The post-Reformation landscape offered the stage rich material, but the confessional terrain did not simply transpose its existing features onto plays; theater recontours the religious ground it represents, by drawing alternative routes of thought and feeling for mixed-faith audiences to travel. The fundamental contention of this book is that theatrical process lures playgoers astray from their everyday religious orientations. In Chapter 1, I demonstrate the confessional diversity of post-Reformation playgoers at some length, in order to counter the usual, often implicit, assumption that theater audiences were uniform, orthodox groups of Church of England Protestants. Yet my purpose in showing examples of the complex and varied religious lives of known playgoers is not to suggest that these individuals’ responses to plays were narrowly or directly determined by their respective confessional identities; rather, these identity positions are points from which to measure the kinds of imaginative stretching elicited by theatrical effects. The orchestration of audience response is not experientially or ideologically totalizing. It was rarely directed toward changing opinions on matters of religious controversy. However, commercial theater did enable ongoing, collective, emotional experimentation with alternative religious perspectives.
The shared, affective thinking structured by performance pulled different religious groups into a mixed-faith public. Whatever the long-term, historical aftereffects of the emergence of this cross-confessional theater public, playgoing was not a secularizing activity for early modern Londoners themselves. They remained enmeshed in the religious culture of the period in which they actually lived. Neither was the general function of commercial drama to produce the merry, protoecumenical, English good-fellowship that appears in some parts of some plays. Nor was theater the handmaiden of Protestant hegemony. Rather, playhouses were spaces of virtual experimentation with changing structures of religious thought and feeling. Theater gives cultures, as Steven Mullaney writes, “a means of thinking about themselves, especially when confronting their more painful or irresolvable conflicts and contradictions.” In the multidirectional, uneven, and massive transformations of the long English Reformation, theater was “an affective technology … an especially deep, sensitive, and probing instrument, as theater tends to be in times of crisis.”4 The impact of this collective, cross-confessional, affective thinking on early modern religious life was indirect but profound.
Post-Reformation theater’s polyvalent religious experiments do not point forward in a teleological narrative of disenchantment or “Anglican” triumph. But this does not mean that theater does not effect cultural change. It is precisely in the multiple, erratic, exploratory, imaginative shifts structured by performance that the stage does its ideological work. Cultures, as Raymond Williams clarifies, are processes, not static things:
A lived hegemony is always a process…. It is a realized complex of experiences, relationships, and activities, with specific and changing pressures and limits. In practice, that is, hegemony can never be singular. Its internal structures are highly complex…. [Moreover], it does not just passively exist as a form of dominance. It has continually to be renewed, recreated, defended, and modified. It is also continually resisted, limited, altered, challenged, by pressures not all its own…. The most interesting and difficult part of any cultural analysis … is that which seeks to grasp the hegemonic in its active and formative but also its transformational processes.5
The continual reiteration on which dominant structures of religious belief depend is never self-identical, and never uncontested. Cultures reproduce themselves and change through repetitions that are never the same. As many cultural materialist and new historicist scholars of the 1980s and 1990s recognized, “colluding” or “contesting” are inadequate categories to describe these ongoing, multiple, and entangled processes of cultural reproduction and mutation.6 Accordingly, I attend less to moments of direct religious opposition than to a more slippery set of confessional experiences orchestrated by theatrical devices: unlikely sympathies, arousal, uncertainty. Commercial plays did not generally change people’s doctrinal beliefs—nor did they seek to—but the conventions and pleasures of theater could loosen existing religious structures and wiggle them into other shapes.
This is possible because people too are cultural processes, as Judith Butler observes. Like gender identity, religious identity is not a thing but a “stylized repetition of acts through time.”7 The confessional lives of individual audience members should be thought of not as static facts but as practices. Religious selves are not discrete, coherent, ideological units. Rather, these identities are constituted and continually recalibrated through their interactions with confessional culture. This ongoing process of reinscription and change is always at work in even the most inane daily activities. But early modern theater offered groups of diverse individuals special license, as well as the imaginative tools, to encounter their world differently than they did in everyday life, to feel their culture from other perspectives. Theater gave Londoners, across the spectrum of belief, particularly capacious and flexible forms of mental and emotional access to the tangle of post-Reformation life. However intangible their impact on the outside world, these virtual, emotional, and mental experiments are themselves small, embodied, cultural transformations. While flickers of feeling (especially in response to something fictive, not even real) may seem insignificant, such experiential micromovements are the most basic unit of ideological reproduction and change.
Representation itself is a social process. This is most overtly true in the case of theater, where the real-time interactions of live actors and audiences are the very medium. (As Peter Brook writes, “A man walks across a stage and someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.”)8 Theater is a relationship between performers and audiences that unfolds over time. In my close readings, I stress the phenomenology of performance, and the dialectic between stage and playhouse, because it is in these temporal and relational dynamics that it is easiest to see how theater works as a mechanism of cultural adaptation, rather than as a repository of discourses. Post-Reformation culture, the Londoners who lived it, and the plays they collectively made are all interlocking processes; and my purpose is to show the enmeshed workings of the gears that connect and move them.
The drift over the last decade toward readings in which plays simply register historical conditions is now being countered by a renewed emphasis on theatrical form—originally so crucial to the cultural materialist and new his-toricist project. The goal of this work was always to track living relationships between a society and its fantasies, not to spot discourses in texts as if pinning and labeling butterflies. While the newer critical moniker “historical formalism” usefully marks its affinities with new historicism and distinguishes itself from belle-lettrism,9 I retain “cultural materialism” in order to mark emphatically that my goal is not just to juxtapose literary texts and historical conditions in a way that richly describes both, but rather to show the active role of representation in the ongoing making of the world. The term stresses continuity with the insights of revisionist Marxists of the 1970s and 1980s (particularly Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, and Williams) regarding the transformative cultural work enabled by the semiautonomy of literary