Literature and Theatre
This chapter investigates Roman Catholic dimensions in the poetry of the Church of England clergymen Richard Crashaw, George Herbert, John Donne and Robert Herrick, so demonstrating the persistence of Roman Catholic thinking in the Church of England deep into the seventeenth century. Through key distinctions between ideas of sanctity in ‘Against the Perils of Idolatry’, in the Church of England’s The Book of Homilies, and in Lancelot Andrewes, detailed discussions of Richard Crashaw and George Herbert show persistent patterns of Catholic worship in poetry by the Church of England clerics until Crashaw’s publications of 1646–52. The chapter fills out this picture through the later and earlier examples of Robert Herrick and John Donne, assessing the varying degrees of adherence to Catholic worship in each poet. Each discussion considers the different reigns and religious conditions in which the poets wrote, and the conditions are focal in conclusion. While Donne’s and Herbert’s poems went into print in the year William Laud became archbishop of Canterbury (1633), Crashaw and Herrick’s poems were printed in an era (1646–49) when the Prayer Book was banned, traditionalist clergy were ejected from their livings and royalists were subject to Parliament’s direct attack on traditional church life. Each cleric’s publications on Eucharistic worship thus shines striking Roman Catholic light on the seventeenth-century Church of England in its various phases of change.
This book presents a challenging, new view of English Literature 1558–1689. It demonstrates the vital continuity of Roman Catholicism in English Literature from the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558 to the deposing of James II in 1689. Focused mainly on poetry and plays, it argues that English Literature was a significant means by which Roman Catholic ideas persisted in an era which established the Book of Common Prayer and the Church of England. Presenting a new view of that Church’s culture, and so of its wider relation to religions both Catholic and Protestant, the book will be important to anyone interested in the interaction of literature and religion in the period, as well as in questions of how English Literature flourished in a Biblicist age. Through the very idea of literary works to chapters on the Eucharist, Purgatory, Christian worship and the Virgin Mary, the book joins together major and minor authors of the era to present English Literature afresh. Important figures include William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, Queen Henrietta Maria, Robert Southwell, John Donne, George Herbert, John Dryden, Robert Herrick, Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn. With focused discussion of works by these and many others, this is a vigorous recognition of England’s literary culture and its heritage, 1558–1689.
This summarises what the book has established: the continuity of Roman Catholicism in English Literature 1558–1689, especially in reference to the literary theology of works, Purgatory, Christian worship and the Virgin Mary. It reflects on this continuity regarding critical assessments of the era’s literature; the religious identities of the literature’s consumers; English religion of the era; the relation of works to authorhood; women’s studies in the light of Mary’s Reformation; cross-dressing and theatrical sanctity; and the putative contribution of English Literature 1558–1689 to later English toleration. Firmly arising from the critical arguments of the book, the discussion sets critical agendas for the future.
Developing on ‘works’, this chapter focuses on theatre as a counterpart to Chapter 1’s focus on poetry. The backdrop to its two Roman plays is a papacy perceived in the era by Protestants and Catholics as heirs to the Caesars, analogical habits of mind encouraging typological interpretations and (in the case of Sejanus), the capacity of Tacitean literature to imply comparisons between ancient Rome and early modern England. The chapter introduces the topic of sacrificial works and the sacrifice of the Mass through Juan Luis Vives’s critical edition of Augustine’s City of God: the canonical text for a century and half from 1529. It then locates Jonson’s early Jacobean play Sejanus his Fall, Shakespeare’s Elizabethan Julius Caesar, and John Ford’s Caroline Love’s Sacrifice in this Augustinian context through original and critically informed readings of the plays. A versatile theological theatre in Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline England emerges, which inventively addressed questions of Christian salvation from recognisably Catholic viewpoints.
The Introduction presents the basis for the book. It identifies the common ground between works of literature and the theological works central in Reformation debate. It then establishes the English religious context for literature of Elizabethan and later eras. This includes surveying relevant recent discussions of Protestant Biblicism; consideration of attitudes to literature in key Protestant authors like Spenser and Milton; a wholly new view of Church of England views on works of literary imagination expressed and exemplified in The Book of Common Prayer of 1559; the promotion of official ideas of national culture through the printers of the Prayer Book; English attitudes to Catholics and Catholicism, 1558–1689; and consideration of the Prayer Book, the Act of Uniformity, The Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, theatrical and poetic censorship, and associated Church of England views on theatre and poetry. The Introduction thus challenges varied ideas of ‘Protestant poetics’ key in early modern literary discussion today. Establishing anxiety about literary works as monuments in main Protestant poets like Spenser and situating this anxiety in an England of broken monuments, lastly the Introduction sets the scene for the book to come in two main ways: a view of its chapters; and a view of Philip Sidney’s deviations from Church of England orthodoxy, especially in The Defence of Poesy’s linked views on literature, works and salvation.
This chapter considers the Virgin Mary in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry as the divisive mother of Christ and the image of England’s broken church. Developing on views of saints in England from Chapter 4, here the focus is depictions of Mary as the saint defining the Reformation’s limits and hermeneutic. With special attention to Henry Constable and Richard Verstegan, the chapter attends to Mary as a divisive figure in recusant poetry. It shows Protestant poets including Aemilia Lanyer and John Milton limiting Mary’s representation along scriptural lines. Yet the bigger picture from Protestant and proto-Catholic authors from as early as Spenser and ‘The Wracks of Walsingham’ to ‘A Ballad Upon the Popish Plot’ (1679) is poets seeing in Mary the broken state of England’s church. Through metaphors of rape and defloration, images of Mary here brutally highlight England’s loss of Christian community in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Developing on salvation in the theatre, this chapter reads early modern drama against ritual changes to remembrance of the dead in the Prayer Books of 1549 and 1559, as well as Article 22 (‘Of Purgatory’) of the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles of Religion (1571). Following an identification of the proper relation of theatre to religion, attention to Purgatory in Hamlet and Dr Faustus opens large questions of religious memorial on stage. The chapter therefore traces the origins and development of this memorial from the Inns of Court play Gorboduc: the first tragedy printed in English and the first in blank verse. Co-authored by Thomas Sackville, a supporter of Catholics in England and abroad, Gorboduc influentially combined funerary ritual with history and fury, stimulating the development of revenge tragedy and history plays. The chapter displays this configuration of funerals, history and fury developing in Tamburlaine II and The Spanish Tragedy, by the associates Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd, showing that their distinctive developments flowered into the era’s major genres: tragedy, history play and comedy. The chapter illustrates the funerary and purgatorial concerns in each of these genres in turn, taking in relevant commentaries from John Hemmings, Henry Condell and Thomas Nashe with special regard to Shakespeare and humoral spirituality. The conclusion is a haunted stage of tragedies, histories and comedies, which variously defied Article 22 of the Thirty-nine Articles, consistently exploiting in Catholic ways areas of difference between the English and Roman churches.
This shows how the name of the Virgin Mary gave rise to varied religious meanings in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theatre. The chapter begins with two Robin Hood plays by Anthony Munday in view of Munday’s vexed religious identity and the devotion to the Virgin in Robin Hood literature. On The Roaring Girl (1611), the chapter identifies the central figure of Moll with Robin’s devotion but also with contentions over cross-dressing medieval saints, cross-dressing Roman Catholic Mary Ward, and Mary Frith, investigated by the Consistory Court of the Bishop of London in 1612. Shedding new light on Middleton, Dekker and London, the discussion shows The Roaring Girl turns on Marian conceits. After the Spanish match (1617–24), Catholic Henrietta Maria’s marriage to Charles I (1625) enabled Marian presentations in court masques. The presentations of Chloridia (1630), Tempe Restored (1631), The Temple of Love (1634) and Luminalia (1637) revive a medieval sacred drama of English feast days. The chapter ends with Henrietta Maria’s influence in Robert Davenport’s King John and Matilda Margaret (printed 1655 and 1662), Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Honour (printed 1668) and the theatre of Aphra Behn. Focal here are The Rover and The Younger Brother (published 1696). These illustrate a Restoration theatre of loyalist Catholics, the Stuart brothers and their supporters making sophisticated appeals to the public. With Behn pointing to recusant communities, the chapter shows substantial networks of Catholic continuity between English theatre in its pre- and post-revolutionary forms.
This chapter considers the theology of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature. Examining the theologies of the era, the chapter argues that epitaphic contexts made English literature deeply theological through a view of works resonantly Roman Catholic (hereafter, ‘Catholic’). The chapter presents sustained evidence for an intentional Catholic theology in Ben Jonson’s Works and the recognition of this theology in major and minor seventeenth-century figures. The chapter distinguishes Jonson’s ‘Works’ from those of Protestants like William Perkins (1631) and Jonson’s Catholic theology is identified in major seventeenth-century successors including Bishop Brian Duppa, Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace, Margaret Cavendish and William Davenant. John Dryden echoes Jonson’s view of works in An Essay of Dramatic Poesie (1668), his reflections on literary works as a member of the Church of England in Religio Laici (1682), and the visible development of this thinking in literary works after his conversion to Catholicism. From Jonson to Dryden and taking in many between, both Catholic and Protestant, the chapter establishes the continuity of literary works as theologically Roman Catholic in seventeenth-century England.
Manchester’s Mechanics’ Institution, established in 1824, has during the past two hundred years been co-opted into narratives increasingly remote from the essence of its foundations. A substantial body of literature has evaluated the Mechanics’ Institution with a focus on ‘social control’, and has routinely privileged the history of ‘science’, narrowly conceived. Such histories have tended to conclude the Mechanics’ Institution ‘failed’. Detailed archival study, focused on the first ten years of the Mechanics’ Institution’s existence, tells a different story. This article places the foundation and early years of this institution within the story of Manchester and the broader history of working-class education. It explores some of the tensions and concerns underpinning its establishment, in particular the impact of the Peterloo Massacre, on Manchester’s Liberal nonconformist leadership. It then traces a rapid movement from fear and distrust between different elements of Manchester’s industrial society towards an environment where deeper levels of mutual support and understanding became possible.