What Merry World in England? Nostalgic Paroemia and The Second Part of Henry VI

Chapter Two examines a fantasy of the past central to the late-Tudor idea of nostalgia: the topos of a ‘merry world’, or ‘merry England’. This chapter analyses the diverse articulations of the ubiquitous ‘merry world/England’ proverb that circulated in Tudor culture, in post-Reformation critiques of Catholicism as well as influential sixteenth-century plays and interludes (e.g. Hick Scorner, Lusty Juventus), whose ideas still circulated in late- Elizabethan England. This context informs Shakespeare’s own use of the topos in The Second Part of Henry VI, in which he employs a contested religious discourse to craft an ambivalent political rhetoric. The chapter demonstrates the cultural currency of the play’s nostalgic proverbial discourse through an examination of Protestant writers who mocked the idea of a preferable Catholic past. 2 Henry VI employs the culturally familiar language of proverbs to introduce political instability and radicalism into Shakespeare’s play, as representatives of the crown and its opposition use nostalgic rhetoric to secure or to gain power. In the play, the ‘merry world’ discourse communicates a longing that is revealed to be impotent in its desire to reclaim a place and time that never existed.