3 - “Verie Devout Asses”: Ignorant Puritan Clowns

Summary

ANOTHER notable clown type in the era, one that emerges on the professional stage by the 1590s, was the stupid or ignorant puritan, a religious zealot typed by his rusticity, misspeaking, and inane logic. Such clownish figures as Stupido of the Cambridge University play The Pilgrimage to Parnassus (c. 1597–98) and the zealous Constable in Blurt, Master Constable (1601–2) have much in common with the type as it appears in various religious polemics of the era, such as the controversial Marprelate Tracts (1588–89), and in the similarly scandalous Hackett controversy. But a full appreciation of the ways in which the comic was turned against puritans through clowning resulting in the creation of a Renaissance puritan stereotype requires an understanding of the degree to which a sort of put-down stereotyping played a prominent, though heretofore not fully appreciated, role in defining doctrinal and ideological religious boundaries in post-Reformation England, an era in which discrediting opposing religious views was often achieved by associating one's opponents with laughable ignorance.

What is most familiar to students of the era was the fact that many Renaissance puritans promoted a learned self-image in opposition to Catholics and even to fellow (though more moderate) English Protestants, whom puritans deemed, by comparison, as intellectually and culturally deficient. Thus, in the late 1590s a yeoman from Yorkshire reviled his parish parson by proclaiming, “Parson thou art an ass … I never saw such an ass as thou art,” just as a man in Buckinghamshire in the 1630s mocked a parson in his village as “tinkerly,” that is, low class and unrefined.