Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2018 Of Neere Neighbors: Sacrament and Sociality in the Drama of Islamic Conversion, C.1600-1640 Stephanie Kucsera Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Kucsera, Stephanie, "Of Neere Neighbors: Sacrament and Sociality in the Drama of Islamic Conversion, C.1600-1640" (2018). Dissertations. 2970. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/2970 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 2018 Stephanie Kucsera LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO “OF NEERE NEIGHBORS”: SACRAMENT AND SOCIALITY IN THE DRAMA OF ISLAMIC CONVERSION, c.1600-1640 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN ENGLISH BY STEPHANIE L. KUCSERA CHICAGO, IL MAY 2018 Copyright by Stephanie L. Kucsera, 2018 All rights reserved. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the people who made this dissertation possible, starting with my professors in the Department of English at Loyola University Chicago. Dr. Jeffrey Glover’s unfailingly practical advice and professional insight were not only useful to the project but were instrumental to my growth as a scholar. Dr. Suzanne Gossett’s summer session on early modern drama introduced me to some of the texts that would become central to this project, and it was during our time together on an independent study that I began to entertain many of the questions that would eventually frame this dissertation. I thank her for giving me both her sound critical opinion and the freedom to explore. Finally, I would like to thank my dissertation director, Dr. James Knapp. His insightful reading and decisive comments made this project stronger and sharper, and his good humor and encouragement made this long and arduous process enjoyable. My friends in the Department of English and outside of it provided me with a much needed cheering section on the bad days, one that helped me come back to the dissertation ready to confront it again. In particular, I would like to thank Anna and John Ullmann, Traci Meeder, and Shane Gormley. Finally, I would like to thank my family while knowing that my thanks cannot be reduced to a few lines. So I’ll just say this: I’d like to thank my parents for their patience and encouragement, and I want to thank my grandma for reading me so many books. iii For Grandma. TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii ABSTRACT vii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: PERFORMING BAPTISM, CROSSING BOUNDARIES IN OTHELLO 27 “an extravagant and wheeling stranger”: English Politics and the Islamic “Other” 38 “th’affairs of state”: Ceremonies and the Construction of the English Commonwealth 56 “all seals and symbols of redeemed sin”: Rendering Baptismal Initiation Visible 63 “foul and violent tempest”: Debating the Baptismal Signs 74 “Are we turned Turks?”: Disrupting Baptism’s Seals and Symbols 84 “nothing extenuate”: Conclusion 96 CHAPTER 2: PERFORMING APOSTASY, DISRUPTING ORDER IN A CHRISTIAN TURN’D TURK 99 “no country I can call home”: English Renegades and the Politics of Conversion 107 “If any odds be, ‘tis on Mahomet’s side”: Conversion and Confessional Crisis 120 “a confused noise of music”: The Conflict over Ceremony 132 “our country’s shame”: Ceremonies and the Commonwealth 144 “heaven is just”: The Consequences of Ceremony 149 “Let my example move all pirates”: Conclusion 157 CHAPTER 3: PERFORMING RECONVERSION, RECOVERING COMMUNION IN THE RENEGADO 162 “charity and conscience”: Reintegrating Renegades or Compromising the Body Politic? 169 “joined in devotion”: The Corpus Mysticum and the Coherence of the Body Politic 180 “black guilt and misery”: The Consequences of the Calvinist Consensus 190 “zealous undertakings”: A Challenge to the Calvinist Consensus 204 “such cures as heaven hath lent me”: High Sacramentality and Ritual Reintegration 216 “a wonder to the world”: Conclusion 224 CHAPTER 4: PERFORMING MOORISHNESS, DEBATING SPECTACLE IN THE ENGLISH MOOR 227 “a Barbary dye”: Commerce and Conversion 237 “for Sinnes prevention”: Piety and Performance under the Laudian Reforms 248 “the heauen that I am iustly fallen from”: Anglicans, Apostates, and Actors 261 “the effects of this our queint complot”: Stage, Spectacle, and Social Reform 276 “But who knows what he knows, sees, feeles or heares?”: Conclusion 284 CONCLUSION 288 BIBLIOGRAPHY 299 v VITA 323 vi ABSTRACT This dissertation traces scenes of Christian-Muslim conversion across representative works by William Shakespeare, Robert Daborne, Philip Massinger, and Richard Brome to examine how the popular drama of the early seventeenth century participates in English political and ecclesiastical discourses about the meaning of interfaith conversion and its stakes for the construction and stability of late-Reformation English national identity. I argue that the structural and stylistic changes that define each drama’s distinct presentation of interfaith conversion may be understood as engaged in the still-evolving debates over the Church of England’s sacramental theology and ceremonial practices—the very ritual actions that could render the meaning of conversion legible for a community—in light of simultaneously-shifting English relations with the Ottoman Turks and the independent Islamic states of North Africa. In complicating traditional readings of both the trajectory of Anglican reform and patterns of English interaction with Islamic North Africa and the Levant, this dissertation challenges popular critical readings of these plays that maintain the absolute and irredeemable alterity of the “other.” Instead, these texts’ images of conversion reveal a far greater range of responses to interreligious encounter than a simple opposition of “us” and “them.” Ultimately, these texts serve less to vilify Muslims in moments of heightened international tension than to highlight the stakes inherent in changes to English theology and ecclesiology for responding to the conversion of English Christians. vii INTRODUCTION “To know what was generally believed in all ages, the way is to consult the liturgies.”1 — John Selden, Table Talk England at the turn of the seventeenth century was a nation obsessed with conversion: kinds of conversion, causes of conversion, processes of conversion, the effects of conversion, stories of conversion, the rhetoric of conversion. In light of the protracted, and often recursive, trajectory of the Protestant Reformation in England across the sixteenth and seventeenth centu- ries, though, it is perhaps unsurprising that early modern English writing demonstrates a recur- ring interest in the navigation of both ecclesiastical and spiritual change. On the one hand, con- version could possess a highly public dimension, especially when it referred to changes in reli- gious or confessional affiliation during this period. Within living memory, England had gone from a highly conservative Roman Catholicism to Catholicism under the supreme head of the king; to a tentative Protestantism when, at the direction of King Henry VIII, England officially turned from a Roman Catholic nation to a Protestant nation in 1534; to a more radical Protestant- ism under Edward VI beginning in 1547; to a renewed Roman Catholicism under Mary Tudor after Edward’s death in 1553; and then, with Elizabeth’s ascension in 1558, to Protestantism once again. In the space of some twenty-five years, then, England itself converted three times. But while conversion could center on the highly politicized, polemical divisions between Roman Catholics and Protestants, on the other hand, conversion could also refer to “the achievement— 1 John Selden, Table Talk (London: 1689) cited in Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cam- bridge UP, 1997): 17. 1 2 or perhaps better, the reception—of salvation, [as] an experience that occurs without any specific or explicit change in denominational identity.”2 For the early modern English, such a spiritual conversion was defined by “its inward turn, its focus on consciousness, subjectivity, and interior- ity.”3 For some English Christians, though, religious conversion was more properly understood as comprising both an inward and outward alteration: inward renewal under the influence of grace required the outward setting aside of former outward standards of behavior (sometimes the adoption of different standards of religious belief and activity), but the outward could also com- pel a change in the inward. In either direction, an intimate interconnection was suggested be- tween the two.4 But while the early modern English were forced to navigate the shifting currents of the Protestant Reformation in terms of its impact upon internal English politics, ecclesiology, and spirituality, it was also necessary to contend with the effects of reform as they were further im- pacted by a changing international scene. One source of apprehension was the fear of Roman Catholic enemies abroad who would threaten to re-convert Protestant England by the sword. Most memorable, perhaps, was the Spanish Armada episode in 1588, but fears of a Roman Cath- olic re-conversion were no less felt, when, in