CHAPTER 1
Mixed Faith
The early modern commercial theaters drew confessionally diverse audiences. Despite increasing attention among scholars of the drama to the diversity and complexity of post-Reformation religious life, it remains common practice to refer to these audiences simply as “Protestant.”1 This shorthand is useful insofar as it registers the large numerical majority of conforming members of the Church of England, as well as that institution’s claim to national hegemony. However convenient, the term risks homogenizing the de facto pluralism of the post-Reformation religious scene, erasing Catholic factions, and eliding the changing and internally contested nature of English Protestantism itself. This chapter shows that a far more diverse set of confessional characters filled the playhouses: hot, lukewarm, and cold statute Protestants; recusant, church papist, and militant Catholics; avant-garde forerunners and Laudians; converts and serial converters; the conflicted and the confused.
The varied confessional filters through which people experienced these plays exceed taxonomy. Religious identities—then as now—are more than the box one might tick on a census. They consist not only of consciously held beliefs but also of doubts, automatic devotional habits, unorthodox longings, curiosities, residues of rejected ideologies, and degrees of fervor. “Believers,” as Judith Maltby observes, “are rarely theologically consistent.”2 Confessional positions are relative: one man’s conforming Church of England Protestant is another’s church papist. They are situational, subject to alteration over the course of an individual’s life through conversion, experimentation, or wavering commitment. It was also possible for a person’s religious orientation to remain constant while the social meaning of that position changed, as was the case for many Calvinists during the Laudian ascendency who found themselves relabeled as “puritans,” or for English Catholics at varying moments of relative toleration or persecution. Moreover, religious identities are constantly recalibrated in response to changing institutional, social, and devotional stimuli: a woman might be a differently interpellated religious subject when attending Church of England services in the morning than when she is speaking with a puritan neighbor in the afternoon or lying awake, afraid of death, at night. Religious identities are not so much something one is but rather something one is constantly doing. This is not to say that post-Reformation English people did not hold strong and sincere beliefs, or that confessional labels did not have real social and spiritual consequences; rather, like all discursively produced subject positions, confessional selves are shifting composites of mixed cultural materials. Peter Lake aptly calls post-Reformation religious life “a number of attempts, conducted at very different levels of theoretical self-consciousness and coherence, at creative bricolage.”3 Religious identities, in other words, are like gender identities as described by Judith Butler: “The very multiplicity of their construction holds out the possibility of a disruption of their univocal posturing.”4 These heterogeneous threads not only constitute religious identities but also contain the possibilities for their reconfiguration. The variety, complexity, and mobility of playgoers’ confessional positions should deter us from a default assumption that audiences’ responses to theater were ideologically coherent or orthodox.
While religious differences did sometimes generate contrasting experiences of particular plays, the variegated confessional identities of individual playgoers did not delimit their possible responses to theater in narrow or predictable ways. People also felt things in theaters not easily aligned with their belief systems. In Thomas Cartelli’s words, “The playgoer may … entertain responses that would seem decidedly abnormative outside the theater”: thousands of committed Christians dared God out of heaven with the atheist Tamburlaine.5 As Susan Bennett observes, the process of reception “acts bi-directionally.”6 Particular confessional positions form part of the interpretive frameworks that create the play in varying shapes in the minds of playgoers. But spectators too are reshaped, however imperceptibly, by the dramatic fantasies that they absorb. Theatrical process can orchestrate responses that jostle spectators into emotional perspectives and mental experiences that fall outside the orbit of their real-world religious beliefs. This is one of the basic reasons people go to plays: to feel, imagine, and occupy subject positions differently than they do in real life. Theater’s particular capacities to generate shared emotion, and structure collective attention, could pull diverse audiences into temporary, cross-confessional communities. To adopt playgoer John Donne’s phrase, in the theaters, “these mixed souls [do] mix again.”7
My claim is not, however, that the playhouses promoted protosecular religious toleration, or Erasmian good fellowship. If confessional differences were sometimes subsumed, displaced, or reconfigured in shared dramatic fantasies, the result was not the consolidation of a distinctly via media theater culture. Both the extant body of drama and the material practices of the theater business that produced it are far more confessionally polyvocal. The playhouse was a space of “suspended belief,” where the indirection of dramatic fiction allowed theatergoers more license to imaginatively experiment with the possibilities, and emotionally wrangle with the problems, of post-Reformation life. The commercial theaters offered their mixed-faith audiences sophisticated techne for collectively thinking and feeling through the densely layered palimpsest that constituted their religious world. The records left by this shared daydreaming about the endlessly reappropriated cultural materials of the holy are characterized not by the clear triumph of one ideological position (for example, minimally doctrinal, decently ceremonial, proto-Anglican, or protosecular Church of England Protestantism) but rather by the complexity of the drama’s refractions of London’s diverse religious cultures. The confessional impact of the practices of the commercial theater business is difficult to specify, but this does not mean that religious discourses, or their enmeshed embodiments (people), were unchanged by the vivid, unruly refashionings of mixed-faith materials on offer in the playhouses. The usual absence of immediate, easily identifiable, social consequences to theatrical performance does not mean that plays do nothing. Early modern drama’s influence on London’s religious culture was multivalent, contradictory, and often subterranean. Theater’s capaciousness as a form of social thought and emotion, its distinctive facility to both accommodate multiple perspectives and focus collective attention, made it a medium well equipped to engage with the complexities of post-Reformation life. The commercial theaters gave confessionally diverse Londoners somewhere to be shaken by the ground moving beneath them, to feel the tremors of tectonic shifts, whose ultimate direction was unknown.
In the playhouses, ideologically divided crowds processed the seismic instability of post-Reformation confessional culture together. Sir Humphrey Mildmay, an avid theatergoer with some Catholic leanings, recorded frequent trips to the playhouse in mixed-faith company. Sir Humphrey saw Volpone accompanied by his godly brother Anthony, who was a “great opposer … of Popery” and would later serve as jailor to King Charles I, along with their cousin Sir Frank Wortley, who would become an enthusiastic officer in the King’s army and pen a defense of the episcopacy.8 This ordinary occasion—when a crypto-papist, a puritan, and a pro-episcopal loyalist sat together, watching a play written by multiple convert Ben Jonson while he was still Catholic, with puritan actor John Lowin in the title role—demonstrates how thoroughly confessional heterogeneity permeated the production and reception of commercial drama. In Chapter 3, I discuss the complex and unpredictable effects of mixed-faith collaboration among actors and playwrights within theater companies. Here, the crucial point is not simply the fact of these playgoers’ confessional diversity but also the flexible imaginative engagement with London’s mixed religious culture enabled by the process of performance.
For example, early in Volpone Nano the dwarf and Androgyno the hermaphrodite entertain their employer with a rhyming exposition of the transmigrations of the soul of Pythagoras, which initiates the audience in the pleasures of transformation that are central to the play. While Volpone generally keeps religious issues peripheral, here they are underscored. Nano and Androgyno’s repartee begins with the question:
How of late