TY - JOUR
AU - Pickett, Holly Crawford
AB - Musa Gurnis’s Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling narrates the way that early modern theater imaginatively reshaped the contentious and “polyvocal, confessional scene” of post-Reformation England (1). Gurnis first establishes the diversity and complexity of the religious positions held by London’s playgoers. While she argues against reducing that richness to stark binaries such as Catholics versus Protestants, she also warns that the multiplicity of the positions should not be mistaken for toleration or a nascent multiculturalism. Another important part of her argument is the concept of theater as a refracting or reconfiguring force within the religious landscape. The medium of theater is not simply a passive vehicle for the confessional debates of the day; rather, she argues that plays allowed audience members to imaginatively inhabit new religious positions as a form of emotional or affective experimentation. After a first chapter that maps “the confessional heterogeneity of theatergoers,” including underscoring historical work that debunks the idea that puritans are not playgoers (7), chapter 2 looks at a group of plays that tackle the Spanish Match from a variety of perspectives. The section subtitled “Plays Are Not Tracts” emphasizes the book’s refrain that “plays allow confessionally diverse spectators to believe in religious counterfactuals—to feel them as if real—without having to avow them as true” (39). The third chapter focuses on mixed-faith collaboration among playwrights by comparing two coauthored plays about contentious religious saints of differing religious positions: the hotly Protestant Sir John Oldcastle by Michael Drayton, Richard Hathway, Anthony Munday, and Robert Wilson; and the decidedly Catholic Sir Thomas More by Anthony Munday, Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Heywood, and William Shakespeare. The “common denominator” across the two collaborations is Anthony Munday, a Catholic seminary student, who “lived in the contradiction between his complicity with state-sponsored, religious violence and his collaborative work on ideologically flexible drama” (88). Gurnis argues that Munday is not so much an exception as an “exaggerated, representative example of the ordinary operations of the theater business,” where mixed-faith collaborations fueled the ideological flexibility of the London theater scene (88). The fourth chapter on Middleton’s Game at Chess is perhaps the exception that proves the rule, because Gurnis argues that the play intensifies the religious perspectives of some of its audience members by inciting them to anti-Catholic surveillance, or even violence. Unlike the period at large, the play presents the religious milieu as a black-and-white binary. Even the stage itself was likely painted in a checkerboard pattern. By drawing the spectators into the political drama and the hunt for allegorical meaning, Middleton enlists the audience into the dominant Protestant perspective and even invites them to turn on their Catholic colleagues in the audience. The chapter’s point is that this Protestant hegemony must be recreated in the play; it is not a prior certainty. The final chapter turns to Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure “as a case study in the capacity of theatrical process to shift habits of religious thought” (8). The play first establishes—and then undermines—a Calvinist system of predestinarian judgement. Especially through its intense focus on the hypocritical Angelo’s psychology, the play suggests that our judgments about salvation or damnation are ultimately opaque and flawed. The play lures its mixed-faith audience members “into a hypothetical world in which predestinarian rubrics of spiritual and social judgment are operative but do not work” (150). In a short epilogue, Gurnis explores the operation of pity in John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, arguing that the play “opens a gap between religious judgment and emotional response” by making the play’s incestuous central characters emotionally compelling and sympathetic (158). This lively and accessible book makes a convincing case for the confessional complexity and diversity of early modern theater: its audience members, its playwrights, and its plays. Far from a monolithic Protestant institution or even a mirror of the religious turmoil of its day, Gurnis’s early modern stage actively shapes and reshapes the confessional identities of its audiences. © Folger Shakespeare Library 2022. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling: Theater in Post-Reformation London. By Musa Gurnis
JF - Shakespeare Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/sq/quab030
DA - 2022-01-17
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/mixed-faith-and-shared-feeling-theater-in-post-reformation-london-by-fla3NlWLHL
SP - 276
EP - 278
VL - 71
IS - 3-4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -