The
Marprelate Tracts: A Modernized and Annotated Edition.
(62) The Daily Worker's reviewer, 'Martin
Marprelate', wrote that the novel 'has for its hero a Party, the Levellers', and that readers 'see the Party in all its aspects'.
In this essay, therefore, my aim is to adopt the perspective of what we might call the "long 1580s" of the children's companies, their early period of prominence between the establishment of the Paul's and Blackfriars playhouses and the
Marprelate controversy, which appears to have led to the suppression of the Children of Paul's in the early 1590s.
(7) Most scholars agree that the boys stopped playing by 1590 due to the involvement of Lyly, then master and chief playwright for the boys, in the
Marprelate controversy.
Richard Tarleton, the well-known professional actor and clown, created the character of "Martin
Marprelate," in accordance with the bishops' wishes to mock and parody the reformers' cause in England.
Public scandal in this case was only just getting started, as Harington refers Prince Henry to the Martin
Marprelate pamphlets and their satirical treatment of Cooper's misalliance in print.
They are the queer poetics of the
Marprelate controversy; the promiscuous parthenogenesis of the Nashe-Harvey pamphlets; theaters of envy in The Poetomachia and Troilius and Cressida; aristocratic remains in Coriolanus and Timon of Athens; and dogges, verse, and effeminate men in the misanthropic railings of Anger, Sharp, and Munda.
In part, this is because of the tradition in ecclesiological debate of humorous abuse that stemmed back to the
Marprelate tracts of the 1580s and before.
Sharpe highlights familiar moments of public debate and unrest: the print campaign that supported the break from Rome, the Pilgrimage of Grace, resistance theory smuggled in from abroad during Mary's reign, controversy over Elizabeth's marriage negotiations, and the
Marprelate tracts.