Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England by Huston Diehl (review)

310Comparative Drama tiated being" (163) despite having ignored Latin American theater. Most egregious is the specious rationale for excluding women: claiming that no female dramatist equals in status the selected males, the authors uphold the very dynamic which they lament: "In any case, the condition of women as the most oppressed of the oppressed has received much less attention in published post-colonial drama than it should have done" (166). This emphasis on published texts putatively permits only superficial mention of workshop productions by such figures as Augusto Boal, though such work was over-valued in the analysis of Fugard. Ironies culminate in the final echo of Said's call "to transcend static notions ofidentity" (168) and in the closing reference to Brian Friel and Samuel Beckett, not in acknowledgment of arbitrary omissions but in validation of the study ofpost-colonial theater as a means to understand our own. The value of self-knowledge notwithstanding, this validation veers perilously into that colonial territory of FirsWThird-World hierarchies which post-colonial theory targets, underscoring the contradictions of a text which could have so fruitfully hit the mark. JANET V. HAEDICKE Northeast Louisiana University Huston Diehl. Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. Pp. xv + 238. $39.95. In this important new study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theology and literature, Huston Diehl argues "that Elizabethan and Jacobean drama is both a product of the Protestant Reformation—a reformed drama—and a producer of Protestant habits of thought—a reforming drama." Drawing "on the insights of symbolic anthropologists who believe that religious practices help shape both individual consciousness and cultural forms," and focusing on "what Clifford Geertz identifies as 'the disruptive, disintegrative, and psychologically disturbing ' aspects of religion," Diehl treats tragedies by Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Middleton, and Webster "as one area in which the disruptions , conflicts, and radical changes wrought by the Protestant Reformation are publicly explored." Diehl is "particularly interested in the [Reformation] controversies surrounding the images and rituals of the medieval Church because the issues they raise—about representation, art, theatricality, spectacle, interpretation, and imagination—so clearly pertain to the drama": "By inspiring new kinds of rimais, spectacles, and dramas, the reformed religion, I argue, contributes to the formation of a uniquely Protestant theater in early modern England." In her seven rich and concise chapters, Diehl first "gives a historical account of the Protestant reformers' responses to a pronounced iconophilia in Reformation England," then "demonstrates that early Pro- Reviews3 1 1 testant artists as well as Protestant polemicists like John Foxe employ a revolutionary rhetoric that reinterprets the sacred genres and images of the traditional Church and depicts scenes of martyrdom and iconoclasm as powerful and even spectacular theater." In the remaining chapters Diehl turns "to the tragedies themselves in order to explore some of the ways the Reformation, with its radical critique of late medieval piety, its iconoclastic violence against the devotional images of the Roman Church, and its suppression of the Roman Mass and popular religious drama, stimulates theatrical production." Chapter 3 attempts to show, with a special emphasis on Hamlet and Doctor Faustus, "that Elizabethan and Jacobean drama reflexively address the reformers' inquiry into the legitimacy of the theater, exploring Protestant-induced fears that plays seduce and corrupt their audiences." Chapter 4 tries to "analyze the distinctive habits ofmind that the Roman Mass, on the one hand, and the Reformed Lord's Supper, on the other, induce in their worshippers," and to "show how Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedies—with their intense exploration of mystery and representation —rehearse the crucial differences between these competing ritual experiences ." Chapter 5 "argues that early modern tragedies represent a world filled with false and demonic as well as divine signs, engaging their spectators directly in the problem of interpretation." Chapter 6 focuses on "representations of erotic love and marriage in Stuart love tragedies" and tries to show "how they interrogate the fatal identification of images and women in early Protestant culture." Chapter 7 analyzes "the way Webster appropriates a Protestant rhetoric ofwitnessing in The Duchess of Malfi, nurturing in his own spectators a selfreflexivity that can best be understood in...