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44 ‘Hear My Tale or Kiss My Tail!’ The Old Wife's Tale, Gammer Gurton's Needle, and the Popular Cultures of Tudor Comedy
Get accessAndrew Hiscock is professor of English literature at Bangor University, Wales and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the Institut de Recherche sur la Renaissance, l’Âge Classique et les Lumières (Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier III). A fellow of the English Association and a trustee of the Modern Humanities Research Association, he has published widely on English and French early modern literature. He is English literature editor of the academic journal MLR and series editor for The Yearbook of English Studies. In addition, he is series co-editor of the Arden Early Modern Drama Guides. His most recent monograph is Reading Memory in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and he is at present co-editing a critical collectionShakespeare and Memory and preparing a critical study of Shakespeare’s history plays.
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Published:18 September 2012
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Abstract
The comedies, farces, and romances composed during the Tudor period continue to invite audiences to reflect upon the politics of popular representation in the same way that jest books, ballads, cony-catching pamphlets, and prose narratives did for an evolving publishing market in the sixteenth century. Ultimately, the cumulative effect of surveying the currents of received thinking among self-crowned arbiters of literary and cultural taste in sixteenth-century England may be that, in returning to these play texts, jests, and ballads from the period, we are also drawn to ponder the ways in which Tudor comic narratives can uncover the seemingly irrepressible appetite in society for a kind of cognitive shorthand when dealing with members of a social status group and, indeed, the ways in which the undertaking of comedy itself may rely upon such operations of reduction, elision, and erasure. Moreover, when we take into consideration the enormously buoyant markets for broadsides, jest books, and crime narratives as the Tudor period unfolded, it becomes all too possible that sections within the wider populace might be found to be actively investing in foreshortened and/or grossly distorted narratives of popular representation which often circulated within official culture or elite milieux — milieux from which members of this ‘wider populace’ might be partially or wholly excluded.
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