Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling. Musa Gurnis

      Introduction

      This book is a cultural materialist study of the mutually generative relationship between post-Reformation religious life and London’s commercial theaters. Early modern English drama is shaped by the polyvocal, confessional scene in which it was embedded. Yet theater does not simply reflect culture. The representational practices of the theater business refract the confessional material they stage. Early modern plays draw contradictory scraps of confessional practice together in powerful fantasies that reconfigure existing structures of religious thought and feeling. These performances do not evacuate religious material by bending it. Nor do they offer audiences a simple psychological escape from the realities of confessional conflict into a power-neutral space of free play and fellowship. What post-Reformation English theater did was involve mixed-faith audiences in shared, imaginative processes that allowed playgoers to engage with the always-changing tangle of religious life from emotional and cognitive vantage points not elsewhere available to them. Recent scholarship on the relationship between commercial theater and post-Reformation culture moves beyond a binary model of Catholic and Protestant religious difference, toward a fuller recognition of the diversity and complexity of confessional positions available to early modern English people. However, this rich critical conversation remains limited by a tendency to focus on single authors, particularly William Shakespeare, and on individual strands of the broader confessional culture.¹ In contrast, Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling: Theater in Post-Reformation London shows how industry-wide, representational practices reshaped the ways ideologically diverse Londoners accessed the mingle-mangle of religious life across the spectrum of belief.

      The long aftermath of the religious upheavals of the mid-sixteenth century cannot be understood through attention to any one confessional group in isolation. As Ethan Shagan writes, “English Protestants and Catholics [of varying stripes] defined … their identities … in response to their ideological opponents, allowing for a remarkable degree of cross-pollination of ideas, imagery, and texts across confessional divides.”² The subcultures of puritans, church papists, Laudians, recusants, ardent conformists, and converts were entangled and mutually defining. These lives cannot be understood either in crude, block categories or as idiosyncratic snowflakes of private faith, but only as embedded in the densely woven fabric of mixed religious discourse and practice through which they were made. Particular confessional identities developed in relation to a larger and always-changing religious matrix. However, the heterogeneity of these confessional positions should not be mistaken for protomulticultural, Erasmian toleration.³ The reality of religious diversity existed in constant tension with the shared belief that there could only be one true faith. Confessional factions sought the power to define and enforce orthodoxy with a ferocity commensurate with the stakes—life and death in this world and the next. Yet Protestant hegemony was internally contradictory, changing, and contested. Dominant versions of English Christianity were displaced not only through direct religious opposition but also indirectly through the countless jostlings of alternative, often muddled, everyday confessional practices. Post-Reformation religious culture was produced collectively and chaotically, by diverse agents from endlessly reappropriated materials.

      So too was commercial theater. Plays were made by mixed-faith groups of creative professionals responding to industry trends with the resources available to them. Author-focused projects implicitly assume that the ideological imprints of individual playwrights are