Search

Perhaps no finer example of the paradoxical nature of the politics of household drama can be found than the career of John Heywood. The most consistently courtly of Tudor dramatists, Heywood was also in many ways a thoroughly ‘oppositiona’ playwright, profoundly out of sympathy with the religious reforms of the 1530s and 1540s. Indeed, he came perilously close to dying for his beliefs in 1543, when he was condemned for denying the Royal Supremacy in the aftermath of the Prebendaries Plot. Yet his opposition to royal policy took place, in all but the latter instance, at court and in the royal household where he found employment throughout both the Reformation period and the Marian reaction. And his dissent was expressed, not in factional in fighting or secret conspiracy, but in the more public forum created by the production of courtly drama and the circulation of literary manuscripts. Through these means he made articulate appeals for the continuation of the old order aimed at the courtly community and, in the late 1520s and 1530s, chiefly at Henry VIII himself. Only after the return to protestantism under Elizabeth was he prompted to enter self-imposed exile in 1564, and only then after he had provided at least one dramatic entertainment for the new queen. THE PLAYWRIGHT Heywood was born around 1497, perhaps, as his most recent editors suggest, in Coventry, where he may have begun the association with the Rastell family, and through them with Thomas More, which was to colour his early dramatic career. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last two decades, a developing sociology of science has placed Boyle within the specific contention that the Scientific Revolution rested essentially on political, social and material foundations. A key writer in this emerging orthodoxy was James Jacob, who argued that Boyle's science, politics and religion were direct ideological responses to the wider context of political instability in the Interregnum and Restoration. On this reading, Boyle's material circumstances during the English Civil War and its aftermath produced a social ethic of expediency, which, in turn, was transformed at the Restoration into the ideological advancement of the mechanical philosophy on behalf of the Royal Society and the Anglican Church. Although this work proved a timely corrective to internalist studies that gave little attention to social context, and thus opened up new fields of enquiry into the social relations of science, Jacob's treatment of both Boyle and the Royal Society was open to the charge of being excessively monocausal. In so far as the Society was supposed to have had a specific corporate ideology contained and expressed in Thomas Sprat's History, Michael Hunter convincingly showed that though the History was certainly commissioned by the Society, it was not very closely supervised because a specific public role for science representing the Society's ethos remained very imprecise beyond a broad Baconianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]