In his book on the sweating sickness, the Tudor physician, scholar and religious conservative John Caius relies on the nostalgic topos of ‘merye Englande’ to advise his readers on how to ‘preserve’ themselves against the disease and other afflictions. The past, exemplary for Caius, is also proximate, and his ‘merye Englande’ invocation orients his readers towards the future. By signalling Italy's present possession of ‘old world’ values, and through his confident hope (‘I doubte not but we shall’), Caius tempers his lament for an idealised, neighbourly England by suggesting that recovering those values is possible and even necessary as a social and physical panacea. The ubiquitous ‘merry world’ trope is expansive and complex. Its use signals temporal rupture and a general dissatisfaction with the present, one in sixteenth-century England associated with the Reformation and the change in the ‘ritual season’ of England. As this chapter demonstrates and as Harriet Phillips has recently shown, the Protestant polemic imagination attached its use to recusancy and sedition, and the ‘merry world/England’ circulated as a more shadowed cultural phenomenon than its carnival or festive associations have allowed.

In The Second Part of Henry VI (1590, rev. 1594–7), in the rebel Nick's complaint that ‘it was never merry world in England since gentlemen came up’, Shakespeare offers his audience a familiar lament, one they could have heard in a sermon, play, or ballad. How various religious and dramatic Tudor texts employ the ‘never a merry world’ topos is this chapter's first concern.