Rede me and be not wrothe (review)

138 Reviews these questions are easier to raise than to answer and Barber is to be congratulated for having attempted a task that must be the focus of ongoing attention. Constant Mews Department of History Monash University Barlowe, Jerome and William Roye, Rede me and be not wrothe, ed. Douglas H. Parker, Toronto/Buffalo/London, University of Toronto Press, 1992; cloth; pp. vii, 247; 1 plate; R.R.P. CAN$50.00. A work such as Barlowe and Roye's vigorous attack on the Mass, the monastic orders, and the character and influence of Cardinal Wolsey might once have been used as evidence for the coUapse of traditional devotions and the ecclesiastical order in Hcnrician England. Contemporary wills and accounts show, however, that such was not the case. Rede me and be not wrothe is therefore best seen as a wide-ranging satiretobe judged not by its impact, but by the circumstance of its existence. The work was part of the energetic exchange of pamphlets and squibs by which the Reformation was argued as vigorously as it was in weightier doctrinal treatises. The preface places it in the context of such a programme of pamphlets, when the addressee is asked for 'any m o soche smale stickes come unto youre hondes', which it might not be possible to publish in England, but with which the fire of controversy might be augmented. 'The servant of the Lord must not strive', wrote William Tyndale in 'The parable of wicked Mammon', 'but be peaceable unto all men, and ready to teach . . . It becometh not then the Lord's servant to use railing rhymes, but God's word; which is the right weapon to slay sin, vice, and all iniquity'. Tyndale appears to have employed Wtiliam Roye as an assistant in preparing his translation of the N e w Testament and to have been uneasy about his approach to religious debate. Roye's aggression found its oudet in the satirical modes of which Tyndale was so wary. This 1528textwas a particularly important piece of anti-Wolsey satire, along with Skelton's Why come ye not to courte (1522), and more directiy so than a work such as Skelton's Magnyffycence which, it has been suggested, was composed as early as 1511 and thus pre-dates Wolsey's zenith. Rede me and be not wrothe was also part of a long-standing tradition of anti-prelatical and anti-monastic satire which appealed to both popular and Reviews 139 aristocratic interests, criticising not only the monks for then idleness but the prelates for the way in which 'they disdayne the auncient and true noble bloud'. Rede me and be not wrothe was wide-ranging both in its targets and its style. One of its interesting features is its satirical mis-reading of Wolsey's coat-of-arms, a piece of iconographical satire that takes its place along with linguistic, social, personal, cultural, and intertextual satire. Parker's discussion of the satirical tradition of Rede me and be not wrothe although usefully locating it within the tradition initiated by Lollardy, would have benefitted by some more extensive discussion of the larger Reformation satiric tradition. The discussion of the literary aspects of the satire is particularly unadventurous. The footnotes, although comprehensive, oftenrelyon a restricted range • of sources. It is unnecessary to gloss the line, "The dolfull destruction of noble ttoye' with the comment 'As immortalized in Homer's Illiad' (p. 171). And although Barlowe and Roye might well have liked to depict Wolsey preceded in procession by 'two great asses of silver', George Cavendish, whose Life and death of Cardinal Wolsey '(1554-57) Parker misquotes (p. 184), speaks of 'two great crosses of silver' as carried before him. James Rigney Department of English Roehampton Institute, London Bath, Michael, Speaking pictures: English emblem books and Renaissance culture, London, Longman 1994; cased and paper; pp. xiii, 311; 7 figures, 25 plates; R.R.P. £38.00 (cased), £16.99 (paper). Despite the pioneering work represented by Henry Green's Shakespeare and the emblem writers (1869), literary scholars have been slow to grasp the enormous importance of emblem studies for the exegesis of Renaissance literary works. Much about the subject is...