Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation

by Greg Walker

Writing Under English Literature and the Henrician Reformation spans the boundaries between literary studies and history. It looks at the impact of tyrannical government on the work of poets, playwrights, and prose writers of the early English Renaissance. It shows the profound effects that political oppression had on the literary production of the years from 1528 to 1547, and how English writers in turn strove to mitigate, redirect, and finally resist that oppression. The result was the destruction of a number of forms that had dominated the literary production of late-medieval England, but also the creation of new forms that were to dominate the writing of the following centuries. Paradoxically, the tyranny of Henry VIII gave birth to many modes of writing now seen to be characteristic of the English literary Renaissance.

576 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Greg Walker is Regius Chair of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He writes on the literature and drama of the Medieval-to-Renaissance period in England and Scotland.

His first book was John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520s (Cambridge University Press, 1988), his most recent John Heywood: Comedy and Survival in Tudor England (Oxford University Press, 2020). Among other publications are Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford University Press, 2005), Medieval Drama: An Anthology (Blackwell, 2000), and Imagining Spectatorship from the Mysteries to the Skakespearian Stage (Oxford University Press, 2016), co-written with John J. McGavin.

He co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English (Oxford University Press, 2010) with Thomas Betteridge. With Betteridge, Eleanor Rycroft and Gregory Thompson, he was responsible for the production of David Lyndsay's Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis at Linlithgow Palace in2013.

Reviews

[Tracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very exciting inquiry into how well-educated figures responded in writing to the tyranny of Henry VIII's last twenty years of rule. Walker says the English had to be trained how to cow to power. It clearly was difficult for them to learn.

[Ellie Hope · Rating 2 out of 5]

39/100