This chapter considers the attempt during the Marprelate controversy (1589–90) to reprise the rhetoric of plain Englishness as both presbyterian polemic and comic commodity represents a complex set of nostalgias: not for just the medieval history of reformist ploughmen but the more recent reformist era of the 1540s. This bid for authenticity, however, is destabilised by both the tracts’ use of ‘tradition’ as a foil for stylistic experiment and their perceived affinity with the entertainment economy of the late 1580s. As the last part of the chapter argues, ‘Martinism’ was partly the creation of ‘anti-Martinism’ and these salient features can be read through the work of the anti-Martinist critics, in particular pamplets by John Lyly, Robert Greene, and Thomas Nashe. The close attention they pay to the textual detail of the tracts represents its own critical tradition, one minutely sensitive to the contemporary resonances of their linguistic affect.

Chapter Six looks at three plays by William Shakespeare which explores the merry world broadside ballad as a mode of consumption, probing the nature of audience complicity that it invites. It begins with The Winter’s Tale (c. 1610), which interrogates the status of old tales and of happy endings, and the idea – explicitly articulated in Cymbeline (c. 1610–11) – that to be ‘put into rhyme’ is to suffer aesthetic and emotional impoverishment. It then contrasts As You Like It (c. 1598–99) with King Lear (c. 1605–06) as rival disguised-king stories, in which the failure of ballad tropes to reflect reality is played first as farce and then as tragedy.

This chapter argues that the phrase ‘the merry world’ – and sometimes even the word ‘mirth’ – acquired a coded status in Reformation polemical print that then shadowed its use in other contexts: a way of expressing nostalgia for the pre-dissolution past that was proximate to, but not identical with, sedition and recusancy. There is evidence that these feelings were widespread, even amongst orthodox Protestants, but also that they remained potentially incendiary. Focusing on a series of disguised-king broadside ballads set in a pseudo-medieval ‘merry’ past, it suggests the historical fictions of cheap print recuperated the psychic materials of merry world complaint as a source of cosy and uncontentious pleasure.

Chapter Seven considers The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1600), Shakespeare’s only play explicitly set in contemporary England which also addressed the historical freight of mirth. Merry Wives juxtaposes historical with theatrical nostalgia in the person of Falstaff, embodying not just past carnival but more recent stage history. Translating the drama of repetition and disappointment into the register of theatrical experience, the play uses the structures of audience familiarity to make a bold claim for something new.

Beginning with the wildly unsuccessful first performance of Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle in 1607, the introduction interrogates the idea of mirth in early modern England. It argues that ‘mirth’ was understood in three distinct but related senses: as a historically inflected hangover from the pre-Reformation past (‘the merry world’); as secular pastime; and as a generic category denoting certain kinds of entertainment. It sets out the emergence of nostalgia for the pre-Reformation past alongside the growth of a competitive professional theatre and print market. The Knight of the Burning Pestle dramatises the dynamic between the nostalgic desire of audience for past pleasures, both theatrical and historical, and the pressure of the competitive theatre towards novelty. The second half of the chapter situates this tension in relation to the historical rupture of the Reformation; to the explosion in cheap print; and contemporary cultures of performance.

This chapter reassesses the aesthetics of the early modern broadside ballad, arguing for the paradoxical readerly and writerly value of literary inadequacy. The authenticity gap, between the reality of the pre-Reformation past and the stylised conventions through which these broadsides approached it, offered an opportunity in which both writers and readers were complicit. One was the commodification of ‘northern-ness’ in popular literary culture in the years after the Northern Rising, which reveals in miniature the cultural and political work this kind of print could carry out: for example in William Elderton’s A New Yorkshyre Song. It also opened up creative possibilities ifor entrepreneurial writers and printers. These are very much at work in invocations of the cheap print merry world in William Kemp’s Nine Daies Wonder (1600) and Thomas Nashe’s Lenten Stuffe (1599), both from the disorderly world of commercial entertainment, who use these tropes both to shape and legitimate their authorial personas and as springboard for innovation.

Chapter Three explores a series of polemical adaptations to the long poem A Lytell Geste how the Ploughman Learned his Pater Noster (1510), arguing that the figure of the simple English countryman came to embody national tradition. First emerging in the Tudor rediscovery of the reformist ploughman and the poetics of Protestant plainness, Luke Shepherd’s John Bon and Mast Parson (1548) reflects an understanding of the common man as naturally Protestant. During the second half of the sixteenth century this figure became assimilated to a recusant aesthetic, first as comedy in Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1552) Respublica (1553) and William Stevenson’s Gammer Gurton’s Needle (c. 1553), and then tragically in John Heywood’s Pater Noster poems (c. 1550) and Thomas Deloney’s ‘A pleasant Dialogue betweene plaine Truth, and blind Ignorance’ (c. 1588). Both discourses, however, shared an understanding of the common man as an embodiment of English tradition and as a therefore a source of political and theological legitimacy.

A brief coda on the afterlives of early modern broadside ballads considered no longer as performances but as texts, and increasingly assimilated to a narrative of English popular culture that would re-emerge in the nineteenth century’s rediscovery of ‘Merry England’.

This chapter considers two plays which draw explicitly on the broadside ballad tradition of merry world fiction: Thomas Heywood’s The First Part of Edward IV (c. 1599); and Henry Chettle and Anthony Munday’s The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington (c. 1598). While these play-texts quote from, allude to, and overlap with the ballad stories they dramatise in various ways, it is also possible to see a distinctively theatrical vocabulary emerging which adapts the merry world topos to the stage. As such, they presuppose a high degree of audience familiarity with the visual and verbal conventions of the genre on page, stage, and in performance. The theatrical literacy of this assumed audience allows both plays to be constructed around moments of recognition and repetition. This degree of stylistic self-consciousness is playfully knowing in Heywood’s Edward IV and a source of frustration in the Downfall, where it is the impetus for an elaborate meta-theatrical framework exploring audience desire and response.