Heterodox Drama: Theater in Post-Reformation London
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Heterodox Drama: Theater in Post-Reformation London Musa Gurnis-Farrell Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2011 © 2011 Musa Gurnis-Farrell All rights reserved ABSTRACT Heterodox Drama: Theater in Post-Reformation London Musa Gurnis-Farrell In “Heterodox Drama: Theater in Post-Reformation London,” I argue that the specific working practices of the theater industry generated a body of drama that combines the varied materials of post-Reformation culture in hybrid fantasies that helped audiences emotionally negotiate and productively re-imagine early modern English religious life. These practices include: the widespread recycling of stock figures, scenarios, and bits of dialogue to capitalize on current dramatic trends; the collaboration of playwrights and actors from different religious backgrounds within theater companies; and the confessionally diverse composition of theater audiences. By drawing together a heterodox conglomeration of Londoners in a discursively capacious cultural space, the theaters created a public. While the public sphere that emerges from early modern theater culture helped audience members process religious material in politically significant ways, it did so not primarily through rational-critical thought but rather through the faculties of affect and imagination. The theater was a place where the early modern English could creatively reconfigure existing confessional identity categories, and emotionally experiment with the rich ideological contradictions of post-Reformation life. ! Table of Contents Introduction: Heterodoxy and Early Modern Theater . 1 Chapter One: “Frequented by Puritans and Papists”: Heterodox Audiences . 23 Chapter Two: Religious Polemic from Print into Plays . 64 Chapter Three: Martyr Acts: Playing with Foxe’s Martyrs on the Public Stage . 107 Chapter Four: The Politics of Predestination in Measure for Measure . 148 Bibliography . 191 i ! Acknowledgements There are many people I wish to thank, without whom this dissertation would never have been written. First, I am grateful to some early interlocutors: to my undergraduate advisor Amanda Piesse for introducing me to early modern drama, and to my glorious friend Wayne Jordan for showing me the radical possibilities of live performance. I am materially indebted to the Folger Shakespeare Library, for their support at a crucial time in the development of this project, and to Peter Lake and Steven Mullaney for their encouragement. I am grateful to the many friends and fellow travelers who have taught me that intellectual work is collective, provisional, ongoing—and sometimes a drunken delight: especially Atticus Zavaletta, Christine Varnado, Bryan Lowrance, Allison Deutermann, Fred Bengtsson, Liam Meyes, Jeff Doty, András Kiséry, Patricia Dailey, Anjuli Kolb, Alicia DeSantis, Jenny Davidson, Alice Boone and John Kuhn. This dissertation would not exist without the love and support of my family, or the kindness and patience of my beautiful husband Nathaniel. I am deeply and warmly indebted to my dissertation committee—Jean Howard, Julie Crawford, Molly Murray and (honorary member!) Alan Stewart—for their generosity and rigor. Finally, I owe a special debt to my incomparable mentor and friend, Jean Howard, for the example that she sets. ! ii ! For Atticus, my brother in Christ. ! iii 1 Introduction: Heterodoxy and Early Modern Theater In 1582, the future playwright Anthony Munday was working as an informant for the “priest hunter” Richard Topcliff, a government officer charged with enforcing the Elizabethan statutes against Catholics. Topcliff was a notorious sadist, his name a by- word for torture. One night in April of that year Topcliff and his men arrested a descendent of the dissident saint Thomas More, confiscating a number of illegal Catholic books from his home, including the hagiography The Life and Death of Sir Thomas More. In 1592 Munday, by then writing for the theater, used the same devout biography seized during the raid as the primary source for Sir Thomas More, a play sympathetic to the Catholic martyr. Later, in 1599, Munday recycled material from Sir Thomas More in a new piece of theater, this time celebrating the life and death of a Protestant hero, Sir John Oldcastle. Within a space of seventeen years, in other words, a professional persecutor of Catholics wrote a play about a Catholic saint that he then used as a template for a play about a Protestant martyr.1 Munday’s devotional career was generally complex, but this 1 Munday led a contorted religious life. He began his literary career under the patronage of the Catholic Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere. In 1579 he was studying at the English College at Rome, a training ground for missionaries working toward the re-Catholicization of England. It is unclear, however, whether he was there as an actual student or as a spy. In the early 1580s he was back in England, working as an actor, informing on Catholic priests, and writing anti-Catholic tracts. During the late 1580s Munday delivered evidence of the puritan minister Giles Wigginton’s involvement with the Martin Marprelate tracts to the Archbishop of Canturbury, John Whitgift. Bearing in mind that Sir John Oldcastle, the subject of Munday’s 1599 play, was a lollard martyr, and that the lollards were considered the cultural forerunners of Elizabethan puritans, this means that both of Munday’s martyr plays celebrated religious groups that he himself had helped to persecute. David M. Bergeron, “Munday, Anthony (bap. 1560, d. 1633),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), May 2007 online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/19531 (accessed 18 July 2011). Despite Donna Hamilton’s attempt to trace consistent Catholic commitments through Munday’s career in Anthony Munday and the Catholics, 1560–1633 (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2005), I would argue that there is no way to make sense of Munday’s life in confessionally coherent terms. 2 anecdote in particular suggests something not only about heterodoxy, but about the productive centrality of heterodoxy to early modern theater. The myriad pleasures of early modern drama included seeing the most fraught aspects of post-Reformation culture vividly imagined on the stage. While theatergoers may have enjoyed seeing their own confessional identities celebrated, seeing alternative and unorthodox religious practices offered another kind of excitement. But early modern stage representations of religion were not always easy to parse along strict confessional lines. Indeed, I want to argue that one of the pleasures the theater provided was the opportunity to experience religious tension in a concentrated form, and, perhaps even more, to engage in fantasies that crossed sectarian lines. In what follows I will show that the early modern theater offered audiences a powerfully elastic experience of England’s conflicted religious culture. The drama promoted responses that crossed sectarian divides, inviting audiences to laugh at jokes made by a jolly Catholic priest in a play with a hard-line Protestant agenda, to recognize shared values in a puritan caricature, to sympathize with a dead Catholic whore. Where other scholars have sought coherent expressions of religious belief in the drama, I attend to the hybrid, ideologically conflicted, but emotionally and imaginatively powerful religious fantasies that appeared on the post-Reformation stage. Focusing on plays by William Shakespeare, as well as those by lesser known playwrights like Thomas Dekker, John Ford, Thomas Middleton, and James Shirley, “Heterodox Drama” argues that the early modern stage presents a range of dramatic configurations that trouble early modern religious identity categories. These plays combine narratives, visual imagery, and polemical tropes associated with, or commonly deployed by, rival religious groups to produce ideologically contradictory but 3 emotionally powerful dramatic effects. Through illustrative case studies, I will show how these confessionally polyvocal stage moments that encourage unorthodox fantasy and cross-denominational identification are generated by particular practices of the theater industry: collective authorship; the widespread recycling of dramatic tropes; the incorporation of hotly debated and topical controversies; as well as the religious diversity of early modern playgoers themselves. One of the greatest pleasures the theater offered, I will argue, was the chance for audiences to “suspend belief,” and to experience in a more imaginatively flexible way the competing voices of a heterodox society. One of the common pitfalls of earlier literary studies of post-Reformation culture was to think of the early modern English as divided into two monolithic groups: Catholics and Protestants. Certainly, men and women in the period tended to identify strongly by religious group and to perceive religious differences in sharply dichotomous terms. For example, the frontispiece of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, after the Bible the most popular book of the period, with its engraving of godly Protestant martyrs on the left and corrupt Catholic sinners on the right, illustrates the widespread understanding of the oppositional relationship between the Protestant and Catholic churches: true church and false, Christ’s flock and Whore of Babylon. While this kind of binary thinking