Staging Debate in Tudor Interlude

• In Event: Renaissance Dialogues

Abstract

This paper demonstrates how sixteenth-century English reformers manipulated dialogue's ability to make interpretive demands on its audience to present arguments that exceeded their verbal content, calling on audiences' experience of witnessing conversation to supplement the logical propositions characters voice. Attributed to John Heywood and John Rastell, the interlude Of gentlynes and nobylyte (ca. 1525–27) stages the futility of verbal debate in deciding the relative nobility of the estates. The characters invoke "reason" as shared ground for reaching agreement, but mutually abandon the discussion after discovering reason is unable to sway their adversaries from giving "wylfull credens" to their own opinions. The characters nonetheless endorse "experience" as a means to judge propositions, including the audience's experience of the dialogue in which they participate. Even when debate fails to resolve its own literal content, the dialogue posits that the act of witnessing conversation as performance adds an interpretive dimension necessary for persuasion.

Author

• Simone Waller, Northwestern University