Turning Princes into Pages: Sixteenth-Century Literary Representations of Thomas Cardinal
Conclusion Traduced by Ignorant Tongues?
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ConclusionTraduced by Ignorant Tongues?The aim of this thesis was to provide an overview of the Tudor literary characterizations of Cardinal Wolsey, and how these images evolved across the sixteenth century in response to the social, political, and religious events of that period. We have seen how early critics of Wolsey began a process of adopting generalized negative imagery to criticising the Cardinal (beginning with the general insult ‘dog’ before moving on to calling Wolsey a ‘butcher’s dog’, for example). As the century wore on, these images were refined and reapplied to Wolsey so that they came to crystallize around the Cardinal and, despite their initially nonspecific applicability, increasingly were utilized and understood to represent Wolsey alone (‘that butcher’s cur’). What is so fascinating about Wolsey and these Wolsey-texts is this process of adaptation. Any Romanist cardinal could have been represented by the scarlet galero, and there were several English cardinals throughout the sixteenth century who were well-known during their respective careers: certainly William Cardinal Allen’s efforts to undermine Elizabeth I would have earned him a high level of domestic interest, for example.437 However, whatever their contemporary or subsequent relevance, no English prelate has ever managed to capture the public imagination quite like Wolsey. His own aggressive self-promotion, evidenced through the reporting of events like the elaborately contrived reception of his galero in London, was an overwhelming success. Indeed, his efforts appear to have been so effective that they eventually came to represent his lack of godly humility. Equally, Wolsey’s apparent efforts to seek out and punish those he felt were undermining his reputation (as when he punished John Roo of Grey’s Inn for his libellous play) demonstrated the Cardinal’s keen awareness of the importance of self-representation.438 In part by the careful manipulation of his public image, Wolsey managed to place himself squarely at the center of the European political stage. Unsurprisingly, this high level of visibility attracted the attentions of numerous critics, who both adapted Wolsey’s self-images as well as employing their own to appropriate and twist Wolsey’s carefully crafted public relations framework. These images were powerful enough that they continued to be utilized and adapted by authors writing far after Wolsey’s death and burial in Leicester Abbey. While initially these characterizations were used to attack the Cardinal and his policies, subsequently they were taken as a rhetorical trope, able to be adapted to serve contemporary purposes long after they ceased to be directly relevant to Wolsey. The literary Wolsey came to represent far more than just the man himself: rather, he became a vehicle for transmitting anti-clerical, anti-Romanist, and anti-foreigner sentiments, and was thus employed as a propagandist weapon in the Reformation. He was a target for anger from Romanists as well, since Wolsey was often represented as having betrayed the principles of the Church that he had sworn to serve. The resulting characterizations, after a century of adoption, adaptation, and transmission, gelled around Wolsey to such an extent that modern scholars and the public alike still routinely mistake mimetic and poetic history for fact. This ongoing misapprehension of Wolsey’s life and career is perhaps best exemplified by the final text in this study: at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Shakespeare and Fletcher undercut the stock image of Wolsey as a typical scheming cardinal by adding subtle reminders that Wolsey was not merely a melodramatic villain, but rather an imperfect person whose ambitions led to his catastrophic fall. Though Shakespeare’s authorial intentions or opinions are famously opaque, it seems feasible that if we read Wolsey as the victim and not the villain, then Shakespeare and Fletcher have taken the dominant stock image of Wolsey as a bloated and nefarious prelate and undercut it by portraying a more human, multilayered character. This reading is confirmed by comparing other characters’ actions against their perceived reputations: for example, Buckingham is referred to as the “mirror of all courtesy” (2.1.53), though he is markedly discourteous and unable to control his temper. By following this methodology we are given a play markedly different—and considerably more nuanced—from the standard reading, one which demonstrates how previous directors, actors, scholars, and audiences have allowed the stock images of Wolsey bequeathed to them by writers like Skelton and Foxe (as well as pictorial representations of an obese Wolsey, despite the fact that none were taken during Wolsey’s lifetime) to color their interpretation of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s text. That Shakespeare’s sympathetic characterization of the Cardinal is the final incarnation of Wolsey discussed in this thesis is not just a happy coincidence, nor is this text merely used as a chronological bookend to round off the Tudor period; it provides an ideal summative example of a text which plays with the ambiguity of authorial trustworthiness in representations of mimetic and/or poetic history. This play poses readers and audiences with an abstract philosophical question with historiographical and literary implications. Was Wolsey ‘traduced by ignorant tongues’, as his character in Henry VIII feared? Jerome Barlowe and William Roy defended themselves by beginning their Rede Me and Be Nott Wrothe with an address to Wolsey and any potential detractors: “Rede me and be nott wrothe/ For I saye no thynge but trothe.”439 This concern with the protective, instructive, even salvatory nature of truth is central to this thesis, and its varying uses—or misuses—in the texts discussed highlights the problem with an anachronistic acceptance of written accounts as purveyors of ‘historical fact’. Texts like George Cavendish’s Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey and John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments have long proved popular with modern readers searching for a window into the past. The scenes viewed through those windows have often been tacitly accepted as being accurate representations of what Tudor England must have been like. In using Wolsey as a case study, we can see that this approach is fundamentally flawed, as it relies on an unacceptably anachronistic misunderstanding of the evolving nature of Tudor conceptions of history and truth. Abraham Fleming’s self-professed goal to “frankelie and boldlie speake” was made specifically to advertise his edition of the Chronicles as being a more ‘truthful’ portrayal of English history; as we have seen, this claim was largely based on Fleming’s inclusion of a large number of editorials to guide the reader’s understanding of particular events.440 It highlights that while there was an increasing emphasis being placed on accuracy, the objective reporting of facts was not the priority. Rather, as this corpus demonstrates, the goal was to provide the reader (or audience) with a convincing analytical tool to understand people and events: an interpretation that dispelled the artifices of the opposition. This is, of course, not a new discovery, and the problems associated with it certainly reach back to Wolsey’s era and earlier. Yet the image of Wolsey as a morally corrupt Machiavellian villain that is still so overwhelmingly dominant in both scholarship and popular culture—the existence of which is so largely due to historiographical authors like Foxe—confirms that we have a great deal of work to do in unpicking the means and motivations which produced characterizations like this. There are innumerable opportunities to discover how these features applied to the real Wolsey, and how these same literary mechanisms reveal not just Wolsey but the authors, publishers, and editors that utilized them (to say nothing of the audiences and readers that received them). Too little analysis of ‘historical’ texts has been undertaken, fruitful as it may prove: to understand these texts, we must first understand how and why they were created. We care about these texts because they provide glimpses of the past: by approaching them from a literary perspective as well as a historiographical one, we gain a far more nuanced understanding of not just the structures and objects of this period, but the people and ideas that shaped them. Directory: 3735 3735 -> Oregon State Lottery Behavior and Attitude Tracking Study – May 2014 Oregon State Lottery® 3735 -> Path: /Applications/Autodesk/*/Maya app/Contents/MacOS/Maya Download 1.22 Mb. Share with your friends:
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