Disorder in the house of God: disrupted worship in Shakespeare and others

Comparative Drama, Spring, 2004 by Bruce Boehrer

Let's start with two famous disturbances in church. The first of these appears in The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1592), where the aged Gremio describes Petruchio's nuptials in a horrified monologue:

      [W]hen the priest
   Should ask if Katherine should be his wife,
   "Ay, by gogs-wouns" quoth he, and swore so loud,
   That all amaz'd the priest let fall the book,
   And as he stoop'd again to take it up,
   This mad-brain'd bridegroom took him such a cuff
   That down fell priest and book, and book and priest.

   But after many ceremonies done,
   He [Petruchio] calls for wine. "A health!" quoth he, as if
   He had been aboard, carousing to his mates
   After a storm, quaff'd off the muscadel,
   And threw the sops all in the sextons face....

   This done, he took the bride about the neck,
   And kiss'd her lips with such a clamorous smack
   That at the parting all the church did echo. (1)

This behavior goes far to establish Petruchio's reputation for mercuriality. As Gremio comments at the outset of his narrative, Katherine is "a lamb, a dove, a fool" compared to her new husband (3.2.157), whose actions in church provide an ominous foretaste of domestic tyranny to come.

Alongside this Shakespearean moment I would like to recall a brief anecdote from Ben Jonson's conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden, conducted while Jonson was Drummond's guest at his estate in Scotland during the winter of 1618-19. According to Drummond's notes, Jonson, who had converted to Catholicism in 1598 and returned to the Anglican fold around 1610, boasted that "after he was reconciled with the Church & left of to be a recusant at his first communion in token of true Reconciliation, he drank out all the full cup of wyne." (2) Evidently this gesture still tickled Jonson some eight years later, when he recalled it to impress his host.

But just how, exactly, did Jonson intend his tale to impress? What precise effect did he expect it to elicit, and how does comparison with Petruchio help clarify the matter? A world of difference separates The Taming of the Shrew from the conversations with Drummond: the former is verse, the latter prose; the former dramatic, the latter narrative; the former fictional, the latter autobiographical; and so forth. Yet even so, both passages develop out of a context one must regard as in some sense theatrical, obviously so in the case of Petruchio, but scarcely less so in the case of Jonson, who is not only a playwright and former actor in 1619 but is also very clearly recollecting a moment of what can only be called performance. Likewise, both passages draw their theatrical appeal from the contrast between a setting (the church and its rituals) that implicitly demands reverence, on one hand, and, on the other, conduct that flies in the face of such demands. Moreover, both Petruchio and Jonson emerge with their misbehavior in some sense vindicated, recuperated to an official doctrine (patriarchalism, Anglicanism) that it seems at first to violate. In these ways, at least, one can almost imagine Jonson's actions to be a deliberate derivative of Petruchio's, an exemplary instance of life imitating art.

Such parallels may prove sufficiently intriguing, in themselves, to warrant scholarly study. But in fact one of my main concerns here has to do with their inadequacy and deceptiveness. For by casting the church as a setting that requires decorous behavior, the cases of Petruchio and Jonson belie the extent to which this decorum remains inchoate within the early modern English historical record. When viewed from the standpoint of a twenty-first-century Anglo-American standard of civility, in other words, the unwritten rules of behavior that Petruchio and Jonson violate may easily appear more established than they actually were in Elizabethan and Jacobean social practice. The ideal of proper churchgoing that may at first blush strike one as the uncomplicated product of a fixed and enduring standard of good manners--a standard rendered all the more inevitable by the horror that Petruchio's and Jonson's violation of it elicits--emerges instead as the desired but inconsistently realized ideal of a disciplinary regime coextensive with Norbert Elias's civilizing process. (3)

In what follows, I consider the cases of Petruchio and Jonson from this standpoint, relating them to some of the extant historical evidence of how Englishmen and women behaved in church during the age of Shakespeare. I follow this discussion, in turn, with a somewhat broader inquiry into how the early modern English drama enacts and alludes to disorder in the rituals of Christian worship. And I conclude by considering the metadramatic dimension of such disturbance: the extent to which disruptions of the order of prayer suggest a sort of complementarity between church and theater, congregation and audience. Renaissance divines and antitheatricalists conventionally insisted upon the antipathy of these constructs, and scholarship has traced this gesture of dissociation in great detail. (4) But scholars have also noted that "English theology and ecclesiology shaped the drama at a fundamental level...." (5) This essay seeks to contribute to the latter perspective by suggesting that the kinship between church and theater grows particularly intense at the level of their common failure to instruct, to delight, and, in the process, to construct an ideal public for themselves.