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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 extractable from the larger processes of creative production. Others ascribe the confessional complexity of the drama to the complexity of the broader religious culture, passively recorded in particular plays. Throughout this book I will be arguing that this is not how theater works. The confessional dispositions of individual playwrights do not always correlate with the religious leanings of their plays. This is true of single authors (who even alone write in dialogue with other playwrights, companies, and audiences), but all the more obviously so in the common case of multiple authorship. As I show in Chapter 3, confessionally mixed groups of players and playwrights cobbled together commercially viable drama from the representational tools at hand. The conventions of genre and characterization, the structures of audience engagement, and the capacities of stage space and costume all exert their own influences. The cultural products of this complex and highly contingent system are seldom coherent expressions of anyone’s individual faith. Commercial plays do not transmit religious matter intact. The business and formal pressures of theatrical mediation reshape confessional content. The multiagential processes of creative production exceed the ideological control of any one person or discourse.

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 form. It maintains that representation is not merely reflective but constitutive, and it takes up the challenge of understanding the complicated ways that people and their societies make each other through language, with the belief that this model of culture is also why our own scholarly and pedagogic work matters.

Attending to such critical lineages enables genuine methodological growth, instead of pendulum swings by which merely reflective readings of texts are replaced by merely contextual treatments of history. “What will come after historicism?” is a question that misunderstands the methodology it looks to replace. The basic premise of cultural materialism, and of revisionist Marxism generally, is that the world as imagined and the world as lived create and constrain each other continually. To adapt the old “Mother Russia” joke: we can never be done with this dialectic, because it is never done with us. Understanding the always-changing, cultural feedback loop through which individual subjects and societies form each other is difficult, unending, and vital critical work. At its fullest, cultural materialism articulates a dense, formative matrix of human experiences, expressions, and activities in the world. It is a methodology adept at showing dynamic relationships between seemingly disconnected areas of social practice and culture. By insisting on the entanglement of the past and present, it demands continual methodological revision: “It is the eternally vigilant prophet proclaiming the relations between the tasks of the immediate present and the totality of the historical process.”¹⁰

Now, while we are watching the fire sale of the humanities in a university system that runs on the exploitation of an adjunct precariat, is a particularly suicidal time to abandon a methodology devoted to analyzing the relationships between social conditions, and the forms of knowledge production and cultural expression that subtend and change them. A country that elects a billionaire, reality television star as president cannot dispense with Marxist cultural studies. Creeping neoliberalism teaches us to assume that critical paradigms have built-in obsolescence after which they need replacing or rebranding. Looking for the “next thing” turns a capacious way of seeing the ongoing process of collectively making and being made by the world, into a “thing” that has outlived its market value. It is not progress to pursue a theater history that ignores social history, or to embrace pseudomaterialist criticism that describes “stuff” rather than social relationships.¹¹ Cultural materialism is not an emaciated ghost, shuffling toward the dustbin of criticism. We need this politically useful, intellectually flexible, and profound way of looking at the mutually shaping relationships between humans, language, and the world.

In the chapters that follow, I flesh out the claims I have been making in this introduction, showing by close engagement with dramatic texts and performance practices how early modern theater drew mixed-faith playgoers into new relations with a complex religious culture. Refuting the common assumption that audiences consisted of conforming Church of England Protestants, Chapter 1 illustrates the confessional heterogeneity of theatergoers, through representative examples of the complex and changing religious lives of about seventy known playgoers. This sample presents a far more diverse set of confessional characters than previously has been imagined in playhouses.¹² Alongside various kinds of fellow Protestants, and assorted types of Catholics, puritans attended the commercial theaters throughout the period. I demonstrate this fact—and discuss the critical persistence of the false notion that godly people hated plays. The religious position of individual playgoers informed, but did not narrowly determine, their responses to theater.

In Chapter 2, I argue for theater’s capacity to restructure playgoers’ experiences of confessional material. Early modern commercial drama fostered imaginative flexibility. Audiences were initiated in the pleasures of generic variety, experiments with staging conventions and genre, and the proliferation of dramatic subjects and perspectives available in the entertainment market. The emotional and mental elasticity cultivated by this theater culture extended to playgoers’ experiences of dramatized religious material. Recent work on theatrical response emphasizes uncued audience behavior and diverse appropriations of the drama.¹³ This scholarship tends to pit agential, individual playgoers against the supposedly totalizing force of stage spectacle. Yet the usual dichotomies drawn between active and passive, emotional and critical, individual and collective reception, are inadequate to describe the complex and fluctuating mixtures of these elements of response orchestrated by theatrical process. To illustrate how theatrical pleasure can reorient playgoers’ experiences of confessional content, I turn to a group of plays from the early 1620s that capitalize on popular interest in the Spanish Match. Unlike the rigid, oppositional religious binary into which A Game at Chess interpellates its audiences, other Spanish Match plays, such as The Noble Spanish Soldier, The Spanish Gypsy, and Match Me in London, invite more ideologically supple forms of identification and delight.

In contrast to work that seeks to identify the religious affiliations of individual playwrights, Chapter 3 focuses on mixed-faith collaboration. Religious differences among playhouse colleagues were common, and they had varied and unpredictable effects. Turning to a subgenre of stage hagiographies, I show how basic conditions of dramatic production, such as collaborative authorship, as well as the pressures of dramatic trends, generated confessionally hybrid plays. For example, the popularity of Falstaff led to the incorporation of the jolly English—and Catholic—thieving priest Sir John in the godly play Sir John Oldcastle. Playwrights with antipapist sentiments but expertise in the subgenre collaborated on a script sympathetic to the eponymous Catholic martyr, Sir Thomas More. Even in a genre that fosters plays with explicit religious loyalties, the working practices of the theater business produce mixed ideological formations.

In Chapter 4, on Thomas Middleton’s 1624 topical allegory A Game at Chess, I attend to the confessional and political work of surveillance in which the play enlists audiences. In contrast to existing criticism that focuses largely on identifying references to historical people and events, I show how the play’s structures of address and spacialization exercise theatergoers’ faculties of religious and political discovery, interpellating a Protestant collective out of a mixed-faith crowd. A Game at Chess does not simply publicize political and religious content but rather engages playgoers in the collective activity of being a confessionally and politically discerning public.

In Chapter 5, I take Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure as a case study in the capacity of theatrical process to shift habits of religious thought. The play inducts its mixed-faith audiences into a Calvinist hermeneutic of social and spiritual judgment, leading confessionally diverse playgoers to make assumptions on cultural grounds as to characters’ election or reprobation. Yet Measure for Measure’s reversals of plot and affect disrupt the predestinarian framework of thought and feeling that it initially asks mixed-faith audiences to adopt. Through such basic dramatic devices as soliloquies and dramatic irony, Measure for Measure activates—and unsettles—one of the most deeply entrenched practices of Calvinist culture. The play offers spectators of varied confessional identities (those for whom predestinarian theology was anathema, as well as those who lived its pressures daily) a multidimensional experience of the internal instability of a dominant religious paradigm. Measure for Measure offers mixed-faith audiences shared predestinarian feeling. It allows intimate access to the interiority of a puritan hypocrite and possible reprobate, and it asks playgoers of various religious affiliations to suspend judgment on Angelo’s soul.

In the epilogue, I explore the theater’s distinctive role in early modern public formation. Unlike Habermasian print publics centered on rational-critical debate, drama offered a different kind of encounter with matters of religious controversy. For example, John Ford’s 1630 ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore recasts the tension of a Caroline controversy between Laudians and Calvinists, as to whether the Church of Rome was the Antichristian Whore of Babylon, onto the star-crossed romance of incestuous lovers, allowing audiences a more emotionally layered experience of a divisive religious issue. Early modern commercial theater was a public-making forum, but one in which feeling was a central, and essential, tool for collectively reimagining post-Reformation culture.