Abstract: This book considers the impact of Henry VIII’s break with Rome and the Royal Supremacy of the 1530s upon the generation of poets, playwrights, and prose-writers who lived through those events. Spanning the boundaries between literature and history, it charts the profound effects that Henry’s increasingly tyrannical regime had on the literary production of the early 16th century and shows how English writers strove to mitigate, redirect, and finally resist oppressive royal demands. The book argues that the result of Henrician tyranny was both the destruction of a number of venerable literary forms and the collapse of a literary culture that had dominated the late-medieval period, as well as the birth of many modes of writing now seen as characteristic of the English literary renaissance. Separate sections of the book focus specifically upon the work of John Thynne, the editor of the first collected Works of Chaucer; the playwright John Heywood; Sir Thomas Elyot; Sir Thomas Wyatt; and Henry Howard, the poet Earl of Surrey.

Keywords: sixteenth century, Tudor history, tyranny, Henry VIII, royal supremacy, Renaissance literature, William Thynne, Chaucer, John Heywood, Thomas Elyot