Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling
Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling
Theater in Post-Reformation London
Musa Gurnis
Published in Cooperation with Folger Shakespeare Library
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2018 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gurnis, Musa, author.
Title: Mixed faith and shared feeling : theater in post-reformation London / Musa Gurnis.
Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017052154 | ISBN 9780812250251 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Theater—Great Britain—Religious aspects—History—16th century. | Theater—Great Britain—Religious aspects—History—17th century. | Theater audiences—Great Britain—Religious aspects—History—16th century. | Theater audiences—Great Britain—Religious aspects—History—17th century. | Theater and society—Great Britain—History—16th century. | Theater and society—Great Britain—History—17th century. | English drama—Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500–1600—History and criticism. | English drama—17th century—History and criticism.
Classification: LCC PN2590.R35 G87 2018 | DDC 792.0942/09031—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017052154
To Wayne Jordan, my fellow practitioner in the Paradise School,for showing me that theater exists to transform audiencesandto Atticus Zavaletta, my brother in Christ,for pointing out that the Reformation was whenreligion got queered
CONTENTS
Chapter 3. In Mixed Company: Collaboration in Commercial Theater
Chapter 4. Making a Public Through A Game at Chess
Chapter 5. Measure for Measure: Theatrical Cues and Confessional Codes
Epilogue: Pity in the Public Sphere
Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling
Introduction
This book is a cultural materialist study of the mutually generative relationship between post-Reformation religious life and London’s commercial theaters. Early modern English drama is shaped by the polyvocal, confessional scene in which it was embedded. Yet theater does not simply reflect culture. The representational practices of the theater business refract the confessional material they stage. Early modern plays draw contradictory scraps of confessional practice together in powerful fantasies that reconfigure existing structures of religious thought and feeling. These performances do not evacuate religious material by bending it. Nor do they offer audiences a simple psychological escape from the realities of confessional conflict into a power-neutral space of free play and fellowship. What post-Reformation English theater did was involve mixed-faith audiences in shared, imaginative processes that allowed playgoers to engage with the always-changing tangle of religious life from emotional and cognitive vantage points not elsewhere available to them. Recent scholarship on the relationship between commercial theater and post-Reformation culture moves beyond a binary model of Catholic and Protestant religious difference, toward a fuller recognition of the diversity and complexity of confessional positions available to early modern English people. However, this rich critical conversation remains limited by a tendency to focus on single authors, particularly William Shakespeare, and on individual strands of the broader confessional culture.1 In contrast, Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling: Theater in Post-Reformation London shows how industry-wide, representational practices reshaped the ways ideologically diverse Londoners accessed the mingle-mangle of religious life across the spectrum of belief.
The long aftermath of the religious upheavals of the mid-sixteenth century cannot be understood through attention to any one confessional group in isolation. As Ethan Shagan writes, “English Protestants and Catholics [of varying stripes] defined … their identities … in response to their ideological opponents, allowing for a remarkable degree of cross-pollination of ideas, imagery, and texts across confessional divides.”2 The subcultures of puritans, church papists, Laudians, recusants, ardent conformists, and converts were entangled and mutually defining. These lives cannot be understood either in crude, block categories or as idiosyncratic snowflakes of private faith, but only as embedded in the densely woven fabric of mixed religious discourse and practice through which they were made. Particular confessional identities developed in relation to a larger and always-changing religious matrix. However, the heterogeneity of these confessional positions should not be mistaken for protomulticultural, Erasmian toleration.3 The reality of religious diversity existed in constant tension with the shared belief that there could only be one true faith. Confessional factions sought the power to define and enforce orthodoxy with a ferocity commensurate with the stakes—life and death in this world and the next. Yet Protestant hegemony was internally contradictory, changing, and contested. Dominant versions of English Christianity were displaced not only through direct religious opposition but also indirectly through the countless jostlings of alternative, often muddled, everyday confessional practices. Post-Reformation religious culture was produced collectively and chaotically, by diverse agents from endlessly reappropriated materials.
So too was commercial theater. Plays were made by mixed-faith groups of creative professionals responding to industry trends with the resources available to them. Author-focused projects implicitly assume that the ideological imprints of individual playwrights are