Malfi COntext VLE Flashcards
Why was England anti-catholic?
Henry VIII’s break with the Catholic Church was to create religious friction in England
From 1558 when his daughter Elizabeth I ascended the throne, English Catholics were seen as disloyal and potentially treacherous.
Much of this anti-Catholic feeling had resulted from the reign of Henry’s eldest daughter Mary Tudor (‘Bloody Mary’) who was a Catholic, and who burned and tortured many Protestants during her short reign.
When James I came to the throne in 1603, what was the accepted religion of England?
Protestantism, though there were many faces to this.
The Reformation of the late 16th century had shown Protestants that there were other ways to worship God without the formality of the Church of England.
Dissenters and Puritans moved away from the established Church to a simpler, more direct and personal way of worship that reflected the importance of individual conscience rather than the infrastructure of clergy, bishops and King.
What impact did anti-catholic feeling have on how catholic countries were presented?
demonisation of the Catholic church and Catholic countries, especially in Spain, England’s avowed enemy. Italy, too, posed a threat, yet not so much a poltical one as Italy as a unified country did not exist in 1613; it was a collection of autonomous states and provinces all ruled by separate princes
What does David Gunby say of Italy?
In presenting their revenge plots … the dramatists almost invariably … set their plays in Italy … In doing so,
they embodied the typical Englishman’s attitude to these distant lands: A MIXTURE OF FEAR AND FASCINATION …
Inasmuch as it reflected a real world, it was, however, AN ENGLISH ONE. For the strong satiric elements to be
found in most Italianate revenge plays indicate a DEEO CONCERN FOR A SOCIETY UNDER STRESS and felt … not to
be changing but degenerating.
Simon Trussler on Italy
There were good practical and artistic reasons why Italy … provided the setting for so much Jacobean
tragedy.
From there in 1520 had come what was still regarded [in 1600] as virtually a “handbook of political intrigue” – The Prince, by the statesman and philosopher Machiavelli, whose very name had become, somewhat unjustly, synonymous with devious (and probably devilish) conspiracy.
Simon Trussler, Shakespearean Concepts, 1989
represented by dramatists as a centre of “[murderous] personal strife, often driven by the impulse for
revenge”, and of political duplicity irreligiously rooted in the supposed tenets of Machiavelli. Plots based in either (or frequently both) kinds of conflict were further subject to the intervention of decorative cardinals,
whose behaviour good Protestants “might safely deplore while any kind of dramatic debate on matters affecting the theology of the Church of England remained taboo.”
