Reformation Fictions: Polemical Protestant Dialogues in Elizabethan England (review)

The dialogue has been a staple of literature since the classical era. It has a number of qualities that make it appealing for an author with particular goals in mind. It is essentially dramatic in its presentation (if not always in its quality), which allows its reader to enter into it with, as it were, a “willing suspension of disbelief” but which nonetheless, in its imitation of a conversation, lends an air of authenticity to its subject. Its use of characterization allows an author to distance her or himself from the topic by suggesting that the author is merely presenting what that character would say (and how he would say it), rather than representing any personal belief on the author’s part. As well, the dialogue’s popular and oftentimes scurrilous style makes it an ideal vehicle for promoting opinions beyond the confines of the more rarified atmosphere of political, philosophical and theological debate.

Antoinina Bevan Zlatar investigates a variety of polemical dialogues from Elizabeth’s reign with an eye to their literary function, their historical placement, and their theology. She makes the (necessarily subtle) claim that “the polemical dialogues were rhetorical constructs produced by particular men at particular moments in the Elizabethan Reformation with the aim of educating the ‘unlearned’ in the state of the English Church [and] that these authors were consciously crafting a popularizing response to, or version of, more formal works of controversy” (6). It is this popularizing response that is perhaps the most important aspect of Zlatar’s thesis, because it shows the didactic role of the dialogue among common people. In somewhat the same way a modern-day television comedy might take on some social issue to bring the public to a particular position regarding that issue, so a dialogue, with its characters and their attendant sarcasm, irony, and emotion, was used to sway public opinion. By embodying the issues in characters who might be funny, or pathetic, or just average folks—who can, in other words, be identified with by the reader—the people can engage with the issue (in this case the conflict between Good Protestantism and Bad Roman Catholicism), and be guided toward an appropriate response (the Pope is antichrist, Elizabeth rules over a Protestant country by God’s divine authority, Elizabeth’s bishops are no different from Catholics). The dialogue’s characters also drive the standard “plot”: the conversion, either successful or failed, of the Roman Catholic. Not all the Catholics are converted to Protestantism in all of the dialogues, but the reader at least has the comfort of knowing that they will be damned.

Zlatar describes her book as “an unashamedly interdisciplinary project, situated between cultural history and historicist literary criticism” (7). The comment is frustrating, since to declare oneself unashamed suggests the opposite. Interdisciplinarity is a requirement in studying the political religious literature of the protestant reformations, and need not be justified. The opposite, in fact, is true; if anyone sought to explain these texts without engaging in their theological import, that person would be guilty of bad scholarship. Unfortunately the territorialist tendencies in modern academia seem to require at least a mild defense, lest scholars appear to be treading on other scholars’ turf. Pity. It is precisely because of her willingness to transgress disciplinary boundaries that Zlatar’s book is helpful. She discusses a variety of polemical dialogues with a literary critical lens, noting in particular the use of a variety of rhetorical devices used in the texts. She places those texts within their historical context, and makes suggestive conclusions about the authors’ motivations and goals. A fine example can be seen as she draws connections between the Jesuit Campion’s arrival in England in 1580, and the anti-papal dialogues of John Nicholls, Anthony Munday, and George Gifford that make significant use of scurrilous stereotypes of Jesuits, and which were printed in the period when Campion was in the Tower, or shortly after his execution. Neither does Zlatar ignore the theological underpinnings...