ABSTRACT
An Advertisement', in The Oxford Authors: Francis Bacon, ed. Brian Vickers, Alan Stewart dates the first version of 'An Advertisement' to April 1589 in Bacon's Early Writings 1584-1586. Francis Bacon offered this warning in 'An Advertisement Touching the Controversies of the Church of England'; a government brief he wrote in spring 1589 in response to the controversy generated by the publication of the Martin Marprelate tracts. In effect, the style of the Marprelate tracts encouraged public dissemination of their anti-episcopal content by rewriting traditional polemic for the popular culture of jig and jest, ballad and manuscript libel. Love's Labor's Lost may share a Latin pun with Lyly's Pappe with an Hatchet and a physician/mountebank conjunction with Pasquill's A Countercuffe. The language of contemporary church controversy probably informs other plays on political and historical subjects that address issues of rebellion, sedition, and treason, particularly plays of the earlier 1590s, when the Marprelate controversy was fresh in mind.
