SOURCE: “The Pardoner and the Friar as Reformation Polemic,” in Renaissance Papers 1971, edited by Dennis G. Donovan and A. Leigh Deneef, The Southeastern Renaissance Conference, 1972, pp. 17-24.

In the following essay, Bryant analyzes The Pardoner and the Friar, which, he argues, is not really a bitter attack on the Roman Catholic Church but rather a general satire of religious corruption.

While Henry VIII may have smiled at first upon dramatic pieces written in support of the papacy, his apparent tolerance changed drastically after Pope Clement VII excommunicated him in 1533. Thereafter the stage became a powerful weapon for propagandists in the ecclesiastical controversy between Reformers and Roman Catholics—a weapon which had the sanction of the Crown.

But in all fairness one should remember that many of the abuses and excesses of Roman Catholicism which came to be satirized on the stage in support of the Reformation were equally...