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8 - Literature and the court

from 2 - The Tudor era from the Reformation to Elizabeth I

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
William Sessions
Edited by
David Loewenstein  and
Janel Mueller
David Loewenstein
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Janel Mueller
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Summary

The dynamics of literature in the early Tudor court

In the summer of 1537 Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, was imprisoned by order of the King. This was the first of four such occasions (from the last, in the Tower, he would not return). ‘The most folish prowde boye that ys in Englande’, the 21-year-old heir to the greatest title outside the royal family, was boxed in. If his punishment was mild – confinement in Windsor Castle, silent without the court’s activity, where walls without tapestries returned ‘a hollow sound of plaint’ – Surrey’s dilemma was not. In his stanzaic poem beginning ‘So crewell prison’, the longer of two texts he wrote to dramatise his situation, Surrey’s speaker is losing his ‘freedom’, a pun ambiguously situated between ‘liberty’ and ‘blood-nobility’. In actual fact, Henry VIII had sequestered his cousin, and the personal humiliation for the stylish aristocrat was worse than the public. Accordingly, in conversation, the courtier George Constantyne answers the attack on Surrey as a ‘prowde’ show-off by responding: ‘What then? he ys wise for all that’ and ‘no mervell though a yonge man so noble a mans sonne and heyre apparante be prowde’. The courtier on the lower rung identifies the very public place Surrey held in the stratified space – physical and cultural – called the court in 1537.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature , pp. 229 - 256
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

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