “godly” King Edward would assume power in his own right and rule (so they hoped) according to Christ's principles of charity and brotherly love. In this context, many could read Churchyard's final “when” as obliquely declaring that only when Edward takes control of the realm and purges Dudley and his fellows might the suffering currently endured under Dudley's rule finally be brought to an end.
Churchyard's poem provoked an immediate response from one Thomas Camell. In his own printed broadside, Camell accused Churchyard of attacking the current government, and he chastised him for daring to criticize England's highest officers. Camell warned Churchyard that a commoner poet such as he must never presume to comment on the doings of those in power. Referring to Dudley and his fellow councillors as “Goddes of degree,” Camell warned Churchyard that “it grees not, it cordes not, nor orderly fyttes / That men shuld fynd fault with Gods and theyr wyttes / Jupiters seate standes some what to hye. / For us to judge it, that come it not nye.”Footnote 3
Camell's response to Churchyard created a literary firestorm. No less than fourteen subsequent printed works followed Camell's denunciation of Dauy Dycars Dreame, as Churchyard, Camell, and a host of new poets battled over Camell's hostile reading of Churchyard's work. Rather than retract his allusive call for “Rex” to rule, Churchyard and, later, several of his supporters instead countered Camell's charges with a witty display of the various protections that the dream-vision genre offered to poets accused of communicating dangerous matter. In the first of several responses to Camell, Churchyard quickly sought refuge in the multiply interpretable nature of the visionary genre. Churchyard insisted that Dauy Dycars Dreame could not be read as the piece of relatively straightforward political polemic that Camell construed it to be. Instead, it must be recognized as a piece of opaque literary art, a complex dream prophecy that by its very generic nature allows for no easy, single interpretation. Confident in the facts that his poem named no particular person and that it spoke only in general terms, Churchyard simply invited Camell to point to any place in his text that offered incontrovertible evidence of offensive matter. In so doing, Churchyard promised that he himself stood “redi to defende” his work at any moment with his own benign interpretive glosses, readings designed to counter any hostile interpretation Camell might seek to impose upon his text.Footnote 4
The pseudonymous Churchyard supporter “Western Wyll” similarly stressed the multiply interpretable nature of the dream-vision genre as a means to deflect Camell's criticism. In the first of two poems he would release supporting Churchyard, Wyll presented a fictional discussion between a London printer and three sailors concerning Camell's charges. After hearing Dauy Dycars Dreame read aloud, Wyll's characters all offer various interpretations of Churchyard's piece, interpretations that differ from one another and, of course, from Camell's hostile reading. Indeed, Wyll cleverly has his speakers identify only one interpretation out of all those they heard to be on its face unbelievable, and that is Camell's own.Footnote 5
Western Wyll and Churchyard also sought to trouble Camell's confident claim that he could detect Churchyard's “true” intentions behind the poem's generalized lines. Western Wyll, for instance, argued that Churchyard could not be held accountable for any perceived controversial material in Dauy Dycars Dreame, because the poem's words were not in fact Churchyard's at all but those of an actual laborer named Davy, a man who had hired Churchyard to put into poetic form a strange dream he had experienced. Wyll then used his assertion that Dauy Dycars Dreame represented an actual dream vision as a means to thwart any attempt to fix authorial intent in Churchyard's piece. No man may be held responsible for a seemingly offensive dimension to Davy's vision, Wyll's character Wylkin insists, for dream visions are by their very nature events that are unmotivated, unbidden, and without guiding intention. “A dreame is but a dreame, a fansye of thee heade,” Wylkin declares, and for Camell to attack a man merely for having a dream “smelles of craft.”Footnote 6
Of course, Churchyard could not himself adopt Wyll's exculpatory strategy, since he had already acknowledged his poem as his own literary creation. Nevertheless, Churchyard too sought to protect himself against charges of seeking covertly to convey private political beliefs by highlighting the fact that his piece was from first to last one spoken only in character. At least twice in his poetic responses to Camell, Churchyard reminded readers that his poem may not be read as anything other than the words of its imagined literary speaker, one “plaine Dauy Dicar.” Any attempt to read a sophisticated allusive critique into words specifically created to be those of a simple commoner, Churchyard implied, would be a willful and perversely erroneous attempt to misconstrue the nature of Churchyard's artful literary exercise.Footnote 7 Although Churchyard ultimately appears to have been examined by the Privy Council on the subject of Dauy Dycars Dreame, the protective strategies offered by his poem's chosen dream-vision form evidently did aid Churchyard in escaping condemnation. There is no record of Churchyard ever receiving any official punishment for this allusive work of political comment.Footnote 8
The contention between Churchyard and Camell reveals the continuing power of the medieval dream-vision form to convey controversial content in a relatively safe mode. While by the mid-sixteenth century the chief protective power the visionary form had enjoyed in medieval England—the assumption that it may in fact be a direct revelation from God—had been lost for aboveground writers, authors continued to recognize the numerous other protective mechanisms the genre provided for those who wished to touch on potentially dangerous subjects. Further, early modern writers discovered similar mechanisms in all sorts of other literary genres, and over the course of the Tudor period they turned a remarkably broad range of literary forms to the purpose of interventionary, controversial comment. Indeed, as Annabel Patterson has argued, it was precisely the use of literary endeavor as a relatively safe medium in which to convey controversial commentary that helped to create the very idea of “the literary” as “a kind of discourse with rules of its own” in early modern England.Footnote 9 Kerby-Fulton's work reveals a history of the “the literary” as a protective mode of writing much longer than that previously uncovered by Patterson, and her discovery of this long history serves to enrich our understanding not only of early censorship practices and their evasion but also of the very logic behind much early English literary writing. For this reason (among many others), Kerby-Fulton's work stands as a valuable addition to the shelves of early modern scholars and, on a wider scale, to those of anyone interested in the history of the English struggle for freedom of expression.
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Kathryn Kerby-Fulton's Books under Suspicion traces a long history in late medieval England of engagement with religious controversies once thought confined solely to the Continent. Further, it identifies the strategies by which “suspicious” material could come to be disseminated and preserved in England under the ever-present threat of retribution by religious authorities. While Kerby-Fulton's study of the censorship and transmission of controversial Catholic religious thought in medieval England may not seem immediately to speak to students of the early modern English period, in fact Kerby-Fulton's work provides a valuable history of the origins of literary form as a relatively safe medium for contentious communication, a topic vitally important to any understanding of early modern literary culture.
Kerby-Fulton's recovery of a textual history of censorship and its evasion in preprint times provides an important new context for assessing the later development of literature under similar conditions in the print era. Similarly, her detailed analysis of the key role the visionary genre played as a medium for communicating potentially dangerous matter in medieval England helps to illuminate the strategies Tudor and Stuart authors employed in evading censorship. It was in fact a medieval-style dream vision of just the sort that Kerby-Fulton studies that occasioned perhaps the earliest and certainly the most public articulation in the Tudor period of the protections that literary form could offer to writers of controversial material. A case study of the debate surrounding this dream vision (of the sort Kerby-Fulton herself employs in Books under Suspicion for studying the reception of Piers Plowman) can help to reveal both the continuities and the discontinuities between the medieval and early modern uses of the visionary to convey controversial content.
In the year 1551, an evangelical Protestant poet named Thomas Churchyard released a broadside poem entitled Dauy Dycars Dreame.Footnote 1 Churchyard modeled his work upon the closing lines of Passus VI of the B-text version of Piers Plowman, as it had been printed by Robert Crowley in the previous year. Churchyard appropriated from Langland's poem the character of Dawe the Diker (“Dauie the Dyker” in Crowley's spelling) to serve as the speaker of his work, and he borrowed the distinctive “when-then” structure of the prophecy that foretells Dawe the Diker's death in constructing his own dream vision.Footnote 2
Through a series of lines beginning with the word “when,” Churchyard's poem foretold that the “dreadfull dayes” currently afflicting the English people would come to an end only when a host of ongoing social abuses were abolished. Most of Churchyard's lines handled only long-standing social ills of the sort frequently denounced in early reformist writings, namely, vices such as greed, bribery, flattery, and oppression of the poor. The last of Churchyard's so-called whens, however, was unique, and it was precisely this line that earned Churchyard the public censure he soon faced. In its final “when,” Churchyard's poem declared that England would find happiness only when “Rex doth raigne and rule the ro[a]st, and weedes out wicked men.” Read in the context of current politics, Churchyard's last “when” could well be construed as a piece of daring political protest. At the time Churchyard composed Dauy Dycars Dreame, England's King Edward VI had just entered his teenage years. In their minor king's name, a collection of privy councillors led by John Dudley, earl of Warwick, ruled the nation, a group many believed to be engaged in covertly robbing the English church and in oppressing the poor for their own benefit. In their hatred of Dudley and his allies, evangelical Protestants in particular longed for the day when the highly idealized “godly” King Edward would assume power in his own right and rule (so they hoped) according to Christ's principles of charity and brotherly love. In this context, many could read Churchyard's final “when” as obliquely declaring that only when Edward takes control of the realm and purges Dudley and his fellows might the suffering currently endured under Dudley's rule finally be brought to an end.
Churchyard's poem provoked an immediate response from one Thomas Camell. In his own printed broadside, Camell accused Churchyard of attacking the current government, and he chastised him for daring to criticize England's highest officers. Camell warned Churchyard that a commoner poet such as he must never presume to comment on the doings of those in power. Referring to Dudley and his fellow councillors as “Goddes of degree,” Camell warned Churchyard that “it grees not, it cordes not, nor orderly fyttes / That men shuld fynd fault with Gods and theyr wyttes / Jupiters seate standes some what to hye. / For us to judge it, that come it not nye.”Footnote 3
Camell's response to Churchyard created a literary firestorm. No less than fourteen subsequent printed works followed Camell's denunciation of Dauy Dycars Dreame, as Churchyard, Camell, and a host of new poets battled over Camell's hostile reading of Churchyard's work. Rather than retract his allusive call for “Rex” to rule, Churchyard and, later, several of his supporters instead countered Camell's charges with a witty display of the various protections that the dream-vision genre offered to poets accused of communicating dangerous matter. In the first of several responses to Camell, Churchyard quickly sought refuge in the multiply interpretable nature of the visionary genre. Churchyard insisted that Dauy Dycars Dreame could not be read as the piece of relatively straightforward political polemic that Camell construed it to be. Instead, it must be recognized as a piece of opaque literary art, a complex dream prophecy that by its very generic nature allows for no easy, single interpretation. Confident in the facts that his poem named no particular person and that it spoke only in general terms, Churchyard simply invited Camell to point to any place in his text that offered incontrovertible evidence of offensive matter. In so doing, Churchyard promised that he himself stood “redi to defende” his work at any moment with his own benign interpretive glosses, readings designed to counter any hostile interpretation Camell might seek to impose upon his text.Footnote 4
The pseudonymous Churchyard supporter “Western Wyll” similarly stressed the multiply interpretable nature of the dream-vision genre as a means to deflect Camell's criticism. In the first of two poems he would release supporting Churchyard, Wyll presented a fictional discussion between a London printer and three sailors concerning Camell's charges. After hearing Dauy Dycars Dreame read aloud, Wyll's characters all offer various interpretations of Churchyard's piece, interpretations that differ from one another and, of course, from Camell's hostile reading. Indeed, Wyll cleverly has his speakers identify only one interpretation out of all those they heard to be on its face unbelievable, and that is Camell's own.Footnote 5
Western Wyll and Churchyard also sought to trouble Camell's confident claim that he could detect Churchyard's “true” intentions behind the poem's generalized lines. Western Wyll, for instance, argued that Churchyard could not be held accountable for any perceived controversial material in Dauy Dycars Dreame, because the poem's words were not in fact Churchyard's at all but those of an actual laborer named Davy, a man who had hired Churchyard to put into poetic form a strange dream he had experienced. Wyll then used his assertion that Dauy Dycars Dreame represented an actual dream vision as a means to thwart any attempt to fix authorial intent in Churchyard's piece. No man may be held responsible for a seemingly offensive dimension to Davy's vision, Wyll's character Wylkin insists, for dream visions are by their very nature events that are unmotivated, unbidden, and without guiding intention. “A dreame is but a dreame, a fansye of thee heade,” Wylkin declares, and for Camell to attack a man merely for having a dream “smelles of craft.”Footnote 6
Of course, Churchyard could not himself adopt Wyll's exculpatory strategy, since he had already acknowledged his poem as his own literary creation. Nevertheless, Churchyard too sought to protect himself against charges of seeking covertly to convey private political beliefs by highlighting the fact that his piece was from first to last one spoken only in character. At least twice in his poetic responses to Camell, Churchyard reminded readers that his poem may not be read as anything other than the words of its imagined literary speaker, one “plaine Dauy Dicar.” Any attempt to read a sophisticated allusive critique into words specifically created to be those of a simple commoner, Churchyard implied, would be a willful and perversely erroneous attempt to misconstrue the nature of Churchyard's artful literary exercise.Footnote 7 Although Churchyard ultimately appears to have been examined by the Privy Council on the subject of Dauy Dycars Dreame, the protective strategies offered by his poem's chosen dream-vision form evidently did aid Churchyard in escaping condemnation. There is no record of Churchyard ever receiving any official punishment for this allusive work of political comment.Footnote 8
The contention between Churchyard and Camell reveals the continuing power of the medieval dream-vision form to convey controversial content in a relatively safe mode. While by the mid-sixteenth century the chief protective power the visionary form had enjoyed in medieval England—the assumption that it may in fact be a direct revelation from God—had been lost for aboveground writers, authors continued to recognize the numerous other protective mechanisms the genre provided for those who wished to touch on potentially dangerous subjects. Further, early modern writers discovered similar mechanisms in all sorts of other literary genres, and over the course of the Tudor period they turned a remarkably broad range of literary forms to the purpose of interventionary, controversial comment. Indeed, as Annabel Patterson has argued, it was precisely the use of literary endeavor as a relatively safe medium in which to convey controversial commentary that helped to create the very idea of “the literary” as “a kind of discourse with rules of its own” in early modern England.Footnote 9 Kerby-Fulton's work reveals a history of the “the literary” as a protective mode of writing much longer than that previously uncovered by Patterson, and her discovery of this long history serves to enrich our understanding not only of early censorship practices and their evasion but also of the very logic behind much early English literary writing. For this reason (among many others), Kerby-Fulton's work stands as a valuable addition to the shelves of early modern scholars and, on a wider scale, to those of anyone interested in the history of the English struggle for freedom of expression.