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The Antitheatrical Body: Puritans and Performance in Early Modern England, 1577-1620

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The Antitheatrical Body: Puritans and Performance in Early Modern England, 1577-1620 ABSTRACT Title of Document: THE ANTITHEATRICAL BODY: PURITANS AND PERFORMANCE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND, 1577-1620 Simon W. du Toit, Ph.D., 2008 Directed By: Dr. Franklin J. Hildy, Theatre and Performance Studies The antitheatrical pamphlets published in Shakespeare’s England provide an excellent view of the early modern religious engagement with the stage. However, critics have discussed the antitheatrical pamphlets most often by examining the theology or psychology they seem to represent. This study offers an interdisciplinary approach, as it stands at the shifting boundaries between performance studies, religious studies, and theatre historiography. It offers a close reading of puritan religious experience in the “ethnographic grain,”1 reading the struggle between the puritan and the stage through the lens of a contemporary discourse of embodiment: early modern humoral theory. Puritan practitioners of “spiritual physick” appropriated humoral physiology and integrated it with Calvinist theology to produce the embodied authority of prophetic performative speech. This study’s central claim is 1Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, (New York: Vintage, 1985). that the struggle between the antitheatrical writers and the stage was a social drama, in which each side fought for social control of the authority of performative speech. I suggest that performance of prophetic speech is the primary signifier of puritan identity in English puritan culture. What distinctively identifies the puritan body is not physiological difference, but cultural practice, visible in the bodily dispositions constructed in puritan culture. The puritan body performs a paradox: it is closed, bridled, contained, and ordered; and it is open, permeable, passionately disclosing, and subject to dangerous motions and disorder. The puritan body knows itself as double. It is alienated from the flesh, and therefore constructs itself in a liminal process of becoming. I document evidence of a humorally grounded logic of practice within puritan culture; trace the outlines of the puritan body through the antitheatrical literature; and finally observe the social role of the antitheatrical pamphlets in the market for argument. The antitheatrical pamphlets order the worldly environment, shaping time and place to privilege the redemptive hegemony they construct. However, the pamphlets’ engagement with the market for cheap godly print gradually served to etiolate their ritual authority. While the antitheatrical pamphlets served as “argument” that performed social distinctions, they also mark a transition in the public representation of puritanism, beginning the shift towards the carnivalesque body of the Stage Puritan. THE ANTITHEATRICAL BODY: PURITANS AND PERFORMANCE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND, 1577-1620 By Simon W. du Toit Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2008 Advisory Committee: Professor Franklin J. Hildy, Chair Dr. Heather Nathans Dr. Kent Cartwright Dr. Susan Haedicke Dr. Kristen Poole © Copyright by Simon W. du Toit 2008 Acknowledgements It has become a commonplace to acknowledge the production of a work such as this as the result of a collaborative process. It is difficult to adequately express my sense of the extent to which that is true in my case. The process of writing a dissertation is a process of initiation, in which the writer enters a liminal space, that of the candidate, within which the tribal elders administer gentle corrections until the initiand is ready to emerge. As I make my turn towards emerging, I am profoundly grateful for the process of transformation I have undergone, for which I can take little credit. The work below clearly shows traces of the guiding hands of each member of my dissertation committee; the remaining errors are my own, the unpurged dross that awaits further correction from the community of which I am glad to be a new member. That community of scholarship is wide and heterogeneous. I am grateful for the work of those who went before me, which opened possibilities to be explored, and for the institutions whose existence makes such work possible. In my particular case, my gratitude to the University of Maryland for financial support seems inadequate return for the exploration it allowed me to do. I am a gratefuI recipient of the University’s Open Fellowship, and more recently of the Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship, which permitted me to devote my full attention to this writing. I am also particularly grateful for the support and inspiration provided by my former students and colleagues at Dordt College. In particular, I thank Dr. John Kok, Dean for the Humanities at Dordt, whose encouragement launched me on this journey. I want to express my gratitude for the generous contributions of the many librarians I asked for help, without whose knowledge and assistance this work would have been much diminished. At the University of Windsor, Heather Heuston, Janice Bell, Maureen Souchuk, and Alida DeMarco; at the Meeter Center at Calvin College, Paul Fields; at the University of Maryland, Judy Markowitz; and at the Huntington Library, Stephen Tabor all provided important contributions. This has been a long and occasionally solitary journey. Along the way, supportive friends have provided more sustenance than they often knew. My extended family has moved with me along the journey, holding out cups of refreshment; I am particularly grateful for the active interest of my father-in-law, Rev. Arie G. Van Eek. As we together reach this marker in the journey, a marker that is both an ending and a beginning, I offer my heartfelt gratitude for the longsuffering patience, encouragement, and insight of my wife Esther Van Eek, my daughter Kate du Toit, and my son Nick du Toit. This has truly been a family excursion, and we are eager for the road that lies ahead. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii Table of Contents iii List of Figures iv Introduction: The Edifying Word 1 Historical Context 7 On Early Modern English Religious History 7 On Theatre Historiography, the Antitheatrical Pamphlets, and Cheap Print 18 On Theatre and Stage Puritans 27 Theoretical Context 31 On Ritual and Social Theory 31 On Performance Studies, Speech Act Theory, and Prophetic Speech 39 On Embodiment: Humoral Theory and the Puritan Body 52 Conclusion 67 Section One: The School of the Affections 68 Chapter One: Attending to Puritan Practices in Dry Drayton 80 Authority and Performative Speech 80 Affections, Consumption, and Physick 93 Chapter Two: Dry Drayton in a Broader Context 106 Ritual Practices of the Puritan Body: Prophetic Performative Speech 107 Ritual Practices of the Puritan Body: The Fast 128 Ritual Practices of the Puritan Body: Apparel 135 Ritual Practices of the Puritan Body: Iconoclasm 138 Ritual Practices of the Puritan Body: Sports and the Sabbath 152 Conclusion 160 Section Two: The Market for Argument 165 Chapter Three: The Antitheatrical Pamphlets 170 John Northbrooke: A Treatise Wherein…Vaine playes…are reproved 170 Two Sermons: Thomas White and John Stockwood 180 Stephen Gosson: The School of Abuse 194 Anthony Munday 198 Three Treatises Against Dancing: 211 Thomas Lovell and Christopher Fetherston Stephen Gosson: Plays Confuted 216 John Field: A Godly Exhortation 227 Phillip Stubbes: The Anatomie of Abuses 230 Conclusion 239 Chapter Four: Consumption and Production of Antitheatricality 245 The Consumption of Prophetic Performative Speech 245 The Antitheatrical Pamphlets and Civic Space 254 The Antitheatrical Pamphlets and the Performance of Place 264 Conclusion 267 Conclusion 268 Appendix A: Antitheatrical Pamphlets in Date Order 275 Bibliography 276 iii List of Figures Fig. 1 Robert Fludd: The Three Chambers of the Soul 61 Fig. 2 Stephen Batman: “Of Faith” 145 Fig. 3 Frontispiece, The Christian Warfare against the 147 Devill World and Flesh, 2nd ed. Fig. 4 Detail of Fig. 3 148 Fig. 5 Detail of Fig. 3 149 Fig. 6 Detail of Fig. 3 150 Fig. 7 Puritan Churches and Public Theatres 249 Fig. 8 Antitheatrical and Anti-Dance Pamphlet Publication, 1577-1583 256 Fig. 9 Paul’s Cross Churchyard in 1600 258 iv Introduction: The Edifying Word The figure of the early modern English puritan remains elusive and contradictory. Conventionally, puritans are imagined as dour religious moralists intolerant of difference, and ‘anxious’ or ‘fearful’ about performance. On the other hand, the conventions of the Stage Puritan often present a clownish “bellygod,” freely indulging in all kinds of consumption. Kristen Poole has suggested, “Within the context of early modern literature, the figure of the Puritan is…frequently represented through the lens of the grotesque.” 2 The puritan often occupies the cultural status of grotesque in contemporary theatre scholarship as well, in part because of the continued appeal of Shakespeare’s Puritan characters, but also in part because of scholarly assumptions about the nature of puritan religious experience. Historian Margo Todd finds a post-Christian bias in such historiography, suggesting that “Puritanism” is a fabrication of “the inadequate perspective of historians on subjects to whom they unabashedly condescend, and whom they are more willing to caricature than to try to fully understand.” 3 This study approaches puritan culture through the lens of the anti-discipline of performance studies, hoping to offer a view of the puritan
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