The Protestant context of George Peele's "pleasant conceited" Old Wives Tale.

Publication: Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England

Publication Date: 01-JAN-06

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THE first eight decades of scholarship on The Old Wives Tale left us with a play that is a naive and pleasant conceited comedy, or a satire of romantic comedies, or a flawed representation of the language, methods, and ethos of folk literature. (1) However, in 1978, John Cox established as central to the play two related themes: the use of Eumenides' prophecies by some of the characters who, through the practice of charity, bring about the defeat of the evil conjurer Sacrapant. (2) Cox's article led directly to the most fruitful period of scholarship on the play at the beginning of the 1980s when four major articles by Marx, Viguers, Renwick, and Cope appeared, which have not as yet been supplanted. In these works, the play emerged as a unified festive comedy in which the induction is related in theme and method to the framed play, the various plots are carefully coordinated and presented through developed stagecraft, and the characters form a hierarchy based on their relationship to the providential order. (3)

Criticism of The Old Wives Tale has not progressed much beyond these articles because no critic has attempted to relate the play to Peele's oeuvre and his perennial theme of the celebration of Protestant England under Elizabeth. Jenkins noted the presence of Peele's anti-Spanish bias, but he did not connect it to any developed political context. (4) Horne asserted, "The Old Wives Tale is the Arraignment of Paris brought down to the hearthside level," but he provided no further amplification of this interesting idea. (5) In 1983, Braunmuller summed up the situation by saying that the absence of a historical context has served "to conceal Peele's connection with the play, that is, to hide the dramatist or any other 'source' from our view." (6)

Two decades later, the play remains essentially, as Braumuller said, "mysterious" and "sui generis." However, a new direction has been indicated by Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean. In The Queen's Men and Their Plays, they trace the origin of the Queen's Men acting company to the nationalistic agenda of Sir Francis Walsingham, who assembled the all-star company in the name of service to the Elizabethan government and a Protestant ideology. The original company employed three actors from Lord Leicester's Men, and as a result Leicester maintained close ties with the Queen's Men. Some of the plays performed by the company include Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, The Old Wives Tale, The Famous Victories of Henry V, and Wilson's Three Lords and Ladies of London, which are marked by allegorical characterization and staging and are directed toward the praise of Elizabeth and her government. (7)

It will be the purpose of this article to recover the neglected subtextual religio-political context of Peele's play. I will show how he uses the folklore, romance, and ritual elements and themes to depict the struggle between Protestant England and Catholicism as represented by Sacrapant. When viewed from this perspective, The Old Wives Tale becomes less mysterious and joins Peele's other works as a celebration of the English Protestant settlement under Elizabeth.

I

The primary theme of all of Peele's works is the praise of Protestant England under Elizabeth. Peele was a courtier poet who used pageantry, myth, allegory, history, and spectacle to create patriotic shows that demonstrate the rightness of Elizabeth's reign. His first important work, The Arraignment of Paris, which was published in 1584 and is based on his long poem The Tale of Troy, is an allegorical and patriotic play that, in many ways, anticipates the rest of his career. Peele appropriates the classical myth of the "choice of Paris" and transports it to England where Elizabeth, who presumably served as privileged audience at the first performance, is awarded the prize by Paris as befitting her role as the all-powerful goddess of the second Troy. As Montrose argues, this play is part of a gift-giving cycle in which Peele offers his play as the gift to Eliza, a mirror image of the action in the play itself: "The play ends with the providential Elizabethan fulfillment of Troy's promise, a civilization achieved by the virtuous and gentle discipline of holiness and temperance, chastity and justice." (8)

Peele's pageants for the lord mayor of London are intended for the same patriotic purposes. In 1585, he wrote the Device of the Pageant borne before Woolstone Dixi, in which actors embody Country, Thames, and London, whose patriotic values and natural riches are praised, and Elizabeth is extolled as the preserver and salvation of the body politic. Similarly, in Descensus Astraea (1591), Peele presents Elizabeth as Astraea, the goddess of justice, who has returned to England to usher in the golden age despite the attempts of Catholic villains to defeat her.

In 1589, in the aftermath of the defeat of the Spanish Armada, Peele wrote a patriotic pamphlet, A Farewell. Entituled to the famous and fortunate Generalls of our English forces Sir John Norris and Sir Frauncis Drake Knights, to celebrate the launching of another strike against Spain. Peele salutes these Armada heroes as the descendants of Classical heroes and urges them to go "to loftie Rome / There to deface the pryde of Antechrist,/ And pull his Paper walles and popery downe" (34-36). The anti-Catholicism and anti-Hispanic sentiments expressed in Descensus Astraea and Farewell are also present in his plays, The Battle of Alcazar (1589?) and Edward I (1593). The Battle of Alcazar concerns the attempt by Norris and Drake, which was celebrated in A Farewell, to burn the Spanish fleet, seize the Azores, and place Don Antonio of Crato on the throne of Portugal. Peele attacks Philip II and the pope as representatives of Babylon who are determined to enslave England, just as in Edward I he castigates Queen Elinor of Castile as the representative of Spanish Catholic perfidy.

Finally, in 1595, the same year that he published The Old Wives Tale, Peele wrote Anglorum Feriae to celebrate, on the occasion of the queen's Accession Day, her recent escape from an assassination plot reputedly masterminded by Dr. Lopez, her physician. Peele invokes Clio to chronicle Elizabeth's escape from death during her adolescence when she was imprisoned by Mary and throughout the continuing attempts by Spain to subvert her reign, culminating with the attack of the Armada against England in 1588. In honor of her accession "were Eglantine / And wreathes of Roses red and white put on" (40-41). The Elizabethan Tudor rose has created an age of concord and fruitfulness for her people and country.

The Old Wives Tale contains the same methods and themes as the rest of Peele's oeuvre. The major difference is that in The Old Wives Tale the political context is hidden behind the facade of the "pleasant conceited comedy." By delineating this context, it will be possible to see that the play is not sui generis but of a piece with his praise of Elizabeth and the Protestant English settlement throughout his career. Peele has translated the fundamental political and religious conflicts of his age into folk, romance, and ritual elements. The importance of the recovery of the politico-religious context lies in the recognition that a play that has been perceived as having no relationship to the contemporary contexts is in fact thoroughly involved with them. Peele uses the popular drama to reconfigure the age's most dominant conflicts and present them under the guise of a pleasant conceited comedy.

In Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theatre in Early Modern England, Huston Diehl has argued that Protestantism was not hostile to the use of the imagination in dramas, and she has traced the presence of a Protestant aesthetics in Elizabethan tragedies. Drawing upon the work of Paul White, John King, and Robert Knapp, among others, she maintains "that the popular London theater ... in the years after Elizabeth reestablished Protestantism ... rehearses the religious crisis that disrupted, divided, energized, and in many ways revolutionized English society." (9) The tragedies of Marlowe, Kyd, Webster, Shakespeare, and Middleton contain rhetoric, rituals, spectacles, and material objects associated with Catholicism in order to condemn it and at the same time promote Protestantism and English nationalism. (10)

Similarly, Peele, like Dekker in The Shoemaker's Holiday, Protestantizes comedy by employing allegorical methods and plots to attack Catholic imperialism, simony, and the Eucharist. (11) The best way to reveal the Protestant English context of The Old Wives...

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