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Stage, cathedral, wagon, street: the grounds of belief in Shakespeare and Renaissance performance
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Stage, cathedral, wagon, street: the grounds of belief in Shakespeare and Renaissance performance
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STAGE, CATHEDRAL, WAGON, STREET:
THE GROUNDS OF BELIEF IN SHAKESPEARE AND RENAISSANCE PERFORMANCE
by
Matthew J. Smith
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
December 2012
Copyright 2012 Matthew J. Smith
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to express my thanks to several individuals whose support and guidance have
contributed to this dissertation and to a learning experience for which I am grateful. I would like
to thank my chair, Professor Bruce Smith, for being a continual source of intellectual motivation
and for his patience and advice. I would also like to thank Professors Rebecca Lemon and
Heather James for the manifold ways they have influenced this project since its inception and
also for modeling the vocation of scholar and teacher with intellect and professional
consideration. Many thanks as well to Professors David Rollo and David Albertson for their
insights on my project. Others in the academy have helped me along the way in more ways than I
am able to mention; I would like to sincerely thank Meghan Davis Mercer, Gregory Colón
Semenza, Clare Costley King’oo, Gregory Kneidel, Elizabeth Hart, Patricia Taylor, Christopher
Perreira, and Aaron Kleist, each of whom have uniquely shaped this dissertation. Several
institutes have provided resources for research; in particular, I would like to acknowledge the
Renaissance Society of America, the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute, and the
Huntington Library for their support. I reserve my deepest gratitude for those relationships that
have affected me since long before becoming a graduate student. These include especially my
parents, Rick and Janice. I owe thanks to my children, Cecily and Ambrose, for providing
always-welcome distraction with things more important than this dissertation. Finally, my
profoundest affection and debt is owed to my wife, Ashley, whose enthusiasm for my work is
unsurpassed and to whom I dedicate this dissertation.
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ii
List of Figures v
Abstract vi
Introduction 1
Does Belief Survive Representation? 7
The Grounds of Belief: A Description of Method 18
Shakespeare and the Other Performance Genres 38
Chapter One: The Experience of Ceremony in Henry V 43
Pardoning 46
Feeling 53
Readying 66
Concluding 82
Chapter Two: How to Believe in the Chester Mystery Cycle:
The Theme of Immanence 83
What is Given and What is Believed 88
The Household in “The Last Supper” 96
Signs and Things: The Supper Table 107
Mary’s and Martha’s “Ah’s” 115
Immanence and Invisibility in “The Fall of Lucifer” 123
Conclusion 134
Chapter Three: God’s Idioms:
“Sermon-Like” Belief in Donne’s London Sermons 136
The Voice of St. Paul’s 139
The Idiomatic Things of God: Chiasmus, Marginalia, and Literacy 147
The Art of Hearing and Not Hearing, Seeing and Not Seeing 155
Sermon-Like Belief 166
Conclusion 176
Chapter Four: “Ballads! Hark! Hark!”:
The Performance of Belief in Early Modern Godly
Ballads 179
Defining the Godliness of Godly Ballads 181
Ballad Imitation and Conventionality 193
Pausing for Belief 216
Conclusion 233
iv
Chapter Five: Hamlet and the Problem of Interiority 235
Descartes, the Ghost, and Hamlet’s Elusive Interiority 239
The Renaissance Conceit and Hamlet’s Pursuit of Action 252
Conceit and the Performativity of the Mind—Claudius Prays 258
The Melancholic Imagination; or, Hamlet as Bent Thought 270
“When our deep plots do fall”: The End of Delay 278
Conclusion 285
Conclusion: The Immanent, The Popular, The Interior 287
Bibliography 292
v
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1: December, Le Grant Kalendrier et Compost des Bergiers, 1496 102
Figure 2: Corpus Christi Liturgy, Missale ad Usum Insignis Ecclesie
Sarisburiensis, 1555 110
Figure 3: Wenceslaus Hollar, “St. Paul’s, the Nave,” 1656 143
Figure 4: Copperplate Map of London, 1559 145
Figure 5: John Gipkyn, Old St Paul’s, 1616 149
Figure 6: Ballad. “Ann Askew, intitled, I am a Woman Poor and Blind” 189
Figure 7: The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, 1490 196
Figure 8: Ballad. “The Heartie Confession of a Christian” 199
Figure 9: Geneva New Testament, 1575 204
Figure 10: Burial Office, Book of Common Prayer, 1573 205
Figure 11: Ballad. "A Song of Syon of the Beauty of Bethell” 207
Figure 12: Ballad. “The Dying Tears of a Penitent Sinner” 211
Figure 13: Ballad. “Some Fyne Gloues” 230
Figure 14: "Remember thee! / Ay, thou poor ghost,” The Works of William
Shakespeare, 1893 247
Figure 15: "Remember thee! / Ay, thou poor ghost,” Hamlet, Prince of
Denmark, Illustrated by Harold Copping, 1897 249
vi
ABSTRACT
Stage, Cathedral, Wagon, Street: The Grounds of Belief in Shakespeare and Renaissance
Performance expands what counts as belief in historical performance. It explores how
belief sounded, looked, and felt to audiences in Renaissance England. To this extent, my
dissertation suggests a radical reorientation of the study of drama and religion. Most
scholars study performed religion primarily in terms of how it was “represented” on stage:
signified by certain verbal and visual images and decoded, in effect, by audiences. This
approach has produced insightful material histories of religion but is limited both by its
focus on allusion—re‐presentation—and because it recognizes belief primarily where it
can be corroborated by comparison to more conventional sites of religion, such as the
church and established religious texts. I argue that belief existed at more basic experiential
levels, in the perceptual habits of audiences, in the environmental “grounds” of the
performance venue, and in what are often considered the mundane and marginal aspects of
the playgoing experience—such as ambient distractions, acoustics, dramaturgical
transparency, and even admission fees. The result is a depiction of communal belief that
collaborated with its performative media. In essence, by studying the phenomenal
conditions of historical performance through its props, spaces, and bodies, I am expanding
belief beyond the confines of religion and into activities that were fundamental to attending
a performance in Renaissance England.
1
INTRODUCTION
This dissertation expands what counts as belief in Renaissance performance. Belief, especially as
applied to religion, is often narrowly defined in relation to knowledge—a claim to have
knowledge about something outside the scope of normal experiential and scientific inquiry.
Assertions of belief are frequently characterized not by their psychological intentions but by the
qualities of their objects: to have belief is to extend the mind just past the far reaches of
knowledge, to know something that belongs to the purview of belief. Thus, in historical
scholarship, belief is defined primarily by association with its familiar theological contexts rather
than by the cognitive qualities that constitute confidence in something. The Oxford English
Dictionary confirms this associative definition when it lists as the first and oldest definition of
belief in the English language, “The trust that the believer places in God; the Christian virtue of
faith.”
1
As such, the sacred is an object of belief because it is sacred, not because it is believed.
Belief, then, is frequently understood to be a special exception of knowledge directed towards
something transcendent rather than something immanent. In this way, Christianity has sometimes
abstracted belief from its function as a perceptual activity and has elevated it to the level of
symbol, moving away from defining belief by its psychological qualities and instead identifying
belief by the activity of symbolizing the sacred in religious incarnations.
Similarly, in some ways belief in the Renaissance period was categorized by its semiotic
significance in religion. In post-Reformation England, even well into the seventeenth century,
belief had immense cultural capital, just as the concept of “faith alone” took gradual hold on the
official statements of established religion. Scholars have long argued over the ways that theater
1
Oxford English Dictionary, 3
rd
ed., s.v. “belief, n.”
2
and other performance festivities dealt with the cultural preoccupation with belief. Drama has
variously been seen to promulgate religion, to illustrate and thus promote belief, to balance belief
with skepticism, or to subvert it. Yet among all these historical interpretations, one thing is
certain: Shakespeare and his contemporaries’ imitations of belief were not static. Renaissance
dramatists and performers created and repurposed a constellation of ever-changing imagery and
dramatic actions through which English culture articulated popular religion. As evinced by anti-
theatrical polemics and by governmental theater closures, popular theater, with its increasing
topical allusiveness and its mimetic designs, met religion at a particularly volatile moment in
time and place. It became a battleground for the theologically founded disputes of word versus
image, sensations and affect, effeminization, and ceremonialism. One central reason for theater’s
envelopment in such controversies was its combination of social popularity and its free-wheeling
deployment of cultural imagery. In turn, as the need to identify and confirm true belief increased,
so did drama’s capacity for testing, recognizing, and contextualizing religious imagery within its
performative expressions.
Yet because of drama’s role as a social examiner of the sacred, it is sometimes easy to
limit the purview of belief in performance only to language and spectacles that are overtly
religious. Hence, in studies of Renaissance drama the critical identification of belief almost
always refers to religious objects of knowledge as they are represented on stage. A character in
prayer, a performance of martyrdom, an allegorical correlative to self-sacrifice, an allusion to
eucharistic imagery—each is rightly but narrowly recognized as a performance of belief.
Consequently, when the content of drama is not overtly religious, critics have neglected to
discuss belief in performance in favor of discussing knowledge in performance. One major
reason for this is the emergence of materialist thought and that of Michel Foucault in particular
3
whose influence on New Historicism and cultural materialism presents knowledge as the product
of cultural conditions of power. The representation of knowledge in Renaissance drama has
become a popular topic at the expense of belief because exploring knowledge on stage allows
critics to subject what E. M. W. Tillyard called the “Elizabethan world picture” to non-
teleological and nonexclusive histories, such as histories of radical religion and recusancy and
histories of sexuality.
2
Such studies flourish because they complicate how opinion and habit are
justified by their cultural conditions—how experience becomes knowledge—but in dwelling on
the ideological terms of justification, they limit the historical relevance and scope of belief.
Even studies of early modern religion and drama demonstrate a preoccupation with
knowledge. This is the case when religion on stage is identified primarily by its representation of
theological allegory, allusion, and imagery. Yet the study of religion in Renaissance theater often
falls into two narrower projects: either cultural history is largely ignored for the sake of
representing religious thought on stage with optimal coherence, or cultural history usurps
religion altogether. Two recent periodical studies on the “turn to religion” in early modern
criticism articulate these tendencies well. Ken Jackson and Arthur Marotti agree with the
observation that recent historical criticism is guilty of “transforming religion into politics or
culture, and ignoring its alterity,” in response insisting that religion “is not just another field for
anthropological investigation or political decoding.”
3
Similarly, in a special issue of English
Language Notes devoted to the religious turn in early modern studies, Julia Reinhard Lupton
asserts that “Religion is not identical with culture,” explaining: “This is not to say that religion
does not participate in culture or ideology, but rather that what makes religion religion
2
E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture: A Study of the Idea of Order in the Age of Shakespeare,
Donne, and Milton (New York: Vintage Books, 1959).
3
Ken Jackson and Arthur Marotti, “The Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Studies,” Criticism 41, no.
1 (2004): 179-180.
4
(distinguishing it from other forms of identity such as nationality or ethnicity) is its absurd
insistence and unlikely persistence beyond the logics of custom and habit, practice and power.”
4
Cultural studies seeks to uncover the cultural contingencies of religion, but in so doing it often
wrongly classifies belief as a kind of knowledge and thus as a cultural product. As I discuss
below, this is perhaps most visible in the opinion of some theater historians who assert that the
representation of religion in performance empties it of its ability to accommodate belief.
Of course, historical religion is also a category of knowledge, especially in the form of
doctrine and rules of piety, but belief covers much more ground, encompassing also those habits
of thought that remain unjustified and experiential. Such an alternative characterization of belief
is offered by Plato’s Socrates. Recognizing belief as the broader epistemic category and
knowledge as the more specific, Socrates defines knowledge as justified, true belief, and he
describes belief as something that needs to be tied down by reasons in order to become
knowledge.
5
Belief, in turn, is preeminent to knowledge—an attitude towards something, express
or tacit, that implies confidence, whether justified or not. This definition attends more closely to
the disposition of believing than to the object of belief and, I propose, admits a greater variety of
information as relevant to the study of historical belief.
I intend to explore the pluralities of belief as a perceptual phenomenon that precedes
knowledge and that is diffused into the holistic conditions of its appearing, including especially
the popular motives and cultural idiosyncrasies of Renaissance performance. This is not, of
course, to downplay the contingencies of culture and history but to resist, as much as possible,
conflating religion-as-represented and religion-as-believed. As an illustration of this, consider the
4
Julia Reinhard Lupton, “The Religious Turn (to Theory) in Shakespeare Studies,” ELN 44, no. 1 (2006): 146.
Original italics have been removed.
5
This definition of belief, or “opinion” as it is often translated, can be found in Meno, 97a-98b and Theaetetus,
201a-d in John M. Cooper, Plato: Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997).
5
status of religion in the popular balladry of Richard Corbett. Corbett was a seventeenth-century
prankster and street performer, but he was also Dean of Christchurch and later the Bishop of
Oxford. Amusing stories survive of Corbett taking off his clericals, dressing like a balladeer, and
singing songs at Abingdon Cross perhaps to the very people who heard his sermons down the
street. Another story tells of Bishop Corbett overhearing a poor ballad-monger complain of his
depleted sales in a tavern. Taking pity on his drinking mate—as John Aubrey tells it in 1693—
the “jolly Doctor . . . puts on the ballad singer's leathern jacket, and being a handsome man, and
had a rare full voice, he presently vended a great many, and had a great audience.”
6
Renaissance
religious performances present us with many similar enigmatic scenarios where religion is co-
opted by humor, commerce, sex, government, and other ulterior motives and cultural factors. For
this reason, literary historians have focused on uncovering these ulterior motives and have
largely relegated religion to a supporting roll under the sensationalist appetites of early modern
city-dwellers and under the conditions of power that undergird the religious establishment. Yet to
view Corbett’s ballad antics as undermining or as disparate from his vocational role as a preacher
is to uncritically privilege the official dissemination of doctrine in sermons over the pluralist and
flexible emergence of devotion in popular settings. For there were, of course, hundreds of godly
ballads published in Corbett’s day, and it would be dismissive to ignore the potential for
godliness in the jovial charity displayed by Corbett’s alehouse performance. In terms of belief,
although the performance venues of balladeers like Corbett were filled with urban sounds and
distractions, early modern godly ballads prompted certain attitudes towards popular piety and
engendered certain religious virtues within the settings and moments of their performances—
6
John Aubrey, Brief Lives, Chiefly of Contemporaries, Set down by John Aubrey, between the Years 1669 &
1696, ed. Andrew Clark, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1898), 1:184-85.
6
virtues such as mirth and temperance that were integrated with the popular conditions of their
genre.
Belief is thus a concept that allows us to suspend presuppositions about religious
knowledge and its representations in performance. The central question of belief in Renaissance
performance is how believing in drama and believing in the sacred overlap with each other; it
draws attention to the ways that popular performances redirect and uniquely characterize belief
rather than to how theater validates or invalidates it. Shakespeare serves as a historical linchpin
for the study of performative belief not only because of his cultural prominence but also because
of the especially subtle and attuned ways that he dramatizes the cross-characterization of
theatrical belief and religious belief. Scholars have commented, for instance, on the liturgical
valences of symbolism in Shakespeare’s Lancastrian tetralogy, on the Mass and the craving for
justice in Othello, and on parallels between Pauline theology and “the epistemology of
Shakespearean romance,” among other examples where religion is ciphered by its theatrical
medium.
7
This dissertation looks at performativity even more broadly as contextualized in
related performance genres—ceremony, pageants, sermons, ballads, and rhetoric—in order to
hone in on those qualities of belief that bridge religion to Shakespearean theater within its
performative culture.
As such, this dissertation suggests a radical realignment of the relation between religion
and Renaissance performance, exploring religious experience at the most visceral of levels,
attending to spaces, disguises, acoustics, distractions, and other performance marginalia, as well
7
See, for instance: Timothy Rosendale, “Sacral and Sacramental Kingship in the Lancastrian Tetralogy,” in
Dennis Taylor and David N. Beauregard, eds., Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern
England (New York: Fordham UP, 2003), 121-40; Regina Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics: When God Left the
World (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008), 39-58; and Joel B. Altman, The Improbability of Othello: Rhetorical
Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010), 339-73.
7
as to the consciousness of the historical audience. Therefore, this project could also be described
as a phenomenology of belief in performance because it presupposes a pre-empirical historical
mindset that incorporates physical, perceptual, and intellectual fields of experience as criteria for
understanding performative events. These criteria are the grounds of belief in a performance,
encompassing how Renaissance audiences believed in performances, how they believed in the
divine through performances, and how the two activities were inseparable. By looking to
Shakespearean theater and other neglected but vitally relevant genres, I aim to demonstrate that
Renaissance performativity was comfortable with its utilization of religious media for fashioning
belief. Audiences, in turn, embraced the conspicuous nature of belief in performance,
assimilating the activities of attendance and playgoing into the content of their fictive belief as
well as into their devotion.
Does Belief Survive Representation?
To frame my discussion of the grounds of belief in Renaissance performance, I will present the
recent critical history of drama and religion as a discussion about evacuation, vacuousness, and
fulfillment. Particularly in regard to Shakespeare, there is a great deal of work on the religious
confessions of authors and on Christian allegorical readings of character and narrative, but from
a historical standpoint all such readings are void if Renaissance theatricality qua theatricality
empties its sacred representations of belief. The central question that determines the nature of
this alleged emptiness is: with its symbolic economy and festive play, how does theater
compensate for and react to the deficits in ritual devotion that result from the continually
changing religious atmosphere of post-Reformation England? This is essentially a “vacuum”
problem. Answers to such a question sometimes amplify the power of theater’s “incarnational
8
aesthetic” to fill the vacuum left by Catholicism.
8
Other responses characterize the theater like
Boyle’s air pump and its audiences like the new philosopher viewing the old traditions with
skepticism. Moreover, the question is complicated by problems of inclusion: what counts as
religion, belief, and performance? At times, religion expands into heterodoxy and popular piety,
and at others it contracts into an orthodox locus of doctrine and propaganda. Can we recognize
religion by its habits of representation, or is its identity bounded by specific confessions?
Additionally, should we classify the religion of the secular stage as wholly different from the
religious phenomena of other, often less secular, performance genres? My point of view is that
an acute awareness of doctrinal orthodoxy is not necessarily at odds with an expansion of what
counts as belief into the popular and the performative, and I aim to demonstrate that Renaissance
dramatic performance and Shakespeare in particular share a great deal of their phenomenal
conditions with the ceremonies, environments, and imaginings of popular devotion.
“Performance kills belief.”
9
In one of several influential New Historicist books on
Renaissance drama, Stephen Greenblatt issues a maxim of literary historicism that captions a
decade of debate and that still serves as a springboard for critical studies of religion and drama.
Greenblatt’s was the most thorough articulation of the secularizing power of theater at the date of
its publication. With pointed nuances, it follows the cultural materialist work of Jonathan
Dollimore who argues that Renaissance theater illuminated the social relativity of religion and
also on the work of C. L. Barber who describes theater as filling a vacuum left by the loss of
8
“Incarnational” aesthetic or drama is discussed in Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East
Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995), 1; Michael O’Connell, The
Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), 63; Beatrice Groves,
Texts and Traditions: Religion in Shakespeare 1592-1604 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007), 52.
9
Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England
(Berkeley: U of California P, 1989), 109.
9
religious ritual, spectacle, and symbolic meaning in the Reformation.
10
The theater, argues
Barber, established itself as a “place apart” from the church—a kind of secular substitute for the
old religion’s ceremony and imagery.
11
Greenblatt recognizes similar histories of relativity and
substitution and posits a theory not just of vacuousness but of evacuation, where religion
dissipates in the processes of becoming theater and being represented through theater. If we
consider the possibilities of this statement on its own—“Performance kills belief”—we can see
that it refers specifically to the effects of performativity and theatricality. It is not a statement
about the religious content of plays, as such content—e.g., a conversion scene or an allusion to a
saint—viewed only as content, can only be measured by reference to the progress of secularism
or devotion outside of theater. In this case, speculation about historical audiences’ reception of
overtly religious dramatic content depends entirely on the non-dramatic history of belief and
unbelief in the period—i.e., whether Renaissance England considered saint veneration to be
sacred or idolatrous. In effect, treating religion in drama this way transforms Greenblatt’s
statement to mean “unbelief kills belief,” since the validity of religion in performance really only
amounts to the validity of religion in society. Instead, Greenblatt shows us that the question of
belief in drama must account particularly for the impact of the theatrical medium insofar as it
inherently supports or subverts belief, asking: how do the representational mechanics of theater
kill belief?
New Historicism has enjoyed an enormous amount of attention in recent decades, and so
while I will not rehearse its tenants here, I do want to highlight its contribution to the vacuum
problem. For Greenblatt, the vacuum left by the Reformation and its consequent individualism
10
Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His
Contemporaries, 3
rd
ed. (Durham: Duke UP, 2004), 11.
11
C. L. Barber, Creating Elizabethan Tragedy: The Theater of Marlowe and Kyd, ed. Richard P. Wheeler
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988), 31, 34.
10
finds a stronghold in theater. Even though theater was a site of negotiating and individual self-
fashioning, it enforced an experience of publicness and mutual complicity that by its very
transparency enacted a collaborative iconoclasm upon tradition and notions of a master narrative.
The key concept of Greenblatt’s evacuation thesis is transparency: the theatrical is identifiable as
such because it makes the social, cultural, and epistemological conditions of belief transparent to
audiences, and belief cannot survive this exposure. According to Greenblatt, representing
religion in theater is an act of iconoclasm because its medium is designed to reveal the “human
strategy” behind “supernatural events,” and so Greenblatt suggests that Renaissance playgoers
were aware that theater executed “the evacuation of the divine presence from religious
mystery.”
12
Greenblatt’s view that Renaissance theater evacuates its sacred representations of their
religious meanings clarifies a central point of dispute: does theater fill the void left by the old
religion, or does it intensify it? Subsequent engagements of the vacuum problem from other
materialist critics, while retaining the secularist view, sought for a nuanced understanding of
Renaissance theater’s compensation for its loss of the ability to represent the sacred literally. In
Louis Montrose’s account—the next major contribution to the vacuum theory after Greenblatt—
the need in Renaissance England for idealistic symbolic forms was met primarily by the
ideological structures of the state, endowing “material existence with greater coherence and
value.”
13
If the old religious ritual provided meaning by setting itself apart in time and space,
then “theatrical performance, marked off in both time and space from the normal flow and loci of
social activity, offered to its audience—and, of course, to its performers—an imaginative
12
Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 107, 113.
13
Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of Elizabethan Theater
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996), 30.
11
experience that partially and temporarily removed them from their normal places, their ascribed
subject positions.”
14
Several drama historians have followed Montrose’s precedent—what can be
described as a focus on the diffusion of religion into the theater and state for secular ends. The
significant emphasis here is on the practice of ideological appropriation. Ramie Targoff, for
instance, views theater as evacuating devotion of its religious representations, but then describes
the ways that theater compensates for the loss of traditional devotional practices such as private
confession by appropriating the role of stirring the soul into conviction.
15
Likewise, Michael
O’Connell describes how the vacuum is filled with the incarnational aesthetic of the body
through the central device of bodily impersonation on stage, meeting a religious psychological
need with the symbolism of the increasingly secularized human body.
16
Most recently, Adrian
Streete has studied Renaissance theater through the history of Protestant iconoclasm, concluding
similarly to O’Connell that religion on stage suffers from the loss of an incarnational channeling
of imagery, and so drama empties itself of sacred meaning just as it asserts itself.
17
In these
studies only the slightest trace of religion survives on the secular stage, primarily in the form of
bodily affect.
Although arguments like these imply a secularist understanding of the progression of
theater, it is worth remembering that religion was an extremely popular subject of dramatic
representation in the Renaissance. Religion frequently found itself positioned on stage only five
feet above its closest spectators in the pit, but this distance, according to Streete, is large enough
to establish a psychological distance between the audience and religion-as-represented,
14
Montrose, The Purpose of Playing, 32-34.
15
Ramie Targoff, “The Performance of Prayer: Sincerity and Theatricality in Early Modern England,”
Representations 60 (1997): 49-69.
16
O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye.
17
Adrian Streete, Protestantism and Drama in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009). See
especially page 24.
12
instantiating a subject-object perspective “where the relative claims of the human subject take an
uneasy precedence over those of an increasingly distant divine object.”
18
Where does belief end
and modern subjectivity begin? Another vein of scholarship has been especially sensitive to this
question by exploring how Renaissance theater accommodates the paradoxes of secularism and
Protestant reform. The touchstone for such work is Catherine Belsey’s The Subject of Tragedy,
which like several major works of criticism in the 1980s focuses on the distinct contradictions
inherent to the genre of tragedy. Belsey sees tragedy as throwing “into relief the problems and
contradictions which are often only implicit in other modes of writing”—contradictions
especially between the absolute and the democratic, including the religious and the secular.
19
Similarly, responding to arguments like that of Paul Whitfield White that assert Renaissance
theater’s role as religious propaganda, Jean Howard posits that religion does not exist in drama in
the form of “straightforward promulgation of dogma” but rather as a representation of
“ideological contestation,” especially in the form of dramatic paradox.
20
Like most materialist
critics, Howard prefers to think of religion in drama in terms of “representation” because it
suggests implication “in the power relations of a particular society.”
21
This characterization of
“representation” is commensurate with Greenblatt’s, locating in the term’s prefix (re-) the forms
of “power” that enable Renaissance theater to thrive.
22
18
Streete, Protestantism and Drama, 30.
19
Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (New York:
Routledge, 1985), 9.
20
Jean Elizabeth Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge,
1994), 7. See also Paul Whitfield White, Theatre and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage, and Playing in Tudor
England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993). For another study of the distinctive capacity of early modern theater to
balance paradoxes but from a non-materialist perspective, see Bryan Crockett, The Play of Paradox: Stage and
Sermon in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: U of Philadelphia P, 1995).
21
Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle, 7.
22
Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 2.
13
“Representation” is thus an all-important term for the presentation of belief in
Renaissance drama, made particularly prominent by the titular New Historicist journal. Yet while
representation is a useful model for de-centering master narratives and for drawing out the
material contingencies that contradict authorial genius, it has proven to be problematic as an
account of belief in Renaissance drama because of its own inherent binaries. Namely, for religion
to be re-presented on stage, it must be understood as originally present elsewhere, such that if
belief is represented here, then it cannot be present here. Representing belief means siphoning it
through the machine of theatricality, a process of foregrounding the human strategies and
material conditions behind what were once thought to be mysterious sacred phenomena. What
remains insufficiently questioned in this process is theatricality itself—whether the
impersonations and transparencies that append the theatrical were perceived by early modern
audiences as incompatible with belief. A second binary underlying the notion of theatrical
representation is that of established religious institutions and emergent media. Often religion is
exclusively classified in theater by the measure of the Book of Common Prayer, sermons by
high-profile preachers, or other major institutional disseminations, but if we are to challenge the
historical biases of master narratives then we should also allow performances to expand our
understanding of religious energy and audience belief from the bottom-up, defining the presence
of belief not only by its representations of established religion but by the first-person patterned
experiences of popular audiences.
However, as the archive for the popular experience of religion in theater is expectedly
sparse, expanding what counts as theatrical belief has taken its critical cues from a revised
understanding of what counts as historical religion. The work of Debora Shuger, in particular,
has proven invaluable for challenging the binaries implicit in critical habits of representation by
14
widening our understanding of orthodoxy.
23
In the apt summary of Jackson and Marotti, “Shuger
and others pointed out that if we were going to address the alterity of the Renaissance, we would
have to fully address religion,” which upon scrutiny turns out to be complex and changing.
24
Representation-minded performance studies have been so concerned with the influence of
alternative histories of religion outside the theater that they have often neglected the variety of
religious sensibilities within the theater. Complimenting Shuger’s work, others have sought to
extend Renaissance drama’s reach into religion. Claire McEachern, for instance, demonstrates
how the imagery of Renaissance drama and literature takes on a life of its own, influencing as
well representing English national identity.
25
Huston Diehl similarly argues for a dialectical
account of religion and drama, asserting that when the old ritualistic habits of mind dissolved
new ones emerged and manifested in theater, reinvented with a greater awareness of the
processes of representation and subjective introspection.
26
Still, arguing that mainstream early modern English Christianity was not opposed to
theater only refutes half of the evacuation thesis because while religion may not oppose theater,
theater may still debunk religion. Jeffrey Knapp addresses this problem by reading religion in
theater side-by-side with theatricality in early modern sermons. Knapp complains that “neither
Greenblatt nor Montrose . . . credits the established church with any cultural capital of its own”
with which to fill the vacuum left by the old established church, and he overhauls the assumption
that the church influences the theater only through propaganda. He writes: “the theater could be
envisaged as an aid to preaching, a model of religious conformity, a promoter of
23
Debora Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and Dominant Culture
(Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1997).
24
Jackson and Marotti, “The Turn to Religion,” 179.
25
Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590-1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996).
26
Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern
England (Ithica: Cornell UP, 1997), 5.
15
antisectarianism, and even a dispenser of teaching and sacraments rivaling the church.”
27
However, because of the prominence of preaching in Knapp’s comparison, his portrayal of
religion in theater is top-heavy with locating only those religious qualities in theater that can be
corroborated by reference to the established church. Regina Schwartz has also addressed the
theatrical side of the vacuum problem. She argues that the foreclosure of transubstantiation and
its sacramental metaphysics left Protestant England with a creative desire to encounter God
physically, and this desire is met by drama and poetry in themes of incarnated ideals—such as
the monarchy, justice, love, and monism.
28
Schwartz signals a strand within the “turn to religion” to interpret drama sacramentally.
Richard McCoy similarly advances the bodily interpretations of eucharistic aesthetic, finding in
Shakespeare “hints of Eucharistic miracle” and wondrous affect “akin” to what one may feel at
communion.
29
Likewise, T. G. Bishop writes that the “language of Shakespearean incarnation . .
. seeks a sacrament-like function which can express the life of the flesh, and inform that life with
its own vitality.”
30
Bishop, in fact, offers a strong, if somewhat vague, counter to the notion that
theater evacuates religion of its literal mysteries: “The plasticity of language [in Shakespeare]
and the mutability of experience are twin—or one—in their interinanimation. They are the vital
unity of a kind usefully imaginable through the older theological conception of the sign that
acts.” Additionally, taking up the broader “sacramental,” as opposed to just “eucharistic,” logic
of the sign that acts, David Coleman has argued that, far from being neutralized by theater, the
27
Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 2004), 8, 13.
28
Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics.
29
Richard McCoy, “Miracles and Mysteries in The Comedy of Errors,” in Ken Jackson and Arthur Marotti,
eds., Shakespeare and Religion: Early Modern and Postmodern Perspectives (South Bend: U of Notre Dame P,
2011), 91, 83.
30
T. G. Bishop, Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 87.
16
sacraments and English theater developed hand-in-hand through the Renaissance period.
31
The
two underwent parallel reforms, and thus the sacraments add sociological and thematic
complexity to drama’s representations of the sacred.
A noteworthy tension in the work of Schwartz, McCoy, Bishop, and Coleman is that
identifying sacramental resonances in drama can edge ironically close to the binaries underlying
the view that performance kills belief. Particularly in arguments that rely on comparing the affect
of the eucharistic miracle to audience affect in drama, criticism often measures belief in drama
by belief as it is defined in eucharistic discourses; and as a result the materialist understanding of
theatricality and evacuation lingers answered: do the transparencies and social conditions of
theater reveal the strategies behind religion and therefore neutralize the sacred in performance?
32
This question runs through the recent profusion of criticism studying the physical
conditions of theater, suggesting that the playhouse is a place where theatrical and not religious
things occur. Elizabeth Williamson examines religiously laden props and objects on the
Renaissance stage and attempts to more fully describe the sacred—especially Catholic—residue
of spirituality in performance, arguing that theaters “were taking advantage of audience
members’ residual interest in the materiality of religion, revealing ongoing contradictions
between post-Reformation theory and practice while taking full advantage of the highly visual,
31
David Coleman, Drama and the Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century England: Indelible Characters (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
32
There are, of course, many critics who prefer to explore religion in theater primarily on an intellectual level,
as do John Cox and Stanley Cavell, whose contribution to this discussion should not be understated. While scholars
like Cox who look for religion in Shakespeare at the level of “allusion” and not allegory do not engage the problem
of theatricality, they do expand the scope of what is religiously at stake in the intellectual world of Shakespeare. See
John Cox, Seeming Knowledge: Shakespeare and Skeptical Faith (Waco: Baylor UP, 2007), and Stanley Cavell,
Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987).
17
object-centered nature of their own medium.”
33
Still, whether religion survives the collisions of
old religious practice and the new drama is determined ultimately by the nature of theatrical
representation. Anthony Dawson has studied these collisions acutely and in recent years has
resasserted the evacuation thesis, stating forthrightly his opinion that “theater is a secular, and
secularizing, institution.”
34
Dawson attends to the material and social conditions of theater that
scholars like Williamson, Knapp, and Diehl had repurposed to argue for religion’s survival, but
he advances the evacuation thesis by characterizing Shakespearean theater as uninterested in
religion in any serious fashion and by admitting the predetermined secularism of a
representationalist model of criticism. Writing about the secularizing power of the Claudius’s
confession scene, Dawson says: “In general, of course, the play seeks a theatrical not a religious
effect. While the sort of representation we encounter here would not be possible without a sense
of being spiritually lost, its purpose is . . . entirely contained in its representation; it has no
further designs, no desire to move people to repentance or religious, as distinct from “poetic,”
faith. Belief, that is, is suspended.”
35
Dawson is aware of the recent turn toward “sacramental”
readings of Renaissance drama as a way of mystifying the power of theater, and he rebuts by
pointing specifically to theatrical representation as a historical secularizing medium. “Theatrical
belief replaces religious faith.” Dawson continues: “Brimful of religious thinking and
sacramental allusion, the theatre gains its effects by secularizing them, finding a new language to
33
Elizabeth Williamson, The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama (Burlington: Ashgate,
2009), 5.
34
Anthony B. Dawson, “Shakespeare and Secular Performance,” in Paul Yachnin and Patricia Badir, eds.,
Shakespeare and the Cultures of Performance (Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), 84.
35
Anthony B. Dawson, “Claudius at Prayer,” in Jane Hwang Degenhardt and Elizabeth Williamson, eds.,
Religion and Drama in Early Modern England: The Performance of Religion on the Renaissance Stage (Burlington:
Ashgate, 2011), 243, my italics.
18
give them an incarnated, that is to say, a fleshly life on the stage.
36
Dawson addresses the heart of
the vacuum problem: despite the presence of religious imagery, allusion, and eucharist-like
affect, the translation of religious presence to religious representation on the popular stage
undeniably pulls belief out from its conventionally established contexts and popularizes it.
In this dissertation, I take issue with the predicate of this argument—that the popularizing
of religion in theater suspends belief—and I want to be clear about the crux of the issue. The
survival of religion in Shakespearean theater and popular performance depends on two factors:
(1) where one locates the authoritative “presence” of religion and (2) whether Renaissance
theater accommodates the presence or re-presence of religion in a manner still consonant with
belief. In short, the question is not as much whether audiences believed in the sacred in theater
but whether Renaissance popular performances provided the grounds of belief.
The Grounds of Belief: A Description of Method
In scholarship on Renaissance performance and religion one sometimes finds interesting
statements that describe the sacred as chased out of theater or as eclipsed, as in Streete’s
description of the “increasingly distant divine object” in drama.
37
Similarly, Dawson’s account of
how theater transforms and thus kills its sacred content conjures Ovidian images of belief like
Philomela flying out of London’s Rose or Curtain theaters at the very moment that religion dons
costumes and impersonates itself before an audience. Belief in the abstract, of course, cannot be
measured, and so what such statements describe is in fact the audience’s perception of the sacred
in theater as an object of belief and the theater’s perception of itself as a medium for belief. Thus,
the image of belief distancing itself from drama illustrates a process wherein Renaissance
36
Dawson, “Shakespeare and Secular Performance,” 97.
37
Streete, Protestantism and Drama, 30.
19
audiences enter into a certain physical and imaginative environment where the sacred will be x-
rayed, in a sense, and therefore debunked. This iconoclastic understanding of theater is founded
on the assumption that objects of sacred belief in Renaissance culture are predominantly
mysterious and therefore fatally vulnerable to having the curtain opened on them and being made
transparent. This much is clear in Greenblatt’s increasingly mystifying vocabulary choices for
conveying the master narratives of literary history—from “monolithic entities,” to “totalizing
power,” to “mysterious perfection,” to “untranslatable formal perfection.”
38
Christianity, and in
particular the archive-dominant, regime-centered Protestant history of post-Reformation
England, is of course a prominent master narrative, and so these descriptions of the genius of
Shakespeare as understood from a monolithic historical perspective rightly characterize certain
traditional readings of Shakespeare’s genius as unknowable and—it goes without saying—
inattentive to the politics of theatrical representation. What seems to have happened, however, is
that religion as a subjective experience has been lumped together with religion as a master
discourse, and therefore belief has largely been assumed to be “mysterious” and “untranslatable”
just like its most prominent English institutional form in the period, the Church of England.
According to this reasoning, it follows that just as revealing the material contingencies hidden
beneath master narratives upends them by debunking their untranslatable opacity, so is religion
secularized when the theater unveils its symbols and other conditions of power. For instance, if
an emotion, prop, or narrative commonly invocative of religious belief is used patently to assist
theatrical impersonation, then that emotion, prop, or narrative ceases to accommodate or even
mediate belief.
38
Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 2-4.
20
I contend that this is an inadequate way of understanding belief in Renaissance
performance. Belief in the sacred is indeed contingent on material circumstances, but it is not
equivalent to a social status or even to the established institutions that govern religious belief.
Belief can be described from the top-down in religious charters and injunctions, in authorized
prayer books, and in doctrine, but belief also emerges from the bottom-up in cheap print, in the
idiosyncrasies of parishioners’ sermon notebooks, and in alehouse ballad performances. Belief is
even nourished in the estimated fifty million individual attendances at Renaissance England’s
secular stages, where, in addition to viewing religious dramatic content, audiences mingled with
crowds, heard spiritual songs, discussed religious opposition to theater, and engaged in
distinctive perceptual activities that purported much about general habits of thought and how the
sacred can be experienced bodily.
39
Still, the promotion and experience of belief also exists
somewhere in the middle, between the institution and the outright popular, in the social and
sometimes raucous atmospheres of sermons and at the biblical cycle plays that continued to be
performed in English towns late into the sixteenth century. Such events resulted from the popular
confluence of commerce, entertainment, advancement, power, sensuality, and theology—the last
of these not being the only origin of belief. Given these many correlatives to religion, it is
anything but apparent that the identity of belief depended on maintaining an attribute of absolute
mystery or monolithic rigidity.
To this point, consider “performativity” in its salient definition as a certain quality of
conspicuous presence: the quality of a thing’s presence insofar as it is presented. I prefer the term
“performativity” here to “theatricality” because it aims more basically at what happens to a thing
in performance and because it extends beyond theater. According to this definition, a performed
39
Andrew Gurr offers this estimate in Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England, 3
rd
ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2004), 69.
21
prayer, for example, is unlikely (though not impossibly) directed towards a divine audience
because it is preeminently presented to a human audience. It is given to the audience as an
illustration of prayer, but in order for the audience to accept the presence of prayer as illustrative
of a norm, exception, exemplar, or parody, the audience must at the very least concede the
prayer’s place in the formation of character and plot. A much larger interpretive jump is made,
on the other hand, when one takes the conspicuous presence of religion in performance to imply
its falseness. It does not follow that because a certain devotional exercise can be presented
conspicuously—and therefore transparently as a performative strategy—that all such devotional
exercises, including the one being performed, come under performative iconoclasm. On the
contrary, I would suggest that religion as conspicuously presented to an audience has the
potential to distribute belief into the imaginative and physical grounds of theater and to reconcile
belief to the human strategies of its production and presentation. This potential depends on how
early moderns conceived of the relation between performativity and belief.
The conversion of Theophilus in Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger’s 1620 The Virgin
Martyr offers a brief demonstration of the indeterminate nature of performativity as a way of
measuring the authenticity of a given presentation of the sacred. Near the end of the play, after
the martyrdom of the saintly Dorothea by the decree of her persecutor, Theophilus, the audience
is presented with a scene where true and false spirituality overlap in their respective theatrical
presentations. Theophilus has just converted to Christianity after being visited by the angel,
Angelo, who appears with music and gives him a basket of heavenly fruit, when Theophilus is
met by the demon, Harpax, whose presence is made known through the same music and
spectacle, making it difficult for Theophilus to differentiate the angel from the demon.
22
Theophilus’s musings in the interim bear out the ambiguities of performativity as it relates to
faith:
All this ground, methinks, is bloody,
And paved with thousands of those Christians’ eyes
Whom I have tortured; and they stare upon me.
What was this apparition? sure it had
A shape angelical. Mine eyes, though dazzled,
And daunted at first sight, tell me, it wore
A pair of glorious wings; yes, they were wings;
And hence he flew:—‘tis vanish’d! Jupiter,
For all my sacrifices done to him,
Never once gave me smile.—How can stone smile?
Or wooden image laugh? [music.] Ha! I remember
Such music gave a welcome to mine ear,
When the fair youth came to me:—‘tis in the air,
Or from some better place; a Power divine,
Through my dark ignorance, on my soul does shine,
And makes me see a conscience all stain’d o’er,
Nay, drown’d and damn’d for ever in Christian gore.
40
Immediately, Theophilus is startled by the diabolical laughter of Harpax who had been imitating
the music to which Angelo earlier appeared—“[within.] Ha, ha, ha!” Performativity, or
theatricality, is decidedly not a problem for Theophilus’s belief, given that it was the
40
Philip Massinger and Thomas Dekker, The Plays of Philip Massinger, vol. 1, 4 vols., 2
nd
ed. (London, 1813),
104-06.
23
performances of martyrdom and of Angelo’s miraculous appearance that led to his conversion.
Furthermore, notice the credence that Theophilus attributes to the spectacular when he
disparages his physical idols; Jupiter is an unworthy object of belief because his images cannot
perform and thus demonstrate their divine power. It is curious, then, that Massinger and Dekker
follow this familiar attack on idolatry with an instance of false theatricality, where Theophilus
mistakes demonic duplicity for an angelic spectacle. The playwrights make no attempt to obscure
the role of performativity in Harpax’s trickery, as is signaled by his bemused laughter. In fact,
the role of performativity in this scene is complicated even further by the extent to which
Theophilus falls for the trick, allowing the false music to incite spiritual introspection and even
conviction of sin—“makes me see a conscience all stain’d o’er.”
The effect that this topsy-turvy portrayal of performativity has on the audience is
complex. Eventually Theophilus realizes his mistake and chases Harpax away with a cross of
flowers, made from the miraculous bouquet that accompanied Angelo’s gift of fruit. Still, to an
extent, the scene unhinges the miraculous and spectacular performances of the divine that inspire
conversion and belief. As many critics have done, one could extract the ambiguity of
performativity in a scene like this, compare it to the many early modern attacks on theater as
idolatry, and speculate about contemporary perceptions of the relative earnestness or self-
criticism of the scene. I would, however, direct attention instead to the grounds of belief in the
scene in terms of the crossover between dramatized belief and audience belief. Consider the
many perceptual correlatives to the problem of performativity here. The music that deceives
Theophilus is also audible to the audience with an equally deceptive effect, as is the preceding
scene’s display of ventriloquism when the voice of the unseen Harpax is heard from one end of
the room and then instantly from the other. By the time Harpax reveals himself to be hellish—
24
“Enter HARPAX, in a fearful shape, fire flashing out of the Study”—the audience along with
Theophilus have become alienated in the performative environment, disorienting the fictional
space of Theophilus’s study as a place of theater-like trickery, cross-fertilized with the theatrical
space of stage device and dramaturgical convention.
41
The sacred appears in this scene in the
forms of character conversion and angelic miracle, but neither is presented as distant or
mysterious. To the contrary, Theophilus’s faith is demystified through the duplicitous
theatricality of Harpax, and by extension the religious narrative, as an object of belief itself, is
made transparent and even suspect. Yet just as Theophilus is able to embrace the ambiguity of
performativity and ultimately allow it to inspire his belief, so does the theater reinforce the tie
between performativity and religion—pulled taught with tension to support belief.
To be certain, the Renaissance stage would add a plethora of sensory and perceptual
variables—distractions, player-crowd interactions, public playing conditions, and satire, to name
a few. One aim of this dissertation is to look in-depth at several performances of the sacred and
to account for some of these variables. As I will show, early modern English religion did not
require its objects of belief to be opaque, untouched, and untranslatable but instead respected the
phenomenal conditions of belief. By “phenomenal,” I refer to the conditions of audience
consciousness, bodily experience, and perspective that frame the appearance of dramatized
objects. A relatively small body of scholarship has emerged that uses principles of
phenomenology to address the conditions of Renaissance drama by attending to how the
embodied experience of drama influences its meanings. Part of the effect of this work is to
describe various continua between subject, object, space, and time in the historical experience of
theater, resulting in a portrayal of dramatic material that resists being objectified as if it were an
41
Massinger and Dekker, The Plays, 106.
25
object of empirical science. Recently, this body of criticism has been described as “historical
phenomenology,” drawing on continental philosophy of consciousness to ground the
understanding of performance in its perceptual and intellectual conditions. “Historical
phenomenology” as a term of literary criticism first appears in Bruce R. Smith’s 2000 essay,
“Premodern Sexualities,” in which Smith describes “an erotics of reading” that resists what he
perceives to be an overly objectifying critical habit of treating texts as objects to be “seen,
known, mastered.”
42
He elaborates on this in another essay, contending with Derridean
“logocentricism” which he describes as the isolation of semantic meaning from its physical,
dramaturgical, and physiological contexts and, instead, attempts “to reconstruct bodily
experience in the past on historically informed terms.”
43
Historical phenomenology, he argues,
attempts to restore the relevance of historical subjects’ first-person emotional and sensory
experiences of texts and plays to our interpretations of them—this in opposition to
methodologies that assert “the radical differentness of the early modern past,” a category in
which we might place the representational model.
44
What historical phenomenology especially
adopts from the philosophies of Edmund Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and others, according to this
formulation, is a suspicion of concluding too quickly about what a thing is, a text is, a symbol is.
There are ways of knowing literary objects outside of the critical laboratories of semantic logic
and historical contingency, and, for Smith, some of these ways can be utilized by treating
embodied experiences of texts and plays—passions and sensations—as preeminent to a strict
subject-object understanding of them.
Smith spearheads a collection of recent advances to a long tradition of phenomenological
literary studies, and I would like to suggest that historical phenomenology’s primary inheritance
42
Bruce R. Smith, “Premodern Sexualities,” PMLA 115, no. 3 (2000): 325.
43
Bruce R. Smith, “Hearing Green: Logomarginality in Hamlet,” EMLS 7, no. 1 (2001): 5.2.
44
Bruce R. Smith, Phenomenal Shakespeare (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 23.
26
from its precursors is most significantly by way of the phenomenological practice of description.
“Phenomenology is descriptive psychology,” writes Husserl in his early work, Logical
Investigations.
45
By “descriptive,” Husserl means the literal description of an object as one
experiences it, without previously disqualifying certain aspects of the experience as relevant and
others as irrelevant. Phenomenology is called descriptive psychology in order to connect the
science of observation to the conscious person who does the observing, and, likewise, such
psychology is called descriptive in order to reinforce the continuity between a conscious person
and her objects of consciousness. In other words, knowledge is neither merely sensory reception
nor cognitive wiring. Thus, the object of phenomenological description is the intentional object
as intended, that is, accounting for characteristics both of the object and of the psychological
structures and intentions that grasp it.
There are of course critical precedents to historical phenomenology, and understanding
these helps illuminate the nuance of more recent studies in drama. Beginning in the mid-
twentieth century, descriptive psychology became popular as a methodology for reading
literature. Phenomenological literary criticism—and the word “criticism” should invoke some
comparison to American New Criticism—interpreted literary works as descriptions of
consciousness, formalized through genre, narrative, and form. For example, in his study of
Dickens, J. Hillis Miller reads characters’ actions as psychological variances of thought about
certain themes: a “kind of insubstantial fabric, a psychic rather than objective phenomenon.”
46
Similarly, Paul Brodtkorb, in his well known study of Moby Dick, Ishmael’s White World, argues
that Melville weaves patterns of Ishmael’s consciousness into the novel’s themes—the “World,”
45
Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 1, trans. J. N. Findlay, ed. Dermot Moran (London:
Psychology P, 2001), 176.
46
J. Hillis Miller, Charles Dickens: the World of His Novels (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1958), 19.
27
“Body,” “Others,” and “Time.” The job of the critic, Brodtkorb says, is to define the “subjective
literary universe” of an author or character as it is revealed in symbols.
47
Robert Magliola
usefully summarizes the aim of this phenomenological literary criticism as uncovering the
“experiential patterns” through which the protagonist or speaker structures the world of the
literary work.
48
In terms of description, these phenomenological literary critics treat the text itself
as a reflective description of the author’s consciousness. They seek to interpret how texts
perform a kind of imaginative variance on themes legible in the experiential patterns of narrative
and voice.
More recent work has moved away from the quasi-formalist tendencies of this criticism
and has applied principles of phenomenology in particular to performance. This is because,
unlike the phenomenological literary critics of earlier decades, critics doing work in or similar to
historical phenomenology are invested in the histories of culture, power, and contingency, and
since historical theater situates performances in public settings—in spaces filled with bodies,
perspectives, and environments—these contingencies are expanded to include the physical and
perceptual conditions of dramatic knowledge. A recently compiled volume entitled Knowing
Shakespeare addresses the popular topic of the body in early modern performance but redirects
focus to the body as a sensing subject and thus as a phenomenological site of “interrelationship
among multiple discourses that run diffusely across, over, and around” its continuous acts of
47
Paul Brodtkorb Jr., Ishmael’s White World: A Phenomenological Reading of Moby Dick (New Haven: Yale
UP, 1965), 143.
48
Robert R. Magliola, Phenomenology and Literature: An Introduction (West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1977),
13. Magliola’s is an excellent and extensive review of mid-twentieth-century phenomenological literary criticism. A
notable addition to the Miller and Brodtkorb is the relatively more recent work by Maurice Natanson, especially The
Erotic Bird: Phenomenology in Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998).
28
perception.
49
The titular reference to “knowledge” is, I would add, vexed in this book, as its
phenomenological approach suggests an attention to attitudes of sense perception and cognition
before they are intellectually justified as known. Somatic awareness, in this way, is a “condition”
for the action of drama. Hence, Julia Reinhard Lupton describes phenomenology, especially as it
relates to the study of Shakespeare, as a viewpoint that “always concerns the subject as a point of
reference, but often within an arena constituted by the attentive presence of other people as well
as the draw of things.” “Drama and phenomenology are thus closely linked,” she continues,
“since each makes the company of others into a condition of action.”
50
Lupton is especially
sensitive to the physical objects and sensations of theater as things to think through. Even on the
stage, objects of sensation contain, in an audience’s engagement of them, the intentions and
cognitive habits of their beholders. Thus it is that a dramatic element such as belief cannot be
evacuated from its representations on stage as long as those representations are still present as
objects or words, as bodily proximities and human relations.
There is a sense, moreover, among scholars of Renaissance theater that the period
conceived of the physical environment of the stage in a similar way, as continuous through its
bodies and physical perspectives with its articulation of ideas, such as we have seen in
Theophilus’s inability to escape the epistemic reality of performativity, confronted with
conspicuous signs every direction he turns. Michael Witmore suggests that even the metaphysics
of drama in the Renaissance were understood always in their relation to physical dramaturgy:
Shakespeare did his metaphysical work with actors, sound, spaces, and things. He
used the specific resources of the theatre—that is, its physical limitations; its
49
Shankar Raman and Lowell Gallagher, eds., Knowing Shakespeare: Senses, Embodiment, and Cognition
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 3.
50
Julia Reinhard Lupton, Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life (Chicago: U of Chicago P,
2011), 15.
29
reliance on sound, speech and gesture; its indebtedness in performance to the
passage of chronological time—to say equally specific things about the
relatedness of beings in the world and their mutual participation in some larger,
constantly changing whole.
51
In the words of Timothy Morton, phenomenology as applied to the study of history “attempts to
insert the conscious, feeling subject into a world with which it interacts.”
52
In a significant sense,
entering a Renaissance performance space necessarily means entering deeper into the world of
things.
This perspective on Renaissance drama as a denser microcosm of the relations between
objects and people has informed some—though very few— illuminating engagements of belief
in performance. Sarah Beckwith has addressed the topic of eucharistic meaning and belief in
drama, thinking phenomenologically about the vacuum problem in conversation with the work of
McCoy, Schwartz, Bishop, Coleman, Greenblatt, and Dawson. Beckwith posits a view of
“sacramental theater,” but instead of locating sacramentality in audience affect she locates it in
theater’s capability for heightening the audience’s awareness of “how we are present to each
other” in “each other’s opportunities and limits.”
53
As an overtly inadequate container for the
divine, the eucharist provides a symbolic model for drama’s ability to incite belief. That is, a
phenomenology of eucharistic meaning suggests that dramatic signs such as the host are not
51
Michael Witmore, Shakespeare’s Metaphysics (London: Continuum, 2008), 6.
52
Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge: Harvard UP,
2007), 83.
53
Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003), xv.
30
merely represented symbols but share “a natural or metonymic connection with somatic
experience.”
54
Moreover, what Beckwith and Witmore’s emphases on the confines of theater reveal is
an understanding that the diffuse and artificial atmospheres of Renaissance performance is not in
contradiction historically to the presence of religion because it is within the dramaturgical
contingencies of drama that belief takes shape. Belief not only survives but thrives in this
performative atmosphere of heightened perceptual relations because, in the words of Merleau-
Ponty, perception “asserts more things than it grasps”—including one’s self-awareness when one
is attuned “to the interaction between the conscious and the sensual aspects of a particular
phenomenological moment.”
55
James Knapp elaborates on the instances when this
phenomenological moment involves religious belief, comparing the philosopher Jean-Luc
Marion’s analysis of the icon to religion in historical theater. Totally unlike the understanding
that performativity dispels belief, Knapp argues that religion in theater works like an icon that
must in fact be evacuated “of its purported representational characteristics” in order to convey
“the trace of the invisible” sacred object.
56
Marion himself stresses the importance of kenosis, or
emptying, in the icon’s transmission of the sacred:
The icon, therefore, is derived from the kenosis of the image. . . . The self-
affirmation of the image, like all others, yields only in front of an abandonment: it
is precisely because the icon is not given for itself, but rather undoes its own
54
Smith, “Premodern Sexualities,” 326.
55
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Routledge, 2002),
421.
56
James Knapp, “Penitential Ethics in Measure for Measure,” in Jackson and Marotti, Shakespeare and
Religion, 261.
31
prestige, that it perhaps demands veneration—veneration that it does not seize but
rather lets pass through it to the invisible prototype.
57
In other words, like icons, performances depend on the conspicuousness of their theatricality in
order to mediate an experience of belief. As in the example of a performed prayer, it is the patent
inauthenticity of the prayer being presented that awakens the audience’s attention to the excesses
of prayer as a devotional activity—excesses that spill even into the environment and spectacles
of the playhouse or other performance venue. Prayer, in this example, may become present to
audiences in a form heightened by the performance’s physical and psychological conditions,
infusing it with social relevance within a playhouse crowd or perhaps instilling it with bodily
meaning as the body-in-prayer is made spectacular.
The historical criticism of Lupton, Beckwith, and Knapp advance Smith’s focus on the
embodied experience of historical texts and performances by describing the phenomenology of
human conviction and devotion, still maintaining an awareness of the somatic engagement of
ideas but also attending to phenomenology’s transcendental aims. Exploring belief in
performance is a transcendental endeavor because it requires explicating an attitude (believing)
towards a performance as it appears in its physical, perceptual, and intellectual criteria. With
specific regard for the unique environments and epistemological thought of Renaissance
England, I summarize these intentional criteria as the “grounds” of belief. This dissertation does
not attempt to validate or prove the tenants of phenomenology through the historical study of
performance; rather, it generally adopts the phenomenological critique of empirical psychology
(what Husserl describes as “psychologism”) as well as its sensitivity to the conditions of
57
Jean-Luc Marion, The Crossing of the Visible, trans. James K. A. Smith (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003), 62.
32
knowledge. Insofar as it relates to the emergence of belief in Renaissance performance, I proffer
the following four principles as especially pertinent to the elucidation of the grounds of belief:
1. Belief is preeminent to knowledge. As I discussed in the opening of this dissertation,
one’s intentional engagement with a spectacle involves belief before it involves
knowledge. Meaning emerges, I argue, among the experiential conditions of a
performance, between and through bodies, environments, categorical intentions, and an
audience’s self-awareness. This is not to neglect the material conditions of production
that mediate the creation and knowledge of art; it is rather to acknowledge that the first-
person experience of a performance implicates an audience member in her habits of
perception, cognitive intention, self-orientation, and somatic awareness—her unjustified
knowledge or, as it were, her belief—before and among the power conditions that justify
belief and turn it into knowledge.
2. The representation of belief does not preclude its presence. The representation of religion
and the presence of belief are two different phenomena, the former often associated with
identifiably religious objects and allusions and the latter implicit in an audience’s act of
recognizing the sacred as such in its conspicuous language, performativity, and setting on
stage. According to the dominant historicist-materialist methodology, to describe a thing
as represented means that its actual existence is elsewhere, if anywhere. Recent historical
exploration of popular piety has proven otherwise: that the popular representation of a
thing like religion involves a dialectic between institutional proscriptions for authorized
belief and the malleability of devotion that grows within the contexts and ulterior motives
33
of popular production. The presence of a religious object on stage may indicate the
unlikelihood that it will be simultaneous used for its conventional religious function, but
as I have argued, the conspicuousness of strategy and performativity—as in the icon—
does not nullify its potential for affecting belief in nuanced ways.
3. Belief is perceptually continuous. Restated in simple maxims, environments matter; a
foreground exists at the expense of a background; and the medium is the message. Yet in
drama the medium, imagined as a singular apparatus, includes the overlapping fields of
imagination and theatrical scaffolding that stretch from the mind of the actor to the bodies
of the audience. These loosely philosophical maxims are meant with pre-modernity in
mind, remembering that Descartes and his legacy had not taken hold by the time of the
composition of the performances I examine. The statement that belief is perceptually
continuous, moreover, is different from the statement that knowledge is epistemologically
or culturally continuous, a claim that is similarly pre-modern and under which we might
place arguments such as those of Michael Schoenfeldt and Gail Kern Paster who
demonstrate the continuities between physiology and the cultural validation of knowledge
of human beings.
58
The statement that belief is perceptually continuous refers to the
phenomenal process whereby an object’s appearing as such and a perceiver’s
consciousness of it occur simultaneously. As an object and medium for belief, fiction
involves unique modes of perceiving and appearing, as Husserl explains:
58
Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser,
Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999); Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body:
Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004).
34
It would be the task of phenomenology, therefore, to investigate how
something perceived, something remembered, something phantasied,
something pictorially represented, something symbolized looks as such,
i.e., to investigate how it looks by virtue of that bestowal of sense and of
characteristics which is carried out intrinsically by the perceiving, the
remembering, the phantasying, the pictorial representing, etc., itself.
59
Insofar as it may occur in or through a performance, therefore, belief depends on the
perspectival grounds in which a phenomenon unfolds. Do environmental distractions
incite a reactionary attitude of focus that in turn affects the perceived coherence of
theological content? Or, in a performance of confession, does the centrifugal focus of an
audience’s gaze in a round theater bestow a “sense” of privacy or honesty, perhaps
shaping its theatricality as earnest, satirical, voyeuristic, and so on?
60
4. Creativity expands the grounds of belief. Performativity—the quality of a presented
thing as conspicuously presented—opens performative content to more varieties of
perceptual recognition than occur in a non-performative context. That is, a performance
of religious devotion carries traces of the imagined natural context of devotion in addition
to its performative contexts, and so belief as an attitude of perception is tested among a
variety of intentions—“something phantasied, something pictorially represented,
something symbolized . . . as such.” This expansion of the grounds of belief derives from
59
Edmund Husserl, “Pure Phenomenology, Its Method, and Its Field of Investigation,” in Husserl: Shorter
Works, trans. and ed. Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston (Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1981), 12.
60
I have explored this question in Hamlet in an essay: “Describing the Sense of Confession in Hamlet,” in The
Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies, vol. 2, eds. Paul Cefalu, Gary Kuchar, and Bryan Reynolds
(New York: Palgrave, 2012), forthcoming.
35
a phenomenology of the imagination. Husserl asserts that literature has a unique role in
assisting the philosopher in phenomenological description because aesthetic texts
augment the content of a given intention, such as belief. Artful language, in Merleau-
Ponty’s words, grants the listener “access to a thought to which he was until then
indifferent or even opposed.”
61
This is because fiction and poetry—where one expects
poetic license—are laden with far less empirical baggage than “natural” perception and
thus carry fewer presuppositions about what a thing is prior to describing it.
62
In fact,
literature executes a practice of phenomenological reflection that Husserl calls
“imaginative variance”—the process of thought that often causes philosophers to say
things like, “Suppose there is a . . . .” To aid the description of phenomena, and for the
sake of bracketing one’s presuppositions, it is useful to vary “the perceptual object . . .
with a completely free optionalness, yet in such a manner that we keep perception fixed
as perception of something, no matter what.”
63
Poetry, Husserl says, can be more useful
than one’s own spontaneous imaginative variance:
In respect of the originality of the new formations, of the abundance of
detailed features, and the systematic continuity of the motive forces
involved, they greatly excel the performances of our own fancy, and
moreover, given the understanding grasp, pass through the suggestive
61
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception: and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology,
the Philosophy of Art, History, and Politics, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1964), 8.
62
“The Eidos, the pure essence, can be exemplified intuitively in the data of experience, data of perception,
memory, and so forth, but just as readily also in the mere data of fancy (Phantasie). Hence, with the aim of grasping
an essence itself in its primordial form, we can set out from corresponding empirical intuitions, but we can also set
out just as well from non-empirical intuitions, intuitions that do not apprehend sensory existence, intuitions rather
‘of a merely imaginative order.’” Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W.
R. Boyce Gibson (London: Gorge Allen & Unwin, 1931), 57.
63
Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 70.
36
power of the media of artistic presentation with quite special ease into
perfectly clear fancies.
64
In addition to captivating its audience, a performance’s qualities of design and
conspicuous presentation provide the historical critic with a greater sample of
psychological content to describe: content that forms a “systematic continuity” between
appearance and perception but that nonetheless constellates around distinct objects of
belief. In a sense, the performance of religion slows down the audience’s habits of belief
by expanding what counts as belief. It shows that objects of belief are subject to the same
psychological and perceptual conditions to which fiction is subject—i.e., environments,
marginalia, types of intentionality, etc.
Belief, then, is a concept of engagement. Consider, for example, an early modern
churchgoers’ experience of psalm singing. The parishioner may indeed have justified opinions
(knowledge) about the event: she might claim to know the promises of God expressed in the
Psalm to be reliable, or she might claim to know the religious ethics of psalm singing as a
liturgical activity. However, her belief in the event encompasses much more. Belief exists also
on the levels of attitude and bodily comportment, in one’s self-awareness through speech and
hearing in an acoustic space, and in the liturgical disposition implied by the tonal song. For
example, the different experiences of word recognition, rhythm, and affect in a given song
style—i.e., polyphony, plainsong, or melisma—imply different dispositions of belief that might
correspond to unique correlative virtues. For instance, a melismatic drawn-out chant might
tacitly encourage introspection and bodily stillness, impacting one’s consciousness of, and
64
Husserl, Ideas, 201,
37
therefore belief in, the divine. Marion is once again helpful for identifying the attitude of belief
as it exists before becoming justified as knowledge. Belief is not characterized, he says, as an
affirmation of religious evidence or as a way of compensating for a deficit of evidence. This
would be to relegate the sacred to the status of scientific knowledge. Instead, the phenomenology
of belief focuses on the attitude of the believer because her object of belief exceeds and saturates
her capacities of understanding and knowledge.
What we lack in order to believe is quite simply one with what we lack in order to
see. Faith foes not compensate, either here or anywhere else, for a defect of
visibility: on the contrary, it allows reception of the intelligence of the
phenomenon and the strength to bear the glare of its brilliance. Faith does not
manage the deficit of evidence—it alone renders the gaze apt to see the excess of
the pre-eminent saturated phenomenon, the Revelation.
65
This is not to avoid the question by deferring to transcendence, but, quite the opposite, it is to
define belief by one’s contact with the sacred’s immanent symbols and manifest objects,
explicitly poised not as representations of things known but as signs that reflect back to the
disposition of the believer. For Renaissance drama, even on the secular stage, this expands belief
into the audience’s activities of perception, and in such performative contexts, this perceptivity is
heightened because objects become more immanent. Objects are defamiliarized as objects,
bodies as bodies, spectacles as spectacles, and religion as religion.
So we come full circle to the conspicuousness of performance. I argue that by its acts of
conspicuous presence and by its reflection back upon the perceptual attitudes of its audience,
65
Jean-Luc Marion, “They Recognized Him; and He Became Invisible to Them,” Modern Theology 18, no. 2
(2002): 150.
38
Renaissance performances disperse religious awareness into their phenomenal grounds and thus
awaken the possibilities of belief in them.
Shakespeare and the Other Performance Genres
Although it engages the critical genre of Shakespeare studies, this dissertation includes in-depth
examinations of several neglected performance genres as case studies of popular performativity
and religion. These performance genres—sermons, Corpus Christi theater, and godly ballads—
represent a range of performativity and also a range in terms of their status as religious genres,
both in content and environment. The sermon is perhaps the most overtly religious of these
performances, though, as I aim to show, it is still densely embedded in ambient and rhetorical
qualities of performativity. On the opposite end, godly ballads might be considered the most
popular or secular of these performance genres. They are essentially street performances that
wear their popular motives on their sleeves, or purses, as it were. My intention is to avoid
making heterogeneous claims about the presence of religion in all three genres, so as to highlight
the variety of phenomenal angles from which to describe belief. The inclusion of other
performance genres is also designed to tease out the grounds of belief in Shakespeare, here
represented by Henry V and Hamlet. These two plays are particularly iconic in their critical
popularity as well as in their icon-likeness, each crowded with religious imagery and allusion.
For these same reasons, however, the plays offer a unique opportunity to challenge some
traditional interpretations by attending to their conditioning of belief. As a way of tying
Shakespeare to the lesser studied performance genres, I focus specifically on aspects of
performativity in Henry V and Hamlet—respectively, the ceremonial phenomena of Renaissance
theater and the ways that Renaissance fiction composes the pursuit of belief.
39
These five chapters are structured by Shakespeare’s plays as bookends. They begin by
thinking about Shakespeare’s most famous history play as a ceremonial event of sorts, and they
end by treating Shakespeare’s perhaps most famous tragedy as an epistemological epic where
knowledge is a problem rather than a solution. A chapter on the Chester Mystery Cycle begins
the triad of chapters in the middle, so placed because English mystery plays established the most
important precedent for performed religion in later Renaissance drama. The order of the two
subsequent chapters—on sermongoing in Donne’s London and popular devotion in early modern
ballad performance—is not chronological but instead seeks to juxtapose and compare the two
genres. Ironically, whereas the overtly religious venues of Donne’s sermons prove to be
distracted and diffuse, the street environments of early modern godly ballads prove to contribute
to a sense of focus and religious unity.
Chapter One, “The Experience of Ceremony in Henry V,” challenges the traditional
bifurcated reading of King Hal as either a Machiavellian mastermind or a Protestant hero by
describing the vexed question of ceremony in the play insofar as it is informed by the
ceremonialism of Shakespearean theater. Taking cues from both Henry and the play’s Chorus, I
describe the phenomena of theater—character, rhetoric, stage, environment—as presented in a
state of perpetual becoming, a kind of gerundial transparency that reveals its own strategies of
theatrical and ceremonial mediation. In the words of the Prologue, this is the paradox of
theatrical “cipher,” containing nothing as an object in itself but—like the icon—purporting the
potential for tremendous inspiration when presented to an audience. This chapter sets the stage
for the grounds of belief in theater by drawing out the religious valences of theatrical ceremony
and by demonstrating how attention to the phenomenal qualities of the stage can reorient
radically the recognition of audience and character belief.
40
Chapter Two, “How to Believe in the Chester Mystery Cycle: The Theme of
Immanence,” inherits the first chapter’s emphasis on the gerundial face of things and argues for
the centrality of immanent experience to the presence of religion in the cycle. The Chester Cycle
was comprised of a three-day festival of performances acted on mobile carriages, depicting the
biblical narrative from “The Fall of Lucifer” to “The Last Judgment.” Individual pageants were
funded, produced, and acted by guilds. These plays were not only entertainments but were
opportunities for the guilds to fashion an identity of spirituality and civic generosity. However,
such a civic context, I suggest, does not detract from the robust experience of sacredness that the
plays offer. Specifically, they assimilate their festive and communal atmosphere into their telling
of the biblical narrative, including its dramatic conflicts as well as its moments of transcendence.
Thus, the experience of belief that the plays incite draws attention to the perceptual activities of
sight and touch, challenging audiences to embrace the production’s artificiality and conspicuous
performativity as qualities of—and not detriments to—belief.
Chapter Three, “God’s Idioms: ‘Sermon-like’ Belief in Donne’s London Sermons,”
brings the first two chapters’ insights on theatrical environment and immanence to bear on the
unique shape of belief in John Donne’s prominent sermon events. The effect of Protestantism's
heightened belief in the sacred “Word” on seventeenth-century London's bustling sermon culture
has long been studied. Yet what has not received adequate attention is the reverse influence: how
the prominent culture of early modern sermons affected the shape of religious belief. Using a
1628 sermon delivered by Donne at St. Paul's Cathedral as a touchstone, this chapter proffers a
characterization of “sermon-like belief”—that is, the ways that the performative, environmental,
and idiomatic qualities of the sermongoing experience shaped religious devotion.
41
Chapter Four, “‘Ballads! hark, hark!’: The Performance of Belief in Early Modern Godly
Ballads,” transitions from looking at the idiomatic character of belief in an overtly sacred venue
to exploring its adaptability in the street performances of ballads. Although godliness was one of
the more prevalent ballad themes, critics have had difficulty taking the religious sensibilities of
ballads seriously. This is because ballads, perhaps more than any other popular performance
genre in early modern England, are troubled with myriad ulterior conditions, such as the market,
propaganda, unoriginality, excessive conventionality, and their distracting and secular
performance venues. I suggest, however, that if we understand belief to be an activity of
engagement, then the many popular appropriations of ballads should not be understood as
neutralizing their ability to constitute an experience of godliness for their auditors. I show how
the composite identity of religion in ballads as they appear in performance locates the unity of
belief in the perceptual activities of the audience—in the very activities of stopping to hear a
ballad, holding the broadsheet, recognizing its conventions, paying the balladeer, and reciting the
song at home. As is the case with Donne’s sermons, belief is distributed into the performative
conditions of the genre and then refocused by the audience into a coherent and persistent
experience of faith.
Lastly, Chapter Five, “Hamlet and the Problem of Interiority,” argues that the conditions
of belief analyzed in the first four chapters are contained, in a sense, in the phenomenology of
Renaissance fiction, or “conceit,” as Hamlet puts it. Far from evacuating performed religion of
its capacity for belief, I will have aimed to show that Renaissance performativity engenders
belief in often improvised ways, drawing audiences out into various performance environments
and thus subjecting character, dramatic conflict, and theme to theatrical transparency. In this
chapter I consider how Hamlet, in particular, is drawn out into his own performative
42
environment and kept from retreating into an internal mental space by the phenomenal
framework of fiction. In response to the problem of interiority, like the theatergoer, Hamlet is
forced to believe things—the Ghost, his duty, the divine, his own cognition—in improvised
ways, in moments of contact and without pretending to achieve perfect clarity and distinctness of
internal thought. Hamlet thus offers an ideal opportunity to situate the phenomenology of
Renaissance performance historically. Far from being on a trajectory towards the empirical
skepticism of Descartes, Hamlet celebrates the mixture of subject and object in activities of
believing; it embraces the creativity and spontaneity, and even the obscurity and mental illness,
at play when one believes through performance.
43
CHAPTER ONE
THE EXPERIENCE OF CEREMONY IN HENRY V
O pardon, since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million,
And let us, ciphers to this great account,
On your imaginary forces work.
(Henry V, Prologue)
66
In the Prologue of Henry V, the Chorus’s “crooked” (curved, bent) O shape before “pardon” here
and in the first line of the play is a paradoxical symbol of emptiness and wealth.
67
The double o’s
of “crooked” just four words later insinuate a playful ownership of this paradox, with the “us” of
line 17 perhaps also referring to the printed figures on the page that, like printed numbers,
acquire value by adding “ciphers” (zeros) to them. In Renaissance England, a cipher was a
conspicuous trope for visual nothingness. Figurative uses often adopted derogatory meanings.
Sometimes, ciphers are flatterers who, though “nothing of themselues,” yet “puffe men vp” like
added zeros, or, as in one Protestant sermon, ciphers are those who “take a roume” in the church
pew but “signifie nothing” because they “hatest to be reformed.”
68
Such is one meaning of the
Chorus’s confession that drama is not real life, just merely a cipher, often understood to
foreshadow King Henry’s revelation of the emptiness of monarchy’s “idol ceremony” and his
confession that his authority is merely a cipher. The problem that has always haunted this
interpretation of Harry as an iconoclast of ceremonial authority is its nearness to interpreting him
66
All references to Henry V are from: William Shakespeare, King Henry V, ed. T. W. Craik (London: Arden
Shakespeare, 1995). References to the play will occur within the text in Act, Scene, Line(s) format. Prologue 15-18.
67
For more on the paradox of ciphers, see Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of
the Paradox (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966), and Miriam Jacobson, “The Elizabethan Cipher in
Shakespeare’s Lucrece,” Studies in Philology 107, no. 3 (2010): 336-59.
68
George Benson, A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse the Seauenth of May, M.DC.IX (London, 1609), 81;
Henry Smith, The sermons of Maister Henrie Smith Gathered into One Volume (London, 1593), 645. A shorter
version of this chapter is forthcoming in Studies in English Literature.
44
also as an iconoclast of theatrical ceremony, as condemning all of the physical and ideal
materials from which we get Henry V. Moreover, that the play is saturated with questions of
ceremony makes the jump from Henry-as-iconoclast to Shakespeare-as-iconoclast all too easy,
which fits unnervingly well into Stephen Gosson’s puritanical charge never to forget that a
player is really a false “cypher”: “if anye Player belie me in your hearing vpon the stage, you
would rather consider of the person than of the speach, for a Player is like to a Marchants finger,
that standes sometime for a thousande, sometime for a cypher, and a Player must stand as his
parte fals, sometime for a Prince sometime for a peasant.”
69
For Gosson, and problematically for
Shakespeare, the Chorus’s identification of “us” as ciphers might imply duplicity and emptiness.
Yet if we consider the “wooden O,” with “the girdle of these walls” and its “swelling
scene,” then we can also take the “crooked figure” to be the Chorus player himself, his bending
body and the curved mouth that enunciates O’s, as well as his environment and his voice
(Prologue 13, 19, 4). In light of the paradox of this embodied cipher, what Bruce Smith calls a
“semantic emptiness … [that] stands as testimony to … embodied fullness,” it is less plausible to
view the Chorus’s cipher as a sincere, or even merely ironic, confession of vacancy.
70
Put
simply, the wooden cipher of the round theater is filled with things, sounds, and the experiences
of people—the grounds of belief for theatrical and religious ceremonialism alike. We would do
well, then, to include cipher’s other noteworthy meaning. Besides being a zero, an encryption,
and an empty symbol, a cipher is also an exposition. Especially in its use as a verb—“To cipher
what is writ in learned books”—a cipher is also the key to a code; it supplies meaning where
69
Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions (London, 1582), A8v.
70
Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: Univ.
of Chicago Press, 1999), 14.
45
meaning is hidden.
71
This latter meaning is notably positive rather than derogatory. In fact,
ciphering a thing is often the opposite activity to iconoclasm. To cipher is to illuminate the
substance of something that seems merely ceremonial. If Shakespeare has this meaning in mind
in his treatment of monarchical as well as theatrical ceremony in Henry V, then we might expect
something other than iconoclasm from its protagonist.
This chapter disputes one popular understanding of Henry as “a pattern of Protestant
monarchy” who strips the altar of his kingly ceremony in order to inspire his troops to victory
over the French.
72
Such interpretations hinge on discovering either a major transformation in
Harry’s character, with its climax in the soliloquy of Act Four, or a pragmatic Machiavellian
duplicity.
73
In contrast, I argue that in so transparently putting the audience’s “imaginary forces
[to] work” in collaboration with theatrical ceremony and its correlative “idol ceremony,” the play
71
Katherine Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen, eds., Shakespeare’s Poems: Venus and Adonis, The Rape
of Lucrece, and the Shorter Poems (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2007), 305; Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed., s.v.
"cipher, cypher, n,” and “cipher, cypher, v.”
72
David Womersley, Divinity and State (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010), 332. With Womersley’s, the three most
comprehensive studies of Henry V and ceremony are chap. 1 of W. Gordon Zeeveld, The Temper of Shakespeare’s
Thought (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1974); chap. 4 of Richard F. Hardin, Civil Idolatry: Desacralizing and
Monarchy in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton (Newark DE: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1992); and chap. 4 Knapp,
Shakespeare’s Tribe. Of these four, only Zeeveld argues that Henry fully embraces his ceremonial role.
Contrariwise, Hardin and Womersley read Henry as an ideal Protestant king and iconoclast of sorts while Knapp
lands somewhere in between but emphasizes Henry’s anti-materialism in a Protestant vein. A short but insightful
study of the iconoclastic elements of Henry V and its attention to staging and imagination is James R. Siemon,
Shakespearean Iconoclasm (Berkeley: U of California P, 1985), 76-113.
73
Other claims that Henry undergoes a conversion/transformation include: Maurice Hunt, Shakespeare's
Religious Allusiveness: Its Play and Tolerance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); Constance Jordan, “Henry V and the
Tudor Monarchy,” in Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion, ed. Garret A. Sullivan (New York:
Oxford Univ. Press, 2006), 108-19; Eric La Guardia, “Ceremony and History: The Problem of Symbol from Richard
II to Henry V,” in Pacific Coast Studies in Shakespeare, ed. Waldo McNeir and Thelma N. Greenfield (Eugene:
Univ. of Oregon Press, 1966), 68-88; Richard C. McCoy, “‘Thou Idol Ceremony’: Elizabeth I, The Henriad, and the
Rites of the English Monarchy,” in Urban Life in the Renaissance, ed. Susan Zimmerman and Ronald Weissman
(Newark DE: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1989), 240-66; Rosendale, “Sacral and Sacramental Kingship,” 121-40;
Camille Wells Slights, “The Conscience of the King: Henry V and the Reformed Conscience,” Philological
Quarterly 80, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 37-55; Cyndia Susan Clegg, “Feared and Loved: Henry V and Machiavelli's Use
of History,” Ben Jonson Journal 10 (2003): 179-207.
46
resists the didactic monument that Henry’s conversion could potentially become (4.1.237). In
Henry V, Shakespeare presents ceremony as cipher-like, that is, as a conspicuous mediation of
experience, as forthright in its performativity, both blamed and valued for its patent lack of
substance. The play’s self-admission of its cipher-like dependence on a theatrical environment,
both physical and affective, becomes part of Henry’s struggle with ceremony. In keeping with
the Chorus’s announcement that the theater’s attendees and personnel substantiate the play, like
adding zeros to a number, I will explore interactions between the so-called content of the play
(representation) and the theatrical event as it unfolds (presence). In this way, I treat the play as a
kind of historical gerund, as an event being experienced, defining theatrical ceremony
perceptually as well as politically and religiously. This chapter investigates three points of
interaction between Henry’s struggle with ceremony and the phenomenon of Renaissance
theater, each an activity both of characters and of the audience: “pardoning” the play’s self-
confessed artificiality, “feeling” as a precondition for dramatic thought, and “readying” the
audience for action through ceremony. My argument freely interweaves discussions of historical
religious ceremonialism with the phenomenology of ceremony exhibited in Henry V in order to
study the intersection of theatrical and overtly religious belief in the form of ceremony. I argue
that the play’s most climactic moments—Henry’s soliloquy and the St. Crispin’s speech—do not
mark points of transformation for Henry but, instead, assert the dependence of both monarchy
and theater on ceremony and its paradoxes.
Pardoning
Act Four, scene one of Henry V is an extended consideration of ceremonial authority. The scene
is self-revealing of its own ceremonial nature as theater and so affords a unique opportunity to
47
think about how the play works as ceremony. This entails attending to the conditions and devices
that focus the Renaissance audience’s attention towards the play’s characters and themes. The
first Chorus in Henry V with its address to the audience’s “imaginary forces” is such a device.
The Chorus draws attention to the material conditions of theater in 1599 at the Curtain or perhaps
at the new Globe—the “stage,” “this unworthy scaffold,” “this wooden O,” and “these walls”
(Prologue 3, 10, 13, 19).
74
He acknowledges, in other words, that he is standing on wooden
floorboards that creak the same as the audience’s wooden benches and stools. Visually, if the
theater is open-roofed, then the audience literally sees the “brightest heaven” above them in
addition to the partial roof that was painted like the “heavens,” reminding them that they paid
admission to enter a physical wooden enclosure that is otherwise a wholly familiar environment
but for its “invention” (2). Furthermore, the Chorus alludes to the theater’s architectural
resemblance of a “cockpit” and by extension to the nearby bear-baiting theater, an association
that brazenly accepts Stephen Gosson’s accusation that Elizabethan theaters “turne reasonable
Creatures into brute Beastes” (11).
75
Also contributing to this enclosed sensory environment, at
the line, “when we talk of horses,” the audience’s imagination is assisted by the ubiquitous noise
of animals “Printing their proud hoofs i’th’ receiving earth” just outside (26, 27). In fact, the
ambient effect of the Chorus is quite different from that of dramatic rapture; it makes it difficult
for the audience to forget that there is an outside to this inside “O.”
74
Although probably written in 1599, the year that the Globe opened, the original place of performance for
Henry V is unknown. However, the title page of the First Quarto edition of the play says that it was played “sundry
times,” a good indication that it was performed at some time in the Globe. The Cronicle History of Henry the Fift
(London: Printed by Thomas Creede, 1600).
75
Stephen Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse Conteining a Plesaunt Inuectiue against Poets, Pipers, Plaiers,
Iesters, and Such like Caterpillers of a Comonwelth. (London: 1579), A2v. Thomas Platter visited both the Globe
and a local cockpit in his 1599 trip to London and observed that the cockpit was “built like a theater”: Thomas
Platter's Travels in England, ed. Claire Williams (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937), 167-68.
48
In addition to explicitly referring to the theater environment, the Prologue also positions
the audience in an attitude of active response through its many imperative verbs—“Pardon,”
“Suppose,” “Piece out,” “make,” “Think,” “Carry,” “Admit” (8 and 15, 19, 23, 25, 26, 29, 32).
These imperatives can be considered “categorical intentions.”
76
They are intentions that imply
unsaid judgments about the objects they intend—in this instance, the visible anatomy of the
theater. For instance, to “Piece out,” the audience must first recognize that the play is “pieced-
out” and dispersed into its environment, and, similarly, to “make,” one has to first recognize the
play as un-made. But more remarkably, to “Think,” one must implicitly acknowledge that the
play is theoretically not yet thought and could potentially not be intended categorically as a play.
I use “intend,” here, phenomenologically, as the most foundational relation between a mind and
an object of its attention. To command an audience to think about the play implies a mode of
intention that precedes rational thought and justified belief. Before the audience begins piecing,
making, and thinking, the play is a contiguous collection of wood, sky, noise, circularity, outside,
and inside, and the Chorus wants audiences to be aware of this.
Still, the most frequent of the Chorus’s imperatives is the request that the audience
“pardon” the play’s material limitations. Responding to the Chorus’s “O Pardon,” the audience,
gerund-like, takes up the role of pardoning those violations of reality that are necessary for
theater, and the effect is an explicitly cipher-like manifestation of theater, duplicitous yet
perceivable. The Chorus—the actor and the character—unravels theater’s material and
intentional conditions in a way that resists disappearing into the sublimity of the history of
England’s king. It is notable, moreover, that the Prologue was not in the Quarto and thus
probably not in all of the play’s earliest productions, perhaps playfully offering itself as a
76
For an introduction to this idea, see Robert Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge,
Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), 88-90.
49
marginal textual intrusion that requires pardon itself.
77
Albeit an aspect of the play as text rather
than event, that the Chorus is a variant and not necessarily part of the core play, makes it all the
more important as a rendering device.
78
Its variant status—though perhaps unintended as such—
adds to the play’s continual foregrounding of its ceremonial presence, and the imperative to
pardon the performance for its unrendered and unresolved material condition is itself part of the
process of engaging the play.
79
The point of attending to such marginal details is to understand the perceptual stuff that
comprise the play’s most iconic elements. Henry’s inner character is one of these, and we can
look to the marginal properties of the cloak he borrows from Erpingham for disguise—another
textual variant—to uncover the first-person experience of character formation.
80
The cloak is a
prop that provides the physical conditions for the recognition and believability of disguise. Bert
States reminds playgoers that props like the cloak announce that they are not actually cloaks by
their uses as props.
81
In this way—insofar as it is conspicuously mediatory—the disguise is akin
to the Chorus’s description of the play’s ceremonial evolution. Henry, acting as a character,
treats the costume as a fictional prop, disguising himself as one of Erpingham’s captains in a
class somewhere between his character’s real social position and that of his common
interlocutors, Bates and Williams. As a physical device, the cloak is visible to everyone, but it is
77
Craik, ed., King Henry V, 17-18.
78
This usage of “render” is inspired by Timothy Morton’s, borrowed from filmic vocabulary, in Ecology
without Nature, 34-36.
79
The 1600 Quarto includes another fascinating use of “pardon”: “With pardon vnto both your mightines. / …
/ What rub or bar hath thus far hindred you, / To keepe you from the gentle speech of peace?” (5.2.23-67). Among
bar’s many meanings, the notable repetition of “pardon” here is a reminder of the physical bars that separate the
audience from the “gentle speech” of the stage.
80
The First Quarto begins this scene with Pistol immediately addressing the disguised Henry and thus cuts
Henry’s request of Erpingham: “Lend me thy cloak, Sir Thomas.”
81
“Scenery comes into existence in order to deny that it exists.” From Bert O. States, “The Phenomenological
Attitude,” in Critical Theory and Performance, ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (Ann Arbor: Univ. of
Michigan Press, 1992), 372.
50
only the nucleus of a broader perceptual vicinity of disguise. Consider the aural environment:
does the literal sound of the disguised actor’s voice change in this scene? Does the noise of the
audience—floorboards, talking, internal thought—grow quieter when they realize that somebody
on stage is not representing himself to his fellow characters honestly? Visually, does the cloak
shadow over the king’s eyes, and by consequence hide the kingly look that the audience had
heretofore associated with authority? Physically, does it fasten at the neck? Or perhaps the actor
playing Harry holds the collar of the prop together in his hand, leaving a closed fist positioned
over his chest, conveying insecurity and perhaps sincerity. While all these details are speculative,
we can recognize the give-and-take between the audience and the mundane aspects of stagecraft
in constituting a sense of Henry’s interior character. The audience might wonder, for example, if
Williams will catch a glimpse of color beneath the fold of the cloak or hear a hint of royal accent.
In any event, the use of a prop as a fictional prop encourages the audience to look deeper and by
consequence, to impute to Henry a deeper sense of character. And in a play that hinges on the
question of ceremony—the struggle between royal façade and inner substance—it is significant
that a mere costume acts as an agent for character depth. Here, disguising is an activity of
rendering by the audience, once again obeying the Chorus’s imperative: “your thoughts that now
must deck our kings” (Prologue. 28).
The audience’s participation in ciphering (i.e., deciphering) the scene through its
imperatives and disguise provides a new perspective on the topic of the characters’ conversation.
In the beginning of Act Four, the three “soldiers” begin to argue about whether the king’s
ceremony hides incompetence and neglect. Bates, for one, holds that whatever the king “may
show” outwardly is at odds with his inward “wish,” but the discussion fails to resolve this
important question (4.1.113-14). The only conclusion made is the realization that functioning
51
authority relies on ceremony despite the king’s subjects’ inability to empathize with this. Further,
this discussion of ceremony marginalizes the central issue at hand, whether the king’s “cause” is
“just and his quarrel honourable” (127-28). Bates argues that the justness of the king’s cause is
irrelevant, since a soldier is morally exempt through obedience to the king, while Harry retorts
that individuals are responsible for their own spiritual standing, despite their cause of death (127-
33).
82
Bates and Williams are willing to concede that the king has responsibilities to his subjects,
but they are not willing to grant the reciprocal responsibility of subjects to submit to the king’s
ceremony as if it carried the whole weight of his authority. Ceremony, for them, has purpose but
no substance and, therefore, should be thrown off.
The disguised Henry’s conversation with Bates and Williams dramatizes the critical
questions of whether ceremony contains any real substance, whether there is anything to
decipher at all, and whether theater can meaningfully mediate an experience of the sacred, such
as the sacredness of God’s monarchy. Consider, moreover, that this discussion of ceremony is
itself mediated by the cipher of disguise. The cloak and its conspicuous otherness contribute to
Henry’s character and serve as perceptual conditions for the audience to recognize Henry’s inner
thought through. In this scene, the audience is actively attuned to an implied secret performance
behind the player’s main performance of Henry. The imagined “real”—that is, undisguised—
space of the play is only made visible during Erpingham’s interruption to Henry’s soliloquy
(4.1.282). Moreover, the audience’s awareness of the real Henry is aided by the sense of touch
introduced by the cloak. For the first time, the audience acknowledges that the actor playing
Henry can feel his clothes under the unfamiliar weight of the cloak. The cloak begins to look
82
Womersley points out that Henry’s insistence on the individual culpability was common in contemporary
Protestant discourse, but instead of reading Henry’s wavering as a counterpoint to this Protestant vein, Womersley
excuses it as “Imperfect sanctification.” Divinity and State, 335.
52
texturally uncomfortable and provides a physical analogue to Henry’s vocalized discomfort with
ceremony. The audience vicariously experiences “the pleasure of tangibility and the objects’
appeal to the sense of touch beyond any purely visual and imagistic import,” and this heightened
sense of touch “calls the object home to its ‘proper’ place of self-identity.”
83
In this case, because
the cloak’s true owner (Erpingham) inhabits a space off-stage, the sensorial appeal of Henry’s
cloak and our awareness that the actor is touching it locates the “proper” home of the cloak and
thus also the home of the real stage, within the physical ambience of the theater—the objects,
people, props, and perceptual structure of the theater. The prop gestures towards an unseen place
where the real Henry is. The audience sees only an actor in two sets of clothes—a scene of
conspicuous performativity—but we are conditioned to “Pardon” and “Piece out” an unseen yet
real character beneath the clothes.
This conspicuously worn clothing adds new meaning to Harry’s attempt to demystify and
personalize the struggles of a monarch, saying: “his ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he
appears but a man” (4.1.105-06). Later in the scene Henry expresses his desire to enact
iconoclasm upon “idol ceremony,” but he also wavers and vents his frustration at his inability to
do so. Yet ironically, Henry only “appears but a man” earlier to Bates and Williams because he
puts on, rather than “laid by,” a costume. This constitutes a paradox of the phenomenology of
ceremony: Henry’s inner fitful character is a function of the very theatrical accoutrements that
plague him.
83
Alice Rayner, Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota
Press, 2006), 74, 81.
53
Feeling
The study of ceremony in Henry V usually takes a theological perspective, appropriately since
the play is full of language derived from Protestant anti-ceremonialism.
84
One common
conclusion views the play as a conversion narrative in which Henry discovers a kind of proto-
Protestant understanding of authority that forswears the superstitious trappings of ceremony. Yet
these readings of the play have difficulty accounting for the seeming contradictions in Henry’s
treatment of ceremony, at times appearing to throw off “the sword, the mace, and the crown
imperial” and at others ceremonially memorializing his bloody scars incurred in battle (4.1.258).
Maurice Hunt and Jeffrey Knapp offer more moderate interpretations, with Hunt arguing that
Henry is a champion of religious tolerance and Knapp finding in Henry an anti-materialist
version of sacramentalism.
85
The problem, however, with these interpretations is that they fail to
reconcile the extremities of Henry’s contradicting words and actions. We need to understand
Shakespeare’s exposé of the intellectual and physical ceremony of theater as an exploration of
the paradox of ceremony, illustrated by the two meanings of cipher, and ultimately, I argue,
closer to a defending than to a stripping of ceremony.
To this end, a crucial question about Henry’s conversion is how a believable intellectual
experience can be dramatized in a play that is so self-aware of its ceremonial situation. What
environmental and observational assumptions underlie the conversion of character? Bert States
would classify this problem as part of the “character phenomenon”: “As we say, character
‘develops.’ So what is it in the character phenomenon which persists? If character changes with
every scene, or within single scenes, or even constantly, where do the eye and ear get the notion
84
A fuller explanation of the “ceremonialism controversy” of English reform can be found in Achsah
Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in
Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), 1-43.
85
Hunt, Shakespeare’s Religious Allusiveness, 35; Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe, 131-32.
54
that something called character is iterating itself, always being itself, in this chaos of different
and differing phenomena in the stage world?”
86
In other words, what theatrical devices remain
out-of-focus yet serve to create character singularity? Bates and Williams get it right when they
reject Harry’s claim that beneath all the ceremony the king is only a man with “human
conditions.” One component that makes the king a king could at any moment turn him into a
normal soldier: disguise. I have attempted to show that disguise is partly a matter of the process
of rendering a scene into a remembered event, like the audience’s pardoning. Attending to this
pardoning allows us to capture theater in a gerundial and unresolved state, a state of becoming
theater. Thus, a gerund that is implied in Henry’s anxious and frustrated soliloquy is that of
“feeling.” Feeling, both physical and affective, is an activity that perpetuates Henry’s character
phenomenon.
We have already seen the physical side of Henry’s character phenomenon in his cloak
and the audience’s identification with the “real” Henry’s sense of touch. To put it another way,
theater is a felt experience, meaning it delivers a sensory and emotional impression before it is
digested into rational thought, and, significantly, it is the preeminence of feeling over
remembered thought that consumes Henry’s struggle with ceremony. Consider, for instance,
Harry’s response to Bates’s remark that he would rather the king “were here alone, so should he
be sure to be ransomed” (4.1.121-22). The disguised Harry seems shocked at such an
unsympathetic response and so writes it off as a rhetorical tactic: “howsoever you speak this to
feel other men’s minds” (125-26, my italics). Discursively, the most obvious interpretation of the
action of feeling other men’s minds is of discovering others’ opinions, to feel them out. This is a
meaning similar to that used by Edmund in King Lear: “he hath writ this to feel my affection to
86
States, “The Phenomenological Attitude,” 373.
55
your honour.”
87
However, in context, Henry takes Bates to be trying to rouse his emotions, and
in this way, to feel other men’s minds is to incite feeling in other men’s minds. Yet a third
potential meaning of “feeling” is to mold other men’s minds, to test and manipulate them.
Importantly, Bates’s feeling of his interlocutors’ minds is a gesture that momentarily
circumvents rational dialogue; it is a feeling-out of his companions to see if they share a mutual
understanding about the king, one that attempts to resist ceremonial authority.
Henry’s take on the conversation recognizes that Bates cannot, in fact, see beyond the
ceremony of things, but, at the same time, the audience has witnessed Henry’s dressed up
nakedness and noted that he is unable to act beyond ceremony himself. This should be no
surprise to the playgoer who takes the Chorus seriously and who realizes that even the
audience’s felt experience is ceremonial, as the sensory reception of the ceremonies of theater
always mediates the activities of rendering the scene into characters and stories. Referring to the
ceremonial symbols of his kingship, which he bemoans as his “hard condition,” Henry describes
ceremonialism as a kind of “great greatness,” a phrase that is unable to point to an authority
beyond itself (4.1.248). The king’s authority, he says, is “Twin-born with greatness, subject to
the breath / Of every fool whose sense can no more feel / But his own wringing” (231-33, my
italics). Henry says that to be stuck in ceremonial existence is to think no further than one can
feel, as is the case with Bates and Williams, at the expense of considering the justness of the
king’s true cause for invading France. Ceremony receives a similar treatment in Julius Caesar,
probably written very closely after Henry V. Julius Caesar is filled with discussion about
ceremony, from Flavius’s iconoclastic order to “Disrobe the images, / If you do find them
decked with ceremonies” to Caesar’s reputed superstition “Of fantasy, of dreams and
87
William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1997), 1.2.86-87, my
italics.
56
ceremonies” (1.1.65-66, 2.1.196). Yet Julius Caesar’s most sophisticated discussion of
ceremony appears in the first scene where the tribune Murellus accuses the Romans who
celebrate Caesar’s triumphal entry of being “worse than senseless things” (36):
And when you saw his chariot but appear,
Have you not made an universal shout,
That Tiber trembled underneath her banks
To hear the replication of your sounds
Made in her concave shores?
(1.1.44-48)
Murellus depicts this ceremonial celebration as an echo, relaying both the frivolity of the event
and its lack of substance. The “replication” of its “sounds” echo back to its spectators and
consume their senses with the surface of the event rather than its cause—in this case, the defeat
of Pompey. As is also demonstrated in Henry’s conversation with Bates and Williams, ceremony
foregrounds its felt experience and often ignores the king’s cause. Renaissance literature
frequently noted this ambivalent characteristic of ceremony, frequently in political and court
settings, such as occurs in Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament where Autumn describes
this superficiality as indicative of court fools who do not think beyond the limits of their felt
impressions: “A foole conceits no further than he sees; / He hath no scence of ought, but what he
feeles.”
88
Notably, fools are the actors of the court, and so their morality—their “ought”—is
constituted by feeling. Henry’s predicament is in this way similar to that of the fool; he struggles
to legitimize kingly ceremony given that his subjects’ grasp of it is primarily through its physical
and emotional symbols.
88
Thomas Nashe, A Pleasant Comedie, called Summers Last Will and Testament (London, 1600), H2v.
57
Hence, feeling in Henry V is in an important way counterpoised to the substance of
ceremony and the rarifying of ideas. Henry opens Act Four by encouraging his captains to
remember that despite the ominous outlook of battle, “There is some soul of goodness in things
evil, / Would men observingly distil it out.” This metaphor compares the promise of ill-omened
battle to the evaporating alcoholic spirits in distillation. To distil an unfelt rationale of goodness
out from the felt experience of fear is, as Shakespeare expresses it elsewhere, to retreat to
“reason,” to use “the fineness of their souls” rather than the soul’s embodied feeling.
89
Yet, while
in the beginning of Act Four Henry imagines goodness to be rarified and soul-like, his soliloquy
tells a different story, admitting that his own fineness of mind is jealous of his subject’s “gross
brain” (4.1.279). With this in mind, what we see in the soliloquy is far from a simple conversion
of opinion from ceremonialism to iconoclasm. Instead, as with the failure of Henry’s disguise,
the soliloquy is an expression of “feeling” and of “wringing,” made visible by treating the action
of the play as we did the Chorus, by attending to the felt conditions of Henry’s complaint.
Relevant to the historical valences of the early modern ceremonialism controversy, the
soliloquy ends with a theologically dense prayer to the “God of battles.” In it, Henry’s position
on ceremony is openly contradictory. To understand the play as a conversion of character, one
would treat this part of the soliloquy as the climactic moment of transformation when Henry
turns his attention away from the superstitions of ceremony and directly towards God without
mediation. However, there are two problems with this view. First, the prayer uses contradictory
theologies of ceremony to express penitence, and second, the religious history behind the prayer
is not the only important background within which the audience renders Henry’s character.
89
William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, ed. David Bevington (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1998),
1.3.209-10.
58
The most outspoken contradiction in the prayer is between a Catholic model of
ceremonial devotion and a Protestant, Reformed iconoclasm. In response to his inherited sin—
“the fault / My father made in compassing the crown”—Harry asks God to recognize the
“chantries” that he built “where the sad and solemn priests / Sing still for Richard’s soul”
(4.1.289-90, 298-99). Such a request would seem anathema to any anti-ceremonialist, including
most English Protestants, because of its explicit appeal to Catholic practices of repose prayers
and works-based soteriology. However, in a complete reversal of theological affiliation, Henry
ends his prayer with recognizable Protestant sola fide soteriology:
More will I do,
Though all that I can do is nothing worth,
Since that my penitence comes after all,
Imploring pardon.
(299-302)
Harry reverses his position, claiming that any acts of penitence that he conducts or commissions
are “nothing worth,” and that the preeminence of sin (“all”) causes him to rely ultimately on
“pardon.”
90
The ceremonial frustration suggested by Henry’s “great greatness” is here performed
in a theologically unsettled prayer. Furthermore, the prayer ends by “Imploring pardon” and
reminding the audience of the gerundial nature of ceremony. In one way, this prayer could be
understood as a progression from Mosaic intercession, to ceremonialist penitence, and finally to
reductionist Protestant reliance on faith alone, but if we think of it as a feeling-out of his
90
Admittedly, the meaning of this last “all” is the cause of critical disagreement. There are three main critical
options. The first is that “all” means all sin, especially the sin of Henry’s father. This is the generally accepted
reading. A second option reads “all” as referring to “all that I can do,” meaning Henry’s Catholic-minded works of
penitence, and the third interprets “all” as all that Henry has gained. For commentary on the three possibilities that I
consider, see Gary Taylor’s appendix: William Shakespeare, Henry V (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998), 295-301.
59
ceremonial role, then this climactic moment depicts Henry as clawing around, as it were, for a
feeling of justification rather than pursuing a deliberate conversion from ceremonialism to
rarified thought. If anything, the soliloquy demonstrates that, even in the most private situation
that theater can offer—praying alone on stage—Henry cannot escape his gerundial entanglement
with ceremony.
Furthermore, Henry bridges the ceremonial division between character and chorus,
foreground and background, when he joins voices with the Chorus and implores pardon. Recall
Henry’s earlier complaint about “every fool whose sense can no more feel / But his own
wringing” (4.1.232-33). Here, Henry implicates himself as one of these fools and proffers the
preeminent experience of “wringing” as universal to anyone engaging ceremony. His prayer is a
kind of wringing-out of ceremony for forgiveness, a spongy pressing of his own “gross brain” for
something persuasive, and a prayerful gripping of his hands in a gesture of desperation. Henry’s
character does not undergo a linear transformation from the materiality of superstitious ceremony
to the fineness of soul-like anti-ceremonialism—nor from Catholic to Protestant. What the
audience is left with is a sense that Harry is feeling his way through the problems of ceremonial
authority but with no impression that he sees a clear way out of it.
Does ceremony, then, as well as the psychological baggage that accompanies it, emerge
as something exterior to Henry? This is a phenomenological question in that it asks whether a
character’s psychology manifests in any way apart from its ceremonial appearing. That is, is any
manifestation of character in this scene wrested free from ceremony’s wringing grip? The answer
is yes and no. Ceremony is exterior to Henry insofar as he is a character in a story and therefore
represents a person. The very fact that Henry soliloquizes on the frustrating trappings of
ceremony—to greatly stretch Descartes’s later argument—suggests that there exists a person
60
beneath the expressed articulation of the struggle. However, in terms of Henry as a performative
phenomenon and of his character as something that comes to presence in the theater before an
audience, ceremony is not exterior to him—though not so much “interior” as co-present with
him. This is because his character “traits”—in this scene, his apparent authenticity and assertion
of common humanity—are wed to the theatrical environment of their materialization. And
Shakespeare cauterizes this connection by continually putting his main character in narrative
situations where he is forced to perform before others. I am thinking, of course, of his disguised
conversation with Bates and Williams and of the St. Crispin’s Day speech, but also of others
such as the barely masked semblance of a council in the first scene, his theatrical exposure of the
English traitors in Southampton, and even his courting of Katherine—“It is as easy for me, Kate,
to conquer the kingdom as to speak so much more French” (5.2.185-86). Do any traits escape the
confines of performativity? Does Henry’s authenticity, for instance, elude the mediation of
acting and ceremony in this soliloquy? Shakespeare seems to insist that it does not. Besides
Henry’s overt allusion to his religiously ceremonial penance as well as his painful feeling out of
his mind for the words that might prove that he possesses a fundamental authenticity, there is
also the mediating environment of the theater itself. In short, although this soliloquy presents
Henry alone and presumably honest, the play’s preoccupation with the activities of the audience
and the transparent scaffolding of the theatrical environment prompt reflection on the felt
conditions through which Henry’s soliloquized sincerity appears.
One way to think of the appearing of Henry’s common humanity is through the Merleau-
Pontian notion of perception, summarized by David Morris as emerging “in the crossing of the
body and the world.”
91
All physical perceptions, he asserts, are dual perceptions, occurring
91
David Morris, The Sense of Space (State U of New York P, 2004), 33.
61
simultaneously, of the perceptual object as well as of the perceiver’s body. Thus, when Henry
perceives the symbolic yet real objects of his ceremonial authority—“The sword, the mace, the
crown imperial”—he also remembers the feeling of them. His memory records the crossing of
his sensing body and the objects that adorn it (4.1.258). For this reason, Henry’s struggle with
ceremony is not as simple as disrobing his body because he has experienced ceremony and
knows his body through its ceremonial touch. The younger King Henry expresses the novelty of
this phenomenon in Henry IV, Part 2 to the Lord Chief Justice when he first experiences the
royal garments, saying, “This new and gorgeous garment, majesty, / Sits not so easy on me as
you think.”
92
Anti-ceremonialism, for Henry, cannot carry the anti-materialistic strain that it does
for some early modern religious iconoclasts. Traces of Henry’s envy for someone else’s body,
for a body whose touch is not always mediated by ceremony, can be seen in his envy for the
emotional health that even the supplicant beggar enjoys: “Canst thou, [idol ceremony] when thou
command’st the beggar’s knee, / Command the health of it? No, thou proud dream / That play’st
so subtly with a king’s repose” (253-55).
The bodily embeddings of ceremony also involve the audience’s sense of touch and
spatial perception. If for Henry, the-character, ceremony comes to presence conterminously with
his body, then in the playhouse, where character is not a preexistent substance but a phenomenon
of experience, Henry’s search for authenticity comes to presence in a perceptual environment
shared by actor and audience alike, such that Henry’s assertion of common humanity appears in
the crossings of real people, among all of the theater’s bodies and its environment. Hence,
theatrical phenomena, such as character and transformation, are perceived simultaneously to the
audience’s perceptions of the playhouse, of the presence of other spectators, and of their own
92
William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part 2, 2
nd
ed., ed. A. R. Humphreys (London: Arden Shakespeare,
1967), 5.2.44-45.
62
bodies. To suggest that these various perceptions are independent of each other and therefore that
Henry’s internal character is an isolated perception would be to treat the play as if it were an
abstract script without any manifest dramaturgy or ambience. Instead, the unity of the theatrical
phenomenon—in this case, of Henry’s authenticity and common humanity—results from the
contact and movements between the play’s various perceivers and their environment. David
Morris offers a tangible experiment to illustrate that a perceptual object in space is made present
through “body-world movement,” but this example can also be extended to the bodies and
environments of Shakespearean theater. He writes:
Obtain a wine cork. Lay the cork on a table so that it can roll on its long axis
across the table. Rest your hand beside the cork so that your finger and thumb
drape down, just grazing its circular ends. Close your eyes and relax, bracketing
any assumptions or claims about the cork and what it should feel like. Hold your
hand very still for a minute or two, exerting as little pressure as possible on the
cork, yet touching it. Then lift your hand off the table, keeping your wrist and
hand relaxed so that the cork just hangs between your fingers. Now wiggle the
cork.
93
The experiment is meant to disrupt one’s habits of perception. When held with relaxed fingers
and, as much as possible, when bracketing assumptions about the object between one’s fingers,
one’s physical sensations of the cork’s ends feel independent of each other, but as soon as one
squeezes and wiggles the cork, the habit of perceiving a singular object of perception—the
cork—is unavoidable. “The unity is in the wiggle.” In some sense, too, the unity of Henry’s
character, his authenticity and the common humanity that may exist beneath its ceremonial guise,
93
Morris, The Sense of Space, 37.
63
are only ever manifest in the movements and contacts between the perceiving bodies and
perceived bodies of the theater. The play’s unity is in the feeling.
Soliloquies are good examples of this phenomenon because they represent inner conflict
and inner character. Consider, for instance, the heightened feeling of isolation experienced by the
audience when they perceive a character in soliloquy. In contrast to when the stage is filled with
multiple characters, when audience members sitting on stools on the edge of the stage are nearly
enfolded into the crowd of players, the audience of a soliloquy experiences a greater feeling of
being unseen by the character soliloquizing. The audience also experiences a kind of perceptual
solitude. The chorus that precedes Act Four, in introduction to Henry V’s most powerful
moments of soliloquy, draws this very connection between audience and character. The Chorus
verbally depicts Henry “Walking from watch to watch, from tent to tent” addressing his subjects
as “brothers, friends and countrymen” (4.0.30-34). Henry’s strolling the ranks can hardly be
shown on the stage, but the audience’s imagination sets up his confrontations with Pistol, Gower,
Fluellen, Bates, and Williams in the following scene and relays an impression of Henry in
solitude and personal thought, only visible in the dark night to those close enough to be in
conversation. The audience, as it is, remains privileged to hear and see Henry in close proximity
throughout all of these conversations. Moreover, the Chorus emphasizes the audience’s attentive
perceptiveness in response to Henry’s sense of solitude, even noting the details of Henry’s face:
“Upon his royal face there is no note / How dread an army hath enrounded him” (35-36).
Whatever host of people has “enrounded” Henry on the battlefield, the audience is positioned
within this circle. This phenomenon of intimacy arises in the crossing of the actor’s body with
the audience’s, as is enacted also in Henry’s look:
His liberal eye doth give to every one,
64
Thawing cold fear, that mean and gentle all
Behold, as may unworthiness define,
A little touch of Harry in the night.
(44-47, my italics)
This emphasis on Henry’s gaze frames the audience’s “sense of depth and space” within the
theater, sensitizing their awareness that the theatrical space is a space of relations between
bodies, “not simply rooted in the crossing of one’s body and the world, but in the crossing of
one’s existence and an other’s existence.”
94
Synesthetically, we are told to “Behold” visually
Henry’s own sight and then to feel its “touch.” Thus, “A little touch of Harry in the night” not
only personalizes Henry’s character by referring to him as the more casual “Harry,” but it also
uses intimacy and the setting of soliloquy to suggest a heightened sense of character. As in the
play’s Prologue, the Chorus enlists the audience’s senses, here delineating and sensitizing the
spatial contact between the actor and the audience, resulting in a feeling of Henry’s authentic
character.
In light of the ways that this scene draws attention to Henry’s imagined inner character
beneath his ceremonial authority, one might wonder why the soliloquy concludes with a
tormented plea for forgiveness and why Shakespeare chooses to end a speech about the
psychological distress of ceremony with Henry’s confession of his father’s sin—“the fault / My
father made in compassing the crown” (4.1.290-91). One answer is simply that he needs to pray
to God for his soldiers’ courage, and in order to pray effectively he must be in good standing
with God. This is a kind of compensation for the “farced title funning ‘fore the king” (260). Yet
another reason, more apt to the scene’s phenomenological nuances, stems from Henry’s
94
Morris, The Sense of Space, 25.
65
realization that even his disguised attempt to be unceremonious is vexed with the psychological
underpinnings of ceremony. Henry remembers that the very grounds upon which he exercises
ceremonial authority are tainted with his father’s usurpation of the throne. Thus, even though this
inherited sin does not alleviate his struggles with ceremony, it at least allows him to assert
through prayer a division between Henry-as-king and Henry-as-sinner, something, as of yet, he
has been unable to do. In the script and in the character’s speech, this scene is about the ways
that ceremony spills into everything. As a term of conspicuously frontal engagement, ceremony
spills into the king’s own consciousness and attempt at authenticity, as well as into the
consciousness of his subjects who cannot feel but their own wringing. However, viewed
according its gerundial playing, the sense of character in this scene derives from the intersection
between theatrical ceremony and Henry’s emotional appeal to a deeper, sinful self beneath
ceremony. These impressions of honesty, privacy, and confession contrast with the exceptionally
public setting of the subsequent St. Crispin’s speech, and much of one’s holistic interpretation of
Henry at the end of the play—whether he is iconoclastic, pragmatic, duplicitous, or otherwise—
depends on whether this apparent authenticity in the soliloquy carries over into the St. Crispin’s
speech. Has he grasped an inner common humanity beneath ceremony in the soliloquy, which he
then offers his soldiers, or is the soliloquy merely a moment of insecurity that he must vent in
order to maintain a ceremonial mask before his soldiers, a kind of emotional rite of passage into
more confident ceremonialism?
Shakespeare makes answering these questions difficult on purpose, and in so doing he
foregrounds the phenomena of human appearing in theater. Henry’s authenticity is not just a
matter of his words, his physical solitude, or his gestures of kneeling and praying. As I have
argued, it is also a function of space and the perceptual intersections of his body with the
66
audience’s bodies, his look with their looks. The soliloquy scene is ultimately suspicious of the
political dangers and psychological tolls of ceremonial authority, but at the same time the scene
continuously relies on the paradox of ceremony—empty yet full with meaning, encoded yet
deciphering—in making Henry’s character present to the audience.
III. Readying
Henry’s soliloquy demonstrates that his character is constituted by felt experiences that unfurl
before the audience in the gerundial present. The final prayer illustrates this as a kind of
wringing, suggesting that even a king’s private moments are laden with ceremony and are
therefore indecisive. What, then, does one make of the apparently decisive resolve of the St.
Crispin’s Day speech?
95
The speech has been called “the climax of the king-and-commoner
dialectic of the Henriad” and even “the thematic climax of the entire Henriad.”
96
I do not
challenge the thematic significance of the speech, but I would also not presuppose that its climax
is the stripping of ceremonial authority, what Richard Hardin describes as Henry’s “liberating
himself and his society from bondage to idol (therefore idle) ceremony.”
97
As I have shown, up
to this point Henry has not garnered momentum toward an expected anti-ceremonial conversion,
especially given his lack of clarity in the preceding soliloquy and its reliance on the cipher-like
95
For Ted Motohashi, Henry “‘re-members’ … the ‘dis-membering’ of other memories through the speech,
particularly those of women and of dissident voices”: “‘Remember St. Crispin’: Narrating the Nation in Henry V,” in
Hot Questris after the English Renaissance: Essays on Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, ed. Yasunari
Takahashi (New York: AMS, 2000), 197-214, 201. Similarly, Slights argues that Henry’s confidence at the Battle of
Agincourt is the culmination of his Protestant conclusion at the end of the soliloquy—“Imploring pardon”—of the
representative struggle to Protestant theology. Jonathan Baldo makes the connection between the secular and sacred
readings explicit when he reads Henry’s forswearing of ceremony as a strategy for nationalizing ceremonial
authority in St. Crispin’s Day: “Wars of Memory in Henry V,” Shakespeare Quarterly 47, no. 2 (1996): 146. Eric La
Guardia makes a similar argument but puts it in terms of history and ceremony, with Henry choosing history over
ceremony—ceremony holding religious connotations.
96
Hardin, Civil Idolatry, 126; Norman Rabkin, “Rabbits, Ducks, and Henry V,” Shakespeare Quarterly 28
(1977): 287.
97
Hardin, Civil Idolatry, 126.
67
mediation of theatrical ceremony. Has the play, then, memorialized into a monument of Whig
history without our noticing, forfeiting the paradoxes of ceremonialism to the inevitable progress
of Protestant iconoclasm? Or, as I would argue, is it not so much that the king’s cause has
become clear and distilled but, rather, that the play has embraced the paradoxes of its own
ceremonialism? Thus, viewed as an exposé on the phenomenality of theater, whatever
iconoclasm the king’s speech does enact is always held in check by its own assertion of
ceremony.
The St. Crispin’s speech proves to be more like a conditioning of the mind than a
rhetorical defense of the king’s cause. Just before the French attack the English on the morning
of the Battle of Agincourt, Henry offers a noteworthy description of the rhetorical intent of his
recent speech, saying, “All things are ready, if our minds be so” (IV.iii.72). Given the wringing
and contortion on display in his soliloquy, this statement begs the question of how Henry himself
went from “Imploring pardon” to “ready.” Some scholars suspect that Henry’s readiness is
duplicitous, viewing his rhetoric as manipulative, but this interpretation presumes that Henry has
distilled an ideological position in between scenes—somewhat like Hamlet before Act Five—
from which he deludes his audience. Yet this is inconsistent with the audience’s and Henry’s
dependence on pardoning and feeling. Thus, a useful approach to the speech is to question the
readying of “our minds” as well as the “All things” that mediate our intellectual assent. I suggest
that Henry’s inspiring monologue is anything but a resolution of mind. In fact, Henry derives his
rhetorical power from using both ceremony and iconoclasm as a strategy for making his audience
ready to fight, while leaving the substance of the ceremony—the king’s cause—behind.
Similar to the prayer to the God of battles, the St. Crispin’s speech presents contradictory
views of ceremony, stripping as well as reinforcing it. This speech is frequently understood as an
68
activity of iconoclasm and social leveling, but this interpretation is phenomenologically troubled.
For one, the king’s use of ceremonialist and outright sacramental imagery is almost excessive.
Hunt provides a summary of this imagery, which includes, among others, references to the relics
of his soldiers’ scars, the eucharistic notes in the “host” of soldiers being “familiar in his mouth,”
the “flowing cups” that are “freshly remembered,” and, of course, the brotherhood of martyrdom
that Henry extends to “he today that sheds his blood with me.”
98
Additionally, Henry’s language
of disrobing to express his pure and naked motivation—exclaiming that “It earns me not if men
my garments wear” because “Such outward things dwell not in my desires”—is undermined by
the earlier paradox of putting on garments in order for his “ceremonies” to appear “laid by”
(4.3.26-27). Even Henry’s pretended disrobing has a prop-like quality, what Rayner imagines to
inhabit an “in-between space” that “breaks down the dualism between world and stage in what
might be called an aspect of ‘readiness.’”
99
However, the speech also plays on anti-ceremonialist rhetoric. Henry readies his troops
by addressing his representative soldier as “He that shall see this day.” Such language
superficially strips—disrobes—ceremony’s power of mediation, in religious terms, between the
devotee and the sacred object (4.3.44). Put gerundially, the audience is witnessing the
memorialized event as it is being memorialized. His rhetorical strategy is to position his (and the
theater’s) audience as a direct witness of the event and thus to marginalize their awareness of
being mediated by ceremony. However, the play has heretofore made the play audience self-
aware of its imperative activity of pardoning theater’s artificiality and has also conditioned the
audience to recognize the felt experiences of Henry’s rhetoric. In his continuation of Marlowe’s
98
Hunt, Shakespeare’s Religious Allusiveness, 36. Additionally, David Womersley insightfully observes the
speech depicts a vision of apolcayptic unity that foils the anxieties earlier expressed by Williams: Divinity and State,
331-32.
99
Rayner, Ghosts, 76, my italics.
69
Hero and Leander, George Chapman personifies the goddess Ceremony in a similar fashion,
forwarding her nature as the mere face of devotion but, in so doing, asserting the necessity of
ceremony all the more. Ceremony appears to Leander and commands him to observe proper
“nuptial rites”:
all her body was
Clear and transparent as the purest glass,
For she was all presented to the sense:
Devotion, Order, State, and Reverence,
Her shadows were; Society, Memory;
All which her sight made live, her absence die.
100
Like Henry’s emphasis on memorializing the battle—the impending victory that “shall be
remembered”—the goddess Ceremony is the form of shadowy “Memory.” She makes memory
ready to act for the good of “Devotion, Order, State, and Reverence,” goods that were frequently
associated with ceremony. Yet she also nods to the primacy of “substance” and is, paradoxically,
wholly sensory as well as transparent. In terms of performativity, ceremony is transparent—
conspicuous in its presentation of transcendent material yet no less confident for being so
conspicuous. Henry’s speech takes on this same purposeful ambiguity of character and confident
performativity, unabashedly choosing the practical power of ceremony over and despite his
gesture towards iconoclasm.
With regard to the contradictory presence of both ceremonialism and anti-ceremonialism
in Henry’s speech, it is worth noting that this same polarized ambivalence toward ceremony
would have had readily identifiable analogues in Shakespeare’s England. Holidays and civic
100
Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman, Hero and Leander, a Poem (Chiswick: C. Whittingham, 1821),
50-51.
70
festivals were woven into the fabric of religious and working life, and the higher profile festivals
often instigated a flurry of polemicism over their morality and usefulness. Given Henry’s
concern with his inherited authority, the well known history of the War of the Roses, and the
contentious status of Queen Elizabeth’s own ceremonialism, the two political and religious
festivals that Elizabethan audiences perhaps most easily associated with Henry’s speech were
Elizabeth’s coronation and the commemorative annual Accession Day festival. The latter
occurred on November 17 of each year, the anniversary of Elizabeth’s succession.
101
For the
Accession holiday, the court would host a ceremonial tournament, and the nation would
celebrate by ringing bells, lighting bonfires, and attending sermons written for the occasion.
More importantly, however, the ceremonial day was highly contentious, and the typical
arguments on either side hone in on the ceremonial and anti-ceremonial issues that we have
observed in Henry V—namely, the useful power of commemoration and, contrariwise, the
distraction and idolatry of ceremonial mediation.
102
On the one hand, there exist accusations like
that of the puritan Robert Wright who argues that the Accession Day festivities treat Elizabeth as
if she were a god, while, on the other hand, we read the Catholic William Rainolds also accuse
the nation of pagan idolatry in celebrating the event.
103
Puritan and Catholic alike found reasons
to call the festival idolatrous. Predominantly, though, English Protestants valued Accession Day
as a ceremonial counter-ceremony, as it were, to the abuses of Rome. Roy Strong cites a
manuscript of another speech written for the occasion that views the festival as a
commemoration of the queen’s mediatory presence as monarch; much like a ceremony herself,
101
Roy C. Strong has written an informative article on this festival: “The Popular Celebration of the Accession
Day of Queen Elizabeth I,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 21, no. 1 (1958): 86-103.
102
For further discussion of monarch veneration and alleged idolatry in Elizabethan England, see Louis A.
Montrose “Idols of the Queen: Policy, Gender, and the Picturing of Elizabeth I,” Representations 68 (1999): 108-61.
103
Strong, “The Popular Celebration,” 100.
71
through Elizabeth “we enjoy withall . . . the gospel preached amongst vs, the peace of
conscience, the reconciliation betwene god and our soules.”
104
Others admiringly compared
Elizabeth on Accession Day to Solomon, Josiah, and the Queen of Sheba.
105
Defenders of ceremony did not, however, always extol the virtues of the thing
ceremonialized—in this case, the queen. Sometimes, writers largely ignored the message and
focus on the medium, extolling the experience of ceremony itself as a form of memorialization
and inspiration. Sir Thomas More expresses this sentiment decades earlier in Utopia, where the
island’s religious practices embrace all the typical devices of ceremonialism—“They burn
incense, scatter perfumes and display a great number of candles”—but are quick to admit their
purely utilitarian benefit: “not that they think these practices profit the divine nature in any way .
. . . They feel that sweet smells, lights and other such rituals somehow elevate the human
mind.”
106
Moreover, addressing the many reformers who rejected the sensory experience of such
religious ceremony, Richard Hooker points out the inconsistent treatment of ceremony’s basic
mediatory qualities: “To solemn actions of Royalty and Justice, their suitable ornaments are a
beauty. Are they only in religion a stain?”
107
Of course, as I have demonstrated, some reformers
also rejected political ceremonialism, but what is most salient to my discussion about these
divergent and sometimes inconsistent opinions is that it is not uncommon for them to obscure the
thing ceremonialized when quibbling over the merits of ceremony. In other words, it is often
one’s opinion about the ceremonial medium rather than the object mediated that determines
opinions.
104
Ibid., 99.
105
Ibid., 98.
106
Sir Thomas More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, eds., George M. Logan, Robert M. Adams,
and Clarence H. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), 237-39.
107
Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Piety, Book V, The Works of Mr. Richard Hooker, ed. W. S.
Dobson, 2 vols (London, 1825), 1:491.
72
We see this focus on the experiential environment of ceremony in accounts of Elizabeth’s
coronation procession. On 14 January, 1559, Elizabeth was carried on a golden litter through the
streets of London, stopping to receive gifts, hear speeches, and watch pageants. Although
decades before the first performances of Henry V, for two significant reasons the queen’s
coronation procession is relevant to the play’s treatment of ceremony. The first is that the
procession’s first pageant, of five, was a symbolic pyramid dramatizing The Uniting of the Two
Houses of Lancaster and York, the historical setting of most of Shakespeare’s history plays,
including Henry V. The second point of relevance is that The Uniting of the Two Houses was
performed on Gracestreet Street, the very street where Queen Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth’s mother,
enjoyed a coronation pageant in her own honor.
108
As it is for Shakespeare’s Henry, the
ceremonialism of Elizabeth’s reign was contextualized by concerns of legitimacy and
inheritance. Still, Malcolm Smuts reminds us that the details of the pageants’ scripted speeches
and specific symbols “often bear little relationship to what most spectators actually saw.”
109
Instead, while they attempt to record the words spoken, accounts of the procession are also
preoccupied by its ambient environment. In the most famous account of the pageants, Richard
Mulcaster frequently notes the queen’s difficulty in hearing the children deliver speeches and
even seeing the stages. Moreover, the pictorialized allegories seem crowded, even garbled, with
figures, multiple stages, and symbolic relations between characters, and Mulcaster notes that
while each stage was full of people, decorations, banners, and trim, even the gaps between
ornaments on the stages’ physical structures were filled-in with sentences expressing the
108
See Arthur F. Kinney, ed., Renaissance Drama: An Anthology of Plays and Entertainments (Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 1999), 20.
109
R. Malcolm Smuts, “Public Ceremony and Royal Charisma: the English Royal Entry in London, 1485-
1642,” in The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone, ed. A. L. Beier and
David Cannadine (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), 67.
73
pageants’ themes: “Ouer the two syde portes was placed a noyes of instrumentes. And all voyde
places in the pageant wer furnished with prety sayinges, co~mending and touching y meaning of
the said pageant, which was the promises & blessinges of almightie god made to his people.”
110
The dominant impressions of the ceremony were of its exuberance and noise, how its dense
sensory atmosphere echoed, like Caesar’s triumph in Julius Caesar, off its many surfaces.
One nuanced response regarding the merits of such ceremonial experiences is in a letter
from William Cavendish, the Earl of Newcastle, to Prince Charles. Cavendish affirms the
opportunity provided by monarchical ceremonies like the coronation and Accession Day
festivals by observing the kind of spatial and phenomenological “distance” that is created
between kings and their subjects through ceremony:
What preserves you Kings more than ceremony. The cloth of estates, the distance
people are with you, great officers, heralds, drums, trumpeters, rich coaches, rich
furniture for horses, guards, marshal’s men making room, disorders to be laboured
by their staff of office, and cry “now the King comes;” . . . aye, even the wisest
though he knew it and not accostumed to it, shall shake off his wisdom and shake
for fear of it, for this is the mist is cast before us, and masters the
Commonwealth.
111
Beyond the impressiveness of the spectacle, which speaks to kingly authority, Cavendish
encourages Charles to embrace moments of distance-building. “Distance,” here, draws on several
early modern meanings. One is the distance between military ranks, as is scene in the ceremonial
110
Anon. The Passage of our Most Drad Soueraigne Lady Quene Elyzabeth through the Citie of London to
Westminster the Daye before her Coronacion (London, 1558), C1r-C1v.
111
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, The Life of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, ed. C. H.
Firth (London: John C. Nimmo, 1886), 329, my italics. Following the suggestion of the editor, I have amended
“maskers” to “masters.”
74
entourage.
112
Yet another more ambient meaning is the distance between the monarch and his
audience cast by the ceremonial environment, a figurative “mist” of horns, colors, voices, and
drums. Ambiguously, this distance connotes both close proximity and expanse, that ceremony
brings kings and subjects together but also separates them further, and in this way the distance of
ceremony expresses the paradoxes of ceremonial cipher dramatized in Henry V. In the play,
Henry articulates both extremes of ceremonial distance, at one point bemoaning its self-isolating
qualities and at another, such as in the St. Crispin’s speech, declaring that “This day shall gentle”
the “condition” of any man who fights alongside him (4.3.63).
Shakespeare seems particularly aware of ceremony’s perceptual ambiguities in Henry V,
especially its paradoxes of distancing and ciphering, and in the St. Crispin’s speech Henry
presents both sides of the argument. He distances himself from his soldiers in both senses, by
closing the distance between him and his audience through his words and by memorializing this
rhetoric through the use of a feast day that, by definition, mediates meaning and thus expands the
distance of his authority. Readying, in this speech, occurs through Henry’s rhetorical placing of
his audience on the seam between ceremonialism and anti-ceremonialism, and he achieves this
through what we might call “ceremony making.”
This day is called the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day and comes safe home
Will stand a-tiptoe when this day is named
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall see this day and live old age
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
112
Oxford English Dictionary, 2
nd
ed., s.v. “distance, n.”
75
And say, ‘Tomorrow is Saint Crispian.’
…………………………………
This story shall the good man teach his son,
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by
From this day to the ending of the world
But we in it shall be remembered,
(IV.iii.40-46, 56-59)
This is a remarkable instance of ceremony making, of filling the cipher of ceremony with the
experience of its audience. Henry re-establishes the ceremony by making the traditional
shoemaker’s feast day meaningful in the context of the battle.
113
In other words, by adding a new
memorialized event to St. Crispin’s Day, and by playing up this expanded meaning, Henry
elevates the immanence of his soldiers’ ceremonial experience. He expands his superficially
iconoclastic language into the ceremonial grounds of his audience and into the performative
grounds of the stage. Henry continues this strategy of immanent spectacle later in the play when
he refuses to display his battered armor in his triumphant procession after the battle, the Chorus
explaining:
he forbids it,
Being free from vainness and self-glorious pride;
Giving full trophy, signal and ostent
Quite from himself to God.
(V.0.19-22)
113
While not exploring its nuances as a ceremony, Joel Altman observes what he describes as a “sacramental”
communion between the audience and King Harry in this speech, joining “past to present, audience to soldiery, in an
honorable fellowship transcending time and space.” “‘Vile participation’: The Amplification of Violence in the
Theater of Henry V,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 16.
76
His insistence reinforces the importance of the moment of ceremony making over the actual
remembrance of it, despite the fact that he emphasizes the memory of the battle so heavily in his
speech.
With some seeming contradiction, Henry draws meaning from the memorialized
ceremony of his occasion but also insists that this meaning is immanent to the moment,
constituted also by his soldiers’ actions of courage. Compare, for example, the historical speech
as recorded in Shakespeare’s main source, Holinshed’s Chronicles, which reads:
if they would but remember the just cause for which they fought, and whome they
should incounter, such faint-harted people as their ancestors had so often
overcome. To conclude, manie words of courage he uttered, to stirre them to doo
manfullie, assuring them that England should never be charged with his ransome,
nor anie Frenchmen triumph over him as a captive; for either by famous death or
glorious victorie would he (by Gods grace) win honour and fame.
114
Among Shakespeare’s many elaborations on this historical account, one is Henry’s mentioning
of his “cause” for war. Not only does he declare it to be “just” but also makes the power of
memory—his strongest rhetorical tool—contingent on his soldiers’ comprehending and agreeing
with this cause: “remember the just cause for which they fought.” Shakespeare relocates this
moment from Holinshed to Henry’s discussion with Bates and Williams. The reason for this, I
suggest, is that Shakespeare wants to emphasize the fact that Henry’s most climactic response to
disbelieving soldiers is an assertion of ceremony’s power—memory, religious imagery,
camaraderie. To further explain this, I borrow Michael Witmore’s definition of Shakespearean
114
Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, vol. 3, 6 vols (London, 1808), 79. J’s,
u’s, and v’s have been modernized.
77
“immanence”; things and events in Shakespeare’s drama often receive their uniqueness and
performative existence through “their comprehension within other things and events.”
115
Insofar
as its presence is immanent, Henry refuses to limit the meaning—or “rouse”—of his speech to
“something that is either completely outside of the world or completely encapsulated within some
point of it”—completely present or completely re-presented.
116
As a theatrical event, the St.
Crispin’s speech neither defers meaning wholly to its ceremonial counterparts—the traditional
holiday and future memory—nor restricts meaning wholly to the battle at hand and his just
cause. Readiness and inspiration are found in the paradox of an immanent memorial.
The feast is further infused with meaning by contrasting the readiness of his soldiers to
the idleness often associated with festivals. Reformation England experienced its first reduction
of observed festivals in the liturgical calendar with Henry VIII in 1536, and Edward VI revised
these reductions.
117
While the reductions fit generally into the Reformational paradigm of
minimizing distractions from spiritual devotion, the monarchs’ express rationale was headlined
by their complaint that too many festivals meant that there were too many days when people
abstained from work, a policy that participates in the conventional Protestant condemnation of
idleness—adding a pun to the soliloquy’s “idol ceremony.” Shakespeare shows his awareness of
the historical revisions to the liturgical calendar in Henry’s first soliloquy in 1 Henry IV.
118
Here,
Hal overtly links “idleness” to the celebration of “playing holidays.”
119
This anti-ceremonialist
115
Witmore, Shakespearean Metaphysics, 12.
116
Witmore, Shakespearean Metaphysics, 23-24.
117
See David Cressy, “God's Time, Rome's Time, and the Calendar of the English Protestant Regime,” Viator
34 (2003): 394.
118
The link between Hal’s soliloquy and the St. Crispin’s speech is also made by Hunt, Shakespeare’s
Religious Allusiveness, 24-38.
119
William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part 1, ed. David Scott Kastan (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2002),
1.2.185, 194.
78
connection returns through a remark made by Westmorland in Henry V, the comment that
instigates the St. Crispin’s speech. Westmorland says, “O that we now had here / But one ten
thousand of those men in England / That do no work today!” (4.3.16-18). Presumably, these idle
Englishmen are those who abstain from work for the holiday. Had they not celebrated the feast
day, or had the calendar already been reformed, perhaps England’s odds would look better. The
detail of Westmorland’s complaint is a notable addition to Holinshed where Henry merely hears
someone say “I would to God there were with vs now so manie good soldiers as are at this houre
within England,” with no mention of those “That do no work today.”
120
With this in mind, there
arises an alternative interpretation of Westmorland’s newfound readiness to fight where he says,
“Perish the man whose mind is backward now” (72). Surely the audience is not convinced that
the pessimistic Westmorland suddenly believes that the justness of the king’s cause will
mystically fight in their favor. Rather, the readiness of Westmorland’s mind is staged as a result
of his felt experience of the moment, much more than rhetorical inspiration but also the
immanence of the ceremonial dynamic manifest in Henry’s speech.
The immanence of ceremony and the distance—close and far, full and empty—that it
creates with its audience are common topics of sixteenth-century polemical tracts about
ceremony. Thus, Henry’s manipulation of ceremony also works to elide the moral tension of the
contemporary ceremonialism controversy. Many early modern tracts about theater point to its
ceremonial conditions—defined phenomenologically as mediated sensation—and not only to the
play’s “content,” in condemning or defending theater’s moral value. Stephen Gosson, for
example, criticizes the ambience of theater as “noysome too the body” and not just to the soul,
120
Holinshed, Chronicles, 79.
79
emphasizing the bodily confusion caused by what Henry calls the “rouse” of ceremony.
121
Gosson complains that theaters emit “straunge consortes of melody, to tickle the eare; costly
apparel, to flatter the sight; effeminate gesture, to rauish the sence; and wanton speache, to whet
desire too inordinate lust.”
122
This phenomenology of theater focuses not on immoral content but
on the physical infiltration of inordinately strange and pleasing sensation, fearing that it might
“slip downe into the hart, & with gunshotte of affection gaule the minde, where reason and
vertue should rule the roste.”
123
These effects are precisely what More and Cavendish acclaim.
Against accusations that the adornment and visual sensuousness of theater turn it into an idol,
Thomas Heywood’s An Apology for Actors responds that, from its provenance, theater utilized
ambience—costumes, sets, colors—as visual media for identifying character types, especially
moral and immoral characters.
124
This view of theater is remarkably similar to the Catholic
bishop Stephen Gardiner’s description of religious ceremonies as “gates to our sences.”
125
Heywood embraces the phenomenology that Gosson condemns by preferring to think of
theatrical ceremonialism as deciphering its content rather than distorting it; that is, it is not
always disorderly to elevate physical and perceptual stimulation above intellectual
comprehension. With this in mind, Heywood writes, “I hope there is no man of so vnsensible a
spirit, that can inueigh against the true and direct vse of this quality,” speaking specifically of the
ways that color can be used to decipher the moral lessons of theater, those which Gosson judges
to “flatter the sight.”
121
Gosson, The Schoole, D3v.
122
Gosson, The Schoole, B6v.
123
Gosson, The Schoole, B7r.
124
Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors Containing Three Briefe Treatises (London: 1612), F2r.
125
James A. Muller, ed., The Letters of Stephen Gardiner (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), 485.
80
Heywood’s use of “vnsensible” participates in a melee for the term among ceremonialist
polemics of the period. The vocabulary of sensation takes on cultural capital fueled by differing
views of the relation between the mind and physical perception. For instance, in a song praising
John Case’s recently printed treatise called The Praise of Musicke, William Byrd attests that
Case “soundly blames the senceless foole, & Barbarous Scithyan, of our dayes.”
126
Like
Heywood, Byrd implies that the sensible person is the one who brings physical perception and
intellectual understanding into harmony. Thus, by calling anti-theatrical polemicists
“vnsensible,” Heywood implicates the audience’s understanding of the relation between
sensation and reason and, consequently, echoes the 1549 prayer book injunction, “Of
Ceremonies,” that proscribes religious ceremonies “to stir up the dull mind of man to the
remembrance of his duty to God.”
127
When a mind is dull—or when one’s “sense can no more
feel / But his own wringing”—it is justified to combat feeling with feeling for the sake of being
ready to experience beauty and to receive moral instruction (4.1.232-33).
Read in light of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s description of literary language, Heywood’s
defense of theatrical ceremony demonstrates an awareness of the crucial similarities between the
perceptions of artistic and religious ceremonial language. Language, writes Merleau Ponty, “is
never the mere clothing of a thought which otherwise possesses itself in full clarity.”
128
A
performance, likewise, does not strive to communicate content to which the mind is already
familiar and accustomed. Instead, the content of a play is manifested simultaneously with the
manifestation of its phenomenal conditions—its physical and affective readying of the audience.
126
William Byrd, “A Gratification vnto Master John Case, for his Learned Booke, lately made in the Praise of
Musicke” (1586).
127
Oxford English Dictionary, 2,d ed., s.v. “unsensible, a.” Gerald Lewis Bray, ed., Documents of the English
Reformation (Cambridge: James Clark, 2004), 275.
128
Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, 8.
81
Shakespeare’s audience experiences the play’s ideas immanently in the bodies, props, and spaces
of its actors. The phenomena of Henry’s character, his intellect and its ambiguous resolve, is the
play’s primary example of how theatrical content always appears simultaneously to the
appearing of its environment and conditions. The “accent” of artful language, Merleau-Ponty
continues, “is assimilated little by little by the reader, and it gives him access to a thought to
which he was until then indifferent or even opposed.”
129
Likewise, for Heywood, theatrical
ceremony improves the mind’s readiness for moral instruction. According to the Chorus,
Heywood, and even to Henry, incompetent theatergoers literally lack the will to feel their way to
the kinds of moral judgments that are derived from sensory and affective experience.
Shakespeare, therefore, can be said to be readying his audience through the phenomenal
readying that Gosson rejects. Shakespeare and Henry’s audiences in Act Four experience a kind
of assimilation. They are led processively, or gerundially, through the unresolved journey of
Henry’s struggle with ceremony, and meanwhile Henry’s audience assimilates “little by little” a
dosage of ceremonialism, perhaps unaware. Shakespeare’s king, then, is like the iconoclast who,
in destroying sacred objects, unintentionally acknowledges their spiritual power.
130
By showing
the place of the future scars to be inflicted on his arm, Harry makes transparent the felt
conditions through which the mind is made ready. Like his disguise, even Henry’s act of
iconoclasm must dress an altar before it can be torn down.
129
Ibid., my italics.
130
For discussion of this phenomenon, see Ann Kibbey, The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism:
A Study of Rhetoric, Prejudice, and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), 42; Joseph Leo Koerner,
The Reformation of the Image (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004), 107-08.
82
IV. Concluding
In the end, Henry’s use of ceremony to ready his troops for battle evades the important questions
raised by Bates and Williams about who is responsible for the souls of fallen soldiers. Even
more, Henry never explains his justification for war—what the play refers to as the king’s
“cause.” It is noteworthy that these lingering concerns constitute the would-be substance behind
the political and theological ceremonies that Henry uses; they are the imaginary meaning behind
the sign. To the Elizabethan Protestant, it is ultimately the integrity behind ceremonial actions
that justifies them, and so despite the play’s dramatization of the famous English victory, there
remains a dark note, reminding audiences of the dangers of theatrical cipher. In this light, my
interpretation of Henry’s inconsistency, lack of resolution, and embrace of ceremony does not
prove that the play is ceremonialist through-and-through. However, in demonstrating that it at
least is not iconoclastic, we are faced with the question: what is Henry’s character if he is not a
ceremony-stripping champion of Protestantism? There are, of course, many answers to this
question, but there is one I want to highlight. Henry is a character who experiences genuine
intellectual and moral conflict, and this conflict manifests in explicit allusion and phenomenal
likeness to the religious and theatrical ceremonialist controversies of early modern England.
Thus, somewhere between the Chorus and the historical figure, Henry is a bearing point for the
audience’s physical, emotional, and ethical experiences of theater, however paradoxical they are.
83
CHAPTER TWO
HOW TO BELIEVE IN THE CHESTER MYSTERY CYCLE:
THE THEME OF IMMANENCE
The inclusion of mystery plays in a study on the foundations of belief in early modern
performance is important for several reasons. For one, mystery plays form one line of the
dramatic ancestry of the celebrated drama of Elizabethan England. Second, although neglected
relative to other Renaissance English drama, for certain parts of the country, mystery plays were
far and away the most prevalent form of popular theatrical performance. Mystery plays were
often huge productions that culled the resources of entire towns. To clarify, I use “mystery
plays” to refer specifically to the biblical cycle plays that were often performed in conjunction
with either the Feast of Corpus Christi or Whitsuntide in certain English towns and not
necessarily to the exclusion of the miracle, morality, and saint plays that shared some of the same
elements of production. Thirdly, and most importantly, mystery plays, and especially their
longest generic form in the cycle play, take it as their express intent to incite belief in audiences.
This aim makes sense given that the genre developed to some extent from the Catholic Feast of
Corpus Christi—a festival celebrating the body of Christ sacramentally manifested in the
eucharist. Indeed, many scholars choose to classify cycles like the Whitsun Plays of Chester as
Corpus Christi Cycles. Although there has been much debate over the extent to which the cycles
should be attributed to the liturgical festival, it is at least certain that, like Corpus Christi, the
cycle plays proved to be too much for Reformation England. All of the major English cycle plays
were suppressed for their connections to the old religion. The Chester Cycle is the focus of this
84
chapter, and it is among the latest surviving pageant plays, performed into the 1570s.
131
Many of
the conventional iconoclastic assaults were applied: biblical cycle plays were profane, vulgar,
superstitious, and vainly ceremonious.
Yet mystery plays like the Chester Cycle should not be categorically lumped together
with other forms of suppressed art. Mystery plays were either adored as instruments of devotion
and social unity, or they were attacked as occasions for idleness and distraction. One thing that is
clear is that this genre of early English religious drama was grounded in a robust and complex
world of signification, where the relation between symbol and meaning was not only a matter of
aesthetics but a matter of devotional habit and even sacred dogma. The Wycliffite author of the
fifteenth-century “tretise of miraclis pleyinge” recognizes the force of the plays’ attempts to
mediate godly belief even as he condemns it, writing on the one hand that “miraclis pleyinge
been verrey leesing as they ben signis withoute dede” but also that “they ben holden in mennus
minde and oftere reherside by the pleyinge of hem than by the peintinge, for this is a deed bok,
the tother a qu[i]ck.”
132
Scholars such as Theodore Lerud have shown that the “quick” (living)
quality of late-medieval religious drama was bounded up in powerful structures of religious
mediation and that in some super-mimetic way it sought to manifest “Christ’s living presence.”
Sarah Beckwith adds that mystery plays realize “the sacramental relation between form and
grace” such as is not found in Renaissance theater.
133
Accordingly, the critical focus of the
131
The last recorded performance of the Chester Cycle is in 1575, while cycle plays at Doncaster and Durham
appear to have been produced up to 1576. The Chester Cycle’s heritage in written form survives even longer, with
the Huntington Library MS 2 dating to 1591, demonstrating a more lasting interest in the plays if only as artifacts.
Moreover, guilds continued to produce plays in Lancaster and Kendall into the seventeenth century: see David
George, ed., Lancashire, REED (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1991), xliii, 29.
132
“A tretise of miraclis pleyinge,” ed. Clifford Davidson (Washington, DC: University Press of America,
1981), 2:243-47, 216-19.
133
Theodore Lerud, Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Chrsti Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2008), 6; Beckwith, Signifying God, 59.
85
sacramental aspects of the mystery plays, and especially the biblical cycle plays, has been on the
manifestation of God in the character of Christ—a kind of dramatized eucharistic host held
monstrance-like at the center of the performance.
It may indeed be the case that Corpus Christi drama centers on the body of Christ as a
narrative theme, most acutely realized in the plays of “The Crucifixion” and “The Resurrection,”
but insofar as the plays are dramatic—involving conflict, dialogue, suspense, and anticipation—
it is perhaps more noteworthy that the Chester Mystery Cycle is founded on God’s absence from
the performance. I am referring specifically to the disappearance of God in the first play, “The
Fall of Lucifer” by the Tanners. The angels and God live in harmony, until the audience
experiences the stage directions: “Then they sing and God shall withdraw,” momentarily
vacating his throne and leaving the angels alone in heaven.
134
At this point, things change: the
teleological structure of God’s creation is splintered by Lucifer’s doubts and actions of self-
exaltation; sin is born; and the cycle unfurls into play after play of confounded characters
struggling to see God. In a significant way, even the appearance of Jesus at “The Annunciation
and The Nativity,” which begins with Gabriel’s recital of the Ave Maria, garners its theatrical
release from the rising action caused by the sins of its preceding characters and typological
foresights. As I will explore, the ramifications of God’s disappearance on the Chester Cycle’s
status as an object of belief are momentous because the audience’s experience of the sacred in
the plays becomes premised on God’s invisibility and on the imperative to see and feel the divine
nonetheless.
134
The Chester Mystery Cycle: A New Edition with Modernised Spelling, ed. David Mills (East Lansing:
Colleagues P, 1992), 1.136f. Citations from the plays are from this addition and will appear in the text (play number.
line numbers) unless otherwise noted.
86
Paying careful attention to these ambiguous spectacles in lieu of God’s presence, this
chapter is about the theme of immanence—that is, the perception of the profane and familiar that
is before audiences in place of the divine itself, which is invisible. I expound on what it means
for the Chester Mystery Cycle to be an object of immanent belief for its audience. This entails
examining belief-as-represented on stage as well as belief-as-wrought by the stage. The Chester
plays represent a unique genre in the course of early Renaissance religious drama because they
explicitly seek to promote “good belief,” but they are also of interest because they straddle a
period of religious change and register the effects of this change on drama.
135
Consider, for
example, several convergences of drama and cultural censure in the year 1576. This was the year
of the suppression of the Wakefield plays and the imposition of significant restrictions in York,
prohibiting the impersonation of God in plays; it was also the year of the opening of London’s
first commercial playhouse, The Theatre; even more, 1576 was the year that a group of London
actors visited York for a performance.
136
The impersonation of the divine gave way to the birth
of a commercial subculture where the sacred would once again be mixed with the profane, and
the northern regions experienced this in particularly pointed terms centering on the question of
the compatibility of belief and performance. Thus, the visibility and invisibility of God in the
Chester Cycle is not only a source of dramatic conflict but also a bearing point for exploring the
relation between belief and performativity in the early English Renaissance.
Here, I look at several prominent plays from the Chester Cycle with the intention of
closely describing how the plays appeared to historical audiences as objects of belief. What
exactly was to be believed in the plays? What was the relation between the spectacles on stage—
135
The Chester Mystery Cycle, 5.
136
For the letter of suppression to Wakefield, see A. C. Cawley, ed., The Wakefield Pageants in the Towneley
Cycle (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1958), 125. For the troupe’s visit to York, see Alexandra F. Johnston and
Margaret Rogerson, eds., York, REED (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1979), i.
87
sets, props, and players, each familiar to the town audience—and the sacred narrative they
purported to dramatize? Was it image-based, sensationalist, ceremonialist, iconoclastic, logo-
centric, or otherwise? The majority of criticism by scholars such as Mervyn James, Theodore
Lerud, Victor Scherb, Gail Gibson, David Coleman, and Glynn Wickham takes a devotional or
incarnational view of the plays, focusing variously on how the plays are infused with the divine
from the top-down, applying principles of devotional aesthetics to the plays’ symbolism and to
the social bodies surrounding them.
137
Alternatively, I hope to demonstrate that the Chester
Cycle frames belief primarily from the bottom-up, engaging audiences foremost with its
immanent spectacles and with the fact of human spiritual blindness, rather than through a
sacramental lens. As Sarah Beckwith suggests, Corpus Christi theater performs a radical
“resemioticization” of sacred media that centers on the body and the sacramental actions of
theater, but I would take this phenomenality even further and suggest that the predominant entry
point for believing through the cycle is an engagement of the mundane, the profane, and even the
obscure rather than an engagement of the divine primarily through the miraculous and
transcendent.
138
Preferring to emphasize the performativity rather than the sacramentality of
Corpus Christi theater, I describe this bottom-up religious theatricality as a theme of immanence:
a presentation of the sacred based on the recognition that the transcendent only always appears in
what is immediate and subjectively accessible without ever usurping the immanent with the
transcendent. Consistent with a recurring theme of this dissertation, the Chester Cycle seeks to
shape a unique experience of the divine through the parts and pieces of its performance because
137
Mervyn James, “Drama and Social Body in the Late Medieval English Town,” Past & Present 98 (1983): 3-
29; Lerud, Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Chrsti Drama; Victor Scherb, Staging Faith: East Anglian
Drama in the Later Middle Ages (Madison: Fairleigh Diskinson UP, 2001); Gibson, Theater of Devotion; David
Coleman, Drama and the Sacraments; Gylnne Wickham, Early English Stages 1300 to 1600, Volume Three: Plays
and their Makers to 1576 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981).
138
Beckwith, Signifying God, 59.
88
it is only through parts—notwithstanding their popular purposes and contexts—that audiences
come to a unified experience of belief.
What is Given and What is Believed
The Chester Cycle is often classified as early English drama, a label that rightly implies that its
generic boundaries are less “worked out” than those of later English drama. Despite their
common origins in liturgical performance, the plays of the Chester Cycle include what a
seventeenth-century playgoer in London might perceive to be overlapping purposes, such as
religious instruction, civic celebration, and liturgical event; there is nothing very “commercial”
about the confluence of these ends. Indeed, one way to account for the emergence of the Chester
Mystery Cycle is to begin with the Corpus Christi feast and ceremonial procession, then to the
creation of a Corpus Christi play to accompany the ceremonial liturgy, and finally to the
development of a three-day play festival moved to Whitsuntide. In other chapters, I discuss
similar built-in tensions between performance and belief—plays and ceremony, sermons and
their environments, godly ballads and popular culture, theatricality and interiority—but the
Chester plays are unique in that their integration of belief and performance does not survive,
historically speaking. Performances of the cycle were sparse during Elizabeth’s reign; recorded
performances occurred in 1561, 1567, 1568, 1572, and 1575.
139
Even though these dates are well after the suppression of the Feast of Corpus Christi
(1548), sometime before 1540 the cycle’s banns were rewritten in reaction to Protestant ideas
about devotion and art. The banns are a kind of prologue that was performed before the plays.
They included an announcement of performance and a review of the individual guilds and their
139
David Mills, Recycling the Cycle: The City of Chester and Its Whitsun Plays (Toronto: U of Toronto P,
1998), 146.
89
productions. The post-Reformation changes constitute a rewriting more than a revision, as the
late banns are almost entirely different from the early banns. The most obvious differences are
the addition of a longer introductory announcement of the performance preceding the survey of
individual guilds and also the adoption of a second-person imperative voice from a third-person
voice to announce the guilds. Thus, instead of “Semely Smythis also in Syght / a louely Caryage
the will dyght,” the late banns read, “You Smythes honest men yea and of honest arte / howe
Christe amonge the doctors in the temple did dispute / to set out in playe comely yet shalbe your
parte.”
140
The tone implied by the latter second-person voice is forceful and, in a way, self-
critical, as if making transparent its awareness of the fragility of religious art in post-Reformation
culture. This is consistent with many explicit remarks in the late banns that criticize the outdated
Catholic ideas contained in the plays. Salient examples include the admission that apocryphal
stories “Intermingle there with onely to make sporte / some tinges not warranted by any writt”
and also the request that audiences not “compare this matter or storie / with the age or tyme
wherein we presentlye staye / but to the tyme of Ignorance wherein we did straye.”
141
Of course,
we should not be too quick to assume that such sentiment reflects the actual beliefs Cestrians as a
whole, especially given that Catholic resistance to reform lasted longer in Lancashire—just east
of Cheshire—than almost anywhere else in England. Still, the revisions to the plays’ banns
illustrate how anxiety over the plays infiltrated the performed content itself, as the banns were a
consistent part of the performance. The banns demonstrate the deep performative and authorial
tension between popular performance and religion inherent to the cycle play, ultimately leading
to their suppression.
140
F. M. Salter, “The Banns of the Chester Plays,” Review of English Studies 16, no. 62 (1940): 139, 145.
141
Salter, “The Banns of the Chester Plays,” 142-43.
90
Many of the reasons for the suppression of the Whitsun plays follow suit with general
Protestant trends of iconoclasm, but as even these trends can be diverse, it is worth briefly
looking at the character of these religion-inspired critiques. Some evidence of this can be found
in the letter book of the extreme Protestant activist, Christopher Goodman. Goodman returned to
Chester in 1570 after a significant stay in Geneva where he worked with the reformer, John
Knox. Goodman appears to be especially concerned with the Whitsun plays, in one letter
describing them as a popish plot to maintain Catholic practice, if only at a folk level.
142
Another
letter from Goodman’s book written by Archbishop Grindal condemns “the usuall plays of
Chester” as containing “sundry absurd & gross errours & heresies joyned with profanation &
great abuse of god’s holy word.”
143
The argument here is often repeated in similar contexts: that
the plays distract from and also misappropriate the scriptures by representing them visually in a
popular performance. The same sort of accusation is leveled by the author of the fourteenth-
century “A tretise of miraclis pleyinge” who complains that the emotion incited by such plays is
false devotion because it “ben not principaly for theire oune sinnes ne of theire gode feith
withinneforthe, but more of theire sight withouteforth.”
144
In other words, if one’s spiritual zeal
can be traced to outward sensory stimuli, then it does not constitute true repentance. Moreover,
besides the banns themselves, perhaps the most valuable source for the historical context of the
Chester Cycle is the Breviary of Robert Rogers and his son, David. While Rogers’s primary aim
is to record the play as a civic custom, writing after the plays were suppressed, he does not shy
away from casting judgment on the cycle as an “abomination of desolation with suche a clowde
142
Christopher Goodman’s Letter-book (c 1539-1601), Plas Power MSS, DD/PP/839, 119. For an in-depth
discussion of Goodman’s book see Mills, Recycling the Cycle, 146.
143
Plas Power MSS, DD/PP/839, p. 119; quoted in Miss, Recycling the Cycle, 147.
144
“A tretise,” 2.369-61.
91
of ignorance to defile with so highe a hand the moste sacred scriptures of God.”
145
Like the other
criticisms, Rogers identifies the misuse of scripture as the plays’ chief crime, mentioning also the
scale of the production, the crowds, and the elaborate spectacles as a misapplication of religious
energy.
All of these censures of the Chester Cycle and its miracle-play relatives express
disturbance with the plays’ mixture of the Bible and popular performance. In particular, they
condemn the role of the human body in the dissemination of holy writ—especially in the form of
inappropriate sensory engagement in devotion, similar to the complaints leveled by Gosson,
discussed in Chapter One. Attacks on mystery plays do not seem to be so developed as to fit
neatly into the later Protestant division of the word of God as heard and read versus devotion as
seen and touched. Rather, they primarily voice alarm at the notion of the Bible being performed
at the discretion of a town, out of control of the church, and made into a popular spectacle. The
human body is at the center of this alarm over uncontrolled popular religion. This logic
presupposes that authentic devotion should be differentiated from circumstance and
environment, suggesting, with the author of the “tretise,” that revealing the human strategy
behind belief debunks it. This view of authenticity is not unlike the literary historical opinion,
discussed in this dissertation’s Introduction, that transparent theatricality kills belief, only here
the opinion represents a radical Protestant perspective.
Several scholars have explored the centrality of the body to the identity of religion in the
Chester Cycle. The body is important, of course, not only for its part in the controversy over
physically mediated devotion but also for the part it plays in the heritage of the cycle as a Corpus
Christi play where the body of Christ is a devotional object. Mervyn James’s influential article
145
R.M. Lumiansky and David Mills, The Chester Mystery Cycle Essays and Documents (Chapel Hill: U of
North Carolina P, 1983), 266.
92
on the early English Corpus Christi celebrations introduces the idea that the ceremonial
celebrations of the body of Christ could play a significant unifying role for the social body,
providing the city “with a mythology and ritual in terms of which the opposites of social
wholeness and social integration could be both affirmed, and also brought into a creative tension,
one with the other.”
146
This social function may account for the persistence of the theme of
Corpus Christi from a liturgical procession to a liturgical play and finally to the more
autonomous form of the Chester Cycle performed in Whitsuntide. There is evidence in the late
middle ages and in the Reformation that the eucharist often served a unifying social function.
John Bossy’s article, “The Mass as Social Institution 1200-1700,” was the first widely influential
essay to make the social historical claim that the theological symbolism of the eucharist allowed
it to represent both social division and social wholeness.
147
David Mills in his comprehensive
study, Recycling the Cycle: The City of Chester and Its Whitsun Plays, suggests that this social
integration is perpetuated in the plays even by the economic conditions of their production,
though he is reluctant to say that the body of Christ as a symbol contributes in any deliberate way
to this integration. Such conditions include companies sharing wagons and an awareness of
mutual economic benefit.
148
Other recent studies of mystery plays by critics like Sarah Beckwith
usually adopt this relation between the body of Christ and the social body, but the critical
challenge has become explaining how this integration translates into plays like the Chester Cycle
146
James, “Drama and Social Body,” 98.
147
John Bossy, “The Mass as Social Institution 1200-1700,” Past & Present 100 (1983): 34-35.
148
Mills, Recycling the Cycle, 117.
93
where the body of Christ is represented wholly differently than it is in Corpus Christi
ceremonies.
149
I too want to think about the body in the Chester plays, but setting aside the social
conditions of the play as a focus, I attend to the body as a perceiving subject, that is, the body as
seeing, hearing, touching, ingesting, and comprehending. Whereas the predominant critical focus
especially in Renaissance theater has been on the body as a known object, as represented in
drama and by all of the cultural crosscurrents that influence bodily knowledge, I will focus on
the body as a knowing and believing subject, as one of several markers of immanence. By
immanence, I am referring to the principle of consciousness whereby any object of our attention
is wholly known through immanent experience. Immanence, thus, is a term that describes the
continuous relation between an object as it is perceived and as it gives itself to perception—a
continuum that accounts for the fact that what is implied in a perception is often much more than
the physical perspective affords. In the Second Lecture of The Idea of Phenomenology Husserl
writes: “Every intellectual experience, indeed every experience whatsoever, can be made into an
object of pure seeing and apprehension while it is occurring. And in this act of seeing, it is an
absolute givenness.”
150
For example, suppose that we see a statue from a given angle and in a
given context; despite our perspectival limitations, we perceive an object—a statue of a certain
creature, in a certain position, representing an emotion or narrative moment—that transcends the
bare sensory qualities that are given in the experience of it. Bert States uses the term “frontality”
to describe the given qualities of the statue.
151
Immanence, then, refers to the paradox of
149
A good example of one approach to this problem is Sarah Beckwith’s use of ritual theory in Bordieu and
Merleau-Ponty to argue that mystery plays themselves enact—rather than merely represent—social relations:
Signifying God, 28-41.
150
Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. Lee Hardy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999), 24.
151
States, “The Phenomenological Attitude,” 371.
94
perception in which an object appears—in its perceptual entirety but also only insofar as it is
given to perception in its individual parts. An immanent understanding of Corpus Christi drama
like the Chester Cycle means attending to the specific perceptual conditions of its playing—the
frontality of the sacred in the play—and, especially, to the embodied experience of its audience.
In light of the work done on mystery plays as dramatic extensions of the body of Christ,
we can observe that the theme of immanent religious devotion carries over from the Chester
plays’ origins in the Corpus Christi feast to the dramatic cycle itself. In the liturgical feast, the
theme of immanence is manifest in the eucharistic body of Christ, both in Mass and in the
procession where the host is carried in a monstrance. In celebrating the eucharist, the Feast of
Corpus Christi not only commemorates the sacrifice of Christ but specifically the sacrament and
the miracle of transubstantiation.
152
Thus, the focus of the feast is the eucharist’s ability to make
Christ’s body immanent to those who behold it—a supernatural kind of immanence. The late-
medieval reformer John Wycliff, along with the medieval realists and nominalists that influenced
him, attacked what we might call the super-immanence of the eucharist, applying alternative
metaphysical laws to sacramental dogma, such as the principle that “a quantity must be identical
with the substance to which it is attributed.”
153
Such scholastics were more interested in
questions of existence than questions of perception, but their eventual influence on the Protestant
Reformation did in fact bleed into the ways Protestants thought of devotional perception. In
Chapter One, I discussed some ways in which early modern theater was essentially ceremonial
and mediatory. Protestant ideas about sensation-heavy devotional practices were suspicious of
this kind of mediation. Whereas the church that instituted the Feast of Corpus Christi tended to
152
Miri Rubin calls the eucharist the “raison d’etre” of the feast/procession. Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in
Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991), 245.
153
Rubin, Corpus Christi, 34.
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think of religious mediation as a bridge, reformers thought of it as a divide, and, importantly, it
was the embodied character of ceremonial devotion that troubled reformers just as much as the
embodying illustrations of stained glass and devotional statues. In other words, reformers
abolished ceremonies like the Feast of Corpus Christi in the sixteenth century both because they
rejected the doctrines of ceremonialism (i.e., transubstantiation) and because they rejected the
perceptual disposition that led devotees to look for transcendent meaning in religious images and
ceremonies. In short, reformers sought to separate the perceiving devotional subject from the
devotional object when that object seemed too idol-like.
What emerges from this sketch is that mystery plays like the Chester Cycle evolved
within a contest over the religious value of immanent experience. Michael Witmore has written
on role of immanent experience in Shakespearean metaphysics, grounded in the work of early
modern metaphysicians, and he defines immanence as the perspective that identifies things in
actions and dramaturgical appearances rather than in “spatially discrete bodies or materially
indifferent ideas.”
154
As applied to the genre of mystery plays, immanent experience is especially
differentiated from its dominant religious metaphysical milieu, where the established church both
before and after the Reformation exercised the power to sanction certain metaphysical
identities—the most prominent of which being the eucharist. Thus, historically, to foreground the
parts and pieces of an experience of the sacred is to toe the edge of subversion insofar as the
same metaphysical laws that constitute the eucharist become subject to the touch, sight, and
audition of the common audiences of a popular performance. On one side of this popular
performance is the liturgical heritage of the cycle, recalling scenes of a civic procession centered
154
Witmore’s discussion of immanence is especially helpful for its combining of dramaturgy and metaphysics.
He focuses specifically on the metaphysical thought of Whitehead, Bergson, and Spinoza for contextualizing
Shakespeare historically among philosophers. Shakespeare’s Metaphysics, 3.
96
on an elaborate monstrance holding the eucharistic host. This monstrance represents the
elevation of the host during the Mass—an event much contested in the liturgical debates of
Reformation England—and as such asserts a devotional model based on Christ’s immanent body
and its reenacted sacrifice. On the other side is the Reformation’s distrust of mediated devotion,
to the extent that the eucharist becomes primarily a memorial, merely representing rather than
reenacting the breaking of Christ’s body. This is not to say that Protestant ideas about perception
did not involve their own implied theory of immanence. Quite the contrary, reformers cared
deeply about how people’s bodies, senses, and perceptual thoughts grasped the divine. For many
Protestants, immanence was re-established by stripping the altars of their superstitious
ceremonial ornament and thereby clearing the path for what they understood to be a more direct
experience of prayer and worship. As I show in Chapter Three on Donne’s sermongoing
environment, Protestants came to intensely scrutinize the relation between how one perceives a
thing both as it is given (a preacher’s sermon) and as it is perceived (God’s holy word). If
anything, the Reformation removed immanence from the realm of sacramental miracle and
robustly re-imagined perception as an important factor in practical piety.
The Household in “The Last Supper”
As one of the town biblical plays that survived the longest into Protestant England, the Chester
Whitsun plays register both perspectives on the immanence of sacred content—a concern with
the subject as perceiver and with the sacred object as transcendent and other. Although the banns
changed with the onset of Protestantism, the plays’ dramatic content followed the same basic
script throughout its performance life. Therefore, the contrasting views on immanence are both
included in the plays, coexisting but mutually exclusive of one another. David Mills, for
97
instance, has shown how the early and late banns that accompanied performances differentiated
between opposing Catholic and Protestant interpretations of the eucharist. He notes that the post-
Reformation banns provide a caveat to the Bakers’ production of “The Last Supper,” instructing
them to “see that with the same wordes you vtter / as Criste hym selfe spake them to be A
memoriall / of that death and passion which in playe ensue after shall.”
155
Mills notes that these
lines seek to encourage a “memorial” interpretation of the Last Supper, but it should be added
that the Bakers’ play also contains potential for dramatizing the institution of a transubstantiated
supper. To this end, “The Last Supper, and Betrayal of Christ” includes what must have been an
extremely controversial elaboration on the biblical text in which the character of Jesus, seated at
the table, addresses his disciples just before uttering the words of institution:
For know ye now, the time is come
that signs and shadows be all done.
Therefore make haste, that we may soon
all figures clean reject.
For now a new Law I will begin
to help Mankind out of his sin
so that he may Heaven win,
the which for sin he lost.
And here, in presence of you all,
another sacrifice begin I shall,
155
Salter, “The Banns of the Chester Plays,” 146.
98
to bring Mankind out of his thrall,
for help him need I most.
(15.69-80)
Although the actual words of institution ten lines later generally follow the biblical rubric—“this
is my body / that shall die for all Mankind / in remission of their sin”—it is prefaced by this
provocative declaration that “signs and shadows be all done.” In the context of the performance
festival, these lines were spoken on Tuesday of Whitsun week, the second day of performances,
and so to most playgoers they could also be understood as the focal moment of the many
foreshadowings of salvation from the previous days’ plays. The rainbow of “Noah’s Flood” and
Melchysedeck’s offering of bread and wine to Abraham are two examples of theatrical moments
that audiences could have identified as the “signs and shadows” to which Jesus refers—
respectively, to the sacraments of baptism and the eucharist. Still, given the high-profile Feast of
Corpus Christi associated with the Whitsun plays and also the proximity of these lines to the
words of institution, Jesus’ words would have also been taken to refer to the literal presence of
his body in the Last Supper.
Thus, the immanence of this sacred event can go either way: either it is reformed through
interpretation as a memorial and therefore as a reminder of the immanent access that Christians
have to God through Christ, or it dramatizes the immanence of Christ in the miracle of
transubstantiation. Jesus’ expression contains both forms of immanence, stressing his presence
and the present moment of communion: “here, in presence of you all.” God’s presence in the
Chester plays is decidedly contested, and the question of immanence points to the present
moment of the historical production—to the immense amount of time taken for the performance,
to the organizational structure established over the years for producing the multi-stage moving
99
plays seamlessly, and to the necessarily fragmented viewing experience of any given audience
member. Julian Yates, in his book on the “object lessons” of early modern England, provides a
useful illustration for thinking about the perceptual contingencies of immanent experience. His
“object lessons” are technologies, moments, and things that turn perceptions into empirical
lessons; an object lesson is literally the work that takes place when one’s experience of an object
becomes a lesson. With the phenomenological critique of empiricism and psychologism in mind,
Yates looks for those literary moments of erring judgment that
[restore] the labor of the things or beings that perform the work of connection and
are erased or forgotten in the process. These lessons restore another order of
movement to the scene, a blurring of categories. Things speak, take on faces,
appear to address us. And this movement permits us to understand the formal
relations between things, to perceive the labor that conjunctions do in enabling
scenes we tend to read as human drama.
156
In other words, things happen in the moments that pass while an indiscernible shape resolves into
a face and into a person. Mystery plays resolve into their own unique generic identities but are
transparent in their strategies of production, thus resisting the separation of believing audience
and laboring players. Here, “the labor of things or beings” includes actors delivering lines and
people behind the scenes operating theatrical devices such as that used to lift Jesus into the
clouds in “The Ascension.” Yet it also includes the phenomenological devices used to
cognitively haul the scene from its status as tableaux into a living picture. Both the audience and
the guilds embrace the transparency inherent to cycle drama and so also affirm the command to
“all figures clean reject” in embracing the thematic immanence of the present experience.
156
Julian Yates, Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 2003), xvii.
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For the audience of the Chester Cycle, these theatrical devices and strategies always had
implications for religion. Not only does the versified content of the Chester plays combine with
its corporeal and technological civic contexts to render a scene, but it also combines with the
immanence of the sacred object being dramatized or, at least, with popular experience of the
sacred. In other words, biblical plays like “The Last Supper” expand what counts as belief by
invoking the perceptual and intellectual activities that audiences associate with the communion
liturgy and its various cultural representations. Consider the supper table as an object, probably
originally built by the carpenters, themselves responsible for “The Annunciation and the
Nativity,” and eventually coming into the hands of the Bakers.
157
In the beginning of the play,
the stage directions describe Peter and John walking into the town to find a room to use for
Passover supper: “Then Peter and John shall go, and they shall speak to a man carrying a brick-
coloured pitcher of water” (15.36ff). At this point, it is likely that the actors, probably already
standing on the ground level, walk out into the audience in search of the man carrying a pitcher.
When they find him, the three finally approach the carriage, which is likely curtained, and then
the audience experiences the first of several monumental “reveals” in this play, as the curtain
recedes for the Owner to offer the disciples the famous room of the Last Supper:
Lo, here, a parlour all ready dight,
with pav-ed floors and windows bright.
Make all things ready as you think right,
and this have you shall.
(15.53-56)
157
While the Carpenters are only mentioned in one source for the Whitsun Plays, there is evidence to suggest
that later sources’ labels of “wrights” refers to the carpenters. See Lumniansky and Mills, Essays and Documents,
170.
101
The Owner’s ekphrasis serves several purposes. First, it directs attention to details that audiences
may not have automatically noticed, since windows illuminate less when the room is outdoors
and since many may not have been able to see the elevated floor of the carriage from the ground
level. Second, the Owner presents the room as a blank canvas of sorts, where the largest blank
space is the table itself. This second “reveal” occurs in the time contained in the subsequent stage
direction: “Then they shall deck out the table and return” (60f). Altogether, the table of the Last
Supper comes to presence through an engagement with the audience and a kind of dramaturgical
exposé. The audience watches one of their own present the carriage, followed by Peter and John
decking the table with its distinctive accouterments—wine, wine glasses, and bread, of course,
perhaps as well as the other dishes of the Passover dinner. This play’s utilization of audience
interaction would have become particularly memorable over the years due especially to its
custom of sharing the bread that the Bakers made with the audience. The late banns instruct the
players to “caste god looves Abroad with A Cheerfull harte.”
158
“The Last Supper’s” several devices for establishing a setting of exchange and revelation
with its audience once again demonstrate its conflicted yet intensive treatment of immanent
belief. One can trace a palpable narrative of this conflict in the bread itself. It begins with the
Bakers, the most fitting company to produce a play about the breaking of bread, their charter
instructing them “to be redy to pay for the costs and expenses of the Play and light of Corpus
Christi.”
159
158
Salter, “The Banns of the Chester Plays,” 9.
159
Lumiansky and Mills, Essays and Documents, 206.
102
Figure 1. Detail from woodcut for December. Le Grant Kalendrier et Compost des Bergiers (Troyes, 1496).
The most conspicuous of these “costs” goes towards the wheat itself, paying three pence for
three “stryke of wyete.”
160
In the play, the bread—having been baked in preproduction—first
appears in the hands of Peter and John who use it to “deck out” the table, at which time the bread
is transformed into a cue through which the audience anticipates the Last Supper—a sign of
things to come. In essence, this play begins as a scene of hospitality; the owner opens the doors
of his home, and two of the disciples work to make it hospitable. Julia Reinhard Lupton
describes the phenomenological dimension to hospitality as “a form of theater” that conditions
relationships and, for this reason, is political. The “virtue of hospitality,” she writes, “[requires] a
160
Lumiansky and Mills, Essays and Documents, 191.
103
certain virtuosity, an element of pure performance.” It is “a labor of display, not only the laying
of foods on trenchers of wood, plate or sugar, but also the display of self and household for the
assembled company.”
161
Hospitality returns in extremis at the end of the play when Jesus dons a
servant’s towel and washes the disciples’ feet.
In this context, the play balances its prop of bread atop the border between the sacred and
the utterly familiar. This comparison of divine and earthly food has a long tradition, appearing
even in the “Gradual” of the liturgy for the Mass of Corpus Christi. The “Gradual” culls from
psalmic verses that treat food as basic sustenance and sets them to music to be sung after the
reading of the “Epistle”: “The eyes of all wait upon thee, O Lord: and thou givest them their
meat in due season,” and “Thou openest thine hand: and fillest all things living with
plenteousness.”
162
As a kind of performance in its own right, this scene appropriates table-setting
and cooking into one of the cycle’s most iconic plays. For these brief moments, the immanent
objects of bread and cup are fleshed out by a new context and take on meanings outside the
traditional image of the Last Supper. They are signs of provision and generosity, and they
reframe for a moment the Last Supper as a gift that the town of Chester gives to Jesus, rather
than the other way around. In these ways the transparent making of the scene—far from
discouraging belief—becomes essential to the audience interaction and spiritual virtues
thematized in the Last Supper.
161
Lupton, Thinking with Shakespeare, 64.
162
“Oculi omnium in te sperant, Domine, et tu das illis escam in tempore opportuno”; “Aperis tu manum tuam:
et imples omne animal benedictione.” English quotations are from The Sarum Missal In English, trans. Frederick E.
Warren, (London: De La More, 1911), 361.. For the early modern Latin I have consulted the Corpus Christi liturgy
in Missale ad usam insignis ecclesie Sarum (Antwerp: Printed by Christoffel Ruremund, 1527), O6v-O7r.
Renaissance editions of the missal such as this one employ extensive abbreviations, and so for legibility I have
quoted in the notes the Latin from a nineteenth-century edition that is identical but omits abbreviations: Missale ad
Usum Insignis et Praeclarae Ecclesiae Sarum, Pars Prima: Temporale (London: C. J. Stewart, 1861), 455-60.
104
Once Jesus and all the disciples are seated at the table where they assume the iconic
pose—“Then Jesus shall recline, and John shall sleep in his bosom”— the audience experiences
the most climactic “reveal”—“Then Jesus shall take bread, break it, and give it to his disciples”
(80f, 88ff). By this point, the bread’s immanent status has completely reversed. Whereas in the
hands of Peter and John, entering the carriage with the pitcher-carrying man from the crowd, the
bread is familiar, at the tableaux moment when Jesus breaks the bread it becomes distant and
symbolic, transformed into the body of Christ, reminiscent of the monstrance that held it in the
Corpus Christi procession. The play’s dialogue has temporarily given way solely to Christ’s
voice, echoed inter-performatively by the priest in the consecration liturgy. A contrast is invoked
here to Latin as the liturgical language for celebrations of the eucharist. This is one the scenes
most prevalently referenced by the post-Reformation banns when they highlight the cycle’s use
of the vernacular: “These storyes of the Testamente at this tyme you knowe / in A common
Englishe tongue neuer read nor harde / yet therof in these pagentes to make open shewe.”
163
Although information on the week-to-week liturgical lives of laypeople in late-medieval Chester
is scarce, we can be reasonably sure that before the Reformation and even up to the Act of
Uniformity in 1559 the English-language Sarum Rite was in use in churches and at Chester’s
Abbey of St. Werburgh, which was dissolved in 1540 and then resurrected the subsequent year
as the Protestant cathedral. The consecration liturgy and words of institution in the 1559 Prayer
Book were entirely in English, but in the Sarum Rite it was still in Latin. For this reason, the play
prompts a kind of confusion of the audience’s sensory memory—what Walter Ong would call
their “sensorium,” the embodied perspective and sensory habits of a viewer at Mass.
164
The play
163
Salter, “The Banns of the Chester Plays,”142.
164
Walter Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New
Haven: Yale UP, 1967), 6.
105
is reminiscent of the liturgy and also of the subjective feelings of spectatorship in church, but the
moment of transcendence stops just short of the liturgy by remaining in English. In terms of
sensorium, the upheld bread is primarily an object of visual belief, a sign presented to the
physical senses. In the liturgy, most congregants would not have understood the priest’s words
that accompanied the elevation, but in “The Last Supper” audiences experience a confluence of
sight and vernacular understanding, feeling a bodily disposition of reverence towards the scene
through sensory memory but also comprehending the bread as unusually immanent. In pre-
Reformation performances, this immanence was perhaps heightened by the absence of rood
screens that blocked parishioners’ views of liturgical movements in many churches. By the
1570s, rood screens existed primarily as a memory, but for the majority of the cycle’s late-
medieval and early Renaissance performances they were familiar enough to emphasize a
continuity of immanence between the mundane and the transcendent. The use of vernacular and
the visual immediacy of the scene project a nuanced kinesthetic and gustatory identity onto the
sacred symbol of the bread and mixes it with the attitudes of sacred perception that the audiences
carried over from their liturgical lives in Chester’s churches. Thus, Jesus’ words of institution in
this scene are particularly striking for their familiarity, adopted as they were into a scene of
hospitality and festivity. Especially relevant here is the attitude of centering belief on a specific
visual moment and place—this point in the Mass and this point in Chester’s production of “The
Last Supper.” This focal moment traverses the pre- and post-Reformation contexts of the play’s
history, presenting Christ not primarily through reference to the sacrament but through the bodies
and props of the stage, as accessible as the loaf he holds in his hands.
The bread’s penultimate stop on its journey through the play is in the hands of Judas.
Dramatically, it would make sense for there to be a pause in dialogue after Jesus says,
106
For more together drink not we
in Heaven-bliss till that we be
to taste that ghostly food.
(15.102-104)
After the audience allows the transformation from real to “ghostly” food sink in, the stage
directions instruct: “Then he shall eat and drink with the disciples, and Judas Iscariot shall have
his hand in the dish” (104ff). It is not until fifteen lines later that Judas dips the bread in wine
and eats it—“Then Judas shall reach into the dish” (120f). This means that Judas holds the bread
in this hand for a conspicuously long period of time. The tableaux of transcendent theology has
passed, and, perversely, Judas now enacts his own elevation of the host. One might compare this
to the theological objections of reformers, who attacked transubstantiation by speculating about
the animals that might consume and digest fallen crumbs of the eucharistic host, as in John
Milton’s sarcastic summary: “even the most wicked of the communicants, not to mention the
mice and worms which often eat the eucharist, would attain eternal life by virtue of that heavenly
bread.”
165
Christ’s body, mystically contained in the bread, has been clutched and eaten by Jesus’
betrayer, and as Judas leaves the room, the mystical bread is replaced by ordinary food, as Jesus
exclaims, “Brethren, take up this meat anon!” (15.137). Thus, the bread’s journey from the
familiar, to the sacred, and finally to the profane defamiliarizes the loaves that finally reach the
hands of audience members, as the Bakers “caste god looves Abroad” to the audience who
restore the bread to its original status as regular sustenance.
The continuity that “The Last Supper” draws between the bread as a mundane object and
the bread as a transcendent symbol is remarkable. On their own, of course, both experiences
165
John Milton, Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al, 8 vols., (New Haven: Yale UP,
1953-82), 6:553.
107
were common in late-medieval and Renaissance England, but it was unusual to involve
audiences in a transaction between common bread and its incarnation as the sacred host. To
borrow Yates’s words, the play restores “another order of movement to the scene, a blurring of
categories” through the triangulation of immanent drama, civic context, and sacred experience.
The play shows how the sacred comes to presence through the workings of the popular stage as
well as how drama appears through the defamiliarization of a sacred institution. That is, the
scene reveals to audiences the process of becoming sacred through the work of cooking, decking,
hosting, holding, dipping, speaking, and ingesting. It complicates different views of divine
immanence by using bread to bridge the divide between church and drama.
Signs and Things: The Supper Table
Another object that traverses both mundane and sacred identities is the supper table; it serves to
create distance as well as to form a bridge and so incites audiences to question the right context
in which to interpret the scene. Should we view the table as representative of an altar, with all the
perceptual attitudes of sacramental immanence that come with it, or should we view it as a stage
prop that likely served normal, non-theatrical purposes throughout the rest of the year? Hannah
Arendt notes the paradox of immanence enacted by such a mundane object in an anecdote: “The
weirdness of this situation resembles a spiritualistic séance where a number of people gathered
around a table might suddenly, through some magic trick, see the table vanish from their midst,
so that two persons sitting opposite each other were no longer separated but also would be
entirely unrelated to each other by anything tangible.”
166
Commenting on this passage, Lupton
explains, “The table, unlike the couch, distributes distance while also creating the possibility of
166
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998), 53; quoted in Lupton, Thinking
with Shakespeare, 12.
108
the face-to-face; it is quite literally the support not only of plates, notebooks and Sabbath
candles, but also of the very spacing that sustains human relationship.”
167
The table in “The Last
Supper” brings the sacred to immanent access through a physical feeling of domesticity and
human relationship, but it also subordinates itself in order to empower the iconic tableaux to
transcend the mundane. I use the term “tableaux” here with the historical links between early
English drama and still-images in mind. This link has been explored by Theodore Lerud who
argues that mystery plays are better understood as deriving from ancient image theory than from
theater.
168
Yet I also use “tableaux” to signal the unique fame of this particular image of the Last
Supper, which was bound to transcend its theatrical narrative imagistically in the minds of
historical audiences.
We have no way of viewing this particular table today, but the Chester play has made it
clear that it was not the table but its personnel and notably its setting that are most important.
Among the many famous images of the Last Supper from medieval and Renaissance Europe,
Leonardo da Vinci’s is in the minority that positions its occupants on only three sides of the table
in an overt pose oriented towards the viewer. Another common arrangement is rounder, with
some occupants’ backs facing the viewer, sometimes with their heads turned sideways to show
profiles. Albrecht Dürer experimented with woodcuts of both positionings. The difference
between the two arrangements in terms of immanence is the question of to whom the supper
table is oriented: does it mediate the disciples and Christ to each other, or does it present (deck,
elevate, dramatize) the entire group to the viewer? Mark Morton observes that “the three-sided
positioning . . . tends to impose an emotional distance between the viewer and the subject
167
Lupton, Thinking with Shakespeare, 12.
168
Lerud, Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Chrsti Drama, 4.
109
matter.”
169
At the same time, this emotional distance might also incite comparisons to the
distance of the Holy Liturgy and so express a deeper, miraculous form of access.
It is probable that the positioning in Chester’s “The Last Supper” used the three-sided
arrangement so that Jesus would be visible at a wider angle to more audience members. Yet one
illustration of the Last Supper that fits the Chester play’s description to a remarkable degree,
except for its circular arrangement, comes from a sixteenth-century Sarum Missal printed in
Paris by William Merlin in 1555.
169
Mark Morton, “Making Space,” Gastronomica 12, no. 1 (2012): 7-8.
110
Figure 2. Illustration for the Corpus Christi office in Missale ad Usum Insignis Ecclesie Sarisburiensis (Paris,
1555)
As the red-letter print beneath it reveals, this image is meant to illustrate the liturgy for the Feast
of Corpus Christi, making it especially relevant as a cultural companion to the Whitsun play of
“The Last Supper.” The two details about the room expressed to Peter and John by the Owner of
the house are its “pav-ed floors and windows bright,” both of which are represented here in an
111
uncommon combination.
170
Along with the figure of Christ, the scene centers on the cooked
paschal lamb in a dish, prominently set to play up the hospitality and ritual specificity of the
occasion. Moreover, Judas is also prevalently distinguished both by his lack of a halo and by the
bag of money in his hand, drawing attention to his clutching action in contrast to Christ’s
foreshadowed elevation. Like the Sarum Missal’s woodcut, the Chester’s “The Last Supper”
straddles the line of the emotional distance between the audience’s bodies and the body of Christ.
What I want to stress is that the play makes a point to show the audience the table at three
perceptually different moments: before it is prepared, while it is in use at the words of institution,
and after it has been defiled by Judas. Although there is an occasion that briefly centers on Jesus’
elevation and prayer, audiences are privileged witnesses of the domestic and dramaturgical labor
of cycle theater.
Anachronistic as it is, one could interpret this exposé as a kind of iconoclasm and
stripping down of the Catholic consecration liturgy, but—similar to the feeling of ownership of
popular religion induced by godly ballads, discussed in Chapter Four—the exposé also provides
a feeling of intimacy. Unlike the Missal’s illustration, Chester’s “The Last Supper” shows more
than just the Last Supper; it creates a space and time in which the moment depicted in the
illustration comes to pass, and the majority of this space and time is devoted to such marginal
details. As a result, audiences are allowed to “live with” the sacred event in a familiar element.
This may indeed play into what Jesus means by foregrounding the “presence” of the occasion—
“in presence of you all, / another sacrifice begin I shall.” In contradistinction to Mills’s argument
that there is no “present” in the drama of the Chester Cycle, the present time is here enacted by
170
The central panel of Dieric Bouts the Elder’s triptych, “The Last Supper” (1464-47), and Domenico
Ghirlandaio’s fresco, “The Last Supper” (1480), both fifteenth-century, are two additional examples of “pav-ed
floors and windows bright.”
112
the continuous presence of objects like the bread and table—displayed all the more prominently
by their inhabitation of the familiar.
171
Moreover, for the play, presence seems to be the fulfillment of the “signs,” “shadows,”
and “figures” that Jesus tells his disciples to “reject.” Like the paradox of immanence enacted by
the supper table—both separating and connecting—the present experience of “The Last Supper”
holds signs and objects in tension with each other. This tension makes sense given the tradition
of paradox surrounding the church’s descriptions of the body of Christ. A stark demonstration of
this is found in the Sarum Rite use for the feast of Corpus Christi. The Sequence is a song in the
communion liturgy that precedes the reading of the Gospel, in this case, from the Gospel of John
where Jesus says, “My flesh is meat, and my blood is drink indeed,” and it is always customized
to fit the theme of the individual feast day.
172
For Corpus Christi, the Sequence is about the
miracle of the eucharist, and it registers the conflict between the signs and objects present at the
altar. In the second stanza, for instance, it draws attention to the altar table “to-day before us laid
/ the living and life-giving bread,” so as to make the elements of the eucharist appear especially
accessible on the occasion set aside to commemorate it.
173
Yet in the same stanza, the Sequence
observes that these physical objects of bread and wine are “The same which at the sacred board /
was by our incarnate Lord / given to his apostles round,” emphasizing the historicity and
experiential significance of the “board” (mensa) that supported the original Last Supper, as if to
171
Mills, Recycling the Cycle, 153.
172
“Caro mea vere est cibus: et sanguis meus vere est potus”—“cibus” translated as “meat” rather than “food.”
Missale ad Usum Isignis et Praeclarae, 458.
173
Sarum Missal, 262. “panis vivus et vitalis / hodie proponitur”: Missale ad Usum Isignis et Praeclarae, 457.
113
say that what was palpably familiar to Christ is now elevated to the status of liturgical
furniture.
174
An even more pressing expression of the paradox of sign and object emerges later in the
Sequence. The fourth stanza echoes the words of Jesus in the Chester play in saying that the
present experience of the eucharist supplants all signs and figures:
On this table of the king,
our new Paschal offering
brings to end the olden rite.
Here for empty shadows fled
is reality instead;
here, instead of darkness, light.
175
The diachrony that this establishes connects the “empty shadows” then to the immanent
communion now, linked by novi in the Latin text—the perfect active indicative tense, meaning “I
recognize” and reinforcing the fact that signs begin as perceptions. Yet two stanzas later, the
liturgy emphatically describes the same perceptual eucharistic event as utterly non-sensory and
incomprehensible:
Hear what holy church maintaineth
that the bread its substance changeth
174
“Quem in sacrae mensa coenae / turbae fratrum duodenae / datum non ambigitur.” Nothing about “our
incarnate Lord” appears in these lines.
175
Sarum Missal, 362.
In hac mensa novi regis
novum Pascha novae legis
phase vetus terminat.
Vetustatem novitas,
umbram fugat veritas,
noctem lux illuminat.
(Missale ad Usum Isignis et Praeclarae, 457)
114
into flesh, the wine to blood;
Doth it pass thy comprehending?
faith, the law of sight transcending,
leaps to things not understood.
Here beneath these signs are hidden
priceless things, to sense forbidden;
signs, not things, are what we see;
Flesh from bread, and blood from wine,
yet is Christ in either sign
all entire confessed to be.
176
Although some of this serves an instructional function of differentiating between the substance
and sensory qualities of the eucharist, it is worth observing the dramatic change in emphasis with
the previous stanza. Whereas earlier the focus was on the immanence of the physical table and
the activity of witnessing (sensing) the eucharistic objects, here the song intently expresses the
distance between the physical world and the sacred, stressing the congregants’ inability to
176
Sarum Missal, 362, my italics.
Dogma datur Christianis,
quod in carnem transit panis,
et vinum in sanguinem.
Quod non capis, quod non vides,
animosa firmat fides,
praeter rerum ordinem.
Sub diversis speciebus,
signis tantum et non rebus,
latent res eximiae:
Caro cibus, sanguis potus ;
manet tamen Christus totus
Sub utraque specie.
(Missale ad Usum Isignis et Praeclarae, 457)
115
perceive or understand the transcendent eucharist. This is amplified by the Latin verb “transit”
for “substance changeth,” which can mean traversing or surpassing: the substance surpasses or
exceeds a basic perception. We see this same transition in the earlier quoted late banns of the
Chester Cycle: “the time is come / that signs and shadows be all done / . . . / all figures clean
reject.” The tension between signs and objects is, thus, inherent to the Corpus Christi tradition.
The Chester play takes on this tension but draws a continuity of time and space between
the transcendent and the familiar so that then and now both unfold before the audience. What
primary distinguishes “The Last Supper’s” treatment of iconic transcendence from the liturgy of
Corpus Christi is that the play insists that its objects are both “signs” and “things,” not usurped
by the former. Without demystifying the sacrament, it allows the sacred to pivot on the activity
of the audience, on where they stand and on their attention to immanent detail—the bread, the
table, the wine, Judas’s hands. These theatrical objects connect then and now, mundane and
transcendent, in a performance that stresses the accessibility of the sacred in the festival itself
and in the production’s performativity, rather than deferring to a place beyond it.
Mary’s and Martha’s “Ah’s”
My argument has been that the theme of immanence emerges in the Chester plays and
particularly in “The Last Supper” through a sensitive yet prominent tension between sign and
object. Moreover, if the Chester plays engage the status of figures and sacred signs, then it is
worth querying how it is that the sacred is made present in them. To this point, Glynne Wickham
has challenged the view that mystery plays intend to mimetically “re-enact” sacred history on the
basis that it is impossible to re-enact a miracle. Instead, he argues, the purpose of mystery plays
“is to nourish and sustain faith . . . to supply in three-dimensional, realistic, visual images an
116
outward, theatrical figuration of an abstract concept.”
177
Scholars have found Wickham’s
evaluation of re-enactment provocative and have applied a broad-ranging critical vocabulary,
variously understanding the plays to memorialize, symbolize, represent, sacramentalize, or
reform their biblical content and their liturgical heritage of the feast of Corpus Christi. Sarah
Beckwith, for instance, has used the perspective of “sacramental theater” as a way of
illuminating the capacity of Corpus Christi theater “to cause what it signifies, to perform a bond
of love in the community of the faithful.”
178
Sacramentality, here, is defined as bridging the
divide between representative grace and real grace. Gail McMurray Gibson’s description of
“incarnational aesthetic” similarly understands mystery plays to mediate the divine but with the
reminder that the incarnation was a cultural concept that reached beyond church contexts, even
enduing “crudely popular” forms with the “deliberate and conscious effort to objectify the
spiritual even as the Incarnation itself had given spirit a concrete form.”
179
David Coleman is
also interested in the sacramentality of theater and particularly in what he calls the “sacramental
sociology” of religious art, but he is attentive to how mystery plays also register controversies
and anxieties over the sacraments, arguing that the very existence of sacramental theater betrays
the ongoing unraveling of the church’s hold on sacramental theology.
180
Another prominent
approach to understanding the sacred uses of mystery plays is understanding them as tools for
sacred memorization. Theodore Lerud and Victor Scherb both see mystery plays as theatrical
counterparts to devotional images and so stress the memorializing nature of their
performances.
181
177
Wickham, Early English Stages, 27.
178
Beckwith, Signifying God, 60.
179
Gibson, Theater of Devotion, 8.
180
Coleman, Drama and the Sacraments, 33.
181
Lerud, Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Chrsti Drama; Scherb, Staging Faith.
117
Despite the move away from thinking of mystery plays as simple re-enactments, studies
tend to reproduce a problematic binary between performance and faith that too narrowly limits
the ways that audiences could have believed in mystery plays. The implication is that biblical
plays are meant to be viewed as mimetic addenda to the historical miraculous event—an event
whose sacred status exists elsewhere in history or in church contexts; mystery plays acquire their
sacred meaning by representing the semiotic of devotion from other religious contexts, such as
the liturgy. As a result, the object of faith is implicitly absent from performance. Greenblatt has
shown how this binary can “evacuate” the potential for faith from theatrical performances of the
sacred.
182
Yet, as I have discussed, evacuation is only an option if belief cannot sustain being
made transparent, and the Chester Cycle is one significant illustration of sacred drama’s absolute
comfort with theatrical transparency.
In the Chester Cycle, what is perceptually given is its mimetic content; yet what is
attended to through faith is more broadly integrated into the performance event—an application
of sacred narrative and devotional attitude to a specific community in time and place. Even in
church settings, I propose that having faith—especially in late-medieval and sixteenth-century
England—very often meant habitually seeing what is perceptually given in a liturgy, devotional
practice, or performance and attending to it as a manifestation of the sacred with a scope beyond
its material conditions. This implies an awareness that a spectacle’s perceptual appearance
contains more than is comprehended in the moment. The cycle never pretends to achieve re-
enactment or even the miraculous power of sacramentality re-enacted in its eucharistic
counterpart but instead takes artificiality as its thematic premise, as is seen in the hospitality
displayed in “The Last Supper,” and it embraces the expansion of perception and thought that
182
According to Greenblatt, theatricality causes “the evacuation of the divine presence from religious mystery,
leaving only vivid but empty ceremonies.” Shakespearean Negotiations, 113.
118
accompanies belief. For this reason, Chester’s plays foreground an immediate experience of the
mundane, the temporal, and even the doubtful, and they ask audiences to believe in something
hidden.
One significant way that the Chester plays structure the audience’s immanent experience
the familiar and even obscure is through heavy doses of literary typology and prophecy.
183
There
is a centripetal structure to the cycle, with Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection in the center,
preceded by stories of faith and salvation that foreshadow Christ, and followed by plays like
“The Harrowing of Hell,” “The Resurrection,” and “Emmaus” that dramatize characters’
recognitions of Jesus after the resurrection and so look backwards towards the original passion
events. Christ is immanent to the audience of the cycle not primarily in body—as in the eucharist
and the Corpus Christi procession—but in his obscured presence through prophecies, types, and
moments of recognition. Indeed, the narrative structure of the Chester Cycle is towards Christ,
but it is not structured by a revelation of Christ himself. Drama emerges from the cycle’s
dwelling in this obscured state of towardness, looking forward and looking backward towards
where Christ should be. So in addition to representing, imitating, symbolizing, memorializing,
and sacramentalizing their sacred content, the Chester Cycle also obscures its sacred content.
This is not to say that the plays encourage disbelief; just the opposite, the post-Reformation
banns make it clear that the cycle’s aim is to promote belief: “thereof in these pagentes to make
open shewe / . . . . / to sett out that all maye disserne and see / and parte good be lefte beleeve
you mee .”
184
One might imagine the towardness of the Chester Cycle as a combination of sacred
183
As Mills summarizes, “The repeated use of prophecy in the cycle becomes a form of internal cross-
reference, giving added coherence to the structure, and also confirmation that historical events move to God’s
controlling will.” Recycling the Cycle, 161. See also Kevin J. Harty, “The Unity and Structure of The Chester
Mystery Cycle,” Medievalia 2 (1976): 137-58.
184
Salter, “The Banns of the Chester Plays,” 142.
119
and secular revealing—perhaps illustrated in churches by the shrouding of the crucifix during
Lent and in commercial theater by Shakespeare’s Paulina drawing back the curtain on Hermione.
The Chester plays’ overarching technique for creating drama is to hide the sacred and to begin
alongside the audience where the sacred is seen only obscurely, behind a partition of dramatic
conflict, refusing to do anything more than gesture towards the sacraments and absolutions of the
established church.
We see this technique at play in the cycle’s rendition of “The Healing of the Blind Man,”
which also contains Jesus’ visit to Mary and Martha and his resurrection of Lazarus. The episode
of Lazarus’s resurrection follows the healing of the Blind Man and, among other distinctions, the
episodes are differentiated by the former’s public and crowded scene, full of accusations and
arguments, and the latter’s far more intimate and simple setting. These differences are
appropriate since the healing of the blind man on the Sabbath is meant to be a controversial
defiance of Jewish law, while the raising of Lazarus concerns a personal friend of Jesus’. The
Glovers took on the formidable task of bringing cohesiveness to such a sharp transition. They
achieve this through the motif of visibility and belief, concentrating on the same issues of
perception and faith that are prominent in the stories’ source of origin, the Gospel of John. In the
healing of the Blind Man, the Pharisees’ unwillingness to “hear” the account of the miracle and
to “believe . . . as you see” contrasts with the Blind Man’s readiness to accept Jesus’ revelation—
“Thou hast him seen with thine ee” (13.203, 245, 232). The stage directions at the end of this
episode take spectacular liberties with the source, reading: “Then they shall gather stones, and
Jesus shall suddenly vanish,” one of the cycle’s many stage tricks and a certain crowd pleaser
(289ff). Jesus illustrates the Pharisees’ spiritual blindness by becoming physically invisible.
Several lines later, after the Jews and Pharisees leave the stage in frustration and perhaps after
120
the carriage’s curtain closes and reopens, Mary Magdalene appears on stage and complains of
the absence of Jesus during her brother’s death—“Ah ,Lord Jesu” (306). This particular
exclamation—“Ah”—is important in this play as an expression of the perceived divide between
the immanent and the transcendent, communicating Mary’s inability to reconcile her belief with
what she sees or, in this case, does not see. It is this “Ah” and its exclamation of immanent shock
that introduces drama into the episode. For this reason, we hear Martha echo the same
ambidextrous sound to express recognition rather than blindness when Jesus finally reappears—
“Then Jesus shall come”—saying, “Ah, my Lord, sweet Jesus!” (313f-314).
Mary and Martha transpose the spectacular effect of Jesus’ sudden disappearance onto
the long and torturous absence of Jesus during Lazarus’ sickness. This adds force to Mary’s
complaint that “In feeble time Christ yode me fro” (Christ went from me) because according to
the preceding episode Jesus can appear and disappear whenever he pleases (309). Yet the
characters’ doubt also prompts the question of whether Mary and Martha share the Pharisees’
blindness. Why did Jesus choose not to come to Lazarus’s aid earlier? Chester suggests a twofold
answer comprised of Mary’s and Martha’s lack of belief and Jesus’ desire to differentiate
between the conditions of faith and the “open shewe” of his power. As in many of the Chester
Cycle’s plays, Jesus’ followers both believe and doubt his power and promises. In a fashion
consistent with the cycle’s superimposition of later Christian revelation onto earlier biblical
characters, Martha understands that Lazarus “shall rise the last day,” but she does not believe in
the full extent of Jesus’ power now (387). This now, the present moment of immanent
experience, is expressed in her “Ah,” through which the audience also attends to what they see
and do not see. Thus, Martha uses the same utterance in a momentary lapse of belief when Jesus
orders the tomb to be opened, exclaiming, “Ah, Lord, four days be agone / sith he was buried,
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blood and bone. / He stinks, Lord, in good fay” (440-42). Jesus’ forceful reply commands
attention, not only because he stands in a dramatic pose “turning his back and with hands
upstretched” but also because for once Jesus is claiming to speak “openly” (446ff):
Father of Heaven, I thank it thee,
that so soon has heard me.
Well I wist, and soothly see,
thou hearest mine intent.
But for this people that stand hereby
speak I the more openly,
that they may lieve steadfastly
from thee that I was sent.
(3.447-54, italics added)
In one way, to speak “the more openly” means to pray loud enough for his companions to hear
him in the hopes that they will follow his example of faith. It also refers to Jesus’ frequent
caveats in the Gospel of John that his teachings are intentionally obscure until a certain point
when he will speak more “plainly” to his followers.
185
Yet when one considers the play’s
preoccupation with witnessing and believing what is witnessed, another interpretation refers
“open” speech to the visual spectacle of Lazarus’ resurrection and the moment when the sacred
comes out from behind obscurity.
Mary Magdalene figures prominently in the gospels of Matthew and John. Her most
prominent appearance that involves recognition is, of course, her visit to Jesus’ tomb, where,
turning from the tomb to look for Jesus in the city, the Geneva version reads: “behold, Jesus also
185
John 16:25 (Authorized Version).
122
met them, saying, God save you,” echoing the earlier phrasing through which the empty stone is
removed to reveal the empty tomb—“And behold, there was a great earthquake.”
186
As in the
biblical account, the Chester play grounds its drama, and therefore its power to promote belief,
by hiding Jesus and delaying sacred revelation. “Behold,” “Ah,” see an empty tomb, but
understand by faith the imperceptible miracle that has taken place. There is a strong meta-
dramatic element to this scene. The Chester Cycle itself is an empty monstrance of sorts,
historically related to Corpus Christi but also conspicuously missing its sacramental status
imbued by the elevation of a priest. “The Healing of the Blind Man” and “The Last Supper” seek
to promote belief by foregrounding their emptiness and their dramaturgical familiarity, perhaps
illustrated by the moment when Mary Magdalene turns from the tomb to behold Jesus standing
behind her. Audiences of the Chester Cycle take blindness as a given, but the attitude of
towardness that the cycle incites posits meaning in this vacancy because it brings focus to the
nuance of immanent belief—wherein faith diffuses into the entire grounds of performance, often
taking emptiness as its object.
This infusion of meaning into vacancy is similar in phenomenological perspective to the
“ceremony making” of King Henry’s St. Crispin’s Speech of the first chapter, but whereas
Shakespearean theater utilizes soliloquy to sensitize audiences to isolated moments of
recognition, the Chester Cycle uses spectacular tableaux of transcendence—here signaled by
“Ah.” Among twelve “Ah’s” in the second half of the play alone—more than any other play—
Lazarus’s “Ah” expresses the same activity of perception and non-perception that it does for
Mary and Martha, but where the women fail to experience belief, Lazarus’s “Ah” is able to
express faith largely because he presupposes the limitations of perception and therefore treats his
186
Matthew 28: 9, 2 (The Geneva Bible).
123
vision of Christ as full of sacred excess: “Ah, Lord! Blessed most thou be, / which from death to
life hast raised me / through thy mickle might” (456-58).
“The Healing of the Blind Man” begins with disbelief and a heightened awareness of the
invisibility of Christ’s body. Eventually the play leads the audience towards revelation, but its
primary concern is with how the invisible can become an object of faith. It is this tension
between towardness and vacancy that creates dramatic action. The audience is challenged to
have faith without requiring an “open shewe” of divine power—power such as that on display in
the eucharist and in the resurrection. Drama obscures the divine, but it also provides the
foundation through which the audience can build faith from the ground-up.
Immanence and Invisibility in “The Fall of Lucifer”
The obscurity of the sacred and the creation of dramatic conflict are part of the same process in
the Chester Cycle. Successful belief, then, occurs when audiences find the capacity in immanent
experience—i.e., what is perceptually given—to accommodate faith. This confirms T.G.
Bishop’s sense that “Perception is liable at any moment to become the theatre’s subject, so that
theatre is always about to suggest a theory of itself.”
187
Just so, the first play of the Chester
Mystery Cycle, “The Fall of Lucifer,” takes drama as its subject by grounding the entire cycle in
an initial conflict based in an obscured vision of God. This play introduces sin and unbelief into
the narrative world by dramatizing Lucifer’s first sin. It is a particularly noteworthy play because
it takes on the task of explaining the provenance of sin within a perfect universe. Chester’s first
play does not, of course, appease the accusation that Daniel Defoe would later level against
Paradise Lost, that it does not address the “main problem” of how “the spotless seraphic nature
187
Bishop, Shakespeare and the Theater of Wonder, 3.
124
could receive infection.”
188
Rather, the play’s interest in the origin of evil is a reflection on the
relation between popular religious performance and its sacred content. “The Fall of Lucifer”
dramatically asserts, first, that the fundamental conflict inherent to godly belief is the obscurity
of God and, second, that successful belief requires receiving the perceptual content that is given
in a performance and treating it as part of an immanent whole—a whole that transcends its
material conditions.
Consider, for instance, how the first four-line stanza of the play establishes a perceptual
status that is at once absurd yet also demanding of absolute dignity.
GOD Ego sum alpha et oo,
primus et novissimus.
It is my will it should be so;
it is, it was, it shall be thus.
(1.1-4)
These first two lines also open plays 2 and 24, the latter being the final play of the cycle, “The
Last Judgment.” They take Latin, the language of the eucharist, and make it comprehensible in
the here-and-now of lay performance. On paper, these lines register the absolute perfection,
timelessness, and omnipotence of God. These aspects of his character are buttressed by a series
of theological Latin commonplaces in the ensuing lines, including:
The whole food of parents is set
in mea essentia.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Peerless patron imperial
188
Daniel Defoe, The Political History of the Devil, ed. Irving N. Rothman and R. Michael
Bowerman (New York: AMS, 2003), 55.
125
and Patris sapientia.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
All mirth lieth in mansuetude
cum Dei potentia.
(1.7-8, 11-12, 15-16)
The absoluteness of God is further reinforced by three liturgical songs sung by the angels, two of
which are described as “Dignus Dei” and “Gloria tibi Trinitas” (96f, 136f, 224f). Additionally,
in contrast to the play’s angelic characters, God’s lines are shorter, sometimes rhyming, and
often song-like, attributes that associate God with the sounds of liturgy and that symbolize his
perfection. However, if we look beyond the page and imagine these first lines in their historical
performance, we see a carriage that the pre-Reformations banns describe as “the heuenly
mancion,” outfitted with a heavenly scene above and a hellish dungeon below where the fallen
angels later appear, and we see a man in a godlike costume with a gold-painted face delivering
the plays’ first fifty-two lines, replete with Latin and trinitarian theology, most of which is
intended to sound over-the-top to average Cestrians.
189
In this light, God’s declaration that “It is
my will it should be so” comes across as conspicuously anthropomorphized, underscoring the
fact that the absolute “will” of the “alpha et oo” must be imagined from the perspective of human
will—an actor with a gilded face from the Tanners. Such an obvious limitation cannot but
foreshadow the more serious subsequent display of individual will in Lucifer’s rebellion.
“The Fall of Lucifer” presents the will of God transparently in the conditions through
which it is given. In addition to the tension introduced by a costumed actor playing God—a
practice that would play a significant role in the cycle’s suppression—the play foregrounds other
189
Salter, “The Banns of the Chester Plays,” 137. David Mills suggests that the actors were probably gilded
based on the angels’ description as “gayer than gold”: The Chester Mystery Cycle, 14.
126
ways that divine will is given in the conditions of performance. In his initial speech, God draws a
parallel between his absolute will (as in line 3) and his creative will—that is, the license that he
exercises in creation, including poetic creation. God says:
Both visible and invisible,
all lies in my wielding.
As God greatest and glorious,
all is in mea licentia.
(1.17-20)
In the form of “licentia,” God restates his claim to comprehensive control over the universe, but
here he adds that the things of his “wielding” comprise two categories of perception: the
“visible” and the “invisible.” This is the first hint of dramatic conflict in the cycle, for God’s
invisible will is unknowable to creatures, and creatures’ lack of knowledge leads to error. The
term “licentia” may also, of course, suggest an awareness of the controversies surrounding the
production of the cycle, especially in Reformation England where “licentia” could mean
licentiousness or dangerous speech. This meaning is confirmed in the post-Reformation banns,
where the audience is told that the author “was nothinge A freayde” to cite biblical texts in the
vernacular “with fear of hanginge breninge or Cuttinge off heade / to sett out that all maye
disserne and see.”
190
Still, even for late-medieval productions of the play, these lines self-allude
to the process of poetic creation and to the poetic license that allows the visible to stand in for the
invisible. We see this meaning reinforced in the lines that follow, dropping heavily with poetic
license:
Prince, principal, proved
190
Salter, “The Banns of the Chester Plays,” p. 142.
127
in my perpetual providence,
I was never but one
and ever one in three,
set in substantial soothness
within celestial sapience.
The three trials in a throne
and true Trinity
be grounded in my godhead,
exalted by my excellency.
(1.23-32)
The alliteration in these lines is excessive to the point of being provocative; they suggest
“licentia” in the form of boldness of speech. They challenge, in a sense, anyone who wonders
whether the cycle will really exercise its performative license over its sensitive theological
content, and so God sets a precedent to be accepted or rejected, creating a performative narthex
through which audiences enter a play grounded in the paradox between God’s absolute will and
the imperfect creation that is the play itself.
This speech that opens the three-day play festival introduces the problem that leads to the
foundational conflict of the play, Lucifer’s rebellion. It frames this rebellion as a failure to
recognize the marks of divine creation in the immanent pieces and vacancies of experience. As
God puts it in his opening monologue:
The might of my making
is marked in me,
dissolved under a diadem
128
by my divine experience.
(1.33-36)
At one and the same moment, God declares that his creation is evidence of his absolute will but
also that this teleology is unknowable, “dissolved under” the idea of his very existence. This is
the problem that sets the drama of the cycle in motion: that the gap between God’s absolute
perfection and his imperfect creation is so infinitely expansive that true belief is largely in the
eye of the beholder. Those who are godly will ultimately find God in the body of Christ—
represented in cultural memory by the corpus Christi to which the play historically alludes—but
they must trudge through the obscurities of typology, prophecy, and other opaque forms of
immanent experience to get there.
For this reason, the dialogue of “The Fall of Lucifer” continually returns to language
about the creating and forming of things. Early on, God predicts Lucifer’s discomfort with the
unknowable, and so he warns him not to aspire to fully know creation: “For craft nor for
cunning, / cast never comprehension” (1.73-74). Accordingly, God constantly asserts his own
right to possess the knowledge of creation, claiming that immanent experience and unknowable
ontological reality meet in him:
The world, that is both void and vain,
I form in the formation,
with a dungeon of darkness,
which never shall have ending.
This work is now well wrought
by my divine formation.
(1.79-84)
129
Again, drama is introduced into the play by making belief contingent on Lucifer’s ability to
accept the invisible absolute in the visible phenomena of creation. Likewise, drama is introduced
into the play-scape through this allusion to the “dungeon of darkness,” probably a cavity that the
Tanners constructed beneath the carriage’s main stage where the devils will later be imprisoned.
Thus, the significance that God attributes to the cosmic creation—“angels nine orders of great
beauty”—also applies to the dramaturgical creation of the festival performance. The dramatic
action that begins to unfold charges the audience to recognize how creative artifice can
accommodate faith, just as Lucifer is charged to accept how the cosmic artifice attests the divine
attributes stated in the play’s opening—God’s omnipotence, comprehensiveness, and absolute
will.
It is with dramatic satisfaction, then, that Lucifer’s original sin is initiated by the
disappearance of God, briefly discussed in the opening of this chapter. Before God vacates his
throne, he first warns Lucifer that his beauty should not tempt him into pride, cautioning that
before long he will become “revisible” (135). Then the stage directions read, “they sing and God
shall withdraw,” and immediately Lucifer issues his rebellion (136f):
Aha! That I am wondrous bright
amongst you all shining is full clear!
Of all Heaven I bear the light
though God himself and he were here.
All in this throne if that I were,
then should I be as wise as he.
130
What say ye, angels all than been here?
Some comfort soon now let me see.
(137-144)
Consistent with the play’s central conflict of visibility and invisibility, Lucifer marvels at his
own physical brightness and insinuates that his luminescent body coupled with its position on
God’s throne amounts to God’s authority. These lines introduce a voice that is more personal and
subjective than anything the play has yet offered. Lucifer is decidedly perspectival—a
subjectivity that shows the more brightly when juxtaposed with the angels’ song, as music often
being a mark of liturgy and conventional religious symbolism in the plays.
191
Importantly, the
play presents the original angelic sin as a response to the limitations involved in being a creature
with subjective vision. In the first 136 lines of the play, God has made it clear that his divine
authority is not only embodied in him but also diffused throughout creation as an extension of his
will. So, according to God, Lucifer has no excuse. Yet Lucifer’s statement of pride—“though
God himself and he were here”—makes sin out to be a result of partitioning, as God
momentarily becomes partitioned by the beauty of his own creation.
Moreover, if one considers that an essential factor in creating dramatic action is the
limited perspective of the audience and/or of a character (i.e., dramatic irony), then we can
further observe that the emergence of drama in the play coincides with the introduction of
immanence as a theme. In other words, as a popular play involving devices of anticipation,
conflict, and resolution, the Chester Cycle takes on the perspective of Lucifer to popularize
biblical material—insofar as his perspective represents an attention to what is visible and
191
Richard Rastall observes that late-medieval audiences would have recognized the conventional precedence
of heaven being a place of music. In his essay on music in the cycle, Rastall follows John Stevens in framing the
function of music in the plays as “representational.” In heaven, for instance, music often represents “Divine Order.”
See Richard Rastall, “Music in the Cycle,” in Lumiansky and Mills, Essays and Documents, 116.
131
immanently knowable. The episode proceeds to dramatize arguments between Lucifer, his
sidekick Light Borne, and several orders of angels—Virtues, Cherubim, Dominations,
Principalities, Seraphim, and Thrones. Eventually God returns to the stage, rebukes Lucifer, and
banishes him to the dungeon of hell situated beneath the carriage where the fallen demons regret
their pride. Still, it is not until God disappears and Lucifer rebels that the play begins to take on
the performative character that the cycle carries through “The Last Judgment”; characters reveal
unique personalities, dialogue becomes more dialogue-like, and the audience’s perspective is
subject to bias at any given moment. In an unexpected way, Lucifer’s perspective acts like the
supper table of “The Last Supper”: God disappears, and consequently the play becomes more
familiar. “The Fall of Lucifer” clearly condemns Lucifer’s sinfulness, but the Christian myth is
only dramatically compelling because it is mediated by the same attention to the immanent that
leads to sin. In a distinct sense, the fact that God’s authority is partitioned and no longer patently
visible in his anthropomorphized gilded actor adds a layer of verisimilitude and turns perception
itself into a bearing point for dramatic action.
It is also worth noting that Lucifer’s expressly limited perspective in this play is marked
by a series of exclamations, drawing an express parallel between God’s disappearance here and
Jesus’ disappearance in “The Healing of the Blind Man.” Lucifer’s first statement of rebellion
begins with an “Aha!” His subsequent interjections begin with other utterances of surprise,
including:
Distress? I command you for to cease
and see the beauty that I bear.
(1.153-54)
And,
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Go hence? Behold, seigneurs on every side,
and unto me you cast your een.”
(1.189-90)
Notice that each expression, beginning with the original “Aha,” is followed by a statement that
draws the audience’s attention to what is visible. This is Lucifer’s argument: how can the angels
be expected to remain loyal to an invisible authority when his own beautiful body is right in front
of them? Thus, Lucifer’s exclamations are much like those of Mary and Martha in “The Healing
of the Blind Man.” They attest to a misrecognition of immanent revelation and to a
misapplication of the excesses of belief. These expressions culminate in Lucifer’s reversal of the
theme of immanence that was introduced in God’s opening monologue. Lucifer takes God’s
throne and commands his onlookers to “Behold my body, hands and head— / the might of God
is marked in me” (199-200). Lucifer’s “Behold” insinuates a completely different understanding
of belief and sight than it does for the character of God and in the aforementioned biblical
account in Matthew. Lucifer’s mistake is not his attention to beauty. Rather, he sins by
terminating the meaning of beauty in the sensory object that is perceptually given. Lucifer falls
because he does not see the divine will in his own luminescent body. The audience engages this
framework in their response to the artistic creation of the play, implicitly asking: is the play
merely a spectacle, or is it continuous with God’s absolute will to create?
Thus, “The Fall of Lucifer” institutes a kind of aesthetic ethic to its performance, and this
ethic is based on a distinctly popular understanding of the categories of immanence and
ontology. Lucifer, as we have seen, misinterprets the immanent beauty of his own body when
God’s bodily presence is obscured. On the other hand, God’s warnings to Lucifer consistently
emphasize his role as the creator and Lucifer’s status as a creature. I would contend that there is
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something more sophisticated being dramatized here than a mere caveat about the dangers of
rebellion against one’s maker. The Chester author constantly returns to language of visibility and
invisibility as well as to sign-object terminology, such as God’s “The might of my making / is
marked in me” and Lucifer’s parallel “the might of God is marked in me.” Whereas Lucifer’s
arguments always refer to what is visible, God’s arguments emphasize ontology, but,
importantly, the play foregrounds both perspectives. God does not apologize for the potential
obscurity of his divine transcendence in creation, even in his own absence. Instead, he expects
the angels to understand that objects are signs and that an experience of beauty refers to more
than is perceptually given. Lucifer himself realizes this error immediately after his “fall”—“Now
Lucifer and Light Borne fall,” once again beginning with an expression of immanent
observation: “Alas!” (240f).
Alas! that ever we were wrought,
that we should come into this place!
We were in joy; now we be nought.
Alas! We have forfeited our grace!
(1.241-44)
The manuscripts of the play register an important textual transition here. The first fallen angel to
speak, whom we presume to be Lucifer, is no longer identified by name. Beginning with these
lines, Lucifer and Light Borne are referred to generically as “Primus Demon” and “Secundus
Demon,” and perhaps the fallen angels were visually represented by generic-looking demon
costumes, certainly denuded of their previous splendor.
192
This transition describes their change
192
The Chester Mystery Cycle: A Reduced Facsimile of Huntington Library MS 2, ed. R.M. Lumiansky and
David Mills (San Marino: The Huntington Library P, 1980).
134
in nature and inscribes in the manuscripts a union of immanence and ontology: Lucifer is now
perceivable as he is, the first demon.
Appropriately, then, the play ends with the creation of the first day:
As I have made you all of nought
at mine own wishing,
my first day here have I wrought.
I give it here my blessing.
(1.309-312)
The play ends with a benediction that unites immanent experience and ontology. The creation of
the first day results from the creation of “Lightness and darkness,” the very conditions of
visibility and invisibility that have made it possible for Lucifer to rebel (303). Somewhat
brazenly, then, God closes by reinforcing the meaning behind the obscurity of creation—his
absolute will (“wishing”).
Conclusion
The closing benediction to “The Fall of Lucifer” also serves as the prologue to the rest of the
cycle. It provides the first palpable link to the real world in which unfold the other twenty-three
plays, and as such, it carries the perceptual conditions of original sin into the rest of the cycle.
The plays’ many moments of typology and prophecy, as well as of humor and doubt, trace their
dramatic ancestry to the first disappearance of God. Through careful treatments of prop objects
and through a prominent focus on the theme of perception, the Chester Cycle presents itself not
only as something to behold but also as something to actually hold. One might object that these
seams in verisimilitude are simply due to the fact that such early drama is not yet stabilized by
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playhouses and commercial companies, but there seems to be something thematically purposeful
about the cycle’s overt theatricality. By fully embracing their createdness and artificiality as
religious artistic media, the Whitsun Plays are able to tackle a basic facet of all presentations of
the sacred, that God is given in immanent experience and is always caught up in the familiar
realm of what is present. Somewhat opposite to its sacramental counterparts, it gives itself to the
audience foremost as a compilation of fundamental elements—time, place, objects, hospitality,
and bodies—and it only asserts its ontological status through conflicts of perception. Viewed as
drama, we can even understand these elements to purposely obscure anything that might be seen
as an “open shewe” of divine presence. Rather than bock towards the transcendent as such, the
plays insist on an immanent experience of divine presence, presenting things as signs and signs
as things. Such religious plays may either thematically subvert or promote orthodox belief, but in
either case, they maintain that drama forms the conditions to dispel, accommodate, and incite
faith.
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CHAPTER THREE
GOD’S IDIOMS:
“SERMON-LIKE” BELIEF IN DONNE’S LONDON SERMONS
God’s “idiom,” as Donne describes it, is the topic of a sermon “Preached at St. Paul’s, Upon
Christmas Day, 1628” on the biblical epigraph: “Lord, who hath beleeved our report?”
193
The
epigraph is the voice of one of God’s messengers—a prophet, a letter writer, or Jesus—who
returns disappointed that his people did not listen to God’s word. The 1640 folio edition of this
sermon relays what immediately would have struck Donne’s audience as out of the ordinary:
there is no citation for the epigraph. Donne addresses this omission in the first sentence: “I have
named to you no booke, no chapter, no verse, where these words are written: But I forbore not
out of forgetfulnesse, nor out of singularity, but out of perplexity rather.” His perplexity stems
from the fact that versions of this sentence—“Lord, who hath beleeved our report?”—appear so
frequently in different contexts throughout the Bible that it transmits meaning in an
unconventional way. It becomes an idiom:
I am sure you have all observed, that many men have certaine formes of speech,
certaine interjections, certaine suppletory phrases, which fall often upon their
tongue, and which they repeat almost in every sentence; and, for the most part,
impertinently; and then, when that phrase conduces nothing to that which they
193
George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, eds., The Sermons of John Donne, 10 vols. (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: California UP, 1953-62), 8:292. All references to Donne’s sermons are from this edition and will
abbreviated: volume, page.
137
would say, but rather disorders and discomposes the sentence, and confounds, or
troubles the hearer.
194
Idiomatic phrases, continues Donne, render speech “not the better beleeved, but the worse
understood,” establishing a distinction between believing a sermon and understanding a sermon
germane to sermongoing culture.
Why, then, do the Scriptures include such idioms if they cause confusion? According to
Donne, scriptural idioms are God’s attempts to condescend to ordinary communication, to soften
biblical lessons with verbal cushions that delay and echo the argument to assist human
understanding. Thus, Donne explains:
Now, this, which you may thus observe, in men, sometimes out of infirmity,
sometimes out of impiety, out of an accommodation and communicablenesse of
himselfe to man, out of desire, and a study, to shed himselfe the more familiarly,
and to infuse himselfe the more powerfully into man, you may observe even in
the holy Ghost himselfe, in the Scriptures, which are the discourse and
communication of God with man; There are certaine idioms, certaine formes of
speech, certaine propositions, which the holy Ghost repeats several times, upon
severall occasions in the Scriptures.
195
The OED defines this specific usage of “idiom” as a “form of expression, grammatical
construction, phrase, etc., used in a distinctive way in a particular language, dialect, or language
variety; spec. a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from the
meanings of the individual words.”
196
I want to draw a contextual parallel between the Bible’s
194
Ibid.
195
8:292-93.
196
Oxford English Dictionary, 3
rd
ed., s.v. “idiom, n.”
138
idiomatic language and Donne’s sermon’s idiomatic environment. Beyond its semantic
meanings, Donne utilizes the situational, spoken, and phenomenological dimension of idioms to
change the way that his audience understands belief—specifically, belief in sermons. An
“idiom,” in Renaissance terms, has a meaning that is “not deducible” from the individual words
of the phrase itself but is established in the context of the speech act; idioms grant privileged
status to the “suppletory” (marginal, peripheral) aspects of communication. “Lord, who hath
beleeved our report,” then, communicates something more than just a complaint about the
disbelief of God’s people; its meaning is “established by usage” and by the in situ experience of
its auditors.
I suggest that Donne describes an idiomatic dimension to belief—a dimension that is
particular to the world of early modern sermons and that should influence how we think about
the status of the divine word in post-Reformation England. The idiomatic aspects of sermons are
the grounds of their delivery and audition, the space that they fill, and the models of belief by
which they are received, and so the sermon idiom, as a concept, affords an opportunity to think
about the grounds of belief in Renaissance sermongoing. Contemporary writings show that
seventeenth-century sermons in London were distinctly invested in the environmental, social,
and physical conditions of their delivery, even transgressing the boundary between theological
content and its marginal contexts. The first sections of this chapter will explore how the archive
about the sensory environments surrounding early modern London sermons amplifies what we
can consider idiomatic about them. In turn, this idiomatic character shifts the meaning of belief
in such sermon contexts from the merely theological to the phenomenological—the belief event
as a physical and intellectual perception, its spectacles, acoustics, distractions, and inessentials.
The latter sections of this chapter address how we describe the relation between Protestant belief
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and performances of the sacred. I will argue that the sensory, diffuse, and idiomatic character of
sermongoing functioned not only to distract auditors’ attention but also as a kind of sacred object
of belief itself. Sermons conditioned a specific shape to belief that is “sermon-like” in that its
content is continuous with its phenomenal context, where performativity and audience attention
are imperative. Having sermon-like belief is an act of faith that is not only incited by but
embodied in a congregation’s first-hand experience of a sermon.
The Voice of St. Paul’s
In the first place, we can acknowledge that the idiomatic element of seventeenth-century
sermongoing is pervasive. This is one of several ways in which the sermon experience is
performative. Michael O’Connell remarks that “The sermon can be understood perhaps as the
quintessential form of Protestant drama, one in which a solitary figure assumes the role of
conveying and interpreting God’s word.”
197
I would add, however, that the performativity of
early modern sermons also appears in much less centralized ways; it spills out into the aisles and
pews, into the crowds and market stalls in the back of the knave, and into the robust attempts of
auditors to grasp the word of God with their bodies and minds. That is to say, sermon culture can
be documented by far more than quartos and folios of edited sermons and even more than the
liturgical orchestration and rhetoric of the preacher. As phenomena of the city and its society,
sermons were multifarious perceptual events that echoed the diffusion of the playhouse but
greatly raised the spiritual stakes for the audience.
Consider, for instance, the occasion and venue for this sermon in 1628: Christmas at St.
Paul’s Cathedral. The sermon would have been delivered as part of evening prayer, and the
197
O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye, 90.
140
congregation would have notably included London’s aldermen and mayor. At sermon time, the
city leaders ceremoniously put on their cloaks, walked up to the choir where the pulpit stood, and
sat to hear the sermon. Likely counterbalancing this ceremony, however, was the noise of
visitors and children playing, as evidence suggests that on major festivals, such as Christmas,
children were allowed to play in the cathedral in the evening, “whence comes that inordinate
noise which many times suffers not the preacher to be heard.”
198
Furthermore, as a visible site,
St. Paul’s exhibited further confrontations between ceremony and disorder. Historically, St.
Paul’s had been the tallest structure visible in London, but after 1561, when its towering spire
was destroyed by a fire, it stood as a sign of change as well as magnificence. The conspicuously
missing spire blended with the cathedral’s physical marks of religious reform—its lack of
ornament, decaying roof, and reputed dereliction in ringing its bells—and also with the increase
in secular uses of the cathedral, including the leasing of space to tradesmen and the book trade
outside the nave.
199
At the same time, however, St. Paul’s was known, often discontentedly, for
its extravagant music, its use of surplices, its kneeling railings and practices of genuflecting, and
other high-profile signs of ceremonialism.
200
An author by the pseudonym of Philonax Lovekin,
in his 1661 tragedy, Andronicus, dramatizes divergent views on the devotional effects of huge
church spaces like St. Paul’s in a short exchange of differing opinions:
Cleobulus. I love no such triumphant Churches—
198
For details about the specific sermon attendees and the allowance of children, I am indebted to Peter
McCullough and Mary Morrissey. For the visitation of the mayor and alderman, see The Order of My Lord Mayor,
the Alderman, and the Sheriffs, for Their Meeting and Wearing of Their Apparel throughout the Whole Year
(London, 1735), 21. For the reference to the “inordinate noise,” see Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of
the Reign of Charles I: 1631-1633, ed. John Bruce (London: Longman, Green, Longman, & Roberts, 1862), 300.
199
Derek Keene, Arthur Burns, and Andrew Saint, eds., St. Paul’s: The Cathedral Church of London, 604-
2004 (New Haven: Yale UP, 2004), 53.
200
Ibid., 53-54. For the specific state of singing at St. Paul’s, see John N. Wall, “‘That Holy roome’: John
Donne and the Conduct of Worship at St. Paul’s Cathedral,” in Renaissance Papers, eds. Christopher Cobb and M.
Thomas Hester (Rochester: Camden House, 2005), 61-84.
141
They scatter my devotion; whilst my sight
Is courted to observe their sumptuous cost,
I find my heart lost in my eyes;
Whilst that a holy horror seems to dwell
Within a dark obscure and humble cell.
Crato. But I love Churches, mount up to the skies,
For my devotion rises with their roof:
Therein my soul doth heav’n anticipate.
201
Notice the way that the interlocutors describe the effects of cathedral-like structures by the ways
that “triumphant” spaces either fill their senses or, inversely, are filled by their senses, either
scattering devotion through the inflammation of sensory experience or elevating devotion by
pulling the “soul” up to “heav’n” through the senses. Yet, in St. Paul’s, a congregation’s senses
fill the building without encountering reform and decay along the way. One gets the sense that
the cathedral was just so large and had undergone so much disrepair that anyone—conservative
or reform-minded—could find some reason to complain.
One common complaint was about the building’s nave, called Paul’s Walk. To see Paul’s
Walk was to see a marketplace in the back of a giant nave, a venue crowded with people, stalls,
and posted notices, what Bruce Smith summarizes as a “heterogeneous throng.”
202
And to hear
Paul’s walk was to hear distinctive merchants’ calls, the whispers of city gossip, and even the
lectures of clergy-for-hire offering a sample of their product. Bishop Earle, in his 1629
Microcosmographia, depicts the Walk as “a heap of stones and men, with a vast confusion of
201
The passage is quoted in a kind of commonplace list of dramatic passages in Edward Verrall Lucas, ed., The
Works of Charles and Mary Lamb: Dramatic Specimens and the Garrick Plays, vol. 4 (New York: G. P. Putnam,
1904), 527, my italics.
202
Smith, The Acoustic World, 61.
142
languages. . . . The noise in it is like that of bees, a strange humming or buzzing, mixed of
walking, tongues, and feet. . . . It is the synod of all parts politic, . . . the market of young
lecturers, . . . [and] the general mint of all famous lies.”
203
Of course, church authorities
attempted to hedge civic commotion in the church, as is indicated by John Chamberlain’s
observation that St. Paul’s established a “new devised order to shut the upper doores in Powles in
service time, whereby the old entercourse is cleane changed, and the trafficke of newes much
decayed.”
204
Yet despite attempts like this, its reputation for varieties of social interaction
persisted.
A holistic understanding of St. Paul’s Cathedral as London’s center for preaching—with
the city’s most popular sermon venue, Paul’s Cross, just outside in its courtyard—should include
this extra-liturgical atmosphere.
203
Bishop Earle, Microcosmographia (London, 1629), K1r-K2r.
204
Sarah Williams, ed., Letters Written by John Chamberlain during the Reign of Queen Elizabeth
(Westminster: J. H. Nichols and Sons, 1861), 162.
143
Figure 3. Wenceslaus Hollar. “St. Paul’s, the Nave,” 1656. State 2. Plate P1024A. University of Toronto.
The tunneling nave with its steep lancet arches and countless pillars provided a singular acoustic
identifiable as the sound of St. Paul’s. Together with Paul’s Cross, the cathedral was
simultaneously an icon of Reformation iconoclasm, a social hub, and a theater for the voice of
the English preacher.
144
The cathedral’s voice, as it were, surfaces even in specifically visual media. A
copperplate map of London from the 1550’s, for example, depicts St. Paul’s before its spire was
destroyed in relation to other important city structures, including Christ Church and Newgate
Market. Some details of the map reveal its visual and aural eminence in London topography as
well as the interconnection between these visual and aural characteristics.
145
Figure 4. Detail of Copperplate Map of London. 1559. Museum of London.
One such detail is the cathedral’s roof. In comparison to the roofs surrounding the cathedral that
are shaded on one side to show angularity and elevation, for St. Paul’s the engraver chose instead
to portray its distinctive wooden roof, multiple times repaired, here detailed by parallel lines
146
rather than shading, as it often appears in other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century illustrations.
The lines of the roofing over the nave and choir curiously angle in and up toward the steeple.
The immediate effect implies that the Cathedral’s steeple is the perspectival center of the map,
which it is not. This can be taken as a statement about its size, as if it is so enormous that any
structures within its eyeshot are in perspectival reference to it. Yet, in addition, the upward and
inward angled roofing conveys the curvature of the vaults that it covers, a quality that provides a
consciousness of the building’s interior, a first-person perspective of looking down the deep nave
and even hearing the echoes of crowd and preacher created by the repetitious curves of its vaults
and arches.
The angled roof also emphasizes the building’s steeple that is elongated in this map to the
extent that the church is taller than it is wide. This reflects the visual and aural prominence of its
bell tower. An antagonistic view toward the bell tower and its steeple’s grandeur might interpret
this elongated depiction in light of early modern literature’s many comparisons of religious
structures like St. Paul’s to the pride and arrogance associated with the Tower of Babel. Thomas
Dekker’s is perhaps the most famous of these associations. In his 1608 The Dead Tearme,
Dekker personifies the steeple itself as “Paules steeples complaint” who looks down at the
“shuffling,” “halking,” and “humming” of Paul’s Walk and laments: “I verily beleeue that I am
the Tower of Babell newly to be builded vp, but presently despaire of euer beeing finished,
because there is in me such a confusion of languages.”
205
St. Paul’s spire was, on the one hand, a
symbol both of diffuse noise, as it is for Dekker’s steeple, and, on the other, a singular mark of
the focalized sound of the preacher. Moreover, in the copperplate map, just to the right of the
spire is Paul’s Cross. The pulpit itself is portrayed in a markedly large space and is also
205
Thomas Dekker, The Dead Tearme, in The Non-Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, eds. Alexander B.
Grosart, 5 vols. (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), 4:51.
147
disproportionately expansive in comparison to the space just below the cathedral, St. Paul’s
Church Yard. In the greater area of the map surrounding St. Paul’s, Paul’s Cross stands out as an
especially empty space. The topographer illustrates how the Paul’s Cross area had the potential
to be filled to the brim with crowds and their noises, expressing an aural as well as visual
emptiness. The asymmetry, then, between these two elements of the map—the elongated spire
and the spatially enlargened outdoor preaching area—shows how the topographer relates to them
as an auditor who alternately hears its steeple from a distance and also hears its human sounds
from within earshot of the preacher.
The voices of the cathedral and Paul’s Cross—their preachers as well as their
environments—affect their topological depictions. This demonstrates the aural pervasiveness of
Donne’s sermon venue, perhaps the noisiest of them all. Donne’s own preaching voice, then,
although iconic, is not alone. It is in competition with other sights and sounds, but it also draws
its voice from the Cathedral’s distinct atmosphere. Donne’s voice in this Christmas sermon, self-
reflexively idiomatic as it is, looks and sounds like its environment. Such voices fill the acoustic
space, compete with distracting noises, and jostle the mapmakers sense of proportion.
The Idiomatic Things of God: Chiasmus, Marginalia, and Literacy
We can think of this social and physical environment as comprising part of the idiomatic
character of Donne’s sermon. Donne registers the conflict between the sermon and its ambience
by creatively converting God’s idiom—“Lord, who hath beleeved our report?”—into an
imperative for belief, integrating this distracting and confusing environment into his depiction of
faith. The idiom that “conduces nothing to that which is said” and is outside of the content of the
148
sermon takes on a new voice as the noisy, peripheral environment that separates good
sermongoers from those who do not believe the preacher’s report.
So it is that Donne directs this idiomatic phrase at the church itself. “The act,” Donne
says, “is to beleeve,” and “The Object, the next, the nearest Object of this Belief, is made the
Church; that is, to beeleve that God hath established means for the application of Christs death,
to all, in all Christian congregations.”
206
Donne is not only talking about belief in Christ as the
“means” to salvation but also belief in the Church as the “means” to Christ. So while the
“Church” here refers primarily to the Christian body in the abstract, it also refers to the “Church”
that environs this specific speech act—the place of hearing. Keeping in mind that this sermon
was delivered on Christmas evening, and that most in attendance would have received
Communion at the cathedral or at another church earlier that morning, it is with some irony that
in the same breath Donne accuses his auditors of lacking belief while drawing attention to the
means of salvation, most immediately embodied in the congregation’s physical presence at the
sermon, sitting in the choir, standing next to pillars, gathered around the pulpit, or hearing the
preacher’s resounding voice as they pause outside the nave doors.
The church interior is an object of belief, including especially its perceptual presence,
dispersed, as it was, into both sermon content and sensory environment. This is because the
sermongoing experience is a battle for attention.
206
8:309-10.
149
Figure 5. John Gipkyn. Old St Paul’s (sermon at St Paul’s Cross), 1616. Society of Antiquaries, London.
Illustrations of sermons typically show a crowd gathered around the pulpit, concentrating in the
front and showing signs of distraction further away, often talking with each other, playing with
dogs, sleeping, or just passing by. Moreover, motivations for sermongoing varied. A sermon
could be a dutiful habit of devotion, a social opportunity, a business transaction, a civil
ceremony, a spontaneous pop-in, a rhetorical display, or even a law-school class assignment.
Still, while one might expect Donne to simply extol the sermon’s words as the only worthy
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didactic focus of attention, he does not. In fact, he makes the idiomatic church environment an
object of belief, and idioms, Donne says, are the Holy Ghost’s tools for order, form, and
accommodation to human experience.
Theologically, Donne defines the belief content of the church narrowly as the word and
sacraments that it protects and administers. Yet his discussion of believing in the church
implicates these essentials in the inessential conditions of their appearance. The “Word,” he says,
does not consist of all of the individual words that might be taught in the church but only those
which are “inspired by the holy Ghost.” The word of God, in this sense, is “not Apocryphall, not
Decretall, not Traditionall, not Additionall supplements.”
207
We remember, of course, that the
“suppletory” things of God’s word serve the purpose of accommodating to human
understanding, but Donne’s point here is to further define the “Act” of belief as the discretion
exercised when isolating “the true Church” from among its supplements and then identifying
“what the true Church proposes to us” in its sermons. Like the early modern idiom whose
meaning is not derived merely from its semantic content, it is only in “usage,” in the activities of
hearing and believing, that a sermongoer can discover what the “church proposes.” To illustrate
this, Donne takes a common sermon topic of his, the question of ceremonial things indifferent,
and applies it to belief and sermongoing. He lists a series of indifferent objects of attention—
including the “Problematical points” that people debate, the mistake of focusing on inessential
aspects the Bible, and an individual believer’s idiomatic preferences and biases. All three are
distractions from the central content of a sermon, and Donne demonstrates this through the
metaphor of book marginalia. He compares the peripheral beliefs of things indifferent to “those
marginal and interlineary notes, that are not of the body of the text.” As in his initial introduction
207
Ibid.
151
to the concept of biblical idioms, Donne speaks somewhat paradoxically here. The marginalia of
God’s word are interjectory and supplemental and, therefore, not the essential objects of
Christian belief. An example of such auditory marginalia might be “those often periodicall
murmurings, and noises” made by auditors in response to the sermon—sounds of agreement,
understanding, or even dissent—frequent enough to cause Donne to complain that even people
out of earshot of the sermon itself “will give a censure upon it, according to the frequencie, or
paucity of these acclamations.”
208
Statements like this reveal that while Donne is conclusive
about what is truly essential to the church’s salvific function—the word and the sacraments—he
nevertheless continually insists that sermons are full of idiomatic objects of perception that must
be brought to auditors’ attention in order to be marginalized—to be called out as “marginalia.”
The reason for this emphasis on marginalizing what is inessential, according to Donne, is
that the act of hearing is preeminent to believing. To this point, Donne paraphrases a scriptural
passage that served as a commonplace defense of preaching in the seventeenth century:
’Tis true, sayes the Apostle here, Men cannot be saved without calling upon God;
nor call upon him acceptably without Faith; nor beleeve truly without Hearing;
nor heare profitably without Preaching; nor preach avowably, and with a blessing,
without sending; All this is true, sayes our Apostle in this place; but all this is
done; such a sending, such a preaching, such a hearing is established.
209
At the heart of this statement is a chiasmus of hearing. Donne’s auditors are to relate to hearing
through the mode of believing, and they are to relate to his preaching through the mode of
hearing. Furthermore, keeping in mind that the marginalia of the sermongoing experience is both
part of and aberrant to the content of sermon belief, this activity of hearing is laden with other
208
10:133-34.
209
8:308.
152
activities of environmental interpretation. Chiastically speaking, audition is the medium as well
as the object of sermon belief, and so Donne charges the hearer to interpret the “body of the text”
out from its context. To interpret a sermon, therefore, is to selectively focus on ideas that are
didactic, essential, and unbiased. The same phenomenon occurs in the Protestant parlance of
describing the word of God as “plain,” as in William Perkins famous statement that “It is a very
by-word among us: It was a very plaine sermon. And I say againe, the plainer, the better.”
210
Richard Younge in 1657 demonstrates the interpretive undercurrent of the plainness of sermon
content when arguing for the importance of both “saying” and “doing” God’s ordinances. His
“plain” preaching is also given in chiasmus:
Pastors are the glasse, the school, the book,
Where peoples eyes do learn, do read, do look.
The learned Pastours words, though plain;
To plain men truth may preach:
But Pastours pious practice doth,
A holy life them teach.
211
Younge’s point is to challenge the autonomous virtue of plain preaching, particularly when the
preacher himself is not a virtuous person. He argues that the “plain” reception of something
preached does not guarantee that it will “teach” the auditors anything at all. He agrees with
Donne that there is something more to hearing a sermon than merely isolating the words of the
preacher and rendering them “plain.” Like hearing, plainness is involved in a chiasmus that
210
William Perkins, A Commentary on Galatians, ed. Gerald T. Sheppard (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1989),
140.
211
Richard Younge, The People’s Impartiall and Compassionate Monitor; About Hearing of Sermons
(London, 1657), 8.
153
contradicts an overly linear understanding of sermon belief. Thus, hearing symbolically
represents both the object of belief and the disposition of believing.
More specifically, Donne’s discussion of the idiomatic character of belief culminates in
his proposal of a kind of church literacy: an exhortation to recognize God’s direct interventions
into major events in England’s history. The key, he says, to reversing the complaint, “Lord, who
hath beleeved our report,” is to acknowledge that major historical events result from God’s
providential “judgement” and are not mere “accidents”:
Now I have all that I need to have: what is it? . . . to understand God truly, and to
know, and acknowledge, that this change which I see, is an act of the right hand
of God, and that it is a judgement, and not an accident. O, beloved, that wee
would not be afraid of giving God too much glory; not afraid of putting God into
too much heart;
212
Donne cites the storm that destroyed the Spanish navy in 1588, the discovery of a letter that
unraveled the Gunpowder plot in 1605, and the unseasonably cold weather to which England
attributed the alleviation of plague as examples of misunderstanding God’s judgments to be
merely accidents of human experience. Yet as a way of applying this literacy to the church itself
and to his sermongoers’ imminent bodily presence at St. Paul’s, Donne applies the concepts of
“accident” and “judgment” to his auditors’ personal experiences of life and faith.
But then, in every such letter, in every judgement, God writes to me too; and that
letter I will open, and read that letter; I will take knowledge that it is Gods hand to
me, and I will study the will of God to me in that letter; and I will write back
212
8:305.
154
again to my God and return him an answer, in the amendment of my life, and give
him my reformation for his information.
213
Those who neglect actively to engage history on the individual level, as if God’s judgments are
manifested in seemingly mundane accidents, have “fallen lower then [sic] under the Prophets
increpation, non credidi.” Such people are unable to answer the prophet’s complaint—“Lord,
who hath believed our report?”—and therefore are guilty of disbelief because they have
dismissed the idiomatic things of experience as mere accidents.
Through Donne’s repetition of this idiom, and through his insistent reminders of the
accidents of God’s judgment and of sermongoing, it is clear he refuses to consider belief outside
of the first-hand and perspectival activities of believing. Because the accidents of God’s
judgment are a necessary step in the interpretive process, Donne wants to draw attention to his
congregation’s habits of belief that are usually ignored. He uses the extended metaphor of God’s
handwriting to cast new light on things that are normally so obvious in appearance that auditors
habitually see through them. “All comes from Gods hand,” Donne says, “by way of hand-
writing, by way of letter,” but at the same time, “to acknowledge it to be Gods hand, and not to
read it” is “a slighting of God”; it is to slight the accidents of God’s hand-writing, his paper, and
his ink.
214
Truly believing God’s report means reading his writing on the deteriorated walls of St.
Paul’s, and in the dispersed interior architecture of its nave, and even in one’s on-setting
drowsiness at the forty-fifth minute of the sermon. These things may be particularities of
embodied circumstances, repetitions that, in Donne’s words, “discompose the sentence” of God’s
writing, but Donne would point out that they are still involved in the embodied act of believing.
213
8:306.
214
8:305.
155
The Art of Hearing and Not Hearing, Seeing and Not Seeing
This 1628 sermon is one of a few of Donne’s that addresses the topic of how to hear sermons
well, or, in Donne’s words, how to “heare profitably.”
215
The art of hearing sermons constituted
its own printed literary genre in the seventeenth century. Such books had titles like: The Day of
Hearing, Hearing and Doing, The Boring of the Ear, The Difference of Hearers, and The Poor
Man’s Help . . . Hearing of the Word Preached.
216
As well, books on the sense faculties often
included exhortations on how to beneficially hear God’s word preached. Art of hearing treatises
understand themselves to be companions to other works that were addressed to preachers, instead
of auditors, on how to compose and deliver sermons well. Wilhelm Zepper, in his 1599 The Art
or Skil Well or Fruitfullie to Heare the Holy Sermons of the Church, draws this connection by
reminding readers that “to make Sermons, and to heare them, are (as we say in schooles)
relatives.”
217
Thus, in addition to making good sermons, “we must know, that it is a point of no
meane or common skill and paine also, to heare holy Sermons well.” In a 1629 sermon at Paul’s
Cross, Donne similarly expresses the strain required in the act of listening to a sermon as a
feeling of pain. Particularly in the case of the poor, who hear fewer sermons because they cannot
afford chaplains, cannot leave their work, and cannot afford a seat, beneficial hearing is painful:
“They must stay, they must stand, they must thrust, . . . they must take pains to hear.”
218
215
The most comprehensive study of these treatises is Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers
and Their Audiences, 1590-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010).
216
Hugh Roberts, The Day of Hearing (London, 1600); Henry Mason, Hearing and Doing (London, 1635);
Stephen Egerton, The Boring of the Ear (London, 1623); William Harrison, The Difference of Hearers (London,
1614); William Burkitt, The Poor Man’s Help . . . Hearing of the Word Preached (London, 1694). For a longer list
of hearing treatises, see Appendix A, in Ceri Sullivan’s excellent introduction to the art of hearing genre: “The Art
of Listening in the Seventeenth Century,” Modern Philology 104, no. 1 (2006): 34-71.
217
Wilhelm Zepper, The Art or Skil Well or Fruitfullie to Heare the Holy Sermons of the Church, trans.
Thomas Wilcox (London, 1599), B2r.
218
9:123.
156
Painfully hearing a sermon, according to art of hearing treatises, can be achieved by
approaching the sermon with preparation and reflection. Many authors proscribe a threefold
method to profitable sermongoing. A sermon by Gryffith Williams aptly titled The Fruitfull
Knocking, printed as a folio in 1636, provides a representative example of this approach:
1. Preparation, before we come to the Church.
2. Attention, while we heare the Word.
3. Meditation, after we have heard the same.
219
This threefold preparation is patterned on the traditional exhortations to prepare, attend, and
reflect when receiving Holy Communion. It is a pattern that the Elizabethan Prayer Book
instantiates in the two prayers that bookend the administration of communion—respectively
beginning, “We do not presume to come this thy Table” and “Almighty and Everlasting God, we
moste hartely thanke thee.”
220
The intended effect of preparing, attending, and meditating,
Williams says, is that “in hearing them [sermons], you heare, not onely them, but you heare the
voice of Christ through them.” Interestingly, art of hearing treatises describe in great detail
practices of meditation, and, in particular, one frequently endorsed practice for hearing the voice
of Christ in a sermon is repetition of the sermon—literally, repeating the sermon and its main
points afterward, often over a meal with family and servants who were unable to attend.
221
In
219
Gryffith Williams, The Right Way To The Best Religion; Wherein Is Largely Explained The Summe &
Principal Heads Of The Gospel. In Certaine Sermons & Treatises (London, 1636), 154.
220
Church of England, The Booke of Common Prayer, and administracion of the Sacramentes, and other Rites
and Ceremonies in the Churche of Englande (London: Printed by Richardi Iugge, & Iohannis Cawode, 1559), Q5v,
Q7r.
221
For instance, after one sermon in 1659, Andrew Hay went to his “familie exercise” and “first prayed and
then did read the sermones prettie exactlie.” Andrew Hay, The Diary of Andrew Hay of Craignethan, 1659-1660, ed.
Alexander George Reid (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1901), 24. See also Hunt, The Art of Hearing, 72-81.
157
Donne’s words, this allows a “good hearer” to be not only a “Doctor to him that sits by him” in
church but also “in his repetition, when he comes home.”
222
Practices of preparing for, attending to, and meditating on a sermon can also be
understood as a concentrating—compacting and isolating—of the sermongoing experience.
Implied in these hearing treatises and in Donne’s discussions of good listening are exhortations
to convert the overall sermon experience into an essential “Word,” but, as I have been arguing,
there remains a significant emphasis on the word-as-perceived by bodies in a space. In a
Whitsunday sermon, Donne suggests that this objectification of the sermon is necessary for
edification:
Our errand hither then, is not to see; but much lesse not to be able to see, to sleep:
It is not to talke, but much lesse to snort: It is to heare, and to heare all the words
of the Preacher, but, to heare in those words, the Word, the Word which is the
soule of all that is said, and is the true Physick of all their soules that heare.
223
Donne’s exhortation moves from the general sensory experience of ambient sounds, tiredness,
and distracting spectacle, to attending specifically to the words of the preacher, and finally to
distilling those words into “the soule of all that is said.” There is an expansive view of the
sermon implicit in this command to render the sermongoing experience into its essence, a view
that Donne makes explicit: “The Word of God is made a Sermon, that is, a Text is dilated,
diffused into a Sermon; but that whole Sermon is not the word of God. But yet all the Sermon is
the Ordinance of God.”
224
For Donne, the content of the “whole Sermon” includes the subjective
222
9:118.
223
5:56.
224
Ibid.
158
experience of its auditors, and so distilling it into just the “Ordinance of God” requires
systematically ignoring the marginal conditions of the sermongoing experience.
In Derrida’s vocabulary, Donne discloses the process of re-marking—the “basic gesture”
of ambience whereby some perceptions are marked as “significant.” Timothy Morton describes
the re-mark as “a kind of echo” because significance—the marking of foreground over
background and voice over noise—always manifests as a re-petition of perceptions, either
sensory or intellectual.
225
In one way, when a sermongoer repeats the sermon in a new
environment, he or she is transmitting the echo of the preacher’s voice, but, for Donne, it is also
important that the original physical sermon environment repeats the sermon itself in the form of
acoustic echoes: “The Church is his [God’s] Eccho; a redoubling, a repeating of some particular
syllables, and accents of the same voice.”
226
Such imagery would make a palpable impression, as
is evinced by one seventeenth-century traveler’s observation that English cathedrals during
sermon time can be “so lofty that the Ecco drowns the intelligableness of the voice.”
227
However,
as in the “pain” and “thrust” of hearing, sermongoers should not passively hear the echo as if it
were just any re-mark of voice over noise but should actively “apply themselves to the Eccho of
his Church, when perchance otherwise, they would lesse understand the voice of God, in his
Scriptures.”
228
Donne conflates the echo of the church building with the concentrated echo of the
preacher’s voice as it is distilled out by active listening. Just as the nave redoubles the sound of
the preacher’s voice, so does the preacher redouble the voice of God from the Scriptures.
225
Morton, Ecology without Nature, 48. See also Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (London: Continuum
International Publishing Group, 2004), 20, 106.
226
6:223.
227
C. Morris, ed. The Journeys of Celia Fiennes (London: Cresset, 1947), 6.
228
6:223.
159
Donne uses the echo to insist on the relentless impact of one’s auditory environment on
the profitability of sermon belief. This is a further expression of his contradictory but consistent
rejection and reinforcement of belief’s idiomatic character. Such a paradoxical stance on the
relation between auditory content and phenomenal context also emerges in a sermon delivered to
a royal audience at White-hall in 1627 on the biblical epigraph, “Take heed what you hear,”
where the process of heeding is laid bare as a series of echoes that are produced ambiguously
both by the acoustic environment and by the hearer’s attentive faculties. For this reason,
somewhat against the grain of early modern Protestantism’s partiality for the ear over the eye,
Donne describes the ear as an organ for “acquiring knowledge” of all kinds, wanted and
unwanted.
229
This sermon’s royal audience may explain Donne’s choice of examples for the
ear’s vulnerability. Rhetorically addressing those who keep dangerous company with
blasphemers and political dissenters, Donne warns that people who stand in “an ill ayre” of
dangerous voices may themselves be diffused into their company’s “cloud” of blasphemy:
The ear, in such cases, is as the clift in the wall, that receives the voice, and then
the Echo is below, in the heart; for the most part, the heart affords a returne, and
an inclination to those things that are willingly received at the ear; The Echo
returnes the last syllables; the heart concludes with his conclusions, whom we
have been willing to hearken unto.
An echo, in this light, both physical and figurative, represents the inevitable affect of
soundscapes on hearers. This suggests that Donne’s epigraph, “Take heed what you heare,” is
not as simple as it may at first sound. For heeding what you hear often depends on heeding
where you hear.
229
7:408.
160
In addition to directing auditors in profitable hearing, art of hearing literature also
addresses how not to use the other four senses. The way that Donne frames the art of hearing,
through the concept of reading God’s judgments in the accidents of human experience,
synthesizes one of the more popular themes of hearing treatises—namely, that the profitable
hearing of God’s Word preached depends on successfully navigating through the sensory
distractions of God’s Word preached and particularly distractions of sight.
John Brathwaite’s Essaies Upon the Five Senses summarizes post-Reformation
England’s celebration of hearing above the other senses:
Hearing is the organ of understanding, by it we conceive, by the memory we
conserve, and by our judgment we resolve: as many rivers have their confluence
by small streams, so knowledge her essence by the accent of the Ear. As our ear
can best judge of sounds, so hath it a distinct power to sound into the centre of the
heart.
230
Besides offering a psychological account of the ear’s supremacy, it is also noteworthy that
Brathwaite emphasizes the ear’s competence in engaging an entire soundscape and distilling it
into what is worthy of being resolved and known by the faculty of judgment. The ear is better
suited than the other senses to focalize the accidents of auditory knowledge, organizing the
“small streams” and indistinct “sounds” of its environment around other more significant sounds
that comprise the soul of the sermon. It is well known, of course, that many English puritans
distrusted theater for its incitement of idolatry yet endorsed sermons, but we can think of this
differentiation of theater and sermons also in terms of a kind of cleansing of the senses as
230
John Brathwaite, Essaies Upon the Five Senses (London, 1625), B4r.
161
conduits for belief.
231
Donne and authors of art of hearing treatises think of sermons as
opportunities to begin with an environmental sensory experience that is more similar to a play
than not and then to discipline one’s senses and intellect so as to hear only the word of God. This
is because, despite the diffuse atmosphere of sermons and especially of outdoor pulpits, and
unlike plays, sermons were imagined to have an identifiable center. There are many reasons for
this characterization. For instance, sermons had single authors, single speakers, and usually a
single source (the Bible); whereas plays were often anonymously authored, had many speakers—
requiring entire troupes to be realized—and often had several textual sources with which they
took considerable liberties. In contrast to plays, the imagined center of sermons drew on the
vocabulary of the singular “Word” of God and so adopted its authority (or Authority).
The ability to find this theoretical center and beneficially hear it, however, is as much an
object of belief—albeit an activity—as the sermon proper, so that in practice the center of the
sermon acts as a metonym for the holistic sermongoing experience. Another way to describe this
treatment of the sermongoing activity as an object of belief itself is as a phenomenology of
sermon belief, wherein the act of perceiving is psychologically continuous with the object being
perceived. On this point, Jean-Luc Marion describes preaching as a kind of self-referential
revelation that always refers back to itself. This is because the first-person experience of a
sermon auditor “cannot reach Jesus historically as its intentional object because the received
lived experience (preaching), as a screen, returns the spirit of the I to itself in a repeated lived
experience (faith).”
232
In other words, because preaching is a further revelation of an original
revelation—the gospel—the most direct object being revealed to the auditor is the fact of
231
O’Connell, The Idolatrous, 36-62.
232
Jean-Luc Marion, The Visible and the Revealed, trans. Christina M. Gschwandtner (New York: Fordham
UP, 2008), 9-10. In this discussion, Marion is building on the work of the philosopher, Rudolf Bultmann.
162
revelation itself. And the content of this fact of revelation is what Marion calls the I—the “lived
experience” of the sermon and its “real immanence in consciousness.” Thus, as a
phenomenological object of belief, the sermon blends theology with the particulars and
inessentials of the first-person experience of the event. Donne and his contemporaries’ emphasis
on how to hear sermons profitably demonstrate this blending of revelation and its circumstances.
This is well illustrated by Donne’s 1628 Christmas sermon that, as I have been arguing, aims to
instruct auditors in the pragmatics of digesting a sermon. Consider again Donne’s description of
the literacy of divine writing: “God writes to me too; and that letter I will open, and read that
letter; I will take knowledge that it is Gods hand to me, and I will study the will of God to me in
that letter.” Particularly in the context of the church—which, according to Donne, is the most
immanent object of belief for the sermongoer—opening, reading, identifying, and studying
constitutes a specific perceptual disposition, an attitude towards sermons that concentrates them
into conduits of belief, even if at face value they are anything but centralized.
In short, replacing the eyes, the ear becomes the organ of church literacy that reads God’s
univocal judgment through the dissonance of sensory environments. At work in the process of
hearing a sermon is a kind of necessary synesthesia where the congregation is not only charged
to privilege the ears over the eyes, but where true belief occurs in the transformation from being
a viewer to a listener. We can understand this focus on the activity of hearing as an extension of
what Marion calls the “lived experience” of the sermon. Writers often emphasize the necessity of
moving from merely hearing the Word to actually doing it, but the activity of belief happens
somewhere in the event of selective perceiving and especially selective hearing, in the process
that Husserl describes as “bracketing” the object of perception. Importantly, it is not the final
product of selective hearing but the activity of selecting and bracketing that constitutes belief.
163
Salient to this activity of selective perception, early modern sermons and hearing treatises
warn auditors of common distractions and, in so doing, create a third category of sensory
experience: in addition to the sermon and its insignificant environment, there are significant
distractions. Writers draw attention to certain ambient sensations in a way that is analogous to
Donne’s assigning of significance to the idiom, “Lord, who have beleeved our report?” The
surprisingly diverse lists of such distractions reveal auditors’ constant battle to concentrate—a
battle made more self-conscious by the proliferation of writing about it. Physical distractions of
noises and sights include acoustics, hard materials, animals, and humans. The extreme
boisterousness of St. Paul’s Walk was, of course, uncommon in other churches, but writers still
note the shuffling of human bodies during sermons, such as the prebendary John Lee’s complaint
that young walk into churches during service time just to have a look around without being
sensitive to the sacred space: “I have seen them from my seat (and not seldom) so walking or
standing.”
233
Despite the fact that preachers often recommend that auditors stand during the
sermon if they feel too tired to concentrate, movement and chatter appears to have been a
problem for many. One sermongoer, also targeting younger attendees, conjectures that many
treat the church as a gathering for eligible singles and thus create a commotion: “When a man
comes to hear a Sermon, there is a Sermon and the Market, there is a Sermon and a friend to
speak withal; and so many young people will go abroad to hear Sermons; What is the end of it?
It is, that you may get wives and husbands many of you.”
234
Another sermongoer complains of
the opposite occurrence of people taking too little interest in the sermon and leaving at disrupting
moments: “as I have seene divers begin to hem, and to hum, and to hang downe the head, to
233
“Archbishop Laud’s visitation of Salisbury in 1634,” Wiltshire Notes and Queries 1 (1893): 122.
234
Thomas Shepard, Subjection to Christ in all his ordinances . . . ineffectual hearing of the word (London,
1652), N8r.
164
yawne, raspe, and stretch (as being weary with long sitting) saying that they have businesse, and
therefore must away.”
235
Moreover, a recent essay by John Craig demonstrates that three of the
more prominent noises comprising the soundscape of parish churches were parishioners’ groans
in response to the sermon, barking dogs, and the crack of dogwhippers’ whips.
236
These sounds,
like many others, were both allowed and disallowed. For instance, some dogs were strays and
others were pets. Of course, the relative disturbance of certain noises would vary depending on
individual parishes and parishioners; more reform-minded puritans, for example, might take
issue with psalm singing and bells while more moderate auditors would not. Allowing for
disagreement on what counts as a distraction, perhaps the most exhaustive list of the cacophony
of disturbances during sermon time is found in Henry Mason’s 1635 Rules of Right Hearing
God’s Word. Mason’s longwinded complaint mentions “Men and women . . . clapping their pew
doors, and . . . redoubling the knock,” people disturbing the service by entering late, children
crying and the spectacle of “the Nurse [who] carieth him out of doores,” dogs barking and the
sexton’s whip, insinuations of people flirting, and even the potential distraction of a preacher
who is too “furious in his actions,” “fluent in his words,” and “vehement in his exclamations.”
237
Whereas other sounds, such as the flipping of book pages or horses walking outside, are rarely
noted, writers observe the distractions listed by Mason more frequently and thus attribute
significance to them insofar as they are specific sermongoing distractions that should be ignored.
Believing in the sermon, in other words, means also that parishioners know what perceptual
ambience is especially distracting and shun it.
235
Thomas Granger, Paul’s Crown of Rejoycing. How to Heare the Word with Profit (London, 1616), F4r.
236
John Craig, “Psalms, Groans, and Dogwhippers: the Soundscape of Worship in the English Parish Church,
1547-1642,” in Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 104-123.
237
Mason, Hearing and Doing, 667-68, 685.
165
Sermons and art of hearing treatises also address the practical problem of where to look
while you listen. This problem is an example of the continuu, between psychology and
perception that the phenomenological practice of bracketing aims to bring to light. The most
common solution is to look straight at the preacher, even at his eyes, “lest gazing on other things,
your eyes withdraw your minde from the doctrine deliuered.”
238
Some writers, however, take the
opposite approach and recommend intentionally looking away from the preacher. One writer
recommends looking away from the preacher if his manner of delivery is distracting, and another
suggests looking down or covering one’s eyes in an attempt to neutralize visual distraction
altogether.
239
Read as a group of potential answers to the problem of where to look, these
proscriptions treat vision as a tool for controlling the attention of the ears. According to Walter
Ong, this synesthetic combining of sense activities is due to the different ways that sense organs
locate subjects in relation to their objects. He writes: “Sound situates man in the middle of
actuality and in simultaneity, whereas vision situates man in front of things and in
sequentiality.”
240
Sermongoing, then, as early modern writers imagined it, is a kind of tug-of-war
between the spatial and directional perceptions respectively enacted by sound and sight. More
specifically, the aim for many hearing treatise authors is to execute hearing as if it were seeing,
attempting to locate a sight-like perceptual line through the non-linearity of the church
soundscape. Such mixing of directionality and space sheds new light on Stephen Egerton’s
comment in 1623 that truly isolating and understanding the auditory discourse of a sermon is like
finding one’s way through a maze or navigating the ocean by the stars.
241
238
Harrison, The Difference of Hearers, C8v.
239
Simon Patrick, A Discourse of Profiting by Sermons (London, 1684), C1r; Mason, Hearing and Doing, 622.
240
Ong, The Presence of the Word, 128. I have unitalicized the entire quotation.
241
Egerton, The Boring of the Ear, E1r.
166
Perceptually, though, what might this synesthetic directional hearing look like? The
directional focusing of sermongoers’ auditory attention is imagined to be an effect of the their
visual focus or lack thereof. Sight perceives objects in directional reference to the seeing subject
whereas, in “profitable hearing,” sermongoers strain (or thrust, or pain) to see only the preacher
and his eyes. Moreover, through visual strain they hope to hear only his voice. Sermongoers
close their eyelids or stare at objects such as rafters, beams, and the floor that they imagine to
possess no visual stimuli. They are instructed to look at objects that they implicitly believe do
not pollute sound with sight. Such objects imaginatively function as exclusively auditory
media— space through which only sound travels without the distractions of other sensations—
but we can also think of these objects as occupying patently irrelevant space—space that is
outside of the perceptual line of hearing created by the straining of the eyes. In other words, the
church ceiling, the floor, and the darkness of closed eyelids do not place the perceiver “in front
of” of any significant visual object of sight but instead are thought to orient the hearer only in
front of the preacher’s voice. This confirms Steven Conner’s observation that “there can only
really be a . . . point of audition” in terms of a “somewhat strained and optimistic analogy” to a
point of view.
242
In short, the church environment—its distractions and peripheral perceptions—
becomes significant for sermon belief through auditors’ imagined remodeling of their point of
view into a point of audition, overlaying lines of non-sight onto spheres of hearing.
Sermon-Like Belief
What I have been calling “sermon belief” has at least three different kinds of belief objects when
viewed in light of sermon environments and contemporary writings about sermongoing. First,
242
Steven Connor, “Ear Room,” Paper presented at Audio Forensics Symposium, Image-Music-Text Gallery
(London, UK, November, 2008).
167
believing in a sermon means believing in the ideas expressed in the words of the sermon, what is
typically called the sermon’s content as imagined from a natural perspective. A second kind of
belief object is the sermon’s context, including its distractions and ambience. These are objects
of belief insofar as auditors attribute significance to them as oppositional to profitable hearing
and insofar as the activity of bracketing sensory marginalia itself affects belief. In terms of
sensory engagement, it is by extra-auditory and out-of-focus perceptions that sermongoers
identify the soul of the sermon. A third object of sermon belief is the activity itself of attending
to a sermon, including intellectual concentration, sensory focus, preparation, repetition, and
spiritual digestion. This last kind of sermon belief is perhaps more accurately called sermon-like
belief because it is a disposition toward the sermon that reflects Protestant beliefs about the
saving properties of the spoken word. That is, sermongoing activities are sermon-like in that they
seek to assign salvific properties to the sermon as an object that requires rigorous attention. In
turn, having a disposition of sermon-like belief implies that such belief is efficacious for
salvation.
Sermon-like belief is the emphasis of Donne’s 1628 Christmas sermon. His interest is in
the sermon as an object of belief and in the relation between coming to a sermon and attaining
saving belief. Moreover, he proscribes a kind of church literacy—a skill of reading the
judgments of God in their manifest circumstances, particularly of the visual and auditory
circumstances of the sermon setting. This is how Donne ties the idiomatic character of
sermongoing to belief. He defines efficacious believing as acknowledging divine intentions in
their manifest accidents. In fact, more than usual, this sermon plays up the “manifest” quality of
belief in its objects. The word “manifest” and its derivatives occur eight times in the sermon,
always referring to the historical contexts of the biblical idiom, “Lord, who hath beleeved our
168
report?” Donne explicates three specific biblical instances of this question, and each instance
represents a further manifestation of the means for salvation. The last of these means is the
church itself which Donne metaphorically depicts as a tree that is planted publicly “here in his
terrestriall paradise, and not in heaven; in the manifest ministery [sic] of the Gospell, and not in a
secret and unrevealed purpose, (for, faith comes by hearing, and hearing by preaching, which are
things executed and transacted here in the church).”
243
His repetition of the Protestant maxim—
“faith comes by hearing”—signals the kind of manifestation that he has in mind—the
“ministery” of sermons—but as we have seen, this language of the “root” and transaction of faith
could easily mislead one to assume too simplistic of a subject-object (hearer-sound) relation to
sermongoing.
On the contrary, believing is a selective, synesthetic, and bodily perceptual activity, and,
accordingly, Donne and his contemporaries often refigure hearing as something more than
audition. When its perceptual object is also an object of faith, as it is with a sermon, hearing is
used metonymically to connote an intellectual and soulful activity. In a 1624 sermon, while
discussing how to avoid hypocrisy in sermongoing, Donne states that attentive bodily awareness
and physical “religious posture” are necessary for the soul to have a true religious experience
while, at the same time, the body cannot truly hear unless the soul is also listening.
244
This
soulful listening is what Donne calls “hearkning”: “hearkning is the hearing of the soul.” Donne
elaborates on this complex relation between hearing and believing: “as the soul is infused by
God, but diffused over the whole body, and so there is a Man, so Faith is infused from God, but
diffused into our works, and so there is a Saint.”
245
We can interpret “hearkning” in Donne’s
243
8:310.
244
6:101.
245
6:100.
169
thought as a further expression of the interdependence between the idioms of sermongoing
experience and its sacred objects of belief. Even though, for Donne, hearkening refers to an
activity of deeper listening, or more-than-hearing, there is also an element of hearkening that
happens in the body. Paradoxically, one achieves the hearing of the soul not by attending to
things of the soul but by embracing the manifest bodily nature of sermongoing belief. For
“Practise,” or efficacious belief, “is the Incarnation of Faith” and not the extraction of faith from
its idiomatic and physical incarnations. So it is that in this sermon, as in the Christmas sermon,
Donne emphasizes the preeminence of the sermongoing activity itself as an object of belief:
Faith is incorporated and manifested in a body, by works; and the way to both, is
that Hearing, which amounts to this Hearkning, to a diligent, to a considerate, to a
profitable Hearing. In which, one essentiall circumstance is, that we . . . apply our
selves to the Ordinance, Come, and hearken unto me
246
So to clarify Donne’s statement to reflect its idiomatic character, “hearkning is the [manifest]
hearing of the soul.”
A circumspect look at the topic of sermon-like belief in Donne’s sermons reveals the
prominence of this interdependent relation between idiomatic perception and faith-through-
hearing. A profitable outward disposition towards distraction and visual spectacle—a disposition
of continuous estrangement—is a sign that efficacious belief exists in the soul, but, at the same
time, Donne persists in depicting the belief object of a sermon as essentially manifest. That is,
inward belief is a sign of bodily and intellectual engagement. Furthermore, I suggest that in the
sermongoing culture of the early seventeenth century, here represented by Donne, the belief
object of a sermon, insofar as it is a singular object or substance, gains its solidarity and
246
Ibid.
170
centrality from its idioms. By this, I mean that the soul of a sermon is phenomenally comprised
of the body of the sermon. For Donne to infer that the church itself is an object of idiomatic
belief is for him to think about the effects that objects have on the ways that they are believed.
On this point, the object-ness of belief is closely related to the “vacuum problem”
discussed in the Introduction—recent discussions about the state of sacramental belief in early
modern England after the break from Catholicism, wherein many scholars have identified certain
gaps in literature, art, and social ceremony left by the Reformation’s rejection of Thomistic
sacramentalism. Without the pervasive sacramentality of Catholic theology and ceremony, the
question becomes: how does Protestant belief turn into efficacious saving faith? Or, what is the
objective sign for saving faith? We can find indications of these questions in the Puritan’s
wrestling with salvation anxiety, or in what has become known as “staging faith” in Renaissance
theater, or perhaps even in what Stephen Greenblatt has called the “regenerative” activities of
iconoclasm.
247
These are examples of ways that early moderns arguably attributed sacred
meaning to activities that were not otherwise sacred. According to a recent book on this topic by
Regina Schwartz, in post-Reformation England, high-profile Catholic doctrines, like
transubstantiation, “displace their [material] longing for that sacred world onto other cultural
forms”—forms such as the emerging mechanistic philosophy, Shakespearean tragedy, erotic
247
In the first circumstance, see Robert Burton’s instruction that fear of God’s wrath is often a sign of
salvation: God causes anxiety “in some,” he writes, “to make a way for his mercy that they repent and be saved, to
heal them, to try them, exercise their patience, and make them call upon him, to confess their sins and pray unto
him, . . . . So that this, which they take to be such an insupportable plague, is an evident sign of God’s mercy and
justice, of His love and goodness.” The Anatomy of Melancholy: What it is with All the Kinds, Causes, Symptoms,
Prognostics, and Several Cures of It. In Three Partitions; with Their Several Sections, Members, and Subsections,
Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically Opened and Cut Up (London: Chatto and Windus, 1883), 734. For
discussion of staging belief, see Victor I. Scherb, Staging Faith, as well as Sarah Beckwith’s discussion of
sacramental theater in Signifying God. Stephen Greenblatt references “regenerative violence,” see Renaissance Self-
Fashioning: from More to Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980), 188. I refer also to my extensive
discussion of the “vacuum problem” in the Introduction.
171
mysticism, monism, and poetics.
248
Of course, any discussion of early modern England’s latent
desire for lost sacramental meaning is speculative, and it is important to remember that
Protestant England was by-and-large still sacramental or, at least, continually fraught with
questions about how sacramental is too sacramental. Yet there remain traces of what we might
call sacramental logic in early modern England and in particular in the sermon-like belief I have
been discussing, regardless of how closely we connect such traces to actual sacramental
theology.
Namely, sermon-like belief involves a logic of inner and outer or, in Thomistic terms, of
substance and accidents. I am proposing that even though early modern sermons represent a
distinct part of the liturgy that precedes the order for Communion, seventeenth-century writings
about sermongoing betray a longing for the distinction between the substance of belief and its
accidents. This is a longing that is also fulfilled in the actual sacraments, but because communion
was administered so infrequently and because many early moderns regularly attended sermons
weekly or oftener, sermons took on a substance-accident duality, loosely speaking, that in many
ways mirrors the logic of Catholic sacramentalism.
Although this logic is not articulated metaphysically, we can understand the near
obsession with the idiomatic character of sermons in the writings I have discussed to be in some
way ascribing the early modern sermon a body and a soul, and such writings locate this
distinction in the grounds of the sermongoing experience. The diffuse sermon environment is the
body of the sermon and, in a sense, is conflated with the body of the sermongoer. This is evident
in the ways that the vocabulary of the divine “Word” has developed within the culture of early
modern sermongoing. In sermons and hearing treatises, two common renditions of God’s word
248
Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics, 13-14.
172
in a sermon are the “word as heard” and the “word preached.” For instance, Thomas Granger in
1616, prefers a “verbatim” translation of a Pauline clause about hearing the word, “when yee
receiued of us the word of the preaching of God.”
249
Granger prefers a transliteration because
Paul “speaketh here especially of their act of beleeuing, the first degree whereof is hearing.” The
transliteration reads: “because receiuing the word of hearing from us of God.” The latter renders
the “word” not only more objective in its application to its audience but also differentiates it
from its audience as a compound object of sense. The object of belief, in this case, is not the
word that they heard but the compound “word of hearing” that was spoken to them “of God.” A
similar conflation of the activity of the sacred word and the conditions of its manifestation occurs
in uses of the “word preached.” An anonymous 1650 large, one-page document entitled Some
plain Directions for the More Profitable Hearing of the Word Preached, evidently designed to
be posted in public places for sermongoers to read, discusses the importance of attending
sermons habitually: “Long absence from the word preached; the sound of it being long from the
ear, a Christian is too apt to forget what should be the behaviour of his soul in hearing.”
250
Like
Donne’s “hearkning,” the profit of the soul depends on the disposition of the body, in this case,
the “ear” being in habitual familiarity with the specific experience of hearing a sermon—
alienating distractions in order to uncover the sermon’s substance. As well, attending to the
posture of the ear implies that there is an inner hearing manifested in, and attained through, outer
hearing. Both the “word of hearing” and the “word preached” compound the embodied activity
of hearing with the content of what is heard, drawing a continuum between them. The effect of
this vocabulary is to syntactically present sermongoing as accidental to the substance of the
249
Granger, Paul’s Crown of Rejoycing, B1r-B1v.
250
Anon., Some plain Directions for the More Profitable Hearing of the Word Preached (London, 1650), my
italics.
173
sermon yet inseparable from it and, thus, to reinforce the notion that sermons have souls within
their bodies.
Donne’s own uses of the “word preached” explicitly depict it as akin to the sacraments, in
one sermon calling the “word preached” the “Sacrament of faith” and in another attributing
saving power to it comparable to the “Sacraments administred in the Church.”
251
In particular,
Donne understands the “word preached” to be like the sacraments because it has a dualistic
nature that implies a center and a periphery. Insofar as embodied sermons are phenomena that
are manifest and that are in a state of incarnation, they manifest and incarnate something. Thus,
in another of Donne’s usages of the “word preached,” he describes the physically perceived
sermon as a kind of adhesive for the soul:
God made us with his word, and with our words we make God so farre, as that we
make up the mysticall body of Christ Jesus with our prayers, with our whole
liturgie, and we make the naturall body of Christ Jesus applicable to our soules,
by the words of Consecration in the Sacrament, and our soules apprehensive, and
capable of that body, by the word Preached.
252
Donne repeats his portrayal of the audible sermon and its environment as God’s handwriting that
requires a certain literacy to apprehend. His comparison of the “word Preached” to the
consecration liturgy is especially noteworthy because of the careful yet ambiguous way that
English theologians handled eucharistic theology. With the suppression of the elevation of the
host and of the accompanying sacring bell, the consecration prayers in the 1559 order for
Communion rely heavily on the spoken language itself and especially on the words of institution
251
5:262; 3:302. See also Jeanne Shami’s discussion on the word preached as “efficacious” in John Donne and
Conformity in Crisis in the Late Jacobean Pulpit (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), 142.
252
3:259-60. My italics.
174
for indicating sacramental presence. In fact, one sees in the consecration prayer a building up of
supplications, preparations, and even narratives that suggest themselves as a kind of prayerful
outer casing for the inner sacramental power at the center of it all, not unlike the marginalia of
sermongoing. Even the words of institution—“Take, eat, this is my body”—appear marginalized
in the syntax of the prayer as part of a subordinate clause that begins, “who in the same nyght
that he was betraied, toke bread.”
253
The priest then repeats these words of institution during the
actual administration of the sacrament, after the elements are formally consecrated. As a result,
even the words of institution, which represent perhaps the most consequential speech act of the
consecration, bear a slightly ambient quality and occupy a somewhat marginal grammatical
position in order to syntactically substantiate an unseen and unheard sacramental core.
254
This
same logic is at play in the “word preached.” Donne states that sermons are like consecrations;
they connote what is preparatory, audible, and environmental to salvation. Simply through the
use of these peripheral elements, Donne insinuates that sermons have a substance that is known
through its manifest accidents.
Therefore, it can be said that early modern sermongoers understood sermons
sacramentally in their logic of duality but also distinctly unlike sacraments insofar as literature
about sermons is far more concerned with their outward conditions—what to avoid, how to
prepare, how to remember. The “sacramental” way that people treated sermons is not primarily
as a miracle or as a positively defined object of belief but, rather, through the logic of a
sacramental psychology—the notion that an outward experience, when undertaken properly, can
have unseen inward effects. In this way, even though most of its attention is devoted to sermon
253
The Booke of common praier (1559), Q6r.
254
On the importance of the words of institution in Donne’s time see Richard Hooker’s discussion in Works,
2:4-5.
175
conditions, the surrounding literature serves to carve out a sermon-shaped space within the
holistic experience of sermongoing. As I have tried to demonstrate, Donne outlines such a space
in his own sermons through statements of warning, through theology, and, in particular, through
imagery and rhetorical creativity.
An especially pointed illustration of this sermon-shaped experience is his instruction on
the appropriate posture of sermongoing, or “coming,” delivered in a sermon preached at St.
Paul’s exactly two years prior to the 1628 Christmas sermon. Here, how one attends a sermon is
analogous to how one receives the sacrament:
there are many commings to Church, commings for company, for observation, for
musique: And all these indispositions are ill at prayers; there they are
unwholesome, but at the Sacrament, deadly: He that brings any collaterall respect
to prayers, loses the benefit of the prayers of the Congregation; and he that brings
that to a Sermon, looses the blessings of Gods ordinance in that Sermon; hee
heares but the Logique, or the Retorique, or the Ethique, or the poetry of the
Sermon, but the Sermon of the Sermon he heares not; but he that brings this
disposition to the Sacrament, ends not in the losse of a benefit, but he acquires,
and procures his owne damnation.
255
It is ambiguous what Donne means by the “blessings of Gods ordinance in that Sermon,” but his
auditors are at least told that a sermon’s inner power is not its logic, rhetoric, ethic, or poetry.
Rather, it is the “Sermon of the Sermon.” “Comming,” in this passage, is a synonym for
“hearing.” Like hearing, “comming” involves a host of rigorous activities, such as navigating
through multiple sense stimuli, keeping the right motivation in mind, and, most importantly,
255
7:293.
176
ignoring the rhetorical flourishes of the preacher’s words. Donne’s condemnation of “collaterall”
coming is one that he repeats elsewhere: “When thou comest to meet him [Christ] in the
Congregation, come not occasionally, come not casually, not indifferently, not collaterally; come
not as to an entertainment, a show, a spectacle, or company.”
256
Collateral sermongoing means
primarily having the right motivations, but it also means assuming a disposition that rejects the
emotional and physical sensations one would experience in an entertainment, spectacle, or show.
Donne’s caution against “collaterall” coming implies that sermons are constructed in such a way
that demands the imposition of uni-lateral attention from their audiences. “Comming,” thus,
illustrates the inevitably idiomatic way that Donne and his contemporaries think about sermons,
but it also indicates the role that idiomatic or “collaterall” experiences can play in directing
sermongoers to perceive more deeply and to collaborate in discovering the soul of the sermon.
Conclusion
When auditors hear through the idiomatic aspects of a sermon to its soul, they transform from
accidental hearers to intentional hearers; they convert the venue’s soundscape into the “word
preached”; and they hone a decidedly “collaterall” diffusion of attention into a singular belief
object with the aim of attaining its salvific properties. It is clear, however, that the “theory” of
sermon-like belief expressed by Donne and like-minded contemporaries is not an exact science.
Auditors are instructed to hear sermons selectively but also to engage with their environments.
They are told to hear profitably by selective looking or, alternately, by selective not-looking, as
the significance of a sermon’s content functions by attributing significance to its marginal
context. As a result of these instructions, sermons are treated like sacraments in logic but not in
256
6:100, my italics.
177
substance. In all, portrayals of a congregation’s relation to a sermon take on various metaphorical
faces, including chiasmus, marginalia, literacy, echo, body and soul, and even sacrament. These
models are neither opposed to one another nor entirely cohesive. Rather, Donne and his
contemporaries seem to embrace this variety as part of the diffuse presence that early modern
sermons had for sermongoing in the first-person. It would not be a stretch to infer that a cohesive
rendering or distilling of this multifarious sermon culture was, indeed, an aspect of sermon-like
belief.
And although Donne has served only to provide the primary examples for my analysis of
early modern sermon-like belief, it should be stated, in closing, that the significance that Donne
attributes to the environment and conditions of sermons reflects his attitude towards the physical
world in general. Notably, Donne’s thought about the human body, an extremely popular subject
in recent years, shows this same attitude. Much like what I have called church literacy, in his
Devotions, Donne claims that he can read his soul in his body, as if it were a physical effigy of
his spiritual self—that “thou dost effigiate my soul to me” in “the state of my body.”
257
Although
the state of his body involves aspects of complexity and decay that do not directly represent the
state of the soul, still, the corruption of the human body reflects the general depravity of the soul.
The correspondence between the sign and the thing is, according to Donne, decidedly accurate, if
nonetheless caught up in the details of the body’s accidents. In a similar way, Donne’s biblical
idiom—“Lord, who hath beleeved our report?”—can be read as a commentary on the idiomatic
character—or body—of belief in early modern sermongoing. True saving belief may be
theologically reducible to abstract faith in Christ, but gerundial believing is a largely extra-
theological activity that is environed by idioms and sensations. The sermon, understood by
257
John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa (New York: Oxford UP, 1987), 119.
178
Donne and his contemporaries as a phenomenon of first-hand experience, is a kind of effigy of
the activity of faith.
Sermon-like belief, then, exists in an auditor’s ability to transition from the eye to the ear
and to identify a sacred substance in the accidents of a sermon and its environment. Thus, in a
post-Reformation culture that is often described as word-centric, Donne’s Christmas sermon
suggests an alternative model to Catholic metaphysics for understanding the attainment of saving
belief. Instead of witnessing with faith the elevation of the transubstantiated host, where the
substance of God is manifest in physical accidents, Donne’s auditors witness the acoustic and
familiar voice of the preacher and discern the saving Word that is manifest in its idioms.
179
CHAPTER FOUR
“BALLADS! HARK! HARK!”:
THE PERFORMANCE OF BELIEF IN EARLY MODERN GODLY BALLADS
The topic of religion in English printed ballads has a somewhat tenuous critical history. Ballad
scholars have tended to discuss religion under the auspice of some other cultural factor—
propaganda, polemic, sensationalism, commerce—and so religion is often depicted as a
superficial characteristic of godly ballads. The assumption is that since some aspects of popular
culture contravene Christian morality, the popular contexts in which ballads were performed
edge out the authentic religious intentions of balladeers and audiences and result in an
excessively conventional genre where religious expression is rarely original. Many early modern
contemporaries held a similar opinion about the potential for ballads to convey religious
meaning. Henry Chettle criticizes various social vices in his pamphlet Kind-hart’s Dreame,
including that of balladeering in the city, condemnable especially for its consequence of “with-
drawing people from Christian exercises, especially at faires, markets and such publike
meetings.”
258
Like early modern invectives against playgoing, the complaint that ballads distract
people from godly activities was common. “Alderman Pennington, with some hundreds
following him,” presented a list of complaints in the Root and Branch petition at the beginning of
the Long Parliament in which ballads are likewise accused of “withdrawing of people from
reading, studying, and hearing the Word of God.”
259
What is remarkable about this criticism is
258
Henry Chettle, Kind-harts Dream (London, 1593), C1r.
259
Samuel Rawson Gardiner, ed., The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625-1660, 3
rd
ed.
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1906), 139.
180
that the petition associates the distracting influence of popular ballads with the institutional
church ceremonialism that it also deems corrupt.
Yet despite these criticisms there were still hundreds of godly ballads circulating in early
modern London. According to Stationers’ Registers, more than one-third of the ballads registered
during the majority of the Elizabethan period were religiously themed, and Samuel Pepys
categorized 110 of his ballads under “Devotion and Morality.” Moreover, by no means were
godly ballads generally lumped with their secular counterparts in the public’s mind. As early as
1549, for instance, William Baldwin expressed his wish that godly songs “myght once driue out
of office the baudy balades of lecherous loue that commonly are indited and song of idle
coutyers.”
260
In a similar vein, Sternhold’s and Hopkins’s Whole Book of Psalms sets the Psalms
to ballad stanza and simple tunes in an effort to reroute popular music from the profane to the
biblical.
261
These proscriptions of godly songs to replace secular tunes reminds us that the ballad
form itself—with its features of stanzaic verse, tune, and central situation—was certainly not
always viewed as structurally unfit for religion, especially given that Sternhold’s and Hopkin’s
settings were used in churches all over the realm. In fact, most early modern opponents attacked
ballads for the circumstances of their sale and performance rather than for their literary form.
Balladeers were often disparaged as drunks and vagrants, and their voices criticized as noisome.
Others complained that the broadside sheets themselves littered the city, overflowing every
market stall and pasted “on euery post.”
262
These circumstantial factors press the question of
belief’s survival in godly ballad performance: is belief swallowed by the ulterior motives and
popular contexts of its environment?
260
William Baldwin, The Canticles or Balades of Solomon (London, 1549), A3v.
261
Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins, The Whole Book of Psalmes, Collected into Englysh Metre (London:
John Day, 1562).
262
Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penniless’s Supplication to the Devil, ed. J. Payne Collier (London, 1842), 42.
181
I contend that while religion in ballads does, in fact, serve other aspects of the broadside
trade, including commercial gain and entertainment, there remains a distinctive identity to belief
in godly ballads. The aim of this chapter is to discover how performances of early modern
ballads conditioned an experience of belief for audiences. In large part, identifying religion in
ballad performance is a matter of looking for belief in the bustling and diffuse world of street
performance, in some ways not unlike that of the outdoor sermons at Paul’s Cross. This is done
by expanding our sense of performed religion to include aspects of performance convention,
atmosphere, and audience participation—factors that are often understood to merely environ or
even marginalize religion. My phenomenological presupposition is that the perceptual activities
and environments that condition a ballad performance are just as relevant to the appearance of
belief in godly ballads as are theological and moral instruction. Thus, the shape of belief in early
modern ballads is a factor of performance; belief in ballads is parsed out into the composite
conditions of ballad reception, and it persists precisely for this reason. As scholars like Ian Green
and Natascha Würzbach have shown, ballad religion is dispersed into many different pieces and
motivations, and sometimes these pieces appear primarily under ulterior purposes—for example,
as the balladeer’s market cry or as a series of repeated ballad conventions. Yet in the
performance of a godly ballad, I argue, these parts constitute a whole, and there is evidence that
this whole constituted a meaningful experience of religious belief for audiences.
Defining the Godliness of Godly Ballads
From the early twentieth century, discussions of early modern English broadside ballads have
demonstrated a degree of discomfort with treating the godly ballad as a religious genre. Part of
the trouble is defining the “ballad” in the first place. From there, scholars have struggled to
182
determine the degree to which religion—as a literary and performative category—survives the
process of defining the genre. What I mean by this is that scholars often marginalize some of the
attributes that conventionally mark a performance as religious from the core of what counts as a
ballad. For instance, one would be right in assuming that the average passerby who caught a few
verses of a godly ballad being performed by a ballad-monger outside, say, the Globe Theater in
Southwark would probably not have had an experience of personal devotion, but, I want to
argue, it is not out of the question that ballad performances can facilitate experiences of public
and communal belief. The perspective that resists defining godly ballads by their promotion of
godliness misapplies a twentieth-century bias towards separating the sacred and the secular,
which in turn entails a separation between the personal and the public. This perspective relies on
the notion that a historical experience is identifiable and measurable as “religious” or
“devotional” by comparing it to other activities that are more-or-less unanimously considered
historically religious—such as sermongoing, Bible study, corporate prayer, spiritual reading, or
psalm singing. Yet I want to challenge the idea that ballads can only be identified as religious in
reference to analogs of conventionally devotional experiences. Their capacity for belief, in other
words, is not merely a function of representation but is also a function of the spontaneous and
malleable presence of belief in popular performance.
Should ballads be defined by their “folk” content, by the conditions of their production,
by their status as cheap print, by the identity as a particular kind of performance, or in some other
way? The answers to this have divergent implications on the identity of ballad godliness and on
whether we understand godly ballads to accommodate belief. In 1932 Gordon Hall Gerould
proffered a definition of ballads that emphasizes the folk characteristics of ballad content in a
way that problematically distances the ballad from both its conditions of production and the first-
183
person experience of its performance. He writes that a ballad is “a folk-song that tells a story
with stress on the crucial situation, tells it by letting the action unfold itself in event and speech,
and tells it objectively with little comment or intrusion of personal bias.”
263
Especially
noteworthy is Gerould’s stress on the “objective” quality of ballads. According to this definition,
a balladeer’s first allegiance in singing a song is to the story itself as it is known in ballad lore
and as it is told in ballad idiom. David Atkinson channels this notion of objectivity through a
reception theory that stresses the generic conventions of ballads. He calls these conventions the
genre’s “horizon of expectations.” Defining the ballad requires understanding its “interpretive
context”—“a kind of reception that is bounded in terms of its parameters or horizon of
expectations; it imposes a ‘reading imperative’, the requirement that the text be interpreted in
accordance with the nature and assumptions of its idiom.”
264
I will return to the importance of
genre expectations later in this chapter, but I want to highlight here the persistent neglect of
ballads in performance, as if the meanings of ballads are strictly limited by their textual tradition.
Belief is almost completely excluded from these folk definitions of ballads because their
literary focus classifies religious content as mere convention and ignores the cultural conditions
through which belief becomes present. Scholars have justifiably fought to introduce the cultural
factors of ballad production into ballad definition and the horizons of their meanings. Perhaps the
most important of these production factors is the decline of godly ballad print in the seventeenth
century. According to Tessa Watt’s calculations, the circulation of religious ballads seems to
have dropped from 35% of all ballads registered from 1560 to 1588 to 9% from 1625 to 1640.
265
These numbers do not account for unregistered ballads, which outnumber ballads in the Registry
263
Gordon Hall Gerould, The Ballad of Tradition (New York: Oxford UP, 1957), 11.
264
David Atkinson, The English Traditional Ballad: Theory, Method, and Practice (Burlington, VT: Ashgate,
2002), 11.
265
Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991), 44-51.
184
when based on the surviving sample of extant ballads. Watt argues that despite this decline,
ballads as commercial products were used to private ends and that, in the case of religion, ballad
godliness maintained a real identity in early modern England. This identity, she suggests, is
mosaic-like—continuous with older devotional practices but embracing Protestant ideas about
salvation. Yet even Watt betrays some hesitation in acknowledging the real presence of belief
among ballads’ many popular motives. For example, she acknowledges the religious content in
deathbed godly ballads but insinuates that their sensationalism may have overridden their
religious reception, and, likewise, she suggests that while Protestant martyr ballads survived their
audiences’ lack of religious enthusiasm, they did so merely as “cardboard cut-outs” of the
“emotional religious core” of the martyrdom narrative.
266
Ian Green adopts a secularist reading of the decline in godly ballad print, locating the
agency for ballad production and therefore popular ballad capital in their publishers. He contrasts
the numerous godly ballads of the sixteenth century that typically include an authorial attribution
with the later seventeenth-century broadsides that were anonymous and often stock, and he
suggests that the “picture that emerges gives much greater weight to the role of the publisher” in
the production of godly ballads.
267
The implication here is that ballads are defined by their status
as circulated cheap print and not by their use and reception in performance. The consequence for
ballad godliness, or the lack thereof, is that “the great majority of the cheap works which sold
best were neither the product of ‘godly’ authors’ pens nor would have been acceptable to them.”
Thus, Green’s low estimation of ballads’ capacity for facilitating belief suggests that the reason
for the decline of godly ballad print is that ballads are simply unsuitable for religious content. He
266
Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 108-09, 95-96.
267
Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), 445.
185
writes that “one is forcibly struck by . . . the incompleteness of the teaching and the
repetitiveness of the language and ideas” contained in godly ballads.
268
He continues:
The elements of Protestantism in these ballads, such as a focus on the teaching of
the Bible, salvation through faith, or the example set by Protestant martyrs, were
so small that what one is looking at here is something much more akin to a secular
ballad—on seduction, drunkenness, war, or ‘strange news’ from Germany or
Lincolnshire —with a change of focus and a few, safe, undemanding clichés that
even sincere supporters of ‘prayer-book religion’ (whose standards are generally
assumed to have been much lower than those of the ‘godly’) would have found
inadequate.
269
Because of the literary conventions and strictures of the ballad form, most notably the
requirement to entertain, according to Green, neither the worldly nor the godly found much use
for religious ballads.
Natascha Würzbach takes the performance situation into account by drawing on speech-
act theory, but her conclusion posits a secularist view similar to Green’s:
There is a definite link between the secularization of content and the emergence
both of a presenter level of communication . . . and other textual speakers. The
reasons for this, from the point of view of textual intent, is to be found not only in
the unsuitability of presenter communication practices of religious and theological
moral themes, but more in the principal function of a speaker who assumes sole
responsibility for conveying the subject of communication. Where this subject of
communication is part of an unquestioned, fixed world view orientated towards
268
Green, Print and Protestantism, 470.
269
Green, Print and Protestantism, 471.
186
salvation and redemption there is no necessity for a personalized statement. It was
only during the process of secularization, which characterized the seventeenth
century, where the abandonment of dogmatic safeguards made possible a plurality
of opinion and choice of behaviour, that a personalization of the textual message
proved useful if not vital.
270
Würzbach is claiming more than the statement that ballads were incompatible with religious
messages; she goes as far as to use this incompatibility as evidence for the secularization of
English society at large. What is especially noteworthy in this claim is the implication that
popular religious genres can only thrive when they are produced by a society where sanctioned
dogmatic opinions are enforced.
Recent scholarship on recusant and aberrant theological opinion has overturned this basic
assumption that sixteenth-century England underwent an organized and holistic revolution in
religion—thus, challenging Würzbach’s “fixed world view”—but, regardless, Würzbach’s
argument has too dichotomous a view of the relation between the religious and the secular.
271
Secularism, she says, developed hand-in-hand with individualism and particularly the
individualistic attitudes of the speakers in godly ballads. Because of its implied impersonality,
Green’s argument that godly ballads fail to facilitate belief because they include merely “a few,
safe, undemanding clichés” would seem to be at odds with Würzbach’s individualism argument,
270
Natascha Würzbach, The Rise of the English Street Ballad 1550-1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990),
237.
271
I am thinking of the many arguments for Catholic continuity in post-Reformation. See especially Eamon
Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1992);
Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society under the Tudors. (Oxford: Oxford UP,
1993); Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity, and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern
England (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 1993); and Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and
Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995).
187
but in fact they share the fundamental presupposition that performativity negates belief. This
argument is similar in significant ways to the secularist view of Renaissance theater that frames
performative religion primarily as empty “representations.”
272
At stake in these arguments is an
implied evaluation of the authenticity of religion in godly ballads: how can a godly ballad really
express belief if it is so excessively conventional, or if its creation is primarily attributable to
printers rather than authors and performers, or if the ballad speaker’s personalized voice implies
secularization? Must authentic belief—however haphazardly we must identify it—be located in
an authorship and voice that is free from popular motives and circumstances? One central
problem with these assumptions as applied to godly ballads is the privileging of institutional
Protestantism and “prayer-book religion” over the performative godly genres of the poor. My
argument is that this bias largely results from neglecting the event of the performance as a
potentially belief-filled phenomenon that assimilates rather than isolates the individual and that
locates belief not in pretended autonomy but in community and collaboration.
Few scholars have focused on the conditions of ballad performance and none with ballad
godliness specifically in mind, but the precedents are promising for revitalizing the first-person
experience of ballad religion. An early statement about ballad performance made by Louis Pound
cautions against relying too much on ballad conventions to delineate their meanings, saying,
“Ballad creation has for its motivating impulse the circumstance that characters and their story
are to be brought before hearers, not in a narrative to be read, but briefly and memorably and
dramatically in a recitational or song way. Only stories which lend themselves well to such
handling are eligible material.”
273
I would add that the “song way” of ballad performance
includes literary factors, such as their lyric conventions. The several essays that Bruce Smith has
272
See the subsection, “Does Belief Survive Representation?” in the Introduction.
273
Louis Pound, “The English Ballads and the Church,” PMLA 35, no. 2 (1920): 186.
188
written on English broadside ballads offer nuanced readings of ballads in performance that treat
the lyric conventions of balladry as embodied activities in performative space. Smith suggests
that we look to the ways that ballads “interact in highly volatile ways with the physical body,
with soundscapes, with speech communities, with political authority, with the singer’s sense of
self.”
274
His historical phenomenological approach treats the body as the “common denominator”
between all of the parties involved in a ballad performance, from balladeer, to audience, to
scholar. In ballad performances the “human body,” he writes, is “the site where objects becomes
subjects.”
275
With a commensurate attention to embodied performance, Christopher Marsh
contributes an awareness of music’s role in connecting different social groups to the first-person
experience of ballads. Saliently, he describes the popular aspects of ballads as continuous
phenomena, serving as a kind of common denominator similar to Smith’s description of the
body.
276
These studies and their turn to performance enhances our ability to define the
experience of ballad religion because it does not wholly define the ballad genre according to
either its lyrical tradition or its cultural production. Both factors, I argue, play a part in ballad
godliness but primarily insofar as they frame the first-person experience of public belief. I also
argue that ballad conventionality is enfolded into this experience of belief. By conventional, I
mean to say that ballads are so utterly repetitive, allusive, imitative, and cliché-driven that it is
difficult to sort out how they might be viewed as seriously engaging any subject matter.
Nonetheless, ballads’ conspicuous signs of performativity—their conventionality and
imitativeness—inflect a unique model of belief that draws on this performativity to promote
audience solidarity and belief-in-common.
274
Smith, The Acoustic World, 173.
275
Bruce Smith, “Afterward: Ballad Futures,” in Patricia Fumerton and Anita Guerrini, eds., Ballads and
Broadsides in Britain, 1500-1800 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 323.
276
Christopher Marsh, Music and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010).
189
Thus, taking a statement about ballad religion such as Green’s—that “most ‘godly
ballads’ were narrowly conceived and flabbily executed”—we can examine what it means to
“execute” religion in a ballad while accounting for its popularism. According to some, for a
ballad to be godly means not only that it must exhibit religious content but also that it must
execute it in a way that is clearly adapted from another form of godly expression. For instance,
consider that seventeenth-century popular culture identified Foxe’s Actes and Monuments of
these Latter and Perillous Days, Touching Matters of the Church as one example of
Protestantism’s cemented historical heritage. The ability of the Actes and Monuments to facilitate
belief is not a topic of dispute because it appears in churches and other formally devotional
contexts. Yet in the case that a ballad appropriates a story from Foxe—say, that of Ann Askew—
which happened all the time, we are faced with an interpretive problem: how much can Askew’s
narrative be appropriated into the lyric conventions, commerce, and generally unoriginal genre of
balladry until it ceases to accommodate belief? The answer to this question, of course, requires
that one differentiate the kind of belief promoted by readings of Foxe in a household or church
190
from the kind of belief instantiated in an improvised alehouse recital of a ballad posted on a wall.
Figure 6. Detail from "Ann Askew, intitled, I am a Woman Poor and Blind," Pepys Ballads 2.24
If one were looking for the kind of devotion promoted by readings of the Actes and Monuments
in ballads, then one might well conclude that religion is “flabbily executed” in them. Yet there
are two problems with this, taking Foxe as an example. The first is expressed in my argument on
“Sermon-like Belief” in Donne’s sermons. Despite their institutional contexts, even sermons and
other performed religious literature are theatrical and draw on the idiomatic conventions of their
delivery. In 1570 a copy of the second edition of Foxe’s Actes and Monuments was ordered to be
placed in every collegiate church in England, just like the Bible, and both books were read
privately and also aloud—and, hence, performed.
277
Thus, even the authoritative story of Ann
Askew is subject to a performer-audience scenario, to its distractions and environment. The
second problem with judging belief in popular balladry by comparison to habits of belief in more
277
I am indebted to Bruce Smith for this reminder about the ordinances for Foxe.
191
“institutional” venues is a narrow view of what constitutes popular belief. An object of
perception becomes an object of belief, I propose, through its audience’s engagement of its
individual parts and pieces and not by accessing an allegedly unaffected presentation of the
sacred. Audiences participated in ballad performances of “Ann Askew” by being moved by the
narrative but also through compiling the experience of godliness from among its ulterior
conditions—its balladeer’s musicality, its costumers’ exchanges of currency, its audience
members’ physical proximity to each other, and its recognition of ballad commonplaces.
Participation is a dominant theme of the ballad-going experience. For one, it was
common for audiences to browse broadside sheets while ballads were being performed.
Bartholomew Fair’s Cokes “Runs to the ballad-man,” exclaiming “Ballads! hark, hark! pray
thee, fellow, stay a little. . . . What ballads hast thou? let me see, let me see myself.”
278
Cokes
then demonstrates another common form of audience participation by singing the burden (or
refrain) at the end of each verse with the balladeer. These occurrences—in addition to dancing,
purchasing broadsides, applause, and other reactions—are obvious forms of participation, but I
want to suggest that audiences part-ticipated (from pars and capere, “to take part in”) on more
basic perceptual and intellectual levels through the activity of recognition. Audiences
participated simply by recognizing that religion is dispersed into different parts (pars) of the
ballad and piecing them together through their presence as audience. One fundamental principle
of classical phenomenology is the relation between whole and part. Wholes are perceived only in
their parts. Consider the basic complex statement that “the ballad is godly.” This begins as a
perception of a ballad identified by its several parts: the balladeer, the crowd, the broadside, the
familiar tune, etc. Then, we attend to a particular property of the ballad, namely, its godly
278
Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, in The Selected Plays of Ben Jonson, vol. 2, ed. Martin Butler (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1989), 3.5.17-18.
192
content, by recognizing language and other conventions that are popularly associated with
religion.
279
“Finally,” in the words of Dan Zahavi, summarizing Husserl, “we relate the two prior
stages. We take the object as whole, and the part as part, and we intend the part as a part of the
whole, and articulate it in a judgment”: the ballad is godly.
280
In this way, godliness does not
disappear as an identifiable category just because it is dispersed into various parts, some of
which may also be parts of other wholes, such as “this tune is from a Robin Hood ballad,” or
“this woodcut is from a ballad about shepherds,” or “this audience/crowd is walking into the
playhouse,” or “this balladeer has a better voice than that one.” From the point of view of
attempting to understand popular religion as it appears in ballad form, the composite nature of
ballad religion poses no problem. In fact, to return once again to Husserl’s phenomenology of the
imagination, that ballads are so very conventional and imitative of each other highlights rather
than dissolves their religious identity. One can better understand the essence of a thing—the
whole in its parts—by imagining “with a completely free optionalness, yet in such a manner that
we keep perception fixed as perception of something.”
281
We can think of godly ballads as a
heightened imaginative form of “optionalness.” Ballads are forthright about their status as a
variation on themes, and ballad authors make no attempt to hide the generic formula from which
they diversify. They use and recycle each other’s allusions, tunes, commonplaces, mnemonic
devices, and visual traits proudly, as it were, incorporating the theme of godliness into the
cultural mode of ballad singing.
It is the participation of authors, balladeers, and audiences in writing, singing, and
recognizing these conventions that characterizes the identity of ballad religion. I now turn to two
279
The observation of religion, of course, is also a very complex perception. I explore this more below.
280
This breakdown of Husserl’s complicated psychology of perception is taken from Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s
Phenomenology (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003), 36.
281
Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 70.
193
different “parts” of the whole of ballad belief—namely, (a) ballad imitation and conventionality
and (b) the audience’s physical actions that piece together the ballad as an embodied experience.
Popular religion appears in popular forms, and the godly ballad appears in parts that are often
diffuse and ulterior. Nevertheless, their popularism, their recurrent performances, their cultural
fascination, and their solidarity as a genre comprise the grounds of an experience of belief.
Ballad Imitation and Conventionality
Early modern ballads thrive on imitation. In fact, it was probably the case that their habits of
extensive imitation and allusion contributed to their popularity and survival. Readers and
audiences of ballads wanted to hear what they expected to hear. Atkinson provides a useful list
of some of these expected formal characteristics :
Repetitive textual, metrical, and melodic structures; patterned arrangements of
narrative and conceptual components, or parallelism in phrase and idea, including
so-called incremental repetition; conventional vocabulary and epithets; recurrent,
formulaic phrases, lines, and stanzas; formalized refrains. . . . a recurrent
vocabulary of melodic, rhythmic, and dynamic techniques, as well as
ornamentation, designed to meet the emotional and metrical demands of the song
texts.
282
I would add to this list recurrent themes and habits of “stock” allusion to stories and phrases that
popular society would readily recognize, such as allusions to the Bible, traditional English lore,
and commonplaces of the political establishment.
282
Atkinson, The English Traditional Ballad, 12.
194
Take for example the seventeenth-century godly ballad, “A most Excellent Ballad of
Ioseph the Carpenter.” To summarize that this ballad is simply about the annunciation and birth
of Christ from the perspective of Joseph misses how significantly the ballad’s imitativeness and
conventionality shape its meanings. The verses in this broadsheet are not separated into stanzas,
but they do follow a rhyme scheme of aaab, cccb, dddb, and so on. The first eight lines read:
Joseph an aged man truly,
Did marry a Virgin fair and free,
A purer Virgin did no man see,
Then [sic] he chose for his dear his dear.
This Virgin was pure, there was no nay,
The Angel Gabriel to her did say.
Thou shalt conceive a boy this day,
The which shall be our dear out dear.
283
This was a popular ballad in the seventeenth century, and it is representative in its physical
layout: a title, woodcuts (in this case, two), the song, and a printer’s advertisement at the bottom.
If we focus on the presentation of this well-known story and how Joseph’s perspective comes to
presence in the ballad’s conventions, perhaps the most immediately striking observation is how
much the religious content is shaped by the ballad’s auditory characteristics. We could even say
that the story of Joseph and the Virgin is co-opted by its appeal as a performance—by its
performativity. Not only does it have a regular and simple rhyme, but it also is filled with interior
rhyme and consonance. The soft “g” of the first line’s “aged” reappears in the second line’s
“Virgin” at about the same point in rhythm. Also, lines 5 and 6 share a subtle internal rhyme in
283
“A most Excellent Ballad of Ioseph the Carpenter,” Pepys Ballads, Pepys Library, Cambridge, 2.27.
195
“there” and “her”; while lines 7 and 8 internally rhyme “conceive” and “be.” Moreover, the
rhyme structure centers on the repetition of “dear,” used in different grammatical positions, in
first-person and then in third-person. Although this ballad does not indicate a specific tune, it is
probable that the refrain-like “dears” were sung with emotional intensity and were the most
recognizable aspect of the ballad in performance. One can see the extent to which these rhyme
and song aspects dominate the biblical content in the four lines devoted to confirming that the
virgin was “pure”—a kind of allusion. I call this detail an “allusion” not because it is directly
referencing a biblical or dogmatic text but because it functions like an allusion by nodding to its
importance as a theological detail. In other words, it disclaims originality and conspicuously
refers to other religious expressions.
The effect is a sense that the balladeer is advertising the fact that, as presented to popular
culture, his ballad is historically and theologically accurate, that if you purchase this ballad then
you will have brought an object of entertainment as well as godly instruction into your home for
only a penny or half-penny. This same phenomenon occurs near the end of the ballad when the
holy family is in search of a place for Mary to give birth.
But when to Bethelem they were come,
The Inns were filled all and some,
When Joseph intreating every groom,
Could get no bed for his dear his dear
Then was he constrained presently,
Within the Stable all night to lye,
Wherein they did Oxen and Asses tye,
With his true love and Lady dear.
196
Again, the emphasis is on idiosyncratic aspects of the narrative, that the inns were full and that
the stable housed animals.
Figure 7. Notice the ox and ass on the left: Nativity scene from The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ
(Westminster: Caxton, ca. 1490) Sp Coll Hunterian Bv.2.24
The almost cameo appearance of the “Oxen and Asses” is another allusion of sorts, if only to
these two specific animals’ ubiquity in renditions of the story. As non-specific as this allusion
may seem, it is a good example of the kind of widespread cultural imitation for which ballads
patently aim. Notably, however, this kind of ad hoc appropriating of biblical detail leads Green
to assume that this ballad, as an example, must not be “the work of a ‘godly’ author” since it
“holds the verba ipsissima of the Bible in low regard.”
284
Details like these are also subject to
disapproval among contemporaries who doubt ballads’ ability to instruct or profit hearers. For
instance, in 1582 Richard Stanyhurst complains that ballad authors and balladeers are “a frye of
such wooden rythmours” who suffer from never learning Greek and Latin in school, and William
284
Green, Print and Protestantism, 458. I am applying Green’s analysis to this ballad in particular.
197
Webbe in 1586 describes the sound of performances as “the vncountable rabble of Ryming ballet
makers.”
285
The next few lines of “A most Excellent Ballad of Ioseph the Carpenter” illustrate this
alleged failure of religious instruction:
The Virgin fair thought it no scorn,
To lye in such a place forlorn,
Which night she had a young-Son born,
Even Jesus Christ our dear our dear
This is the actual moment of the nativity, comparable perhaps to the moment of eucharistic
institution in the Chester’s Cycle’s “The Last Supper.” Jesus appears, however, in a subordinate
clause about the holy family’s acceptance of their animal-infested housing. Furthermore, that
“Jesus Christ” is immediately followed with the ballad’s refrain-like “our dear our dear” is a
point of potential concern. Stanyhurst and Webbe might well argue that it marginalizes the
moment of incarnation by positioning the name of Christ—the first time it appears in the
ballad—alongside a representative example of superfluous and repetitive rhyme. Notice the
similarity of this complaint to some of the modern critical arguments against the didactic
capacity of religious ballads. Some early moderns as well as moderns argue that religion is
“flabbily executed” in ballads. Yet we should also notice that situating the moment of
incarnation next to “our dear our dear” is to position Christ adjacent to the telltale musical
convention of the ballad—the musical moment in which audience attention most inheres.
Reverence is paid to Jesus through this convention as it is appreciated in the popular community
285
Richard Stanyhurst, “From the Translation of the Aneid,” in G. Gregory Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical
Essays, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1904), 141; William Webbe, “A Discourse of English Poesie,” in G. Gregory
Smith, 1:246.
198
that listens to and purchases such ballads. The name of “Jesus Christ” appears as a mere part of
the whole ballad, as a part of the prominent rhyme scheme, as part of a series of less important
biblical details, and as part of a repetitive refrain, but by the same token the moment of the
nativity is memorialized—even literally—through the ballad’s most recognizable musical motif.
This motif may not be acceptable as liturgical song or performed before a royal audience, but it
is a moment of musical intensity and popular commemoration nonetheless.
I am discussing techniques of imitation and allusion in the context of the contemporary
controversy over ballads because the point of dispute is precisely the corrupting or defrauding of
godly material with ballad conventions. What is especially important to notice is that the
arguments of modern scholars who view ballad religion as unserious are actually
incommensurate with those early moderns who opposed godly ballads. In fact, that ballad
authors are accused of not knowing Greek or Latin only strengthens the case that godly ballads
assert a unique religious expression because being obviously unlearned is what enables ballads to
invoke a literary mode of imitation and to capitalize on this popular status by heightening their
emotional immediacy. Moreover, the “wooden” quality of their unlearned rhyming is equally
functional, foregrounding the popular assimilation of something else, of some other religious
form that popular culture understands to possess the authority of religious instruction.
This kind of imitation is especially pronounced in a 1593 ballad entitled “The Heartie
Confession of a Christian.”
199
Figure 8. “The Heartie Confession of a Christian,” HEH Britwell, 18278.
200
Although there are much more than stanzaic verses on this broadside, the song itself is a
confession of sin and a kind of exemplar of the process of repentance in prayer. The speaker
begins by admitting that he is “drowned” in “sin originall”; he asks for forgiveness for his
“violence and treacherie” and then confirms the renewal of his “state in heaven.”
286
The stanzas
are spattered with biblical allusions, such as the comparison of Christ to Moses’ “brazen snake”
and the triple title of Christ as “Prophet, Priest, and King.” The fourth stanza illustrates the
extensive use of general allusion and conventional language:
3. *Where I ungodly am, and superstitious,
Unreverent, profane, and irreligious,
Leading my life after a worldly fashion
Against the rule of my heavenly vocation,
And thus am set in an ilfavor’d case;
Christ is my *perfect holiness, and grace:
Him, as that holy of holies, if I frequent,
My blottes, and blemishes shall soone be spent.
The speaker uses stock phrases of popular theology. His self-description is obviously repetitive,
conveying less a sense of original confession than offering a conspicuously performative
example of contrition. The list of “ungodly” attributes—“superstitious. / Unreverent, profane,
and irreligious,” etc.—serves simply to show that the ballad is somewhat theologically
sophisticated, able to depict sin in at least seven different guises. In addition, the speaker alludes
to the temple “holy of holies” and uses the idiomatic pairing of “blottes, and blemishes.”
286
“The Heartie Confession of a Christian,” HEH Britwell, 18278. I have modernized letters but not spelling.
201
Whereas “A most Excellent Ballad of Ioseph the Carpenter” conventionalizes and memorializes
biblical details primarily through rhyme structure and musicality, “The Heartie Confession of a
Christian” conventionalizes biblical details through allusion and popular idiom.
Music is less prominent here than style. Although the Duchess of Newcastle’s opinions
about ballads may have been idiosyncratic, her description of ballad “Tone” in a 1664 letter
provides a context for understanding this ballad’s imitative style. She writes that “neither should
Old Ballads be sung so much in a Tune as in a Tone, which Tone is betwixt Speaking and
Singing, for the Sound is more than Plain Speaking, and less than Clear Singing.”
287
What seems
to be culturally consistent about Cavendish’s statement is not that balladeers always lacked
skilled voices but that ballad performances had a “Tone” derived from more than their melodies.
She describes this tone as circumstantial, organically arising from common labor, in this case
comparable to the sounds of “good housewives” spinning thread and to “the noise the wheel
makes in the turning round.” Her attention to the common circularity of ballad tone, as opposed
to the grander “Musick of the Spheres,” stresses that this tone is imitative. Ballads—and godly
ballads in particular—circle each other and circle the theological knowledge of popular culture
through imitating and alluding to it.
288
Audience participation in godly ballad performance—broadly defined—is also evident in
their physical appearances. “The Heartie Confession of a Christian” is dissimilar from later black
letter broadsides but is not entirely unique from earlier religious ballads. The form of broadsides
more-or-less regularized by the end of the seventeenth century, but earlier ballad authors and
printers often experimented with different ways of framing them. Notable in this ballad are the
printed marginalia. They are comprised of short theological explanations and citations. Where a
287
Margaret Cavendish, Sociable Letters, ed. James Fitzmaurice (New York: Garland, 1997), 217.
288
Ibid., 218.
202
ballad verse says “Where I by nature* through my parents fal,” a corresponding asterisk appears
in the margin with the doctrinal explanation: “*Against our birth sinne, commonly called
originall sinne.” Or, where the ballad refers to “Christ my *redemption,” the margin explains:
“*The proper remedie, is hi[s] [re]demption and glorie, w[ith] the due reward of his ex[cee]ding
mercie towards us.” The margins also contain abbreviated biblical citations, as in: “That is divine
substance, majestie, or godlines: as, Mat. 5.48. Joh. 13.15. and 17.20.21.22,” and so on. These
bits of doctrinal exposition and biblical citation tell us a great deal about the way that ballad
authors conceived of godly ballads. They tell us that ballads are self-aware of their
conventionality, that they think of themselves as a genre not primarily designed for issuing
doctrine but for repeating it. In the earlier sixteenth-century stages of ballad production, from
which we receive this broadsheet, ballads appear to be less comfortable in their own skins. Here,
for instance, there is an implicit need to annotate. That is, the doctrinal annotations frame the
ballad’s verses and therefore intend them to be the kind of religious expression that requires
doctrinal framing. Like “A most Excellent Ballad of Ioseph the Carpenter,” this ballad is an
expression of remembrance, summary, confession, and example. Remarkably, the ballad states
this intention expressly in a statement printed above the title. It reads:
There bee many that speake much of Jesus Christ, and beare a faire shew of his
holines and vertue: but none are able to conceive (much lesse to declare) the
sweete comforts of his heavenly grace, saving such as hold faith in a good
conscience, without hypocrisie, pride, and covetousnes, and be reformed in their
lives with charitie, peace, and unitie.
The statement differentiates between hypocrites who “speake much of Jesus Christ” and those
rare few who “are able to conceive . . . his heavenly grace,” with true conception leading to true
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repentance. This deeper conception, he continues in the “forespeech” that precedes the first
stanza, is not given by doctrine alone but by a “somme” (sum) of it, “to ease my troubled
minde.” The author thinks of his godly ballad as imitative in that as it summarizes theology, and
he deems this summarized and performed form of doctrine to be especially conducive to
inspiration. Also conducive to deepening the ballads presentation of the sacred is its enclosed
physical appearance. Stacked above the ballad are a didactic epigraph, a title, Bible verses, and
the “forespeech.” Below are the printer’s advertisement and the date, and in the margins lie
doctrinal glosses and biblical references. This enclosed broadsheet layout is characteristic
particularly of the period’s religious ballads.
In these ways, godly ballads are essentially composite imitations of other religious forms.
They often piece together different kinds of speech—instruction, preface, citation, title, note,
etc.—and they also imitate the forms of other prominent religious literature and performance.
Most conspicuously, “The Heartie Confession of a Christian,” with its full margins,
typographical variety, italics, prefaces, and stanza titles very much resembles the print layouts of
the sixteenth-century Geneva Bible in England and the liturgies of the Book of Common Prayer.
204
Figure 9. Page from the Geneva New Testament, printed in London, 1575.
205
Figure 10. Except from the Burial liturgy, 1573.
Significantly, both books were frequently read aloud in post-Reformation England, not least in
churches. This excerpt from the burial liturgy is representative of how the Prayer Book served as
a kind of performance text, with indented white-letter liturgical directions for movement—e.g.,
“Then shalbe sayde or song”—interspersed among black-letter decorative text to be read
aloud.
289
“The Heartie Confession of a Christian” likewise presents a scriptural reading and sung
response. Thus, the ballad is allusive not only to monuments of established religion such as the
Prayer Book and Geneva Bible but also specifically to these texts’ performative qualities.
289
Church of England, The Boke of Common Praier, and Administration of the Sacramentes, and Other Rites
and Ceremonies in the Churche of Englande (London, 1573), P8r; also, The New Testament of Our Lord Iesus
Christ (London, 1575), 577.
206
Consider that, like “The Heartie Confession,” auricular confession was a central component of
many of the Prayer Book’s liturgies, including the morning and evening prayer offices, Holy
Communion, and Baptism. Just like this ballad confession, those confessions come into
performance through a performed scene where the glosses, liturgical directions, and
ornamentation of the physical text are acted out in bodily movements, audience responses, and
song. Godly ballads invoke the authority of performed religion by imitating the composite nature
of these other texts’ physical and performed appearances. I want especially to stress that there is
institutional religious precedent for the conspicuous conventionality and allusiveness of godly
ballads and that it is a quality of the popular godliness of ballad culture to confidently self-
identify as imitative without compromising the robustness of its religious identity.
Another especially pronounced example of this diffuse physical appearance is the 1642
“A Song of Syon of the Beauty of Bethell.”
207
Figure 11. "A Song of Syon of the Beauty of Bethell,” HEH Miscellaneous, 180158.
208
Here the ballad is enclosed by a title and spiritualized authorial attribution above (“By a
CITIZEN of SYON”), the printer’s advertisement and Bible verses below, biblical glosses in the
margins, and also rectangular line boxes and some ornamentation dividing the page into
sections.
290
What is especially remarkable about “A Song of Syon” is its integration of this
enclosed appearance into the song’s religious content. Such an enclosed appearance, I would
add, has added significance as a form of self-authorization given the fact that only a few years
later the production and sale of ballads would be drastically inhibited by authorities.
291
This
ballad’s primary message is an exhortation to flee worldly wealth in favor of spiritual comfort. It
makes sense that this motif was popular given that their audiences were of mixed economic
status; the poor hear a song about hope and solidarity while the rich hear a warning that implies
the possibility of sharing in this same solidarity through charity. The first three verses:
One
a
thing beleevers hearts are fixt upon,
that thing of God they are to seeke alone;
And seeking seeke they must till they obtaine,
b
preferring it before all earthly gaine.
c
That precious thing is, that they may be blest,
to sit in * Gods own House, and here to rest,
Even all their daies, in glory to abide,
whatever outward want they have beside.
290
"A Song of Syon of the Beauty of Bethell,” HEH Miscellaneous, 180158.
291
I am referring to the September 20, 1647. See C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait, eds., Acts and Ordinances of the
Interregnum, 1642-1660 (London: Wyman and Sons, 1911), 1021-23.
209
d
That they may view the beauty of the Lord,
and in his worship ever more accord:
e
Gods glory is the thing they doe desire,
and in his Temple daily to enquire.
292
These first verses set up an inner-outer distinction between those who seek “earthly gaine” and
those who “rest” “here” within “Gods own House.” In many ways, this notion could be said to
theme a great deal of the most pervasive religious literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. We hear the admonition against preferring worldly gain espoused in sermons,
chapbooks, and religious tracts—perhaps even appearing in godly print more often than not.
Therefore, to understand this religious message in ballads means attending to the genre’s distinct
performative idioms, to what distinguishes this economic ethical message in ballad form. We see
this inner-outer distinction appear, so to speak, in the broadsheet’s physical layout. If, as in “The
Heartie Confession of a Christian,” this ballad is intended as a type of popular “somme” of piety,
then in order for readers to embrace this confession they must move through the ballad’s various
glosses, epigraphia, and ornaments. Readers must weave in and out of italics, between border
lines, and around superscript letters. In these ways, entering into the “Temple” of salvation
becomes a matter of piecing together the whole godly broadsheet in its many visible parts.
To say that the ballad’s religious identity is somehow beyond its numerous parts is to
miss the point. It is in these idiomatic conventions that ballad audiences engage them in attitudes
of believing. Much like the sermongoer’s battle with distractions, these parts take on religious
significance, which becomes clearer when one considers the ballad in performance. “A Song of
Syon” was, of course, written for performance, and it is worth remembering that it is only the
292
I have converted the ballad’s in-text marginal flags into superscripts for clarification. In the original, as can
be seen in the reproduced image, the italicized scripts are just slightly smaller than normal.
210
text in the middle of this broadsheet—not including the superscripts—that was heard by
audiences, unless balladeers read some marginal notes and epigraphs for the sake of advertising
the visual appeal of the ballad sheet. Furthermore, this middle text was surrounded by other
kinds of environmental marginalia in performance. Where the printed ballad is hedged in by
biblical citations and by authorizing glosses that would not be spoken, when the ballad is sung it
is hedged in by people and by its sensory atmosphere. Visually, audience members who
purchased or held the ballad participated in the ballad’s imitative conventions—its unique brand
of performativity—by granting its likeness to similar print layouts found in churches. Aurally,
the ballad sonically enters the air and is enclosed by its acoustic reach and echo barriers. Where
the biblical glosses reveal the ballad to be overtly imitative of other religious literary forms—
sermons, chapbooks, the Prayer Book, the Bible—in performance this imitation survives only in
part. When read, “A Song of Syon” shapes readers attitudes toward its central text, but when
sung, its religious identity appears in a mixed atmosphere and undergoes a perceptual dispersion
rather than a centering. Once the song reaches the ears of its auditors it gets reorganized, not by
the lines and marginalia of the broadsheet but by its audible qualities, especially those that are
most recognizable, such as its familiar phrases, tune, and allusions. It becomes bordered by a
culture that expects conventionality and by an audience that is familiar with its idioms. Even the
authorial attribution to “a CITIZEN of SYON” suggests its essentially imitative status: there is
no apparent center to a godly ballad in performance outside of its recognition in the perceptions
and minds of its audience—its citizens.
So locating the capacity for belief in godly ballads requires identifying the devices they
employ to become recognizable as objects of belief, seeing their sometimes-disparate pieces as
parts of a whole. The circularity in this statement is key. When an audience recognizes an
211
allusion, idiom, or convention as familiar to the godly ballad genre, they are identifying the
whole religious experience through its parts. A seventeenth-century ballad entitled “The Dying
Tears of a Penitent Sinner” is especially transparent in its dependence on such audience
recognition.
Figure 12. Detail from "The Dying Tears of a Penitent Sinner," Roxburghe, p. 2.113.
Deathbed ballads were one of the most common types of godly ballads in the period. This
particular woodcut was used frequently for this narrative situation—depicting an oversized
person speaking to a crowd of seven gathered around his bed, perhaps expounding on the book
lying on his lap. Like many seventeenth-century ballads, this one is divided into two parts: the
left side of the sheet and “The second part, to the same Tune” on the right.
293
As a deathbed
ballad, “The Dying Tears of a Penitent Sinner” serves two didactic purposes. It offers advice
293
“The Dying Tears of a Penitent Sinners,” Roxburge, 2.113, British Library, C.20.f.8.
212
about what is most important in life, and it serves as an example of (hopefully) dying well.
However, in terms of instruction, the first part of the ballad is quite sparse, really only offering
one-and-a-half stanzas that can be described as educational:
Thy promise is, good Lord, that when
a sinner doth intend
Quite to forsake his wicked life,
wherein he doth offend.
Thou wilt forgive, and pardon grant,
for his offences all,
As is often the case, the second part of the ballad offers more instruction in the form of
elaboration, in lieu of developing the narrative. Though still relatively sparse, the speaker offers
several popular articulations of soteriology in the vein of:
He did indure the punishments
which unto us was due:
Because we should shake off our sins,
and learn to live a new.
The speaker then provides a few verses mentioning some details of the crucifixion narrative—the
scourging, the thieves, and the spearing of Jesus’ side. Still, in a godly ballad of twenty-five
verses, it is important to ask what the vast majority of verses are saying if they are not
instructing.
In this case, most of the ballad’s content is in the form of general petitions and cries,
reflections on these petitions, and articulations of the speaker’s position relative to his audience.
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In short, the ballad is full of non-didactic expressions of self-identity and desire. The effect is not
didactic but orientational, establishing the relations between God, speaker, deathbed audience,
and ballad audience. To make the matter more complex, the identity of the audience alternates
and is sometimes composite. Much of the time, the speaker directs his cries towards God, as in
these excerpts:
O Gracious God, O Father dear,
in mercy look on me:
To thee; O Lord, I make my moan,
to thee I call and cry:
And thou O Lord, wilt hear my voice,
when on thee I do call.
O Heavenly God, O Father sweet,
In mercy look on me:
In addition, interspersed throughout are cries directed towards the dying penitent’s immediate
audience surrounding his deathbed:
Draw near kind friends and neighbours all,
which now are come to see;
And to bear witness of my death,
give ear a while to me:
214
If we consider of his pains,
and how his time he spent:
It well may make our stony heart,
to soften and relent.
And now dear wife and Children all,
I bid you all adieu:
This deathbed audience is conflated in performance with the audience surrounding the balladeer.
The result is an intensified presence of first-person voice—intensified not only in language but
also in sound and in the immediacy of the crowd surrounding the balladeer. Bruce Smith has
elaborated on the “residual” memory implied by the conventionality of ballad tradition, arguing
that ballads incite memories of “pastness” and feelings of “passion” in the same moment: “With
respect to the present they serve as reference points to the past, as gestures towards experiences
that the audience, like the protagonist, is presumed already to have had.”
294
The intimacy created
by a shared experience of memory has everything to do with the ways that godly ballads incited
belief. For one, the conflations speaker and balladeer, narrative addressee and performance
audience, are integral to ballad religion because it is the rapport built between the balladeer and
his audience that allows a process of recognizing and accepting the conventions that constitute a
ballad’s godliness. To this end, the speaker’s cries—“Draw near kind friends and neighbours
all”—impose the label of neighbor on the audience and engage them in recognizing a speech act
of conspicuous conventionality, prompting the audience to feelings of familiarity and—as if
294
Bruce R. Smith, “Shakespeare’s Residuals: The Circulation of Ballads in Cultural Memory,” in Stuart
Gillespie and Neil Rhodes, eds., Shakespeare and Elizabethan Popular Culture (London: Arden Shakespeare,
2006), 196.
215
through the backdoor—validating the godly content of the ballad as part of the popular
institution of balladry. The fact that there are more petitions and harkenings in the ballad than
there are statements of doctrinal instruction exemplifies the utterly conventional quality of godly
ballads as imitations of each other. This is the case with the imitative qualities of the crucifixion
narrative, of the deathbed motif, and even of the peddler’s cries for people to stop and listen to
her song.
Given this imitative quality, simply reading the ballad might give the false impression
that the author is interested merely in feeding the masses what they want: they want the
sensational experience of hearing a ballad, and its superficial godliness adds the feel-good factor
of being superficially morally acceptable compared to, say, crime ballads. This characterization,
as I have been arguing, is incomplete. It is the case that closing a deathbed ballad with “And now
dear wife and Children all, / I bid you all adieu” is superficial insofar as it lacks authorial
originality. Yet it is not the case that the religious experience is entirely secondary. In fact, this
same superficiality urges audiences to recognize the convention and to authorize the pattern.
They entertain, for a moment, the conspicuous comparison to Christ’s last words on the cross,
and although the appeal to “friends and neighbours all” may also be a market gimmick to turn
heads, it becomes associated with the deathbed-crucifixion parallel and becomes part of a unified
genre of godliness. Even the select details used to represent the crucifixion narrative—whip,
thieves, spear—like the conspicuous details of Chester’s “The Last Supper”—bread, cup, table—
prompt recognition and authenticate the popular performance as religious.
To close this section, consider briefly the effect of self-allusion in the ballad “A Most
Excellent Ditty, Called Collins Conceit”:
In my conceit if men would looke,
216
where sacred virtues dwell.
And live according to Gods booke,
then all things should be well.
295
The speaker admits that there are ballads “of sundry sorts” bouncing around the city and
purporting godliness. This popularity, however, does not deter him from asserting his own
ballad’s “sacred virtues.” Neither does the speaker find it distracting to allude to “Gods booke”
as an eminently more profound book of religious virtue. On the contrary, these are the
qualities—imitation of other recognized religious genres and conspicuous acknowledgement of
other ballads—that comprise the unique identity of belief in ballads.
Pausing for Belief
It is clear from the imitative character of godly ballads that their godliness is collaborative.
Ballad conventions, allusions, and other signs of imitation are the parts of religion that constitute
the whole of a godly ballad. My argument has been that the ulterior purposes and performative
contexts of these conventions do not detract from godly ballads’ ability to promote and facilitate
belief. This claim presupposes that the historical evaluation of religion in literature and
performance is not subject solely to the hierarchies of authority in which we contextualize texts
and productions. This presupposition has been well recognized since the advent of New
Historicism. I am repurposing it for a phenomenology of belief in performance—far from its
usual political and materialist incarnations. The hierarchy adopted by some of the definitions
reviewed in the first section of this chapter make the legitimacy of popular religious expression
dependent on prior establishments of religion, including other popular print, sermons, biblical
295
“A Most Excellent Ditty, called Collin’s Conceit,” Pepys Ballads, Pepys Library, Cambridge, 1.455
217
literature, and state religion, such as mandatory injunctions and oaths. Yet while religious belief
in early modern England always existed in some relation to these established expressions of
godliness, popular religious expressions are not always thoroughly defined within or by
comparison to outside institutional contexts. Ballad religion, saliently, is an activity of a
performance community. The key to understanding religion in early modern ballads is realizing
that they do not intend to offer theological nuance or even much in the way of religious
instruction. In other words, they are imitative of other religious genres—most of which have
more official credibility—and are conspicuous in this imitation. Thus, as we have seen, most of
the instruction that they do offer is already commonplace. However, this is not to say that ballads
were less important to the religious experience of early modern England than other more
established genres. On the contrary, imitation itself is central to popular piety. As two of godly
ballads’ most conspicuous instruments of performativity, imitation and conventionality engage
ballad audiences in acts of recognition and familiarity and thus constitute the grounds of belief
specific to the people who performed, heard, and bought godly ballads.
I will now look more closely at this act of recognizing the unity of belief in ballad
religion, especially as it appears in performance. As I have argued, godly ballads stress
community, and this environmental solidarity is enacted by the ballad itself and in the audience’s
group recognition of it. I want to proffer one other major aspect of religion in ballad
performance: the activity—or non-activity—of pause. As an illustration, imagine a spinster, or
someone of any common occupation, walking through a market, on her way to hear a sermon, or
perhaps passing by the theaters in London’s Bankside. Were she to come upon a ballad
performance in public, it would have been an unconstrained occasion, very unlike most musical
performances today. Its environment would have been loud and unfocused, enclosed perhaps by
218
a monger’s stall on one side, a crowd on the other, and whatever architectural barriers could be
used for sound amplification. Its audience would have likely been amorphous, with people such
as the spinster stopping mid-ballad to listen and perhaps also leaving mid-ballad. This makes the
conventionality and repetitiveness (sometimes in excess of twenty verses) of ballads all the more
important, as hawkers would have aimed to convince passers-by to stop and pause for just a few
moments, hopefully long enough to appeal to their tastes. Thus, among the broader Renaissance
culture of literary performance, where new plays were commissioned and performed weekly,
where sermons were delivered daily, and where animal fights and baitings consistently drew
crowds, godly ballads provided a unique, if unexpected, experience of pause and rest. As
unlikely as it may sound given the proliferate production of early modern ballads, this
circumstantial pause is a trait of their godliness.
The notion that godly ballads incited an experience of pause in their performances should
not be confused with their general call to action. An important and consistent characteristic of
ballad religion is the direct warning to listeners and readers. It is common to hear a balladeer
shout phrases like “Awake!” or “Awake, sinners!” several times in a ballad. This is the case in
“Great Brittains Arlarm to Drowsie Sinners in Destress” where the opening lines adopt the voice
of a street evangelist or a prophetic pamphlet:
Rouse up dull Sinners all with one accord,
With prayers & tears now call upon the Lord,
Security hath lulld us fast asleep,
When as we have most cause to mourn and weep.
296
296
“Great Brittains Arlarm to Drowsie Sinners in Destress,” British Library, C.20.f.8. Roxburghe, 2.202-03.
219
This is a typical opening for godly ballads with prophetic messages, as is its tune “Aim Not Too
High,” also known as “Fortune My Foe.” Such prophetic ballads tend to include some amount of
topical allusion to urban-specific vices and to recent national events that may be taken as omens,
such as earthquakes and fires. Moreover, as in “Great Brittains Arlarm,” many prophetic ballads
also review different social and familial relationships—parents and children, rich and poor,
lender and borrower—in an attempt to shake people out of ungodly habits in everyday life. Such
emphases on apocalyptic events and on death have prompted Margaret Spufford to say that
popular religious print tended to be negative and anxiety-inspiring.
297
Yet despite its intention to rouse its audiences into spiritual reflection, this and similar
ballads do so through an imperative to stop and listen, to participate by transforming a popular
performance into an experience of belief. In a way, this makes perfect sense. Several of the
ballads I examined accuse audiences of thoughtlessly going through their daily work and
recreation without pausing for reflection. Even the poor who cannot afford to gamble or to stroll
into church fashionably dressed are exhorted to slow the fast pace of their worrying and to take
comfort in God’s spiritual provision. Enforcing this reflection, the last two verses of “Great
Brittains Arlarm” prompt a final moment of corporate pause:
Once more, I say, O sinners now awake,
And all your hanious sins in time forsake:
Who knows but that the Lord will hear our prayer:
And shew us mercy for unfeigned years.
And let each one that reads what here is pend,
297
Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in
Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), 207.
220
Strive night and day their lives for to amend:
That God in mercy all our Souls may save,
When as we fall into the silent Grave.
Godly ballad authors do not perceive their potential readers and auditors to be generally static
and restful in life. On the contrary, as we see here, they imagine their songs as exceptional
opportunities for audiences to stop and reflect. In this respect ballads functioned like the liturgy:
to focus attention and to make congregants aware of their individuality amid their group-ness—
to make them reflective, in multiple senses of the word, of the immediacy of belief within the
immanent experience of the improvised ballad environment. In these two stanzas the speaker
intends his ballad to serve as a kind of communal prayer, with its prayerful activities of listening,
reflecting, and repenting. The speaker (and author) also imagines the ballad as an object “pend”
(penned), printed, and read by individual audience members. Even as mere imagination, both
activities of hearing and reading require that audiences pause and think about the ballad. For
audiences to spiritually benefit from “Great Brittains Arlarm,” they must intend the ballad—
orient their perception of it—as an opportunity to amend their lives.
Even in the most physical of senses, godly ballads offer the opportunity to pause. There’s
something inherent to the pause of hearing a ballad performed that enacts qualities of
recognition, community affiliation, and temperance. This may be surprising since ballad
performances were by no means sedated events. They were often conducted amid a plethora of
city noises—such as other forms of music, hawkers’ cries, animals, crowds, and the sounds of
outdoor labor.
298
Moreover, anti-ballad polemicists argued that ballads added to these noises and
that godly ballads dragged religion through the uncontrolled mania of popular media and its
298
I have discussed this atmosphere at length in Matthew J. Smith, “Resuscitating Religion: The Godly Virtues
of Early Modern Ballad Performance,” currently under review.
221
commotion. This complaint highlights the significant nuance of ballads’ emphases on audience
pause; becoming an audience member of a ballad performance means fighting off distractions,
and pausing for a performance reflects behaviorally the inside-outside religious appearance of
broadsheet marginalia that I discuss above.
A seventeenth-century ballad called “The Distressed Pilgrim” demonstrates how the
audience’s simple activity of stopping to hear a ballad creates a space for belief. “The Distressed
Pilgrim” is remarkable because its speaker is conflated with the persona of a traveling ballad-
monger. He introduces himself as “a Pilgrim poor and bare” who was once rich and generous to
his friends and family but is now “exceeding poor.”
299
His complaint is that those who were once
closest to him now “Will not so much as turn aside” to help him but “rather seek to scoff and
scorn, / and jeer my Poverty.” This is a potentially alienating public acknowledgement of the
economic conditions that have forced the monger into such a transient trade. The pilgrim’s
expressed reason for singing this song is to ask for advice: “Now in the midst of all my Woes, /
what shall I do or say?” The ballad audience is challenged with self-identifying either as a good
neighbor or a bad neighbor. This subtle self-allusion continues:
As I do wander up and down
in sorrow, I am crost;
From Place to Place, from Town to Town,
My Substance is all lost:
But yet I think within my self,
As I shall tell to ye,
Though God hath taken all my Wealth,
299
“The Distressed Pilgrim,” British Library, C.20.f.9. Roxburghe, 3.40-41.
222
Yet patience works for me.
By this point in the performance, audiences might as well forget the fictional character and see
only the singer before them in a real social and economic situation. The last line of this verse
repeats what amounts to a one-line burden that changes somewhat throughout the ballad, saying
variously: “Yet patience works for me,” or “Let patience work for me,” or “For a patient man Ile
be.” Patience is the primary recurring attribute, expressing in the form of a Christian virtue the
audience’s physical activity of pause. The speaker has been wandering in sorrow and has landed
here, in this city, and at this particular performance place. The transient speaker addresses the
audience members as transients in their own urban lives, and both parties stop in order to learn
patience together. This collaboration is triggered when the speaker incites response by asking the
audience, “what shall I do or say?” The audience steps into the performance and theoretically
steps out of the society that has impoverished the ballad speaker; while the speaker steps out of
his wandering vagrancy and addresses the audience with presumed introspection—“But yet I
think within my self.” And the two meet together in the performance to create a religious
experience that is economically empathetic and momentarily reflective. The ballad calls this
moment “patience.”
This activity of patience is a perceptual pause. Simply by stopping and listening—in the
market, at the tavern, at St. Paul’s Cathedral—the audience does what those who “Will not so
much as turn aside” fail to do. Of course, in one way, the ballad-monger wants to sell ballads,
and this is very much a part of the godly community that the performance creates. Yet it is only
part. This moment of pause interacts with the ballad’s theme of patience and transforms the
ballad’s many commonplace-like phrases—“a second Job to be”; “I tast ofs Holy Rod”; “Come
Woe or Wealth, come Life or Death;” “he suffered on the Tree”—into a kind of mutual
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understanding between the poor and the patient. Rather than discredit the ballad speaker as
unoriginal, these commonplaces lend him a unique ethos, a kind of egalitarian authority to
present religious advice in a familiar parlance. Oddly, though, the ballad’s last verse seems to
suggest that the speaker was on his deathbed and dying the entire time: “And now adieu unto the
World,” etc. However, this too is so patently conventional that it does not distract from the
immediate community of balladeer and audience at hand. If anything, the line contributes to a
feeling of closure and the end of wandering and busy distraction. In “The Distressed Pilgrim,”
the parts of godly ballads are treated transparently as parts; ballad performativity is on display,
but it does not evacuate the performance of its occasion for belief. It is an act of patience to hear
the ballad, to see the balladeer, to authorize the individual godly parts, and to bring them together
as a whole godly ballad. One even gets the impression in hearing this ballad that the singer’s
short refrains—“to be Patient in misery”—are admissions about the genre itself, as if the speaker
extends religion to his audience with a brazen yet generous a take-it-or-leave-it attitude.
The pauses implied in ballad texts and enacted by performances in many ways intend
literally to slow normal life to the downtempo pace of belief. Appropriately, then, one of the
more frequently occurring religious themes in ballads is the admonition to beware the
fleetingness of wealth and life. In a profound way, the activities of pause that I have been
describing combat unhealthy attitudes towards ephemerality. Ballad performances purport to
take an experience of the familiar and to encircle it in a space of patience and pause. In terms of
conventionality, this slowing can be thought of as another kind of imitation or borrowing from
more established church performance genres. Only, instead of being slowed by the rhythm of
bell ringing, the structure of liturgical choreography, and the longevity of sermons, ballads must
use popular material—broadsheets, crowds, commerce, drama, and, importantly, music.
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Recent scholarship has offered insight into the role of music in ballad performances.
Christopher Marsh, in particular, has discussed how ballad tunes fit into the broader culture of
early modern music. Marsh distinguishes the audience experience of ballad music by a kind of
“shuffling”: “This was a great age of cultural regurgitation, and in balladry the individual parts
occur again and again in patterned but also constantly shifting alliances.”
300
Audiences
recognized ballad tunes and therefore must have carried previous thematic associations of other
tunes into their new ballad settings. This shuffled effect is exacerbated by the recycling of
language conventions and woodcuts. Woodcuts were often spliced together from previous
contexts to create a new narrative use for the illustration. Also, as I have demonstrated
elsewhere, in contrast to the more controlled early modern practice of psalm singing, the
musicality of ballads was intended to stimulate the senses and embrace the mirthful performance
environment, shaping ballad atmospheres into temperance rather than condemning it.
301
Hearing
ballad music, then, would have been a decidedly self-referential, mirthful, and “shuffled”
experience. Yet godly ballads, in particular, use music as an apparatus for pause. For example, a
ballad entitled “The Great Tribunal” implicitly carps its own musicality but does so with a
greater aim in mind:
With Cherubims of Angels compassed round,
No murmuring, but a sweet harmonious Sound
Of Hallelujahs to the King of Kings,
Under the shadow of his blessed Wings.
302
300
Christopher Marsh, “Balladry as a Multi-Media Matrix: Best-Selling Songs and their significance in
seventeenth-century England,” paper presented at “Performing the Book: Multi-media Histories of Early Modern
Britain,” (Rutgers University, British Studies Center, February, 2011).
301
Smith, “Resuscitating Religion.”
302
“The Great Tribunal,” British Library, C.20.f.9. Roxburghe, 3.469.
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Angelic music is beautiful, of course, and ballad tunes are mere “murmuring” in comparison.
Nevertheless, heaven’s music and ballad performances share the quality of being heard with
godly intention, of constituting a community of listeners “compassed round.”
The same phenomenon occurs in the performance of “A Wonderful Prophecy.” It tells the
story of a saintly girl who dies, resurrects to offer prophecies representative of conventional
godly ballad morality, and then dies once more. The narrative is a variation on the deathbed
scenario, but one especially noteworthy feature of this ballad is that, at the girl’s final passing,
the crowd surrounding her deathbed hears heavenly music:
At her decease, an Harmony
Of Musick there was heard to sound,
Which ravishd all the Standers by,
It did with Sweetness so abound.
303
Again, mentioning miraculous music almost certainly incited recognition of the not-so-perfect
singing of the ballad performance, but it could also prompt a kind of pride in association, as if
the music of godly ballads participates in a higher musical tradition by virtue of the fact that
balladry perpetuates such sacred stories. Furthermore, the fictional “Standers by” and the ballad
crowd merge insofar as both exercise the patience of pausing to hear the prophecy of this saintly
girl, whether in-person or in song.
I am suggesting that music serves as an instrument of pause by contributing to the
creation of a godly audience community. Through self-reference to their own godly performance
communities, ballads defend their mixture of music, mirth, and religion. Ballad religion survives
in performance in part because such a setting constitutes a respite from the excesses and pace of
303
“A Wonderful Prophecy,” British Library, C.20.f.9. Roxburghe, 3.664-665.
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urban life. We might think of ballads as having environments that stand in counter-distinction to
that of sermons at Paul’s Cross. Whereas the outdoor sermon venue sought to emit God’s word
into its extensive space—full of busy-minded socialites hoping to be noticed, and only faintly
reaching the ears of the poor standing far off—godly ballads sought to create a mutual and
intimate experience of belief within an open space through commerce, recognition, song, pause,
and patience. They sought to pull together—rather than to fill—their diffuse public
environments, just as they sought to unify their conspicuously public content.
On this note, one mid-sixteenth-century ballad by Thomas Brice, the Protestant hero of
Queen Mary’s reign, entitled “Against Filthy Writing and Such like Delighting,” does not hold
back from confronting religious anti-ballad polemics that attack ballads’ combination of mirth
and religion:
We are no foes to Musicke wee, amis your man doth take us
so frendes to thinges corrupt and vile, you all shall neuer make us
If you denie them such to bee, I stand to proue it I
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Such boldness of self-justification is characteristic of godly ballads. Brice finds himself in a
position of having to defend the status of religion in popular songs by condemning those songs
that take the popular and vulgar too far. His strategy is in part pro hominem—“I stand to proue it
I.” Another godly ballad in defense of popular religious music is “A Commendation of Musicke”
by the famous sixteenth-century ballad author Nicholas Whight. Whight’s argument is similar to
Brice’s in that it defends godly ballads for their balancing of mirth and restraint. The ballad
defends the effects of popular music on the grounds of its natural provenance (as Cavendish also
does), its scriptural precedents, its poetic tradition, and its physiological benefits according to
304
Thomas Brice, “Against Filthy Writing and Such Delighting,” HEH Britwell, 18274.
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Galenic medicine. Yet Whight suggests that his final argument encapsulates them all, namely,
that music exhibits “concord,” by which he means an element that unifies and moderates the
“good” of one’s listening experience.
305
By its formal qualities—its “harmony,” “skyll,” and
“measure”—music acts as the intermediary, or “mery meane,” between its excesses and vices.
Thus, advocates of godly ballads conceived of the experience of ballad music as unifying even at
the levels of physiology and form. This picture puts a different spin on the shuffled character of
ballad music, especially regarding religious ballads. Many of the conventions of godly ballad
music that might be viewed as imitative or unoriginal can instead be understood as participating
in the unity of the ballad tradition. Even the extreme repetitiveness of the songs—their twenty-
odd verses, repeated burdens, predictable melodies—engage audiences in an experience of
“measure” and “concord,” patience and group unity.
It is significant that the physical activity of stopping to hear a performance, combined
with the intellectual activities of recognizing and piecing together ballad parts, always lean in
tension against ballads’ diffuse environments and audiences’ often partial listening experience.
Audiences perceive an object of belief in—and always in—these pieces of religion and ballad
conventions. Even the audience orientation established by pausing at a ballad performance—both
physically and intellectually—contributes to an objective identity to ballad religion. In saying
that audience presence helps constitute an objective identity to ballad religion, I do not disavow
audiences’ subjective activities of recognition and pause. Rather, in the vocabulary of James
Elkins, when an audience stops to hear a godly ballad performed and thus authorizes it, there is a
sense in which the godly ballad “stares back” at them.
306
In one way, godly ballads become
religious objects when audiences perceive them as such, but, in another way, belief emerges
305
Nicholas Whight, “A Commendation of Musicke,” HEH Britwell, 18346.
306
James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1997).
228
through the perceptual space of popular religion into which audiences enter. Smith would remind
us that even the medium of song “pushes at the boundary between the human body as an
autopoietic system and the built environment as an autopoietic system. Through singing, the
body projects itself into space and claims that space as its own.”
307
Audiences pausing to hear a
godly ballad performance simultaneously give themselves as objects of perception, like the
parishioner at liturgy that in being present for corporate confessional prayers simultaneously
presents himself to the sight of the priest and to his words of absolution. Godly ballads provoke
response, an awareness of the genre’s tradition, an awareness of others within the performance
space, and an awareness that each of the ballad’s allusions and imitations is an instance of the
ballad looking out at other expressions of religion. Elkins imagines a scenario in which
audiences refuse to acknowledge that objects look back at them, writing that “if I resist the idea
that objects look back at me and that I am tangled in a web of seeing, then I am also resisting the
possibility that I may not be the autonomous, independent, stable self I claim I am.”
308
Autonomy—from other audience members, from the balladeer, and from other godly genres—is
not a privilege that ballad audiences enjoy, and it is the misconception that subject autonomy is a
necessary prerequisite for “authentic” belief—that is, belief that is understood as heartfelt—that
has historically damaged godly ballads’ religious reputation.
The central reason why the godly ballads of early modern England are so interconnected
to—and thus codependent upon—their audiences is their distinct self-consciousness as a genre,
not just regarding their conventionality but regarding their dependence on the godly attitudes of
their hearers and readers. Godly ballads are circular. They do not obtain their religious identity
from theological insight or even from original moral instruction; instead, they become religious
307
Smith, The Acoustic World, 180.
308
Elkins, The Object Stares Back, 74.
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as a genre through use—when audiences borrow a line of verse as a commonplace, or use their
performance to pause for reflection, or when other godly ballads take their woodcuts, epigraphs,
sententiae, tunes, and narratives for their own ends.
A final example demonstrates this circularity and what we might call the practical
phenomenology of godly ballads. “Some Fyne Gloues” is a unique sixteenth-century ballad
whose full title reads: “Some fyne gloues deuised for Newyeres gyftes to teche yonge people to
know good from euyll wherby they maye learne the. x. commaundementes at theyr fyngers
endes. x. other good lessons be written within the fyngers, the tree of Vertues with her braunches
in the right palme and the Route of vyces in the lefte, with a declaration of the other pytures
folowinge in meter.”
309
309
“Some Fyne Gloues,” HEH Britwell, 18343.
230
Figure 13. "Some Fyne Gloues," HEH Britwell, 18343.
231
This ballad was created to be held and read in addition to being sung, and it was printed long
before the ballad layout regularized, though contemporary commentary suggests that the
performative norms of ballads had already regularized. So “Some Fyne Gloues” exists as a kind
of print improvisation and expansion on an essentially oral genre. Although surrounded with
smaller images and notes, the central figures are two gloves: the left filled with sins, the right
with virtues, the fingers with specific new year’s resolutions to behave with godliness, and one
of the ten commandments hovering above each fingertip. The song lyrics explain the images and
captions.
“Some Fyne Gloues” is intended to be a gift. One would purchase the ballad and pass it
on (it is suggested, to someone young) as a New Year’s gift. As such, it is designed to be a tool
for practical piety. Like the other godly ballads I have discussed, it is not original in its religious
content. Instead, its religious appeal is in its copious inclusion of practical morality and in the
experience of fullness and unity-among-parts that such copiousness triggers. Significantly, that
an audience member of this ballad’s performance would buy the ballad only to give it away
reflects the recycled and circular identity of religion in godly ballads. The gloves depicted on the
broadsheet mirror the printing, selling, holding, reading, purchasing, and gifting that took place
by the hands of printers, mongers, and audiences. The gloves also emphasize action and the
practical dimension to ballad piety. Still, taking the broadsheet as a whole, its diversity of content
speaks to the status of religion as it appears in ballad culture. One can almost hear the diverse
sensory ballad atmosphere when looking at the busy broadsheet. Perhaps because ballad printing
was immature at this point, it captures, in a sense, the moment of diffuse song and spectacle that
was lost once it was spoken. Walter Ong’s description of the presentness of sound applies:
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“Although sound itself is fleeting . . . what it conveys at any instant of its duration is not
dissected but caught in the actuality of the present, which is rich, manifold, full of diverse action,
the only moment when everything is really going on at once.”
310
The ballad author or printer of
“Some Fyne Gloues” was inspired not only with religious content but also with replicating the
composite experience of godly ballads in performance, and there is a feeling of urgency in this
desire to capture godly religion. In the upper left corner of the broadsheet appears a tree with
falling leaves. A description to its left reads, “The seare tree leaues faulynge to the grounde,” and
the caption below adds, “The word of God fallyth down & is forgotyn.” In this context,
remembering the word of God—as opposed to forgetting, or perhaps just walking past ballad
performance—alludes most directly to the “Newyeres” gift itself as a memorial object. The
historical suggestion is of a society infused with godly emblems and religious knowledge, such
as is represented here, but the society has failed to put this knowledge to practical pious use.
Remedially, putting on the broadsheet’s gloves is to pause for remembrance.
This ballad extends the pause of audience participation at its performance into the more
permanent medium of printed hands. In contrast to most ballad woodcuts that depict a scene
from the ballad’s narrative, “Some Fyne Gloues” depicts the immanence of the human body in
an activity of belief. Very much like the Chester Mystery Cycle’s call to immanent belief and
also to the Prologue of Henry V, godly ballads like this one draw attention to the conditions at
hand to inspire belief. At one moment, the hands represent the ballad’s reach towards its
audience, and, at the next, they are the audience’s hands, metonyms for their ears and eyes and
for listeners’ presence in an audience circle. The song itself suggests these bodily associations.
Notice that the gloves are torn at the outside seam. The ballad explains that “The seame is broke
310
Ong, The Presence of the Word, 129.
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by impacient breath,” referring to impatience in frivolous living and in failing to remember that
death always waits at the door. Again, we see a godly ballad return to the theme of patience.
Here, however, it is tied specifically to remembrance—remembering death, memorizing the ten
commandments, and memorializing one’s new year’s resolutions to live a godly life.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have argued against the grain of a common way of understanding religious
performance. A performance is truly religious, according to this understanding, if it is expressed
with authenticity, which can be identified by locating belief outside of its physical and
environmental circumstances. Authenticity, thus, is often mistaken to reside in a self-conscious
autonomy. This sense of autonomy, as I have shown, does not exist in the ballad-going
experience. Godly ballad audiences have no confidence that their activities of attendance are
unmixed with ulterior commercial and sensational motives. The same principle applies to ballad
unoriginality. Originality is another common correlative to authenticity, but ballad audiences
also forego any expectation that the religious content of a ballad will be original. Instead, they
engage a religious performance that is excessively imitative, conventional, allusive, repetitive,
formulaic, predictable, and indistinguishable from its environment. So it is that godly ballads
upend some common misconceptions about early modern belief primarily in that ballads make
no attempt to shuffle their performativity to the background.
I have suggested that the identity of belief in godly ballad performance is located in a
participatory relation between audiences and ballads, creating a godly virtue of patience—the
virtue enacted by physical pause. The balladeer herself often serves as mediator, but audiences
also participate through the activity of recognizing the conventions and imitations of ballads in
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performance. Indeed, these become religious activities when they are enacted by an immediate
audience community, and I make this claim based on the notion that every unified object we
perceive is perceived in its parts. The whole is constituted by the perceiver’s recognition of these
parts, and the parts of godly ballads are scattered throughout their conventions, public
environments, ambient distractions, and the individual intentions of audience members.
My aim has been to describe the godly ballad as an exposé of its own exposure to both
psychological and popular forces—commerce, polemic, propaganda, entertainment, publicness.
One might protest that these forces or motives neutralize authenticity, but I would suggest the
opposite. “Popular authenticity” may be an indefinable idea, but popular belief is not. Like
gloves, godly ballads point out at their popular surroundings and ask that audiences stand within
a public yet separate space, patiently recognizing—and thereto constituting—ballad godliness.
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CHAPTER FIVE
HAMLET AND THE PROBLEM OF INTERIORITY
A fortiori the sensible forms of being which lie around me, the paper under my hand, the trees
before my eyes, do not yield their secret to me, rather is it that my consciousness takes flight from
itself and, in them, is unaware of itself.
(Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception)
In this final chapter I examine the relations between Renaissance fiction, the mind, and the
outward world as they appear tangled in the doubtful setting of Hamlet. In previous chapters, I
looked at the grounds of belief in several Renaissance performance genres, beginning by
thinking of drama as a ceremonial medium and moving towards environmental understandings of
how popular performances constitute unique instances of religious experience. I have looked at
the ceremonialism, immanence, environmental dispersion, and popularization of belief in
performance environments. I now want to follow this trail even further and examine the
occurrence of belief in its most famous early modern dramatic form: the cognition of Hamlet.
This play’s reputation for dramatizing the internal thought of its characters is a touchstone of
literary history, and the focal point of character interiority in Hamlet is the titular melancholic
himself.
311
Hamlet’s interiority is especially pronounced because it seems to be closely related to
his delay in avenging his father—the play’s primary device of dramatic conflict. The very time
and space of the play in performance testify to this, as Hamlet paces the stage in one of his
famous soliloquies while the audience complains that the murderous Claudius is getting away
with it.
311
In William Hazlitt’s words, “[Hamlet] is the one of Shakespeare’s plays that we think of oftenest, because it
abounds most in striking reflections on human life, and because the distresses of Hamlet are transferred, by the turn
of his mind, to the general account of humanity. Whatever happens to him we apply to ourselves, because he applies
it so himself as a means of general reasoning. . . . Hamlet is the most remarkable for the ingenuity, originality, and
unstudied development of character.” Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (London, 1817), 104.
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Problematically, in my opinion, many scholars, such as Stanley Cavell, Benjamin
Bertram, William Hamlin, and Millicent Bell, have concluded that Hamlet is a philosophically
skeptical play, that Hamlet’s internal thought reflects a sophisticated doubt in the conditions of
his revenge, and that the play as a whole is presented to the audience as a skeptical challenge to
the world as it is perceptually given.
312
These readings typically link the performance of
interiority to a skeptical perspective that judges at a distance and “eschew[s] authorial
pronouncement.”
313
For example, in Act Two, Hamlet suggests to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
that the world might not be ordered by a higher meaning such as they were taught to believe:
This goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent
canopy the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof
fretted with golden fire, why it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent
congregation of vapours. What piece of work is a man—how noble in reason;
how infinite in faculties, in form and moving; . . . . And yet to me what is this
quintessence of dust?
(2.2.264-74)
314
Hamlet’s dramatized inner mind is the bearing point from which the audience considers this
iconoclastic view. Additionally, his inaction is viewed as the consequence of excessive
interiority, as in Benjamin Bertram’s opinion that “Hamlet’s skepticism fuels much of his well-
312
I am thinking particularly of Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge; Benjamin Bertram, The Time is Out of
Joint: Skepticism in Shakespeare’s England (Newark: U of Delaware P, 2004); William H. Hamlin, Tragedy and
Scepticism in Shakespeare’s England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Millicent Bell, Shakespeare’s Tragic
Skepticism (New Haven: Yale UP, 2002).
313
Hamlin, Tragedy and Scepticism, 2.
314
All parenthetical citations are from Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Arden
Shakespeare, 2006).
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known irresoluteness.”
315
As if looking ahead to Cartesian objectivity, Hamlet’s melancholy and
removal into solitude are often understood to provide him with a kind of epistemological
distance from his circumstances, a distance that foreshadows seventeenth-century empiricism
and offers him the objective perspective required to make materialist conclusions about the
“earth,” the “air,” and “man.” If Hamlet could only access an inner perspective of clarity—the
argument runs—then he would attain the fettle necessary to take on Claudius.
What needs to be stated, however, is that interiority is a problem in Hamlet, not a
solution. I say this not only because scenes of interiority seem to cause rather than solve
Hamlet’s delay but also because Hamlet utterly fails to find a stable center of clarity in the world
of his internal thoughts. In other words, Hamlet is not proto-empirical; it is anti-empirical, and it
is anti-skeptical insofar as skepticism derives from interiority. Moreover, this problem of
interiority has much to bear on the play’s presentation of the divine. In Hamlet, divinity is
portrayed mainly in terms of the supernatural, represented most prominently by the purgatorial
Ghost, Claudius’s attempted confession, Ophelia’s abridged burial, and Hamlet’s ultimate
acceptance of divine intervention—that “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends” (5.2.10). Even
Hamlet’s melancholy has religious significance, as early moderns often understood melancholy
to be a spiritual disorder. This is all to say that the problem of interiority is also a problem of
religious belief. As Hamlet’s delay demonstrates, any attempted retreat to the objectivity of
inward thought is also an attempt by Hamlet’s characters to make sense of the supernatural.
Hamlet certainly does not aim to mediate the sacred to its audience in any way like the Chester
Cycle, but as in Henry V, it inherits dramatic techniques that were wrapped up in issues of
315
Bertram, The Time is Out of Joint, 14. Marvin W. Hunt’s claim that Hamlet’s interiority is thought to be
“most convincingly expressed in . . . [his] famous soliloquies,” the performed expressions of all the time he spends
alone, is another succinct representation of this interpretation: Looking for Hamlet (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2007), 49.
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devotion and sacred immanence. That is, the struggles for belief that the play dramatizes have
enormous ramifications for an audience’s apprehension of the play as a performative object of
belief. Thus, we can ask the question: if Hamlet’s characters and audience do not find persistent
conditions for belief in the sanctuary of interiority and imagined objectivity, then what does
ground their belief?
I propose that belief in Hamlet is grounded in the conceptual work of theater and in the
mind’s contact with the external world. Rather than treat the Ghost’s message only as a
proposition and the Ghost as a vexed piece of merely intellectual evidence, I will consider
Hamlet’s pursuit of belief as it is experientially given to the audience, and I will treat what others
have assumed are obstacles to Hamlet’s true inward thought, such as his melancholy and the
religious questions surrounding the Ghost, as sites of contact with Hamlet’s consciousness that
richly frame how he believes things. Furthermore, as Hamlet suggests, this externalization of
belief is instantiated by the conditions of the theater itself, in the form of Renaissance
“conceit”—the bending of speech and thought that informs the poetics of Shakespearean drama.
I will show how Hamlet’s delay is akin to poetic conceit in that it grounds belief in the body and
in outward circumstance, bringing Hamlet and the play’s audience into epistemological
proximity to each other. This chapter engages some well-studied topics—the Ghost’s religious
entanglements, character interiority, and Hamlet’s melancholy—from the perspective of
Renaissance poetic phenomenology, examining how Hamlet believes things and how this belief
is made present through the conceit of theater to Shakespeare’s historical audience.
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Descartes, the Ghost, and Hamlet’s Elusive Interiority
In this section, I want to establish that Hamlet’s interiority is a problem rather than a solution for
him and that internal thought is not something that the play uncritically celebrates. I will argue
that Hamlet’s mind offers anything but a clear and distinct perspective on the world, and then I
will turn to Hamlet’s first interaction with the Ghost to show that from the outset Hamlet’s mind
is a site of exteriority, constantly reflecting the conditions of belief and rebounding from
isolation.
Rather than a dramatization of skepticism, Hamlet is more accurately an experiment with
belief. It motions towards interiority as its characters begin to feel disoriented in the outward
world of Ghosts, schemes, conspirators, and choices, and in every important way, the experiment
is unsuccessful. An early central object of such experimental belief is indeed the Ghost and his
proposition of murder. Scholars have long argued about the moment when Hamlet finally
believes in the murder, and Steve Roth has even proffered that Hamlet in fact never attains
certain knowledge about his father’s murder.
316
Uncertainty is, therefore, a major theme in
Hamlet criticism. Landmark studies, such as Maynard Mack’s claim that the play has an
“interrogative mood” and Harry Levin’s characterization of Hamlet as “the very personification
of doubtfulness,” establish a tradition of linking the play’s moments of performed interiority to
the elusiveness of steady knowledge.
317
Recent studies, like Marvin Hunt’s Looking for Hamlet,
more explicitly infer a correlation between the depth of Hamlet’s interiority and how radical a
skeptic he is.
318
Likewise, Millicent Bell asserts that Shakespeare “invites his audience to
316
Steve Roth, “Who Knows Who Knows Who’s There? An Epistemology of Hamlet (Or, What Happens in
the Mousetrap),” EMLS 10, no. 2 (2004): 3.1-27.
317
Maynard Mack, “The World of Hamlet,” Yale Review 41 (1952), 504; Harry Levin, The Question of Hamlet
(New York: Oxford UP, 1959), 74.
318
Hunt, Looking for Hamlet, 63.
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question . . . the standard truths of his time” through “particular poetic occasions, like the
soliloquies,” and especially the “most famous of them all, Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be.’”
319
More philosophically minded articulations of Hamlet’s skepticism frame his interiority as
the working out of a kind Cartesian dualism. Stanley Cavell, for instance, argues that we see the
seeds of a distinctly Cartesian skepticism emerge in Shakespeare’s questioning of conventional
truth.
320
Francis Barker similarly emphasizes the divide, or what he describes as a resistance,
between the outward “devices of the world” and Hamlet’s “essential interiority.”
321
As Katharine
Eisaman Maus succinctly puts it: “For Hamlet, the internal experience of his own grief ‘passes
show’ in two senses. It is beyond scrutiny, concealed where other people cannot perceive it. And
it surpasses the visible—its validity is unimpeachable. The exterior, by contrast, is partial,
misleading, falsifiable, and unsubstantial.”
322
What is especially relevant about the Cartesian
view that interiority is less vulnerable to circumstantial deception is its historical significance for
the provenance of seventeenth-century empirical philosophy. I would add the caveat, however,
that Descartes entertains uncertainty and doubt in his Meditations only in order to discover
certainty, a goal he claims to achieve by negating all beliefs except the undeniable fact that he
has a thinking consciousness. Thus, William Kerrigan describes Hamlet “like Descartes with his
cogito” in that “laying doubts to rest Hamlet simultaneously . . . raises them.”
323
Yet Shakespeare critics sometimes resist the comparison to Cartesian skepticism because
they do not see Hamlet as supporting its dualist underpinnings. The most substantial of these
counterarguments has been given by Paul Cefalu who argues that “part of the reason that
319
Bell, Shakespeare’s Tragic Skepticism, 5.
320
Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 3;
321
Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body (London: Methuen & Co., 1984), 36.
322
Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: U of Chicago P,
1995), 4.
323
William Kerrigan, Hamlet’s Perfection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991), 65.
241
Hamlet’s critics have assumed that Hamlet is preoccupied with inspecting the contents of his
private self is that they have mistaken the obsession shown by Hamlet’s peers in the play to
‘pluck out’ Hamlet’s ‘mystery’ for what is usually described as Hamlet’s own inner gaze.” By
contrast, Cefalu suggests that Hamlet’s mind is better understood through a Functionalist model
that “draws attention away from the geography and privacy of the mind, away from conceptions
of the mind as an inner recess or infallible secret place, and toward the mediating role the mind
plays in the teleological and biological economy of the individual.”
324
Somewhat like Cefalu,
Ramie Targoff observes that Hamlet rejects the dualism that he allegedly holds in the beginning
of the play and instead “adopts an entirely new conception of the efficacy of external behavior,”
one that appreciates the intertwined relation between one’s internal, particularly spiritual, self
and one’s behavior.
325
Other scholars have also moved away from a dualist understanding of
Hamlet’s interiority but retain the view that Hamlet is a skeptic, positioning him in line with
other continental philosophers—especially Montaigne—who are less connected to the advent of
empiricism.
326
In this vein, John D. Cox insightfully proposes “suspicion” as a more accurate
term than “skepticism” for describing the epistemological ideas with which Shakespeare
interacts.
327
A. P. Rossiter also reads Hamlet alongside the skepticism of Montaigne, but even
324
Paul Cefalu, “‘Damnéd Custom . . . Habits Devil’: Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Anti‐Dualism, and the Early
Modern Philosophy of Mind,” ELH 67, no. 2 (2000): 400.
325
Targoff, “The Performance of Prayer,” 64. Other studies that argue for Hamlet’s turn to external
behavior over inward thought include Susan Baker’s description of how the dramaturgy of Hamlet wear down
the audience’s “desire” for “the analytic Hamlet of the soliloquies”: “Hamlet’s Bloody Thoughts and the
Illusion of Inwardness,” Comparative Drama 21, no. 4 (1987/1988): 315; J. K. Harmer also describes Hamlet’s
interiority as a problem for action, taking a psychological perspective that explores Hamlet’s frustrations with
moving beyond reason and thought and into action: “Hamlet’s Interiority,” Essays in Criticism 61, no. 1 (2011):
31‐53; and Margreta de Grazia has countered the critical preoccupation with treating Hamlet as a proto‐
modern by arguing that many of the problems of Hamlet’s interiority are in fact due to his status as a
“dispossessed” prince: “Hamlet” without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007).
326
Studies of Montaigne’s influence on Shakespeare extend far beyond the topic of uncertainty, but for a
good overview of the study of Shakespeare and sixteenth‐century skepticism, see William Hamlin, “Scepticism
and Shakespeare,” The Literary Encyclopedia, ed. Robert Clark, Cristina Sandru, et al. (2009).
327
Cox, Seeming Knowledge, 9-14.
242
here Rossiter views Hamlet on a trajectory towards dualism because, like Descartes, Montaigne
“set men’s minds to the discovery of what in this mutable world was enduring and stable.”
328
Even, as I suggest, if Hamlet does not posit a Cartesian kind of dualism, Descartes’s
philosophy remains important if only as the most prominent early modern assertion of doubt. As
I will discuss, Descartes’s importance to this discussion stems from his role in establishing
interiority as the foundation for decades of empirical perspectives on the natural world after
him—perspectives that depend on a person’s independence from an object of study and from its
conditions. Besides Cefalu, several scholars have discussed Shakespeare in comparison to
Descartes without viewing them as like-minded, attempting to account for the phenomenology of
Elizabethan drama and suggesting that there is crossover between the physical environment of
theater and the performance of belief. In his book on knowledge and the inner body, for example,
David Hillman, argues that Shakespeare’s epistemology privileges “visceral knowledge,” that is,
“knowledge experienced in as well as knowledge of the interior of the body.”
329
This
fundamentally differs from Descartes, he continues, insofar as Descartes is always “looking
down” on the body as a merely “mechanical structure.”
330
In other words, somewhere above the
body sits the certainty of Descartes’s perceiving cogito that transcends its circumstances.
Similarly, in Phenomenal Shakespeare, Bruce Smith paraphrases Descartes’s dualism in the
statement, “I can think my body but my body can’t think me,” a claim that Descartes uses to
differentiate the origin of certainty (“I”) from the conditions (“my body”) that muddle the clarity
328
A. P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns and Other Shakespeare Lectures, ed. Graham Storey (New York: Theatre
Arts Books, 1961), 187.
329
David Hillman, Shakespeare’s Entrails: Belief, Scepticism and the Interior of the Body (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1.
330
Ibid., 57.
243
of knowledge.
331
Smith observes that “sensations, imaginings, emotions, and acts of will”—the
building blocks of theatrical phenomenality—are also disqualified from the refuge of Descartes’s
private interiority because they are things that I think about.
332
I am suggesting that the most significant point of difference between Descartes and
Hamlet is the question of whether interiority achieves clarity and objectivity of perspective.
Without question, Hamlet wrestles with some fashion of dualism, but, I argue, his successful
revenge depends on rejecting it rather than perfecting it. A useful concept for contrasting
Shakespeare’s and Descartes’s respective treatments of dualism is the latter’s assertion of “clear
and distinct” perception, from which he derives the “general rule that whatever I perceive very
clearly and distinctly is true.”
333
In another work, he defines clear and distinct perception:
I call ‘clear’ that perception which is present and manifest to an attentive mind:
just as we say that we clearly see those things which are present to our intent eye
and act upon it sufficiently strongly and manifest. On the other hand, I call
‘distinct’, that perception which, while clear, is so separated and delineated from
all others that it contains absolutely nothing except what is clear.
334
An object is truly what I perceive it to be, according to Descartes, if it is clearly manifest to my
mind, perhaps through the senses, and if it is distinct from all other perceptions. Notice that the
second criterion of distinctness significantly qualifies the first criterion of clearness: the thing
that I am perceiving clearly is only perceived as that specific thing because it is distinct from my
perceptions of other things. Suppose, for example, that you are looking at a metal paperweight.
331
Smith, Phenomenal Shakespeare, 17.
332
Ibid.
333
René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, with Selections from the Objections and Replies, trans.
and ed. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 104.
334
René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, trans. V. R. Miller and R. P. Miller (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983),
20.
244
Descartes would say that you can be sure that you are indeed perceiving a paperweight only if
you are able to distinctly separate that object from other continuous perceptions and conditions—
such as light and shadow, reflections of other objects on the metal surface, and any inhibitors to
your wakefulness and clarity of sight. We might think of this experiment in the context of
Hamlet’s epistemological struggle with the Ghost. Can an apparition be clearly perceived?
Perhaps it “shakes our disposition” too much “With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls”
(1.4.55-56). In other words, is Horatio right that the very setting and conditions of the Ghost’s
appearance warp clarity of thought:
The very place puts toys of desperation
Without more motive into every brain
That looks so many fathoms to the sea
And hears it roar beneath.
(1.4.75-78)
A related problem that plagues Hamlet but not Descartes is that Hamlet cannot rely on the notion
that perception is guaranteed by the benevolence of the divine. Descartes grounds the verity of
distinct perception in a divine guarantee: “I know by experience that there is in me a faculty of
judgement which, like everything else which is in me, I certainly received from God. And since
God does not wish to deceive me, he surely did not give me the kind of faculty which would ever
enable me to go wrong while using it correctly.”
335
Because God would not deceive us, he
creates the world to be inherently intelligible to our faculties of perception and thought, and the
correct use of these faculties exemplifies an empirical method of training one’s mind to
recognize objects distinctly.
335
Descartes, Meditations, 37.
245
Hamlet’s problem, according to the thought of Descartes, is that he is too caught up in the
moment and needs to retreat inward to more surely consider the Ghost’s announcement.
Shakespearean theater, on the other hand, embraces this factor of being “caught up” and
obstructs the path to internal intellectual retreat, instead asserting the contingency and
conditionality of belief. This conspicuous theatricality, I argue, is very much like the
conspicuous performativity the other genres I examine. For example, we might draw the
connection between the misidentification of “authentic” belief in subjective autonomy and the
misidentification of belief in Hamlet’s mental interiority. In contrast to Descartes proscription of
clearness and distinctness of perception, Hamlet insists that one cannot escape the obscurity of
perception and inward thought, that belief is always indistinct from its environments, bodies, and
spaces. With questions about Claudius’s penitence, the Ghost’s benevolence, and the
Mousetrap’s manipulation of the imagination in mind, Hamlet is uniquely about the relation
between truth and belief, between attitudes of consciousness and objects of consciousness,
honing in on points of contact between subjects and objects of belief—“Who’s there?”—and
interrogating how distinct the two really are (1.1.1).
It is apparent from Hamlet’s first interaction with the Ghost that interiority is, in fact, a
problem rather than a refuge for Hamlet. The Ghost does not appear to Hamlet until the fifth
scene of the play. Robert Miola observes that these four interim scenes constitute a notable
deviation from the Senecan tragic convention where ghosts appear immediately and propel the
play into rising action.
336
Hamlet, by contrast, has already involved several branches of conflict.
For one, we have the conflict that is known to Hamlet, that he is “too much in the ‘son’” of
incest, but we also have the troubling appearance of the armored Ghost that Hamlet is yet to
336
Robert Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Influence of Seneca (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 13-
14.
246
experience (1.2.67). Thus, when it finally appears to Hamlet, the Ghost is a threatening curiosity
and a cause for questioning, although it does not yet possess a distinct enough identity in
Hamlet’s mind to push Hamlet into an immediate sense of ethical duty. On the contrary,
Hamlet’s immediate reaction is an untidy attempt to situate the Ghost in his mind as an object of
belief. Stephen Greenblatt provides a thorough account of the theological problems that the
Ghost’s very presence raises.
337
One of these is that Hamlet is educated in Protestant Wittenberg
and so does not belief in ghosts, or at least not in benevolent purgatorial souls. Very much the
opposite of Descartes’s divine guarantee, I would add, though, that Hamlet’s struggle to grasp
the Ghost as an object of belief is a preeminent difficulty to the Ghost’s theological baggage.
That is, Hamlet’s struggle for belief is preeminent to his struggle for knowledge. The audience
watches as Hamlet locates and then physically relocates his attitude of belief, agonizing over
how to wrap his mind around the experience before considering how to justify theological
inconsistencies.
Thus, his first reaction when pressed with the command to remember the Ghost’s
message is to imagine his brain as a book or a library:
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain
(1.5.98-103)
337
Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001).
247
Figure 14. "Remember thee! / Ay, thou poor ghost"
338
It is easy to imagine Hamlet in a posture that expresses total concentration on the mind as an
instrument—off-balance physically and momentarily unaware of his body, holding his head and
straining to separate the Ghost’s message from all other thoughts and images, desperate for
distinctness of thought. Hamlet appears uncomfortable trying to reorganize his brain and trying
to conceptualize his mind with book imagery. The scene also expresses pain, as Hamlet strains to
force forgetfulness—“I’ll wipe away . . . . all pressures past.” John Sutton observes that early
modern mnemonic discipline sought to manipulate the matter of the brain. Writers described in
deatailed, physical terms how to “resist the crowding, interfering, and overlapping of traces in
338
The Works of William Shakespeare, eds. Henry Irving and Frank A. Marshall (New York, 1893), 39. Folger
Shakespeare Library.
248
the brain.”
339
But surely, merely remembering the proposition of his murdered father is not the
issue at hand; who could forget something like that? “Remember” has broader metonymic
meaning here. Taking into account that the most popular mnemonic practices were holdovers
from medieval Catholicism and also that these “books” and “forms” include the Protestant
education of his “youth” that discredits the Ghost, the “volume of my brain” can be read as an
experiment with Catholic forms of grasping the Ghost as an object of belief, albeit in a messy
way. As an alternative to the late-medieval mnemonic images of the brain as a filing cabinet, a
pigeon hole, or a storage house, Hamlet considers his mind as a book. Successfully erasing all
other knowledge from its pages is a matter of intense mental discipline and something that is
apparently disruptive to Hamlet.
340
Yet quickly Hamlet’s emotions catch up with his intellectual stress—“O villain, villain,
smiling, damnéd villain!”—as he scraps this Catholic form for a more familiar approach
(1.5.106):
My tables—meet it is I set it down
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.
At least I am sure it may be so in Denmark.
So, uncle, there you are.
(1.5.107-10)
339
John Sutton, “Porous Memory and the Cognitive Life of Things,” in Prefiguring Cyberculture: an
Intellectual History, eds. Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson, and Alessio Cavallaro (Cambridge: Massachusetts
Institute of Technology UP, 2002), 137.
340
See Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd ed. (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2008), 30, 37-38, 69.
249
Figure 15. "Remember thee! / Ay, thou poor ghost."
341
In a collaborative essay, Chartier, Mowery, Stallybrass, and Wolfe argue persuasively that
Hamlet’s table is most likely an erasable wax tablet of the kind that came into fashion in the
sixteenth century. Such tables “were part of a pedagogical system that emphasized the gathering
of commonplaces, their organization under topical headings, and their redeployment as the
materials of one’s own writing.”
342
Importantly, I would add that just as imaginary mnemonic
devices had a loosely Catholic association, so did portable tables have a distinct role in Protestant
pedagogy. Near the year 1600, table books became increasingly popular as pedagogical tools
often used for taking notes on sermons, consistent with the Protestant emphasis on homiletics
and personal study.
343
Additionally, the erasable wax table book became a trope for salvation-by-
341
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Illustrated by Harold Copping (London: Raphael Tuck, 1897), 19. Folger
Shakespeare Library.
342
Peter Stallybrass, Roger Chartier, J. Franklin Mowery, and Heather Wolfe, “Hamlet’s Tables and the
Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England,” Shakespeare Quarterly 55, no. 4 (2004): 410-11.
343
See Jennifer A. Herdt, Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices (Chicago, U of Chicago P,
2008), 203; and Hunt, The Art of Hearing, 94.
250
faith-alone Protestant soteriology. God’s forensic declaration of righteousness was imagined as
softened wax that takes a “Spiritual Stamp,” in the words of Francis Roberts, that just “as in
Table-books we first wipe out the old writing, ere we can write new, so God first wipes out these
old abominable Laws and principles out of the Heart, by Self-denyal and Repentance.”
344
An
even more elaborate use of erasable table books as a metaphor for sola gratia salvation is
Thomas Baker’s The unspotted high-court of justice which traces the history of writing from
ancient Egypt to seventeenth-century England, ultimately championing the erasable tablet as a
symbol of God’s erasable memory and coincident with the restoration of Protestant theology.
345
There is a consistent connection in early modern Protestantism between the habits of
thought associated with tablet note-taking and the kind of theology that rejects the need for
purgatory and by extension the existence of purgatorial ghosts. With this in mind, this scene
reveals a sudden and unexplained shift from an older and generally Catholic way of grasping the
Ghost to a newer, Protestant way. As Hamlet moves his hand from his forehead to his pocket and
draws out his tablet, the audience witnesses a phenomenological tension beyond theological
rationale. We watch the externalization of Hamlet’s thought, from the imaginary book to the
physical book, significant both as an object of external contact between the Ghost and Hamlet
and also as an implicit rejection of the theological stakes that accompany the purgatorial
Ghost.
346
It is unclear whether Hamlet realizes that his Protestant way of believing the Ghost is
theologically self-discrediting, but this episode—with its scrambling between two theologically
344
Francis Roberts, Mysterium & medulla Bibliorum the mysterie and marrow of the Bible (London: Printed by
R. W., 1657), 1360.
345
Thomas Baker, The unspotted highcourt of justice erected and discovered in three sermons preached in
London and other places by Thomas Baker (Exon, 1657), 107‐09.
346
While I agree with Peter McCullough that the Ghost causes theological confusion, I would contend
with his argument that the dramaturgical purpose of the Ghost is to “cancel the signifying power” of both
specifically Protestant and Catholic theological perspectives. See Peter McCullough, “Christmas at Elsinore,”
Essays in Criticism 58 (2008): 311.
251
laden mnemonic models—establishes a pattern for Hamlet’s failure to achieve a position of
stable interiority.
Thus, in Hamlet’s struggle to believe the Ghost we observe a momentary attempt to clear
the brain and perhaps pave a path for distinctness of thought, but Hamlet quickly puts this notion
aside and instead exercises what we might think of as an externalization of thought. It is as if
Hamlet considers for a moment the possibility that interiority could be fashioned as a tidy
straight line from perception to belief—a kind of dualism—but in the end he prefers to keep the
records of his mind within sight and touch. The scene ends, literally, with the question of the
Ghost still on the table, and Hamlet’s table book remains as a constant reminder that his actual
engagement with the Ghost cannot be summarized merely by the abstract proposition of his
father’s murder and also that the process of belief is not so easily distilled into knowledge.
Instead, he entertains different attitudes of belief through physical and physically imagined
things—his brain, his tables—alternatives to the imaginary straight “line of belief” that reappears
as a failed option throughout the play. Because Hamlet’s perception of the Ghost is decidedly
indistinct from the perception of his own knowing faculties and from his religious beliefs, I
would bring the phenomenological principle of the body to bear on Hamlet’s mind—“the world
is given to us as bodily investigated, and the body is revealed to us in this exploration of the
world.”
347
Likewise, Hamlet’s struggle to believe the Ghost is a kind of experiment with the
boundaries of his mind. The limitations of his mind are manifest in his contact with the Ghost,
and interiority—the brain imagined as a book—is one of these limitations.
347
Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology, 105.
252
The Renaissance Conceit and Hamlet’s Pursuit of Action
In frustration with the failings of internal thought, the term that Hamlet uses that best absorbs the
outward-orientation of his pursuit of grounded belief is “conceit.” In Act 2, after being surprised
by the visit of a traveling acting troupe, Hamlet plays audience to a rhetorical conceit in the form
of a dramatic monologue. He is struck by the player’s ability to manipulate his mind to such an
emotional extent, and he responds with astonishment.
Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all the visage wanned
—Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit—and all for nothing—
For Hecuba?
(2.2.486-93)
In terms of belief, the player’s real-life situation is the inverse of Hamlet’s. The player acts
without real-life cause, while Hamlet is stuck in inaction despite having real cause. Later Hamlet
advises the Player to be balanced in his performance, “to show . . . the very age and body of the
time his form and pressure” (3.2.22-24). Notice the similarities in wax imagery described by the
pressure applied to Hamlet’s tablet by a stylus and the “form and pressure” that Hamlet
encourages the dramatist to apply to his scene. By his own account, Hamlet does not truly
possess the Ghost in belief. Thus, the player’s conceit is less an alternative to Hamlet’s brain and
tables than it is a continuation of the same attempt to search externally for a tool to grasp belief.
253
Eventually, by the production of the Mousetrap, Hamlet expands the grounds of belief into
fiction, but this expansion only occurs after a mixed initial response to the player, reacting with
both disgust and admiration. He is disgusted at the “monstrous” self-conceit of dramatic belief
that is too reminiscent of the incest between his mother and uncle, and yet he also expresses
admiration because the player achieves an affective “function” of belief that does not begin by
retreating to an isolated seat of interiority. That is, the player’s conceit does not depend on a
process of perceiving a cause outside him, internalizing it with skeptical scrutiny, then acting on
it.
I argue that Hamlet’s experience of the player’s conceit is not only impactful for him but
is also a conceptual frame for the way that belief is presented in Hamlet as a whole. Hamlet
seems to think that the player’s fictional performance achieves a kind of belief that avoids his
earlier waffling between brain and books. It is worth taking a moment, then, to outline the nature
of Renaissance “conceit” and its influence on the phenomenology of theater. In short, the shape
of thought introduced by Renaissance conceit is essentially a bending and delaying of perception,
and therefore we can think of Hamlet’s own delay in terms of the phenomenality of renaissance
fiction.
In sixteenth century poetics, the figurative “conceit” is a kind of catchall for the mental
process of poetic creation. Outside of poetic contexts, conceit simply refers to intellectual
comprehension. Yet it can also mean the fictional work itself, even down to an individual trope.
And like the Italian concetto, English “conceit” relies on notional connections between poetic
creation and human reproduction.
348
English faculty psychology, together with early modern
poetics, is so infused with reproductive language that the entire process of authorship can be told
348
Robert J. Bauer, “A Phenomenon of Epistemology in the Renaissance,” Journal of the History of Ideas 31,
no. 2 (1970): 281-88.
254
as a series of impregnations: the ear registers sound in a chamber of “implanted” or “inbred” air
which, like the womb, closes up after sensory insemination; the brain, uterus-like, then conceives
an idea; and the author produces a poetic conceit, so-called because it is pregnant with additional
meaning.
349
Hamlet tries to impregnate his mind through different conceits or devices, including
mnemonics and the Mousetrap, but to no end. Further, there is also a type of conceit that occurs
on the other side of the stage, in the audience of fiction, where, in Puttenham’s words, “certaine
intendments or sence of such wordes and speaches inwardly” cause “a stirre to the mynde.”
350
Thus, conceit travels from the mind of the author, to the verbalized trope, to the mind of the
audience. It is perhaps unhelpful to attempt to delineate a precise meaning for a given occurrence
of “conceit,” such as these two by Hamlet, but it can be illuminating to appreciate the interplay
among a variety of meanings. In particular, there is an ambiguity among the psychological,
poetic, and even physiological meanings of Renaissance conceit. Conceits exist in the minds of
authors as well as in books and on stages; poetic pregnancy is in authors, texts, and audiences.
Thus, all intellectual engagement, for Hamlet, is both reception and production—both conception
and insemination—and although he realizes that the player’s conceit is self-forced, Hamlet still
admires this fictional form as an actualization of unjustified belief. His admiration for the player
reveals that Hamlet is not tied to a model of belief that requires absolute internal clarity; instead,
he is apparently attracted by the idea that belief can be pliable and responsive to artificial stimuli.
Additionally, I propose that Shakespeare’s characterization of Hamlet’s belief process
overlaps with the way that Shakespearean theater—a kind of “conceit” itself—mediates thematic
objects of belief to its historical audience. To explain this, we can look to conceit’s inheritance
349
See Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, a description of the body of man (London: William Jaggard,
1615), 608, 262. For a discussion of the connections between the womb and the brain, see Mary Crane,
Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000), 162.
350
George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (Kent State UP, 1970), 155.
255
from rhetoric. Rhetoric is obviously not the only influence on Renaissance poetics (Horatian
poetics, Aristotle’s De Anima, and medieval theater are others), but because it deals with proof
and persuasion, rhetoric is particularly influential on the relation between figurative language
and belief. Classical rhetoric, outlined by Quintilian, categorizes conceit as ornamented language
in the rhetorical stage of elocutio, the third stage of five: inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria,
and pronuntiatio. The two preceding stages involve finding and arranging the matter of an
oration, whereas the two subsequent stages involve the memorization, modulation, and delivery
of material. Although there is some crossover among the five stages, elocutio is the primary
stage for shaping, expanding, and diversifying the content of speech—for framing matter as an
object of potential belief but not for justifying it as knowledge. Successful elocutio is a matter of
finding the most appropriate ways to make an oration affective. In his important study of rhetoric
and poetry, Donald Clark observes an always-existent tension in rhetoric between its aim of
persuasion and what we might call the innately poetic ends of elocutio: “the glory of style to the
classical rhetorician lay in its use of figures. Here rhetoric vindicated its practicality by a
preoccupation with the impractical; and here, as in analysis, rhetoric bore the seeds of its own
decay.”
351
This tension also subtly registers when Aristotle defers to the Poetics in his treatise on
Rhetoric for further explanation of figurative devices like synonym, metaphor, and ambiguity; it
is as if to say that these conceits play an important role in rhetoric, but instruction in them is
351
Donald Lemen Clark, Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance: A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English
Renaissance Literary Criticism (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), 29.
256
more properly the purview of poetry.
352
Thus, by the time of the Renaissance, especially in
Italian writings, elocutio “virtually comes to be equated with poetry.”
353
Insofar as Renaissance conceit derives from the rhetorical tradition, it inherits some
phenomenological features of elocutio. This phemonological character is, in rhetorical terms, a
slowing of the momentum of argument and thus characterizes Hamlet’s delay. We can see this
slowing by looking at the subcategories of elocutio. In Renaissance works on rhetoric, fictional
conceits inhabit a subcategory of elocutio called amplificatio—not just the expanding of material
but especially the careful diversifying of ways to say things, including comparison, antithesis,
syntax rearrangement, and, significantly, commonplaces. Fictional conceits are a kind of
“commonplace,” alongside well-known conventional examples and sententiae. Most expressly,
fiction falls under the subcategory of commonplace called exempla. This rhetorical taxonomy,
disseminated by Erasmus and English rhetoricians, such as Thomas Wilson, can be charted—
elocutio: amplificatio: commonplace: exempla. According to Richard Sherry in his Treatise of
Schemes and Tropes, amplificatio provides arguments with nonessential but helpful
circumstances in which to contextualize arguments, not unlike the idiomatic speech of Donne’s
sermon: “comparison is made by ficcion, & by puttynge to an example. By ficcion, eyther in one
degree, or in many.”
354
Fiction, in this way, is a tool for adding details to things that are too
abstract and for adding breadth to matters that are too detailed. Likewise, speaking of exempla,
Thomas Wilson describes poetry as providing an oration with a “lively picture” and “lyvely
352
Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. W. Rhys Roberts (New York: Cosimo, 2010), 122.
353
Brian Vickers, “Philosophy and Humanistic Disciplines: Rhetoric and Poetics,” in Cambridge History of
Renaissance Philosophy, eds. Charles B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, Eckhard Kessler and Jill Kraye (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1988), 718.
354
Richard Sherry, A treatise of schemes & tropes very profytable for the better understanding of good authors
. . . (London, 1550), E4v.
257
Paterne of the minde.”
355
Poets, Wilson says, cannot “openly rebuke” corruption in society; so
they instead speak “by shadowes.”
356
Sir Francis Bacon similarly identifies such shadowiness as
the activity of fiction, saying that the use of fiction “hath been to give some shadow of
satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it.”
357
One
believes in poetry like one would believe in a shadow of nature.
Thus, conceit is not just rhetorical delay; it is phenomenological delay, serving to vary,
compare, contrast, and provide exempla for objects of belief, especially when the objects of
belief are obscure or indistinct in nature. This same epistemology of delay informs Erasmus’s
statement that exaggerating a point can make it more effective even if objectivity is
compromised. This opinion is echoed in Bacon’s Advancement of Learning when he discusses
the best way to present a disagreement for judgment: “I would have . . . the case exaggerated
both ways with the utmost force of wit, and urged unfairly, as it were, and quite beyond the
truth.”
358
Sir Philip Sidney makes a similar case for the poetic merits of exaggeration as a kind of
literary “magnanimity,” transmitting the Aristotelian definition of magnanimity as the most
virtuous intermediary between ethical extremes.
359
What comes to light in these various descriptors for amplificatio—comparing, widening,
shadowing, enlivening, exaggerating—is that the function of conceit is quite the opposite of
promoting clarity and distinctness of perspective. Renaissance conceit, in fact, disperses matters
of potential knowledge into circumstantial grounds for believing them. Whereas the dualist
355
Thomas Wilson, Arte of Rethorique, ed. Thomas J. Derrick (New York: Garland, 1982), 388.
356
Ibid.
357
Francis Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, eds. James Spedding, Robert L. Ellis, and Douglas Heath
(London: Longman, 1861), 3:343.
358
The Works of Francis Bacon, 4:472; Desiderus Erasmus, On Copia of Words and Ideas, trans. Donald B.
King and H. David Rix (Milwaukee: Marquette UP, 1963), 14.
359
Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesie, in Sidney’s ‘Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary
Criticism, ed. Gavin Alexander (New York: Penguin, 2004), 21.
258
model of interiority can be described as a straight line of interiority that connects perception to
belief, Renaissance concetto seeks to bend this line of belief in response to audience’s emotions
and external circumstances. Thus, elocutio and amplificatio inform the phenomenology of
Reniassance conceit in several traceable ways—namely, in delaying the movement towards an
argument’s conclusion and also in bending the line of cognition that connects internal thought to
outward perception. Consider Hamlet’s comment again,: “Tears in his eyes, distraction in his
aspect, / A broken voice, and his whole function suiting / With forms to his conceit.” The
player’s “function” and “forms” follow his “conceit,” but it is important to recognize also that
Renaissance fiction, in reference to belief, is itself a shadow of an argument that never appears in
clear sight. Hence, Hamlet exclaims that there is something “monstrous” in the player’s
speech—something incestuous yet effective about the player’s manipulation of belief and
dismissal of cognitive autonomy.
Conceit and the Performativity of the Mind—Claudius Prays
The phenomenality of Renaissance conceit reinforces the central question for Shakespeare’s
treatment of belief in Hamlet: does Hamlet’s interiority provide him with distinctness of
thought? Consider, for instance, Hamlet’s admission that “conscience does make cowards of us
all, / And thus the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought” (3.1.82-
84). This is Hamlet’s conclusion to the problem of the unknowable, “To be, or not to be”; we
would rather “bear those ills” that we know to be real than face dangers “we know not of” (80-
81). One wonders why Hamlet would bring the mysterious question of the afterlife into his
considerations on a matter that is far less obscure: his duty to avenge his father. It seems that
Hamlet is confusing matters even more by bringing questions of existence and knowledge to bear
259
on the more immanent concern of Claudius’s guilt. The reason why Hamlet’s thought is so
congested is that he has lost a distinct sense of what the “native hue” of human belief is in the
first place. I have shown how he experiments with different models of memory and belief, but
these have afforded him no greater clarity in “the pale cast” of internal thought. In the Cartesian
version of interiority, the “native hue” is found in a clear line that begins with perception, moves
to self-identity, and ends with empirical certainty. In sequence, these include “I think,” “I am,”
“God is,” “the world is.” The sequence moves from subjective awareness to objectivity—“the
world is.” The problem of interiority in Hamlet is that no one of these individual perceptions is
accessible on its own but instead blends into the others, as when resolution to act is “sicklied
o’er” with failed attempts to find solitude internally.
A better philosophical analogue for belief in Hamlet is Husserlian phenomenology’s
challenge to Descartes’s claim to have attained distinctness of perception. In summary, Husserl
takes issue with Descartes’s assertion that objectivity is derived from a first principle of belief,
the thinking self. He contends that the objects and conditions of our belief have more effect on
how we know them than Descartes acknowledges: “It belongs as a general feature to the essence
of every actual cogito to be a consciousness of something.”
360
Notice even in this brief statement
the italicization of the preposition “of” in addition to “cogito”; one’s consciousness already is
disposed syntactically towards an object of thought before that object is predicated. Drawing on
the work of Michel Serres, Bruce Smith describes the work of prepositions as pre-posing “the
knower’s body” towards an object.
361
In a sense, this is exactly what Hamlet is coming to realize.
After numerous attempts to bring his body into subjection to his mind, he has come to depend on
various perceptual tools of belief, such as his tablet and the Mousetrap. It is no wonder, then, that
360
Edmund Husserl, Ideas, 119.
361
Smith, Phenomenal Shakespeare, 75.
260
Hamlet envies the player who is able to impregnate is mind and body with fictive conceit.
Renaissance conceit does not aim to convey information to audiences in order for it to travel a
straight line of perception and be neatly distilled into internal knowledge. It dwells in the
external conditions that Descartes considers marginal and distracting to clarity of thought.
Conceit perpetually remains in and of the circumstances of its performance. It does not originate
from an autonomous mind within, hence Hamlet’s astonishment at the incestuousness of conceit.
Moreover, we would be wrong to superimpose onto Shakespeare’s theater the modern
distinction that authentic—i.e., separated from external conditions—beliefs are necessarily
independent of their conditions. Instead, Hamlet insists that belief on the stage of life is very
much like belief on the dramatic stage insofar as both require belief in something. In theater, of
course, internal thought must always be dramatized by the visible and audible object of
perception, and in Hamlet Shakespeare applies this phenomenality of thought to belief in
general, including religious belief. To the point, it is not for lack of cause that Hamlet delays his
action but for lack of conceit. Thus, through the phenomenality of conceit the play draws on the
audience’s in-person experience of drama to help heighten the relevance of Hamlet’s delay. In
this way, conceit becomes a way of thinking and not just a term that describes figurative speech.
As Robert Bauer observes, in the Renaissance “conceived” meant both “‘understood’ and
‘felt’—until it had grown to a certain stage of maturity, and was finally made autonomous by
being released as a work of art.”
362
Additionally, in an essay on the Renaissance “Metaphor of
Conception,” Jay Halio states that Elizabethans used the idea of “conceit” creatively and not
mechanically, in puns and tropes that attempt to make sense of the controversial power of the
362
Bauer, “A Phenomenon of Epistemology,” 281.
261
imagination.
363
What Bauer and Halio suggest is that the indistinctness and externalization of
thought that characterizes Renaissance conceits can be applied on a broader scale to a model of
perception inherent to the poetic ancestry of theater. Hamlet and his theatrical audience,
therefore, experience the play in parallel trajectories, each subjecting itself to a narrative world
where thought is always expressed in contact with objects, props, apparitions, bodies, and
sounds.
This link between the narrative world of the characters and the theatrical world of the
audience is evident in Hamlet’s many meta-performative moments, when fictional conceit is the
object of attention for its characters as well as for its audience. Consider the similarities between
the dramatic performances in Hamlet—the player’s speech, the dumb show, the spoken scene of
the Mousetrap—and the scenes that are acted realistically, as representations of the nonfictional
intellect and imagination. The play brackets its dramatic representations of fiction as expressly
fictional; they are explicitly framed by “the very cunning of the scene” (2.2.525). Yet one would
be hard-pressed to ignore the “cunning,” pregnancy, and ambiguity of the nonfictional
performances as well—such as the Ghost’s elusiveness, Hamlet’s “antic disposition,” Claudius’s
aborted confession, and, in particular, Hamlet’s soliloquies. Each of these parts demonstrates the
relative pliability of belief as it turns towards different objects. The Ghost presents itself as an
object torn between opposing theological frameworks and, as an apparition, is totally unavailable
for close scrutiny. Hamlet announces that his madness is merely a show, but his lack of resolve
betrays him as an epistemological wanderer. Claudius’s confession is interrupted for twenty-four
lines of Hamlet’s waffling, resuming just as Claudius’s thoughts decide to “remain below.” And
Hamlet’s soliloquies present themselves as anything but moments of unaffected reflection. This
363
Jay L. Halio, “The Metaphor of Conception and Elizabethan Theories of the Imagination,” Neophilologus
50 (1966): 454-61.
262
is not to suppose that Shakespeare is skeptical of sincere belief or that he delegitimizes drama as
a valid form of social and philosophical reflection. Quite the opposite, it is to assert fiction as a
specific form of reflection that is particularly tuned-in to its phenomenal conditions.
Consider Act Three, scene three, and Claudius’ attempted confession. This scene
provides an example of the crossover between externalization of character belief and the way the
audience comes to know character thought through its theatrical conditions.
364
Claudius’s
soliloquy comes on the heels of Hamlet’s fairly confident confirmation that Claudius murdered
his father, and although the confession is only sixty-three lines, some of which comprise
Hamlet’s interruption, it is a rare moment given to another character’s soliloquy in a play
dominated by Hamlet. This is the first time that Claudius is alone on stage, and, significantly,
this privacy results from largely non-discursive theatrical elements. Claudius’s interiority
initially comes to presence through three features: stage directions, non-verbal utterances, and
dramatic irony. Listed with line breaks, they read:
Exit Polonius.
O
my offence is rank
(3.3.35-36)
Claudius is physically isolated on stage and utters an inarticulate sound (O). This sound breaks
the pattern of intensive verbal design that precedes it. Up to this point, Claudius’s verbal conduct
has been crafty and scheming, a calm counterpart to Hamlet’s equally designed madness.
Claudius repeats this sound in four other places in his soliloquy: “But O, what form of prayer /
Can serve my turn,” and “O wretched state, O bosom black as death, / O limed soul” (3.3.51-52,
364
A extended treatment of this scene can be found in my essay “Describing the Sense of Confession in
Hamlet,” forthcoming in Cefalu et al, The Return of Theory.
263
67-68). This last set of O’s repeats the sound three times, suggesting a complete change in verbal
control. His speech is now recognizably marked by this acoustic sound of suffering. O’s
ambiguity and even its auricular power as a vocalized sound reveal that his deepest thought is
expressed in inarticulate speech.
365
Like the cipher in Henry V, O connotes a didactic emptiness
but a perceptual fullness. That is, we perceive interiority in the form of honesty in Claudius’s
most bodily and least premeditated speech acts—in his most externalized speech.
Next, for the first time, Claudius commences the argument of his soliloquy and
immediately announces his guilt—“my offence is rank.” Consequently, this is also the first time
that the audience has sure knowledge of his guilt, but this certainty is kept from Hamlet.
Claudius provides dramatic irony at the same moment that he speaks by himself, and it is the
exclusive perspective of the audience more than the admission of guilt that establishes a sense of
honesty. Thus, interiority comes to presence through the departures and eaves-droppings of other
characters, in non-verbal bellowing cries, and through the privilege of audience anonymity,
implying a decidedly continuous relation between thought, speech, and body.
At times, even the verbal content of Claudius’s soliloquy is externalized in the
dramaturgical conditions that give it meaning as a confession. For example, Claudius and Hamlet
choose not to act on their desires—the desire for repentance for Claudius and the desire for
revenge for Hamlet—because they are confronted with no-win situations. Claudius suddenly
second-guesses the clarity of his internal “pause”—“I stand in pause where I shall first begin /
And both neglect” (3.3.42-43). This is where the clarity of Claudius’s internal perspective begins
to come apart and undermine the interiority that he initially believes is essential to a successful
confession. We begin to get the sense that Claudius is listening to himself speak, as if he were in
365
I would draw attention to my discussion of the O-like cipher in the Prologue of Henry V in Chapter One and
also to Bruce Smith’s discussion of the “O-Factor” in Smith, The Acoustic World.
264
the audience, as he negotiates the relation between the appearance of contrition and the reality of
deciding between two conflicting paths. Like Hamlet’s decision to hesitate before killing the
king—“That would be scanned”—what constitutes the content of Claudius’s internal “pause” is
diffused beyond his words into sounds and body (3.3.75). For one, Claudius’s honesty and
interiority appear in the relation between his body and Hamlet’s body when the audience
experiences, “Enter HAMLET.” Hamlet’s entrance allows the scene to explore the problem of
interiority in confession more deeply than if Claudius were alone. As Sarah Beckwith says in
conclusion to her study of confession in Measure for Measure, “confession is never exclusively
about the self but always about an acknowledgment of the self in relation to others.”
366
This is
true, I would add, especially insofar as relating to others involves externalization of thought. As
soon as Hamlet appears to the audience on the same stage as Claudius, everything that Claudius
says and does is a function of either concealment or disclosure to Hamlet. Any visible
movement, such as kneeling, becomes a conspicuous movement because Hamlet is watching
him. In other words, we believe that Claudius and Hamlet are both telling the truth not only
because each believes he is unheard by the other but also because we see and hear them both in
proximity to each other.
At this point there must be some dramatic device that keeps Claudius honest, so to speak.
Hamlet could stand on the other side of a barrier or even behind Claudius, in any case out of his
eyesight, implying that Claudius’s interiority partly derives from his non-perception. As soon as
Hamlet speaks, “Now might I do it,” we are reminded that Hamlet’s time—his “Now”— takes
366
Sarah Beckwith, “Medieval Penance, Reformation Repentance and Measure for Measure,” Reading the
Medieval in Early Modern England, ed. Gordon McMullan and David Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2007), 204.
265
precedence over Claudius’s time because the audibility of Claudius’s soliloquy to the audience
depends on Hamlet’s absence.
Help, angels, make assay.
Bow, stubborn knees, and heart with strings of steel
Be soft as sinews of the new-born babe.
All may be well.
Enter HAMLET
Now might I do it. But now ‘a is a-praying.
(3.3.69-73)
Hamlet’s observation suggests that Claudius prays silently, and, as a result, the audience
experiences the reverse of what is realistic; we hear Hamlet speak even though he must be silent
to Claudius’s ears, whereas we do not hear Claudius whom, as in the Gregory Doran film, we
might still see mouthing the sound-movements of private thought.
367
Claudius’s most earnest
moments of confession are inaudible to us and replaced by Hamlet’s commentary on him. Here,
too, it is the obvious rather than the noticeable that constitutes Claudius’s interiority.
This arras-like aspect to the confession scene is a key part of its visual scape. Hamlet sees
Claudius but does not hear him; Claudius sees and hears no one but himself; and the audience
sees and hears both characters, with the exception of Claudius’s silent prayer. Just one scene
later, another confession of sorts occurs—though less obviously—with Hamlet and the Queen in
her closet. There, the eavesdropping Polonius’s stage directions read: “hides behind the arras”
(3.4.7). Yet the theological valences of scene three make character sight and non-sight even more
significant for dramatized confession. Physical barriers to sight in Christian auricular confession
367
Hamlet, DVD, directed by Gregory Doran (Stratford-Upon-Avon: Royal Shakespeare Company, 2009).
266
such as the confessional screen did not appear in the Roman Catholic Church until the Counter
Reformation. It also bears mentioning that Claudius’s confession incorporates aspects of both
Catholic and Protestant confession practices. Specifically, Claudius’s concern with restitution
and “those effects for which I did the murder,” while not altogether excluded from Protestant
theology, is emphasized enough to be associated with the play’s other identifiably Catholic
elements, such as the purgatorial ghost. At the same time, there is obviously no official confessor
for Claudius and thus no intimation of sacramental absolution.
Therefore, the theatrical setting and the entrance of Hamlet make the question about the
identity of Claudius’s confessor an important one because to whom Claudius confesses
determines from where his confession originates. Is his soliloquy an occasion for inner clarity
and the triumph of character interiority? The answer, of course, seems to be that it is not. It is
obvious that Claudius intends to address his confession to God, and in the theater this is acted
directionally, by looking and speaking upwards and inwards—“Then I’ll look up” (3.3.50).
Claudius’s desperate search for a “form of prayer” that could exonerate the “visage of offence”
suggests that there is a substance to the “form” and a mind behind the “visage,” and this inner
substance of thought depends on the hereness that Claudius achieves by directing attention to an
imagined there outside of the audience’s sight (3.3.47). The ambience of the Globe theater, with
its cylindrical shape open to the sky and partial roof painted as the “heavens,” provides a feeling
of extension and expanse. Claudius’s thought spreads upwards and, therefore, reciprocally
directs attention to an imagined inner place of origin to his speech, funneling attention downward
towards an impression of privacy, interiority, and honesty.
But whatever interiority is here really only appears here by motioning elsewhere;
interiority is always behind and between the sounds and bodies of the stage. In this way,
267
Claudius’s attempted interiority and “true nature” are disrupted and drawn outward by the
conditions of theatrical conceit, as if the First Player’s emotional monologue haunts all of the
play’s subsequent soliloquies. We can see this at play in the way Claudius’s interiority is made
present in the broken cadence of Shakespeare’s verse, behind and between his speech. The pulse
of the meter disappears in the two-and-a-half lines leading up to Claudius’ resounding triple O’s,
arranged here with line breaks after each punctuation to highlight their jolted rhythm:
What then?
What rests?
Try what repentance can—
what can it not?—
Yet what can it,
When one cannot repent?
(3.3.64-66)
The first words of Hamlet’s interrupting soliloquy exhibit the same broken cadence—again listed
with line breaks:
Enter HAMLET.
Now might I do it.
But now ’a is a-praying.
And now I’ll do it
[Draws Sword]
—and so ’a goes to heaven,
And so am I revenged!
That would be scanned:
268
(3.3.72-75)
The punctuation in these sets of lines falters, stops, and starts up again more than usual, giving
the impression that the cognitive wheels are turning between the words rather than in them.
There are deeper thoughts that disrupt the words that we hear, that crack through the surface of
these soliloquies, despite the characters’ attempts to verbally express what is beneath the
“visage” of guilt. This interiority is given in the punctuation itself, in pauses and stutterings.
Their words, in this way, become a kind of verbal arras, like Hamlet’s invisibility and dramatic
irony, at once concealing and disclosing Claudius’s honest confession.
Next, perhaps unexpectedly, interiority changes shape and appears as a contrast between
stuttering speech and the resumption of iambic rhythm. The scene ends with back-to-back
couplets, a definitive sign that some resolution has been found and that the intense striving for
interiority is over.
My mother stays;
This physic but prolongs thy sickly days.
KING
My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
(3.3.95-98)
These couplets bring a feeling of summary and a sense that the moment of interiority has passed
unsuccessfully, like the end of a sonnet. The return of meter and rhyme emphasizes the
ornamented character of Claudius’s concession that his “words fly up”; they are decorated and
formalized but to no avail. We are back to the ornament of elocutio and are thus reminded that
conceit, rather than interiority, is what Renaissance drama thinks through. Simply in terms of
269
performance, both characters’ jagged rhythm intimates a gerundial tone by drawing attention to
the struggling speech activity itself and to the suffering of deep thought. Claudius’s final couplet,
then, not only concludes his prayer with the admission of failure but also ends a pair of
soliloquies that advertise their frontal quality—the quality of being just the face of confession.
This is the phenomenality of conceit at work, in the form of theater. The playing out of
the scene reveals the externalization of belief that the characters’ words alone attempt to mask as
pure character interiority. This is a remarkable scene particularly for how it unravels what the
audience identifies as essential to the distinctness of dramatic characters. At their most honest,
when we expect to witness a climax in dramatic action, beginning with the perception of solitude
and the activity of inward thought, we are let down. Both characters’ attempts at interiority are
undone by the presence of the other and even the presence of the audience, and both characters
shrink away from certainty of belief and resoluteness of action. Interiority in Hamlet is indistinct
both from characters’ expressions of it and insofar as it is given in the phenomenality of
Shakespeare’s theater. We, the audience, believe that the characters’ inner struggles are real, but
we are never convinced that interiority provides distinctness of thought that transcends either the
characters’ own bodily conditions or the active perception of the audience. On the contrary, the
cogito on stage is made present in its contact with objects of thought in their environments.
Hence, we believe Claudius’s interiority in the non-words, non-perceptions, and non-centers of
the scene—in the area around, between, and behind the characters. Saliently, Merleau-Ponty
introduces his discussion of the Cartesian cogito by anecdotally demonstrating the dispersion of
subjective thought into its objects and environment: “I AM thinking of the Cartesian cogito,
wanting to finish this work, feeling the coolness of the paper under my hand, and perceiving the
270
trees of the boulevard through the window.”
368
As a result, he recognizes that the mind is more at
home in its objects than it is in pretended autonomous interiority: “A fortiori the sensible forms
of being which lie around me, the paper under my hand, the trees before my eyes, do not yield
their secret to me, rather is it that my consciousness takes flight from itself and, in them, is
unaware of itself.”
369
In embracing the indistinctness of performativity, Shakespeare is able to
experiment with the exteriorities of thought and to search, like the rhetorician, for the devices of
amplificatio that most forcefully move audiences and characters.
The Melancholic Imagination; or, Hamlet as Bent Thought
This chapter has been discussing the problem of interiority in Hamlet—how Hamlet grasps belief
and how the phenomenality of Renaissance conceit shapes the way that this grasping is made
present on stage. Essentially, this is a psychological topic, and one cannot discuss the
psychological world of Hamlet without addressing Hamlet’s melancholy as a condition of the
mind. In relation to indistinctness of thought, melancholy is the play’s most conspicuous
thematic device. There remains the question, of course, of how much of Hamlet’s melancholy is
real and how much is acted for the sake of hiding his intentions, but in any case, the consistent
presence of melancholy as a factor has implications for Shakespeare’s treatment of how the mind
believes things. I suggest that the early modern mental disorder of melancholy has much to add
to our understanding of the problem of interiority because melancholy is a disease that affects the
way that perception turns into belief. As I will discuss, there are implicit as well as explicit
connections between melancholy and Renaissance conceit, such that the melancholic way of
thinking about the world is conceited—externalized and bent.
368
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 369.
369
Ibid.
271
Similar to the ambiguity of “conceit,” early modern melancholy is an indistinct,
amorphous, and, often creative condition in literature. With some variations, melancholy is used
to signify physical imbalance, psychological hallucination, emotional depression, theological
terror, and social alienation. With all these correlatives to melancholy in mind, we are reminded
by Louise Turner Forest that Elizabethan psychology is neither coherent nor consistent among all
its incarnations and that ailments such as melancholy should be viewed with poetic license.
370
One main reason for melancholy’s flexibility is that it is a condition of the body as well as of the
mind. The implication of this is that authors can use melancholy to cause psychologically
unbalanced actions in characters, or alternately they can treat melancholy as a bodily imbalance
that is caused by psychological turmoil. Expectedly, Renaissance authors do not consistently
identify one single cause of melancholy. Such is the ambiguity that lurks behind Hamlet’s first
interaction with the Ghost. On the one hand, melancholy was believed to induce hallucinations of
spiritual beings, sometimes devils.
371
While on the other hand, melancholics were thought to be
especially prone to actual spiritual torment, and it was sometimes recorded that devils appear to
melancholics in order to take advantage of their vulnerable state.
372
The resulting problem is that,
were a ghost to appear, a melancholic would have trouble determining whether it was real or
merely fantastical. These possibilities cross Hamlet’s mind when he wonders whether the Ghost
“be a de’il” sent to abuse his “weakness” and “melancholy” (2.2.534, 36).
There is a sense, as well, in which Hamlet’s humoral way of thinking about the world and
his increasing demystification of his body as a “quintessence of dust” cloak the play as a whole
370
Louise C. Turner Forest, “A Caveat for Critics against Invoking Elizabethan Psychology” PLMA 61, no. 3
(1946): 651-72.
371
Angus Gowland, “The Problem of Early Modern Melancholy,” Past & Present 191 (2006): 90-92.
372
John Hayward, The strong helper, offering to beare euery mans burthen (London, 1614), 187-88. According
to Robert Burton, melancholics were known to sometimes “talk familiarly with devils”: The Anatomy of
Melancholy, 734.
272
in an aura of melancholy. To add to recent work on how such humoral ambiguity is a site of
gender and power differentiation, I want to draw attention to the effect of humoral mind-body
relations on dramatic interiority and on the phenomenality of Renaissance conceit.
373
As is well
known, early modern medicine views melancholy as an imbalance of the body and a sickness of
the mind. Its effects, though diverse, are strongest on the imagination—the part of the intellect
that early moderns understood to produce mental images originally collected from the senses.
Yet it is not the case that melancholy simply infuses the imagination with false sense data.
Instead, melancholy affects the “frame” of the intellect, as Timothy Bright observes in A Treatise
of Melancholy: “when any conceit troubles you that has no sufficient ground of reason but rises
only upon the frame of your brain, which is subject . . . unto the humour, that is right
melancholy.” In other words, melancholy causes the imagination to misinterpret the intensity and
formation of sense and memory data.
For this reason, the most prevalent treatments for early modern melancholy are
behavioral proscriptions to avoid the kinds of experiences that disrupt the normal linear
processes of the mind. For the most part, early modern medical writers encourage victims of
melancholy to avoid certain kinds of non-linear discourses. For instance, Bright and Burton
differentiate between the kinds of discourse that exacerbate melancholy—those that are
“vehement, and of difficult matters, and the high misteries”—and the kinds of discourse that help
cure melancholy—that through “a certaine mediocritie” they “may unbend that stresse of the
minde.”
374
Bright calls the remedial discourses “soft” because they allow the mind to straighten
out, whereas harmful discourses are called “hard” because they weigh down and bend the
373
See Gail Paster, The Body Embarrassed; idem., Humoring the Body; Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves.
374
Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie. Containing the cavses thereof, & reasons of the strange effects
it worketh in our minds and bodies: with the physicke cure, and spirituall consolation for such as haue thereto
adioyned an afflicted conscience (London, 1586), 243-44. See also Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 358, 360.
273
mind.
375
As I will discuss, it is not mere coincidence that both early modern melancholy and
conceit induce psychological states that are described as “bent.” Two of the most dangerous
kinds of discourses for melancholics to engage are intense contemplation and imaginative
fantasy. In the world of Hamlet, we might also think of these two discourses as internal thought
and conceit. Notably, whereas modern culture dissociates fiction and intellectual rigor as two
virtually opposite types of discourse, early moderns grouped them together because they both
strain the imagination and bend the perceptual line of belief. Bent discourses of “vain conceit”
and “studie” cause perceived things to appear unlike they actually are and “turne the minde into a
contrarie bent.”
376
With this distinction in mind, as a melancholic, Hamlet makes all the wrong
decisions according to early modern medicine: he agonizes over the library of his brain, pretends
madness, and attends a play. If he really does suffer from melancholy, then he is exacerbating it
all the way, while, if his melancholy is pretended, then he is at least embracing its mode of
thought.
Theoretically, then, Hamlet’s exposure to bent discourses would worsen his melancholy
and by consequence cause his internal thought to become even less distinct. In a sense, this is
true, but “distinctness” of mental perspective is not easily defined in reference to melancholy. It
is not the case, namely, that in order to achieve clarity of mind one must simply retreat from the
carnality of the body. On the contrary, neglect of the body is often a cause of melancholy, and,
therefore, excessive inward thought can sicken the body and the mind along with it. Writings on
melancholy often warn against bent discourses that cause the mind to “travell” from the body.
377
This is because the early modern body was thought to have a limited quantity of vital “spirits” at
375
Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie, 242-45.
376
Ibid., 243, 255.
377
Ibid., 255.
274
any given time, and a healthy body is kept in balance by the mind through the mind’s application
of these spirits to the body and specifically by preventing the blood to thicken into a melancholic
viscosity. Thus, the advice often given to melancholics is to “abandon working of your braine by
any studie, or conceit: and give your mind to libertie of recreation, from such actions, that drawe
too much of the spirit, and therby wrong the corporall members of the bodie.”
378
Mental
activities involving imaginative conceit and “phantasie” are especially wasteful of the vital
spirits because they do not involve the body and because they are especially exclusive to the
brain.
379
Ultimately, the reason why fiction and contemplation adversely affect the mind is not
because they disentangle it from the corporeality of the body—a Neo-Platonist line—but,
instead, because they allow the bodily fluids to thicken too much, causing the melancholic body
to distort the frame of the brain. Bent discourses indirectly muddle the mind with the weight and
cloudiness of the melancholic body. In short, the relative straightness or bent of one’s thought
depends on the humoral balance of one’s body, and so, at least according to the early modern
medical thought that informed Shakespeare’s use of melancholy, clear inward thought can never
exist in a dualistic relation to the body.
The straight discourses that early modern medical treatises proscribe for melancholy
introduce another problematic binary between the kinds of discourses that straighten the mind
and the kinds that bend it. The suggestion is that straight discourses simply realign the brain
according to its natural frame; they are, in a sense, the “natural hue” of the mind. Defining these,
Burton writes:
Let him read no more such tracts or subjects, hear no more such fearful tones,
avoid such companies, and by all means open himself, submit himself to the
378
Ibid., 243.
379
Ibid., 255.
275
advice of good physicians and divines, which is contraventio scrupulorum, as he
calls it, hear them speak to whom the Lord hath given the tongue of the learned, to
be able to minister a word to him that is weary, whose words are as flagons of
wine.
380
Burton recommends that the melancholic spend time reading—or have read to him—the Bible or
divine authors whose ideas are familiar and direct. André du Laurens adds “Moral philosophy
and good books” to the list in order that they might “help us to amend and counterbalance the
imbalances due to the temperature and shape of the body.”
381
Significantly, these straight
discourses are chosen less for their content than for the mental disposition or frame that they
prompt in their audiences. The desired disposition is largely one of passivity and reception,
engaging the mind minimally so that it can spend more of its vital spirits on the body. Unlike
fiction and contemplation, straight discourses are thought to shape the mind into a kind of
passage for information so that true belief can be acquired without psychological distress. The
image invoked is that of a straight line of influence from the object of belief to the believer, as
when a pastor is “able to minister a word to” a melancholic. Falsehood and crookedness are
consequences of conceit.
The fact that falsehood and fiction are related in early modern medicine illuminates yet
another way in which Hamlet’s melancholy affects the audience’s experience of theatrical belief.
Distinct thought, according to straight discourses, is obviously fraught with ideology, identifying
certain kinds of experiences as natural to the brain and not others. Indistinct thought, similarly, is
indirect, defined by the mind’s having to interact with—and perhaps bend towards—its objects
380
Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 738-39.
381
André du Laurens, A Discovrse of the Preservation of the Sight: of Melancholike diseases; of Rheumes, and
of Old age, trans. Richard Surphlet (London, 1599), 83-84.
276
of belief rather than passively receiving them. In the background is a cultural anxiety about the
autonomy of the postlapsarian human intellect. The bent discourses of fictional conceit and
contemplation are like sin in that they are self-born. Like Hamlet’s remark about the player, bent
discourses cause the melancholic to “force his soul so to his own conceit.” Such self-conception
of thought is a topic of popular sixteenth-century anti-poetic sentiment. Iconoclasts of poetry
warned that “men’s inventions” merely reproduce the original sin that contaminates the fallen
mind.
382
An anonymously authored seventeenth-century treatise, relevantly titled Phantasticall
Conceitedness, depicts self-conceit of the fantasy as a fault of pride. Its language is
representative of many anti-poetic polemics: “When the mind of man doth not deny it self in all
humility before God, and is not guided and acted by the Spirit and light of God, but is wise and
cunning of it self, in it’s [sic] own power or strength of Reason, and the spirit of the world; then
is the same mind revolted from God, and goeth on in it’s own guidance and naturall wisdom, and
that is the Phantasie.”
383
Behind the division between straight and bent discourses, then, is a
theology of intellectual depravity wherein intensive concentration and fiction edge too close to
sin by their very lack of passivity and porousness.
Hamlet comes down aggressively against the ideological implications of this theology
when he reveals his suspicion of Rosencrantz’s duplicity and calls him “a sponge” (4.2.11).
Hamlet has figured out that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are acting on the king’s behalf rather
than out of sincere friendship. Rosencrantz, Hamlet says, “soaks up the King’s countenance, his
rewards, his authorities” (14-15). Even more to the point, Hamlet explains Rosencrantz’s willful
ignorance by the adage, “A knavish speech sleeps in a foolish ear” (21-22). It is worth thinking
382
Peter C. Herman, Squitter-wits and Muse-haters: Sidney, Spenser, Milton and Renaissance Anti-poetic
Sentiment (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1996), 38-43.
383
Anon. A Discovery of the Great Fantasie, or, Phantasticall Conceitednesse (London, 1642), A1v.
277
about how the political, physiological and phenomenological meanings of these accusations
intertwine. Politically speaking, Rosencrantz has become habituated to the king’s ideology.
Physiologically speaking, Rosencrantz cannot comprehend Hamlet’s intended meaning because
his process of mental conception breaks down at some point—perhaps in the ear’s chamber of
inbred air, as Hamlet suggests. And, phenomenologically speaking, Rosencrantz is unable to
engage objects of belief actively but can only passively receive them—that is, in a straight,
natural attitude. As John Sutton has explored, sponges signify activities of passive reception and
the storage of information in early modern England.
384
Sponge-likeness is, in a sense, the
politically acceptable alternative to the self-conceited idolatry that anti-poetic polemicists attack.
Rosencrantz has been conditioned by his political interactions with Claudius to understand
language in a certain sponge-like way, a way that might easily be confused with the objective
distinctness of thought implied by the proscription of straight discourses.
We can infer, then, that there is more behind Hamlet’s sharp disapproval of Rosencrantz
than a response to political danger. Rosencrantz’s way of believing things belittles the dense
complications of belief that delay Hamlet’s action. The supposition that believing is as easy as
filling a sponge threatens to depict Hamlet’s delayed execution of justice as trivial. It also
threatens to demean the dramatic medium of the play itself. As I have shown, the Hamlet’s very
thematic engagement of the topic of belief insists on externalizing thought and thinking through
discourses of amplificatio—bent discourses, like theater. Montaigne offers a sympathetic
perspective, writing that “Tis not perhaps without reason that we attribute facility of belief and
easiness of persuasion to simplicity and ignorance, for I have heard belief compared to an
impression stamped upon the soul, which, by how much softer and of less resistance it is, is the
384
John Sutton, “Spongy Brains and Material Memories,” in Environment and Embodiment in early modern
England, eds. M. Floyd-Wilson & G. Sullivan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 14-34.
278
more imposed.”
385
Montaigne’s expression of softness is very much like Timothy Bright’s. The
Renaissance mindset that shies away from conceit—similar to Hamlet’s—is the same mindset
that looks for a pure perspective of internal thought to neatly receive beliefs. As a melancholic—
real or pretended—Hamlet rejects any model of thought that is sponge-like. He maintains that
thought always thinks of something, and he is not afraid to allow the objects of his thought to
play upon his mind.
“When our deep plots do fall”: The End of Delay
From one angle, what emerges among this collection of texts on melancholy, theology, and
conceit is the pronouncement that imaginative discourses bend the mind and make the body
unhealthy. Shakespeare and Montaigne, from another angle, are slower to presume to know the
natural straightness of mental health. Moreover, the dominant sentiment in Hamlet seems to be
one that appreciates the constant interplay between intellectual subjectivity and the physical and
physiological grounds through which things are believed. In Cartesian terms, this kind of belief
is indistinct and externalized, and if distinct—i.e., unmixed, straight—belief in Hamlet is best
represented by Rosencrantz’s straight absorption of information, then it is easy to see why
interiority is a problem in the play. The problem of interiority undergoes a final development in
the last act of the play, where things change in Hamlet’s approach to belief and action. Here,
Hamlet fully leaves behind the dream of finding an isolated retreat from circumstance in the
mind and instead becomes impulsive, reacting to circumstances as he comes into contact with
them. Such impulsiveness can be read as an acting-out of the phenomenality previously
represented by the player’s conceit and by the imbalance of melancholy. Hamlet’s final actions
385
Michel de Montaigne, The Works of Michel de Montaigne, Comprising his Essays, Letters, and Journey
through Germany and Italy, 2
nd
ed., ed. William Hazlitt (London: C. Templeton, 1845), 76.
279
exhibit a bending of his faculties—a kind of detour from inward certainty and perfect clarity of
thought.
This change is made clear in what is, to my estimation, Hamlet’s first pronouncement that
he believes the Ghost. In Act Five, after reporting to Horatio his discovery of the plot against his
life and successful turning of the tables on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet answers
Horatio’s astounded exclamation, “what a king is this!” (5.2.61):
Does it not, think thee, stand me now upon?
He that hath killed my King and whored my mother,
Popped in between th’election and my hopes,
Thrown out his angle for my proper life
And with such cozenage. Is’t not perfect conscience?
(5.2.62-66)
I say that this is the first pronouncement of belief in the Ghost’s message, but the lines do not
express it in terms of belief. It is not framed in the epistemological language that Hamlet uses
during his first interaction with the Ghost, and the vocabulary does not grasp the King’s crime in
terms of subjectivity and certainty. Rather, Hamlet’s language is more like that of the visiting
player of Act Two. It is action-oriented and emotional. It is also ethical. Hamlet has an obligation
in “perfect conscience” to avenge the Ghost. His earlier musings on the order of the world, on his
body, and on death now appear to be thrown aside for the sake of his “cause,” a word used in
reference to the player and renewed here in the folio version in reference to Hamlet’s reason for
action.
386
386
See Arden appendix, Thompson and Taylor, 472.
280
In Act Five, Hamlet’s actions are not only action-oriented and ethical; they are also
impulsive. Whereas earlier in the play it is Hamlet’s delay that provides dramatic space for his
soliloquies, late in the play it is just the opposite: the continuum between perception and action
closes up the dramatic space for the kind of skeptical reflection that is detached from his
environment. Consider the fact that all of his violent actions are impulsive and reactionary—the
murder of Polonius, the deception of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, leaping into the grave after
Ophelia, and the stabbings of Laertes and Claudius. Each is a response to an immediate threat or
revelation. What happened to the theological problems associated with the Ghost? Moreover,
why does Shakespeare keep Hamlet from resolving the cloudiness of imagination that
accompanies melancholy? Many Renaissance discourses place a high priority on the requirement
for the kind of clarity of thought that Hamlet’s sidesteps. We have seen, for instance, that mental
health treatises proscribe “straight” discursive treatments to melancholics that aim to affix the
sufferer’s attention on didactic books. Additionally, early modern midwifery holds that healthy
conception depends on a woman having a “pure and clear” intellect so that “discontent” does not
distort conception through the blood to the womb.
387
Clarity of thought is also especially
important in matters of faith, relevant to Hamlet’s struggle to reconcile his Protestant religious
affiliation with the Catholic implications of the Ghost. For instance, Richard Hooker protests that
some Puritans depict salvation as too conditional on “knowledge only,” complaining that they
simply think too much about knowing whether one has salvation.
388
A pointed example of this
highly intellectual soteriology is William Perkins’ emphasis on being “ready for faith”:
First the knowledge which the reprobate hath concerning the kingdom of heauen,
is onelie a generall & confused knowledge: but the knowledge of the elect, is
387
Paster, The Body Embarrassed, 180-81.
388
Hooker, Works, 1:603.
281
pure, certaine, sure, distinct, and particular: for it is joined with a feeling and
inwarde experience of the thing knowne: though indeede the minde of man is able
to conceiue more than anie Christian heart can feele
389
Perkins asserts that there is a kind of knowledge that is “distinct” and “particular,” and it is this
kind of knowledge that characterizes the true Christian. An unintended consequence is the
obsession over what constitutes distinct knowledge of salvation.
390
What does it mean for
knowledge of salvation to be distinct, disconnected from all emotional and circumstantial
conditions? Does it mean imagining salvation in a distinct spot—or bookshelf—in the brain?
Does it mean writing it in a notebook so that its distinctness is expressed in written words,
perceptible to other senses? Or, does it mean acting sponge-like and declaring a certain frame of
mind to be its natural hue?
The Hamlet of Act Five prefers absolute indistinctness of belief insofar as indistinctness
precludes an intelligible distance between the believer and the object of belief. His actions and
his thoughts occur simultaneously, external to the mind. He has come to embrace the bent world
of the Renaissance conceit and of melancholy, and he has decided that inaction is the result of
pretended interiority. He calls this preference “rashness” in reference to his reaction to
Claudius’s attempt to kill him via Rosencrantz and Guildenstern:
Rashly—
And praised be rashness for it—let us know
Our indiscretion sometime serves us well
When our deep plots do fall—and that should learn us
389
William Perkins, A treatise tending vnto a declaration whether a man be in the estate of damnation or in the
estate of grace (London: 1590), 35. I have converted i’s to j’s where appropriate.
390
See John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious
Despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 27-30.
282
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.
(5.2.6-11)
These famous lines often serve to explain Hamlet’s change in behavior. The emphasis is usually
on Hamlet’s submission to providence, understanding him to acknowledge the total control of “a
divinity” in providing a way out of his predicament with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. While
this interpretation explains Hamlet’s sudden relaxed demeanor, there are lingering problems with
“deep plots.” What exactly are these? Hamlet earlier insinuates that he has a plan to avoid
Claudius’s “mandate” for Rosencrantz and Guildernstern to “marshal” him “to knavery”
(3.4.202-03). His riposte to this threat might be the “deep plots” he refers to in Act Five, but he
never actually says what his plan is. Alternatively, “deep plots” may refer corporately to the
plans made by every character in the play, from the original regicide, to the Mousetrap, making
sense of the first-person plural pronouns in these lines. Furthermore, these lines from Act Three
only exist in the second quarto version of the play. The folio’s rendition of the earlier passage,
contrariwise, explains Hamlet’s voyage to England as forced by his accidental murder of
Polonius, with no mention of a plot from Claudius or a counterplot from Hamlet. Thus, these
“deep plots” were an addition at some point and are perhaps more important for what they say
about Hamlet’s character than for how they clarify the plot.
Without a direct correlative for Hamlet’s “deep plots,” we could also explain the
reference by its epistemological significance. These “deep plots” are the opposite of
“indiscretion” and in this sense represent premeditation and reflection. In addition to a secret
mental plan, early modern definitions of “plot” often refer to physical spaces, ranges, and even
283
the mapping of space on paper.
391
Leontes in The Winter’s Tale uses the term “plot-proof” to
describe Polixenes being out of the reach of his mind, from the technical vocabulary of
gunnery—“the blank / And level of my brain.”
392
As part of his comment on unexpected
providence, Hamlet’s “deep plots” draw on the imagery of internal thoughts inhabiting a mental
space, alluding to his earlier images of the brain as a library, as a womb, as embodied in his
tables, and here as launching artillery from a safe distance. Whether one’s deep thoughts succeed
or “fall” is a matter of how well they are arranged in the map of the brain, how distinct such plots
are from other designs, and how surely their foundations are plotted in the ground.
393
Deep plots
are deep interior thoughts, imagined to examine life from a safe epistemological distance, and
Hamlet’s deep plots “fall.” Shakespeare even plays on the narrative meaning of “plot,” as Hamlet
compares the absence of his “deep plots” to acting without premeditation: “Or I could make a
prologue to my brains / They had begun the play” (5.2.30-31). Hamlet views himself as forced
into the action of the play. His mind is like a truncated script that is abridged of soliloquies.
In this light, Hamlet’s acceptance of divine control is completely unlike a theological or
philosophical conversion. Providence represents the traveling of Hamlet’s mind; he is aware of
himself only insofar as he is engaged in the world around him. Confronted with this abrupt
change in Hamlet’s attitude toward belief and action, we are invited to compare Hamlet’s delay
in the first four acts with his impulsiveness in Act Five. In this transition, we, the audience, are
never centered in a moment of self-realization or in a performance of empirical certainty. Hamlet
does not resolve the question of the Ghost or the many epistemological problems that accompany
391
Oxford English Dictionary, 3
rd
ed., s.v. “plot, n.”
392
William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, 3
rd
Series, ed. John Pitcher (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010),
2.3.5-6.
393
“fall”: the first folio has “paule” or pall, meaning fail. Thompson and Taylor use “fall” after the corrected
version of the second quarto. The differences do not seem to be significant.
284
his unnerving presence. Notably, prior to Hamlet’s return, interiority is a perspective towards
which characters stretch their minds, and Hamlet, in particular, seems to pick up every
epistemological instrument that he has—observing, reorganizing, dissecting, reading—in an
attempt to precede his action with clarity of thought, a kind of “prologue” to his “plots.” His
attitude in Act Five is quite the opposite. Besides his impulsiveness, Hamlet appears naively
curious and in no way skeptical or removed from his surroundings. This is apparent even when
he marvels at the unpremeditated circumstances of his escape from execution in England. It is
also apparent in his emotionally unprecedented competition of mourning with Laertes at
Ophelia’s gravesite, promising that he will “rant as well as thou” (5.1.273). Furthermore, in the
final fencing match, Hamlet seems to ignore completely the little apprehension that he still has—
“how ill all’s here about my heart”—and instead is almost unrealistically absorbed into the
competition (5.2.190-91). It is Hamlet who presses the action of the fight after each pause: “Give
us the foils,” “Come on, sir,” “I’ll play this bout first,” “Come for the third” (5.2.231, 57, 66, 80).
Thus, he rather literally plays out his proclamation that “readiness is all” (5.2.200). Recall
for a moment Chapter One and that King Henry targets his soldiers’ readiness rather than their
intellectual resolve. There, the motive of action turns out to be just the opposite of what we
expect: Henry vents his inward thoughts in the play’s central soliloquy, accusing “idol
ceremony” of duplicity, only to take full advantage of the same ceremonialism in his rousing St.
Crispin’s speech. These parallels between Henry V and Hamlet are remarkable. As in Henry V,
Shakespeare defies our expectation that Hamlet’s action will be preceded by philosophical
resolution. Neither royal figure ultimately reconciles his philosophical “cause” with his mode of
action. Moreover, the simultaneity of “ceremony making” in Henry’s St. Crispin’s speech—
asserting immanence as well as mediated ceremony—is reflected in Hamlet’s spontaneity, where
285
his actions respond to immediate outward circumstance rather than to “plots” premeditated in a
space of interiority. We might suppose in the beginning of the play that if Hamlet is ever going
to take his revenge, then of course we expect him to do so as the champion of interiority and as
the master of perception. What in fact happens is that Hamlet successfully takes action by giving
up on interiority. He throws up his hands, in a sense, and concedes that indiscretion is what he
needed all along.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have aimed to show how Hamlet can be read as a study of conflicts between
belief and the conditions of belief. The conditions of belief complicate Hamlet’s several attempts
at interiority and ultimately catch up with him. A subsidiary argument I have made is that
Hamlet’s epistemological efforts do not culminate in a celebration of interiority. Rather, his
experience of the internal mind goes only as deep as his contact with the world allows—what I
have alternatively described as exteriority. Taking into account his attitude in Act Five, Hamlet’s
epistemological struggles culminate in a celebration of exteriority in which he allows his
circumstances and experiences to shape his actions without the mediation of internal thought,
even to the extreme. Finally, this chapter contributes to an outline of Renaissance literary
phenomenology, using Hamlet as its illustration, which derives in part from Renaissance
fiction’s relation to rhetorical elocutio. Renaissance “conceit,” similar to early modern notions of
melancholy, is a bent way of thinking and believing. Elizabethan drama, insofar as it derives
from the phenomenality of conceit, embraces indistinctness of belief and is far off-course from
Descartes’s requirement of clear and distinct knowledge for certain action. Just as the thematic
content of the play is given as a conceit—pregnant with meaning and essentially indistinct from
286
its conditions—so is Hamlet’s pursuit of belief characterized by various experiments with
conceiving.
287
CONCLUSION
THE IMMANENT, THE POPULAR, THE INTERIOR
In this dissertation I have sought to demonstrate new ways that Renaissance performances
facilitated belief. My presupposition has been that the activities of believing in the sacred and of
playing audience to a performance of the sacred were interwoven with each other. Belief, as a
Renaissance concept, is pervasive and nebulous, as are the applications of “ceremony” and
“conceit.” Far from emptying the audience of their capacity for belief, plays and other
performances of the sacred attach religious significance to myriad aspects of performance by
virtue of their mutual complicity in the perceptual attitudes of believing. I have described how
five kinds of audience and character engagement—ceremonial, immanent, environmental,
conventional, and external—constitute the perceptual grounds of belief of the sacred and the
performative alike. In these ways, the connections between Renaissance performance and
religion are less in the vein of knowledge—how the sacred is confirmed or subverted, justified or
evacuated—than by way of audience attitude and dramatic experiment. We have seen, for
instance, that Henry V draws on the topical religious valences of ceremony and thus challenges
audiences to consider their own presence at the playhouse as a ceremonial activity. Similarly, the
Chester Mystery Cycle subjects its biblical content to the perceptual limitations of its audience,
elevating its props and spectacles as objects of immanent faith. Donne’s sermons illustrate that
belief extends far beyond the content of a sermon into its environment and into the perceptual
attitudes of its auditors. While, performed in more improvised settings, the godly ballads of
Renaissance England build their popular conditions into a unique brand of performative piety.
And lastly, Hamlet offers an opportunity to look in-depth at the psychology of performative
288
belief, where fictive thinking suggests an alternative to its characters’ failed attempts at
interiority.
One primary goal of this study was to bring Shakespeare into conversation with neglected
performance genres in order to find new connections between performativity and belief in a
broad spectrum. So on the one hand I have attempted to illuminate the religious imperatives of
performances that are often considered secular or popular; while on the other hand I have
described how overtly religious performances cull from their worldly environments to conduct
an experience of the sacred. For these reasons, this dissertation does not fit neatly within the
“turn” towards religion in early modern studies because it is not primarily about religion—
particularly as represented in allegory, allusion, and theology—but it does relate to aspects of
this recent “turn” that seek to expand what counts as belief to include the phenomenality of
drama and devotion. Centrally, belief includes the first-person experience of the sacred as it is
presented, mediated, and conditioned in performances as well as in their conspicuous marks of
performativity. Moreover, because believing in the sacred in Renaissance performance does not
require having justified knowledge about it, some objects of performative belief are not at all
categorically religious—King Hal’s borrowed cloak, the absence of God in Chester’s “The Fall
of Lucifer,” the ornate lancet arches that draw the attention of St. Paul’s sermongoers, a ballad-
monger’s commercial motives for singing godly ballads, and the bent perceptual habits of
Hamlet’s melancholy—but they affect belief all the same.
As an entry point for studying performance, religion, and their intersections, belief opens
the scene to the grounds of performativity and audience attention that are present—but often
inarticulate—in popular performances. In shifting focus from religion in theater to belief in
289
performance, several themes have emerged as recurrent in the phenomenality of the sacred in
performance.
One such theme is immanence. Immanence in Renaissance theater has been explored by
Michael Witmore who locates whole metaphysical identities in the parts of their dramaturgical
production.
394
Drawing on this phenomenological understanding of the transcendent, I have
found that popular Renaissance performances of the sacred heighten the importance of
perception, attributing transcendent meaning to how audiences position and identify themselves
in the performance environment in front of the spectacles being performed. The individual
perspectives, bodies, props, spaces, motives, sensations, and devices of a performance contain in
them a conception of the whole performance—an implied collaborative relation to each of the
other parts and an implied disposition towards the whole, and when the performance touches on
something sacred, each part implies a sense of the whole object of sacred belief—its relations
and default attitudes. So it is that Renaissance performances do not merely defer to religious
institutions and texts outside themselves, not simply representing the sacred, but they also
present themselves as objects of immanent belief. As in the Chester Cycle, performances
sometimes continuously link the mundane to the transcendent, and as in early modern sermons,
popular performances sometimes rely on their distractions and environmental marginalia for
constructing a sense of transcendent meaning.
Another recurrent theme is that of popular belief. Popular culture, of course, is a gigantic
analytical category, but I’ve attempted to describe aspects of the popular that are specific to the
intersections of popular belief and popular performance. Speaking about broadsides and
chapbooks, Tessa Watt helpfully reminds us that popular religion is neither homogenous nor
394
See Witmore, Shakespeare’s Metaphysics, 14.
290
directed toward a single social group but is perhaps better qualified as a kind of “mosaic made up
of changing and often contradictory fragments.”
395
In a performance of religion, or even in a
performance that hints towards religion, popular belief is characterized by special attention to
these fragments—to the speaker conventions and performative periphery of sung ballads and to
the ciphers that comprise Shakespeare’s wooden-O and its inhabitants. Popular belief describes
much more than social status. It describes the ground level of a performance in the composition
of its audience and in the space that holds it; it begins at the level of touch, sight, and sound and
works its way to an audience member’s spatial and psychological self-identity within a theater,
cathedral, or street. Saliently, Caroline Walker Bynum has argued that late-medieval devotion
was preoccupied with certain objects and symbols—specifically, Christ’s blood and body—more
than with theology because divine objects offer a more immanent point of access to devotees.
396
Likewise, in Reformation England, legislation on eucharistic belief centered not on the
metaphysics that affirmed or undermined doctrines like transubstantiation but on how subjects
conceived of the host’s visceral status as elevated on the altar, held in the hand, ingested, or
discovered by mice. There is an affinity between the materiality of religion and the popular
performance of religion: namely, that orthodoxy, heterodoxy, and theology are not as relevant to
popular piety in performance as are access, recognition, and presence. As is the case in changing
eucharistic views, I have aimed to show that a focus on audience sensation and perspectival
engagement is just as critical to popular religion in performance as is social class.
A third prominent theme of these five chapters has been that of interiority and how it
predicates authenticity. We have seen this most obviously in Hamlet but also in Henry V: in the
395
Watt, Cheap Print, 3.
396
Caroline Bynum Walker, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany
and Beyond (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2007).
291
king’s conflicted soliloquy and subsequent appropriation of ceremonial rhetoric. Largely because
of its conspicuous reliance on the physical and psychological conditions of theater,
Shakespearean drama registers character interiority as problematic for belief and in its place
proffers a model for belief—embodied by both Hamlet and King Henry—that embraces the
mediated, perceptual, and, in a word, performative qualities of religiously inspired narrative
themes. Other examples of the problem of interiority include, in the Chester Cycle, the distortion
of immanent perspective illustrated in Lucifer’s misperception that God is not watching him; the
ways that Donne’s sermongoers attribute significance to the marginalia of the sermon
environment in order to focus attention on the heart of the sermon; and the frequent fusions of
character and balladeer, fictional audience and actual audience, that occur in godly ballad
performances. Each instance counters the assumption that Protestant religion always demanded
recourse to a moment of inner, isolated conversion in order to be authentic.
As is the case in each of these themes, performativity is a key concept for understanding
the grounds of belief in popular performance. Performativity is a conspicuous presence,
something present as presented. In a non-performative context, such conspicuous displaying of
religion would discourage belief because of its duplicity.
397
Yet I suggest that the conspicuous
appearance of the sacred in Renaissance performance does not have the same effect. Belief in
Renaissance England not only survived the transparency of performed religion but even absorbed
its performative strategies—its ceremony, immanence, environments, conventions, and
exteriority.
397
An example would be the demonstrations of demon exorcism discussed by Greenblatt in Shakespearean
Negotiations, 94-128.
292
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Abstract (if available)
Abstract
""Stage, Cathedral, Wagon, Street: The Grounds of Belief in Shakespeare and Renaissance Performance"" expands what counts as belief in historical performance. It explores how belief sounded, looked, and felt to audiences in Renaissance England. To this extent, my dissertation suggests a radical reorientation of the study of drama and religion. Most scholars study performed religion primarily in terms of how it was “represented” on stage: signified by certain verbal and visual images and decoded, in effect, by audiences. This approach has produced insightful material histories of religion but is limited both by its focus on allusion—re-presentation—and because it recognizes belief primarily where it can be corroborated by comparison to more conventional sites of religion, such as the church and established religious texts. I argue that belief existed at more basic experiential levels, in the perceptual habits of audiences, in the environmental “grounds” of the performance venue, and in what are often considered the mundane and marginal aspects of the playgoing experience—such as ambient distractions, acoustics, dramaturgical transparency, and even admission fees. The result is a depiction of communal belief that collaborated with its performative media. In essence, by studying the phenomenal conditions of historical performance through its props, spaces, and bodies, I am expanding belief beyond the confines of religion and into activities that were fundamental to attending a performance in Renaissance England.
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Smith, Matthew J.
(author)
Core Title
Stage, cathedral, wagon, street: the grounds of belief in Shakespeare and Renaissance performance
School
College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
English
Publication Date
09/13/2012
Defense Date
08/20/2012
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
ambience,ballad,Belief,Body,broadside,ceremony,Chester,christianity,Conceit,corpus Christi play,cycle play,Drama,dramaturgy,environment,epistemology,Hamlet,Henry V,John Donne,mystery play,OAI-PMH Harvest,Pageant,Performance,phenomenology,Philip Massinger,popular culture,popular piety,Religion,senses,sermon,Shakespeare,stage,Theater
Language
English
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Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
Smith, Bruce R. (
committee chair
), Albertson, David C. (
committee member
), James, Heather (
committee member
), Lemon, Rebecca (
committee member
), Rollo, David (
committee member
)
Creator Email
matthew@matthewjsmith.net
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-97913
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UC11289128
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etd-SmithMatth-1197.pdf
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97913
Document Type
Dissertation
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Smith, Matthew J.
Type
texts
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University of Southern California
(contributing entity),
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
(collection)
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The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...
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Tags
ambience
ballad
broadside
corpus Christi play
cycle play
dramaturgy
environment
epistemology
Hamlet
Henry V
John Donne
mystery play
phenomenology
Philip Massinger
popular culture
popular piety
senses
sermon
stage