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The libretto of this Morality is a free adaptation of John Bunyan's allegory. The text is chiefly from Bunyan, with additions from the Psalms and other parts of the Bible. The words of Lord Lechery's song in Act Three are by Ursula Wood. For stage purposes a good deal of adaptation and simplification of the original has been necessary: thus, The Pilgrim's Progress's early domestic happiness has been omitted; his two companions, Faithful and Hopeful, do not appear; there are only three Shepherds; and Mr By-Ends has been provided with a wife. For this purpose the libretto has utilized the escape, described later, from Doubting Castle. Incidentally, the name Pilgrim is used throughout the libretto as being of more universal significance than Bunyan's title.

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to explore the similar forms, themes, and functions that tend to recur in the prison writing of European intellectuals. The book juxtaposes different pairs of writers across national and period boundaries, from late antiquity to the late twentieth century. Although the experience of different centuries and regimes varies greatly and there is no single category of space implied—all the subjects of this book suffered involuntary confinement in different conditions—being a prisoner or captive in any period means being cut off and kept apart from the continuities of normal life, however that was defined. Many of these prisoners remain well known—Boethius, Thomas More, John Bunyan, Marie-Jeanne Roland, Oscar Wilde, Antonio Gramsci, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Anne Frank, and Primo Levi. Yet their different kinds of writing in captivity have never been read alongside each other so closely and extensively as specific responses to their various kinds of imprisonment.

This chapter presents a reading of John Bunyan's Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666) and Oscar Wilde's De Profundis (1897). In both texts, the recording consciousness of a prisoner explains the reasons for his imprisonment; the narrative is therefore restricted to events and interactions that changed the author's past life and created his literary persona's new responses to them: self-knowledge. The protagonist of each narrative is thus a doubly displaced persona—not only a literary construct but also a shadow from the past—and no longer a separate consciousness except insofar as this is represented by the converted prison writer's quotations of his reprobate self's speech or thoughts. The memorial testimony of the prisoner connotes the experiences of his narrative's shadowy protagonist but specifies different perceptions of these experiences. In this way, each prisoner offers his recollections of personal memories as expert interpretations of historic actions, and description or analysis is coupled with dramatic dialogue.

Highlights the critical approach taken in ‘graceful reading’, in revising our understanding of Bunyan’s Calvinist theology and in pursuing a reader-response approach to his writings, especially in relation to Stanley Fish’s work. The study also identifies similarities between postmodernist fictive strategies, as discussed by Brian McHale and Bunyan’s narrative style.

Though John Bunyan maintained a critical distance from what he took to be a conventionalized story form, his Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners became the paradigmatic Protestant conversion narrative. Further, its deep epistemological uncertainty gives it an important place in the history of differentiation between human and divine authorities. But Grace Abounding is seldom studied for an understanding of the relations between individual and communal identities. This chapter studies Bunyan as a member of a specific community in formation and under duress. With John Gifford, the chapter illustrates the communal investments in an exemplary life. With Agnes Beaumont and John Child, it details the prices exacted for deviations from that model. With the bookseller Francis Smith, it examines arguments for the liberty of conscience and resistance to the Clarendon Code.

This chapter shows what happened to the analogy between England and Israel after the Restoration. Cowley and others greeted Charles II as David and invoked the idea of Israel's redemption. The Church of England was reconstructed, symbol of unity in English Israel. But the reestablished Church was an instrument of division in the nation, persecuting nonconformists like Bunyan and the Quakers, who insisted that the persecuted people of God were the true Israel. Milton and Dryden represent alternative attitudes toward a nation claiming to be Israel. Suggestive of the complex English attitudes toward Jews, Milton as Hebraic prophet demonized nation–building, detaching Israel from the English nation and from Jewish Israel in his Restoration poems. Dryden, England's poet laureate, appropriated Isaiah's prophecies for England and used the biblical Absalom's rebellion to reaffirm Charles II's Davidic authority and the Israelite status of the nation. Some of the material on Milton here appeared in an earlier form in ‘England, Israel, and the Jews in Milton's prose, 1649–1660,’ in Milton and the Jews, ed. Douglas A. Brooks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 13-34; and ‘“The Jewish Question” and “the Woman Question” in Samson Agonistes: Gender, Religion, and Nation,’ in Milton and Gender, ed. Catherine Gimelli Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 184-203, both reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press.

In the Middle Ages, the structural organization of a narrative in terms of a journey took two forms — romance quest and spiritual pilgrimage — that became increasingly hard to separate. The exemplary power of the quest and its formulation of a desire to challenge the unknown helped to inspire the exploration of the New World. It flourished even after the Reformation in allegorical and Calvinist renderings (including Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress). The chapter also studies the landscapes of desire and fear in quest romances, and their structure: a return journey opens up possibilities for symmetrical patterning, in which the second half comments on the first. A one-way journey is likely to lead to death, with God providing the key to narrative meaning.

Chapter 2 begins to establish the argument about white men and their magic. It focuses on Equiano’s beginning effort to figure himself as “stranger” or outsider who looks at the white dominant world and offers his readers new critical and startling insights into it, including magic as its foundation and framing logic.

Martha Lynn Russell’s chapter focuses on another religious road of the early modern period: John Bunyan’s road to the Celestial City in The Pilgrim’s ProgressPart I. Instead of viewing this road as merely allegorical, this chapter argues that Bunyan’s road, from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, also follows a literal journey - of the topography and spatial grammars of England’s Great North Road. Russell considers three cultural conceptions of early modern road infrastructure – transportation, drainage, and fairs – alongside Bunyan’s political and Anabaptist theology and contemporary government roads policy. The Pilgrim’s Progress directly rejects tolls at gates, and the unfixable Slough of Despond reflects England’s unfixable wetlands and correlates there with Anabaptist understandings of salvation and doubt. Furthermore, Vanity Fair parodies fairs of the time to demonstrate the belief that Christians must experience alienation before entering the Celestial City. Contextualising it alongside roads, drainage, and fair systems is crucial to this chapter’s understanding of Bunyan’s unique religious and political vision.

Of the six pamphlets Milton wrote between 1659 and the Restoration in May 1660, five contain suggestions for law reform and a better arrangement of England’s courts: A Letter to a Friend, Proposalls of Certaine Expedients, the document known as A Letter to General Monck, and both editions of A Readie and Easie Way. In all of these, Milton advocates for a decentralized model of legal authority, one in which local communities assume more of the work of making and applying laws in response to local needs; his vision resists the centralizing, standardizing drift of the common law. This chapter also traces Milton’s changing ideas about the jury. Earlier, he saw the lay jury as an emblem of the English people’s powers of discernment and self-government. However, as the English turned toward monarchy, Milton’s views darkened, and in these treatises, he seems to incline toward a civilian model in which verdicts were given by judges. This chapter concludes by contrasting Milton’s ideal of a jury-less courtroom with the trial that his contemporary John Bunyan received.

The life and writings of John Bunyan (1628–1688) follow the contours of the Civil War, Restoration, and Glorious Revolution that shaped England during the seventeenth century. When compared to such contemporaries as John Milton, Samuel Pepys, or Andrew Marvell, however, Bunyan is remarkably silent about the events of those tumultuous years. This book examines the question of Bunyan's “political progress” and the tensions that have surrounded him since he first began to preach and write. It looks at T. S. Eliot's theory of the “dissociation of sensibility” as a watershed of the modern experience, linking that experience of dissociation to the oedipal victory enacted by Parliament in its violation of the primal taboo against regicide. The book also challenges the notion that there was a collective trauma suffered by England following the execution of Charles I. Other topics addressed by the book include religious pluralism and intolerance, rebellion against authority, the temptation to tyranny, the gendering of dissent and the dissent from gendered imperatives, and the impact of cultural change on the experience of national subjects.

This chapter examines John Bunyan's role in the national cataclysm of civil war. Drawing upon Erik Erikson's psychobiography of Martin Luther, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History, it analyzes Bunyan's early years and how the regicide resonates with the young Bunyan's “masterless” state. As a young man, Bunyan served in Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army during the period when Charles I was captured and beheaded by parliamentary forces. The chapter argues that Bunyan's military service acted ironically as a moratorium from the deviancy of his youth and that the regimentation of army life provided him with the external discipline which enabled him to maintain his psychic structure. It also focuses on Bunyan's young manhood, recognizing the importance of his participation in the English Revolution; his “acting-out,” which he calls his “profligacy,” upon his discharge from the military and his return to Elstow; and the meanings of his various religious adventures and attractions before he met the Bedford women and the Bedford pastor, John Gifford.

This chapter argues that John Bunyan's relations to women, and theirs to him, are far more historically, artistically, and psychologically complex than most previous critics have suggested. Drawing on seventeenth-century women's literary history, it reexamines Bunyan's place in the gender politics of the early modern landscape and demonstrates that critics have curiously colluded with Bunyan himself in averting their gaze from the powerful feminine figures that populate his writings. The chapter looks at the controversies surrounding a woman named Margaret Pryor, who was accused of witchcraft after having been turned into a bay mare. This reported incident, along with the scandal of church member Agnes Beaumont riding behind him on horseback, illustrates the historical reality of the women found in Bunyan's writings but who are often considered mere footnotes in critical discussions. Bunyan's writings seem to reveal complex characterizations of femininity.