Welsh Journals

JOHN PENRY AND THE MARTIN MARPRELATE CONTROVERSY. By Donald J. McGinn. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1966. Pp. xi, 255. 25s. 9$. About a quarter of a century ago, Professor McGinn published an article on 'The real Martin Marprelate' in the Proceedings of the Modem Languages Association, LVIII (1943), in which he identified John Penry as the author of the famous satirical tracts of 1588-89. It would be fair to say that the arguments then advanced did not convince most scholars. So, 'spurred on by memories of the unfavourable reaction', McGinn retraced his steps. He re-examined all the external evidence bearing on the authorship of the tracts and made a close study of their 'literary and allusive content'. His final conclusions, presented in this book, were that 'the case for Penry was overwhelming'. The volume makes no pretensions to being a biography of Penry; it concerns itself solely with the problem of his connection with the Marprelate Tracts. The book has some solid merits. In the first place, it casts legitimate doubt upon what its author calls the 'sentimental interpretation of Penry's patriotism', and argues that Penry's prime compulsion was his devotion to the Puritan cause and not his patriotism. This point could, indeed, have been developed much more fully, though it was clearly not a necessary part of McGinn's task to have done so. Again, the author has undoubtedly a very thorough and exact knowledge of the Puritan literature of the period with which he is concerned. The dating and bibliographical details of Penry's known publications are worked out with praiseworthy precision and skill: for example, the dating of the Appellation (ch. xiii), or the valuable appendix on earlier bibliographical studies of the Exhortation. A particularly interesting feature is the careful and minute documenting of Penry's earlier misgivings about the validity of the sacraments as ministered by the Established Church. Never before have these long- standing inner doubts and tensions-which may ultimately have led him to separatism-been so clearly disclosed. Finally, the narrative reconstruc- tion of the chequered fortunes of the clandestine Martinist press of 1588-89 and its operators, as revealed by the somewhat confusing depositions of the witnesses involved in the trial, deserves praise, even if all the conclusions based upon it do not command acceptance. But this new and reinforced battery of arguments offered by Professor McGinn for Penry's authorship of the Martin Marprelate Tracts has again failed to convince this reviewer at least. What the author's analysis of the external evidence really boils down to is to show that Penry was in the conspiracy up to his eyes: managing the press, supervising the printers, procuring the manuscripts, reading the proofs, arranging for distribution, finding a new hiding-place, and so on. That has always been known and never doubted. But it does not make him Martin Marprelate. Indeed, acknowledging that he was as heavily committed as this to the managerial