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Literature of the Henrician period is inherently reflective of the toxic political culture in which it was produced. Written predominantly by a class of people who were immersed within the culture of high politics but nevertheless felt powerless to engender any actual change or effective reforms under the increasingly unhinged rule of Henry VIII, Henrician literature often embodies the incomparable frustration, terror and rage of witnessing a nation’s descent into tyranny. As Greg Walker states, ‘a generation of writers educated to believe in the power of eloquence to move minds and shape events [suddenly came to the realisation] that it could no longer do so in conventional ways’ and through navigating the pressures of censorship, such writers ‘revolutionised writing in English’ (3). Poetry, prose, and drama came to be the battlegrounds in which the ‘struggle to reclaim Henry from tyranny’ was fought (Walker 3). By the late 1530s, such a fight was becoming increasingly difficult to win in light of the suppressive terms of the Succession Act and the growing autocratic behaviour of Henry as a king. As such, much of the writing during this period does undoubtedly contain an acute sense of frustration, rage and terror, for it is often driven by the nigh-on-impossible task of reforming a tyrannical institution from within.
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