ABSTRACT
The sixteenth-century enthusiasm for radical pastoral writing emerged strongly in the Elizabethan period in remarkable new forms. The Piers of texts like Pyers Plowmans Exhortation, the spokesman of economic complaint, almost at the same moment Nashe's parody appeared. Just as we found Throkmorton appropriating both Langland's text, and the mid-Tudor complaint tradition that had accumulated around it, we find the London stage offering another striking moment of Elizabethan medievalism. On the more specific background of Presbyterian thought on church government and its influence on the Marprelate tracts, see Black, The Martin Marprelate Tracts. It is therefore somewhat striking to find that amongst these texts we find a rather familiar one that begins 'I, Piers Plowman'. The addition of an ironic dedicatory epistle added to the impression, both cementing the relationship between Piers and Martin and shifting the text, along with its polemical anticlericalism, into the mode of Martinist irony.
