Religion and Drama in Early Modern England: The Performance of Religion on the Renaissance Stage

Abstract

Jane Hwang Degenhardt and Elizabeth Williamson, eds, Religion and Drama in Early Modern England: The Performance of Religion on the Renaissance Stage. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. xi + 281 pp. ISBN 9781409409021.1. Recent critical work on the culture of early modern England has increasingly recognised the central importance of religion and the complex way it informed every aspect of daily life. However, much remains to be done in order to provide a sophisticated account of the ways in which the various forms of Christianity, Judaism and Islam influenced, or were influenced by, public and private theatrical performances under the Tudors and the Stuarts. The contributors to this collection offer a fascinating and variegated examination of the inter-relationships between religion and drama in an attempt to fill this critical lacuna. In their introduction, the editors claim that they seek 'to complicate our understanding of how references to contemporary religion function within the theater by attending to the representational gaps created by theatrical materiality and performance' (2). They do not see direct analogies between religious or historical and dramatic discourses, suggesting that 'the stage...both draws upon and profoundly reconfigures existing religious signifiers' (2). This 'important methodological shift', they argue, is achieved 'by taking into account the effect of the material conditions of early modern performance, by exploring the intricate resonances between dramatic performances and religious ceremonies, and by re-assessing the multiple valences of religious allusions in early modern plays' (3).2. Overall, the essays speak well to one another and the collection does help to further the methodological shiftto which the editors refer. However, the decision to divide the collection into three sections: 'theatrical materiality and religious effects'; 'intersections of popular theater and religious culture'; and 'beyond allusion and ideology' seems to occlude more than it reveals, closing down instead of opening out the multiple ways in which the various essays overlap and engage with one another, and reintroducing some of the labels and distinctions that the editors wish to challenge.3. Holly Crawford Pickett's stimulating analysis of the smell of incense in early-modern drama offers an important corrective to a myopic critical focus on the sense of sight. That further consideration needs to be given to the latter is, however, demonstrated in Erika T. Lin's careful discussion of the ways in which the visual paradigms of popular worship, particularly the celebration of the Eucharist, can inform our understanding of how the complicated spying scene in Love's Labor's Lost might have been performed on the early-modern stage. By paying close attention to the aural qualities of song in The Shoemaker's Holiday, and tracing the cultural interchange between the Second Three-Man's Song and the immensely popular psalm-singing introduced by the Marian exiles after their return from the Continent, Jacqueline Wylde enriches and complicates current readings of Dekker's rollicking fantasy.4. Peter Berek's 'pains to identify the visible signs used to imply identity' further the strongly materialist focus of the collection, and provide a complex, highly entertaining reading of the significance of noses in staging Jewishness and sexuality and in evoking audience laughter. He notes that his 'sexualized account of looking Jewish is relentlessly male....Not circumcised, women embodied their Jewishness in blood rather than in flesh....Conversion seems easier when the marks of faith are invisible' (66). This focus on the exterior deepens our understanding of the ways in which gender complicates representations of inter-faith conversions on the early-modern stage. Berek's essay directly engages with that of Dennis Britton in the most complementary juxtaposition within the collection observing that the latter confronts scholarly uncertainty about the dramatic representation of allegiance to creed by concentrating on 'the symbolic significance' of 'conversion and circumcision' (60) in contrast to his own highly tangible focus. …

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