Greene’s ‘Quip for an Upstart Courtier’, or Elizabethan England between Tradition and Novelty

The growth of a new wealthy middle-class in Tudor England brought about a great social confusion, which became evident through the inappropriate use of clothing and a particular interest in fashions from abroad. The confusion provoked by the excess of apparel turned to be a good topic for English priests who used it in their sermons to teach sobriety and modesty as the right measure of earthly life. The sin of extravagance in apparel became a favourite theme in Stubbes’s 'Anatomie of Abuses' and in many homilies and sermons throughout the 16th century. If preachers saw pride as the vice to be defeated, prose writers like Robert Greene used it as a good ironic weapon to describe Tudor society’s covetousness and moral decline. In his 'Quip for an Upstart Courtier' (1592), Greene deals with the “abuses that pride had bred in England” and denounces the lack of moral values in young men who had become of rank.