Sarah, it's not that the court before Henry wasn't tyrannical — of course courts by their very nature were sites of a very non-democratic form of governing —. It's that Henry's court was one of the first to implement a series of administrative reforms that created a state of censorship, mass terror (at least in the circles of court), and utter lack of advisory free-speech that had normally been allowed to friends and advisers of the King:
Firstly, several amendments by an important early adviser of Henry, Thomas Cromwell, brought about a change that moved administrative procedures from their semi-medieval style, into a bureaucratic modernity. Secondly, however, was the development of the Acts of Supremacy and the Treason Act of 1534, both of which established Henry as an uncriticizable figure, whereby "all honours, dignities, preeminences, jurisdictions, privileges, authorities, immunities, profits, and commodities to the said dignity” were owed to Henry. Henry's dictatorial alignment of heresy and treason as he ascended to the highest position in the newly-formed Church of England similarly established him as a tyrannical source of control, just as his acts established a Tudor equivalent to the culture of censorship and investigation in Soviet Russia.
[Crowson;485611]Weeelll, I like Wyatt. He can be read as an imagist poet, and I like your reading of the early Tudor Court, although I'd challenge too - are you sure that this was the first court to be dictatorial and dogmatic? How about the whole tradition of 'court'? And feudal life wasn't exactly porous and open.
i like Wyatt because he uses dynamic ideas and images, I think. His poems move, perhaps, become located in both the personal and metaphoric. But this is also an 'easy' reading, rooted in a history which assumes that English poetry moved from aural/trope to blurred personal to metaphor.
I should be working. Back tomorrow.
Sarah-Jane[/quote]
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