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128 5 Hamlet in Purgatory stephen greenblatt Early in 1529 a London lawyer, Simon Fish anonymously published a tract addressed to Henry VIII called A Supplicacyon for the Beggers. The tract was modest in length but explosive in content: Fish wrote on behalf of the homeless,desperate English men and women,“nedy,impotent,blinde,lame and sike,” who pleaded for spare change on the streets of every city and town in the realm. These wretches, “on whome scarcely for horror any yie dare loke,”have become so numerous that private charity can no longer sustain them, and they are dying of hunger.1 Their plight, in Fish’s account, is directly linked to the pestiferous proliferation throughout the realm of beggars of a different kind: bishops, abbots, priors, deacons, archdeacons, suffragans , priests, monks, canons, friars, pardoners, and summoners. Simon Fish had already given a foretaste of his anticlerical sentiments and his satirical gifts. In his first year as a law student at Gray’s Inn, according to John Foxe, one of Fish’s mates, a certain Mr. Roo, had written a play holding Cardinal Wolsey up to ridicule. No one dared to take on the part ofWolsey until Simon Fish came forward and offered to do so.The performance so enraged the powerful cardinal that Fish was forced “the same night that this Tragedie was playd” to flee to the Low Countries to escape arrest.2 There, he evidently met the exile William Tyndale, whose new English translation of the bible he subsequently helped to circulate. At the time he wrote A Supplicacyon for the Beggers, Fish had probably returned to London but was in hiding. He was thus a man associated with Protestant beliefs, determined to risk his life to save the soul of his country and endowed, as were many religious revolutionaries in the 1520s and 1530s, with a kind of theatrical gift.3 In A Supplicacyon for the Beggers, he not only speaks on behalf of the poor but also speaks in their voice, crying out to the king against those who have greedily taken for themselves the Hamlet in Purgatory / 129 wealth that should otherwise have made England prosperous to the benefit of all its people. If his gracious majesty would only look around, he would see “a thing farre out of ioynt” (413). The ravenous monkish idlers “haue begged so importunatly that they haue gotten ynto theyre hondes more then the therd part of all youre Realme.” No great people, not the Greeks nor the Romans nor the Turks, and no ruler, not King Arthur himself, could flourish with such parasites sucking at their lifeblood. Not only do monks and priests destroy the economy, interfere with royal prerogative and undermine the laws of the commonwealth, but, because they seduce “euery mannes wife,euery mannes doughter and euery mannes mayde,”they subvert the nation’s moral order as well. Boasting among themselves about the number of women they have slept with, the clerical drones carry contagion —syphilis and leprosy—through the whole realm.“Who is she that wil set her hondes to worke to get .iij. d. a day,” the beggers ask,“and may haue at lest .xx.d. a day to slepe an houre with a frere, a monke, or a prest?” (417). With a politician’s flair for shocking (and unverifiable) statistics, Fish estimates that one hundred thousand Englishwomen have been corrupted by monks. No man can be sure, he writes, that the child poised to inherit his estate is his own and not a priest’s bastard. Why have these diseased“bloudsuppers”succeeded in amassing so much wealth and power? Why would otherwise sensible, decent people, alert to threats to their property, their health, and their liberties, allow themselves to be ruthlessly exploited by a pack of “sturdy idell holy theues” (415)? The question would be relatively easy to answer were these acts cunningly concealed crimes or assaults on the powerless, but in Fish’s account, virtually the entire society, from the king and the nobility to the poor housewife who has to give the priests every tenth egg her hen lays, has been openly victimized . How can one explain the dismaying spectacle that Montaigne’s friend, Etienne de la Boétie, called “voluntary servitude?”4 For la Boétie, the answer lies in networks of dependency that lock people into submission to their social superiors. Fish’s answer centers not on social structure but on belief. The vast system of...

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