Debates for and against Marriage

Predictably, answer-poetry was one of the means by which the reforming project of propagating the exaltation of marriage to the reading public saturated the literature of the mid-Tudor period. These poems appeared even during the Marian years as sotto voce expressions of dissatisfaction with the Counter-Reformation. Several of the verses and answers that I examine appear in Tottel’s Miscellany, first published in 1557; a compilation described by Paul A. Marquis as being close “to qualifying for what in 1557 could be considered objectionable or even seditious” in its Protestant leanings. ²⁸¹

In each of these examples from Tottel the answer advocates either marriage or married life in response to an antifeminist satire against the same. The poems would have been palatable enough to the Marian regime to evade censorship since, although Catholic doctrine privileged celibacy over marriage, married life was also held in high esteem. Nonetheless the poems were effective as subtle statements of Protestant opposition owing to their belonging to a tradition that, following Erasmus and earlier medieval complaints against clerical abuses, presented marriage as an antidote to the sexual extravagances in which supposedly celibate nuns and mendicant priests were reputed to indulge. The poems also pose a degree of resistance to the Marian Counter-Reformation in that they might be considered substitutes for the sermons on the respective duties of husbands and wives that had been removed from church services when Mary ditched the 1552 new Prayer Book. ²⁸² Two of the Tottel answers that I discuss in detail later stress in particular the importance of husbands fulfilling their conjugal responsibility to manage their wives competently. ‘An

²⁸¹ Tottel’s Miscellany (1557-1587), ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: HUP; OUP, 1928-9). Subsequent references for this text are given in parentheses following quotations. Paul A. Marquis, ‘Politics and Print: The Curious Revisions to Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes’, SP, 97 (2000), 145-64 (p.149).