Religion and Drama in Early Modern England (review)

This volume seeks to redress the limitations of much recent work on religion and the early modern stage that depends on a binary conflict between Catholic and Protestant doctrine, interpretive habits, and modes of dramatization. Such work, the editors rightly argue, limits what can be said about theatre’s engagement with early modern religion, Christian and non-Christian. More importantly, they observe, scholarship on religion and the stage has tended to focus somewhat simplistically on religious allusions without “grappling with the multiple sensory dimensions of theatrical representation” (10). By contrast, this collection of essay aims to think in both more concrete and more abstract terms about the dialogue between religion and drama by considering the material realities of early modern theatrical production as well as a broader “semiotics of theatrical meaning” (7). In opening up previously unexplored avenues to critical consideration, the essays in the volume look to “expose a mutually constitutive relationship between various theatrical and extra-theatrical discourses, arguing both for the autonomy of the theatrical medium and for a multi-directional exchange between theater and culture” (10).

The volume is organized into three sections. The first, Theatrical Materiality and Religious Effects, “demonstrates why considerations of performance and materiality are so important for rethinking the drama’s treatment of religious subjects” (13). The opening chapter by Holly Crawford Pickett, “The Idolatrous Nose: Incense on the Early Modern Stage,” considers how the olfactory experience of early modern drama may have shaped the audience’s relationship to stage action. Focused on Jonson’s Sejanus and Middleton’s Women Beware Women, the essay is interested mainly in incense, which Pickett links not only to the idolatrous potential in Catholic and pagan ritual but, more unexpectedly, to discourses of romantic love. By considering how sensory experience could inculcate an idolatrous worship of the beloved, Pickett posits a vocabulary for representing ritual on the early modern stage that is shared by both verboten religious practice and its secular appropriations. Dennis Britton thinks not about theatrical smell but theatrical sight. In “Muslim Conversion and Circumcision as Theater,” Britton examines the theatrical representation of conversions to Islam in Thomas Kyd’s Solyman and Perseda and Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk to argue that the stage’s dependence on costume to represent religious conversion necessarily opens up discrepancies between outward appearance and religious conviction. The body marked through circumcision is ultimately inaccessible to the audience’s gaze, and as these plays demonstrate, a ritually circumcised initiate to Islam may not have undergone true religious conversion. Central to Britton’s claims, however, is a somewhat worn commonplace of early modern religious scholarship, “the impossibility of distinguishing real from performed religious identity” (85). The essay concludes, also too predictably, that this potential discrepancy makes these figures “dangerous” (84).

Jacqueline Wylde’s chapter, “Singing a New Song in The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” makes a persuasive argument that The Second Three-Man’s song, whose placement in the play has been much debated, makes most sequential and thematic sense at the very end. Wylde demonstrates that this placement most clearly articulates the nationalist, populist, royalist, and Protestant sentiments deployed by the song’s meter, rhyme, and lyrics. She argues that the portrait of English identity that arises from this placement is further complicated by the song’s inclusion of the character Lacy, whose Dutch alter-ego is assimilated into the play’s conclusion not through the erasure of his otherness but through conversion from a potentially threatening foreign competitor to a productive English Protestant community member. The chapter thereby expresses the nuances of confessional and national identity by suggesting the complex status of the convert, whose previous national or religious identity is not erased but transformed through recognition of English Protestant superiority. Peter Berek likewise considers the dramatization of figures of religious and cultural difference. Berek’s essay, “‘Looking Jewish’ on the Early Modern Stage” considers the function of prop noses in theatrical representations of Jews, concluding that the convention had less...