By Jacob Ridley

This is part of a series of introductory posts for the updated edition and translation of Hans Sachs’s first Reformation Dialogue ‘Chorherr und Schuhmacher’ (‘Canon and Cobbler’) in German (1524), Dutch (1540s), and English (1540s), published as Volume 5 of the Treasures of the Taylorian. Series One: Reformation Pamphlets. Ebook of the publication.

• The Historical Context (Tom Wood)
• English Reformation Dialogues (Jacob Ridley)
• The Pamphlets in Oxford (Philip Flacke)
• The Edition including the Bibliography (Henrike Lähnemann)

Related Taylor Editions

• Disputation zwischen einem Chorherren und Schuhmacher
• Een schoon disputacie (the Dutch translation, coming soon)
• A goodly dysputacion (the English translation)
• Hans Sachs’s other 1524 dialogues (coming soon)

When the nine-year-old Edward VI came to the throne of England in January 1547, the floodgates of English Protestant print opened. His father Henry VIII had declared an independent Church of England in 1534, rejecting the authority of the Pope, but Henry remained theologically conservative and enforced heresy laws against the more advanced Protestants as well as Roman Catholics. When Henry died, Edward’s uncle, Edward Seymour, Earl of Somerset, served as regent for the new boy king. Seymour oversaw a relaxation of Henry’s censorship laws, giving the freest rein to reformist writers that they would have until the English Revolution a century later, though Catholics, and any other opponents of the royal Reformation, were of course excluded from this new liberty. The result was a release of pent-up activity, like a pressure canister being opened. The annual output of editions under Edward was almost double that in Henry’s last decade.¹ Though censorship was partially reimposed in the wake of Seymour’s fall from power in 1549, Edward’s six-year reign would be a light in the darkness for outspoken reformers like John Bale, who had left Henry’s England for European exile in the 1540s and would leave again to escape Edward’s Catholic half-sister Mary, who succeeded him after his death in 1553. The peak year for the print trade was 1548, when almost 270 editions were printed in London, an English record not surpassed until 1579. By no coincidence, 1548 was the year when Anthony Scoloker printed the surviving editions of his translation of Hans Sachs.

Plays and dialogues (what I am going to call ‘conversational’ texts) were part of the Edwardine print boom.² Vernacular dialogues had been printed in England since the fifteenth century, and plays since at least the 1510s, but Edward’s reign saw an unprecedented concentration of both. This is unsurprising given that conversational fiction was a key propaganda genre in persuading laypeople to the Protestant cause, and there were still lots of scarcely reformed English laypeople to persuade. Even though the genres differ in their function – plays are written primarily for performance, dialogues for reading – the texts printed under Edward share a didactic and controversial style. They teach the truths of the Reformation and attack Catholic errors (the Mass; saint-worship; purgatory; the sacraments; clerical celibacy; and so on), often with merciless mockery. Almost every conversational text written and/or printed in Edward’s reign has a polemical or instructional focus of this kind. Scoloker himself was responsible for at least two: the translation of Sachs, and his own original composition A goodly dialogue between Knowledge and Simplicity, which he printed with William Seres around 1548, in which Knowledge converts Simplicity to the Protestant faith.³

Only three English plays are known to have been printed in the last decade of King Henry’s life – two reprints of old plays by John Heywood, and the quite conservative morality play The four cardinal virtues and the vices contrary to them – but six survive from 1547–53, and a further four printed abroad.⁴ Some were original, such as R. Wever’s Protestant morality play Lusty Juventus, in which the central protagonist is converted from his immature Catholicism to a proper Reformed faith.⁵ Others were translated, like the French Huguenot play La verité cachée, printed in anonymous English translation around 1551.⁶The four printed abroad were all by the arch-reformer John Bale, and published in Wesel in c.1547–48 for sale in England.⁷ Like Scoloker, Bale had strong connections in Ipswich, where he had been head of the Carmelite friary there before his spectacular Protestant conversion. The most notable of his printed plays was Three Laws, in which Infidelity is personified as the Catholic arch-villain who perverts the laws of Nature, Moses, and Christ, with help from his cronies. These include Ambition the bishop; Hypocrisy the friar; and even Sodomy the monk. Bale is known to have revived this play in the marketplace of his parish in Bishopstoke, Hampshire, in 1551. Sachs’s dialogue between a shoemaker and a parson is quite mild-mannered by Bale’s sclerotic standards. In this context, we can understand why Scoloker’s translation often amplifies the shoemaker’s informal and disrespectful tone and makes the parson more petulant and undignified.

A goodly disputation between a Christian shoemaker and a popish parson is in many ways a typical Tudor Protestant dialogue. It pits a well-educated and conscientious layman against a worldly, ignorant priest. This is the format of later argumentative dialogues like A dialogue or familiar talk between two neighbours (c.1554) – in which Oliver, ‘a professour of the Gospell’, squares off with the Catholic Sir Nicholas Noseled – or the Elizabethan Dialogue between a soldier of Berwick and an English chaplain (c.1566), whose honest Protestant soldier is appalled and exasperated by the one-eyed priest Sir Bernard Blinkered.⁸ The fact that Sachs’s speaker is a shoemaker, and therefore less formally educated than his opponent, puts him in the godly soldier’s company. The upending of normal hierarchies – youth and age, laity and clergy, university and unlearned – by the Reformation was something of a trope, as was the Protestant zeal and Bible-reading of young tradesmen. This is typified by a lost play performed at King Edward’s court in c.1547, which featured a priest called Old Blind Custom and a London apprentice named Hunger of Knowledge.⁹ A parson is put in his place by a sincere and irreverent labourer in Luke Shepherd’s boisterous verse dialogue John Bon and Mast[er] Parson, which is possible context for Scoloker’s change from Sachs’s Canon to the Parson – a less specific job title, but more culturally relevant.¹⁰ The most famous icon of this social reversal was the semi-legendary character Piers Plowman, who had his origin in the fourteenth-century dream-poem Piers Plowman by William Langland. Thanks to Langland’s wide-ranging criticism of clerical abuses, Piers Plowman was printed in 1550 as a proto-Reformation tract, and the figure of a humble but impassioned Protestant ploughman became one of the major recurring spokesmen in Reformation fiction.¹¹ In one early outing, for instance, we find Piers proving transubstantiation to be a romish myth in A godly dialogue and disputation between Piers Plowman and a popish priest, printed twice in Edward’s reign.¹²

Sachs’s dialogue brings in other speakers too, and some embodied action (as when the cook fetches the Bible), and has a semi-dramatic liveliness similar to a play. This quality of animation, and the speeches’ colloquial prose, separates it from the very formal subset of dialogues modelled on the catechism, a set of questions and answers to teach the uneducated. Imitating the power dynamic of a classroom, these were very top-down and hierarchical – the opposite of Sachs’s shoemaker – with a master instructing a pupil, a husband his wife, and so on. John Bale wrote one of these for his two sons, printed for him in 1549, in which the elder brother answers the younger’s questions.¹³ Scoloker’s own Knowledge and Simplicity is in this heavily stylised form, written in rhyming stanzas most of which end with the phrase ‘God’s holy name’.¹⁴ Another feature of this formulaic Protestant genre was heavy use of scriptural quotation to mark reliable, godly speech. In an English anti-Catholic catechism printed in Antwerp in 1545, in which Truth instructs an Unlearned Man, Truth speaks exclusively in biblical paraphrase and quotation, with chapter citations provided in the margin.¹⁵

The most ‘theatrical’ of the Edwardine dialogues are the two in which the Mass, personified as a woman of loose morals, is put on trial in a courtroom for setting herself up as an idol to be worshipped in God’s place.¹⁶ These bestselling pieces were printed in multiple editions in 1548-49 by Scoloker’s London collaborator, William Seres. William Turner’s The examination of the Mass sees Mistress Missa (her name the Latin for Mass) cross-examined by Master Knowledge and Master Freemouth, while Porphyry and Sir Philip Philargery (meaning lover-of-silver) attempt to defend her. She is finally sentenced to banishment, because, as Knowledge cautions, if they do not escort her from England ‘the priestes wil kepe her stil in theyr chambres, and wil abuse her as they haue don before.’¹⁷ The dark reference to sexual immorality, typical of religious polemic in this period, alludes to the English Protestant fear that priests would secretly continue to say private masses for clandestine Catholics. William Punt developed the symbolism of the idea in his Inditement against Mother Mass, in which Mother Mass is cross-examined by Knowledge and Verity and defended by Masters Stiffneck and Covetous; the judge is God’s Word and the jury are the twelve Apostles. In the end she is sent packing back to Rome with her two brothers, Superstition and Idolatry.

The issue of the Mass is the most obvious theological difference between Scoloker’s translation and other contemporary polemical dialogues. No controversy provoked so many tracts in the 1540s and 1550s as the debate whether the eucharistic bread and wine in the Mass – the Lord’s Supper in the reformed English Prayer Book – were literally Christ’s flesh and blood. As well as Punt and Turner, Shepherd’s John Bon pours scorn on Mast Parson’s belief in the Real Presence, as does Piers Plowman on the popish priest’s, and so would Oliver in his dialogue with Sir Nicholas Noseled in 1554, giving their reactions to the recent reestablishment of the Mass in England by Mary I.¹⁸ However, Luther went to his grave in 1546 still devoutly believing that the bread and wine became Christ’s body and blood when consumed by a faithful Christian. Sachs as an early follower of Luther accordingly made no attack on transubstantiation. In contrast to the many Edwardine dialogues, which made the Mass their principle target in their assault on the Roman faith, the Shoemaker and the Parson do not mention it once.

Very few conversational texts are known to have been translated from Dutch before Scoloker, unless we include the Latin Colloquia of the Low Countries’ most celebrated humanist, Erasmus, three of which had been published in English by 1548.¹⁹ The really notable exception, however, is the most famous English play before Shakespeare: Everyman.

This is an anonymous translation of Elckerlijc, a play written probably in the 1480s or 1490s, perhaps in Antwerp, for a drama competition between rederijkers, the ‘rhetoricians’ whose humanistic chambers were centres of polite learning in Dutch cities.²⁰

The play tells the story of a man, representing all of mankind, who is told by Death that he is about to die and face judgement. Abandoned by his family, friends, wealth, and health, he is guided by Knowledge through a sequence of sacraments, from confession to extreme unction, to make his soul ready for Heaven. The English version was printed four times in c.1518-35, making it apparently the most popular play before the English Reformation.²¹ Interestingly, the translator was attempting the religious opposite to Scoloker. Everyman is written in explicit support of the authority of the Catholic priesthood and seven sacraments, especially the necessity of penance for sin. The translator, who was apparently working around the time of Luther’s first protest, actually goes further than the original Dutch. He renames the personified character Virtue as ‘Good Deeds’ to make a more explicit defence of the traditional doctrine of salvation by works, which was coming under pressure from theological reformers. As C. J. Wortham puts it, ‘Elckerlijc is ante-Reformation; Everyman is anti-Reformation.’²² The fact that this popular piece was never reprinted after the mid-1530s shows the changing direction of the wind blowing into England from the continent.

Footnotes

For the bibliography on Hans Sachs, see part 4 of the introduction

1 Literature for this part of the introduction is not part of the bibliography and cited in full. Print figures are from John N. King, ‘The book-trade under Edward VI and Mary I’, in Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain vol. III: 1400-1557 (Cambridge: 1999), 164-78 (pp. 165-66).

2 The standard work on Edwardine literature is John N. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton: 1982).

3 A goodly dyalogue betwene Knowledge and Simplicitie (Anthony Scoloker and William Seres, [1548]; STC 6806).

4 The three Henrician plays were all printed by William Middleton: the second editions of John Heywood, The play of the wether ([1544?], STC 13305.5) and The playe called the foure PP ([1544?], STC 13300); and the first of The enterlude of the .iiii. cardynal vertues, [and] the vyces contrarye to them ([c.1545]; STC 14109.7). The six printed in London under Edward were: the second edition of Heywood, [A play of love] ([William Copland for] John Walley, [1548?]; STC 13304); the third of Hycke Scorner ([printer of Smyth’s Envoy for] John Walley, [1549?]; STC 14040); and the first of The enterlude of Iohan the Euangelyst ([printer of Smyth’s Envoy for] John Walley, [c.1550]; STC 14643); [‘The interlude of Detraction, Light Judgement, Verity, and Justice’] ([c.1550]; STC 14109.2), fragmentary;[‘Somebody, Avarice, and Minister’] ([William Copland, 1551?]; STC 14109.3), fragmentary; and R. Wever, An enterlude called Lusty Iuuentus (John Wyer for Abraham Veale, [1551?]; STC 25148). This bibliographic information is from the online Database of Early English Playbooks (DEEP).

5 STC 25148, above.

6 STC 14109.3, above.

7 All printed in Wesel by Derick van der Straten under the name ‘Nicolaus Bamburgensis’: A tragedye or enterlude manyfestyng the chefe promyses of God vnto man ([1547?]; STC 1305); A brefe Comedy or enterlude concernynge the temptacyon of our lorde and sauer Iesus Christ ([1547?]; STC 1279); A comedy concernynge thre lawes, nof nature Moses, [and] Christ, corrupted by the Sodomytes, Pharysees and Papystes ([1548?]; STC 1287). A fourth play on Christ’s baptism, preserved now only in an 18th century manuscript transcript, was originally printed in the first eleven leaves of STC 1279, which are now missing.

8 A dialogue or familiar talke betwene two neighbours (Rouen [i.e. London?]: Michael Wood [i.e. John Day?], 1554; STC 10383); [Anthony Gilby], A pleasant dialogue, betweene a souldior of Barwicke, and an English chaplain ([Middelburg: R. Schilders?], 1581; STC 11888); no earlier edition of the latter survives. For more on Elizabethan dialogues, see Antoinina Bevan Zlatar, Reformation Fictions: Polemical Protestant Dialogues in Elizabethan England (Oxford: 2011).

9 For details of this lost play, see record #156 in Martin Wiggins, British Drama: A Catalogue, 11 vols (Oxford: 2012- ), vol. 1.

10 Luke Shepherd, Ion Bon and Mast Person (John Day and William Seres [1548?]; STC 3258.5).

11 Robert Crowley printed three editions of The vision of Pierce Plowman in 1550 (STC 19906-7a). On Crowley’s Piers, see John N. King, ‘Robert Crowley’s editions of Piers Plowman: A Tudor Apocalypse’, Modern Philology 73 (1976), 342-52; and on Piers as a Protestant spokesman, see Sarah A. Kelen, ‘Plowing the past: “Piers Protestant” and the authority of medieval literary history’, Yearbook of Langland Studies 13 (1999), 101-36, and Lawrence Warner, ‘Plowman traditions in late medieval and early modern writing’, in Andrew Cole and Andrew Galloway (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman (Cambridge, 2014), 198-213.

12 Printed twice around 1550, probably by William Copland (STC 19903-3.5).

13 John Bale, A dialoge or communycacyon to be had at a table betwene two children ([Stephen Mierdman] for Richard Foster, 1549; STC 1290). Mierdman might have been the printer of the Dutch translation of Sachs’s dialogue which Scoloker used.

14 STC 6806, above.

15 Printed after A briefe catechisme and dialogue betwene the husbande and his wife, trans. Robert Legate (Wesel [i.e. Antwerp: Stephen Mierdman], 1545; STC 4797.3).

16 William Turner’s Examination of the Mass was printed by John Day and William Seres in four octavo editions in c.1548-49 (STC 24361.5, 24362-3, 24634a); The Inditement against Mother Mass, attributed to William Punt, in three octavos by the same men in 1548 (STC 20499) and 1549 (20500-0.5).

17 STC 24361.5, [G8]v.

18 STC 3258.5 and 10383, above. See also Randall Hurlestone, Newes from Rome concerning the blasphemous sacrifice of the papisticall Masse (Canterbury: John Mitchell for E. Campion, [1548-50?]; STC 14006), which contains four dialogues, respectively on the Mass, true worship, honouring saints, and Christian freedom.

19 Funus [1526] was published in English in 1534 (Robert Copland for John Byddell; STC 10453.5); Peregrinatio religionis ergo [1526] in around 1540 (STC 10454); and Philip Gerrard’s translation of Epicurus [1533] in 1545 (Richard Grafton; STC 10460); followed by Edmond Becke’s translations of Cyclops [1529] and De rebus ac vocabulis [1523] in Two dyaloges (Canterbury: John Mitchell [c.1549-53]; STC 10459).

20 Both texts are printed in Everyman and its Dutch Original, Elckerlijc, ed. Clifford Davidson, Martin W. Walsh, and Ton J. Broos (Kalamazoo: 2007).

21 Printed by Richard Pynson ([c.1518-19], STC 10604; [1526-28?], STC 10604.5) and John Skot ([c.1529], STC 10606); [1534?], STC 10606.5).

22 C. J. Wortham, ‘Everyman and the Reformation’, Parergon 29 (1981), 23-31 (p. 23).