BL =

British Library, London

BL Lansd. =

British Library, Lansdowne Manuscripts

Bodl. =

Bodleian Library, Oxford University

CP =

The Cecil Papers, the online digital collection of the manuscripts at Hatfield House

Doran and Jones, Elizabethan World =

Susan Doran and Norman Jones, eds. The Elizabethan World (London: Routledge, 2011)

Hartley, Proceedings =

T.E. Hartley, ed. Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I, 3 vols. (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1981–95)

HEH =

Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, CA

H&L =

P.L. Hughes and J.F. Larkin, eds. Tudor Royal Proclamations, 3 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969)

HPT =

History of Parliament Trust, The Commons 1558–1603. http://www.histparl.ac.uk/research/members/members‐1558‐1603 [Accessed November 29, 2018]

Jones, Birth =

Norman Jones, The Birth of the Elizabethan Age. England in the 1560s (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989)

Jones, Faith by Statute =

Norman Jones, Faith by Statute. Parliament and the Settlement of Religion, 1559 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1982)

Jones, God and the Moneylenders =

Norman Jones, God and the Moneylendes. Usury and Law in Early Modern England (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1989)

Jones, Governing =

Norman Jones, Governing by Virtue. Lord Burghley and the Management of Elizabethan England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)

Parker Correspondence =

John Bruce and Thomas Perowne, eds. Correspondence of Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Parker Society, 1853)

Shakespeare =

Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Suzanne Gossett, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Gordon McMullan, eds. The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd ed., 4 vols. (New York, London: W.W. Norton and Co., 2016)

STC =

Pollard & Redgrave’s Short‐Title Catalogue of English Books (1475–1640), 2nd ed. (1976), digitized as Early English Books Online by Chadwyck Healey. https://eebo.chadwyck.com/home [Accessed November 29, 2018]

TNA =

The National Archives of the UK, Kew

USTC =

Universal Short Title Catalog, a collective database of all books published in Europe from the invention of the printing press until the end of the Sixteenth Century. https://www.ustc.ac.uk/index.php [Accessed November 29, 2018]

This book has been in gestation since 1972. When I began studying history professionally, I had a question on my mind. I wanted to understand the relationship between belief and behavior. My lab was the Reformation, in which people openly talked about what they believed and formally altered those beliefs, marking the beginning of early modern culture. Since I began, my work has explored various approaches to this question, and this book is a synthesis of my varied inquests into Elizabethan society.

In 45 years, I have incurred countless debts of gratitude. Many of those are acknowledged in other books, but a few must be recognized again. I have had great mentors: T.H. McDonald, Carl Christensen, Boyd Hill, Wallace MacCaffrey, and, most importantly, Sir Geoffrey Elton. I have benefitted greatly from the generosity of friends who have taught me about early modern England, and sometimes the meaning of life. This list is too long to enumerate, but Robert Tittler, Susan Doran, Glyn Perry, Susan Wabuda, David Dean, and Paulina Kewes are outstanding examples.

This book would not exist without the generosity of the Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino, California. When Steve Hindle invited me to become the Fletcher Jones Distinguished Fellow for 2015–16, I was delighted at the idea of a year of uninterrupted work in the Huntington, surrounded by a superb group of colleagues. Mary Robertson, Steve Hindle, and Vanessa Wilkie played and continue to play important roles in my education. The first draft of this book was written between walks in the Huntington’s gardens and long talks with the other fellows, long‐ and short‐term.

My professional base is Utah State University, which has made my career possible and pleasurable. Our superb librarians have taken good care of me, ensuring access to databases essential for my work. Jennifer Duncan has been endlessly helpful. My colleagues have helped me in many, many ways. Charlie Huenemann and Susan Cogan have read parts of this work and shared their knowledge. Phebe Jensen read the first draft and gave advice that much improved it.

The greatest debt of all is owed to my wife, Cecile Gilmer, who has almost become an Elizabethan, living with my historical musings and journeying with me. She brought her own considerable skills as a writer to the manuscript, serving as the ultimate reader, making it much more accessible. I dedicate this book to Cecile as a tenth anniversary present.

Of all those people and institutions whose generosity has made this book possible, I can confidently declare, like an Elizabethan epitaph, that their virtues will never be forgotten.

In the second half of the sixteenth century—during the reign of Elizabeth I—a new English culture was forming. Far different from the late medieval culture of pre‐Reformation England, it was the foundation for a new society whose assumptions, values, and actions were markedly “early modern.”

Europeans in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries lived through an era of intense cultural and social dislocation. Across the continent, established ideas about metaphysical and social order were stressed, broken, rejected, confused, and reformed. Outbreaks of religious violence were the most obvious indicators of these tensions, but they were also accompanied with new understandings of social duty and organization. The religious ideologies of the era warred with one another and the governors of their societies struggled to retain control and advance their own visions of what God required of them.

In England, these struggles took peculiar styles, shaped by the nation’s history, customs, and unique religious reforms. The generations of Elizabethans fought to live their lives in a culture that was deeply torn over its values, trying out new ways of living and expressing themselves. The results of their battles are celebrated as the “Elizabethan Age,” the cultural crucible of the modern English‐speaking world.

Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, “To be or not to be: That is the question,” first heard by theater goers in about 1600, poses a conundrum that had resonances for people of the Elizabethan age.¹ They, in their own rough ways, were all looking for themselves in the welter of old and new ideas and experiences that rushed upon the later sixteenth century. It was a time of particularly rapid change in English society, and it left everyone with puzzles about how to live in a world that was radically conservative and rapidly changing. God, salvation, duty, obedience, pleasure, purpose, domestic roles, and universal absolutes were being questioned by people swimming in the rip currents of conflicting truths.

Everyone was coping with the terror of history, using the tools at hand to understand themselves, their society, and their cosmos. In that sense, they were like us, but they lived in a different reality that gave their universe very different organization, reasons, and options.

This book reflects those reasons, options, beliefs, and experiences. It is about how Elizabethans understood themselves, how they perceived reality and acted on this perception. It is about the negotiations between the presumed static order of a divinely governed world and the rapid changes in thinking, knowing, and doing occurring in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Its goal is to make early modern English ways of thinking and behaving understandable, so that its readers can make informed assumptions about how Elizabethans chose the explanations and actions that seemed appropriate to them. Being Elizabethan is a portrait of how Elizabethans, as reasonable agents, living in a transformative time, pursued ends determined by their reason in the context of their lives.

Of course, there was no typical Elizabethan. They came in infinite variety. But they shared aspirations, world views, and values that mark them out as people of a particular time and place.

I define “Elizabethans” as those individuals who were fully adult in 1558 and those who, educated in her reign, lived beyond 1603. They incorporate roughly four generations, born between about 1520 and 1590. They shared many events in Elizabeth’s reign, but experienced them according to their ages, educations, and social roles.

Trying to capture how people reasoned in their lives is like trying to carry water in a sieve. As soon as you have scooped it up, it leaks out in tiny individualized streams. Historians are challenged to put individuals in context. We know we cannot understand the actions of an individual without understanding the system of values, historical events, and connections within which they lived. But we also recognize that within those contextualizing embraces, there are myriad individual choices defining individual acts and thoughts

No one’s choices and expressions in the Elizabethan age were entirely determined by the perceptions sketched in this book, but it is also true that no one’s choices and expressions were unconstrained by these perceptions. People were in a negotiation with their society and their God. It was a negotiation inflected by the ideas they shared with one another, and by the experiences they had in common, whether in terms of demographics (e.g., gender, age), occupations, social groups (e.g., families), common modes of expression (e.g., the Book of Common Prayer), societal structures (e.g., the legal system), or modes of presentation (e.g., the printing press, the pulpit). Everyone was interacting with institutions and audiences both internally and externally. No one could find self‐understanding or engage in social activity without using their shared modes of perception. They lived within a grid of meaning and experience.

The last major attempt to capture the Elizabethan “times” was A.L. Rowse’s two volumes, The Elizabethan Renaissance: The Life of the Society (1971) and The Elizabethan Renaissance: The Cultural Achievement (1972). These took up, he said, “the life of the mind, the values and creative achievements that redeem the record.”² The first volume ticked the usual boxes of social history—food, lodging, sex, belief—while the second explored the expressions of the “English Renaissance” in drama, music, art, science, and medicine. Accessible, entertaining, and informative, Rowse’s books are still in print. Scholarship has advanced far beyond where he left it in 1972, however.

Rowse expressed the rhetorical problem facing attempts to capture the way Elizabethans made sense of their lives. How do you give such a sprawling topic a “vertebrate structure”?³ How can you create a narrative out of a shapeless, bubbling mass of human values and interchanges? Believing that the “ultimate constituent of history is an individual life,” Rowse preferred to tell stories, describing good history as the “Conception of the course of events as a historical, spiritual process—as applied in the philosophy of Hegel.”⁴

Being Elizabethan is my attempt to put Elizabethans into the spirit of their age, but with a vertebrate structure much different from Rowse’s. I assume that we can only make sense of Elizabethans by listening to how they shaped their choices in the face of historical circumstances. When confronted with a problem, how did they understand its origins? Make sense of its impacts? Conceptualize possible responses? How did they understand good and bad, desirable and undesirable?

Holding my work together is a conviction that has been thrust upon me by the evidence: Elizabethans’ perceptions were shaped by a deep belief in God’s Word, but they could never agree on the right balance of authority for applying His Word. This accounts for the tension and creativity that marked the era and ushered in the beginning of a secular society based on individualism.

The question animating all my journeys into the Elizabethan world is, “When people believe something, how do they enact their belief?” I have sought to define how Elizabethans perceived the issues confronting them, looking for actions that are predicated on their perceptions. I also want to know how belief is influenced by the experience of actions taken and the realities of life.

The goal is to invoke the natural responses of Elizabethans to the world as they met it. To do this, I put down layers of values, virtues, social orders, and education, building up the “base” Elizabethan. I then complicate their enduring values—the sort of “truths” they would give you if you asked them about what should be—with jarring changes that disturbed but did not dethrone those values, creating great social tensions. Attempting to harmonize the disturbances, I explore how Elizabethans understood causation, providence, economics, and politics.

I delineate what they believed in and how they learned those beliefs. I then introduce the challenges to those beliefs. Finally, I explore the adaptations made to accommodate both belief and lived experience. A world, presumed to be static, is disrupted by rapid change, creating new syntheses, placing more emphasis on individual choice, and complicating personal and communal identities.

The book begins by describing the idealized lives of the departed. “Speak nothing but good of the dead” was a sentiment widely held in the early modern period. Believing that ancestors should be models for their successors, Elizabethans portrayed the departed in idealized terms. Funeral sermons, epitaphs, funeral monuments, memorial poems, moralizing verses, and other genres didactically taught the living to prepare for death. They summarized what it meant to be a good man or woman. Most of these models of goodness were biblical and traditional, but they also evolved as religious values changed. In 1558, Queen Mary was an ideal Christian because she, a chaste and honorable woman, had memorized the Psalms in Latin, knew the responses in the mass, and recognized the Pope as her spiritual leader. Katherine Brettergh, who died in 1601, was an equally chaste and honorable lady who read her Bible constantly and hated popes. Both women are contemporarily portrayed as embodying the virtues taught by Christ. The female life well lived could be summed up in the few lines of an epitaph: dutiful, charitable, and pious. But how those virtues were displayed could be distinctly different.

This stability of goodness existed because, despite theological bickering, God was still in His Heaven and the Bible, newly available in English, taught timeless virtues. The dead could be guides to the living because everyone, quick or not, existed in a temporal and social relationship arranged by God. Every individual’s beginning and end was a part of the divine plan. God had arranged society hierarchically, assigning each person a role and a station, and history temporally, flowing from The Beginning to The End. In that river of time bobbed the chips of individual lives, all moving with the teleological stream. It was a metaphysical system of meaning within which people paddled in desperate attempts to avoid the rocks of providential chastisement and the whirlpools sucking them toward hell.

God’s creation was fixed and unchanging in a way often referred to as the “Elizabethan World View,” thanks to a famous book by E.M.W. Tillyard. As God’s creation was constant, so too were social relations. Some people were superior to others, and everyone had a place and a role. Wives who disobeyed husbands had to be disciplined, but husbands who let their wives misbehave also had to be disciplined. All people had to enact their stations, or society would fall apart.

In this “static” society, social disorder was a constant problem. People knew all should be in their place, but there was increasing opportunity to social climb. Lowly merchants might live like lords, making it impossible to know for sure to whom you should doff your cap. God’s order was traduced daily, though the law did its best to prevent this.

How did Elizabethans learn their places in the world? Through education in homes, workshops, schools, and churches. The church subjected Elizabethans to enforced instruction in theology and obedience. By law, everyone had to attend every Sunday or be fined, and by law the clergy had to use the Book of Common Prayer. English religion and its messages were scripted. So was the religious education of children. Masters and mistresses were required to catechize their children and servants, and there were many catechisms produced for the instruction of children. At home, in church, and in school, children were taught to obey “conscience rightly formed,” and Elizabethans had a sincere commitment to the idea that truth would be visible if properly sought. If children were taught correctly, they would self‐govern correctly; rather than following the sinful whims of their natural selves, their educated consciences would guide them rightly on the path to virtue and salvation.

Conscience became one of the most important concepts of the era. Its emphasis gave rise to new forms of internal exploration, such as the self‐analytical diary and the memoir, and created a tension between obedience to your betters and knowing better than your betters. The Elizabethan educational project created obedience and undermined it, stressed God’s fixed plan while urging critical thinking.

Conscience might lead you to question, but community enforced your roles in society. Elizabethans were not isolated individuals; they took much of their identity from their communities. Their roles as Christians, as members of a parish, an occupation, a kinship network, a gender, a neighborhood, an age group, assigned behaviors and costumes. Even the dead were buried in locations according to their social places. The “calculus of esteem” directed people’s energies as they fulfilled their roles. But many of these roles were malleable. People might exchange roles, and as they did, they put on new social expectations and put off old ones. They aged, they married, they were widowed, they took on new responsibilities, they got poorer, they got richer. The “string of degree” might not be untuned, as Shakespeare put it, but plenty of Elizabethans plucked higher notes than they were entitled to do, and some played baser tunes. This social mobility was real, though frequently condemned. It had a fruitful dramatic tension to it.

Just as Elizabethans had no word for “unemployment,” so they had no words for “inflation,” “capitalist,” or “self‐fashioning.” If they had, they might have been better able to describe what was happening around them. Instead, they had the confusion that came from watching people behave in ways in which they were not supposed to behave, ascending and descending as the wheel of fortune turned.

Thus far, much of what I have described suggests a view of the metaphysical that sat uncomfortably with the actual. People did not like to admit that things were not as permanent as they seemed, even though the later sixteenth century saw some profound shifts in self‐understanding, even if God was still presumed to have arranged the world. Obviously, the theological reformulations changed individuals’ relationships to God, and therefore to God’s creation, but Elizabethans’ external and internal depictions of divine order were in flux. Their mental and physical worlds were being rearranged. One example of this rearrangement was literal: maps changed. Thanks to the mathematicians, like the Digges family, new ways of displaying physical reality taught them to “see” the physical world differently. Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum of 1570 showed them a round world, and his techniques allowed flat maps to represent multiple dimension, on the seas and on their surveyed fields.

Mercator’s new globe told them that America was to their west, and the experience of America unsettled all sorts of ideas about food, about God, and about themselves. Race and culture needed new definitions. Cosmography changed, too. Galileo had English counterparts who were using telescopic observation to chart the heavens, and, as John Donne’s poetry reminds us, people began to talk about their interior and exterior universe as a place on a map. Purgatory, which had been a place on the Catholic metaphysical map, was abolished, slowly turning heaven and hell into metaphors rather than physical places that could be located by geographers.

All this learning from observation turned toward humans, too. Vesalius produced the first map of the human body in 1543, and English anatomists quickly followed his lead. Dr. Caius required his students in Cambridge to dissect executed felons and then attend their proper, respectful Christian burials. Traditional Galenic medicine, which did not need anatomy, was being challenged by different diagnostic methods, so by the early seventeenth century it was possible to have the same doctor see illness from multiple pathologies at once, providing Galenic, Paracelsian, and astrological diagnoses of a single patient.

Earlier concepts of physical reality were unsteady in the face of all the new learning. Even time became relative. When Catholic Europe abandoned the Julian calendar for the Gregorian in 1582, the English would not go along. But ways of thinking about time were shaken, bringing into question the order of divine and human history. If there were pharaohs in Egypt before the date of the biblical creation, what did time mean?

In history, as in religion, there was a revolution happening under the influence of the ad fontes principles of humanism. Elizabethans had to remodel their past because they were destroying the relics of medieval religion and reinterpreting the history of Catholic England. Shakespeare’s “bare ruined choirs” described the remains of the rejected past; in its place came a more nationalist, more secular, more humanist history that pondered individuals’ choices in historical context, and the evidence for them. Elizabethans were reading, writing, and viewing history as a part of this new dialogue about the individual’s place in community and creation. Their reconceptualizations of the past help us understand them. After all, if there had been no history of the primitive church, would there have been Presbyterians? And if Elizabethan gentlemen had not been taught the history of the Roman Republic, weaned on Ciceronian Latin, would they have thought about their state and responsibilities in the same way? Would the King James Bible have been possible if English scholars had not accepted the necessity of understanding God’s Word by learning ancient languages?

Historical events in motion tested Elizabethans’ understanding of the world. When they encountered a plague, or good fortune, the Spanish Armada, or the ever‐present Spanish Inquisition, how did they react? If we want to understand how they used their perceptions, we must look for their application.

Divine providence was a key explanation of causation: once you have identified the cause of a thing, you have a chance to amend your life. Interpreting historical events through this lens made it possible to understand what was happening and why. When God smites you, you can repent, and God will relent. But if you are weak, Satan sees his chance and bad things happen. Responding to frightening events, Elizabethans knew God was warning them to return His static system to balance.

The most pragmatic thing you could do in the face of misfortune was to address the metaphysical sources of it. Pray, repent, and love God—but loving Him was like loving your own father; it was a matter of duty, and you could be walloped if you failed to obey either of them. “Our Father who art in Heaven, Thy will be done…”

Theirs was a grimly loving God. In such a world, where were the “Renaissance Faire” Elizabethans? Was no one having a good time? How did popular culture “perform” in the face of strict ideas of virtue?

Taking Philip Stubbes’ famous Jeremiad, The Anatomy of Abuses, as a guide to sinful behavior and its providential consequences, there is a surprising level of congruence between his perception of their behaviors, which he saw as lewd, and what they were doing in daily life. There is plenty of evidence of cakes and ale. The scene between Sir Toby Belch and Feste in Twelfth Night, when the former asks, “Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?” sums up a raging debate about the propriety of community socializing. The virtuous were against cakes and ale and communal sociability that involved alcohol and dancing. But they were against lots of other things, too, including usury, greed, lust, and popular pastimes like plays and maypole dances. Traditional ways of relating to one another were under pressure, and the “virtue” so stressed in their educations was harder to define or find. As Queen Elizabeth observed late in her reign, all men had become “virtueless foxes.” It provoked some to assert traditional values more loudly, and others to call for them to be abandoned. All the debates displayed conflicting ideas about what God required, what might trigger providential wrath, and what was good in conscience. Conscience, informed by Scripture, became the battleground of behavior. There were strong adherents on all sides.

Stubbes was concerned about incipient capitalism, too. Of course, Elizabethans had no capitalism, because they did not have a word for it (it is a nineteenth‐century coinage). It was not one of their analytical categories. They expressed their economic ideas in the ethics of exchange, worrying about mutuality, fairness, greed, oppression, and legality. Living in an era of rapid inflation, huge population growth, economic displacement, and globalizing trade, earlier Elizabethans thought more about the visible effects than the causes. Poverty and unemployed were assumed to be freely chosen by the healthy, a sign of their sinful natures, provoking increasingly punitive ways of controlling the needy.

When they thought of the causes of what we would call inflation and increases in real prices, they used mechanical explanations. Human greed and sinful impulses caused economic troubles. Greedy rulers debased the coins, which had a static value, so if coins (and people) were purified, economies would be healthy. These models, however, were insufficient, and the cultural roots of “capitalism” are to be found in Elizabethans’ reframing of economic exchanges with new tools like double‐entry book keeping and in how they believed the law could be used to regulate the economy—for moral and self‐interested reasons. Were their changing business practices forcing ideological redefinitions of economic categories, or were Protestant ideas producing capitalist rationales, encouraging changing economic behavior? Naturally, ideas and activities worked together. New kinds of economic activities, including joint stock companies and monopolies, forced new questions about money, morality, and the state to be asked. Once they had been, the Elizabethans adapted their modes of explanation to answer them. By the early seventeenth century, modern ideas of economics, divorced from Christian ethics, were emerging. Phillip Stubbes raged against the new global economy, but he could not prevent his compatriots from developing it.

All this agonizing about change and choice, conscience and fear of God, had deep interior dimensions hardly visible to the historians. Everyone needed ways of feeling the emotions of divine fear and hope, imagining themselves and God. But England’s options for expressing emotion, for stirring the soul, were few and focused on words, thanks to its Protestant phobia about images. The later Elizabethans could only express their emotional beings in oral and aural ways.

Across Europe, religion was moving toward the emotional interiority of Baroque art and architecture; in England, that interiority focused on words. Something distinct was happening in the use of language in pulpits, on the page, and in theaters. For Elizabethans, words formed their cultural landscape, while sermons and meditations on the Holy Word gave them their mystical connections to God. The English experienced the intellectual changes of the early Baroque, but generally expressed them differently than their continental neighbors. They became connoisseurs of poetic performances, and of emotional words set to music performed in congregations and in small groups. Across the era, they inclined to an internalized individualism, an empirical religion of the heart, sharpened by the drama of Anglican liturgical worship.

By the time the last Elizabethans were adults, English society had been profoundly reformulated. The fixed, hierarchical creation remained, in theory, but it was badly dented in ways that would lead, by the mid‐seventeenth century, to the radical social reformulations of the Civil War era of the 1640s. This static universe had been attacked from multiple angles by the Elizabethans, whose science, global voyages, historical explorations, changing economic lives, sense of self, and Protestant ideas all demanded reformed understandings. The Elizabethan age was the crucible in which the dross of the older world view was cooked off, forming a new cultural amalgam that made 1620 immeasurably different from 1520. The richness of Elizabethan life sprang from the terrible, fruitful contradictions of the time, as they struggled with the collapse of an older order and the creation of a new one.

And that is the irony of the Elizabethan era, the English Renaissance. For most people alive at the time, it had its glorious moments, but it was also a time of great discomfort. Religious tension was a fact of daily life. Theological disagreements turned constantly into political and social tensions, splitting families and communities. Angst about economic behavior and the genuine misery of adapting to a changing economy, inflation, and population growth were equally divisive. Religious disagreement and economic disputes became intertwined—all part of the conversation about morality. Politically, England was generally stable, but it was a very uncertain time on the world stage. War was a constant part of later Elizabethan life, and, though James I resolved the succession crisis and ended the wars (for a few years), he did not bring concord. He united two kingdoms that neither liked nor trusted each other, prompting questions about political identity and allegiance that added one more brick to the load of confusion already toted by Elizabethans. All this made attempts to puzzle out the organization of reality very important to the age, in which even those most certain about God’s plan were uncertain about its daily interpretation.

Confusion made the age one of the most culturally productive in English history. Crisis and confusion gave point to the nation’s dialogue with itself about who it was and how it ought to live.

When William Shakespeare died in 1616, he was set to become a part of the bedrock of the new English culture, an inextricable part of the curriculum in English‐speaking schools. But when he retired to Stratford to live off his revenues as a landed gentleman, he would not have known the fame in store for him. His experience was of a world that was still trying its wings, attempting to make sense of demographic change, economic difficulty, moral confusion, theological gridlock, political tension, and social displacement. When a consensus had been reached, much later, his words would embody the debated views that came of that confusion.