Bishops' Ban of 1599

Weever is also the probable author of an anonymous pamphlet in 1601 entitled The Whippinge of the Satyre, which vindicates the decision of the bishops and attacks Edward Guilpin, John Marston, and Ben Jonson.

[5] An alternative theory on the event supposes that Archbishop Whitgift engineered the ban specifically to protect his friend the Robert Devereux, the favourite of Queen Elizabeth I, from political satire.

[6] This nuanced, political interpretation points out that Essex's failure during a military campaign in Ireland had recently captured the attention of the English public, and figures that the banned books seize upon this controversy.

Because Robert Tofte's Of Mariage and Wiving and the anonymous xv ioyes of marriage are literary translations that do not directly relate to England's contemporary political climate, some scholars suppose that the anti-marriage rhetoric of these two books was perceived as sedition against Elizabeth I.

"[8] Lynda Boose has claimed further that the bishops "attempted to cut off the hostile, malcontented political aggressions of the violently sexualized discourse they heard in these new hybrid literary constructions.