Disputing good bishop's English: Martin Marprelate and the voice of Menippean opposition.(Critical essay)

The Martion Marprelate affair, the most notorious polemical dispute in an age renowned for the quantity and intensity of its religious controversies, scandalized late-Elizabethan England by shifting the question of Church reform into the public domain. (1) In seven abusively satiric pamphlets issued over a ten-month period in 1588-89, a syndicate of writers working under the pseudonym "Martin Marprelate" called for the replacement of England's episcopacy with a decentralized ecclesiology based on local church discipline. (2) Marprelate's enthusiasm for the Presbyterian model of Church governace was characteristic of the increasingly vocal reform movement, though his approach--famously and emphatically--was not. (3) Marprelate turned controversial writing of the day on its head and abandoned traditonal modes of theological argument for a highly engaging, stylistically complex attack on the Elizabethan bishops. His aim was two fold: to humiliate the bishops and the entire ecclesiastical government by disclosing egregious instances of clerical hypocrisy and ineffectuality and to have fun while the whole episode. Fearing public agitation, the bishops hired a contingent of professional writers to discredit Marprelate and launched a nationwide manhunt to locate the mobile press from which the tracts were issued and the group responsible for their production--an objective finally realized in August 1589.

The public furor set off by the Marprelate tracts guaranteed that their influence would extend well beyond the early modern religious sphere. (4) Guided by Mikhail Bakhtin's influential study of Renaissance carnival, Kristen Poole has argued for a close relation between the literary experimentation of the pamphlets and the rise in anti-Puritan stereotyping during the period. (5) She contends that the anti-Martinist poets recruited by the bishops to denigrate Marprelate, by extension, the Presbyterian reform movement exacerbated the explosive combination of abuse and laughter that first secured Marprelate's celebrity status and thus "changed the tenor of the controversy by amplifying the grotesque undertones of the Martinist tracts." A series of libelous pamphlets and dramatic skits depicting Marprelate's beaten, tortured, and symbolically reconstituted body apparently delighted Londoners as "elements of the carnival grotesque" present in the Marprelate tracts became "explicit and predominant" in the officially sponsored responses to them (Poole, 59). The public excitement over these performances soon proved to be as great a source of distress to the Elizabethan authorities as Marprelate himself, and the Privy Council ordered the theaters closed in November 1589. To date, Poole's study stands alone in its attempt to theorize the evolution of polemical stereotyping initiated by Marprelate even though several recent studies have situated the tracts and their responses within the wider fields of early modern censorship, religious confrontation, and the professional print trade. (6) Poole's work remains distinctive--and relevant--because it provides a model for examining the transfer of comic-abusive idioms between the perpetually hostile field of religious controversy and the emerging literary field of early modern England.

Poole's Bakhtinian approach provides and appropriate vocabulary for describing the anti-Martinist appropriation and grotesque exaggeration of Marprelate's own tropes and images, but her imprecise ascription of carnival to the tracts themselves fails to capture the more nuanced strain of carnival that characterizes Marprelate's anti-episcopal campaign. Unlike his polemical adversaries, Marprelate does not, in fact, fully sanction the kind of thoroughly carnivalized world Bakhtin outlines in Rabelais and His World. He instead opts for a more moderate agenda that emphasizes opposition and reform--a partial endorsement of carnival that accords well with what Peter Lake has called the "dual aspects of [P] resbyterianism, populist and clericalist" (550). In approaching the Marprelate tracts through their detractors, for whom physical distortion is certainly a dominant mode of satiric expression, Poole herself amplifies the role of the grotesque in texts more immediately concerned with anatomizing the speech rather than the physical bodies of Elizabeth's bishops.

In what follows, I delineate the undocumented Menippean influence in the Marprelate tracts in an effort to refine prevailing critical orthodoxies about the work. Poole's conflation of the grotesque with the carnivalesque gives and unclear impression of the specific reform measures sought by the Marprelate syndicate, which, as I demonstrate, surely do not rely unequivocally on "elements of the carnival grotesque." The confusion stems in part from the "complex dialogue" that developed between Marprelate and his polemical adversaries (Black, 723). The bewildering citation of quotations, fabricated attributions, crossbreeding of fictional personae, and heteroglot utterances make it all too easy to conflate the anti-Martinist ripostes with the original Martinist pamphlets. However intertwined, though, Marprelate's polemic is not equivalent to the responses that sought to silence it. In fact, Marprelate is anything but a sort of English Rabelais and does not possess a "carnivalian" personality (Manly, 414), for he ultimately fails to construct the "world of social madness and hierarchical inversion" that Poole attributes to the tracts (59). His subversive treatment of his ecclesiastical superiors never obscures his driving ambition to replace the Elizabethan episcopacy with the Presbyterian model of Geneva and Scotland: in other words, to supplant one orthodoxy with an opposing yet still structured alternative. In order to preserve this urgent feature of the tracts, my argument first establishes the crucial relationship between classic Menippea and Martinist polemic. Two key features of Menippean discourse--the confrontational dialogue and scandal scene--allow Marprelate to call for reform but stop just short of advocating a complete inversion of prevailing religious and political hierarchies.

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