Converts and others whose personal lives were strongly marked by conflicting religious influences could retain (sometimes in indirect forms) aspects of abandoned belief systems, or the experience of religious change itself. Playgoer and dean of Saint Paul’s John Donne was born into a family of fervent Catholics descended from Saint Thomas More himself, but he converted to the Church of England around 1600. The complexity of Donne’s life, poetry, and prose have led critics to identify in them concealed beliefs as varied as crypto-Catholicism and crypto-Calvinism. But Molly Murray argues persuasively that Donne was a sincere convert who returns to the paradigms of conversion—irresolution, perplexity, change—as a language in which both to seek and to keep hidden those parts of religious life that are beyond articulation.153 Donne’s gift for thinking in paradoxes was exceptional, but he exemplifies a state of lived contradiction that was common among mixed-faith people.
Ungodly, Occult, Foreign, and Urban
Not all playgoers approached spiritual life with equal seriousness. Religious differences could be of temperature as well as kind. The parishioners of Giles Saint Cripplegate complained of their ungodly curate Timothy Hutton, who let bodies pile up unburied in the churchyard, refusing to leave the Fortune to perform his office until the play was done.154 Playgoing courtier, amateur playwright, and Restoration theater manager Thomas Killigrew was noted for his “profain or irreligious discourses.”155 Killigrew’s theater-bug sister Elizabeth (later mistress to Prince Charles) was similarly described as “very vain and foolish.”156 Playgoer Henry Skipwith was implicated in the Castlehaven trial as an accomplice to crimes so depraved they were considered godless.157 Theater enthusiast Nathaniel Tomkins’s support for his patron Laud’s program of decent ceremony in worship did not prevent him from selling “diverse vestments and other ornaments” of Worcester Cathedral to be used as “Players Capps and Coates.”158
The religious spectrum was also striated with beliefs about the supernatural that did not neatly map onto particular confessional positions. While some folk beliefs were contiguous with residual, late medieval, Catholic lore and apotropaic practices, it is a mistake to think that only papists, or those sympathetic to traditional worship, believed in magic. Protestants too engaged with the occult. Playgoing conjurer Simon Forman’s clients were drawn from across the confessional spectrum.159 As Keith Thomas has shown, many forms of superstitious activity—such as fortune telling, divining the location of lost objects, using love charms, and more—were a fairly ordinary part of the way mixed-faith English people made sense of the supernatural.160
Londoners were also exposed to Continental Protestants, as well as members of non-Christian religions. These more exotic expressions of faith were interpreted through the prism of internal debates among English Christians, but they also pointed outward, offering alternative perspectives on English religious life. Of the total foreign population of Elizabethan London, about half belonged to French and Dutch Reformed Churches.161 Shakespeare’s landlords were French Huguenots.162 Puritan playgoer John Greene attended sermons at churches belonging to London’s smaller Spanish and Italian Protestant communities.163 Many of these immigrants were refugees from Catholic persecution. Although they were subject to xenophobic hostility, their presence also fostered international Protestant solidarity. The godly looked to stranger churches as a “Trojan horse” that might import more fully reformed worship.164 Recognizing that stranger churches were a resource for puritans (or “nurseries of ill-minded persons to the Church of England”), Laud in the 1630s attempted unsuccessfully to suppress them.165 In addition to the congregations of these Reformed Protestant Churches, there were some members of a more distant Christian cousin, the Greek Orthodox Church. Ignorant of the importance of iconography in Orthodox worship, English Protestants, and particularly puritans, embraced Greek and Armenian believers as allies against Catholics and Muslims.166 Non-Christian faiths were similarly interpellated into English confessional conflicts, often without regard for their actual theologies or practices. English Protestants largely misrepresented Islam as a form of idolatrous paganism associated with Catholicism. Popular lore about Judaism was similarly deployed in conflicts between English Christians: puritans were mocked as “Jews” for their allegedly hyperliteral and legalistic treatments of scripture. However, there were small numbers of real Muslims and Jews in London, as well as many merchants and sailors who had direct (if fuzzy) knowledge of their faiths.167 For many English people, rumors of circumcision, the power of the Ottoman Empire, and the potential seduction of Islam were threats to Protestant identity.168 Yet, as Corinne Zeman observes, “elements of Islamic culture—including religiously inflected objects, such as the turban—were often folded into the fabric of cosmopolitan life in London.”169 Though space precludes a fuller discussion of foreign influences, domestic confessional conflicts were connected to a broader world of religious difference.
London was a mixed-faith clearinghouse: the hub of national and international confessional networks circulating books, rumors, objects, and people. While religious diversity existed all over England, the mixed strands of post-Reformation culture converged in London with particular density. Hearing different preachers was an attraction for both tourists and city dwellers; public executions for religion were more frequent in London, and they could draw larger crowds of witnesses. As seen in Gee’s day of Calvinist and Catholic service hopping, the city made a range of confessional experiences easily available. Rapid urban growth enabled mobility and anonymity that likely made conformity more difficult to enforce. Population density drew different confessional perspectives together cheek by jowl. More than this, the city offered a special, capacious instrument for collectively sifting and imaginatively reconfiguring the mixed-faith culture in which all Londoners were immersed: the commercial theaters.
Shared Theatrical Experience of a Mixed Religious Culture
Though constrained by the social conditions of their production, fictions also shift the boundaries of a culture. Doubtless there were some ideological ne plus ultras beyond which individual playgoers could not emotionally travel. But these imaginative limits were not uniform or orthodox. Because confessional lives themselves were mixed and fluid, it is unreasonable to assume that these identities narrowly or rigidly predetermined audience reactions to theatrical fantasies about religion. This is especially true insofar as “theatrical experience is … generally far more permissive than our socially regulated experience of everyday life.”170 While theater did not happen in splendid isolation from real-world, ideological commitments, the imaginative technologies of the early modern English stage facilitated flexible engagements with a heterogeneous, religious culture. In the next chapter, I explore the capacity of dramatic technique to structure collective encounters with post-Reformation religious life. The orchestration of shared playhouse experiences that imaginatively blur, shuffle, contort, or otherwise reshape existing ideological formations was a crucial mechanism through which early modern commercial theater regenerated, and transfigured, the mixed-faith culture that fed it.
The theater’s ability to lure playgoers into other pleasures and subject positions is evident in the story of the playgoing Venetian ambassador Antonio Foscarini. While in London, Foscarini made frequent trips to the low-rent Curtain to stand in the yard “incognito.” On one occasion, when the actors invited the audience to name the next day’s play, “he actually named one. But the crowd wanted another and began to shout ‘Friars, Friars.’ … So loosening his cloak, he began to clap his hands just as the mob did and to shout, ‘frati, frati.’ As he was shouting this the people turned to him and, assuming he was a Spaniard, began to whistle [menacingly]. But he has not given up visiting the other theatres.”171 The animosity of the crowd at the Curtain makes Foscarini’s desire to join with them all the more important. The ambassador abandons his own choice and embraces the wishes of the playgoers around him. Although we cannot with certainty identify the play, just as presumably Foscarini could not at the time, it would have been reasonable for the ambassador to have guessed that “Friars” contained antipapist material.172 Yet he claps and shouts along. Playhouse experience could gather mixed-faith audiences into fleeting communities of thought