Читать книгу Elizabethan Controversialists - Peter Milward - Страница 4

One of the reviewers of my former book, Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age, A.L.Rowse (in History Today, Jan.1978), took the controversialists to task on three main points. First, he criticized them for “stating and restating, and repeating ad nauseam, their own point of view already arrived at,” and for lacking “open minds ready to be persuaded, or even to do elementary justice to an opponent.” Secondly, and consequently, he found among them few writers “who are really worth reading,” but all too many with second-rate minds. Thirdly, he noted “how academic all this disputation was – the kind of things dons like”. In perusing this review, however, I couldn’t help reflecting that these were also the reasons which had dissuaded the reviewer from wading through the controversies himself. Evidently he had contented himself with a few famous names, such as John Donne, “the fair-minded Hooker”, Jewel and Bancroft, from among the Anglicans, with “the Jesuit Parsons” and “the long-winded Perkins”, two adversaries of the Anglican establishment from opposite viewpoints. But that was all. He was perhaps hardly to be blamed for having hesitated to cut his way through the tangled undergrowth lying behind those names, but he must be judged guilty of having falsely implied that he had cut his way through and come up with nothing worthy of a historian’s attention.

In reply to his first charge, I would point out that the controversialists were indeed engaged in presenting and defending their viewpoint against the criticism of their opponents. But to understand them, as is the elementary duty of a historian, it is necessary to consider and even enter into that viewpoint. For them it wasn’t merely what we may call an opinion, which may or may not be true, and for which we would hardly wager our lives. It was rather what we should call a conviction, a matter of religious faith, for which they were in many cases ready to lay down their lives, as they often did. At least, this is often true of the Catholic and Puritan authors, whereas for the Anglicans, whose cause the reviewer tends to favour, they had other means of defending their position than the “pen”, a means they relied on when calling on the magistrate to wield the “sword”.

Such men of conviction weren’t always, it is true, possessed of first-rate minds. Conviction doesn’t always or necessarily improve the intelligence, but it does give a certain edge or point to the exercise of the intelligence. In any case, name isn’t always the same as intelligence. Because certain names, such as those of Donne and Hooker, have risen above the clouds of controversy and reached the ears of modern historians, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they were the best controversial authors of their age, however much the presumption may seem to favour them. Their fame rests on other, more solid foundations – Donne, because he was also a great poet and preacher, Hooker, because he wrote his Laws not precisely as a work of controversy but as a positive investigation into the foundations of the Anglican position.

As for the other names who remain enveloped in the clouds of their quarrelling and our unknowing, can they all be dismissed as second-rate or inferior in intelligence? As one who has made his way through the undergrowth of their writings and the cloud of their contrary convictions, I can give the unhesitating reply, “Certainly not!” In their writings I have found an immense variety of argumentation, personality and human interest. They may have been passionately opposed to each other, seeking by all means to involve the uncommitted reader in their passion. Yet it is this passion of theirs which gives force to their arguments and interest to their personalities. In proceeding from controversy to controversy I have even had the impression of assisting at a series of somewhat long-drawn-out dramatic performances.

Of all the criticisms made by the above-mentioned reviewer, however, the third is easily the furthest removed from the mark. For if there was one thing most of these controversies were not, they were definitely not mere academic disputations. Most of those engaged in them may have been university men, Catholics mostly from Oxford, Puritans mostly from Cambridge, and Anglicans (or simply Protestants) impartially from either university. But they were by no means engaged in mere academic exercises, or “the kind of things dons like”. They were defending their dearest principles, dearest not only to themselves as university men but also to their simplest fellow believers. At least, this may be affirmed of the Catholics and the Puritans, who had the least inducement to compose academic exercises. What they wrote might well be confiscated and they themselves arrested and banished or even executed for their pains. It was often indeed the prospect of death that served to sharpen their minds and their pens. Only the Anglicans were free to enjoy academic peace and to write in the hope of being rewarded with a deanery or a bishopric, but even they were forced to defend themselves against the often penetrating criticisms of their opponents.

It is far from my intention in these pages to “revive old factions” or to “restore old policies” by thus going over the former battleground and recalling the dreams of fallen warriors. They are gone, and their quarrels have mostly gone with them. Yet, as T.S.Eliot reminds us in “Little Gidding”, what they have left us is something precious, “a symbol perfected in death”. They have in their various ways, from their various points of view, striven for something they often held more precious than life itself. Their strife may now be over and their wars forgotten, but it would be a shame and a loss for us to overlook what their strife was all about, as though a matter of little consequence, or to despise those who strove for such matters. After all, they were human beings like ourselves, and by studying them and their strife we may well learn something important about ourselves.

What then was their strife about? That is the subject of the following pages. In general terms, however, it may be described as the principal point at issue between the old and the new, the mediaeval and the modern world. The one was dying, but not without a determined struggle for life. The other was coming to birth, but not without the agonizing pains of labour. When the princess Elizabeth came to the English throne in 1558 it seemed to be an unexpected stroke of good fortune for the small Protestant party, and they proceeded to make the most of it, realizing that if their queen died prematurely, it would again be the turn of the Catholics to control the destinies of the country. Still, they felt that the future was on their side, whereas the past, though it might reach back over a thousand years, might well be left in the hands of the Catholics. Only, as the present moved inexorably into the future, they came to confront another kind of opposition, no longer the old traditional ways of the Catholics but a reform newer than their own, a reform compared with which their own seemed little different from the old tradition. And so, to use Shakespeare’s words in Twelfth Night, “the whirligig of time brought in his revenges.” (v.1)

During the reign of Queen Elizabeth, which fortunately for the Anglicans was prolonged to forty-five years, the controversies were never at a standstill. They were always on the move, fluctuating like the waves of the sea, now with the Catholics, now with the Puritans, first to the right, then to the left, and then back again. There were continual currents and cross-currents, varying with the changing situation at home and abroad and with the human personalities involved in each change of situation. The issues uppermost in the sixties were by no means the same as those in the seventies, and so on. From decade to decade, from year to year, sometimes even from month to month, the situation was changing, with new books on the bookstalls, or new petitions to Parliament, or new proclamations from the Queen to the accompaniment of indignant protests. An appropriate comparison might be made to the English weather. No one knew what might happen next.

We have, moreover, to direct our gaze not just to the particular issues discussed in particular controversies, but to their general effect on the minds of Elizabethan Englishmen. To them at least these were no academic disputations between university dons. They could hardly help taking sides, according to “their own point of view already arrived at”, whether Catholic or Protestant, whether Anglican or Puritan, and later on, whether Jesuit or Appellant. Not all, of course, took sides. Many were pulled this way and that by the contrary winds of disputation. Some, like the young John Donne, were filled with confusion as they followed the arguments on either side and could only pray, “Show me, dear Christ, thy spouse!” Others, like Shakespeare, felt disgust at such “devilish-holy fray” in which “truth kills truth” – as Helena complains in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (iii.2). In either case, they couldn’t, like today’s Oxford dons, dissociate themselves from it all, since it wasn’t only outside them but also part of their inmost selves.

Here perhaps, rather than in the political or social conditions or literary writings of the time, are to be found the seeds of the subsequent development of modern England. The swirling controversies were a kind of typhoon or hurricane determining the pattern of the weather for miles around and for days on end. Nothing like them had been known in England before, and nothing like them appeared after they had finally blown over, with the outbreak of civil war and the beheading of a king. In their midst – though this is a truth that has been strangely overlooked by both historians and literary scholars – appeared the greatest genius in English literature, William Shakespeare, with his immensely varied genius for both comedy and tragedy, not to mention history. How, we may wonder, was Shakespeare himself affected by all these controversies? No doubt, as I have suggested, his feeling was one of disgust, not in the skeptical spirit of the above-mentioned reviewer, but as one who hates to see what Hamlet calls “sweet religion” converted into a mere “rhapsody of words” (iii.4). Far more than Hooker, he was able to rise above them, not out of uncommitted indifference to them but in the deep desire, even within the limits of drama, to bring about a practical solution to them.

Here is, in fact, my own motive in exploring once more this hotly disputed ground of old. In the first place, it is my aim as a student of Shakespeare’s plays, to enter as deeply as possible into the heart of their mystery, not in order to pluck it out with the rudeness of a Rosencrantz but to leave it there with all due reverence. Secondly, it isn’t enough for me to understand the plays themselves, but through them I wish to enter more deeply into the heart of England and of that humanity which is so dramatically represented in them. For the more I peruse the plays and the controversies together, the more convinced I become of their intimate connection. Not that I can lay a precise finger on the connection, saying “Here it is!” or “There it is!” Rather, it is at once here, there and everywhere, as the soul is said by scholastic philosophers to be present in the body, “whole in the whole, and whole in every part”.

In proposing to myself this twofold aim I introduce different controversialists one by one, each as a human character in his own right, without regard to contemporary or posthumous fame. In so doing, I present the main issues for which each one variously stood and with which he was personally associated. Finally, after having gone through them all, I turn to their great contemporary William Shakespeare, considering how far they and their writings were reflected in the course of his plays, in his characters and their often impassioned utterances. Yet it is also my intention not just to end with Shakespeare, but rather to look through his eyes to the present situation of England and to the wider world, and more profoundly to the heart of Man.