Dispossession as Metaphor? Acting and Ventriloquism

Once upon a time, it was possible to argue that the controversy over godliness in late Elizabethan England was discussed primarily in the kinds of literature that were of least interest to literary scholars. At the head of this list were fat theological works, with supposedly popular pamphlets coming just behind. Beyond these were obscure collections of documents to be mined purely for the ‘facts’ they contained, like those collected by John Field to form his registers of the persecution of the godly. For example, the story of the tribulations of the puritan agitator Giles Wigginton was useful from this viewpoint primarily because he happened to mention that the pursuivant who arrested him was the dramatist Anthony Munday. But since the advent of new historicism and cultural materialism, literary scholars have begun to argue successfully that works once perceived as ‘background’ to dramatic and poetic works now stand with them on an equal footing, as both intertextually important and themselves amenable to reading as representations. Th e reading of pamphlets and sermons in this way soon drew attention to the fact that many of the narratives, characters and imageries deployed there also appeared in canonical literary works – and not just in obvious godly or Catholic stereotypes like Malvolio, Tribulation Wholesome or Oliver Martext, but also less recognizable figures like Olivia, Doctor Pinch, Falstaff and Pisanio. Scholars began to read the works of Samuel Harsnett and Martin Marprelate in great detail, looking for cultural synergies between them and the works of canonical dramatists.