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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 [hast thou] suffered translation

And shifted thy coat in these days of reformation[?]⁹

The ensuing back-and-forth traces Pythagoras’s soul’s journey through the bodies of a “reformed … fool,” a Carthusian monk, a lawyer, a mule, a puritan, and a hermaphrodite. This tour de force of doggerel includes four lines of antipuritan satire. It would be po-faced and tone-deaf to assume that Sir Humphrey Mildmay, Sir Anthony Mildmay, and Sir Frank Wortley each found the antipuritan jokes funny or not funny in direct proportion to his real-world opinion of the godly. The jaunty couplets, the erratic “tumbling” meter, the range of subjects satirized, and the atypical physicality of the speakers themselves all give the zanies’ routine a sense of comic overflow that orients audience attention to the movement between forms of identity. The logic of the joke is accretive, accelerating slippages of confessional selfhood, chaotically mixed with transformations of other kinds—between sexes and between species. The cumulative energy of the “transmigration” encourages growing laughter across particular confessional jabs. In performance, the function of the zanies’ skit is not to divide playgoers along sectarian lines but to involve everyone in the quasi-erotic gratifications of variety and change. This kind of ideologically unruly grafting of religious culture and theatrical form permeates the extant corpus of early modern drama. In the playhouses, mixed-faith audiences shared theatrical experiences that transmogrify religious categories.

The real-world religious positions of audience members were part of the generative, confessional polyvocality of the commercial theater scene; yet these identities did not rigidly predetermine how people felt watching plays. Theater happens in the oscillation between “audiences” (actual groups of diverse and complex living people) and “the audience” (that imagined collective elicited in performance).¹⁰ Meanings are not produced solely by the ideological disposition of spectators, nor solely by the experiential impact of theatrical process, but by their mutual interaction. The varied, complex, and changeable confessional positions of playgoers, to which I now turn, do not fix limits to imaginative responses to theater but rather mark starting points from which to measure the possible imaginative and emotional distances traveled in the two hours’ traffic of the stage.

Mixed Audiences, or, People Are Different

Here, I illustrate the confessional diversity of early modern commercial theater audiences, using as examples the religious lives of about seventy known playgoers.¹¹ Obviously, this tiny sample cannot give us any statistical information about the confessional demographics of audiences. It is estimated that at least fifteen thousand people attended the theaters weekly: totaling as many as a million visits a year, on average, over the nearly seventy years between the construction of the first, purpose-built playhouse in 1576 and the closing of the theaters in 1642.¹² Even assuming that the confessional breakdown of the playgoing public reflected that of London, religious historians are rightly cautious when making demographic claims about confessional groups. The legal requirement of church attendance made sincere conformity often indistinguishable from its tepid simulation, and nonattendance could indicate anything from Catholic recusancy, to puritan sermon gadding, to an irreverent preference for the alehouse.¹³ Moreover, because confessional nomenclature was relative and often polemical, we cannot treat the religious subcategories used by contemporaries as neutrally descriptive.

That having been said, the shifting size and visibility of particular confessional groups has been widely canvassed. As Patrick Collinson summarizes, “Historians continue to disagree over the extent to which the English people took the new religion to heart and became more than what contemporaries called ‘cold statute Protestants.’ But it is now generally accepted that by the end of the [sixteenth] century the English nation was Protestant in the sense that (except for a repressed minority) it was no longer Catholic.”¹⁴ Maltby describes committed conformists or “Prayer-Book Protestants” as “nothing other than a minority, though a significant minority, on the religious spectrum.”¹⁵ The godly too were a minority, though one that also claimed for itself a normative role in the national Church.¹⁶ Puritanism bled into a wider Calvinist culture.¹⁷ London’s active puritan underground fostered the “miscegenation” of familist and antinomian ideas with more mainstream strands of puritan thought.¹⁸ An “avant-garde conformist” minority appeared even in the midst of the broad “Calvinist consensus” of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean Church.¹⁹ This group’s emphasis on ceremony and its movement away from Calvinist, predestinarian theology would gain traction in the Caroline Church with the rise of William Laud.²⁰ Catholicism persisted in England, both through the survival (or mutation) of traditional devotional habits and through the efforts of post-Tridentine missionaries.²¹ Estimates vary, but recusant Catholics may have accounted for as little as 2 percent of the population of London.²² Beyond this visible sliver of engagés lay a larger number of committed Catholics, who avoided persecution through occasional conformity. Without windows into men’s souls, these strategic schismatics blend into a broader group of conforming parishioners with conservative, religious tendencies, whom hotter Protestants also described as “church papists.”²³ While complaints about widespread religious ignorance and indifference were often polemical, there is also evidence of subdoctrinal, popular Pelagianism (“Be good, and you will go to Heaven”), as well as more actively irreverent, or irreligious, behaviors and attitudes.²⁴ Alongside these competing and overlapping confessional cultures, there existed a muddily subconfessional, perhaps even sub-Christian, world of folk belief and magical practices.²⁵ The religious spectrum was broad, and the positions people occupied along it were often slippery. “Orthodoxy,” or religious normativity, was contested and elusive territory.

If, as Alfred Harbage asked, we imagine the motley crowd pouring out of the Globe, we can never know how many in that audience were Catholic, or puritan, or converts, or had avant-garde attitudes toward ceremony. Then again—because confessional difference was often invisible but existed in every socioeconomic class, among both men and women, and in every age group—neither could they.²⁶ (For this reason, debates about the class and gender composition of London theater audiences are not immediately relevant to this study.)²⁷ Our inability to recover specific statistical information about the religious sympathies of playgoers, despite our awareness of the reality of confessional diversity, puts us in something like the position of audience members themselves, whose perceptions of the size and activities of both their own and other confessional groups could be highly subjective. Religious heterogeneity was greater than the sum of its parts. The confessional lives described next index the variety, complexity, and mobility of religious positions that audiences brought to plays. Collectively, they suggest the endlessly revisable possibilities of a mixed-faith culture.

Playgoing Puritans

The notion that puritans were en masse fundamentally opposed to theater has persisted despite repeated debunkings.²⁸ As George Walker in his 1935 biography of puritan playgoer Richard Madox points out, “It is a modern fallacy that Puritans were enemies of the drama.”²⁹ Unquestionably, some godly people rejected theater, not only because of its immoral subject matter and dissolute crowds but also because of its association with Catholic or residually popish ceremony. Certainly, the accusation of antitheatricalism was a common trope of antipuritan polemic. Nevertheless, antitheatricalism was not so widespread among the godly as to eliminate puritans from theater culture. My purpose here is to refute the tenacious falsehood that godly people were, by definition, enemies of theater, as well as to identify the underlying assumptions that keep this an intervention that must be repeated each time as if from scratch.

Several recent books, most notably Jeffrey Knapp’s Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England and Alison Shell’s Shakespeare and Religion, reassert the view of a London theater scene grounded in a via media religious culture, in which the godly had little to no part.³⁰ In Knapp’s Shakespeare’s Tribe, early modern English theater is Erasmian, that is, minimally doctrinal and broadly inclusive—but separate from the world of puritans. He writes, “The godly in churches, the good fellows in alehouses and playhouses: these were the rival camps.”³¹ Unfortunately, this influential book repeatedly misidentifies divisive polemic that claims for itself the privileged position of moderation, as evidence of Erasmian toleration—which it is not.³² In other words, Knapp not only (like many others) ignores or minimizes evidence of puritan theater people; he homogenizes a wide range of real confessional differences among theatergoers and practitioners into an undifferentiated ecumenicalism. As the last thirty years of revisionist scholarship debunking the Whig narrative of the English Reformation as the successful installation of an anodyne, via media Anglicanism suggests, Knapp’s account does not accurately describe the diversity and complexity of post-Reformation confessional life.³³

Shell offers an erudite version of a similar argument. She recognizes some forms of confessional diversity in the playhouses, affirming that “audiences were not homogeneous,” but also restates a qualified version of the familiar claim that “[puritans] stayed away from the theatre.” Shell goes so far as to suggest that “a typical London audience of the early seventeenth century [pre-1620s] might have contained, relative to the city’s population in general, a disproportionately large number of those who consciously recoiled from Calvinist doctrine.”³⁴ This is an astonishing claim, since these decades are widely identified as a heyday of the Calvinist consensus, when anti-Calvinist innovations to doctrine and ceremony were still in a nascent stage of development. “Calvinist doctrine” was no fringe of radical religion, as one might suppose from Shell’s speculation here; rather, it was the theological core of the Church of England, as well as a pervasive part of post-Reformation popular culture. The archbishop of Canterbury was Calvinist, as were the many ordinary people who enjoyed godly broadsides and providential monster pamphlets. Essentially, Shell here acknowledges the continuum between puritanism and broader Calvinism, but she does so to reposition Calvinism itself as marginal rather than mainstream. To the contrary, if early Jacobean Calvinists had avoided plays, the theaters might have closed for lack of bums on seats. In short, both Knapp and Shell continue to treat positive forms of puritan engagement with drama as exceptional, rather than normal, and privilege semi-Pelagian, conforming, Church of England Protestantism as central to the theater culture. That is, these books resurrect an old narrative that ties (especially Shakespearean) drama to a merry old, doctrinally unfussed, sensibly Anglican England.

We know, however, that Parliament’s initial decision to close the theaters in 1642 had more to do with crowd control than with the spiritual threat of idolatrous spectacle.³⁵ We know that not all puritans were antitheatricalists, and not all antitheatricalists were puritans.³⁶ We know young John Milton liked going to plays.³⁷ Yet the received narrative—that while earlier sixteenth-century English reformers, such as John Bale and John Foxe, embraced playing as a means of spreading the gospel, their puritan successors from the 1570s onward rejected theater as idolatrous—remains largely intact.³⁸ However, Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean have shown that, in spite of some emerging criticism of playing within the puritan movement, godly statesmen Sir Francis Walsingham and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, formed the Queen’s Men touring company in 1583 to disseminate hot Protestant values.³⁹ Michael O’Connell has demonstrated that Philip Henslowe was producing plays about Protestant heroes that targeted a puritan audience into the early 1600s.⁴⁰ Margot Heinemann has identified godly investments in the drama as “evidence … [that puritans] must have been in the audience” through the 1610s and 1620s.⁴¹ Martin Butler has proved that puritans attended private playhouses in the last decade before the theaters’ closing.⁴² Together, these accounts demonstrate a sustained puritan presence in the early modern theater scene. Why then are puritan playgoers still widely regarded as unicorns: elusive creatures that either do not exist or, if real, are so rare that no one is sure they have seen one?

The expectation of a stark antipathy between godly people and theater people produces interpretive habits that confirm this foregone conclusion. It is common, indeed almost “common sense,” to point to the many plays containing antipuritan satire as indicative of a broad hostility between the theaters and the godly. However, this satire is often surprisingly affectionate toward its targets, and it has usefully been read in the context of more local conflicts, rather than as evidence of total war.⁴³ Moreover, early modern plays are also full of anti-Catholic satire; yet few critics, if any, suggest that therefore most Catholics were enemies of theater generally. To the contrary, it is far easier for scholars to imagine English Catholic people attending plays, even when so many of them have papist villains, because of the strong connection between Catholicism and theatricality. This associative link, powerfully described by Huston Diehl and others, did affect the experience of theater (and of visual and material culture generally) for English people across the confessional spectrum in multiple ways.⁴⁴ “Catholic theatricality” was a strong and pervasive discursive formation. However, it did not prevent all godly people from attending plays. The idée fixe that the playhouse was too popish for puritans to stomach generates scholarly practices that erase evidence of godly theatergoing. For example, Shell interprets in opposite ways similar calls from puritan and Catholic divines for the faithful to avoid the theater: as signs of godly absence and of Romanist presence. Why is the same type of evidence treated as descriptive in the former case but prescriptive in the latter? This interpretive discrepancy is an object lesson in the ways the expectation that we will not find puritans in the playhouses can keep us from seeing them there.⁴⁵

In part, the continued critical reluctance to imagine godly people inside theaters rests on the mischaracterization of puritans as pleasure-hating outsiders. Although puritans habitually identified themselves as a beleaguered minority for theological reasons, as Collinson has shown, they were “not alien to … the English Church but [represented] the most vigorous and successful of religious tendencies contained within it.”⁴⁶ Nicholas Tyacke and others have demonstrated how doctrinal consensus, and a shared sense of religious purpose, united English Calvinists who were otherwise divided on issues of Church ceremony and organization. Until the Laudian ascendency, the Calvinist consensus meant that the difference between Protestants and puritans was largely one of degree, not kind.⁴⁷ For much of the period, the godly were like other Church of England Protestants—only more so—and the distinction between them was subjective. Part of the difficulty in discussing the relationship between puritans and theater is the highly relative nature of the confessional label itself.⁴⁸ Playgoer Benjamin Rudyerd describes himself as “zealous of a thorow reformation,” but he understands this as a mainstream position.⁴⁹ He objects to Laudian, ceremonial innovations and the recasting of devout Protestants as dangerous radicals: “They have so brought it to passe, that under the Name of Puritans, all our Religion is branded.”⁵⁰ Simply put, modern scholars should not be more convinced that “puritans” avoided plays than early modern people themselves were certain, or in agreement, as to whom that term actually described.

The fluidity of puritanism as a category (subject to both change over time and conflicting applications) is apparent in the Protestant religious writer Richard Baker’s defense of the theater. Rejecting William Prynne’s antitheatrical tract, Baker writes, “(What Puritans may do, I know not but) I verily think, scarce one Protestant will be found to take his part.”⁵¹ Here, Baker categorizes antitheatricalism as puritan. However, we should not simply reproduce this polemical conflation.⁵² Rather than maintaining a clear division between moderate Protestants who enjoy theater and radical puritans who reject it, Baker’s pamphlet itself blurs these distinctions by invoking the puritan Francis Walsingham’s support of plays: “Who hath not heard of Sir Francis Walsingham an Eminent Councellour in Queen ELIZABETH’S Time, famous for his … Piety in advancing the Gospel? yet this was the Man that procured the Queen to entertain Players for her Servants; and to give them Wages as in a just Vocation? And would he ever have done this, being so religious a Man, if he had thought plays to be prophane[?] … And now, me thinks, I have said enough in defence of Plays.”⁵³ This paragraph opens the tract, framing Walsingham’s approval as the first and last word on the religious acceptability of plays. Baker presents Walsingham, who supported both the puritan cause and players, as a normative, nostalgic figure of Protestant piety, in order to position Prynne’s antitheatrical tract as “puritan” extremism. Curiously, Baker asserts Walsingham’s perfect Protestantism through positive terms of godly piety, emphasizing his commitment to an evangelical, preaching ministry (“advancing the Gospel”) and using a puritan-inflected idiom (“to give them Wages as in a just Vocation”). Baker’s appropriation of godly Walsingham against godly Prynne demonstrates the degree to which the distinction between puritan and Protestant was in the eye of the beholder, as well as the diversity of thought among the godly regarding theater.

English Protestantism encompassed a range of positions on the role of the visual and material in religious worship that did not neatly correspond to particular attitudes to theater. For example, Stephen Gosson’s 1582 tract Playes Confuted in Five Actions attacks theater with a hot Protestant aversion to images. Yet Gosson himself was a ceremonial conformist; he used the Book of Common Prayer, wore the surplice, and made the sign of the cross at baptism.⁵⁴ The contrast between the puritan tone of Gosson’s tracts and the conforming style of his churchmanship demonstrates that attitudes to the visual in religious ceremony and in art did not always match. Some hot Protestants were iconophobic, but generalized antipathy to visual and material culture was far from standard among the godly. It is a mistake to think that people who strongly rejected “popery” in the English Church were therefore averse to plays, even when they made polemical connections between popish ceremony and theatrical artifice. To the contrary, the incriminating taint of theatrical popery could be used to advance a puritan agenda in ways that did not imply a wholesale rejection of plays themselves. For example, godly theatergoer and satirist Samuel Rowlands attacks the surplice by comparing it to a stage costume:

The gull gets on a surpliss

With a crosse upon his breast.

Like Allen playing Faustus,

In that manner was he drest.⁵⁵

Rowlands uses the accusation of theatricality to raise a puritan objection to popish vestments, yet his memory of a specific costume, actor, and role suggests a pleasurable engagement with the play.⁵⁶ Early modern London was not divided between prayer book Protestants, whose moderate views on ceremony enabled the uncomplicated enjoyment of dramatic spectacle, and precise extremists, whose zealous commitment to reformed worship precluded theatrical pleasure. In fact, it was possible for godly people to separate the negative association between theater and popery from their attitude toward actual plays.

The diary of theatergoer and puritan preacher Richard Madox demonstrates the ability of the godly to reject excessive materiality and spectacle in religious worship but still attend the theater. In 1582, Madox kept a journal of time spent in London while waiting to set sail as chaplain on a trade ship to the Moluccas, a position he received on the recommendation of that champion of puritan clergy, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and which the zealous Madox understood as an opportunity for evangelization.⁵⁷ The London diary records both the details of a sermon, which “shewd … God is always with us and therefore we need no ymage,” and a trip to the playhouse. There is no indication in the diary of a sense of contradiction between attending a sermon against the use of images in worship and watching a play. In both entries, the preacher seems to be sightseeing. Madox writes, “We went to the theater to se a scurvie play set owt al by one virgin which there proved a fyemartin with owt voice so that we stayed not the matter.”⁵⁸ Part of his description suggests possible moral disapprobation—the play is “scurvie.”⁵⁹ But this remark is a far cry from the heated denunciations typical of antitheatrical polemic, and we should not extrapolate from it a general antipathy to theater because of Madox’s religious orientation. Furthermore, the reason Madox gives for leaving the play is not moral but aesthetic, the performer’s being “with owt voice.” The description of the player as a “fyemartin,” or “freemartin”—a sterile female calf with partly male anatomy—may refer not so much to the actor’s transvestism as to the vocal failure of a boy player going through puberty.⁶⁰ In any case, Madox’s disappointment itself shows the expectation of pleasure.

Madox and Rowlands were not the only puritans who enjoyed theater. In practice, the godly attended plays alongside their less zealous neighbors. Butler has already demonstrated the substantial presence of puritans in late Caroline playhouses such as Blackfriars. These playgoing puritans included Sir Thomas Barrington, who supported nonconforming clergy; Sir Thomas Lucy, who was praised for godly piety; and Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick, whose religious devotion is celebrated in a biography by the puritan divine Samuel Clark. Godly Bulstrode Whitelock was such a habitué of Blackfriars that the house musicians struck up a tune he had written whenever he walked through the door. Sir Edward Dering, who as member of Parliament introduced the Root and Branch Bill proposing the abolition of the episcopacy, also frequented the theater—even on the Sabbath. That Butler can locate these godly individuals in the privileged audiences of the Caroline playhouses demonstrates both how embedded puritanism was within the English establishment and “how false it is to conceive of puritan feeling as being in a state of intransigent hostility towards the theatres in the 1630s.”⁶¹

Other playgoing puritans further demonstrate that a zealous commitment to reform in Church worship did not necessitate a rejection of theatrical spectacle. In a 1659 speech to Parliament, godly moderate Henry Cromwell (son of Oliver) compares his own political fortunes to the temporary elevation of the clown Christopher Sly in The Taming of the Shrew, recalling the performance in detail and without disapprobation.⁶² Theatergoer and later parliamentarian army officer Captain Charles Essex kept a nonconformist chaplain.⁶³ Moderate puritan Richard Newdigate frequented both godly sermons and Jacobean playhouses.⁶⁴ Sir Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, attended plays in the public theaters in the 1610s and later supported the separatists who decamped to Massachusetts.⁶⁵ His brother Henry Rich, Earl of Holland, took in Henry VIII at the Globe in 1628, while part of a puritan court faction.⁶⁶ Rich’s unlicensed chaplain, John Smith, a man who mocked Laudian bishop (and fellow playgoer) Richard Corbett’s inability to preach, declared in 1633 “that he loved the company of players above all, and that he thought there might be as much good many times done by a man hearing a play as in hearing a sermon.”⁶⁷ Not all puritans perceived a conflict between their religious beliefs and enthusiasm for plays.

Godliness was an ongoing process. People’s religious leanings and attitudes to theater were subject to alteration. While he did ultimately reject theater, the puritan diarist Richard Norwood also describes an earlier period of his life when he felt the alternating pulls of religious fervor and worldly attractions such as plays. Like many in the period, Norwood’s religious life was full of change. However, Norwood’s later convictions do not negate his previous experience of wavering between godly piety and the appeal of the stage.⁶⁸ The former puritan and future royalist William Prynne, in the course of rethinking his political and religious alignments in the 1640s, also recanted his earlier attack on the theater, Histriomastix, for which he had lost his ears. “It is no disparagement for any man to alter his judgement upon better information,” Prynne writes, declaring “that Playes are lawfull things.”⁶⁹ Prynne’s changes of heart show the value of looking at religious positions not as static and discrete entities but as entangled strands of a broader mixed-faith culture.

No One Is Normal

In the theaters as in local parishes, the zealous mixed with other members of the national Church. If we do not presuppose a normative, proto-Anglican via media in conflict with a puritan fringe, we can better understand the rival ceremonial and doctrinal tendencies within the Church of England, competing for centrality in a large, shared tent. Just as “puritan” was a capacious and contested term, used to describe individuals with significantly different ideas about ceremony, ecclesiology, and art, so too was the pseudoneutral category of religious “moderation” itself fraught and contentious. Ethan Shagan observes that “the golden mean was not merely a point on the spectrum but a condition of authority,” and he rightly warns against “allowing historical categories of debate [such as moderation] to masquerade as scholarly categories of analysis.”⁷⁰ For example, playgoer Bishop Joseph Hall’s suggestively titled Via Media (ca. 1626) was not the irenic olive branch it rhetorically presents itself to be, but rather part of the Calvinist pushback against emerging, Arminian works of controversy.⁷¹ To the playwright and future clergyman John Marston, Hall was a “devout meale-mouth’d Preceisean.”⁷² To his more radical fellow theatergoer, and 1642 pamphlet war adversary, John Milton, Hall’s defense of the episcopacy was an endorsement of “plaine Popedom,” and Hall himself was guilty of “lukewarmenesse … [cloaked] under the affected name of moderation.”⁷³

While claims to religious moderation were often confessional land grabs in disguise, there were playgoers who sought to negotiate the religious landscape, both doctrinally and interpersonally, in ways that were genuinely conciliatory toward other confessional groups. Although theatergoer John Newdigate III came from a godly family, he also maintained friendships with Arminians.⁷⁴ Protestant playgoer Francis Bacon laments in a 1609 letter to his close friend, and fellow theater enthusiast, Catholic convert Toby Matthew “that controversies of religion must hinder the advancement of sciences.”⁷⁵ Lucius Cary, Lord Falkland, scion of a mixed family, and center of a skeptical, Erasmian group of intellectuals, praises latitudinarian questioning as the path to religious truth: “I cannot see why he should be saved, because, by reason of his parents beleife, or the Religion of the Countrey, or some such accident, the truth was offered to his understanding, when had the contrary beene offered he would have received that.”⁷⁶ Pacifist playgoer James Howell called for mutual restraint in religious conflict: “Good Lord, what fiery clashings have we had lately for a Cap and a Surplice! [What] bloud was spilt for ceremonies only … for the bare position of a table!”⁷⁷ However, efforts to carve out more conciliatory positions were sometimes difficult to sustain in the context of confessional conflict. Howell was accused of lukewarmness and timeserving.⁷⁸ Tolerant Cary was so grieved by the escalation of religious and political factionalism into outright civil war that in 1643 he committed battlefield suicide, saying that “he was weary of the times.”⁷⁹

Even discourses and practices that established common ground among English Protestants (such as anti-Catholic prejudice and the shared liturgy) also marked fissures. Until the Laudian recuperation of the Roman Church as a true Church, English Protestants were broadly united by patriotic anti-Catholicism. As Christopher Hill says, the long Reformation “sublimated and idealized” English nationalism.⁸⁰ For example, the overwhelming majority of his fellow playgoers would have applauded William Lambarde’s staunch commitment to a Protestant England. Lambarde’s Anglo-Saxon scholarship recovered historical foundations of English Protestantism; in Parliament in the 1580s, he made a bold attempt to prevent the possibility of a Catholic English monarch. His academic and political efforts epitomize a widely shared sense of national Protestant identity.⁸¹ However, it would be a mistake to treat popular, anti-Catholic nationalism as straightforward evidence of Protestant unity. Although the pope presented a common enemy against whom intra-Protestant groups could join in opposition, the perceived threat of popery within the Church—in myriad forms, from the episcopacy, to the surplice, to altar rails, to set prayers, to superstitious parishioners—was a major locus of internal division.⁸² For example, playgoer Lionel Cranfield’s ornate, private chapel would have satisfied Laudians devoted to the “beauty of holiness,” but been seen by the godly as dangerously popish.⁸³ English Protestants generally agreed that popery was bad, but they fiercely disagreed as to what popery was.

Playgoer and prayer book Protestant Lady Anne Clifford represented a “significant minority [of] committed conformists” whose faith was embedded in the liturgy of the established Church.⁸⁴ During the interregnum, Clifford continued to use the proscribed prayer book, although to do so put her in danger: “She had in the worst of times the liturgy of the Church of England duly in her own private chapel … though she was threatened with sequestration.”⁸⁵ Clifford’s loyalty to the set prayers of the English Church defies what Maltby identifies as the “[false] assumption that non-conformists took their faith more ‘seriously’ than men and women who conformed to the lawful worship of the Church of England.”⁸⁶ But standards of conformity were shifting and contentious; the prayer book itself was a mixed-faith document.⁸⁷ Religious normativity was a moving target. Despite his self-presentation as an exemplar of orthodoxy, Bishop John Overall’s enthusiasm for ceremony and aversion to Calvinist doctrine were decidedly avant-garde for the Jacobean Church. Yet Overall’s visitation articles, establishing rubrics of conformity, would become the model for at least twenty other sets of articles used—albeit, still controversially—by Laudian divines in the later 1620s and 1630s.⁸⁸

Moreover, even pious, conformist theatergoers such as Clifford were immersed in a broader, mixed-faith culture. Clifford’s eulogist praises her ability to sift “controversies very abstruse,” recalling how “she much commended one book, William Barklay’s dispute with Bellarmine, both, as she knew, of the popish persuasion, but the former less papal; and who, she said, had well stated a main point.”⁸⁹ Julie Crawford has shown how Clifford, in her struggle to claim property from her husband and the King, drew on models of political resistance from puritan texts.⁹⁰ This does not mean that Clifford was secretly inclining to either Catholicism or puritanism. The point, rather, is that even firm conformists did not live in an orthodox bubble, untainted by contact with the broader religious spectrum.

The long Reformation embroiled everything it touched in the unstable processes of cross-confessional appropriation. For example, theatergoer Richard Brathwaite’s Spiritual Spicery (1638) includes an anodyne Protestant autobiography, alongside translations of devotional material by Catholic theologians. Similarly, in the same year he published his famous appraisal of contemporary dramatists, Church of England deacon Francis Meres also translated the work of the Spanish, Dominican mystic Louis de Granada.⁹¹ These men were not crypto-Catholics. Brathwaite asserts the orthodoxy of “[extracting] flowers from Romish authors,” by labeling anyone who objects “a rigid Precisian.”⁹² It was common for committed Protestants to draw on Catholic devotional texts. The Jesuit Robert Parsons’s Christian Directory was adapted by the Calvinist Edmund Bunny into A Book of Christian Exercise, one of the most frequently reprinted books in Elizabethan England: Clifford read both Bunny’s version and Parsons’s.⁹³ People across the spectrum of belief productively engaged with texts and practices coded as belonging to other confessional groups, often repurposing these cultural materials for radically different ends.

Catholics, Church Papists, and the Curious

English Catholicism was not simply a monolithic other, against which various English Protestants defined their own identities; this internally diverse, master category offered rich devotional and cultural resources to its various adherents and sympathizers.⁹⁴ Although anti-Catholic prejudice was rife—playgoer John Melton describes Catholics as “blood-sucking antichristian tiraunts”—even committed Protestant audience members were capable of a more open range of attitudes toward Catholic people and Catholic culture.⁹⁵

Early modern English Protestants sometimes flirted with Catholicism without actually converting. As Shagan points out, “[Dabbling] with Roman books and services [was] part of the normal spectrum of English religious activity … [comparable to] experimentation with illicit substances … in the modern world.”⁹⁶ For example, Sir Humphrey Mildmay was born into a family with an impeccable puritan pedigree, but he seems to have been attracted to Catholic devotional practices.⁹⁷ His diary shows him lending part of a Douai Bible, that is, the Catholic translation of the Bible into English.⁹⁸ As shown earlier, there were certainly steadfast Protestants who owned and read Catholic books. But Sir Humphrey’s diary also records him performing “the Spaniards discipline” before bed, a reference to the Spiritual Exercises of the Spanish Jesuit Ignatius of Loyola, and it makes frequent invocations of the Blessed Virgin Mary.⁹⁹ Collectively, these practices suggest Sir Humphrey was inclined toward the Roman Church. Yet, in the midst of legal difficulties in 1648, he made a formal statement denying the charge that he was ever a recusant or held Catholic sympathies.¹⁰⁰ We cannot gauge precisely the strength or exact nature of Sir Humphrey’s attraction to Catholicism. Then again, this might have also been difficult for Sir Humphrey himself. He falls somewhere in the gray region occupied by English Protestants who felt drawn toward devotional practices too popish for the established Church, but not so strongly as to prompt conversion. Similarly, theatergoing courtier Sir John Harington seems to have harbored Catholic sympathies; he supported toleration for members of the Roman Church, and his epigrams are peppered with pro-Catholic arguments and devotional references.¹⁰¹ Harington’s self-description as a “Protesting Catholick Puritan” at the opening of his Tract on the Succession to the Crown testifies to his sense of his own mixed identity and “epitomizes his interest, quintessentially post-Reformation, in how conflicting religious positions can cohabit.”¹⁰²

As with intra-Protestant struggles over nomenclature, defining who was Catholic was a matter of debate among contemporaries, and it continues to pose methodological problems for historians. Earlier Catholic historiography’s emphasis on recusancy has been enlarged to include a broader range of forms of Catholic practice by Alexandra Walsham’s work on church papistry and Haigh’s attention to the conservative religious habits of ordinary people.¹⁰³ Both those committed Catholics who avoided persecution through occasional conformity and others whose devotional tendencies leaned toward traditional religion, but who may not have described themselves as members of the Roman Church, were labeled by various kinds of Protestants as “church papists.” English Catholics were divided among themselves as to their religious obligations. Although strategic conformists were often criticized by their recusant coreligionists as “schismatics” who had abandoned the Roman Church, this group in fact played a crucial role in sustaining an English Catholic community.¹⁰⁴ Playgoer John Davies of Hereford was Catholic, but he attended Protestant services; he was married and buried in the Church of England.¹⁰⁵ Davies of Hereford may have wished to retain the social benefits of parish life and participate in Christian community with neighbors.¹⁰⁶ As Walsham writes, “Living in frosty isolation from people who were in principle agents of heresy and the devil, but in practice friends, acquaintances, and relatives, was largely an impracticable polemical ideal.”¹⁰⁷

Faithful English Catholics sought various ways to balance their spiritual commitments against the economic, social, and political costs of practicing an illegal religion.¹⁰⁸ Even for privileged Romanists, the steadfast recusancy demanded by polemicists was difficult to maintain, and many Catholic casuists included exceptions permitting conformity in pastoral literature. As Protestant playgoer John Earle mocks, “A Church-Papist is one that parts his religion betwixt his conscience and his purse.”¹⁰⁹ Playgoer Sir John Davies of Oxford (not to be confused with his eponymous coreligionist mentioned previously) for a time refused to attend Church of England services. However, while Davies of Oxford continued publicly to embrace the Roman Church, he also made concessions to the Protestant state. In 1610, when considering whether to restore Davies’s blood nobility after his involvement in the Essex rebellion, Parliament carefully parsed the mixed signs of his resistance and accommodation. As they saw it, Davies was “halted between two opinions.”¹¹⁰ He was more willing than previously to attend Protestant services, but he continued to evade communion by pretending to be out of charity with his neighbors. This common ruse of church papists, and his equivocal answer when asked if he would see a Church of England minister, led the bishop of Asaph to conclude that Davies was one of those “obstinate resolved papists [who] do come to church to save the penalty … and yet rest their conscience on not receiving communion.”¹¹¹ But where Asaph saw an entrenched religious position, Lord Zouche saw confessional movement in Davies’s new outward conformity and was “hopeful of his coming.”¹¹² Zouche was encouraged by Davies’s willingness to take the oath of allegiance, and he observed a difference among Catholics whereby, “though at the first, few recusants would refuse it, now almost none will take it.”¹¹³ What constituted adherence to the Roman Church was a matter of external, as well as internal, debate.

English Catholics were divided among themselves regarding the conflicting allegiances claimed by the monarch and the pontiff. After the pope’s 1570 bull declaring Elizabeth a heretical monarch and licensing her assassination, English Catholics were dogged by versions of the “bloody question”: If Spain invaded to re-Catholicize England, for which side would you fight? Challenges to Catholic patriotism were sometimes posed explicitly by an interrogator, but doubts about papist loyalty were often implied, or taken for granted, as in the popular saying “English face, Spanish heart.”¹¹⁴ The religious and political contradiction lived by English Catholics generated both a body of resistance theory and defenses of Catholic loyalism.¹¹⁵ For some, attending Protestant services was a meaningful and voluntary act of political obedience. For other Catholics, conformity was duplicitous, and loyalty was best demonstrated by the open profession of their faith. Theatergoing Catholics included both Sir Charles Percy, a likely participant in the Gunpowder Plot, and William Parker, Baron Monteagle, who revealed his coreligionists’ terrorist conspiracy to the Privy Council.¹¹⁶

“We know that most of the principal Catholicks about London doe go to plays,” writes theater buff and Catholic priest Father Thomas Leke.¹¹⁷ The Romanist upper classes served as an important resource for their coreligionists in post-Reformation England.¹¹⁸ These pillars of “seigneurial” Catholicism supported their community by harboring illegal priests, making sacraments available, employing (or converting) Catholic servants, setting visible examples of recusancy, and participating in international Catholic networks.¹¹⁹ However, English Catholicism was far from a “top-down” phenomenon. Many tradesmen, students, yeomen, servants, and apprentices actively supported Romanist networks, hiding priests and circulating Catholic texts and devotional objects.¹²⁰ In London, Catholics of all ranks had some degree of access to sacraments through foreign embassies and the townhouses of Catholic nobles, such as Montague House in Southwark, as well as in prisons such as the Clink (both close to the Globe).¹²¹ Often, Catholic inmates were allowed to gather together, and free Catholics were permitted to visit prisons for spiritual succor. On one occasion in 1602 when pursuivants did raid the Clink, they found “nearly forty laypersons, mostly women and poor people” about to celebrate Mass.¹²² There was an active Jesuit enclave in Jacobean Clerkenwell, ministering largely to the same demographic of working people that made up the audience of the nearby Red Bull Theater.¹²³ The Inns of Court afforded a semiprivate space for Catholic ritual, as well as a steady constituency of student playgoers.¹²⁴ Holborn was known as an area with a high concentration of Romanists.¹²⁵ Fleet Street, which had a similar reputation as a Catholic neighborhood, was a short distance from the Salisbury Court, St. Paul’s, and Blackfriars playhouses.¹²⁶

Both upper-class and ordinary English Catholics practiced a form of religion very different from that of their late medieval ancestors. As Lisa Mc-Clain writes, “Catholic goals changed—from maintaining strict adherence to pre-reform or Tridentine practices … to finding ways to duplicate the functions of traditional or Tridentine practices while reinterpreting the forms such practices might take.”¹²⁷ Because of the obstacles to receiving sacraments, the circulation of books and manuscripts in Catholic circles took on greater importance. The poetry of Romanist playgoer William Habington appears in a collection compiled by a Catholic woman. Post-Reformation English Catholicism, too, was a religion of the word.¹²⁸ In London, the public execution of Catholic martyrs galvanized sympathetic communities of witnesses.¹²⁹ The devotional life of English Catholics was often piecemeal, idiosyncratic, and flexible, cobbled together from occasional sacraments snatched when they could be had, news and consolation from local networks of fellow believers, pastoral literature, and private meditation, often involving repurposed objects or spaces.

In place of the visible, corporate community of the faithful, so powerfully described in Eamon Duffy’s account of the late medieval Church, later English Catholics faced the isolation of practicing an illegal, minority religion.¹³⁰ But both recusant and conforming Catholics found ways to sustain their spiritual lives within the strictures of Protestant society. As John Bossy observes, “The features of pre-Reformation Christian practice to which conservatively-minded people held most strongly were those which … belonged to a region of private social practice which in effect lay outside the field of legislation”—such as fasting.¹³¹ Devout Catholic convert and enthusiastic playgoer Elizabeth Cary herself fasted during Lent (“living almost wholly … on nettle porridge”), but she also served meat for Protestant family members and guests. Her table was confessionally mixed in both food and talk. She describes meals with her children and their Oxford friends, “conversing freely … [about] religion [with] those very capable on both sides.”¹³² For Cary, the goal was to reconcile those around her to the Roman Church, but she understood the conviction of conversion as emerging from uncertainty and open dialogue.

Conversion and Mixed-Faith Families

Religious lives were changeable. But conversion was not a simple flip from one ecclesiastical monolith to its opposite. As Michael Questier observes, “It is a misreading to see the English Reformation just as a struggle between two tightly consolidated blocks, Roman and Protestant, facing each other across a deserted religious no-man’s-land with a few isolated and lack-lustre nonentities [moving] between the two positions.”¹³³ Religious “start” and “end” points could themselves be unstable composites. Even those who professed throughout their lives the same faith into which they were born also wavered and experimented, under often conflicting pressures of family and education, internal conscience and external law. All post-Reformation English people lived in conditions of at least potential convertibility. Playgoing clergyman John Gee became an anti-Catholic polemicist only after his budding interest in the Roman Church led him to the so-called fatal vespers, the 1623 disaster in which overcrowding at a Catholic service caused the building to collapse, killing ninety-five people. Gee’s providential escape (and subsequent interrogation by the archbishop of Canterbury) led him to recommit to Calvinism. The minister’s account of how he came to be at the deadly Catholic gathering is instructive: “I was the same day in the fore-noone at the Sermon at Pauls-Crosse: and lighting vpon some Popish company at dinner, they were much magnifying the said Drury, who was to preach to them in the afternoone. The ample report which they afforded him, preferring him far beyond any of the Preachers of our Church, and depressing and vilifying the Sermons at Pauls-Crosse, in regard of him, whetted my desire to heare his said Sermon: to which I was conducted by one Medcalfe a Priest.”¹³⁴ Gee’s report gives a glimpse of an urban religious culture in which it was possible for a Church of England minister to hear the Calvinist Thomas Adams deliver an open-air sermon before thousands at Paul’s Cross in the morning, and attend a clandestine Catholic service conducted by the Jesuit priest Robert Drury for a packed crowd of three hundred in a room at the French embassy that same evening.¹³⁵ Gee’s cross-confessional gadding demonstrates the polyphony of the discursive field that post-Reformation Londoners negotiated daily.

A similar sense of malleability, and the contingency of multiple religious influences, characterizes the autobiography of theater enthusiast (later turned amateur actor and playwright) Arthur Wilson, who describes himself as “such Waxe in Religion, as was apt to take any Impression.”¹³⁶ Wilson was apprenticed to fellow playgoer John Davies of Hereford, “who being also a Papist, with his Wife & Familie, their Example & often Discourse gave Growth to those Thrivings I had. So that, with many Conflicts in my Spirit, I often debated which was the true Religion.”¹³⁷ Later apprenticed in another papist household, Wilson continues to question and dispute: “Finding no way fitter to discover the Truth than to search into it, & being always in Argument against them, I went under the Notion of a Puritan; but God knowes, it was rather out of Contention than Edification: for indeed I was nothing.”¹³⁸ Afterward, “out of the Societie of Papists” and serving as secretary to tepid presbyterian Robert Devereaux, third Earl of Essex, he writes that he “became a confirmed Protestant: but found nothing of the Sweetnes of Religion.”¹³⁹ His piety deepened later in the employ of puritan playgoer Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, who maintained silenced ministers: “Now Preaching, the true Glasse of the Soule, discovered more unto mee that I had formerly seene; & good Men, by how much they were eclipsed by the Bishop’s, did privately shine the brighter.”¹⁴⁰ Wilson’s later-life, godly, presbyterian commitments are evident in the disparaging treatment of the episcopacy in his History of Great Britain.¹⁴¹ On one hand, there is a clear trajectory in Wilson’s life from youthful dalliances with papistry to mature puritan devotion. However, it is also apparent that his taste for cross-confessional discussion did not evaporate with his turn toward godly piety. In later years, Wilson struck up a friendly acquaintance with the Catholic priest Father Weston: “Being familiar with him, I askt him many Questions, which are Arcana among them; & he was ingenuous to me in discovering the Truth.”¹⁴² Wilson’s interests in both religious dialogue and theater were lifelong and compatible.

In the process of conversion, spiritually turning toward God (metanoia) and changing denominations could be entangled in various, complex ways. For playgoer and Catholic priest Father Augustine Baker, a horse-riding accident immediately set his mind on higher things (“If ever I git out of this danger, I will beleive there is a God”). Yet his denominational conversion came later in an intense burst of prayer and reading.¹⁴³ Sometimes piety and confessional commitment grew together: playgoing clergyman Peter Heylyn moved from an initial reluctance to study theology under the influence of his “zealous Puritan” Oxford tutor, through a growing love for the English Church that awakened skepticism toward Calvinist thought, to a career as a Laudian polemicist.¹⁴⁴ These examples illustrate differences not only in the content but also in the experiential process of religious change. Baker’s first conversion is an event, and his second the product of a concentrated period of reflection, whereas for Heylyn religious change was a gradual, long-term evolution.

Spiritual conversions did not happen in splendid isolation from worldly concerns. However, Questier rightly points out that it is reductive to speak of people simply subordinating their consciences to better their careers or avoid persecution. More often, “when political and religious motives were both engaged in the mind of the individual convert they were maintained in a constant tension.”¹⁴⁵ For example, theatergoer Christopher Blount was educated by William Allen himself, but in 1585, he abandoned his faith and helped Francis Walsingham embroil Mary, Queen of Scots, in the manufactured conspiracy that led to her execution. Blount’s apostasy seems to have been driven initially by worldly considerations, whether for political advancement or to protect his Romanist family from persecution. Yet his subsequent years of dedication to Leicester (under whose command he served in multiple, Protestant military campaigns); his marriage to Leicester’s widow, Lettice; and his ill-fated loyalty to Leicester’s stepson, Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, suggest a factional commitment beyond shallow careerism.¹⁴⁶ Confessing at his trial that he supported Essex because the earl had promised “toleration for religion,” Blount refused to speak with a Protestant minister before he was beheaded, declaring, “I die a catholic,” but adding the oddly sola fide qualification, “Yet so, as I hope to be saved only by the death and passion of Christ, and by his merits, not ascribing anything to mine own works,” followed by a request for intercessory prayer from the gathered witnesses.¹⁴⁷ The theological irregularity of Blount’s death speech, as well as the complex intersection of political, personal, and religious ties that brought him to the scaffold, demonstrates the conflicting pressures that simultaneously shaped confessional lives.

Public conversions were fodder for polemic. Because both Protestants and Catholics agreed that one sign of the true Church was that its numbers were ever increasing, gains and losses on both sides were widely publicized. In 1637, Lady Newport’s public appearance at the Cockpit, immediately after her scandalous conversion to the Roman Church, contributed to rising alarm about prominent Catholic conversions at court.¹⁴⁸ Perhaps few defections to the Roman Church were as embarrassing to the Church of England as that of playgoer Tobie Matthew, the son of the archbishop of York. Matthew’s autobiography describes a series of efforts by Protestant divines to reclaim him, culminating in what can only be compared to a modern-day intervention: “There came by accident, if it were not rather by design, a kind of … little College, of certain eminent clergymen … into a good large room of the house … with [my parents and] many others of their great family … to persuade me [to] return to my former religion.”¹⁴⁹ This was not a success.

Theater buff John Harington observes that, “[although] brothers and brothers, fathers and sons, husbands and wives [differ] one from another in opinions and beliefs, [yet] many times as myself have seen [they] live in house and bed and board together very lovingly.”¹⁵⁰ Yet, as the archbishop’s mixed-faith household demonstrates, cross-confessional relationships could be intimate without being easy. Catholic convert Matthew’s mother was “more fervent toward the Puritanical sole-Scripture way.” He recounts passiveaggressive exchanges of concern for each other’s spiritual well-being: “She would be telling me often how much she prayed to the Lord for me, whilst I, on the other side, would also … let her know whatsoever I conceived to import her for the good of her soul.”¹⁵¹ In a culture where religious pluralism was widely considered an offense to God, and a danger to society, these acts of pious harassment could be understood as gestures of Christian love or “charitable hatred.”¹⁵² Early modern English people were capable of maintaining close ties with individuals who held beliefs they strongly rejected, yet religious differences could still strain personal relationships.

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 and feeling. As Francis Bacon writes of theater, “The minds of men in company are more open to affections and impressions than when alone.”¹⁷³