The psalms and threat in sixteenth‐century English court culture

The psalms are routinely considered to be sources of comfort and occasions of thanksgiving. In this essay I present a different, and opposite function for the psalms: that of expressing an intense state of isolation, threat, hatred and self‐annihilation. So far from supplying what sixteenth‐century readers called ‘comfortable words’, the psalm translations discussed here inflame authorial pain. They actively deprive authors of any consolation. They deprive authors even of the consolations of expressing the desire for vengeance, despite the frequency with which these texts call vengeance down upon the heads of enemies. Just as the psalms were imagined to have been written originally in a threatening courtly environment, so too are they used by early Tudor courtiers to express the predicament of court life. I focus on psalm paraphrases of the following writers: Sir Thomas Wyatt; George Blage; Henry Howard Earl of Surrey; and Sir Thomas Smith.