The turn to religion in Early Modern English studies

Criticism, Wntr, 2004 by Ken Jackson, Arthur F. Marotti

In Shakespeare's Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England, Jeffrey Knapp explicitly challenges the standard hypothesis that the stage grew increasingly secular over time by arguing that playwrights, including Jonson and Shakespeare, took seriously the religious/didactic potential of the theater and stressed the emphasis Christianity placed on charity and community. Much like the state church, the playwrights sought to avoid conflict over doctrine, often adopting a Pauline "all things to all men" philosophy in the hopes of promoting the Christian mission. This middle-ground position antagonized Puritan anti-theatricalists, who despised this moderation and produced the moderate "secular" feel of many of the plays. The book is particularly good on the history plays, stressing England's need to reformulate a Christian universalism at home, having broken with the larger Christian world. But religion is not religion in this book; it is politics, and, not surprisingly, a tolerant, communitarian politics. The playwrights' "Christianity" involves only religion as a political model for social harmony. For example, the book does not discuss any transcendent desires, any personal relationship with God, any mysticism. In stressing this tolerant "religion," the book avoids such religiously charged plays as Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Timon of Athens, and Cymbeline. And for all its discussion of Paul, it neglects Richard III (whose title character curiously prays to St. Paul). In short, the book at least challenges the notion of a "secular stage," assumes some positive content for religion, and offers some suggestive readings of hardened positions on the history plays. But its intellectual payoff is disappointing.

Lawrence Clopper's English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period bridges the gap between medieval and early modern studies and is, consequently, much more persuasive than Knapp's study in explaining the supposedly "secular" stage. Clopper suggests that our whole narrative involving the evolution from a religious drama to a secular drama is false because the "two" forms of drama developed separately Religious theatrical activity was one thing, he asserts, "ludi" or play another. In the medieval world, no one would have confused the "theater" of the liturgy with distinctly other ritualized forms of "play." Nor would anyone have worried much about confusing the two. The "secular" drama developed from the latter (ludi), not the former (religious liturgy and ceremony). His philology is so old-fashioned as to be new, analyzing terms such as "theatrum" and "ludi" and convincingly suggesting we have misread the medieval world and have thus dramatically misconstrued Shakespeare's secular stage. If he is correct, the critical question of Shakespearean drama is, in fact, reversed: one must ask not how Shakespearean drama got so secular so fast but rather how it got so much religion as it did. Anti-theatricalists complained, perhaps, not because of the turning of the sacred to the profane but because of making the profane more sacred. Clopper is successful, it seems, because he does not assume a secular teleology.