Brian Walsh
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- April 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198754435
- eISBN:
- 9780191816109
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198754435.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies, Drama
Unsettled Toleration: Religious Difference on the Shakespearean Stage, historicizes and scrutinizes the unstable concept of toleration as it emerges in drama performed on the Elizabethan and Jacobean ...
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Unsettled Toleration: Religious Difference on the Shakespearean Stage, historicizes and scrutinizes the unstable concept of toleration as it emerges in drama performed on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stages. This book examines plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries that represent intra-Christian conflict between mainstream believers and various minorities. It analyzes in them the sometimes explicit, sometimes indirect, occasionally smooth, but more often halting and equivocal forms of dealing with difference that these plays imagine can result from such exchanges. Through innovative and in some cases unprecedented readings of a diverse collection of plays, from Chapman’s An Humorous Day’s Mirth, Middleton’s The Puritan Widow, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, and Pericles, and Rowley’s When You See Me You Know Me, the book shows how the English stage in the first decade of the seventeenth century, as a social barometer, registered the basic condition of religious “unsettlement” of the post-Reformation era; and concurrently that the stage, as a social incubator, brooded over imagined scenarios of confessional conflict that could end variously in irresolution, accommodation, or even religious syncretism. It thus helped to create, sustain, and enlarge an open-ended public conversation on the vicissitudes of getting along in a sectarian world. Attending to this conversation is vital to our present understanding of the state of religious toleration in the early modern period, for it gives a fuller picture of the ways religious difference was experienced than the limited and inert pronouncements on the topic that officials of the church and state offered.Less
Unsettled Toleration: Religious Difference on the Shakespearean Stage, historicizes and scrutinizes the unstable concept of toleration as it emerges in drama performed on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stages. This book examines plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries that represent intra-Christian conflict between mainstream believers and various minorities. It analyzes in them the sometimes explicit, sometimes indirect, occasionally smooth, but more often halting and equivocal forms of dealing with difference that these plays imagine can result from such exchanges. Through innovative and in some cases unprecedented readings of a diverse collection of plays, from Chapman’s An Humorous Day’s Mirth, Middleton’s The Puritan Widow, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, and Pericles, and Rowley’s When You See Me You Know Me, the book shows how the English stage in the first decade of the seventeenth century, as a social barometer, registered the basic condition of religious “unsettlement” of the post-Reformation era; and concurrently that the stage, as a social incubator, brooded over imagined scenarios of confessional conflict that could end variously in irresolution, accommodation, or even religious syncretism. It thus helped to create, sustain, and enlarge an open-ended public conversation on the vicissitudes of getting along in a sectarian world. Attending to this conversation is vital to our present understanding of the state of religious toleration in the early modern period, for it gives a fuller picture of the ways religious difference was experienced than the limited and inert pronouncements on the topic that officials of the church and state offered.
Brian Walsh
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- April 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198754435
- eISBN:
- 9780191816109
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198754435.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies, Drama
Samuel Rowley’s When You See Me You Know Me represents the coming of the Reformation and the tumult of religious pluralism under Henry VIII. Catholic churchmen line up against emergent Protestants, ...
More
Samuel Rowley’s When You See Me You Know Me represents the coming of the Reformation and the tumult of religious pluralism under Henry VIII. Catholic churchmen line up against emergent Protestants, and in these confrontations the name Martin Luther and versions of the label “Lutheran” are articulated with unprecedented and unmatched frequency in early modern drama. “Lutheran” as a designation for a set of practices and for a particular religious identity had mutated and accrued a new set of meanings in English religious discourse over the course of the seventeenth century, many of which negatively emphasized Lutherans as quasi-Papists rather than the taproot of the Reformation. When You See Me reminds audiences of the Lutheran origins of the English Reformation and, by emphasizing the commonalities between Henrician-era Lutheranism and Jacobean English Protestantism, refutes the negative associations with Luther’s legacy within the English Church.Less
Samuel Rowley’s When You See Me You Know Me represents the coming of the Reformation and the tumult of religious pluralism under Henry VIII. Catholic churchmen line up against emergent Protestants, and in these confrontations the name Martin Luther and versions of the label “Lutheran” are articulated with unprecedented and unmatched frequency in early modern drama. “Lutheran” as a designation for a set of practices and for a particular religious identity had mutated and accrued a new set of meanings in English religious discourse over the course of the seventeenth century, many of which negatively emphasized Lutherans as quasi-Papists rather than the taproot of the Reformation. When You See Me reminds audiences of the Lutheran origins of the English Reformation and, by emphasizing the commonalities between Henrician-era Lutheranism and Jacobean English Protestantism, refutes the negative associations with Luther’s legacy within the English Church.
