In this compelling study, Harriet Phillips knowingly turns to the anachronistic concept of nostalgia to explain how the seemingly ubiquitous trope of the merry world—a pre–Reformation England inhabited by disguised kings, honest ploughmen, and mythical figures like Robin Hood—could serve contradictory purposes in commercial productions throughout the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Through the lens of nostalgia, the past was transformed into a trope identified more by “the feelings it evoked” than “the exact contours” of the past it purported to portray, offering a memory of a flourishing, unified England that existed before the ruptures of the Reformation (40). As such, the merry world functioned as an ahistorical construct invoked both by Catholics lamenting the Reformation and Protestants harkening back to a “reformist native tradition” (2). Tracing the construct of the merry world as it moves from polemic into commercial popular culture, Phillips provides an extensive exploration of how authors employed this “nostalgic fantasy” to negotiate the relationship of the present to the past and to interrogate the trope's value for addressing contemporary issues (20).
The first part of Phillips's book explores how ballads, cheap print, and theater transformed the merry-world complaint, which had appeared in mid- to late sixteenth-century court records as a lamentation over social change, into a hazy ahistorical construct that achieved cathartic resolutions of modern tensions by relocating them into the merry world. Thus, the merry-world setting of broadside ballads converted the narrative of the disguised king that had been used “to facilitate popular complaint” when it appeared in romances into an “escapist fiction” that posited the merry-world countryside as a space of abundance and unity between king and subject (56, 58). Similarly, authors William Elderton, William Kemp, and Thomas Nashe portrayed themselves in their works as inhabitants of the merry world, using cheap print to recast “their own disordered mobility” as nonthreatening mirth (72). The merry-world construct was not limited to conceptions of mirth but also incorporated a complementary nostalgia for the plain-speaking commoner, whose simplicity and ignorance of theology was perceived as an “embodiment of a timeless, organic, national tradition” (89).
The second half of the book examines what happens after merry-world nostalgia has been commodified and becomes a vehicle for authorial negotiations with their audience. Ironically, while the merry-world trope was used to depict a shared social past, the nostalgic haziness of the trope's meaning encouraged authors to use it as a site for stylistic innovation. For instance, the overtly stylized commoner's dialect first employed by the author of the Marprelate pamphlets was mimicked by other pamphlets in the controversy, becoming a marker of the debate rather than the past it imitated. Depictions of the merry world on stage in works by Munday, Chettle, Heywood, and Shakespeare functioned almost as a metatheatrical commentary on the trope itself—whether through portrayals of the construction and consumption of the trope, staging that separated the space of the merry world from the other elements of the plays, or examinations of the limitations of the merry-world trope and its inability to compete successfully with or to resolve contemporary social tensions.
Phillips's rich examination crosses generic boundaries to explore how the nostalgic lens that enables this literary trope to be used to negotiate societal tensions also opens it up as a space for stylistic innovation and metanarrative. Throughout the book, Phillips deftly draws upon Marxist and postmodern theory to explain how the nostalgic representation of the past provided authors with the opportunity to produce amorphous and continually shifting representations of the merry world, while simultaneously and self-reflexively using the trope to create a space through which to negotiate their own commercial identities. My only quibble with the book is that, at times, Phillips seems to slip into a distinction between high and low culture in which authored texts are depicted as having intentionality, while anonymous cheap print and ballads are merely responses to the whims of the market. Nevertheless, Phillips's exploration of the nostalgic vision of the merry world deftly interrogates the interplay between various forms of popular culture in the period.
