ABSTRACT
The sequence of theological decades in Book I castigates the new clergy for their inadequacy (1.10 and 30), derides their empty and combative 'learning' (1.20) and parodies the theology of Puritan 'election' (or predestined salvation) in Cinna and in Leda. The change of one letter (from 'elect' to 'eiect', 1.50) would more truthfully describe Cinna's state, the poems suggest, while Leda is building on this false security to lead her to 'Sathan' (1.80). The flagrant deception of the 'precise Taylor' (1.40), which plays so sharply on the meaning of 'precise' (puritanical and legalistic), made this poem immensely popular in the period. England is shown to be full of atheists, characterized by Dante as 'Elephants' (1.70), and the country is suffering from heavy rain because 'sino doth raigne on earth' (1.60). England's troubles reach their climax at the end of the book as Alciati's 'offensive emblem' combines with Harington's own allegorical use of stercus (excrement) to characterize the corruption afflicting Elizabethan society (1.90). A sequence of poems that begins with 1.85 and runs to the end of the 'first booke' draws on Alciati's emblemAduersus naturam peccantes and his own A New Discourse. This suggests a dating of the composition of the end of this book around 1596-97. The climax of the sequence is the carefully crafted final poem (1.100), where Harington links the 'rents' taken from church property with schism, and ends, under a heading 'Against Churchrobbers', with a scathing view of the Elizabethan court devouring 'fryers' and delivering 'souldiers'. The 'Favorites and courtly Minions' (made to rhyme with 'Lutheran opinions') swallow up the church and 'Voyd forts and Castles in their excrements'(the last word of Book I). May, while highlighting the irony of this attack from one whose family fortune was founded on church lands seized during the dissolution, suggests that several of the epigrams
clergy of his day, building genealogical families, with the pre-Reformation clergy who left behind a dynasty of 'Colledges' and 'Abbeys well endow'd and Churches sumptuous'. An attack on the self-indulgence of the period, 'In defence of Lent' (111.30), leads to images of the clergyman as disguised 'Mountbank' (111.60) who would 'fall to preache I but patching Sermons with a sorry shift'; the attempt of the clergy to blame 'Symony' on 'the tyme' (111.80); and finally the lamentable fact that 'in theise days', in a reversal of the church before the Reformation, 'The Cleargie men are fat their lyvings leane' (111.90). There is more satire of those who are better at controversy than charity, who can 'cyte Saint Paule' but 'haue not God the worde', (111.50) and of the Family of Love (111.100) who are busy living up to their name (see below). 4 The worst criticism of this book, however, is reserved for the royalty and the court. In a stunning use of Heywood's aphorism 'where no receiuors are there be no theeues' (111.80), Harington implicates the establishment in the corruption of 'Symony', a charge made explicit in an epigram (111.70) that is so savage in its criticism of Elizabeth's reign that one wonders how this godson of the Queen dared to circulate it, even in manuscript. Her 'forty yeares' have not been of 'sweet peace and restfull dayes' but rather 'abounding with abhomination':
For law with lust and rule with rape is yoaked, And zeale with schisme and Symony is choaked.
