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under the spell of the puritans’ religion around Shakespeare—transferred to local congregations.⁴¹

      We have summoned specimens of the sentiments of conformists, reformists, puritans, and Catholics into something of a staging area, because it seemed prudent to start studying the religion around the realm with manageable, if misleadingly tidy, classifications. Moreover, introductions and preliminary classifications of this sort should prove useful as we attend to various confessionally freighted developments that were sufficiently sensational to give pause to a curious, perceptive, accomplished playwright: Queen Elizabeth’s apparent antagonism to preaching; anxieties about the succession stirred by her courtships; the detention in England of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots; the saber rattling that accompanied nearly all late Tudor references to Spain; the Essex insurgency; efforts to enlighten the new king, James I, in and after 1603; and the “powder plot.”

      “IN THESE DOUBTFULL TYMES”

      In 1570, Pope Pius V excommunicated the queen of England. To her religiously reformed subjects, the bull relaying Rome’s verdict, Regnans in Excelsis, was “directly contrary to God’s word.” Pius and many of his predecessors “dreamed” that they were “supreame monarch[s] of the world” with power to “loose” or separate subjects from their sovereigns. But it was a “blasphemous” dream; on that, conformists and reformists agreed.⁴²

      The fallout from Regnans should have favored reformists, who had long complained about conformists’ “papistrie.” But the realm’s conformist bishops gravely labored to distinguish their position from that of their medieval and papist predecessors, whose loyalties were often split between monarch and pope. The queen’s bishops were the queen’s—and were angry when reformist rivals implied otherwise. Even Edmund Grindal, as sympathetic with reformists’ protests for more preaching as any highly placed prelate—and more sympathetic than most—came to dislike what looked to be lodged in the “busy head” of the Cambridge controversialist Thomas Cartwright, which was “stuffed” with “singularities,” with ominously odd ideas about church government. Cartwright had complained about “lordly” bishops as if he and reformist friends had not gotten their livings and licenses to preach from such domineering diocesan executives. Such sauce!⁴³

      But licenses of outspoken dissidents were often suspended, and bishops deprived many reformist critics of their livings. Yet, notwithstanding suspensions and deprivations, authorities were incapable of regulating everything said from the pulpits. As the bishop of London, Edwin Sandys was responsible for selecting the ministers to preach at St. Paul’s Cross and announced his intention to exclude “fanaticall spirits.” But an occasional preacher there scandalized crowds, Sandys irritably admitted, because his fellow bishops had not adequately screened the candidates they recommended to him.⁴⁴

      Sandys is an enigmatic figure. Although he tried to cork criticism coming from the pulpits, reformists had reason to reserve him a place alongside Grindal as one of preaching’s most devoted episcopal advocates. For, during the 1570s, Sandys developed “evasive tactics” to save the sermons that were the centerpieces of the in-service training exercises called prophecies when the queen and regime initially tried to suppress them. Prophesying, at that time, had both a public and a private phase. Crowds in some market towns listened to consecutive sermons on an identical biblical passage, after which the clergy from the region assembled privately to swap comments and, presumably, suggestions for improvements. Sandys seems to have agreed with patrons of prophesying who claimed that candid exchanges about exegesis could only improve preaching in the parishes. Grindal—of whom more in a moment—was opposed to calling a halt.⁴⁵ Regnans, the pope’s excommunication, after all, made it imperative to get religiously reformed responses to “papistry” into market-day conversations, if only because the Christians from the realm’s “blynde corners”—that is, from parishes without curates or with curates who rarely, if ever, preached—would take in more Catholic propaganda than Protestant preaching, were the exercises or prophecies they overheard on their trips to market suspended or suppressed.⁴⁶

      But the queen and her Council were told that preachers removed from their pulpits for having criticized the established church had taken advantage of the opportunities prophesying afforded to cram market-day sermons with invective and to impress passersby with everything that they thought wrong with the established church. In 1574, Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury, ordered the exercises in Norfolk discontinued, claiming the diocese was infested with “puritaynes.”⁴⁷ The following year, Richard Fletcher, while visiting a parish in Parker’s diocese served by his father, heard laymen, “in exercise,” complain about the ministry. The younger Fletcher fretted that prophecies encouraged “every artificer” to play “reformer and teacher.” Any “pragmaticall prentise” apparently could pronounce on “the government and reformation of the church.”⁴⁸ Prophesying was common in Leicestershire, a day’s ride from Stratford and Shakespeare. Eusebius Paget, known for his acerbic editorials on episcopacy and suspended from the ministry in 1571 and 1574, preached during other exercises at Southam, Warwickshire, closer to the bard-to-be.

      Shakespeare was still young, yet it would have been hard for him to have missed the splash that Grindal made when, almost immediately after succeeding Parker as archbishop of Canterbury in 1576, he fell from favor, attempting to save the prophecies. He claimed that his suffragans could supervise prophecies and would prohibit “immodest speech” and “irreverent gesture.” “Worldly-minded” “mislikers of godly reformation,” he averred, despised prophesying because their sins were the subjects of the barbed public sermons.⁴⁹ But four of Grindal’s fellow bishops categorically refused to endorse his spirited counteroffensive against the exercises’ most unreserved critics. Those four were joined by John Aylmer, archdeacon of Lincoln, who named Gilby and Paget as the principal mischief makers during market-day oratory. Gilby circulated a list of officials’ “corruptions”; Paget depicted the realm’s bishops as “Pharisees.”⁵⁰

      The queen ordered that “assemblies callid exercises cease and not be usid.”⁵¹ Grindal objected and berated her, proclaiming that a prince’s proper place was within and not above the church, an opinion that killed his career. He was sequestered and kept from Court, forgotten by power brokers. Aylmer, succeeding Sandys as bishop of London in 1577, took on a number of Grindal’s responsibilities, nominating the Court preachers and presiding over the Ecclesiastical Commission. Prophecies were suppressed, resurfacing in some places as clerical conferences with reduced emphasis on the public phase. We know that Aylmer was especially vigilant. He wanted no defiance of the queen’s cease-and-desist on his watch. As a precaution, he arrested Thomas Randolph, who was visiting London from Oxford, where he was known in 1578 to be preaching enthusiastically “touchynge that which they call exercise.”⁵² Randolph was released, yet the intimidation and incarceration look to have had the intended prophylactic effect. Critics of the conformists reported that a “hush” in Aylmer’s precincts replaced the sounds of a truly reformed religion at work.⁵³

      But things could change in an instant, and Aylmer would have been well aware of that. During the 1540s and early 1550s, he talked regularly with leading evangelical reformers who came to England from the Continent at the invitation of Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury. Aylmer was impressed, figuring that England had become a model as well as a magnet for reformers. Then King Edward VI died before reaching the age of twenty, and his half-sister, Mary Tudor, took over. She labored to make England Catholic again. Aylmer left. Five years later, when news of Mary’s death and Elizabeth’s succession reached him in Saxony, he returned to England and wrote ecstatically about “the divine and godly majestie” that the new ruler of the realm possessed. He came within a millimeter of worshipping her, allowing that the Persians, although they overdid it a bit, had the right idea, falling “flat on their faces before theyr sovereign.” “Thynges would grow to confusion,” Aylmer suggested, unless subjects’ respect for their new queen’s title and supremacy was unstinting.⁵⁴

      That was 1559; Elizabeth was twenty-five years young. Each of her two immediate predecessors, Edward VI and Mary I, had only five or so years to reshape religious policy, but Elizabeth seemed robust enough to make a long run and a large family.

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