Protestantism and Drama in Early Modern England (review)

Adrian Streete’s knowledge of Protestant theology and Reformation history is solid, detailed, and immensely impressive. In Protestantism and Drama in Early Modern England, he displays a keen understanding of the basic doctrines of Luther, Calvin, and other major reformers and the works of John Foxe, William Perkins, George Gifford, and many others. Early modern religion has been a hot topic for more than twenty years, and Streete is well informed about the revisionist controversies of current scholarship. He is expertly prepared to build on this research and eager to rethink many of its claims. Yet despite his combination of massive erudition and promise of a fresh perspective, his arguments end up following predictable lines.

The book’s range is vast and ambitious, signaled by large concepts headlined in each chapter title: “subjectivity,” “representation,” “identity,” “perception,” “exegesis,” “mimesis,” “typology,” “resistance,” and “iconoclasm.” Streete aims to address the problem of representation and mediation in Reformation culture and religion. He makes a consistent and compelling case for Protestantism as an “avowedly Christ-centred religion” (12) while allowing that “Christ moves from being an immanent, ‘felt’ presence in the Christian’s life to being the transcendent loci [sic]of Christian faith” (13). Christ becomes the sole mediator between fallen humanity and God and the key figure for Protestant identity politics and “representational practice” (40). Streete offers ample evidence for this claim, including the enduring popularity of Thomas à Kempis’s De Imitatione Christi (circa 1418), reprinted twenty-seven times between 1503 and 1640 (227n62). Yet despite the persistence of what he calls “mediatory desires” (36), Calvin’s influential doctrine of predestination severely limits the value of works and will and makes efforts to identify with or emulate Christ increasingly unfeasible. Thus, the Reformation expands the gap between the human and divine while reducing the means of bridging it.

At this point, the book’s argument settles into a familiar trajectory. Streete concedes that Calvin’s “emphasis on the depravity of the human subject before God and on the divine’s utter transcendence” has shaped the standard view of the Reformation’s impact, “at least in literary studies,” from Jonathan Dollimore’s Radical Tragedy (1984) onward (85). Here and elsewhere, Streete wants to challenge conventional wisdom, but his modifications range from the minor to the negligible. He notes the comfort God’s grace supposedly offers to the elect but then ends up highlighting Protestantism’s focus on the perversion of free will. Indeed, he declares at the outset that his view of Protestantism is “pessimistic” because “it never quite grants enough scope to grace” (11). He certainly musters plenty of evidence for his darker view, including John Donne’s wry remarks on the quixotic bathos of human attempts to imitate Christ when “‘he that would fast forty dayes, as Christ did might starve; and he that would whip Merchants out of the Temple, as Christ did, might be knockt downe’” (186). Nevertheless, Streete’s approach overlooks Christianity’s—and religion’s—immense capacity for paradox and contradiction. Early modern Protestants certainly agreed on the depravity of the human will, yet many Reformation preachers insisted that God’s grace does not preclude but instead requires even more strenuous human effort.

Streete also exaggerates Protestantism’s “vigorous programme of iconoclasm” (34), and his conclusions are thus misleadingly presentist. In his first chapter on “representation in early modern discourse,” Streete aligns St. Augustine with Jakobson and Lacan to make the unremarkable claim that “the relationship between the signifier and the signified is a matter of arbitrary convention” (49). Although he says he does not want to “reduce Protestant subjectivity” to a prelude to “post-Enlightenment . . . disenchantment” (78), he finds reformers discovering a “proto-Derridean lack” or “absent presence” within their signifiers (63). Here too the conflation of early modern and postmodern anxieties is not especially fresh. More than twenty years ago, Malcolm Evans applied deconstruction to expose a comparable absence at the core of Shakespeare...