Mid-Tudor Drama and Sacramental Reform

Abstract

The urge to form a Protestant subjectivity and society demonstrated in Bale’s drama re-occurs at various points throughout the sixteenth century. The accession of Edward VI may have seemed, to radical Protestants, to offer the perfect opportunity to fully develop a newly reformed realm; conversely, the years of Marian reign may have seemed to offer hope, for Catholics, of the reinstitution of a sacramental sociology. Marian Catholicism, however, is not particularly concerned with the use of drama as a vehicle for religious ideology, differing in this regard from both pre-Reformation Catholicism and sixteenth-century Protestantism.¹ This chapter, accordingly, examines texts from two critical moments in the promulgation of Protestantism in sixteenth-century England: the printed attacks on the mass in early Edwardian England, and the continually adaptive morality plays of Edwardian and early Elizabethan England. These texts demonstrate the ways in which post-Henrician Protestantism, drawing in some ways on the influence of Bale’s example, adopts drama as a means of promoting a reformed sacramentality and, in doing so, suggests the possibility of a reformed society and subjectivity.