Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Nonconformity in Early Modern England (review)

"They think themselves pure, and in a manner, without sin": thus King James characterized the Family of Love, a radical sect whose presence in early modern England fired writers to imagine a semi-pornographic religious cult. James's definition of a puritan in Basilikon Doron was one of the more level-headed responses to the rise of sectarianism in early modern England; other responses included not only satiric attack but also physical torture. Kristen Poole's book acutely observes how the puritan outlook, far from being simply anhedonic, sour, and repressive, was liberating if at the same time socially subversive. Her fine study, surveying the imaginative responses to religious diversity from Shakespeare to the Restoration period, overturns our conventional understanding of that hectored figure haunting the English stage and press, the Puritan.

Leaving aside debates over the definition of puritan, a matter for historians of religion, Poole argues that the stereotype of the puritan is the symptom of early modern England's grappling with religious diversity and social change after the Protestant Reformation. This risible but contradictory figure emerges as a means to explore conflicts and irresolutions about religious, as well as linguistic and social, order. Like those other liminal figures—the vagabond, the masterless man, and the crossdressed woman, among others—the puritan is a representational category through which social anxieties are expressed. Poole's book helpfully analyzes several of these conflicts as each chapter sets up a discursive context and then anchors that context by key works or figures in literature—Shakespeare's Falstaff, Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, The Family of Love, Edwards's Gangraena, and Milton's antiprelatical tracts and Paradise Lost. The book also surveys a wide range of pamphlet and popular literature.

Poole's puritans are not the clichéd, Lenten Malvolios, shunning cakes and ale. Shakespeare's Falstaff of 1 and 2 Henry IV is hardly an obvious candidate for a stage puritan, but Poole ingeniously extends the well-known link between Falstaff, the martyr Oldcastle, and the radical Lollards to evoke the Marprelate controversy, that outlaw pamphlet war attacking religious uniformity. A starting point is that Falstaff, like the puritans, respects neither political nor social order. Further, by showing how this gluttonous, corporeal coward resembles figures summoned by the Marprelate controversy, Poole reveals commonalities of alternative and popular power that lay in the alehouse. Further, she also demonstrates how the Falstaffian figure of the bellygod offers a metaphoric response to that central issue of post-Reformation Christianity—food. Those separating from the state-sponsored church represented their dissent through practices relating to food, their acts of Christian devotion (fasting or communion) evoking dietary regimens. The puritan's fatness reflects his transgression of the social order; Zeal-of-the Land Busy of Bartholomew Fair embodies the competing desires regarding carnal appetite: a turkey pie hanging out of his mouth, Busy is practically bursting out of his clothing. The puritan body is grotesque, refusing to conform to physical no less than to social norms. Whether it's the renegade sexuality on offer in The Family of Love or the babbling insects in Thomas Edwards's Gangraena, puritan aspiration for perfection, for unmediated experience, are forms of a radical individualism that breaks boundaries. Linguistic disorder is a sign of social disorder and of sexual disorder in particular. The Family of Love, with its Familist Mistress Purge, tars the sect by sexual innuendo: freedom of religion and free love are one and the same. Behind the satirical invective is a subversive social message, however, that alternative religion poses a profound challenge to established familial, social, and legal relations.

In the drama, prose, and poetry that this book surveys these cultural anxieties are remarkably stable. A chapter on Thomas Edwards and two on Milton refine these findings. In his antiprelatical pamphlets Milton shares in the dramatic...