‘Acting the Fool at the Court of Henry VIII: Politics, Laughter and Tyranny’
Inaugural Lecture Synopsis
Professor Greg Walker
This lecture is really a story about two interesting men and the ideas of laughter and folly
they evoked in their writings and behaviour. But I hope to use it to address a wider
question: about the relationship between literature – creative writing – and politics;
between writers and rulers. Specifically the lecture will consider the key pinch-point in
that relationship, how civil society responds through its writers to political and civil
crisis: an issue as relevant today as it was in the time of Shakespeare or Homer. How did
writers respond to the sense that something was going seriously wrong in civil society?
How might they register that fact without breaking the bonds that held society together
and sustained their own positions? How did their writing figure in their attempts to
challenge, and ultimately resist unwelcome political change?
The two interesting men are Sir Thomas More and the playwright and epigrammatist
John Heywood, writers who lived in the turbulent reign of Henry VIII, when political
power and civil society were brought into particularly dramatic and violent confrontation
by the king’s break with Rome and the Henrician Reformation. Each of them was a
humorist and actor with a reputation as a ‘merry’ wit; and each of them disagreed
passionately with Henry VIII’s religious reforms and the social antagonisms that they
unleashed, using their writings to criticise and oppose those reforms. Yet, while one died
a martyr for resisting Henry’s demands, the other survived to write and perform plays and
poems and collect witty proverbs throughout the reigns of Henry, his son Edward VI and
Mary Tudor before going into exile in the reign of Elizabeth I. Which of them could we
say was the more effective opponent of royal tyranny? How did they each use humour
and folly in their arguments with power? And what might that tell us about the uses of
laughter and comedy in early modern culture more generally? These are the questions
that the lecture will hope to explore.