Disorder in the House of God: Disrupted Worship in Shakespeare and Others

Abstract

Disorder in the House ofGod: Disrupted Worship in Shakespeare and Others Bruce Boehrer Let's start with two famous disturbances in church. The first of these appears in The Taming ofthe Shrew (c.1592), where the aged Gremio describes Petruchio's nuptials in a horrified monologue: [W]hen the priest Should ask if Katherine should be his wife, "Ay, by gogs-wouns," quoth he, and swore so loud, That all amaz'd the priest let fall the book, And as he stoop'd again to take it up, This mad-brain'd bridegroom took him such a cuff That down fell priest and book, and book and priest. But after many ceremonies done, He [Petruchio] calls for wine. "A health!" quoth he, as if He had been aboard, carousing to his mates After a storm, quaff'd off the muscadel, And threw the sops all in the sexton's face.... This done, he took the bride about the neck, And kiss'd her lips with such a clamorous smack That at the parting all the church did echo.1 This behavior goes farto establish Petruchio's reputation for mercuriality. As Gremio comments at the outset ofhis narrative, Katherine is "a lamb, a dove, a fool" compared to her new husband (3.2.157), whose actions in church provide an ominous foretaste of domestic tyranny to come. Alongside this Shakespearean moment I would like to recall a brief anecdote from Ben Jonson's conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden, conducted while Jonson was Drummond's guest at his estate inScotiandduringthewinterof1618-19.Accordingto Drummond's 83 84ComparativeDrama notes, Jonson, who had converted to Catholicism in 1598 and returned to the Anglican fold around 1610, boasted that"after he was reconciled with the Church & left of to be a recusant at his first communion in token of true Reconciliation, he drank out all the full cup of wyne."2 Evidentlythis gesture still tickled Jonson some eightyears later,when he recalled it to impress his host. But just how, exactly, did Jonson intend his tale to impress? What precise effect did he expect it to elicit, and how does comparison with Petruchio help clarify the matter? A world of difference separates The TamingoftheShrewfromtheconversationswith Drummond:theformer is verse, the latter prose; the former dramatic, the latter narrative; the former fictional, the latter autobiographical; and so forth. Yet even so, both passages develop out ofa context one must regard as in some sense theatrical, obviously so in the case of Petruchio, but scarcely less so in the case of Jonson, who is not only a playwright and former actor in 1619 but is also very clearly recollecting a moment ofwhat can only be called performance.Likewise,both passages drawtheirtheatrical appeal from the contrast between a setting (the church and its rituals) that implicitlydemands reverence,on one hand, and, on the other, conduct that flies in the face of such demands. Moreover, both Petruchio and Jonson emerge with their misbehavior in some sense vindicated, recuperated to an official doctrine (patriarchalism,Anglicanism) that it seems at first to violate. In these ways, at least, one can almost imagine Jonson's actions to be a deliberate derivative ofPetruchio's, an exemplary instance oflife imitating art. Such parallels may prove sufficiently intriguing, in themselves, to warrant scholarly study. But in fact one ofmy main concerns here has to do with their inadequacy and deceptiveness. For by casting the church as a setting that requires decorous behavior, the cases of Petruchio and Jonson belie the extent to which this decorum remains inchoate within the earlymodern English historical record.Whenviewed from the standpoint of a twenty-first-century Anglo-American standard of civility, in other words, the unwritten rules of behavior that Petruchio and Jonson violate may easily appear more established than they actually were in Elizabethan and Jacobean social practice. The ideal ofproper churchgoing that may at first blush strike one as the uncomplicated product of a BruceBoehrer85 fixed and enduring standard ofgood manners—a standard rendered all the more inevitable by the horror that Petruchio's and Jonson's violation of it elicits—emerges instead as the desired but inconsistently realized ideal ofa disciplinary regime coextensive with Norbert Elias's civilizing...

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