Circa regna tonat: Political Anxiety, Censorship and Textual Strategies in the Literature of Henry VIII’s Reign

Abstract

In spite of the humanistic shift that England underwent in the Early Modern period, the production of literature throughout the reign of Henry VIII (1509-1547) was extremely dependent on the political and religious scenario, thus prompting the need for writers to restrain, control and re-fashion their own statements and public ‘persona’. Thus, the aim of this dissertation will be to explore the textual strategies which a number of writers ingeniously developed in order to conceal dissenting private views to avoid political censorship during the above mentioned period. This work will be mainly focusing on three different aspects: on the one hand, the analysis of the atmosphere of political anxiety in Henry VIII’s Court, which substantially conditioned any literary production; on the other hand, the discussion of the existing tension between the author’s self-effacement and the performative act of self-fashioning in literary works; finally, the examination of the ambiguity inherent to some Renaissance texts as a strategy of physical survival to evade the threat which maintaining one’s personal stance entailed in the public sphere. To serve the purpose of illustrating the textual strategies which were used to conflate subjectivity and compliance, I will be primarily concentrating on the work of Thomas More and Thomas Wyatt, among others. To do so, this dissertation will be informed by contemporary literary criticism which has reassessed the Renaissance period from a New Historicist approach, as understood by, among others, Stephen Greenblatt in his seminal work ‘Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare’ (1980)