The Book of Books: Biblical Interpretation, Literary Culture, and the Political Imagination from Erasmus to Milton

Abstract

contortions” in The Spider and the Fly, a parable published in 1556. The pro-Marian work, read as a parable of the defeat of John Dudley, the Duke of Northumberland and Mary’s accession, works as a text of political counsel, in Walker’s reading as “Heywood’s most insistent attempt to counsel his queen on the benefits of moderation” (339). Yet as Mary’s reign progressed, Heywood’s “politics of merriness” waned, and his style lost its gadfly qualities, not least owing to the fact that he was an outsider in a court influenced by Mary’s Spanish husband, his entourage, and Cardinal Reginald Pole. Mary’s death and Queen Elizabeth’s accession with its restoration of reformed religion only exacerbated that outsider status so that, at the age of sixty-seven, Heywood felt forced into exile: Walker points to the prospect of a second Oath of Supremacy and the fact that his children were grown as strong factors in his decision to flee to the Netherlands in 1564. Yet his own sense of his writing as political counsel remained: Walker echoes Jane Flynn in identifying the poem “When all that is to was is brought” as Heywood’s, a work addressing his situation around 1564 as he prepared to leave England. A ballad serving as an ars moriendi, it counsels balancing earthly duties with God’s commandments, emphasizing penitence and the penance of exile as the way to salvation. Walker compares it to Heywood’s uncle Thomas More’s Tower cell A Dialogue of Comfort, as a model for personal resolution in a time of tribulation: yet Heywood’s ballad significantly does not end with a prayer for the queen, as all his other ballads had, and is recognized by Walker as “simultaneously a confession, an apologia, and a work of counsel” (373). Ultimately Walker places Heywood’s work within the tradition of civic religious drama of York, Chester, and his native Coventry, a tradition reflecting a lived experience of the religious life of the laity, a diverse and complex urban community. Heywood’s work too, even in its function as political counsel, impinged upon the very personal: moved continuously to reconcile various regimes’ orthodoxy with his own religious faith, he used verse to chart the Erasmian response to competing demands upon an artistic conscience.