Protestantism and Drama in Early Modern England

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Prot es ta n t ism a n d Drama i n E arly Moder n E ngla n d

Containing detailed readings of plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe and Middleton, as well as poetry and prose, this book provides a major historical and critical reassessment of the relationship between early modern Protestantism and drama. Examining the complex and painful shift from late medieval religious culture to a society dominated by the ideas of the Reformers, Adrian Streete presents a fresh understanding of Reformed theology and the representation of early modern subjectivity. Through close analysis of major thinkers such as Augustine, William of Ockham, Erasmus, Luther and Calvin, the book argues for the profoundly Christological focus of Reformed theology and explores how this manifests itself in early modern drama. Moving beyond questions of authorial ‘belief ’, Streete assesses Elizabethan and Jacobean drama’s engagement with the challenges of the Reformation. Adrian Streete is Lecturer in English at Queen’s University, Belfast. His research focuses on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, poetry and prose, and his previous publications include Re-Figuring Mimesis: Representation in Early Modern Literature (co-editor, with Jonathan Holmes, 2005) and articles in journals such as the Review of English Studies, Textual Practice, Shakespeare and Literature and History.

Prot es ta n t ism a n d Drama i n E arly Moder n E ngla n d Adrian Streete

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521760171 © Adrian Streete 2009 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2009 ISBN-13

978-0-511-64176-3

eBook (NetLibrary)

ISBN-13

978-0-521-76017-1

Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For my parents, with love

Contents

Acknowledgements page viii Introduction 1 part i

31

1 Christ, subjectivity and representation in early modern discourse

33

2 Locating the subject: Erasmus and Luther

58

3 Representing the subject: Calvin, Christ and identity

80

4 Perception and fantasy in early modern Protestant discourse

110

part ii

127

5 Anti-drama, anti-church: debating the early modern theatre

129

6 Consummatum est: Calvinist exegesis, mimesis and Doctor Faustus

140

7 Shakespeare on Golgotha: political typology in Richard II

162

8 Mimesis, resistance and iconoclasm: resituating The Revenger’s Tragedy

200

Afterword 219 Notes 223 Bibliography 267 Index 285 vii

Acknowledgements

There is a wonderful book by Bill Duncan called The Wee Book of Calvin: Air-Kissing in the North-East. It is a parody of those small texts that are found in self-help sections or in card shops and that promise calmness, confidence, or whatever. But it is much more astringent, sceptical and canny than those mass-produced placebos, offering a beautifully written interchange of aphorisms and short essays on the Calvinist heritage of north-east Scotland, while also conveying a grudging respect for that tradition. In the final section, ‘Are You a Calvinist?’, Duncan writes this: ‘You shiver with a sudden thrill when, after days of the sun’s grinding dazzle, the trembling static of blue sky and the distant blur of altocumulus, a car passes the open window, its tyres hissing across the dusk as you turn from your book to the silent billow of the curtain rising like a ghost as you close your eyes and inhale the scent of rain.’ I am not a Calvinist; I am not even religious. But I think I understand this. Duncan also observes: ‘Your favourite confectionary product is “Fisherman’s Friend – Extra Strong”’. For those friends and family who know of my devotion to the Calvinist sweetie par excellence, this too might go some way to explaining my fascination with this complex religion, its adherents and opponents. And although this present book has taken much longer to complete than it should have, as Duncan wisely notes: ‘If it didnae hurt it wiznae worth daein.’ I have given shorter versions of various chapters at conferences, symposia and seminars in Stirling, Manchester, Stratford-upon-Avon, Belfast and New Orleans and I am grateful to the comments and suggestions made at each by colleagues and students. Thanks to staff at the National Library of Scotland, New College Library, Edinburgh University Library, University of Stirling Library and the Queen’s University of Belfast Library for assistance and help. A section of Chapter 1 and most of Chapter 5 was published in an earlier version as ‘“Reforming Signs”: Semiotics, Calvinism and Clothing in Sixteenth Century England’, Literature and History, 12, viii

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1, 2003. A version of Chapter 6 appeared as ‘Consummatum est’: Calvinist Exegesis, Mimesis and Doctor Faustus’, Literature and Theology, 15, 2, 2001. And a version of Chapter 8 was published as ‘Mimesis, Iconoclasm and Resistance: Resituating The Revenger’s Tragedy’, in Jonathan Holmes and Adrian Streete, eds., Re-Figuring Mimesis: Representation in Early Modern Literature (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2005). I am grateful to the editors and publishers of each for permission to reproduce material here. It is good at last to be able to thank those who have helped to make this book better than it might otherwise have been. I began work on it at the University of Stirling, and I am grateful to a number of people there, past and present, including Vance Adair, Fiona Chalamanda, Martin Davies, Neil Keeble, David Reid, Angela Smith and Robin Sowerby. Further afield, thanks to Richard Dutton, Jonathan Holmes, Paul Innes, Chris Insole, John Joughin and James Knowles. At Queen’s University, Belfast I have been uniquely fortunate in my colleagues and friends. I particularly want to thank Fran Brearton, David Dwan, Ian Green, Nigel Harkness, Eamonn Hughes, Debbie Lisle, Edna Longley, Hugh Magennis, Michael McAteer, Andrew Pepper, Shaun Regan, Emma Rhatigan, Paul Simpson and Caroline Sumpter for discussions, suggestions, promptings, provocations, and for their support in so many ways. I have learned much from my undergraduates at Queen’s, as well as the talented group of graduate students with whom I am fortunate enough to work. I am also grateful to the Queen’s Publications Fund for an extremely helpful grant. However, my greatest debt at Queen’s is to two people in particular. Ramona Wray read sections of the manuscript and Mark Burnett read it in its entirety. Their acute and generous eyes have saved me from many infelicities. Much more importantly, their belief in me and in this project has been unwavering: I am proud to call them both friends. Many of the ideas contained here were first formulated in embryonic form in a thesis written under the supervision of John Drakakis at the University of Stirling, funded by a SAAS Major Scottish Studentship for which I am grateful. John has commented on the manuscript of this book in typically rigorous fashion. I owe much to his academic example and I value his friendship. I would also like to thank Alan Sinfield for taking an interest in my work and for commenting so generously on it: his pioneering work on early modern Protestantism remains foundational for all that follow. My thanks are due to Sarah Stanton and Rebecca Jones at Cambridge University Press for being exemplary editors and for guiding a

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relative novice through an occasionally daunting process. And I am grateful to the anonymous reports of two very helpful press readers, many of whose suggestions I have incorporated. Naturally, any errors or idiocies are my own. Thanks to my friends Douglas Anderson, Cathy Dearden, Richard Purden and Paul Innes. Particular thanks to Glenn Preston, who has eaten, drank, laughed and supported me when things were good and bad. I also remember here with affection another dear friend, Stephen Ross, who died far too young. Like anyone in my position, I would not have been able to get to this point without the love and support of my family: Mhari Doyle, Willi McLeish, Ian McLeish, Freddie Streete Snr. and Mary Streete have all aided and abetted. I would like to think that my late Great-Grandfather, William Law, and my late Grandmother, Morag Berry, might have approved of what follows. Although it is easy to idealise those who matter to us, both were remarkable people who understood the power of religion all too well, and whom I miss very much. My greatest debt is recorded in the dedication to my parents, Ann and Gerry Streete, whose love and support means everything to me. To Rachel, Emily and Leah much love. And to Theresa: ‘veo en tua vida todo lo vivente’.

Introduction

O that thou shouldst give dust a tongue/ To crie to thee/ And then not heare it crying!

(George Herbert)

One could say that  Martin Luther was the first great antihumanist: modern  subjectivity is announced not in the Renaissance humanist celebration of man as the ‘crown of creation’, that is, in the tradition of Erasmus and others (to whom Luther cannot but appear as a ‘barbarian’), but, rather, in Luther’s famous statement that man is the excrement that fell out of God’s anus. Modern subjectivity has nothing to do with the notion of man as the highest creature in the ‘Great Chain of Being’, as the final point of the evolution of the universe: modern subjectivity emerges when the subject perceives himself as ‘out of joint’, as excluded from the ‘order of things’, from the positive order of entities (Slavoj Žižek).1 I

In a book called The Christians Apparelling By Christ published in 1625, the Protestant writer Robert Jenison offers this interesting piece of advice to his readers: ‘know, that the thing which laies hold of Christ, applies and puts him on, is Faith, and not feeling, and that therefore thou mayest hold him fast enough though thou feelest him not’.2 Immediately noticeable here is the dichotomy between faith and feeling. Indeed, for Jenison, to have faith in Christ is not to feel him at all. To modern ears this may sound like a strange sentiment, perhaps even a paradoxical one: is it possible to have faith without feeling? How might we ‘put on’ Christ, represent him in mimetic terms, without subjectively ‘feeling’  him?  These questions go to the heart of what this book is about, namely the relationship between early modern Protestantism, subjectivity and the representative practices of early modern drama. As the Bible makes clear, mankind is made in the image of God: ‘God created the man in his 1

2

Introduction

image.’3 In the West, this idea has often been expressed as the  ‘imitation of Christ’ or imitatio Christi and it is a crucial ontological starting point for all Christian thought.4  From its historical and philosophical inception, Christianity posits a relationship between the human subject and the divine object that is, at its basis, mimetic. Just as God images the subject, so the subject images God. Despite the calamity of the fall, much pre-­Reformation theology and religious practice assumed this potential contiguity of divine and man, a contiguity that was further manifested through signs and instantiated in the representational practices of popular piety. In such a religious system it was an invariable, indeed necessary possibility that man might  ‘feel’ the presence of the divine through devotional practice. Christ’s presence could be subjectively encountered here on earth and the practices of much popular late medieval worship were oriented to this end. In this book I examine how this assumption is manifested and challenged in a range of early modern discourses and how this impacts upon conceptions of subjectivity during the period. Traditionally, scholars have argued that the way in which such issues are conceptualised marks a shift in the metaphysical ambits of pre- and post-Reformation religion. In the pre-Reformation period, this  mimetic imaging is predicated upon a theological assumption that man and God are at some metaphysical level potentially reconcilable. This in turn feeds into a cultural assumption that there is an analogous relationship between man and God, one that is reflected in broader structures of civic society: political systems, the law, social hierarchies, gender relationships and language all mirror to some extent that relationship. In countries like England that embraced, however problematically, the ideas of the  Reformers, the metaphysical beliefs that structured these pre-Reformation practices came under sustained critique. Ideas that in the medieval period had tested the boundaries of orthodoxy were now recuperated within the Reformed faith: Protestants of whatever hue found themselves having to rethink man’s ­relationship to the  divine.5 At the basis of this was the potentially  idolatrous biblical assumption that man was indeed made in the ‘image’ of God. I say ‘idolatrous’ for if idolatry is understood as the mistaken worship of any sign over the divine object then the argument that man is made in God’s ‘image’ could potentially involve man investing human images or signs with wrongful power.  The idea that man is made in God’s image is a problematic one in early modern England and it has religious and cultural implications that need to be closely analysed: no longer encouraged to ‘feel’ the divine via outward signs as they had pre-Reformation, the subject was now encouraged to find Christ internally through  faith. To

Introduction

3

take one of the main contentions of this book, if Christ is central to the ­formation of Christian identity then how might the Christian engage with Christ without ‘feeling’ him?  How was Christ to be made present to the subject under a Reformed dispensation? These  questions also have a more ‘secular’ applicability in early modern England. How do these models of religious identification signify in a fallen realm of worldly materiality that can often seem at odds with, indeed critical of, religious ideology? How might this new account help us to reorient current scholarship concerned with such questions? And how does the drama debate, interrogate and critique such issues through its investment in the figurative sign? In answering these questions I offer an account of religion and subjectivity which, although it engages with the foundational work of cultural materialist and new  historicist criticism of the past thirty years, differs substantially from the models of religion and subjectivity that dominate these critical schools. What emerges is a reading that also challenges current critical conceptualisations of religion and subjectivity by arguing for a new understanding of the  political and  philosophical import of Reformed theology in  early modern England.   II  Throughout  his anti-Christian polemic The Anti-Christ, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche argues that Christianity is instituted upon principles of blood sacrifice and an almost insatiable instinct for revenge. In particular, this is what he says about Jesus’ death on the cross: the sacrifice of the innocent man for the sins of the guilty! What atrocious ­paganism! – For Jesus had done away with the concept ‘guilt’ itself – he had denied any chasm between God and man, he lived this unity of God and man as his ‘glad tidings’ . . . And not as a special prerogative! – From now on there is introduced into the type of the redeemer step by step: the doctrine of a Judgement and a Second Coming, the doctrine of his death as a sacrificial death, the doctrine of the Resurrection . . . for the benefit of a state after death! . . . Paul, with that rabbinical insolence which characterizes him in every respect, rationalized this interpretation, this indecency of an interpretation, thus: ‘If Christ is not resurrected from the dead, our faith is in vain’.6

Nietzsche’s  argument that the Pauline emphasis on sacrifice opens up a ‘chasm between God and man’ that would otherwise have remained fused in the person of Jesus is especially pertinent. This gap is absolute since ‘The Christian’s world of ideas contains nothing which so much as touches upon actuality’.7 Nietzsche accuses Saint Paul of being responsible for

4

Introduction

‘rationalizing this interpretation’. The philosopher seems to have in mind the fundamental distinction that Paul makes in Romans between the flesh and the spirit. As he notes, man should aim to live according to the Spirit because ‘if ye liue after the flesh; yee shall die’ (Romans 8:13). Yet according to Nietzsche such antinomies are not only false, they are untenable for the human subject. Christ’s redemptive act is remarkable not because of its universality but because of its singularity: ‘in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the Cross.’8 Actually living ‘like’ Christ and imitating him is, for the philosopher, ‘merely a psychological self ­misunderstanding’ that is masked by the comforting fiction of ‘Faith’ and a belief in the second coming, a confusion that he interestingly associates with Martin Luther.9 Indeed, at the moment when an alternative to this repressive system was within grasp during ‘the harvest of Renaissance’,10 it is the figure of Luther who once again re-institutes  Paul’s ‘insolent’ philosophy. What Luther  fails to realise is that in the supposed ‘corruption’ of the Catholic Church and the secular mendacity of the  papacy lay the seeds of a potential freedom from all Christian structures, a possibility that Nietzsche signals in the wonderfully ironic cry: ‘Cesare Borgia as Pope’.11 He notes that by the early sixteenth century when Luther’s impact was being felt in Rome, ‘the old corruption, the peccatum originale, Christianity no longer sat on the Papal throne!’ 12 I will address the historical validity of these claims in a moment. But what others have traditionally seen as the worldly secularity of the early modern papacy was in fact, for Nietzsche, a philosophical and political opportunity; a means of saving humanity from the ‘original sin’ that is Christianity. In  a way that to a certain extent chimes with the methodological approach of some modern  revisionist historians and theologians,13  Nietzsche does not see Luther as a uniquely forward-looking reformer who swept away the corruption of the late medieval church in favour of a new theological and political dispensation. In fact, the precise moral and political status of the early modern papacy is not really the philosopher’s central concern. He is interested instead in the philosophical impediments of certain doctrinal movements. For him, the Reformation is so problematical because, not to put too fine a point on it, it is predicated upon a theological lie, namely that  man may be ‘like’ Christ in the realm of the secular. The reason for this stance can be traced to the profound antipathy towards Luther that Nietzsche, the son of course of a Lutheran pastor, feels. As he notes earlier in The Anti-Christ:  ‘The Protestant pastor is the grandfather of German philosophy, Protestantism itself is its peccatum originale.

Introduction

5

Definition of Protestantism: the halfsided paralysis of Christianity – and of  reason.’14 The peccatum originale that is Protestantism is a belief, bolstered by the exegetical weight of the Pauline epistles and ratified by an essentially  Lutheran conception of faith, which maintains that the realms of human and divine experience can in some way be made to coalesce through the  sacrifice of Christ. As the philosopher Gary  Shapiro points out: ‘Nietzsche’s Jesus does not develop from a theological perspective ­because he is not a supernatural figure; no divine interventions mark off the different stages of his career.’15 Understood in this way, original sin is not the doctrine that man is inherently sinful thanks to the fall and that he requires the redemptive sacrifice of Christ in order to release him from that burden. Rather, original sin is the erroneous belief that the chasm between man and God was ever reconcilable in the first place . Protestantism paralyses reason because it is predicated upon a false assumption; one that insists that Christ and the human subject may ­ultimately be united in the secular realm. In  Shapiro’s words: ‘Nietzsche’s Jesus could be thought of as the metaphorical or symbolic principle itself; for there is always such a large discrepancy between experience and its representation that he fails to establish any determinacy of meanings.’16 Indeed, unmediated reason is an inadequate means of countering such claims precisely because the heirs of the rationalist project fail to acknowledge their own philosophical reliance upon this Protestant peccatum originale. It is for this reason that Nietzsche offers the half optimistic, half despairing conclusion that Reformed religion is ‘the uncleanest kind of Christianity there is, the most incurable kind, the kind hardest to refute’.17  Nietzsche  exemplifies a central argument underpinning Protestantism and Drama in Early Modern England: that  the shift from  ‘feeling’ Christ to a non-feeling ‘faith’ in Christ is far from straightforward, mediating as it does a fundamental tension between the  religious and the secular. There is no doubt that the sixteenth century saw a profound alteration in the religious thought and practices of late medieval Europe. This is not to say that there were not profound continuities as well.18 This book does not argue for, nor seek to map, an easy trajectory that sees the exchange of a fixed pre-Reformation metaphysic for an equally fixed post-­Reformation metaphysic. Rather, it traces an amalgam of ancient, patristic, medieval, humanistic and Reformed ideas that coalesce during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and that give rise to the range of complex and interrelated theological, institutional and ideological tensions that characterise the post-Reformation landscape. These constitutive tensions had a

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Introduction

profound impact not only on how various forms of  Protestantism repre­ sented the subject in the world but also on the linguistic and political construction of subjectivity in early modern England. This fact is acutely explored in the drama of this period. In the plays that I examine, the models of subjectivity that are available to dramatists are invariably religiously derived or inflected. Yet these plays are also concerned to test whether these models can be sustained within the realm of the secular, particularly when the subject is exposed to the workings and contradictions of state  power . For the moment though, I want to consider further the place of religion in contemporary literary criticism. I will argue that certain critical truisms about early modern subjectivity are intimately bound up with important but problematically partial readings of what early modern Protestantism was. Examining how criticism currently conceives of Protestantism will not only enable me to situate my own critical approach to the relationship between Protestantism and early modern culture; it will also permit a better understanding of the strange but compelling paradox that  Jenison presents us with: ‘hold [Christ] fast enough though thou feelest him not.’ III Traditionally,  both new  historicist and cultural  materialist studies concerned with theological matters have been characterised by the attention that they have paid to Protestantism and to the kinds of subject positions produced in relation to it.  More recently, however, this critical focus has shifted. Taking their lead from the work of  revisionist  historians, critics have begun to re-examine longstanding conceptions of Protestantism, as well as paying more attention to the relationship between  Catholic theology and subjectivity in sixteenth and seventeenth century England.19 Though more work remains to be done, it is fair to say that, by and large, scholars now argue for a much more doctrinally contested culture where subjectivities, rather than fixed according to predefined theological lines, were in fact consistently being renegotiated. In  Katherine Eisaman Maus’ formulation, early modern subjectivity should be viewed as a ‘loose and varied collection of assumptions, intuitions, and practices that do not all logically entail one another and need not appear together at the same cultural moment’.20 This construction is indebted to a flexible revisionist historiography concerned with religious change and affiliation in the early modern period. As  the historian  Andrew Pettegree has noted, ‘historians have begun to talk of a “Long Reformation”, a process requiring many

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7

generations before the changes in belief and behaviour anticipated by the reformers could be accomplished’.21 Or as the literary scholar  Jeffrey Knapp has pointed out: ‘there was no single religion suffusing Renaissance England . . . but rather many religions from which to choose: not simply Catholicism or Protestantism, for the Christian believer, but also kinds of Catholicism and kinds of Protestantism.’22 As the field stands, it is no longer desirable or indeed possible to view the Reformation in England as a singular event that sees the substitution of ‘unpopular’ Catholicism with ‘popular’ Protestantism, or that either of these confessional positions can be reduced to a pre-existing theological checklist of neatly contrasting subject or doctrinal positions. The corollary of such a shift is a credibly adaptable picture of religious change and affiliation in the period. This plural, revisionist agenda sees early modern belief in terms of a spectrum, one that can accommodate a surprisingly wide range of doctrinal opinion, from Catholic recusancy at one end to Puritan  separatism at the other: recent books by  Jean-Christophe Mayer and Beatrice Groves can also be seen in this light.23 Undoubtedly, much of this revisionism has proved a necessary corrective to an older historiographical celebration of the inevitable ascendency of Protestantism, emergent rationality, and the triumph of the British nation-state. Nevertheless, I want to argue that revisionism has become its own worst enemy.24 In respect of theoretical practice, historical and conceptual indeterminacy is now taken for granted in far too many revisionist constructions of the period. In literary criticism, the claim that  identity is endlessly appropriable, consistently malleable, or ‘hybrid’ to use Jean-Christophe  Mayer’s term, too often fails to offer any serious discussion of what ‘identity’ might in fact mean.25 If early modern identity is always ‘hybrid’, then its social, linguistic and political constitution becomes less important than the mere assertion of that fact. The theoretical paradigm underpinning this pluralist/revisionist approach to early modern culture can be seen, as  Antony Easthope has pointed out, as an inevitable endpoint in the advance of a certain version of  post-structuralism within critical and cultural studies more generally, one that a number of historians have also assimilated, wittingly or not. According to Easthope, such readings often lead to what he calls a ‘utopian privileging of difference’.26 This shift also underscores the recent emergence of  ‘Spiritualism’ as a critical movement. Writing of early modern religion,  Ewan Fernie has encouraged us to think ‘not so much of spiritual truth as truths’ and, like Mayer, he identifies  Shakespeare as the emblem of such ‘pluralism’.27 In this theorisation of subjectivity and conceptualisation

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Introduction

of  religious affiliation, the plurality of history and the (critical) history of plurality are virtually interchangeable. The ultimate indeterminacy of subjectivity or of doctrinal position sees an almost imperceptible elision of criticism and history, an elision that becomes creditably hybrid because of its very discretion. As  Easthope writes, such indeterminacy is able to ­operate precisely because it ‘defines itself in a cluster of effects: in disparaging the signifier, ignoring the imaginary, and relegating, reducing, or even trying to evade altogether the insistence of subjectivity’.28  I would not claim that ‘inwardness’ and ‘religion’ are anything but ideologically contested, indeed over-determined categories of historical analysis.29  But the time has come to challenge the pluralist constructions that dominate so much criticism in the field. In fact, the religious debates, controversies and convulsions that mark the early modern period reveal it as a time when the truth claims of various doctrines were seen as absolute, inviolable and fundamental. This applies to Catholicism as much as it does to Protestantism. It also underwrites the polemical insistence that shapes so much of the writing of this period. In the realm of theological debate, early modern ‘pluralism’ was a minority pursuit.30 Certainly I bring Protestantism into dialogue with Catholicism throughout this book because this is what contemporary writers did. However, after 1559 Reformed Protestantism was the official state religion in England. Whatever the complications of this fact (and there are many), to declare that Protestantism was the dominant religion in England after this date is not to sanction the long history of Protestant historiographical and cultural triumphalism: we can be deeply sceptical of early modern Protestantism while at the same time acknowledging its dominant ideological position. Peter  Lake’s account of this period as one where  religious identities were invariably ‘unstable, labile’ is certainly attractive, but it misrepresents early modern culture in the service of a liberal, modern paradigm that does not pertain to the period under question.31 As  James  Simpson has importantly argued, ‘What was achieved in the sixteenth century is better characterized as the origin of fundamentalism than of the liberal tradition.’ Nevertheless, this tradition has been far too quick to dismiss the fundamentalist ethos of this period as ‘reactionary and “conservative”’.32 It is unhelpful to project modern conceptions of ‘plurality’ back on to a period that, whether we like it or not, largely adhered to an unapologetically pre-Enlightenment ethical agenda on such matters. We may value pluralism today: it is far from clear that our early modern forebears did.

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In the case of early modern subjectivity, its historical insistence is of such importance that it cannot constantly be reduced to a process of ‘endless transformation’33 without problematic consequences both critical and political. If, as  Maus suggests, subjectivity is essentially a collision of multiple, indeterminate forces that coalesce as quickly as they disperse, then the historical and political forces that contribute towards that production can become less important than the critical assertion of an endlessly transformative, ‘plural’ difference. The political urgency that animated and underpinned Reformed theology (and those who vehemently opposed it) is too often downplayed in such criticism. In dealing with early modern religious culture, it is useful to remember that, for the most part, Catholics and Protestants had fairly clear views on what it was that divided them.34 Acknowledging this does not have to imply a critically sectarian account of religion in the period. Protestantism and Catholicism were defined through an ongoing mutual antagonism that, while generative, was also messy and unpredictable. Yet any claims for commonality were invariably tempered by the restatement of fundamental doctrinal, cultural and political differences and the relative superiority of whichever religion was being argued for: not even that great ‘pluralist’  Erasmus was above such assertions.35 By the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period on which this book focuses, there were basic theological dividing lines separating Protestantism and Catholicism, they were reasonably clear cut, and they had political implications. I want to reassert the polemical and doctrinal insistence of early modern religious discourse and its sharply contested modes of political production. Certainly we can speak of a ‘spectrum’ of religious beliefs. But criticism needs to recover the p ­ olemical tang of this period  . My  use of the terms  ‘Protestant’ and ‘Protestantism’ is informed by the fact that there are varieties of Protestantism and degrees of sympathy with and controversy within even such a broad definitional purview and I try to acknowledge this throughout. Still,  when I refer to Protestantism or Reformed theology in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England, I am referring to a broad religious outlook that is in sympathy with a range of the central tenets of  Reformation theology as mediated through the work of the magisterial continental Reformers and their followers. In addition to the fundamental doctrines of justification by faith and the power of God’s grace to save the elect, these might also include (but are not l­imited to) sola scriptura, the rejection of material or idolatrous intermediaries between man and God and a broadly defined anti-Catholicism. Since Calvinism was the predominant religious and doctrinal movement in the period I am dealing with, I examine in greater detail throughout this book its assimilation

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within early modern culture. Clearly, Protestantism and Calvinism are not the same thing but they do share a common theological lineage. Therefore, I use ‘Calvinism’ to mean an adherence to all these aspects defined above but also in a more specific doctrinal sense. Here I draw upon the work of Nicholas  Tyacke who has defined early modern Calvinism as ‘centring on a belief in divine  predestination, both double and absolute, whereby man’s destiny, either election to Heaven or reprobation to Hell, is not conditioned by faith but depends instead on the will of God’.36 There are  varieties of Calvinism and considerable controversy between moderate and high Calvinists. But for the purposes of what follows, whenever I discuss Calvinism I will implicitly be drawing upon this definition. The forms of Protestantism that I examine here are largely those of moderate and high  Calvinist or Puritan thinkers. It is certainly possible to focus on these forms of Protestantism while also acknowledging that the spectrum encompasses other expressions of doctrine and worship. Nevertheless, to be any kind of Reformed Protestant in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England it was necessary to come to terms with the doctrines outlined above and in particular the controversial and complex doctrines of justification by faith alone and grace. Not all Protestants state and explore the consequences of such doctrines in stark terms. But by their controversial nature the views of the high Calvinists invariably help to ­define other positions on the religious spectrum in early modern England. Such individuals are commonly termed high Calvinists or Puritans and are often classified as extremists. I want to argue that such a classification is problematic because it implies that such thinkers are somehow deviating from a more benign, gentle Protestantism, one that shies away from the stark divisions expressed by these writers. I have chosen not to focus more fully on joyous explorations of Protestant doctrine because, as I will argue, the theology that informs all considerations of justification by faith and grace in early modern England is not benign or gentle. Reformed theology is a rigorous, extreme expression of Christian doctrine, one whose central tenets are severe and uncompromising. The fact remains that to be a Reformed Protestant of any kind in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England, it was necessary to grapple with the uncompromising message found in Calvin: the world is divided into the  elect and the reprobate and saving  grace can only fully extend to the elect.37 This marks a fundamental difference from  Lutheranism where grace and so salvation is potentially available to all. Just because these fundamentals are played down, skirted around or ignored by some in early modern England, or by some modern critics, does not invalidate their

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11

importance or their centrality. As James  Simpson has recently stated, in relation to Protestant biblical exegesis, the ‘insistence on the simplicity of Scripture produces an unreadable text written in the heart of the elect. Reading might be for everyone, but  predestination certainly isn’t’.38 Part of the difficulty in coming to terms with the early modern religious landscape is that only some are prepared to state these facts directly. It may be comforting to dismiss these individuals as high Calvinists or Puritan extremists. I prefer to call them the most direct expositors of the Reformed message, even if such directness invariably came at a price. It  may be objected that to focus on the more rebarbative aspects of Protestant doctrine, especially as they are manifested in Calvinism, is to construct a narrowly pessimistic view of early modern Protestantism more generally. But I maintain that to hold this view is to forget that all forms of Protestantism are predicated upon the stark tenets of Reformed theology. Protestants of all hues certainly granted (as they must) the possibility of divine grace and joyous responses to the divine.39 Nevertheless, it is a fundamental argument of this book that the central doctrine of Reformed theology, justification by faith alone, is extremely contentious. Indeed, for many during the period, at least until the challenge of  Arminianism that crystallised in the 1620s, justification by faith can often appear antithetical to the doctrine of grace. So while I do recognise throughout the role that grace plays in Protestant theology, I also suggest that one of the central difficulties for Protestantism in early modern England, particularly Calvinism, is that it never quite grants enough scope to grace.40 If early modern England had adopted Lutheranism, this might not have been such a contentious issue, but it chose the more austere Genevan path. Many found the central tenets of Reformed theology, especially the Calvinism that dominated late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England, to be a challenge rather than a comfort. It is also worth noting here that I focus on the dramatic genres of tragedy and history. Were this book to examine early modern comedy then it is likely that more ‘positive’ manifestations of the Protestant conception of grace would be foregrounded. As it stands, writers of tragedy and history are perhaps more inclined to explore those areas where faith is tested and where grace does not offer the subject adequate succour: it is on these anxieties that this book focuses. Most of the educated men whose writings I study here could, according to my definition, be called Protestants. A smaller number could also be defined as Calvinists. But, in a sense, this is beside the point. As noted, I am less interested in what individuals believed than in the degrees to which they negotiated with these related critical intellectual currents

12

Introduction

that ran through early modern society. I argue that the works of  William Perkins, Richard Greenham, John Hayward, Christopher Marlowe, Fulke Greville, William Shakespeare, George  Herbert, John Donne, Thomas Middleton and others, offer acute reflections on the intellectual challenges of Reformed theology. This is not to dismiss the important work that has been done on popular religious belief as well as on women’s writing and Protestantism.41 But here I re-examine how these men, literary and nonliterary writers took the challenges of Protestantism extremely seriously at an intellectual level whether or not they personally adhered to its tenets, and how they explore the complex processes of subject formation and the cultural internalisation of Protestantism  . My central point of reference throughout is the contested figure introduced by Jenison and Nietzsche:  Jesus Christ. There are two main reasons for this. First, Christ has always offered Western thinkers a way of conceptualising the relationship between, amongst other things, sign and signified, matter and spirit, the subject and the divine, the secular and sacred political realms. Central to this is the construction of Christ as simultaneously human and divine that underpins all Christian thought and that it is the business of all Christian thinkers to explain and justify. As  Susan Zimmerman noted recently, ‘the conundrum of the man/God is always the centre, explicitly or implicitly, of the Christian redemptive scheme’.42 For long periods in the West, the seemingly antinomical union of human and divine natures in Christ has proved, if not exactly uncontroversial, then broadly explicable and defensible for most thinkers. But in the ­sixteenth and seventeenth centuries this antinomical union becomes, for the variety of interrelated political, ideological and cultural reasons that will be explored, the locus of intense controversy and debate. Secondly, my interest in Christ emerges out of a desire to offer a fuller account of what happens to him as a cultural avatar in the post-Reformation period. So, if despite fine work done by critics such as Thomas Docherty and Debora Shuger, Christ remains a relatively occluded figure in many critical examinations of early modern subjectivity,43 I argue that this is because literary studies dealing with early modern religion have commonly downplayed the crucial fact that Protestantism is a deeply Christocentric religion.44 Whether in Martin Luther’s seminal theologia crucis (theology of the cross) and its fundamental realignment of man and God or in  John Calvin’s complex and acutely Christological theology, Protestantism is an avowedly Christ-centred religion. This is a fact well acknowledged by theologians: it has been rather less well assimilated by literary scholars. This raises a question that animates much of what follows: if we reinsert Christ as a central component in the

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construction and representation of the early modern self then what might the consequences be for literary scholarship more broadly? This project also arises out of my reading of the work of an important group of medieval scholars including  Caroline Walker Bynum, Miri Rubin, Sarah Beckwith,  David Aers and Lynn Staley.45 Their work has richly demonstrated the various ways in which cultural constructions of Christ are intricately related to the production of subjectivity in the pre-Reformation period. As Sarah Beckwith has convincingly argued, in medieval culture Christ’s body provides ‘the site of a momentous and historically significant process of  internalisation, of social control through the very formation of identity’.46 Clearly, the ‘historically significant process of internalisation’ and modes of ‘social control’ will be rather different in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from those that Beckwith describes in her book. But, again, the one common concept that links both medieval and early modern understandings of  Christ is the idea that he is a model that the subject may in some way copy or emulate. Pre-Reformation, Christian subjects were exhorted to imitate Christ, to feel his presence immanently and affectively in their lives and to reflect deeply on the subjective and institutional consequences of doing so. The same can be said for the post-Reformation period but with one significant qualification: Protestantism retains much of the Christological focus of late medieval popular piety, yet it significantly redefines the purpose and effect of such devotional practice.47 To put it simply, Christ moves from being an immanent,  ‘felt’ presence in the Christian’s life to being the transcendent loci of Christian faith. The popular late medieval idea of the imitatio Christi may get theologically reworked post-Reformation but it remains as culturally potent as ever in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.48 The Reformers’ understanding of Christ, indeed  Reformed ­theology’s deep Christocentrism, is comparatively under-appreciated as a locus for early modern debates about subjectivity. What follows is a new account of the manifold yet problematic ways in which Christ continues to signify within the representative practices of post-medieval culture. Here we may consider Stephen  Greenblatt’s (and by implication  new historicism’s) foundational  disavowal of Christ. At the beginning of Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Greenblatt argues that  self-fashioning necessarily implies a separation ‘from the imitation of Christ – a separation that can . . . give rise to considerable anxiety’.49 By emphasising what many critics have come to see as a gradual shift towards more ­recognisably secular and rational modes of self-representation during the period, exhorting the subject to imitate Christ can seem, in comparison, at best a medieval

14

Introduction

hangover and at worst an exercise in theological self-delusion. Of course, Greenblatt is too canny a critic to negate the possibility of any subjective association with Christ at all.  So, for example, in a section examining Sir Thomas  More’s identification with Christ during his imprisonment, Greenblatt draws attention to a similar account concerning the inquisition of the Lollard William Thorpe. He writes: The sense of the inquisitorial process as theater culminates in a revelation of the ultimate roles, the truth in which all partial representations find their meaning and ground. Christ’s suffering constitutes more than a powerful similitude to the suffering of the heretic; it is the latter’s underlying reality, and hence identification is as much somatic as metaphoric. The point is worth stressing, since the Protestant emphasis on inward grace tends to obscure the implication of the body and hence to render public behaviour incomprehensible or irrelevant. Christ is present not only in the mind of William Thorpe but in his situation; to put the matter somewhat differently, the outward physical compulsion of the authorities is overmastered by an inward compulsion that is no less physical .50

This example notwithstanding, the imitation of Christ is generally discussed in Renaissance Self-Fashioning in relation to Catholics such as More, or Lollards such as Thorpe.51  The implication seems clear enough: the imitation of Christ is primarily a Catholic, somatic mode of identification that relies upon what Greenblatt calls ‘a thick network of ­symbolic bonds’,52 bonds that imply a theological and a subjective connectivity ­between imitated and imitator, model and copy. Viewed like this, Christ offers a means through which both the material and the spiritual might be made present to the subject. Self-fashioning, on the other hand, inculcates a less explicitly Catholic model of imitation, one which ‘always involves some experience of threat, some effacement or undermining, some loss of self’.53 Understood in this way, imitation implies a necessary disjunction between imitated and imitator, and so at a theological and subjective level a potential division between the material and the spiritual allows ‘secular’  self-fashioning to then take place. The imitation of Christ, however it might be conceived, is not really a factor in this new dispensation.54 Greenblatt notes that More’s identification with Christ ‘is as much ­somatic as metaphoric’. I suggest that Protestant culture reworks this mode of religious address so that identification with Christ is somatic ­because it is metaphoric. In many respects, an understanding of Protestant Christology problematises the implicit secular rationality of the self-fashioning paradigm.  When the early modern subject encounters Christ, there is, as we will see, no straightforward, one-to-one analogous ­‘connection’ between the ‘experience’ of Christ and the experience of the subject. Rather, the

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foundational, alien disavowal performed by Christ is ­precisely that which animates a Protestant subjectivity experienced in terms of man as ­figurative  ‘image’ of the divine.  The imitation of Christ should not be understood as a volitional act of ‘self-fashioning’ if by that is meant an appropriation of Christ as stable, subjective, indeed ‘present’ model.  The whole critical premise of ‘self-fashioning’ posits a willingly fashioned subjectivity that seems at odds with the fundamental tenets of Protestant orthodoxy regarding the bondage of the subject’s will and his or her inability to act towards what might broadly be conceived of as the good. Though I say more about this in Chapter 2, in an important sense the Protestant  ­imitation of Christ is profoundly anti-volitional, part of the much larger discourse of  Protestant Christocentrism that is always, indeed inevitably, produced ‘in relation to something perceived as alien, strange, or hostile’. Reformed theology recalibrated the subject’s attitude towards the relative theological and cultural import of the volitional impulse. It is not that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century men and women believed themselves incapable of willed, volitional action: far from it. Protestant piety is not the antithesis of subjective agency. Yet, Protestantism encouraged the subject produced within its purview to believe that such willed action was at best an indulgence, and at worst folly, a mere adjunct to broader matters of salvation. Perhaps the essential performativity of the self-fashioning paradigm captures the dizzying sense of volitional ­autonomy that is undoubtedly present in early modern accounts of selfhood but which, according to Protestantism, is also ultimately false . The religious writing of early modern England is full of imprecations to imitate Christ in all things. At the most basic level of trope, there are myriad poems, tracts, sermons and manuals that deal explicitly with the application of Christ and his life to that of the subject, the imitatio Christi. To take just a few of these examples, in a 1590 sermon based on the biblical mandate in Romans ‘Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ’, the popular London preacher Henry  Smith argues that ‘to put on Christ, is to put on the new man with all his virtues, vntill we be renewed to the Image of Christ, which is like a new man amongst men’.55 Taking up the self-fashioning metaphor, Francis  Clement states in 1593 that ‘the Lord Iesus Christ shall chaunge our vile bodie, that it may be fashioned like vnto Christ’.56 In a book on Christ’s life and death published in 1607, Samuel  Walsall writes in his epistle to the reader: ‘I striue to applie the soueraigne balme of CHRISTS PASSION to the wounds of each Readers conscience’.57 Carrying on this metaphor, he later writes: ‘no deeper booke than CHRISTS wounds; no higher Philosophie than CHRIST crucified’.58 Lastly, emphasising the

16

Introduction

role of Christ as exemplar for the human subject, William  Perkins, the ­pre-­eminent Elizabethan Calvinist notes: ‘We deceiue our selves, if we thinke that he [Christ] is onely to bee knowne of vs as a Redeemer, and not as a spectacle or patterne of al good duties, to which wee ought to conforme our selves.’59 The writers who provide these examples cover a fairly wide spectrum of early modern Protestant opinion. But, to pick up another of the threads of this book, such exhortations should be read as much more than simply recitations of proverbial Christian tropes. As Thomas  Docherty notes in a discussion of Christology in John  Donne’s poetry: ‘The theological incarnation and the imitatio Christi . . . are themselves both kinds of representation . . . The question is whether this kind of  representation can ever be “faithful”.’60 This is an important point. To engage with the early modern Christ is also to engage with how early modern culture represents humanity’s relationship to the divine within the world.61 Indeed, the theological and philosophical frameworks that contextualise such widespread pronouncements need to be examined more closely, for they enable us to see that at the level of representation, Christ plays a rather more central and problematic role in the construction of early modern subjectivity than Greenblatt allows for in Renaissance Self-Fashioning. This  last point can be exemplified by examining briefly the continued popularity in early modern England of  Thomas à Kempis’ classic late medieval devotional tract, De Imitatione Christi (c. 1418), a text that, interestingly, Greenblatt does not consider in Renaissance Self-Fashioning.62 The text by à Kempis emerges from a late medieval devotional movement known as  the devotio moderna, one that places Christ and the imitation of him at the centre of spiritual life.63 Despite its pre-Reformation provenance, De Imitatione Christi maintained its position as one of the most popular of devotional manuals in Tudor and Jacobean England, and this during a period when most other doctrinally Catholic texts were officially proscribed. The reasons for this continuing and sanctioned popularity are multifaceted. Both historians and theologians are now much more inclined to see  Protestantism in the context of a Europe-wide adherence to the  philosophia Christi, a humanist inspired ‘philosophy of Christ’ that places Christ-centred worship, devotion and contemplation at the centre of the Christian life.64 Furthermore, as the historian Ian Green has argued, ‘Thomas à Kempis was no ordinary Catholic’. Indeed his criticisms of scholastic learning and of relics and pilgrimages, his stress on study­ ing the Bible or hearing it read and the regular citation of scriptures in his own

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work, and his comments about the small numbers of professing Christians that love Christ unfeignedly, and the need for grace in doing good works, may have found a ready audience among Protestants .65

Protestant  translators also expurgated many of the most explicitly ‘Catholic’ overtones in à Kempis’ original, such as the sign of the cross and references to human merit. At a less doctrinally partisan level, most Protestants would have found little to object to in à Kempis’ assertion that, through the imitation of Christ, the subject adopts the logic of mediation as he or she is subjectively positioned between the divine exemplar and an interior experience of self. As à Kempis asks: If thou hadst once perfectly entered into the innerness of Jesu and hadst savoured a little of his burning love, thou wouldst have set naught by thine own profit or harm but rather thou wouldst rejoice of reproof done to thee; for the love of Jesu maketh a man set naught of himself.66

Whatever else it might be, the imitation of Christ is predicated on the Pauline dialectic between the inner and the outer man, between fleshly matter and divine spirit: ‘I desire to enjoy thee inwardly but I cannot take thee. I desire to cleave to heavenly things but fleshly things and unmortified passions depress me.’67 Yet despite moments like this, it is important to note that matter has an unavoidably spiritual import for à Kempis, something that is made clear in his writing on the sacrament. Exploring Christ’s sacramental promise to mankind, he says: ‘They be thy words and thou hast proffered them; and they be now mine for thou hast said them for my health. I will gladly receive them from thy mouth to the end that they may be better sown and planted in my heart.’68 Christ is more than an example for the subject to follow. He is the material ground and marker of interior examination: ‘There thou showest me myself what I am, what I was, and from whence I came: for I am naught and know not myself.’69 Self-awareness is produced mimetically with the divine exemplar seemingly providing the ground for imitative, ‘feeling’ knowledge. But this knowledge is produced because the subject lacks an adequate awareness of self: ‘I desire to enjoy thee inwardly but I cannot take thee.’ Such expressions are undoubtedly commonplace in Christian discourse, for example in the Psalms or in Saint Augustine’s Confessions.70 Protestantism was to profoundly re-imagine the constitutive function of this internal inscrutability. Under the impact of the Reformation the centrality of De Imitatione Christi and more importantly of its organising metaphor was not lost but

18

Introduction

rather recast in what its Protestant translators hoped might be a more doctrinally acceptable form. In this way, it is interesting to note the degree of difficulty that a number of these Protestant translators have with à Kempis’ notion of imitation.  For example, in  Thomas Rogers’ popular 1580 translation of the text, he intriguingly promotes the imitation of Christ ‘because we are Englishmen, who of al other people are most famous, and infamous too for imitation’.71 Imitatio is seen here as a national vice, a predisposition both positive and negative towards forming identity in relation to authoritative models. As Arthur Kinney points out, the humanistic ‘method of  imitatio – the art of writing by following specific models’72 was central to early modern rhetorical theory. Rogers is certainly aware of this but his contextual ambit extends somewhat beyond the imperatives of humanist didacticism. This is amplified in the epistle: ‘Who[ever] entreth into a due consideration of mans nature, shal easilie perceaue that most stranglie it is addicted vnto Imitation; and though in truth, we should liue by lawes not by examples, than examples doe more moue than doe lawes.’73 It is again noticeable that Rogers presents imitation not in a positive light but as a strange addiction, an unfortunate human habit that needs to be fed. Rogers also advances a particular perspective on  self-fashioning. He notes: So in Christian imitation two sortes of example there be: one to be followed and that both necessarilie, and always, which is our Sauiour Christ; the other but sometime and in some things, as are good men and women, whether they be aliue or dead.74

Imitation is clearly not a straightforward matter for the translator, nor is it purely a religious phenomenon. Moreover, the suspicion that a humanist sense of imitatio is compromised by the religious implications of such an understanding is confirmed when Rogers writes this: our  Sauior is the example of vs to be followed, and that always, for that he was the most perfectlie good; and necessarilie, because both himself and his Apostles haue commanded vs to do. But here mistake me not, I beseech you. For albeit I saie in al things our Sauiour Christ is alwaies; yet do I not saie in al things: and though necessarilie to be followed; yet not as he was God.75

Here the subject may only imitate Christ up to a certain point. A rather tortuous justification for this is given a little later: Our Sauior Christ therefore in those things which he did as a God must religiouslie be worshipped; and followed zealouslie in what he did as a man. He that loueth and hateth what Christ as a God, doth loue and detest, imitates Christ as much as a man

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may imitate God: he that doth that which Christ did as a man, doth folowe Christ as a Christian should.76

These quotations exemplify a division between imitating Christ as man and imitating Christ as God. The latter is not permissible for man; the former is possible. As the human exemplum, the subject may imitate Christ: as the divine lex, imitation becomes impossible. Though I will say more about this distinction in later chapters, it can certainly be observed that the ubiquity of De Imitatione Christi and other texts like it in early modern England speaks to a deep-seated cultural adherence to  imitative Christocentrism. Nonetheless, Rogers’ translation also reveals a profound concern with the  mimetic nature of this enterprise. Under a Protestant dispensation, the imitatio Christi has to be treated very carefully indeed. On the one hand, the popularity of à Kempis’ text is evidence of the survival into early modern England of a significant strand of late medieval devotional practice, one that is mediated through the devotio moderna and early modern humanism and that seemingly cuts across partisan religious divisions. Underpinning this strand is an understanding of imitatio that privileges Christ as model with a significant degree of cultural authority and that posits man as imitative, authorised copy of that model. On the other hand, conceptualising the imitation of Christ within a Protestant context necessarily entails some reworking of this inherited framework. Imitation is far from being a straightforward matter in early modern  culture.   IV To  understand why this is so, I want to explore further the broader relationship between imitatio and  representation in early modern   discourse.77 We  have seen that in many popular forms of late medieval and humanistic Christocentrism, the relationship between Christ and the subject is conceived of as a form of imitative ‘copying’. This is important not only because it posits a metaphysical link between the subject and the divine. In order for such a connection to be ontologically possible it must also rely upon the theological dominance of Christ’s humanity over his divinity and all that this implies at the level of mimesis. As  Caroline Walker Bynum explains, ‘To be holy was to be “like” God – to return the imago Dei to “likeness with Him . . . sanctity is finally reformation of the total man, and it can be gained by imitation of the sanctity of others, which is accessible to us exactly because it is outer as well as inner.’78 Christ provides the exemplary model for the human subject, rendering through his

20

Introduction

humanity an affective and philosophical connection between model and copy, subject and divine. Although this philosophical notion of imitatio draws upon Platonic, Pauline, neo-Platonic and Patristic sources for intellectual ballast, importantly it also came to be understood in textualised terms during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is manifested in writers such as à  Kempis and the great  humanist  Erasmus and it is deeply implicated in early modern pedagogic practice. Though I return to Erasmus in Chapter 2, I want to draw attention here to Richard  Halpern’s observation that ‘The Erasmian conception of imitation as a fundamental human practice deeply informs humanist theories of how language is acquired and hence of how literature is  taught’.79 According to the Erasmian-inspired humanism of much early modern rhetorical theory,  imitatio refers to the self-conscious adoption of pre-existing literary models in the process of learning to write and think. The Elizabethan humanist  Roger Ascham put it this way in The Schoolmaster: ‘Imitation is a faculty to express lively and perfectly that example which ye go about to  follow.  And of itself it is large and wide; for all the works of nature, in a manner, be examples for art to follow.’80 One of the consequences of imitatio was that it also became a central marker of literary worth, primarily manifesting itself in the ability to draw selfconsciously upon recognised literary exemplars.81 And what better exemplar than Christ? In relation to Christ, this rhetorical understanding of imitatio would at first glance appear to be complimentary. As  the prime exemplar for Christian living, the imitation of Christ could be seen as a kind of social and interior ‘writing’, with the subject becoming the manifestation of the Christocentric ‘text’. By co-opting the model provided by Christ, the subject is able to become a perfect copy of the divine: in this sense, humanistic Erasmian imitatio becomes the ultimate manifestation of good  pedagogy. Imitatio implies the prior existence of the authoritative model that, through a process of replication, produces a copy that derives its authority from that model. However, this elucidation of imitatio relies on a somewhat ‘static’ conception of the interrelationship between model and copy. In his book The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry,  Thomas Greene identifies four main forms of imitatio in operation during the early modern period: sacramental, eclectic or exploitative, heuristic and dialectical imitation. It is this last form, dialectical, that is best placed to account for the relationship between the  humanist and Protestant imitatio Christi. Greene notes:

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dialectical imitation, when it truly engages two eras or two civilizations at a ­profound level, involves a conflict between two mundi significantes. The text comes to terms most effectively with its own humanist problematics, its own incompleteness, by measuring its own signifying habits with those of the subtext. The text is the locus of a struggle between two rhetorical or semiotic systems that are vulnerable to one another and whose conflict cannot easily be resolved. In this dialectic, I think, one reaches the heart of the mystery of acculturation and perhaps its key. Anachronism becomes a dynamic source of artistic power.82

Although Greene’s concern here is with humanist poetics, his dialectical model of imitation maps well onto the connection between the humanist and Protestant imitatio Christi.  If it is to be logically and affectively possible, then the imitatio Christi must to some degree encompass the performative, volitional activity that mimesis necessarily always implies.83 The imitatio Christi is both a matter of copying and of doing on the part of the subject. As it is reconceived in a Protestant context, imitatio Christi is obliged to mediate a tension between imitatio and mimesis. This tension cannot simply be reduced to an easy opposition between imitatio as a ‘passive’ form of imitation and mimesis as an ‘active’ form of the same. After all, ‘copying’ is itself a form of ‘doing’. As Aristotle states in the Poetics, imitation always implies action.84 In a Protestant context, the issue becomes not so much one of text and subtext struggling with each other as Greene would have it but rather one of theological negotiation. Protestantism has to engage in a dialectical negotiation with a much older inherited biblical, patristic and medieval Christological lexis, one which is then taken up by humanism and that commonly emphasises a volitional anthropological model of the subject (man may ‘feel’ or ‘put on’ Christ). At the same time, it promotes its own Protestant anthropology of self that is utterly contrary to such an inheritance (man must have ‘faith’ in Christ and ‘feelest him not’). This has an impact upon the representation of identity, indeed upon the linguistic construction of subjectivity itself. In the words of Docherty, ‘The name or “figure” (rhetorically understood) of “Christ” becomes the very locus of the indefinite article, of indefinition, lack of identity and certainty.’85  It is because of this indefinition that the mimetic discourse of the subject as ‘image’ of the divine is foregrounded as the tension between these two positions is played out across a variety of texts and genres. Although much of the discussion that follows is invariably theological in focus, my working assumption throughout is that the figurative image, however it is conceived, is always an ideological construction and is always implicated in the broader networks of political dominance and subordination that produce subjectivity.

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Introduction

An interesting example can be found in that exemplary text of humanistic Protestant poetics, Sir Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry. This text is, of course, concerned to promote the virtues of poetry over all other forms of discourse, most notably philosophy and history. As such, it is not concerned directly with religious imitatio. Nonetheless, as somebody who is indisputably committed to interrogating the intellectual assumptions of early modern Protestantism, Sidney’s poetics do give an insight into the difficulties of accounting for the figurative image within this particular religious purview.86 Any Protestant account of poetry must necessarily raise questions about the ontological status of what Sidney calls the ‘speaking picture of Poesy’.87 At various points throughout An Apology for Poetry (1595), he wants to hold onto an ontological connection between the product of the poet and the divine. Indeed, in Sidney’s metaphor of the ‘speaking picture’, we see how the verbal (‘Poesy’) relies upon the relative utility of the imagistic without ­necessarily sliding into idolatrous praise of the sign. This is exemplified in his famous discussion of the ‘chief’ form of mimesis, where Sidney in fact elides imitatio and mimesis in a section concerning the divine purpose of poetic imitation.88 Normally in early modern poetics and rhetoric the two were usually discussed as separate terms, with  imitatio referring to those literary models that should be emulated in writing and mimesis referring to literature as offering a  representation of the world.89 For this reason, Sidney’s blurring of the terms is potentially significant. He notes: Poesy therefore is an art of imitation, for so  Aristotle termeth it in his word Mimesis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth: to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture: with this end, to teach and delight. Of this there have been three several kinds. The chief both in antiquity and excellency were they that did imitate the inconceivable excellencies of God. Such were David in his Psalms; Solomon in his Song of Songs, in his Ecclesiastes, and Proverbs; Moses and Deborah in their Hymns, and the writer of Job . . . Against these none will speak that hath the Holy Ghost in due holy reverence.90

Sidney shows that to imitate the divine in whatever form is beyond ­reproach: the mimetic nature of this enterprise cannot be avoided. In terms of a broader theory of signification, this suggests that the ‘speaking picture’ is more than a metaphorical formulation and that the relative utility of the poetic image is affirmed at a metaphysical level. This idea is developed when Sidney argues that, unlike history and philosophy, poetry is marked out because it combines both ‘precept’ and ‘example’: Now doth the peerless Poet perform both. For whatsoever the Philosopher saith should be done, he [i.e. the Poet] giveth a perfect picture of it in some one by

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whom he presupposeth it was done. So that he coupleth the general notion with the particular example. A perfect picture I say, for he yieldeth to the powers of the mind an image of that whereof the Philosopher bestoweth but a wordish description: which doth neither strike, pierce, nor possess the sight of the soul so much as that other doth.91

Poetry, then, is a ‘wordish’ discourse that, paradoxically given Sidney’s Protestant context, signifies primarily in the mind as an ‘image’.92 Indeed, because poetry also speaks to ‘the sight of the soul’, its metaphysical ­potential is thus affirmed. Nevertheless, An Apology for Poetry also betrays a startling degree of ambivalence as to the philosophical consequences of its view of poetry. Consider the following passage: the Poet (as I have said before) never affirmeth. The Poet never maketh any circles about your imagination to conjure you to believe for true what he writes. He citeth not authorities of other Histories, but, even for his entry, calleth the sweet Muses to inspire into him a good invention: in troth, not labouring to tell you what is, or is not, but what should or should not be: and therefore, though he ­recount things not true, yet because he telleth them not for true, he lieth not.93

In this fascinating discussion, Sidney takes on one of the central aesthetic problems concerning the relative status of the image that has intrigued thinkers since Plato.94 For Sidney, as for Plato, the figurative and the fictive are ineluctably bound together. But whereas for Plato this was the cause of deep concern and reason enough to exclude poets from the ideal republic,95 Sidney reworks Plato’s objection by proposing that the constitutive necessity of the figurative can be maintained because the poet does not, indeed cannot, deal in truth. Yet even if this is granted, certain intractable questions remain, not the least of which can be put as follows: what exactly is it that a poem affirms? As Jonathan  Dollimore has persuasively argued, this ambiguity in Sidney is of the first importance in that it concerns the ontological status of what poetry represents and, therefore, its didactic function. In the context of Christian theology, morality depends ultimately on a metaphysical sanction for its prescriptive force; if it is accepted that what is being apprehended (and imitated) is a metaphysical ideal with real ontological status, then the prescriptive force of poetry is considerable; conversely, if the object of imitation is ideal in a fictive sense only, it cannot thus prescribe.96 Sidney’s text reveals one of the central problems of Protestant representative practice, namely the ontological status of the image. Either the poem and the images that it conjures are in some way metaphysically sanctioned

24

Introduction

or else they are simply false ‘inventions’ of the poet, ones that bring into doubt the validity of ‘truth’ and of any claims made in its name. As Mark  Robson has suggested: ‘Such a truthful element, which might be seen as a moment of utopian invention, carries with it (like all utopias) the negative recognition that the world of senses from which it is freeing itself is imperfect, or fallen.’97 If the poem does not ‘affirm’, what purpose is served by valorising poetry? The answer is surely that if ‘truth’ itself is brought into question by the non-status of the poem and its signifying apparatus, then this must be because Sidney cannot afford to ratify the figurative image at an ontological level. Either the figurative image ‘exists’ in some ontological sense or it does not. None the less, to put this philosophical problem in such starkly oppos­ itional terms is to downplay the degree of constitutive tension that the opposition affords Sidney. More broadly, his ontological difficulty enables us to revisit the first quotation from An Apology for Poetry and its somewhat odd elision of  imitatio and mimesis. For if we view poetry or, more broadly, literary creation as imitatio then, as we have seen, the implication is that the poet offers us an imitative copy of an originary and ­authoritative model. Understood in this way, it is the model that is invested with ontological status: the connection between figurative and fictive performed by the copy is subsumed in the relative dominance of the authoritative  model. However,  if we  view  poetry as mimesis then a different set of coordinates comes into play. Because, as Sidney says, mimesis is ‘a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth’, the ontological focus inevitably shifts from the model to the copy. Though the distinction is not an absolute one, imitatio focuses on the authority of the model, mimesis on the authority of the copy. As a result of this move authority becomes invested in the figurative, a dangerous shift because this potentially then invests metaphor, metonymy or any other figurative forms with a degree of ontological  ‘truth’. I argue throughout this book that this possibility is what Sidney and many other Protestants could not fully acknowledge, even as they utilised the possibility in their writings. This problem is not restricted to poetics. Crucially it is also debated in the mimetic play of the early modern stage with its acute questioning of signs and their referents. As we will see in Part II of this book, many dramatists explore through  representation that uneasy elision of imitatio and mimesis, one that oscillates between stating that the figurative image ‘affirmeth’ and claiming that it does not. By re-imagining the relative authority of the model and  its copy, such Protestant-inspired work necessarily throws into question the ontological

Introduction

25

relationship between the exemplar or model and the subject as an ­imitative copy of that model. In fact, as scholars such as Richard Halpern and Robert  Weimann have pointed out, Protestantism (coupled with humanism) conspired to rethink this model and the relative distribution of authority that it presupposes in significant ways. Weimann argues that the Reformation ‘radically redefined’98 both the mode and the location of authority and that such a redefinition had a deep impact upon modes  of representation. He observes: Because authority, including the authorization of discourse itself, was no longer given, as it were, before the writing and reading began, the act of representation was turned into a site on which authority could be negotiated, disputed, or reconstituted. Modern authority, rather than preceding its inscription, ­rather than being given as a prescribed premise of utterances, became a product of writing, speaking, and reading, a result rather than primarily a constituent of representation.99

Weimann detects a gradual cultural downgrading of the  authority of the model in favour of the copy, a move from a relatively static conception of imitatio where the primacy of the model is unchallenged to a much more fluid conception of mimesis or representation where the claims of the copy are beginning to take precedence . The Protestant reconfiguration  of Christ is the most complex manifestation of this shift, one that has broader implications that go beyond the supposedly narrow confines of theology. Textuality is no longer the precondition for imitatio but rather a product of representative and performative practice. The tension between imitatio and mimesis becomes the constitutive yet, crucially, generative focus of early modern representational ­practice.  Halpern describes this shift in the following way: ‘the authority of the model has become dispersed and serialized; it is omnipresent and yet nowhere in particular . . . it begins, ever so slightly, to confuse the distinction between imitation and model, copy and original’.100 Certainly, as both scholars concede, such a shift is far from being absolute: ‘This definition of early modern authority in and of representation is problematic ­insofar as it is read in terms of any linear notion of emancipation or any absolute opposition between spiritual and material locations of authority.’101 This is undoubtedly an important caveat. Nonetheless, we find throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries definite signs of a shift, however uncertain and internally ­inconsistent it may often be, from the relatively fixed authority of imitatio to the much more ­fractured  mimetic realm of representation.

26

Introduction

I have used the word ‘fractured’ to account for this shift precisely because we are also dealing with what  Weimann terms ‘a new kind of Innerlichkeit, or interiority’,102 one whose constitutive features can certainly be outlined in relation to Christological Protestant theology and whose relative claims to cultural authority are negotiated between the competing poles of immanence and transcendence and mediated through broader arenas of representation. Indeed, we have noted the ways in which early modern theorisations evince this uneasy elision between imitatio and representation. What we find time and again, as this elision plays itself out in various cultural forms, is that representation becomes invested with a degree of cultural, theological and political authority that is deeply fraught. By constructing subjectivity as a copy of a model that only retains nominal metaphysical and cultural authority, it is here that the subject encounters the material realm constituted by secular authority and represented through a myriad of fleshly forms, such as politics, sex, the court, the devil, or the theatre. Indeed, it is the tension between the ideal divine subject and its secular mimetic copy that provides one of the main sources of  tragedy  in this period . V In what follows then, I examine the theological, theoretical and literary implications of a representational system based upon Christ. I argue that in much Protestant discourse the sign comes to stand as a surrogate for a union between  subject and object that can never be fully achieved. By producing subjects within a discursive field that is constitutively based upon a distinction between human and divine or subject and object that, nonetheless, the subject relentlessly tries to bridge, a mode of subjectivity is produced that, in the words of Francis  Barker, ‘lies athwart that divide between subject and object, discourse and world’.103 So while this book is presented as a contribution to current debates about early modern religion and subjectivity, it also aims to read early modern theology in a new light and to offer an alternative to the pluralistic and ‘spiritual’ accounts of religion that currently hold critical sway. Here Barker’s quotation is doubly useful: it describes the fraught nature of the subjectivity that I will be exploring and it also encourages us to rethink the political place of theology within early modern culture. Many pluralist accounts of  religion in this period unhelpfully downplay, or in the case of spiritualism, actively mystify the political charge and force of religious doctrine and  language. I argue that early modern thinkers and

Introduction

27

writers took the representational models offered by Protestantism, they used it to explore the subject’s place in the secular realm far beyond the supposedly narrow confines of theology, and that this had far-reaching political consequences. Such an account extends to language as well. In the words of  Miri Rubin, religion is ‘a culture, a system of meaning which represents and constructs experience and imagination’.104 This point is especially apposite in relation to theological writing, since it is often the case that scholars who are prepared to ask complex linguistic and ideological questions of literary texts and the ways in which they produce meanings will more often than not baulk at extending a similar analysis to theological writings. But as Brian  Cummings had rightly observed: ‘Writing envelops the articulation of doctrine and dispute as it proceeds.’105 We must take theological language, its commonplaces, metaphors and similes, as seriously as we would those in a poem or a play, for it is in those literary and figurative forms that complex theological meanings are generated and negotiated. Indeed, the linguistic and cultural implications of Protestant representational practice extend well beyond the realm of the theological to encompass the bifurcated nature of many modes of signification in this period. Linking these concerns together is the performative basis of all ­mimetic action, whether this is carried out within the interior as the subject contemplates the divine, or else in the performative realm of the theatre where the internal workings of the constructed subject are laid open to the scrutiny of the spectator.  The second part of this book examines how these mimetic modes of  representation are transmitted, negotiated and reformulated within the sphere of the literary and in particular the drama. Although I do examine poetry and prose throughout, it is my contention that the late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century  theatre offers a particularly acute critique of these  Protestant modes of representation.106 As Huston  Diehl has persuasively demonstrated, ‘the drama of Elizabethan and Jacobean London [is an] arena in which the disruptions, conflicts, and radical changes wrought by the protestant Reformation are publicly explored’.107 If the  Reformation rethinks the mimetic relationship between human subject and divine object, it is no coincidence that we witness an analogous exploration of the relationship between subject and object in the early modern theatre. This is especially apparent in dramatic representations of subjectivity on the early modern stage and in particular the ways in which the subject is, time and again, imagined in relation to a prohibitive or  exclusionary object.

28

Introduction

The object may be external to the subject, manifesting itself, for example, as a king, a father, a sibling or a nemesis. Or the object may be internal, a vision, a phantom or a failed imitation that comes back to haunt the imitating subject. Whatever the case, this exclusionary object is central to the formulation (and often annihilation) of the subject. It may be true, as Michael  O’Connell notes, that ‘The portrayal of Christ on the Protestant stage of the mid-sixteenth century presented increasing difficulty’,108 but I want to argue that this difficulty is transmitted into other forms of dramatic representation. To understand the exclusionary object of early modern theatrical representation is to acknowledge that it is often a mirror image of those representational models found in Protestant theology, especially the construction of the ‘absenting’ Christ found in contemporary Protestant, and in particular, Calvinist thought. I use the  ‘mirror’ metaphor advisedly for as any reader of  Shakespeare’s Richard II or indeed Corinthians knows, the early modern mirror does not present the gazer with a straightforward ‘reflection’ of the image, but rather a distorted version  of  the  same . In order to set the contextual scene for my exploration of drama and subjectivity, in Chapter 1 I examine the position of Christ in post­Reformation culture, especially the difficulty of symbolising his presence in a religious climate where images of all kinds were viewed with varying degrees of suspicion. Drawing upon the biblical assertion that man is made in the image of God, I offer a theoretical reading of the Christian semiotic tradition, considering the work of Saint Augustine which informs Reformed theology’s unease with the imagistic/representative nature of all signs. Chapter 2 contrasts the work of Desiderius Erasmus with that of Martin Luther and examines both men’s Christologically oriented theologies. In this way, we can see how Luther’s fundamental re-imagining of Christ’s sacrifice paves the way not only for later reformers but for a radically different relationship between human subject and divine object. Then, in Chapter 3, I turn my attention to the work of John Calvin and in particular his seminal impact upon early modern England. I argue that Calvinism instituted a theology where the subject becomes potentially uncoupled from its divine origin. In each of these chapters, I also situate these theological debates within the context of Augustine, Erasmus, Luther and Calvin’s blueprints for the political and civic structure of society. Understanding how the mimetic relationship between man and God is reflected in broader structures of civic society will prepare the way for an examination of how these political relations are explored in the drama of the period.

Introduction

29

In Chapter 4, I broaden the focus out further to consider how the figuratively constructed category of ‘fantasy’ operates in early modern discourse. The way in which fantasy is discussed in theological, medical and casuistical writings of the period is a consequence of the kind of Protestant subjectivity that I have been examining and it impacts upon how early modern writers conceived of human perception. Indeed, in Part I of the book, we see that the move away from ‘feeling’ Christ to having ‘faith’ in Christ is one that, paradoxically perhaps, is also the harbinger of a form of non-being, or what I will call anti-theological subjectivity centred around a variety of figurative forms. If  Slavoj Žižek’s Hamletian assertion that ‘modern subjectivity emerges when the subject perceives himself as ‘out of joint’, as excluded from the ‘order of things’, from the positive order of entities is correct, then what we find with early modern anti-theological subjectivity is a mode of being where the ontological claims of the divine model are downgraded in favour of the competing claims of the subjective copy.109 This is not a narrative of subjective emancipation towards incipient rationality but rather an account of the profound difficulties that the fundamentalist claims of Reformed theology give rise to. In the second half of the book, I demonstrate that the theatre is the forum in which this theologically derived anti-theological subjectivity is most acutely explored. As the space where discourses of nascent secularity jostle with those still powerful sacred narratives and ideas, the theatre is a veritable crucible where dominant and emergent forms of subjectivity are tested. In Chapter 5 I examine the semiotics of pro- and anti-theatrical discourse. More broadly, what we witness in such discussions of theatrical subjectivity is, pace Halpern and Weimann, a gradual shift away from imitatio towards the much more uninscribed realm of figurative representation. Implicit in this is an analogous turn towards those various political structures within which that shift is negotiated, raising crucial questions concerning the efficacy of institutional religion, the limits of kingship and the matter of political resistance. In Chapter 6 I turn to the drama itself, and in particular  Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Here I look at the way in which, in the play, imitative Christology no longer provides a satisfactory ground for the construction of subjectivity, offering instead a subversive but inescapable subtext that ultimately contributes towards the magician’s terrible annihilation. Chapter 7 looks at William Shakespeare’s Richard II and examines the politics implicit in the Christological typologies invoked in the play. I focus on the biblical quotations that are scattered throughout the drama

30

Introduction

and argue that they invariably point up the degree to which the sacral ­inability to atone for blood spilt will be politically apocalyptic in the context of the first and second tetralogies. Building upon this examination of absolutism and resistance, in Chapter 8 I consider  Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy and suggest that the play’s engagement with ideas of resistance feed into what I call the violent mimetic iconoclasm of the genre of revenge tragedy. Like the other plays discussed, it is a text that is structured around a series of failed imitations and it invests mere signs with a degree of representative and political ‘faith’ that they cannot sustain.  These plays point towards a form of non- or anti-theological subjectivity which although emerging from theological discourse, is the site where the relative claims of the human subject take an uneasy precedence over those of an increasingly distant divine object.

Part I 

Chapter 1

Christ, subjectivity and representation in early modern discourse

And as wee haue borne the image of the earthy, so shall we beare the image of the heauenly.

(1 Corinthians 15:49)

I According to one of the most influential and well known critical accounts, early modern Protestant theology is characterised by the way in which it institutes a more interior and immediate form of religious ­experience than had previously been the case.1 It was not that  Catholics did not experience religion inwardly but that, for their opponents, they did not experience religion inwardly enough. So as Alan  Sinfield observes: ‘Protestants were not content with casual or external observance [and] . . . the mediatory functions by which the church had traditionally interposed itself – saints, the Latin Bible and ritual, the priest, indulgences.’2 From now on, religious engagement was to be predicated upon man’s immediate relationship with the divine, a relationship unencumbered by false mediators and contrasted with Catholic practice. This experience of interiority was re-formed both in a religious and in a cultural sense. In Protestant theology, man and God are placed at opposite and ­opposing ends of the metaphysical spectrum. Once the subject examines himself or herself in relation to the magnificent and austere Protestant deity, he or she is almost inevitably found wanting. The consequence of this move, argues Sinfield, is a strange kind of paradox. He notes: ‘The protestant ­determination to create a more immediate relationship between humanity and God placed a vast and uncertain gulf between them.’3 In one  sense, uncertainty becomes constitutive of subjectivity itself, not least because it is the very thing that animates self-examination and the centrality of ­interior scrutiny: ‘We approach God by learning how distant, through our wickedness, we are from him. It is a formula for continual restlessness: the 33

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Protestantism and drama in early modern England

invitation to advance is conditional upon the ­acknowledgement that we are unable, of ourselves, to do so.’4 Indelibly marked by original sin, the Protestant subject is one whose will is inherently depraved and is unable to actively participate in his or her own salvation. For these reasons, concludes Sinfield, the kinds of subjectivity produced in relation to Protestant theology promote anxiety, irrationality and insecurity, not as the signs of failure to engage with the divine but rather as ‘the sign[s] of an authentic encounter with divine rigor’.5 Sinfield’s  is not the only important critical work to claim that the subject’s relationship with God can be characterised as existing in a state of unmediated, existential anxiety, one that produces obedient subjects through an unremitting interior quest for repletion that can never quite be assuaged in the encounter with the divine.  To take a few representative examples, Jonathan Dollimore concludes as follows in a discussion of John Donne’s First Anniversary : ‘Relational identity has . . . given way to anarchic egotism.’6  Or as Katharine Eisaman  Maus notes: ‘The radical Protestants . . . typically contrast an unmediated relationship between God and man, a relationship celebrated for its intrinsic inwardness, with the empty corporeality of external secular affairs.’7 Lastly, in an article on Thomas  Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, Ian  McAdam writes of ‘the Reformation emphasis on an unmediated relationship with God’.8 Although expressed in slightly different ways, each of these critics articulates one of the most embedded of modern critical truisms: the notion that the Protestant subject stands alone with his or her God, a claim so deeply ingrained in our critical thinking that it has become axiomatic.9 I want to rethink this claim. Certainly  it is the case that at an official level, the Reformed agenda sought to eradicate a whole level of mediatory excrescences, such as saints and indulgences, through a vigorous programme of  iconoclasm. In many European countries, iconoclastic purges became almost synonymous with the spread of reform. The historian Ian Green notes: Compared with the emphasis in the medieval church (and many non-Christian religions) on contact with the sacred as a means of overcoming the gulf between God and man, the Protestant church in England, like that of the ‘magisterial’ reformers abroad, focused on a much narrower band of sacred persons, objects, and actions.10

In England, the official policy is most directly summed up in the words of  Elizabeth I’s ‘Injunctions of 1559’. Here it is ordered that all parsons and ministers ‘shall take away . . . and destroy all shrines . . . paintings, and all other monuments of feigned miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry and

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35

superstition, so that there remain no memory of the same in walls, glass windows, or elsewhere within their churches and houses’.11  Considering the vicissitudes of the Reformed religion under Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary I, Elizabeth I’s long and comparatively stable rule ensured that injunctions such as these had an important effect on cultural understandings of interiority. With  idolatrous outward mediators officially proscribed, it makes a certain critical sense to claim that the subject was forced inward as he or she attempted to institute some connection with the divine. If expressions of devotion and identification could no longer be officially mediated through outward signs, then interiority necessarily becomes the guarantor of sanctioned religious experience. Such an understanding is memorably encapsulated in much religious verse of the period. For example, in George  Herbert’s poem ‘Sion’ (1633), the speaker notes that ‘All Solomons sea of brasse and world of stone/ Is not so deare to thee [God] as one good grone’, contrasting the immanent, fleshy world of signs with the transcendent, spiritual impulse of inward worship. The speaker goes on: And truly brasse and stones are heavie things, Tombes for the dead, not temples fit for thee:   But grones are quick, and full of wings,   And all their motions upward be; And ever as they mount, like larks they sing; The note is sad, yet musick for a king. (17–24)12

In a sense, this verse shows that proscribing or forgetting Catholicism’s ‘brasse and stones’ constitutes the practice whereby the Protestant self is reconfigured through the ‘proper’, non-idolatrous and inward ‘grones’ of religious practice, centred on Christ and with the promise of  grace imminent.13  Moreover,  as Ian  Green observes, it is possible to find  Protestants of all persuasions united in the belief that both instruction and imitation should have a strongly Christocentric emphasis: ‘Teaching centred on  Christ as mediator for fallen man, and the inspiration and the model for man to emulate’, he writes.14  But what Green’s formulation misses is the fact that this process of emulation or imitation was far from being straightforward. To quote Herbert again, this time in his poem ‘Deniall’: O that thou shouldst give dust a tongue   To crie to thee And then not heare it crying! all day long   My heart was in my knee,   But no hearing. (16–20)15

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Protestantism and drama in early modern England

Any  move towards the divine simultaneously becomes an acknowledgement that the divine interlocutor fails to hear the speaker or deigns not to do so. The volitional teleology implied by the active verbs here such as ‘give’ and ‘crie’ is profoundly undercut by the overarching exigencies of a theology that will not acknowledge any operative merit in human ‘crying’. Grace is certainly a possibility but even then, for Herbert, it is an unmerited gift. As the  poem ‘Grace’ has it: ‘Sinne is still hammering my heart/ Unto a hardnesse, void of love:/ Let supplying grace, to crosse his art,/ Drop from above’ (17–20).16 To  understand more fully why the cry of ‘dust’ is so ineffectual in Herbert’s formulation, we need to pursue the issue of  idolatry a little ­further. Official proclamations on idolatrous worship only tell us one version of the story. Important is the invocation in the  ‘Injunctions’ of  ‘memory’. Dealing with the physical manifestation of idolatrous ­mediators was one thing but coming to terms with the memory of such mediators presented different problems. The attack upon the apparatus of mediation began as an attempt to counter the material basis of Catholicism but it was soon translated into a much more nebulous cultural memory of what Catholicism’s various mediatory apparatus might have signified.  In order to counter ‘false’ Catholic memory and to emulate Christ ‘correctly’, Protestantism had to refigure how that emulation might take place. As historians like Eamon  Duffy and literary critics like Stephen  Greenblatt have begun to demonstrate, while outward, representative mediators may have been officially removed, it seems that a desire for mediatory practice, a desire that was both symbolic and inward, never quite went away.17 For example, in an examination of the doctrine of  purgatory in his recent book Hamlet in Purgatory, Greenblatt has argued that ‘The Protestant attack on the “middle state of souls” and the middle place those souls inhabited destroyed this method for most people in England, but it did not destroy the longings and fears that Catholic doctrine had focused and exploited.’18 Operating as it does as a midway point between heaven and hell, purgatory is clearly a place and subject intimately linked to the idea of mediation. As his study so compellingly demonstrates, while mediatory functions may be removed, mediatory desires remain strikingly potent within early modern culture, involving as they do what he terms ‘a relationship constituted by memory’.19  With their outward manifestations officially proscribed, mediatory desires primarily signify at the level of interior, remembered response. That said, I think that Greenblatt aligns the concept of mediation too exclusively with proscribed Catholic practices. In doing this, he underplays the fact that mediation is a critical if

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37

contested notion in all versions of Christian thought, not least early modern Protestantism. Here we might recall the speaker in  Herbert’s ‘The Sinner’. In this poem, he begins by stating: ‘Lord, how I am all ague, when I seek/ What I have treasur’d in my memorie!’ (1–2). We notice that the turn towards the ‘treasur’d’ memory is closely aligned with the ‘ague’ that permeates ‘all’ of the speaker’s self. This is because what he seeks are ‘shreds of holinesse, that dare not venture/ To shew their face’ (6–7). For the Protestant subject, memory is a process fraught with internal conflict. But this does not necessarily hinder the search for those ‘shreds of holinesse’. As the speaker concludes: Yet Lord restore thine image, heare my call And though my hard heart scarce to thee can grone, Remember that thou once didst write in stone. (12–14)20

The ‘grone’ that was so important to the speaker of ‘Sion’ now becomes something so faint that, in the process of God restoring man to his image, the burden of memory is shifted onto the divine as he is enjoined to ‘remember’ the covenant that God instituted through Moses in the ten commandments. Here the move towards memory is not so much an abrogation of responsibility on the part of the speaker, but rather a recognition that in order for remembering to be properly constituted, it needs to signify not in the realm of the flesh, represented by the speaker’s ‘ague’, but in the realm of the spirit, figured somewhat ambivalently by the typologically permanent ‘stone’ of the Mosaic covenant. The ideal for Protestantism was that the act of mediation between man and God was to be remembered and instituted as a spiritual exercise that allowed for the workings of grace.21  In practice, as Herbert demonstrates, this was a troubled process. So, from a Protestant perspective, to focus obsessively on outward mediators is to neglect, or rather not properly remember Christ and his foundational mediatory role. Such an understanding plays its part in the theological programme of the reformer Martin  Luther. As he complains in The Bondage of the Will (1525): they have turned Christ from a kindly Mediator into a dreaded Judge for themselves, whom they strive to placate by the intercessions of his mother and the saints, and by a multitude of invented works, rites, religious orders and vows, in all of which their aim is to placate Christ so that he may give them grace.22

By falsely representing Christ so effectively, Luther argues that the ‘multitude of invented works’ of the medieval church serve a placatory

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function that undermines Christ’s biblical status as mediator.23 In essence, Protestantism wants to return unencumbered to the magnificent singularity of Christ’s expiatory sacrifice. As Saint Paul explains in his First Epistle to Timothy, there is ‘one Mediatour betweene God and man, which is the man Christ Iesus’ (1 Timothy 2:5). According to Paul, Christ acts as mediator through his  simultaneously divine and human natures. Christ mediates on our behalf through his sacrifice and as such humankind might be brought to union with God. As John  Calvin notes in his classic commentary on this passage: ‘this mediator is not given to only to one nation, or to a few men of a particular class, but to all, for the benefit of the sacrifice, by which He has expiated for our sins, applies to all.’24 Calvin’s benevolent claim that all may claim Christ as mediator accurately reflects a theological truism that links every shade of Christianity during this divided period. Theologians of all confessional persuasions clung resolutely to the principle of mediation between man and the divine through Christ. To  take just two examples, the Decree of the Fifth Session of the Council of Trent held in 1546 invokes ‘the one mediator, our Lord Jesus Christ, who has reconciled us to God in his own blood’,25  and in a book published in 1598 the Dutch Calvinist Jacob  Kimedoncius refers to ‘the Mediatour of God and men, our Lord Iesus Christ’.26 Theologically, culturally and geographically, the Decrees of Trent and this Calvinist text represent opposite ends of the religious spectrum in early modern Europe. Indeed the irrelativity of these examples to each other is deliberate since it helps to demonstrate that claiming Christ as mediator represents something more than the mere recitation of a biblical commonplace. In relation to the issue of iconoclasm, we need to remember that the question of idolatry was so contested in early modern England precisely because all mediators, whatever their provenance or appearance, served as surrogates for the one true mediator Jesus Christ. In the words of the English Calvinist Richard Fowns: ‘it is against the dignitie of Iesus Christ to make any other mediator vnto God.’27 Or as Fulke Greville puts it from a slightly different angle in Sonnet CV from Caelica (1633): Three things there may be in Mans opinion deare, Fame, many Friends, and Fortunes dignities: False visions all, which in our sense appeare, To sanctifie desire’s Idolatries. (1–4)28

Bearing  in mind the controversy generated by the physical practice of mediation throughout Europe and its various material and spiritual manifestations, such expressions also speak to profound differences of

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39

theological and cultural opinion as to precisely how that mediatory function might be discharged. To quote Fowns again: ‘It is a question much controuersed betwixt the two Churches (the Romish, and the Reformed) in which nature Christ is our Mediator.’29 Though I will return to the issue of Christ’s natures later, Catholic and Reformed thinkers held to very different theological understandings of what Christ’s mediation means and how this might pertain to the human subject. In the context of early modern England and its gradual adoption of the Reformed agenda, coming to terms with the status and function of Christ as mediator is made all the more challenging by the ubiquity, both historical and critical, of accounts detailing and studies examining  the iconoclastic destruction of Christological symbolism. The feast of Corpus Christi, the crucifix, paintings and statues of Christ, even the practice of crossing oneself all came under attack from various strands of Protestant opinion.30 Outward representations of Christ were the loci of official legislation, and both official and unofficial attack. But inwardly, Christ still signified as a powerful theological presence: it is important not to let the iconoclastic impulse obscure the centrality of Christ and his mediatory function within and to early modern theology. William  Perkins puts it like this in A Declaration Of The Trve manner of knowing Christ Crucified (1611): ‘Desire not here vpon earth to behold him [Christ] with the bodily eie, but looke vpon him with the eie of true and liuely faith, applying him and his merites to thy selfe as thine owne.’31 Or, as  Christopher Sutton writes in his hugely popular tract Disce Vivere (1604): ‘The chiefest pitch of our perfection, is to haue some resemblance of his [Christ’s] holinesse.’32  Such formulations are significant as criticism concerned with early modern subjectivity has largely forgotten that early modern  Protestantism is a deeply Christocentric religion  based on practices of imitation. Protestant theology may have placed ‘a vast and uncertain gulf’ between God and the subject, as Sinfield noted earlier. Yet while Protestant thinkers were certainly aware of this gap, they also tried to bridge it via the mediatory function of Christ. Protestant subjectivity may be many things but it is not unmediated, at least not at the level of interior response, a fact that Sinfield downplays. Understanding Protestantism as a deeply Christocentric religion also enables us to reconsider the way in which this religious system represents the subject in the world. Though broadly agreeing with Sinfield that Protestant theology inculcates this subject within an ideological framework that was both generative and repressive, I want to rethink his influential account of subjectivity in relation to the place and function of what I

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will call Protestant representational practice by arguing that Protestantism produces subjects through a particular and identifiable representational system. In this system, the human subject is placed in opposition to the divine object. But where Sinfield identifies an irredeemable ‘gulf’ between subject and object, I suggest that Protestant thinkers repeatedly attempt to bridge that gulf through various practices of mediation and imitation. Though this attempt inevitably foregrounds the representational status of signs, the model for these practices is to be found in Protestantism’s account of Christ’s mediatory function and how he mediates between subject and object. It is a biblical and exegetical commonplace throughout the late medieval and early modern period to exhort the Christian subject to ‘put yee on the Lord IESUS’ (Romans 13:14).33 This injunction is important as it implies a one-to-one mimetic connection between subject and object. It takes for granted that ‘putting on’ Christ is an action that the subject may legitimately perform. However, I argue that Protestantism profoundly disrupts the straightforward relational correspondence between subject and object implied by biblical injunctions such as this. The question is not simply, pace  Green, one of emulation. What we find time and again is a competing desire to affirm that signs do, in fact, ‘designate’ what they signify alongside a quite clear sense that, in the case of the divine, signs simultaneously fail to offer the subject that very designation. This also applies to Protestant discussions of grace. The classic formulation can be found in John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559) where he states: ‘free will is not sufficient to enable man to do good works, unless he be helped by grace, indeed special grace, which only the elect receive through regeneration.’34 Because Protestantism insists upon the division of the world into the  elect and the reprobate, only the elect can receive saving  grace with the reprobate invariably condemned to inferior grace. The Thirty Nine Articles (1563) state the official Elizabethan position on the matter: Works done before the grace of Christ, and the inspiration of his Spirit, are not pleasant to God, forasmuch as they spring not from faith in Jesus Christ, neither do they make men meet to receive grace, or (as the school-authors say) deserve grace of congruity; yea, rather, for that they are not done as God hath willed and commanded them to be done, we doubt not but they have the nature of sin.35

Although the Articles do not state the issue as starkly as Calvin, there can little doubt as to his influence on this formulation: to maintain the ­freedom of God’s grace and the ineffectual nature of man’s cooperation in this regard is to rely tacitly upon a doctrine of justification by faith alone and a belief that ‘they that have the nature of sin’ cannot be of the elect.

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But the liveliest discussions about the precise lineaments of ­prevenient, effective and irresistible grace in early modern England are found in the so-called  covenant theology associated with  William Perkins.36 In his A Treatise of Gods free grace, and mans free will (1601), Perkins speaks of ‘the foure estates of man, the estate of innocencie before the fall, the estate of corruption after the fall, the estate of regeneration after conuersion, and the estate of glorie after this life’.37 Because man has fallen, he must rely upon the gift of grace in order to be regenerated. This is known as  prevenient  or sufficient grace. Perkins explains: ‘Gifts of renovation, are such graces of the Holy ghost, as serue not only to restraine the corruption of the inward man, but also to mortifie it in the root and to make a change of our sinfull nature.’38 Prevenient grace is thus predicated upon God’s gift and upon man’s repentance. It is also  irresistible, since God has decreed those who will be saved and damned. Nonetheless, as Perkins goes on, ‘vertues of this kinde, are onely incident to such as are in Christ’.39 Prevenient grace may be bestowed upon all sinners but God’s irresistible grace can only properly apply to the regenerated elect. What the Articles imply, Perkins states: in that we can do nothing but sinne til we be regenerate, we are taught to acknowledge our bondage vnder sinne and Satan; yea, we must labour to feele this bondage, & to grone vnder the burden of it. This being don [sic], we must goe further yet, & with hungring and thirsting hearts seeke to the Mediatour Christ, who preacheth deliuerance to captiues.40

Although prevenient grace may take the subject so far, the unregenerate subject cannot find Christ.41  Perkins explains: ‘The conuersion of a sinner is a creation: and no creature can prepare itself to his owne creation.’42 Or as he puts it later, ‘there must needs be a grace sufficient to saluation, which is not effectual . . . There is a grace which is sufficient to the conuiction of a sinner, which is not effectual to saluation’.43 The message is clear and uncompromising: irresistible grace can only be found in Christ and it can only apply to the elect. But even here, the ambiguous language of the image is still found. Concerning the suffering of the elect, Perkins writes, ‘it must be our comfort, that we  are predestinate to be made conformable to the image of Christ in afflictions’.44 Whether expressed in the more moderate terms of the Articles or starkly by Perkins, grace in Christ may be irresistible but it is not straightforwardly attainable. And the granting of saving grace confirms one’s elect status as it implicitly condemns those who do not  receive  the same  benefit.

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With this in mind, consider the following interesting passage  from Sutton’s Disce Vivere, which in this text is spoken by Christ: Marke therfore [sic] diligently, what it is for thee to be created to  the image of God: vnderstand, that image is one thing, & similitude is another: for example sake, vnreasonable beastes may haue a similitude with man, but the image of man none can haue but another man. Man eateth and slepeth, so doe the beasts, beholde a certaine similitude & communitie betweene diuers natures: Nowe the image of man none imitateth, but another man of the same nature: The image then is more worth then the similitude. By this meanes shalt thou haue a likenes [sic] of the image of God: if considering that he is good, thou studies to be good: knowing hee is iust, thou endeauour to be iust: beholding his mercy, thou giue thy diligence to be merciful: and now harken howe thou mayest be like vnto him in his image.45

On the face of it, this passage may seem relatively straightforward, an unremarkable Christian exposition of the biblical commonplace that man is made in God’s image. But examining the philosophical assumptions of the passage and the language used to express them, the commonplace comes under some strain. Note the phrase ‘created to the image of God’: might we not expect ‘created in the image of God’? The preposition ‘in’ implies a connection between subject and object. But the preposition ‘to’ is rather less proximal, implying as it does a certain distancing of subject and object. We can also note a similarly conditional, distancing effect in the phrase ‘thou mayest be like vnto him in his image’. Yet perhaps the key phrase is the one that reads: ‘By this meanes shalt thou haue a likenes [sic] of the image of God.’ Once more, we might ask why the subject is not simply made in the image of God rather than having a likeness of that image? There is much more to this difference than linguistic pedantry or quibbling. In fact it goes to the heart of early modern Protestant subjectivity. There is a theological and cultural world of difference in constructing man in the image of God, and in arrogating man to a likeness of the image of God. The former implies proximity; the latter implies disconnection. What we witness here and elsewhere is a seemingly straightforward affirmation of Christian imitation that when we look in greater detail, in fact negates the very terms of its own construction. II The  issue of how signs both produce and mediate the Christian sub­ject’s place in the world can be usefully contextualised in relation to the ­seminal work of Saint Augustine of Hippo. As many scholars of early modern

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religion have stressed, in order to come to terms with the impact of Reformed Protestantism, it is also necessary to understand the importance of what Paul Helm has termed ‘the world of late medieval Augustinianism’.46 This is not to downplay the historically specific theological and political divisions that characterised the Reformation during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But it is to note that Protestant religious culture was as much a product of ongoing internal debates within Western Christendom as it was an externalised division between clearly oppositional theological positions. Between 1490 and 1506,  Johannes Amerbach published an eleven-volume set of Augustine’s work and the dissemination of this edition amongst humanists and early Reformers alike sparked an important Augustinian revival across Europe.47 Although there were often sharply competing uses to which Augustinian theology was put, it is nonetheless possible to say that, for the Reformers, ‘Augustine is clearly regarded as pre-eminent among the fathers. By the time of  Calvin, the supreme authority of Augustine had been firmly established’.48 Indeed in many respects, much Protestant theology represents an extended meditation upon Augustinian thought and Reformed thinkers found in Augustine’s work an account of  Christ’s mediatory role that proved animating and challenging at a theological level: such work was to have a considerable impact on Protestant representational practice.49 This can first be demonstrated with reference to Augustine’s political ontology. In  De Civitate Dei (The City of God, 426 CE), the created universe is conceptualised as consisting of opposing earthly and heavenly cities. Augustine writes: ‘Two loves therefore have given origin to these two cities, self-love in contempt of God unto the earthly, love of God in contempt of one’s self to the heavenly.’50 The earthly city affirms the self in all its cupidity while the heavenly city negates this subjective focus because it abrogates the self. The latter city is almost inevitably superior to the former, not only because it is divine but, interestingly, because it is free of contrariety: ‘that blessed city shall see this in itself – that no inferior shall envy his superior . . . every one will not wish to be what he has not received, although he be bound in a most peaceable bond of concord with him who has received’.51 In Augustine’s schema, existence in the civitas dei is ontologically different from existence upon earth. Because the heavenly city is divine, all who exist there necessarily participate in the divine, safe from the dualities of earthly contradiction: ‘the two cities (of the predestinate and the reprobate) are in this world confused together and commixed, until the general judgement make a separation.’52 However, this is not to posit a final split between the two realms. For Augustine, it

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is Christ who performs the crucial mediatory function that links the two realms, at least until the eschatological triumph of the civitate dei at the end of the world. Augustine explains this function in the following way. He notes that ‘all men of necessity must be miserable while they are mortal’, and goes on: ‘then must a mean be found which is God as well as man, who by the mediation of his blessed mortality may help us out of this mortal misery.’ The only figure that can accomplish this task is the mediator, Christ: the fruit of His mediation is to free those whom He is mediator for from the eternal death of the flesh. So then it was necessary for the mediator between God and us to have a temporal mortality and an eternal beatitude; to have correspondence with mortals by the first, and to transfer them to eternity by the second.53

The central thrust of the Nicene Creed is taken here to its most logical and eloquent conclusion.54 Christ’s performance of mediation and his status as mediator are one and the same and until the subject is united with God in Christ at the Last Judgement, his mediatory role assumes a central importance. This is both a linguistic and an eschatological issue: because of Christ’s mediatory function, inward human identification with him is seen to take place only in so far as it is humanly possible. Augustine points to the fact that Christ is obliged to mediate between  humanity and divinity without dividing the two states yet also without collapsing the two states into one another (‘ut per id, quod transit, congrueret morituris, et ad id, quod permanet, transferret ex mortuis’ as the Latin text has it).55 Crucially, though, he locates the work of mediation in Christ’s human nature. In the words of Stephen Edmondson: ‘Of course, Augustine adamantly adds, Christ’s human nature is able to mediate only because of its unity with the divine nature . . . and not in any sense apart from it. But, nonetheless, it is the human nature that mediates; the divine nature, we might say, only enables this mediation.’56  Though some thinkers were to dissent later from this position, it is fair to say that the majority of important preReformation theologians, such as  Anselm, Peter Lombard,  Bonaventura and Thomas Aquinas, followed Augustine in locating Christ’s mediation within his human nature.57 This  is crucial for two reasons. First, having Christ perform his mediation in his human nature enables theological and cultural connections to be made between human and divine, whereby Christ is seen, in the words of Sarah  Beckwith, ‘as simultaneously flesh and spirit, God and man, image and exemplar, sign and signified’.58 But secondly, and more importantly for our purposes, since this is a position that underpins many manifestations of late medieval popular piety, we

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will also see in subsequent chapters how it is gradually modified and challenged by early modern Reformers. That said, for the moment I want to return to the place and function of language in Augustine’s work as he constructs Christ as mediator. As he argues in  De Agone Christiano (On the Christian Struggle, 396 CE): ‘Let us not listen to those who say that it was not a real manhood which the son of God assumed, that he was not born of a woman, but that he displayed to the beholders a false flesh and a feigned appearance of a human body.’59 We notice in this implicit discussion of unorthodoxy how Augustine inadvertently discloses that Christian orthodoxy necessarily relies  upon figurative language to provide a worrying, albeit necessary, slipperiness that allows distinctions of linguistic category to be made in relation to Christ. Augustine’s concern seems to be that Christ’s body will be seen as a ‘feigned appearance of a human body’ (‘imaginem simulatam corporis humani’), that is to say, a  metaphor.60 The problem for him is that the metaphorical description of Christ as mediator necessarily describes what he does, not what he is (or will be). Augustine wants to hold onto a metaphorical account of Christ without imputing the status of metaphor to Christ himself. Christ is able to perform his office as mediator because he is concurrently human and divine and in neither state displays an ‘imaginem simulatam’.61 By  way of unpacking what this means (and to flag up why it will be so important in an early modern context), we might note the slightly uneasy use of the words  ‘correspondence’ (congrueret) and ‘transfer’ (transferret) in the extract quoted earlier from De Civitate Dei. At a theological level their use is, of course, scrupulously orthodox: Jesus corresponds with humanity and those whom he saves are transferred to salvation through the divinity. Yet it is difficult to ignore the theological work that Augustine’s chosen mode of linguistic reference is obliged to perform.62 To start with, at a linguistic and  mimetic level, stating that Christ has a ‘correspondence’ with humanity as opposed to, say, a ‘direct connection’ might seem at least to raise the spectre of a representational gap between Christ and fallen humanity: such a difficulty is not exclusive to Augustine and we will see how it is negotiated by a variety of early modern thinkers. Augustine would grant that humanity is always obliged to articulate the divine in figurative language; that the mimetic nature of signs can scarcely be avoided.63 Again, this is not to downplay Augustine’s  neo-Platonised Christian semiotics where, according to Charles Taylor, ‘Everything has being only insofar as it participates in God’.64 Nevertheless, we also need to be aware of the way in which, for

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Augustine, the constitutive function of the figurative in a sense becomes the focal point of his theological message. Figurative language is not just a nominal function of discourse: it has to be actively entered into or in some sense incarnated, a fact that theologians since Augustine have implicitly and explicitly wrestled with.  Writing of  Augustine’s use of figural discourse in De Doctrine Christiana,  Lisa  Freinkel observes that ‘the sign is not a thing-in-itself, not something to be enjoyed in its own right, but as a means to an end – a means to another’s enjoyment. Here clearly the sign is not its own master. Its very presence serves another and it is instituted solely for the sake of that other’.65 The semiotic  mediation that figurative discourse performs between subject and object is indistinguishable from  Christ’s theological function mediating between man and the divine. Moreover, by eliding the generative function of the figurative with the generative purpose of theological exegesis, discourse is provided with a means of accounting for the problem posed by Christ’s kenosis or self-emptying, a theological mystery that is necessarily beyond fallen comprehension.66 Augustine is in fact noting the difficulty of  the communicative relationship between human and divine and the way in which the mimetic nature of discourse always mediates that relationship. The basis of this mimesis is that language does not simply describe the mediation between divine object and human subject but actively performs that mediation through its figurative forms. By positing as he does an intimate connection between language and the divine, Augustine holds that the presence of inner love, or  caritas, ‘connects both the conceiver and the objects of his words with the divine order of things’.67 It is through caritas that signification is rendered possible within the subject and within the world. But one of the consequences of such a theory of communication is that the connection between conceiver, words and divine may go awry. In a book that examines Augustine’s centrality for early modern theories of language, Martin  Elsky has said of Augustinian semiotics that ‘the word depends upon the quality of mind that conceives it’,68 leaving open ‘the possibility that one might misspeak because of the mind’s fallen condition’.69 For Augustine, language, like Christ, is obliged to mediate between the human and the divine, but this process of mediation is fraught with difficulty.  For example,  metaphor or metonymy, figurative forms that are integral to all human discourse, are in a sense the price we have to pay for our entry into communication. Moreover, they become the mode of discourse that destabilises the seemingly transparent relationship between sign and signified that is the basis of any communicative utterance because, in fact, they embody the very instability of that relationship. What is more, this instability is potentially

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a mode of effecting the theological and ideological interpellation of subjects. The Marxist philosopher Louis  Althusser reflects interestingly on this process when he asks: Were not men made  in the image of God? As all theological reflection proves, whereas He ‘could’ perfectly well have done without men, God needs them, the Subject needs the subjects, just as men need God, the subjects need the Subject. Better: God needs men, the great Subject needs subjects, even in the terrible inversion of his image in them (when the subjects wallow in debauchery, i.e. sin).70

Though Althusser is primarily concerned to offer us a structural account of how this process of interpellation takes place, his focus on man as image of the divine (or ‘terrible inversion’ of that image) is critical. It is necessary to draw attention to the way in which this kind of figurative theological language is deeply implicated in the  interpellation  of Christian subjectivity. The lack of fixity that I have identified within these Christian manifestations of the figurative should not be taken to imply a glib form  of protostructuralism where the free play of signification overrides historically and culturally determined theological concerns. In Augustine’s theology, it is critical to recognise that the demands of the linguistic and the eschatological do elide. These figurative forms will only cease to signify within Augustine’s schema at the Last Judgement when what Christ does (mediator/mediation) will be overwritten by what he is (Christ/Judge/God). In the words of the theologian Michael  Hanby: ‘in the hypostatic union of Christ, Augustine dissolves any antagonism between immanence and transcendence and any possibility of metaphysically fixing their ratio behind determinable boundaries.’71 The fact that figurative forms  like metaphor and metonymy are constitutively predicated upon the implicit suspension of referents is, theologically, of the utmost importance. Just as at a theological level Christ mediates between human and divine, so at a linguistic level, the notion of the mediator pivots between the subject of reference (Christ) and the eventual object of reference (God). When this unity is made and the elect are separated from the reprobate then, presumably, there will be no more need for metaphor or metonymy. But until this event occurs, and while we are obliged to communicate within discourse, we are invariably left with the uneasy elision between the figurative and the theological. In a passage dealing with the relationship between human signification and the divine in book fifteen of Augustine’s De Trinitate (399–419 CE), he writes: We must, therefore, come to that word of man, to the word of a living being endowed with reason, to the word of the image of God, not born of God but

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made by God; this word cannot be uttered in sound nor thought in the likeness of sound, such as must be done with the word of any language; it precedes all the signs by which it is signified, and is begotten by the knowledge which remains in the mind when this same knowledge is spoken inwardly, just as it is.72

An adherence to the inward force of  caritas cannot fail to disguise the realisation that the ‘word of man’ can never be fully present to itself: God’s ‘word’ dissolves the difference between subject and object in divine presence and human discourse cannot but defer that meaning.73 It is ‘the word of the image of God’ (‘verbum. . .imaginis dei’)74 that is the necessary inheritance of the ‘living being endowed with reason’: When, therefore, that which is in the knowledge is in the word, then it is a true word, and the truth which is expected from man, so that what is in the knowledge is also in the word, and what is not in the knowledge is not in the word; it is here that we recognize ‘Yes, yes; no, no.’ In this way the likeness of the image that was made approaches, insofar as it can, to the likeness of the image that was born, whereby God the Son is proclaimed as substantially like the father in all things.75

This passage demonstrates the way in which the object of figurative discourse consistently slides away from its intended referent. This problem is memorably expressed in the elision that Augustine sees occurring between language, Christ and mankind. When ‘word’ and ‘knowledge’ correspond, then ‘the likeness of the image that was made [man]’ approaches ‘insofar as it can, to the likeness of the image that was born [Christ]’.76 Sentences such as these raise profound ontological questions about the relationship between man and divine, not the least of which is whether language merely ‘describes’, or in fact constitutes that very relationship? Central to this is the function of Christ. Hanby explains as follows: ‘To raise in Jesus a border between  immanence and transcendence, and between passivity and activity, is to ask how the divine and human natures are conjoined.’77 Not only does man correspond to Christ ‘insofar, as it is able’, but this correspondence is also described as a meeting not of essences but of figurative images. Seen in this way, the figurative embodies the promissory substitution of what the subject hopes, in the eschatological scheme of things, will eventually become essential, salvational correspondence. The way in which language mediates our subjective relationship to an authoritative other has also been reconceived in a neo-Augustinian context in the work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques  Lacan.78 Interestingly, in his Ecrits Lacan gets ballast for his theory by returning to a foundational early modern thinker, the Dutch humanist  Erasmus.

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In this way, he provides a connection between these Augustinian concerns and those of the early modern period. Puzzling over the posthumous reputation of Erasmus, ‘how’, Lacan wonders, ‘do you imagine that a scholar with so little talent for the “commitments” that solicited him in his age (as they do in all ages) . . . held such an eminent place in the revolution of a Reformation in which man has as much of a stake in each man as in all men?’79 Lacan’s reply to his own question is both provocative and historically astute: ‘The answer is that the slightest alteration in the relation between man and the signifier, in this case the procedures of exegesis, changes the whole course of history by modifying the moorings that anchor his being.’80 For Lacan, Erasmus’ biblical scholarship, with its emphasis on the etymological historicity of biblical  language, opens the way for a re-evaluation of the association between man and signifier by suggesting that the relationship between the signifier and the signified is a matter of arbitrary convention. What Erasmus unwittingly anticipates, Lacan purposely asserts, writing that ‘we will fail to pursue the question further as long as we cling to the illusion that the signifier answers to the function of representing the signified’.81 That this is a necessary illusion, one that allows communication to take place, Lacan does not doubt. But he also points to the fact that ‘the signifier, by its very nature, always anticipates meaning by unfolding its dimension before it’.82 This has particular resonance for those figurative forms of discourse that are so important in  Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle’s work for example.83 Indeed, Lacan builds upon their work by reformulating the distinction between the discursive functions  of  metaphor and metonymy. Peter Dews explains: Lacan continues the linguist’s argument in so far as he views metaphor and metonymy as two fundamental processes of all discourse (rather than two specific rhetorical figures – although these figures provide the most vivid exemplifications of this process); but he goes beyond Jakobson in viewing metaphor as the mark of the relation of discourse to the subject, and metonymy as the mark of its relation to the object.84

To restate Dews’ formulation slightly, the signifier does not give access to a meaning that is located ‘in’ the signified. Rather, as Lacan notes in a somewhat Augustinian formulation, ‘it is in the chain of the signifier that the meaning “insists” but . . . none of its elements “consists” in the signification of which it is at the moment capable. We are forced, then, to accept the notion of an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier’.85 In the case of metaphor, the gap between signifier and signified is revealed

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but never overcome in the substitution of one subject for another that metaphor always performs, since as Dews notes, ‘there can be no absolute determination of the place of the subject: each signifier is a “metaphor or the subject”, a representation of the subject mediated by another  signifier’.86 In metonymy, on the other hand, the gap between signifier and signified becomes constitutive of a structurally permanent exclusion: ‘In  metonymy . . . in contrast to metaphor, the bar between signifier and signified is not crossed: the object always appears “beyond” or “on the other side of” discourse, as the underlying coherence of the sequence of signifieds which cannot itself be  signified.’87 The fact that the substitution of metaphor is operative in relation to the discourse of the subject, whereas the discourse of metonymy signifies in relation to the exclusory regime of the object, sets up an interesting dialectical tension between the two modes of figurative representation. Building upon an important semiotic lineage that runs from Augustine, through to Ferdinand de  Saussure and Jakobson, Lacan shows how this figurative dialectic consists of an endless slippage between signifiers, and how potentially that slippage has historically implicated the subject in relation to an exclusionary object.88 As in Lacan’s account, it is not the literal conjoining of sign and signified that underpins Augustinian semiotics, but the necessary slippage provided by the figurative image. The critical point is that this slippage finds its expression in, indeed is located in,  Christ as he elides the signifier and signified. Augustine concludes as follows: Therefore,  not God the Father, not the Holy Spirit, not the Trinity itself, but the Son alone, who is the Word of God, was made flesh, although the Trinity brought this about, in order that by our word following and imitating His example, we might live rightly, that is, that we might have no lie either in the contemplation or in the work of our word. But this perfection of this image is to be some time in the future. In order to obtain it, the good master instructs us by the Christian faith and the doctrine of godliness, that ‘with face unveiled,’ from the veil of the Law, which is the shadow of things to come, ‘beholding the glory of the Lord,’ that is, looking as it were through a  mirror, ‘we might be transformed into the same image from glory to glory, as through the Spirit of the Lord,’ according to our previous explanation of these words.89

In this Augustinian schema, we are reminded of the mimetic need to imitate Christ and that the ‘perfection of this image is to be some time in the future’ (‘Verum haec huius imaginis est quandoque future perfectio’), an eschatological realisation that accounts for the temporary necessity of figurative language and a necessity rendered palatable through  caritas.90 The remarkable thing about this passage, though, is that Augustine should

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choose to describe the negation of the Christian’s figurative inheritance in such avowedly figurative terms. The use of the biblical mirror image is interesting since as Paul makes clear, the mirror represents an imperfect (because reversed) imitation or self-slippage experienced by the subject. Augustine draws upon Paul’s allegory in 2 Corinthians 3:18, concerning the shift from the Old Law to the New Law in Christ, when we ‘might be transformed into the same image from glory to glory’. This move appears straightforward enough. But in its very figural logic, the example only serves to remind us of the future conditional structure of such a promise: the conditional ‘might’ of the biblical passage implies the ongoing constitutive necessity of the present shadow or veiled ‘image’. Figurative discourse marks the inheritance of the Christian because the ‘perfection of the image’ in Christ must necessarily always be in the future. But at the level of representation, this can only signify for the subject at the level of present material praxis. The encounter with Christ within Christian theology is always a linguistic encounter with the figurative that positions the subject within a defined representational matrix: critically, neither of these realms offers the subject repletion. Moreover, such a theological encounter has important historical consequences for the way in which subjectivity was represented. These were understood and debated by Protestant theologians such  as Luther who were to develop these Christological discourses in significant ways. Augustinianism bequeathed to the Reformers a system where constructing Christ as mediator meant more than simply the repetition of a biblical commonplace: it connoted complex networks of signification that were linguistically constituted, mimetically manifested and ideologically contested . III The Christocentrism of early modern  Protestantism foregounds the issues explored above. One of the central pillars of  Protestant orthodoxy is the so-called duplex cognitio Dei (twofold knowledge of God), which asserts that any move towards self-knowledge is inextricably bound to knowledge of the divine.91 This principle is most famously exclaimed in the opening line of John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion: ‘Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.’92  Undoubtedly, defining the precise nature of this ‘knowledge’ and what kind of relationship it might entail is far from straightforward. Still, I want to argue that the

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impulse towards self-knowledge is always a double impulse: selfhood is mediated in the Reformation through the relationship with the divine, and as the one mediator between man and God Christ plays a critical role in determining that relationship. The issue for Protestant thinkers is whether the representational price to be paid for asserting some kind of semiotic connection with the divine is either a concomitant downgrading of the  transcendent majesty of the divine or else a slide into  idolatrous worship of the sign. When Protestant writers refer to Christ as ‘mediator’, they are referring not to external material properties that stand in for the divine, but to an inward, spiritual sign. For example, when John  Calvin writes of Christ that ‘in him is the accomplishment of our saluation, whom God had appointed to bee our mediator’,93 he is speaking of an  interior form of mediation between the subject and the divine that manifests itself through God’s  grace.  Again, many Catholic theologians would not necessarily disagree with the principle of this formulation, as the contemporaneous discourse of Jesuit inward meditation shows.94 The difference is that, unlike in Protestant practice, the Catholic’s practice of meditation shifts from a remembered physical outward sign to the practice of inward mediation. The Jesuit Gaspar de  Loarte explains that outward  pictorial representations of the divine are crucial and that: ‘the memory of the Picture shall remayne as it were imprinted in your minde, & to the end also that you maye with more facultie goe forward in your Meditation.’95  But  in order for the Protestant subject to achieve salvation in practice, he or she must try to reach Christ solely  at an interior, spiritual level, and do his or her best to avoid the carnal manifestations of Christ prescribed by writers like Loarte.96  Clearly, throughout early modern Europe the issue was not whether Christ was a model for the human subject to imitate: this much was taken as  read. Erasmus sums up the general consensus like this: ‘Our example is Christ, in whom alone are all the patterns of holy life.’97 Rather, the issue centred on precisely how Christ might be made ‘present’ to that subject, something that was seen as a biblical imperative as well as a pastoral necessity. Maintaining  an adherence to  Christ within the context of the Protestant Reformation raises some provocative and awkward questions. Not the least of these can be formulated as follows: how might Christ be made ‘present’ to the Protestant subject as an interior ‘reality’? Although Protestants might see Christ as an inward sign, does this address how the subject might ‘imitate’ Christ without falling into the idolatrous forms of symbolism that Protestant theologians railed against?98 More than this,

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does the ‘imitation’ of Christ not imply active volition on the part of the subject, an expression of will that sits rather uneasily with Protestantism’s insistence on man’s depravity and inability to participate in the act of salvation? As Paul Cefalu notes, it may well be the case that Protestant theologians stressed the need to privilege  ‘Christ as sacramentum rather than exemplum’. In making this point, Cefalu draws upon  Luther, of whom he writes: ‘Rather than argue that conformatis Christi is achieved through similitudio, an active imitation, the young Luther, in contrast to his late medieval forebears, argued that Christ’s death and resurrection should be understood as signs and tokens of Christ’s actions on our behalf.’99  That said, the problem for Protestantism is that it inherits and is obliged to negotiate with a pre-existing Christological lexis, biblically sanctioned, that often points in contrary theological directions to those favoured under a Reformed dispensation: this lexis does privilege exemplum over sacramentum. As I mentioned earlier, the biblical imperative to ‘put on’ Christ, however this is conceptualised, would logically seem to posit the possibility of a theological connectivity between volition and  salvation,  between words and things, between man and the divine. Given Protestantism’s biblical emphasis, this connection between words and things is critical because according to Carlos  Eire, such ‘accepted theology’ has marked Christian thought at least since the iconoclastic controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries: Accepting a Neoplatonic system of a hierarchy of reflections alongside with vivid incarnational principles, this theology (especially as formulated by  John of Damascus) argued that it was indeed possible for matter to convey spiritual values. After all, ran the argument, had not God divinised matter through  his incarnation?100

The notion that matter could in some way ‘incarnate’ the spiritual is problematised during the Reformation. For early modern Protestants of all persuasions, man is a fallen creature and signs, imagistic or verbal, at best provide an opaque and distorted version of ‘reality’. In ‘putting on’ Christ, who is to say that the subject is not either feigning that action or else performing an idolatrous act? Translating the locus of this action from the fleshly sign to  interiorised spirituality does not avoid these problems. As the examples above from  Augustine demonstrate, even a neo-Platonic conception of Christian signification is not without its difficulties. Indeed, we might see this as a consequence of constitutive tensions in Augustine’s own thought between the philosophical imperatives of neo-Platonism and the often very different trajectory of Christian doctrine. Largely because

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of the Reformers’ debt to Augustine, this tension was reanimated in the early modern period. Augustine’s theology establishes a long tradition of Christian semiotics that stresses the fundamental distance between res (things) and verba (words).101 In the words of Brian Copenhaver and Charles Schmitt: Augustine, Proclus, pseudo-Dionysius, the author of the Book of Causes, and many other medieval thinkers had developed a metaphysical scheme in which God at one extreme and matter or non-being at the other stood as two end-points against which the location of all other entities in the continuum of being could be plotted.102

The late medieval manifestation of this form of Christian semiotics known as  Nominalism is of particular relevance here. For example, as Bryan Crockett notes, ‘One factor in the religious disquiet of Elizabethan England is the Reformation’s indebtedness to the Nominalist movement of the late Middle Ages.’103 Many of the major Reformers including Martin Luther and John  Calvin were well versed in Nominalist philosophy.104 This school of medieval thought promoted an approach to language that offered a reworking of certain dominant scholarly paradigms in respect of  signs. The Nominalists argued that a universal is essentially a fictive construct.105 It is not that universals do not exist but that they are singular categories that reflect their status as signs, not archetypes as such. The most important figure of the Nominalist school was William of Ockham. Ockham’s semiotic theory is intriguing because it replicates the conceptual paradigms he also uses in respect of God. Ockham does not deny that there are categories of mental concepts above verba in the same way that he does not deny the omnipotent existence of God. Nevertheless, these concepts are, like God, at odds with what humans can either predicate or know of them. Heiko  Oberman points out that, for Ockham, ‘The “rational and logical” analysis of God’s nature and characteristics comes up against an impenetrable barrier in the form of God’s peculiar and particular way of being and perceiving, divine activities which are not structured according to the standards of human logic.’106 This reading applies equally to Ockham’s semiotic theory. For example, in his Summa totius logicae (c. 1324) he observes: I say vocal words are signs subordinated to mental concepts or contents. By this I do not mean that if the word ‘sign’ is taken in its proper meaning, spoken words are properly and primarily signs of mental concepts; I rather mean that words are applied in order to signify the very same things which are signified by mental concepts. Hence the concept signifies something primarily and naturally, whilst the word signifies the same thing secondarily . . . all authors who maintain that all words

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signify, or are signs of, impressions in the mind, only mean that words are signs which signify secondarily what the impressions of the mind import primarily.107

Fallen language is essentially a secondary mental construct that has no bearing on the primary order of signs. According to Ockham, as  Martin Elsky notes, ‘the mental language prior to utterance in speech belongs to no spoken or written language and is separate from any vox made significant by convention’.108 At both a theological and a semiotic level, Protestantism held that, to frame the issue in its most positive light, neither words nor images could have a transparent connection to the divine. If  God makes man ‘in our image according to our likeness’ (Genesis 1:26), then the question for Protestantism can be framed in this way: what semiotic and religious status does the ‘image’ have? According to the ‘accepted theology’ outlined above by Eire, the question is answered by stating that there is a similitudinous ontological connection that runs in an ascending order between image, likeness and God. As Ockham makes clear, an ‘image’ does not have to be a physical object out there in the external world: it can be a word or even a thought. Yet under the new Protestant dispensation, such connections are disrupted as the potential difficulty of relating the ‘image’ to the sign that is implicit in Augustine and that is made explicit in Ockham is now brought to the forefront of theological debate across Europe.  Protestant thinkers are no longer able to use the mimetic discourse of man as ‘image’ in order to posit an unproblematic a priori connection between image, likeness and God. Certainly, they reaffirm the construction of the subject in biblical terms as an ‘image’ of the divine. Crucially though, such a construction can no longer be premised upon a straightforward ontology of similitude between signs and things, but rather an ontology that constitutively co-opts the mimetic discourse of ‘image’ in order to construct a subject  pivoting    uneasily    between  likeness and unlikeness. IV In her book Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance, Debora  Shuger identifies two co-existent modes of thought operative in the early modern period, calling them  rational and participatory consciousness.109 In the case of rational consciousness, it ‘sees  reason as the primary connection between self and reality . . . It is thus sensitive to the gap between subject and object, as well as to that between  words and things.’ Participatory consciousness, on the other hand, ‘assumes the primacy of desire in the

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act of knowing . . . It thus tends not to separate words from things, instead treating both as signs, each linked to the other’.110 As Shuger makes clear, the ‘simultaneous existence of both’ modes of consciousness characterises ‘a central tension in Renaissance habits of thought’.111 Though she is undoubtedly correct that both ‘habits of thought’ can be identified in the period, I suggest that, in the representation of  subjectivity, it is primarily the figurative image that is called upon to mediate this clash between rational and participatory modes of thought. After all, depending upon how it is linguistically and ideologically formulated, the figurative image can appear to imply a gap between subject and object, word and thing, or alternatively it can seem to provide a connection between these potentially antinomic pairings. In much Protestant writing, those problematic philosophical  antinomies that both characterise and energise Christianity, between flesh and spirit, word and thing, elect and reprobate, human and divine, were once more laid bare as thinkers tried to formulate a subjective dispensation in relation to the divine. Negotiating these constitutive antinomies has always become more fraught at points of political, social and theological unrest as Augustine, Ockham and the Reformers could equally attest.112 Indeed, it is only necessary to look at the history of the great church councils of the fourth and fifth centuries such as Nicaea, Constantinople and Chalcedon to see the ways in which the debates engendered by Christian antinomy have traditionally structured the parameters of orthodoxy and heresy in the West.113 In particular the question of the precise relationship  between Christ’s human and divine natures invariably animated these foundational debates. As both man and God, Christ is perhaps the ultimate, and therefore most contested, manifestation of Christian antinomy. In some senses, Christ acts as the definitive metaphor in relation to questions of semiotics and faith alike. How is the relationship between the words used to exhort the subject to Christ and the subjective experience of Christ that was hopefully then engendered played out? What might the political and representational consequences of such a relationship be for the subject? As I have been arguing, for some Protestant thinkers the word might provide a temporary but nonetheless adequate substitute for a (anticipated) connection to the divine. For others, the lack of contiguity between word and thing may imply a much larger disconnection between the subject and the divine and the narrower applicability of  grace. Others, like Herbert and  Greville,  seem to oscillate between both positions.  Christ is certainly ­theologically and ideologically ‘present’ in early modern ­religious discourse and the subject is exhorted to identify with him and be open to his

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grace, but it is a presence and an identification that simultaneously avows and disavows. At the heart of the matter is one central question: why does the figure of Christ in early modern Protestantism at once offer and yet also deny the early modern subject a stable ground of subjective identification? To enable me to address this problem, the next chapter examines in greater detail the early modern theological debates  that  contextualise these issues.

chapter 2

Locating the subject: Erasmus and Luther

He who does not know Christ does not know God hidden in suffering.

(Martin Luther)

I On Good Friday, 1570 at Paul’s Cross in London, the martyrologist and Protestant apologist  John Foxe preached a sermon that constructs Christ as a critical locus of subjective identification. In his epistle, Foxe claims that the sermon was not written solely for those of the Protestant faith. Rather it was composed as follows: partly also for the  Papistes cause to doe them  some good if I could, who albeit they professe the whole history of Christes passion as wee doe, yet by their doctrine it seemeth, they goe no further then the outward history. They make much adoe about the Crosse of Christ, and haue fought these 500. years for his Crosse: and yet they know not his Crosse, neither doe they see much more in the passion of Christ, then Animalis homo, that is, the sensible man may doe. They see him poore, sweating, bleeding, falsely accused, wrongfully oppressed, wounded, scourged, derided, crowned with thorne, nailed, crucified, hanging upon the crosse naked, perced, dead and buried. All this they see and graunt with vs, his miracles also they confesse which he wrought, & that he rose agayne the thyrd day, & ascended vp etc. And because they graunt the same to be the sonne of God, therefore they magnifie & worship all the outward implementes that went to his blessed passion, the nayles, the crosse & tymber, the speare, the crowne & thornes, hys coate and tunicle etc. And herein standeth almost the summa totalis of their Religion. But this is not enough. To know Christ Jesus crucified, and to know him rightly, it is not sufficient to stay in these outward thynges: we must go further then the sensible man, we must looke inwardly with a spirituall eye into spirituall thynges.1

As befitted this particular feast day, the title of his address was A Sermon Of Christ crucified.2 In the dedicatory epistle to the printed version published 58

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later that year, Foxe tells his readers that ‘this Sermon (I must graunt) is growen somewhat more large in printing, then it was in preaching’,3 an admission designed to explain the inclusion of considerable expository material in the printed text. In this, he notes that he was encouraged to write the piece ‘at the request of certain friends’. The stated purpose of the sermon was to ‘awake the hartes of such Christians in these drowsie dayes of carnall securitie, to the contemplation of the glorious kingdom of Christ’.4 To modern ears this kind of expression might seem like a ­conventional Christian commonplace, a statement hardly worth pausing over. After all, what could be less remarkable than exhorting Christians to contemplate Christ? The answer lies in the difference that the preacher perceives in the manner and direction of this contemplation between those who profess the Catholic and the Protestant faiths respectively. The well-worn cliché of Foxe as arch Protestant polemicist is not fully augmented by the passage quoted above: of interest in this respect is his concession that both faiths ‘professe the whole history of Christes passion’. Still, it would be a mistake to see this admission as a manifestation of what might today be called ecumenical largesse. Foxe also claims a marked difference between the precise ways in which each faith professes that ‘history’. Indeed, the sermon argues for a recognisable cultural faultline between the Protestant and the Catholic faiths that can be identified in relation to the figure of Christ. Unsurprisingly, according to the preacher, Catholic observance of the passion consists in outward, external worship. Catholics insist upon external physical manifestations of Christ on the cross such as crucifixes and other  figurative representations. These representations focus upon the physical torments suffered by Christ during his final hours such as scourging and bleeding, and the various appurtenances that enabled that suffering to take place like the nails, spear and crown of thorns. As Eamon Duffy has noted, these forms of devotion are characteristic of important strands of late medieval piety. They had an affective purpose in that the objects selected for devotion ‘were vital elements in an understanding of redemption in which the  humanity shared by Saviour and sinner was central’.5 The key word here is ‘shared’. As we have seen, there is a theological and affective connection between man and Christ in these strands of late medieval piety that implies the affective and philosophical  unity of res and verbum, flesh and spirit. Such thinking also underlies much early modern Catholic thought, relying as it does upon a fundamental belief in the efficacious and salvific humanity of Christ as mediator between man and God. For example, when the Franciscan Antonio de Guevara says of Christ ‘thou didst create

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me to thy image, redeeme me with thy bloud, endue me with thy merits, cure me with thy dolours’,6 his focus on the humanity of Christ implies a theological connection between Christ’s physical suffering and that of the sinner.  But for Foxe, there can be no such easy unity. The problem for him is that such Catholic observance appeals to the sensual part of the subject, to Animalis homo. According to his Reformed logic, Catholic worship essentially remains surface bound, a matter of external observance. To put it in Pauline terms, Catholic worship of Christ attends to the flesh while ignoring the more pressing concerns of the spirit. Certainly we must acknowledge that Foxe is concerned with making a polemical point: it serves his expositional purpose and doctrinal agenda to characterise his opponents as lacking in internal awareness. Still, if Paul’s biblical injunction to ‘put yee on the Lord IESUS CHRIST’ (Romans 13:14) is to be adhered to, then for Foxe at least it is necessary to reformulate the subject’s relationship to Christ and to his work. Even more importantly, by constructing an immanent, fleshly Christ as opposed to a transcendent, spiritual Christ, Foxe is also implicitly accusing his Catholic opponents of idolatry.  This is demonstrated in his contempt for the  metonymic cross, nails, spear and crown of thorns that he argues are so central to Catholic worship. The contention is that by taking the representation for the thing itself, Catholic worship is actually deflected away from its true object, Christ . By way of contrast, we may consider a treatise by the Jesuit Fulvio  Androzzi entitled Meditations Vppon The Passion Of Ovr Lord Iesus Christ (1606). Here, Androzzi notes that ‘The memorie therefore of the life and death of Christ, is a roote, by which we receive the merite and reward of Christ’. In this sentiment at least, the Jesuit and the Reformer may find themselves in agreement. Nonetheless, Androzzi’s  practice of imitation is rather different to those of Foxe. He writes as follows: because it is not possible to imitate and folowe the vertue of Christ, except we consider his life: for euen as it is impossible that a painter: be he neuer so skilfull, can draw out the likenesse of any thing, vnles he often looke & cast his eye vppon that, which he is to drawe out: so is it not possible that a Christian man can resemble, and expresse in him self the virtues of Christ, if he haue not oftentimes before him the life, and thinke not eftsons vppon the virtues of Christ.7

For Androzzi, the only way to imitate Christ is to constantly engage with physical reminders of his life and to participate in a process whereby  the physical becomes the guarantor of the meditative experience. To borrow Barbara Lewlaski’s formulation, ‘the meditator typically seeks to apply himself to the subject, so that he participates in it’.8 Another Catholic example

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is found in Robert Southwell’s Marie Magdalens Fvnerall Teares (1594). Mary says of Christ: ‘I would be nailed to the same crosse, with the same nailes, and in the same place: my heart should be wounded with his speare, my head with his thornes, my bodie with his whips: Finallie I would taste all his torments, and tread all his embrued [sic] and bloudie steps.’9 In the theology underpinning such Jesuit formulations, the Christocentric image invariably has a physical manifestation and is inextricably bound up with the practices of devotion . By contrast, William  Perkins argues that such ‘fleshly’ devotion is not acceptable in Reformed thinking: ‘behold him often, not in the wooden crucifix after the Popish manner, but in the preaching of the word.’10 Or as the second official state homily on the Passion puts it in an interestingly textualised metaphor, ‘Oh, my brethren, let this image of Christ crucified be always printed in our hearts’.11 As in Foxe’s sermon, these examples show that Protestant iconophobia was not fuelled by an objection to representation per se but by the wrongful uses to which it believed the devotional image could be put.12 For preachers like Foxe and Perkins, by privileging the immanence of representational practice in relation to Christ, Catholicism creates a gap between man and God and it fills that gap with  idolatrous observance. So while a Catholic may believe that he or she is worshipping God by focusing, say, on the crucifix, for the Reformer the Catholic in fact adores an empty outward   representation. As many of Foxe’s contemporaries were asking, what, then, is the alternative to this form of idolatrous worship? The way in which the  godly Protestant subject gets beyond Animalis homo is that he or she must attempt to locate Christ and his cross inwardly and spiritually: ‘outwardly we professe him, but inwardly we passe not for him’, Foxe states.13 The cross is not to be found in outward man-made representations but rather in interior, spiritual observance. To refigure the debate in Pauline terms: ‘Now then there is no condemnation to them that are in Christ Iesus, which walke not after the flesh, but after the Spirit’ (Romans 8:1). Nonetheless, as I have said, the difficulty for Foxe, and indeed for all those who professed the Protestant faith, was to formulate for themselves in representation a Christ who signified by and through the spirit, yet who was also, in some sense, ‘present’ to the subject. Writing of the mimetic challenges thrown up by early modern iconophobia, Michael  O’Connell notes: ‘Representation sets . . . an ontological puzzle because in the case of the image we cannot precisely define the relationship that exists between the sign and the signified.’14 This ongoing early modern attempt to represent a Protestant conception of Christ results in a passage in the sermon that, inadvertently, highlights further difficulties in addressing this kind of problem. Late in

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the sermon, the preacher signals to his audience that he intends to discuss the ‘enemy’, the Devil. But before this takes place, he says the following: I will first here play Ioseph ab Arimathea, and reuerendly take down the body of our Lorde from the Crosse and lay him in his sepulchre, till ye shall heare of hym within these iii. dayes more againe. And here now hauing taken down the crucified body of Jesus from the Crosse, to occupy your eyes, and to delite your mindes, I entend, by the grace of Christ crucified, to set vp here in Paules Crosse, or rather in Christes Crosse, an other Crucifixe, a new Crucifixe, a new Roode vnto you, a Crucifixe that may do all Christen hartes good to beholde. This Crucifixe is he that crucified all mankind, and hath brought many a man to the gallowes, to the Crosse, to the gibbet, and at last crucified Christ our Sauiour also.15

Though clearly drawing on Colossians 3:9–10, which talks of putting off the old man for the new man who is ‘renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him’, this is a remarkable passage. Perhaps selfconsciously drawing upon his own experience as a dramatist, Foxe casts himself as Joseph of Arimathea and seems to actively participate in the drama of the dismount from the cross.16 Indeed, he also appears to encourage his audience at this moment to suspend their own theological disbelief and to take the central physical sign before them (the preacher) as standing for the thing itself (Joseph of Arimathea). The crucial difference between Foxe’s Protestant rhetoric and the Catholic forms of worship previously mentioned is that all the signs that the preacher draws his audience’s attention to are primarily verbal. For example, it seems unlikely that Foxe carried an actual crucifix with him into the pulpit that he then brandished at this point in the sermon. It may be possible that, given the gestural rhetoric of the sermon, Foxe physically acted out parts of the sermon for his audience, including the dismount from the cross. But even if this admittedly conjectural possibility is granted, it is probably safe to conclude that both the ‘Crucifixe’ and the Christ that Foxe exhorts his audience to ‘see’ are primarily understood as  verbal images. In theological terms, it is through the primacy of the word and its secondary visualisations that the Protestant subject achieves spiritual communion with the Word. In her important study of early modern semiotics Linda  Gregerson has observed that ‘In Reformation England, the verbal image was often thought to be as dangerous in its potential as was the visual. Words, like pictures or statuary, were suspect for the very reason that they were powerful, capable of shaping and thus waylaying the human imagination’.17 The more ‘godly’ Protestants such as Foxe were acutely aware of the transformative power of the ‘verbal image’ and often warned against its dangers.18 In relation to

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Foxe’s passion sermon, its semiotic centre is intended to be Christ. But by using the dramatic metaphor so strikingly, Foxe also draws his audience’s attention to the prospect of the verbal taking the place of the image as an equally problematic, perhaps even potentially idolatrous sign.  If Christ is a purely verbal signifier, does Foxe not thereby reintroduce idolatry by default? Might he not be in danger of constructing a ‘theatre’ of verbal idolatry from the very pulpit in which he rails against the idolatrous old faith? Such a reading is certainly possible and it also mirrors one of the central counter charges made against the Reformers by their Catholic opponents.19 Instead of making an idol of the image, does the Reformer not make an idol of the word?20 Gregerson’s study illuminates one way in which early modern thinkers found a way out of this impasse. In the first place, she rightly notes that Protestant religion was sensitive to accusations of idolatry by proxy: ‘it was incumbent upon the verbal artefact in this period to register and guard its own referential status and its correlative inutility for idolatrous purposes.’21 For the Reformers, Gregerson suggests that the idolatrous potential of the sign could not be completely negated. Instead, the verbal image was marked by ‘a generative instability’ that is a constitutive function of Protestant   discourse.22 Moreover, that instability was central to a mediated understanding of the construction of  subjectivity: ‘The subject takes its shape from that which is outside it.’23 The Protestant subject does not find plenitude in identification, but rather is located ‘in insufficiency’24 or in a kind of proto-Derridean lack. Viewed in this way, we could say that Foxe’s theological message pivots upon a Christ, a theological ‘centre’, which is, in fact, a kind of absent presence.  The audience are exhorted to ‘beholde’ someone (Christ) and something (the crucifix) that, in fact, cannot be seen. In short, the subject is constituted by a paradox, by a discourse of insufficiency predicated upon a fundamental absence that nonetheless  signifies. In the words of Carlos  Eire: ‘the Reformed concern with idolatry extended not only to the use of art in worship, but also to the behaviour displayed in liturgical and social settings.’25 In this example, and in those that have preceded it, a reformulated and highly problematic conception of representation with Christ as the central mediating avatar that would appear to link subject and language within a social context. Central to this conception is the fascinating way in which Protestant discourse at once insists upon the  connection between words and things, yet at the same time also wants to rend the two asunder. It is this animating tension that goes to the heart of early modern identity politics. In order to pursue

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this tension further, I want to come more fully to terms with the theology that structures the parameters of debate in relation to the early modern Christ. To this end, I turn to two central figures that we have already briefly encountered and to their competing Christological understandings: Desiderius Erasmus and his philosophia Christi, and Martin Luther and his theologia crucis. Where the former’s Christology is imminent in focus, the latter’s radically problematises that imminence.   II First published in 1503 and then in a revised edition of 1518, Erasmus’ tract Enchiridion militis christiani (The Handbook or The Dagger of the Christian Soldier) represents one of the most innovative and important expressions of the philosophia Christi in early modern European culture. That said, Erasmus’ Christology is perhaps best understood first in the context of the late medieval pietism already alluded to earlier, as well as a certain humanist  eclecticism.26 In the first place, the Enchiridion shares many similarities with Thomas à Kempis’ De Imitatione Christi, not least their ­common stress on the value of inward, spiritual communion with the divine through the offices of Christ. This shared focus on Christological devotion is more than merely serendipitous. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, we are able to say with some degree of certainty that Erasmus was deeply influenced during his formative years by a semi-formal religious brotherhood known as the  Brethren of the Common Life. 27 The Brethren, with which à Kempis was himself associated, was primarily a lay grouping concerned with personal and social piety, and it emerged from a late medieval pietistic/spiritual movement known as the  devotio moderna that was associated with the Dutch theologian  Geert Groote.28 One historian explains the aims of the movement thus: The spirituality of the devotio was penitential, cultivating personal poverty, with humility generated through real examination, fraternal correction within the community, common examination of conscience, and obedience. Spiritual diaries were kept, with resolutions and intentions drawn up and notes on spiritual reading written down.29

This quotation demonstrates that there is more to the devotio moderna than simply lay piety. Though it would be historically and ideologically premature to see the devotio moderna as containing a nascent Reformism waiting to be brought forth into bloom, it is undoubtedly a movement deeply interested in the ethics of social improvement, something

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that necessarily begins with spiritual reform and which has a defined Christological basis.30 The penitential aim was to model oneself on Christ. In à Kempis’ words, ‘whoever will understand the words of Christ plainly and in their savour must study to conform all his life to his  life’.31 Movements such as this made their impact felt across Europe. For example, in an important recent study the historian  Susan Wabuda has examined the crucial and ongoing adherence in early modern England to various forms of Christocentric devotion.32 To take one instance, examining the continued observance of the Holy  Name (IHS) in mid-sixteenth-century England, Wabuda writes that ‘in a time of religious change, the inescapable Christocentrism of the cult of the Holy Name ultimately made it an uneasy nexus between the dynamism of the Catholic Church, and emerging Protestantism’.33  This point is well taken: the early modern philosophia Christi marks a point of theological and cultural tension that has been somewhat overlooked by literary scholars. On the one hand, there is an ongoing cultural assertion post-Reformation of the imitation of Christ; on the other hand, many Reformers were becoming increasingly wary of the potentially problematic implications of such a practice  . Erasmus writes in the ‘Prefatory Letter’ that  ‘The perfection of Christ lies in our desires, not in our walk of life; it is to be found in the spirit, not in clothing or in choice of food’.34 Non-spiritual observances are to be shunned and the Christian’s combat is to take place inwardly: ‘If you are in the world, you are not in Christ.’35 As Carlos Eire says of the Enchiridion,  ‘The material, visible world can never be the focus of true piety, since it is a distortion of reality or, at best, incapable of bringing one to truth’.36 Indeed, the ‘Prefatory Letter’ makes it clear that Christ is a deeply ‘social’ matter, but this is society understood primarily as a community of spiritual believers in Christ. In Erasmus’ thought, the realm of Christ is not quite an avowal of asceticism; his distain for monastic life and his emphasis on the communal social experience of all Christians forestalls this possibility.37 Yet, similar to Augustine’s civitate dei, Erasmus’ conception of the spiritual as perfection comes close to a  disavowal of the political . The model of civic  society that he proposes is interesting in this regard. He states: Let Christ remain what he is, the centre, with several circles running around him. Do not move that central mark from its place. Those who are nearest Christ – priests, bishops, cardinals, popes, and those whose business it is to follow the Lamb wherever he may lead them – should embrace the intense purity of the centre and pass on as much as they can to those next to them. Let the second circle

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be for the lay princes, who with their armies and their laws serve Christ after their fashion, whether in a just war they defeat the enemy and preserve the public peace or by lawful punishments keep crime in check . . . In the third circle let us place the common people all together, as the most earthy portion of this world, but not so earthy that they are not members of Christ’s body just the same. Not only the eyes are members of the body, but shins too and feet and privy parts. These must be given more indulgence, but in such a way as to invite them, as far as possible, to follow the things that Christ approves.38

This model is perhaps best described as a kind of Christian heliocentrism. Though not a political theorist in the conventional sense of the term, Erasmus’ notion that the whole of civic society is able to, indeed should, partake in Christ is still an important one. We are not offered a fully fledged new blueprint for civic society here since Erasmus takes for granted the existence and structural importance of ‘priests, bishops, cardinals, popes . . . lay princes . . . with their armies and their laws [and] the common people’. Instead, when he talks about Christ as the ‘centre’ with ‘several circles running around him’ he is offering a ‘Spiritualist’ cosmology of civic society where ‘Religion is primarily concerned with internal attitudes, rather than with external religious observances or ecclesiastical structures’.39 For Erasmus if it is axiomatic that if Christ is the unassailable guarantor of the spiritual realm, then by living according to the philosophia Christi, the telos of civic living can only be a kind of  Christocentric spiritualism. As Eire puts it, Erasmus’ Christ ‘is not so much God incarnate changing the structure of material reality, but rather a  spiritual reflection,  temporarily enfleshed, whose primary purpose seems to be to point humans in the direction of the spiritual realm’.40 Indeed, to cleave to Christ is to cleave to spirit: ‘Do not try to divide yourself between the world and Christ.’41 The basis of the Enchiridion’s spiritualism is to be found in Erasmus’ appropriation of Pauline dualism.  For example, in one particularly striking section, he writes as follows: the spirit makes us gods, the flesh makes us brute animals. The soul constitutes us as human beings; the spirit makes us religious, the flesh irreligious, the soul neither the one nor the other. The spirit seeks heavenly things, the flesh seeks pleasure, the soul what is necessary. The spirit elevates us to heaven, the flesh drags us down to hell, the soul has no charge imputed to it. Whatever is carnal is base, whatever is spiritual is perfect, whatever belongs to the soul as life-giving element is in between and indifferent.42

The soul plays a mediatory function between the utterly contrary impulses of spirit and flesh. Still, this dualism impels the subject into the secular

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realm of the flesh. Bearing in mind Erasmus’ ‘political’ interest in a community of spiritual believers in Christ, it is notable that in this passage there is a similar anthropology in operation, albeit at an internal level. As Henning  Graf Reventlow observes, Erasmus’ ‘cosmology is matched by an anthropology in which there is a contrast between anima and corpus, spiritus and caro, homo interior and exterior’.43 Yet this interior dualism is potentially much more radical than Erasmus’ ‘political’ cosmology. As he says, ‘The body cannot subsist without the spirit, but the spirit has no need of the body. But if on the authority of Christ the spirit is so great that it alone gives life, then we must strive that in every written word and in all actions we regard the spirit, not the flesh.’44 If the Christian’s combat of spirit and flesh is to be fully realised, then it would seem to logically imply, through the authority of Christ, a complete disavowal of the material, whether this is manifested in flesh or by institutions.45 Indeed, adherence to Christ would seem to negate the temporal claims of the material, presenting a challenge to those authoritative structures that govern the temporal realm. Having said that, and despite a number of these provocative moments in the Enchiridion, it remains the case that Erasmus is only prepared (or rather able) to push this kind of dualistic logic so far. In fact, Erasmian Spiritualism is predicated upon a Christianised  neo-Platonism rather different from that of Augustine’s and which overrides some of his more antinomian statements: it also problematises his pronouncements about the political applicability of Christ. For example, near the start of the Enchiridion he says: ‘Of the philosophers I should recommend the Platonists because in much of their thinking as well as in their mode of expression they are the closest to the spirit of the prophets and of the gospel.’46 With regard to his anthropology of man, passages such as this demonstrate that Erasmus expects the duality of flesh and the spirit to be ultimately bypassed. Indeed, what is so interesting is that he can never completely disavow the realm of the material: as far as the body is concerned, so far are we from surpassing the rest of brute creation that we are actually found inferior to them in every physical ­endowment. But with regard to the soul we have such a capacity for divinity that we can soar past the minds of angels and become one with God.47

Or as he says later on in a more directly Christological vein: the mind of one who aspires after Christ should be in complete disaccord with the actions and opinions of the crowd and his model of piety should be Christ alone and no other. For he is the sole archetype, and whoever departs from it even

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in the slightest deviates from what is right and runs outside the true path. In a similar vein Plato in his Republic with great earnestness, as is his wont, says that whoever has not imbued his mind with firm ideas about good and evil cannot remain steadfast in the preservation of virtue.48

We might notice the political separatism and superiority that underpins this conception of Christ: Erasmus’ political claims about the community of believers are perhaps in danger of being contradicted by the already fractured conception of universal access to Christ . In order to reach Christ ‘the sole archetype’ at a spiritual level, it is nonetheless necessary to proceed from the flesh: there is no sense in this passage that ‘mind’ is tied to anything other than body. Indeed, what characterises all of these passages is a belief that, in Lisa  Freinkel’s words, ‘nonessential flesh avails . . . a great deal’.49 No matter how he configures the duality of flesh and spirit, Erasmus’ metaphysic does rely upon the fundamental assertion that matter possesses a spiritual import.50 Like Augustine, he maintains that Christ mediates in his humanity, thus enabling a connection to be made between matter and spirit. As Freinkel says of Erasmus: His spiritualism entails an ascent from the mundane to the most high, from the physical to the abstract, but it is an ascent that is impossible unless we ‘push off’, as it were, from that which we would leave behind.  Transcendence thus entails a dependence on the very materiality it would overcome. 51

Certainly it is the case that if spirit is the negation of flesh then, logically, that negation cannot take place without a flesh, posited or real, to be overcome in the first place. It is inconceivable for him that material should not have some connection to the divine referent. Despite his oftendualistic logic, the Enchiridion still holds on to the essentially ‘Classical’ form of signification famously identified by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things. Erasmus’ philosophia Christi is important for a number of reasons, not least in his insistence that the religious basis of social and personal piety should be inward and spiritual. Though the political implications of this are often contradictory, in Christ Erasmus sees a figure that seems to bypass all those outward, fleshy manifestations of the divine. Yet as we have seen, his Spiritualism is still locked into a  neo-Platonic language of  correspondence that posits a connection between the flesh and the spirit, between human and divine. The material realm might be downgraded or even repulsed, but in Erasmus’ philosophy it cannot be negated altogether. Still, those Pauline dualisms that he explores in the Enchiridion do point to a much broader sense in early modern intellectual culture that the message preached in

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the Pauline Epistles may be more intractable and challenging than can be accounted for inside a philosophical system such as Spiritualism.52 For Erasmus, that division is to be overcome or perhaps suppressed through his Spiritualism, a movement that can only take place because the ‘Christian soldier’ is fundamentally a willing, volitional subject. He explains what this means in a passage about the imitation of Christ: although the model of all piety is readily found in Christ, nevertheless, if you take great delight in worshipping Christ in his saints, then make sure that you imitate Christ in his saints and in honour of each saint eradicate one vice or strive to attain a particular virtue. If this is the fruit of your devotion, I shall not be adverse to these external manifestations.53

Apart from neatly demonstrating the way in which the Erasmian philosophia Christi cannot escape the exigencies of the material realm, this passage is fascinating for the way in which it posits a lineage of willed, volitional imitation that begins and ends in Christ. By imitating the saints who themselves imitate Christ, the subject may eradicate vice or attain virtue through his or her own actions. In short, the imitation of Christ provides a connection between what the subject may do (or will) and what the subject may become (righteousness). It was precisely this kind of connection that Martin Luther’s theological innovations were to radically re-imagine.   54 III In  order to come to terms with this re-imagining, something needs to be said about the differing  political implications of Erasmus and Luther’s systems. Luther goes even further than his great rival in refashioning the Augustinian idea that the Christian is subject to competing but related sacred and  secular authorities. Of course, like all thinkers at this time, Luther’s system is prescriptive. But even in the prescriptive nature of his classifications, there is a split between scared and secular that allows for an elemental reformation of subjectivity. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, thinkers associated with the  via moderna such as  Marsilius of Padua and William of Ockham, alongside the important (if ultimately ineffectual)  conciliarist movement, contributed to a gradual erosion in the relative political autonomy of the sacred over the secular. What this signalled, as  A.S. McGrade notes, was ‘the end of political Augustinianism and the hierocratically inspired descending thesis of government with its resulting program of molding

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society from above’.55 Increasingly, many thinkers moved away from seeing, as Augustine had done,  ‘political society as a divinely ordained order imposed on fallen man as a remedy for their sins’56 in favour of an account of political organisation that foregrounded the subjective experience of authority within a community of believers. Though this shift did not preclude a more general adherence to absolutist paradigms, many fifteenthand sixteenth-century thinkers also began to re-examine the role of personal  conscience within the political sphere. For example, in Luther’s Von Weltlicher Oberkeit (1523) written ostensibly in response to the prohibition of his translation of the Bible, he sets out to attack those secular rulers who ‘have had the temerity to put themselves in God’s place, [and] make themselves masters of consciences and belief’.57 Luther counters this secular appropriation by re-imagining the relationship between sacred and secular authority. He observes: And so God has ordained the two governments, the spiritual [government] which fashions true Christians and just persons through the Holy Spirit under Christ, and the secular [weltlich] government which holds the Unchristian and wicked in check and forces them to keep the peace outwardly and be still, like it or not. 58

It might seem from this that, similar to Erasmus, Luther is intent on creating an elect distinct from the rest of society who are nonetheless equally bound by the material and spiritual realms. Yet this is not quite the case as the following qualification shows: Without the spiritual government of Christ, no one can be made just in the sight of God by the secular government [alone]. However, Christ’s spiritual government does not extend to everyone; on the contrary, Christians are at all times the fewest in number and live in the midst of the Unchristian. Conversely, where the secular government or law rules on its own, pure hypocrisy must prevail.59

Luther’s concern is with the Christians; the fate of the ‘Unchristians’ is a secondary matter for him. Effectively, he re-imagines Augustinian dualism solely at the level of the subject.  Unlike Erasmus whose political organisation ratifies a one-to-one correspondence between the material and spiritual realms,  Luther’s political structure does not posit a straightforward relationship between the two. The Christian may be a material being, but the fact that he is potentially bound by the exigencies of the spirit does not have to imply a necessary connection between the material and ­spiritual realms. Luther’s project creates, in Debora  Shuger’s formulation, ‘a private and inward spiritual kingdom [divided] from the whole temporal order of society’.60 By accepting God’s overarching sovereignty and the secular ruler as God’s guarantor upon earth, he focuses on the

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internal spiritual imperatives of authority as potentially separate from any outer material and secular imperatives (which in any case are associated with the Unchristian).   This is important since Luther’s political realignment of the connection between material and spirit is also at the root of his seminal theologia crucis (theology of the cross).  In a sermon of 1519 entitled  A Meditation on Christ’s Passion, he writes: ‘They contemplate Christ’s passion aright who view it with a terror-stricken heart and a despairing conscience.’ 61 Although Luther shared with Erasmus an early exposure to the Brethren of the  Common Life,62 both in terms of tone and message, this statement immediately strikes a rather different note from the Spiritualist philosophia Christi. For Erasmus, the fact that the realm of the material can ultimately have a divine referent is intimately bound up with his belief that the subject is a  volitional agent who,  by imitating Christ, may also partake in his own  salvation within the secular realm. This is also reflected in his fundamentally  neo-Platonic conception of language. Thus the philosophia Christi is predicated upon an elementary question that puts  voluntarism before theology: what can I do to be saved? Understood from this perspective, the subject is at the centre of this system  and his or her potential righteousness and salvation are the focal point.  But according to Luther, asking such a question is not only wrong, it is arrogant, based as it is on false anthropological and political foundations. Erasmus’ approach also elementally misunderstands the nature of Christ’s sacrifice.  For Luther, the works that the subject might do and his or her eventual salvation are utterly separate things: this premise sums up what he takes to be the blindingly clear message of the  Pauline Epistles. In The Bondage of the Will Luther explains as follows: God looks down from heaven and does not see even one who seeks or attempts to seek him; hence it follows that there is nowhere any power which might attempt or wish to seek him, but instead they all turn aside. Besides, if Paul were not understood [in Romans 10:3ff.] as implying man’s impotence, his argument would lose its point. For his whole concern here is to  make grace necessary for all men. But if they were able to initiate anything of themselves, there would be no need of grace. As it is, however, they are not able and therefore they do need grace. So you see that free choice is completely abolished by this passage, and nothing good or virtuous is left in man, since he is flatly stated to be unrighteousness, ignorant of God, a despiser of God, turned aside from him, and worthless in the sight of God.  63

For man, grace is both completely necessary and yet completely unattainable through volition.  In dying for our sins, it is Christ who performs

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the ultimate and indeed only act of  righteousness. Nothing the subject can do can measure up to this act: it is utterly alien to human comprehension. It is therefore up to God to decide who benefits from Christ’s death: God saves us; we do not save ourselves. Indeed, the only way in which we can share in this righteousness is through the gift of faith, something mysterious that God works in us through Christ and which allows for the workings of grace. More than this, unlike Erasmus who wants to hold on to an analogical theory of  language that posits a connection between  flesh and spirit, it has been pointed out that ‘The theologia crucis represents a programmatic critique of the analogical nature of theological language’.64 In terms of both  voluntarism and semiology then, the theologia crucis presents conventional theological wisdom with a number of challenges.65 Indeed in Luther’s theology of the cross, it is possible to witness the foundations of the Protestant  subject who is only ever able, and is compelled to approach God obliquely through secondary signs: the suspended relationship between  subject and object that is the basis of the figurative will concomitantly become constitutive of any relationship with the divine. Luther explains the nature of these challenges in another sermon preached in 1519 entitled  Two Kinds of Righteousness. He notes: ‘There are two kinds of  Christian righteousness, just as man’s sin is of two kinds.’66 The first kind of righteousness Luther calls ‘alien righteousness, that is the fundamental righteousness of another, instilled from without. This is the righteousness of Christ by which he justifies  through faith’.67 Statements such as this go to the heart of Luther’s anthropological revolution. For him, the most important form of righteousness, potential or otherwise, is not that of the Christian subject and hence it cannot be aligned with any secular institutions. Rather, he focuses on that elemental and constitutive righteousness which belongs to Christ alone and which is enacted in his  sacrifice on the cross. As  Alister McGrath writes, for Luther ‘human reason cannot comprehend the manner in which God has effected the salvation of mankind. In the cross of Christ, this tension reaches breaking point, and a near-permanent divorce between the spheres of faith and reason results ’.68 There is no Erasmian sense that the example of Christ might stand as an intelligible and attainable model for all humans to copy or ­imitate, or at least not straightforwardly. Rather, Christ’s is an ‘alien’ righteousness that is profoundly inaccessible to ‘reason’. It takes place and signifies outwith the ambit and indeed competence of the subject: ‘everything which Christ has is ours, graciously bestowed on us unworthy men out of God’s sheer mercy, although we have deserved wrath and condemnation,

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and hell also.’69 Under this dispensation and unlike in Erasmus’ work, righteousness can never be imputed as emerging from the subject. This basic premise of Reformed theology is central to the devotional writing of early modern England. The first verse of George  Herbert’s ‘Perseverance’ expresses it as follows: My God, the poore expressions of my Love Which warme these lines, & did serve them up to thee Are so, as for the present, I did move    Or rather as thou movedst mee. (1–4, my emphasis) 70

The righteousness of Christ is primary and alien, and is manifested through the gift of grace that he bestows on the subject gratuitously through his mercy, an act that rationality cannot comprehend: this alien righteousness, instilled in us without our works by  grace alone – while the Father, to be sure, inwardly draws us to Christ – is set opposite  original sin, likewise alien, which we acquire without our works by birth alone. Christ daily drives out the old Adam more and more in accordance with the extent to which faith and knowledge of Christ grow. For alien righteousness is not instilled all at once, but it begins, makes progress, and is finally perfected at the end through death.  71

Just as original sin is an inalienable, a priori fact of human existence, so Christ’s alien righteousness provides the unimpeachable alien ground of our  subjectivity, a fact that is made all the more stark since it reaches its final eschatological signification ‘through death’. Original sin is thus a kind of primal trauma that creates a splitting of the subject from God, one that is mirrored internally and that is only ‘perfected at the end ’. The second kind of righteousness that Luther identifies is called ‘proper righteousness’, which as he explains emerges from alien righteousness and ‘is that manner of life spent profitably in  good works, in the first place, in slaying the flesh and crucifying the desires with respect to the self’.72 It is this secondary order of ‘proper righteousness’ that allows the subject not simply to sit back and passively accept God’s grace but to strive in the destruction of the realm of ‘flesh’. This is not done in order to contribute towards justification or effect  salvation. As  McGrath notes, ‘by insisting that faith is given to man in justification, Luther avoids any suggestion that man is justified on account of his faith: justification is propter Christum, and not propter fidem’ .73 The subject’s alienation from justification mirrors his or her equal alienation from God through Christ. It is for this reason that there can be no  volitional basis for  salvation. Luther explains as follows in the Heidelberg Disputation of 1518 :

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Because men misused the knowledge of God through works, God wished again to be recognized in suffering, and to condemn wisdom containing invisible things by means of wisdom concerning visible things, so that those that did not honor God as manifested in his works should honor him as he is hidden in his suffering . . . it is not sufficient for anyone, and it does him no good to recognize God in his glory and majesty, unless he recognizes him in the humility and shame of the cross.  74

This extract contains two related ideas that are central to the theologia crucis. The first is that God should be recognised in the  suffering of the cross and the second is that this shameful suffering is something that is nonetheless hidden from the subject.  Fulke Greville expresses it as follows in Caelica: Thy powerfull lawes, thy wonders of creation, Thy Word incarnate, glorious heauen, darke hell, Lye shadowed vnder Mans degeneration, Thy Christ still crucifi’d for doing well,   Impiety, O Lord, sits on thy throne,    Which makes thee liuing Light, A God vnknown. (7–12)  75

We recognise God on the cross not in his glory but in a disavowing nonrational abjection that doubles back upon the sinner. Luther further explicates this paradox: He who does not know Christ does not know God hidden in suffering. Therefore he prefers works to suffering, glory to the cross, strength to weakness, wisdom to folly, and, in general, good to evil . . . God can be found only in suffering and the cross, as has already been said. Therefore the friends of the cross say that the cross is good and works are evil, for through the cross works are destroyed and the old Adam, who is especially edified by works, is crucified .76

Luther sees a works-based  volitional model of salvation as totally inadequate in the face of the revelation of a hidden, suffering God who works his gratuitous,  alien righteousness upon the subject.  Christ’s suffering is not something that gives us ‘access’ to him: instead, he is seen as the negation of volition and as a marker of the subject’s estrangement from God.  McGrath perhaps explains this best when he writes as follows: God is revealed in the cross of Christ. Yet, as the Christian contemplates the appalling spectacle of Christ dying upon the cross, he is forced to concede that God does not appear to be revealed here at all. This insight is fundamental to a correct appreciation of the significance of Luther’s theology of the cross. The God who is crucified is the God who is hidden in his revelation. Any attempt to seek

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God elsewhere than in the cross of Christ is to be rejected out of hand as idle speculation: the theologian is forced, perhaps against his will, to come to terms with the riddle of the crucified and hidden  God .77

For Luther, Christian contemplation and subjectivity are predicated upon a  disavowed revelation in Christ. Moreover, this relationship is surely the essence of the  figurative image writ large. To explain what this means, we might return to  Greville and in particular the following lines from Caelica: Yet vnto thee, Lord, (mirrour of transgression) Wee, who for earthly Idols, haue forsaken Thy heauenly Image (sinlesse pure impression) And so in nets of vanity lye taken,    All desolate implore that to thine owne,    Lord, thou no longer liue a God vnknowne. (19–24)78

Christ is mankind’s ‘mirrour of transgression’, but instead of recognising in that mirror the divine’s ‘heauenly Image’, mankind forsakes this for ‘earthly Idols’. Yet what is a ‘heauenly Image’ if not itself a mediated copy that might be mistaken for the divine object? Rather than offer us access to Christ, Greville’s poem presents us with a series of images and reflections of the divine that provokes this inevitable question: is the ‘Image’ not simply a reversed reflection of the ‘Idol’? Like the figurative image, the Protestant Christ is ‘hidden in his revelation’, seeming to offer a connection between word and thing, man and divine, while simultaneously disavowing that very   connection.79 The Reformer now makes what was indirectly implied in Augustine’s work starkly manifest. Subjectivity is produced through, or rather because of, this foundational scene of  alienation and this alienation is deeply marked in the suspension that necessarily characterises the figurative image. So when  Linda Gregerson writes of the early modern subject that ‘Putting on Christ, the self reconstitutes desire and makes itself anew’,80 she overemphasises the  volitional aspect of Christological ‘activity’. Certainly it is difficult, perhaps even impossible, to write about subjectivity without slipping into the language of active agency. But it is important to register the extent to which, from its inception in Luther’s writings, early modern Protestantism sees the subject as foundationally constituted almost completely in terms of an involuntary, non-rational alienation: to appropriate Lutheran terminology, any volitional impulse is necessarily imputed to the secondary realm of ‘proper righteousness’. Or as Cynthia Marshall has put it in a psychoanalytic context, ‘dissolving the self through submission to

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God is actually constitutive of identity’. 81 Crucially, the alienation that is central to the theologia crucis is imputed to both Christ and to the subject. Christ’s  righteousness is alien but that alien righteousness also stands as a corollary to God’s utter alienation from the subject. So when the subject confronts the cross of Christ, it is as a secondary, oblique, shameful and alien signifier that, in the very  disavowal which it stands for, nonetheless constitutes the ‘active’ grounds of subjective identification and imitation: such ‘activity’ as the theologia crucis allows always belongs to this secondary realm of signification. Protestant identification is produced in relation to and on behalf of an authoritative yet alien and alienating ‘other’ whose ‘presence’ is deeply marked in the suspension performed by language. Such an understanding also implies a representational structure of dominance, subordination, disavowal and even disgust whereby in the subject’s relationship with the guarantor of authority, subjectivity is simultaneously legitimated and refused. This system of avowal and negation will become a constitutive feature of the way in which Protestantism is interpellated at both an institutional and a subjective level.  These problematic ideas are explored further in  Luther’s A Meditation on Christ’s Passion. It is noticeable that, unlike Erasmus, Luther refuses to allow that ‘external manifestations’ of Christ have any efficacy whatsoever. He complains that ‘We have transformed the essence into semblance and painted our meditations on Christ’s passion on walls and made them into letters’.82 By externalising devotion to Christ, Luther accuses his auditors of making Christ into a material symbol:  the language of  mimetic semblance is interesting here because although Luther wants to critique such practices, we notice that his own discourse is in fact deeply bound up with the mimetic. Cautious throughout this sermon not to align Christological  devotion with volition, Luther writes as follows about the work of  meditating on the passion: Unless God inspires our heart, it is impossible for us of ourselves to meditate thoroughly on Christ’s passion. No meditation or any other doctrine is granted to you that you might be boldly inspired by your own will to accomplish this. You must first seek God’s grace and ask that it be accomplished by his grace and not by your own power.  83

The necessity of Christ does not, for Luther, necessarily imply the subject’s effectual turning towards him. Instead, it is clear once again that any movement towards the divine is as a consequence of the divine acting on/in us. Such a movement is central to the crux of the sermon, where it is explained precisely what happens when this grace is granted to the

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subject. Luther says that  ‘The earnest mirror, Christ, will not lie or trifle, and whatever it points out will come to pass in full measure’.84 In the ‘mirror’, the subject reaches the apex of being. Following the setting up of this mimetic relationship with Christ: We must give ourselves wholly to this matter, for the main benefit of Christ’s passion is that man sees into his own true self and that he be terrified and crushed by this. Unless we seek that knowledge, we do not derive much benefit from Christ’s passion. The real and true work of Christ’s passion is to make man conformable to Christ, so that man’s conscience is tormented by his sins in like measure as Christ was pitiably tormented in body and soul by our sins.85

This is a fascinating passage, and one that goes to the heart of Christological Protestant subjectivity. The subject is told that ‘the main benefit of Christ’s passion is that man sees into his own true self and that he be terrified and crushed by this’. On the face of it, this means that in contemplating Christ’s passion the subject comes up against his own (unworthy and terrible) inner self. But if Christ is man’s ‘earnest mirror’ that does not ‘lie or trifle’, then identifying the precise location of man’s ‘true self’ becomes rather problematic. When the subject looks into this metaphorical ‘mirror’, is he terrified by himself or by Christ? Or, rather, is it not the case that the two actions become indistinguishable from each other? Gazing into the ‘earnest mirror’, the subject confronts his ‘true self’ not in  plenitude or correspondence but in the terrible alien ground of Christ’s passion, a ground that is necessarily approached and constructed through the   figurative image.  In  Freinkel’s words: Christ is everywhere, and nowhere. He fills all creation, and yet He can only be reached through faith. He is everywhere present, but only present for us in His revealed  Word. And yet, although bound up in particular signs, although revealed in particular places and moments, the Word remains absolute. 86

Though I would not want to downplay the importance in Luther’s thought of the ‘absolute’ Word,  nonetheless any account of the subject’s engagement with Christ must have as its primary focus the ‘present’ reality of the word. Seen in this way, subjectivity is mimetically produced in the  alien and alienating mirror of the figurative image that produces as it negates the very grounds of its own possibility: ‘it is inevitable, whether in this life or in hell, that you will have to become conformable to Christ’s image and suffering .’87 More than this, in order for Luther to maintain the alien singularity of  Christ’s sacrifice, it becomes a constitutive necessity of his anthropology that Christian subjectivity is produced and grounded in

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representation. 88 Because the Word that provides the grounds of our identity is both alien and constitutive, we cannot help but be impelled into the realm of the word. It is through this very logic that the  mimetically produced subject in Christ shifts from being merely a trope or a commonplace to becoming a theological and anthropological necessity. The tension is that, while at a linguistic level Luther must use the ‘Classical’ language of figurative similitude and representation to describe this process, at a theological level his logic does not allow for what  Foucault calls ‘the old interplay between resemblance and signs’.89 Language and exegesis point in contrary directions. This does not mean that Lutheranism utterly rejected the signifying potential of the immanent, expressed through figurative similitude. Carlos  Eire has argued that Lutheran theology ‘steered a middle course between  transcendence and immanence’. 90 Moreover, Luther still held that  Christ mediates in his human nature,91 so to speak of Lutheranism as inculcating a kind of radical dualism avant la lettre is probably premature.92 But while the Augustinian/Erasmian language of similitude, of figuratively ‘putting on’ or ‘imitating’ Christ is retained , under a Protestant dispensation such language implicitly problematises any direct theological or affective connectivity between signs and their referents,  between words and things, between the subject and God.  Luther’s theological breakthrough also raises a new set of theological and anthropological problems. When he notes that ‘so we also to imitate him [Christ] be afflicted in the knowledge of our sinnes’,93 he shows how consideration of the subject’s sinful distance from the divine is a necessary condition of imitation. For by exploiting the mediatory logic of the figurative latent in Augustine and Erasmus and translating it into a constitutive theological necessity, the subject finds himself caught between likeness and unlikeness, between immanence and transcendence.   By examining the theology that informs these modes of discourse, and by paying close attention to the amount of theological weight that figurative Christological language in particular is called upon to bear in religious discourse, we are starting to construct a reading of Protestant subjectivity that takes proper account of this clash. This form of subjectivity cannot simply be characterised as a prerequisite on the path towards a broadly conceived modernity. 94 Rather, it is a form that we should try to understand on its own early modern terms since the alternative is that we reduce Protestant subjectivity to an irredeemably anticipatory moment in the relentless rise of the rational modern subject and of post-Enlightenment signification and disenchantment.95 We need to understand early modern

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Protestantism as a religion in which subjectivity is conceived through  mimetic discourse, through an uneasy process of mediation and imitation that is not supposed to be rationally explicable for the subject. The subject is offered a locus of subjective identification only to have that locus disavowed, a pattern that is mirrored in the figurative image. This is a pattern that is repeated time and again in the literature of early modern England, especially the drama. In most forms of Protestantism, man is miserable and wretched, and although he may potentially be reconciled to God via the offices of the mediator and the application of grace, his encounter with the divine also impels him not into the unmediated presence of being, but rather into a realm where  representation necessarily acts as an uneasy pivot between human and divine. The Protestant Christ is much more than an avatar for the production of subjectivity: he is the  mediating/postponing  mirror that reflects and produces identity. In this painful realisation, representation becomes the necessary but also inevitable grounds for the simultaneous construction and disavowal of Protestant subjectivity. What is vital here is that the ‘particular signs’ that reveal Christ to the subject are inevitably predicated upon a similitudinous theory of  language profoundly at odds with the theological anthropology that underpins them. In the second half of this book, we will see how drama makes critical use of this model. This point is of the utmost importance for representation. As various Protestant thinkers throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries explore more fully the subjective and institutional implications of Luther’s seminal insight, for  some Christ shifts from being an object of suspension to becoming an object of disavowal. It is this shift that creates the conditions for the analogous and contested explorations of the figurative image that we find in the dazzling interplay of subjects and objects on the early ­modern stage.  

chapter 3

Representing the subject: Calvin, Christ and identity

Christ ‘is our glasse and patterne, not that (as I have said) there is in vs the like power, but yet although wee cannot come neere him, let vs notwithstanding strive to come as neere him as we may’.

(John Calvin)

I So far my  discussion of Protestantism has focused largely on the representational problems that arose from Reformation theology and on how educated Protestants battled with these problems in terms of ­subjectivity. While I maintain this approach in the following two chapters, I also aim to ground these Protestant ideas more firmly in the historical ­context of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England by examining the assimilation  of Calvinism in particular. At a political as well as at a ­conceptual level, Calvinism was especially suited to the cultural exigencies of early modern England. By drawing this implicit distinction between the political and conceptual, I do not mean to suggest that the two can be completely separated, certainly not during this period. This is in no small part due to the fissured legacy of the Reformation in England. Lutheranism  did not attain the same foothold here as Calvinism largely because, in the political and social context of that country, Lutheranism arrived somewhat prematurely. Certainly we must be careful not to impose retrospectively a teleological coherence upon a set of religious phenomena that many living during the early modern period found difficult, diffuse and even alienating. As much recent historical work has shown, the adoption of the reformed agenda in early Tudor England was often piecemeal and grudging, largely owing to the political capriciousness of Henry VIII. In the words of Susan  Wabuda: ‘From the late 1510s, Lutheran influence began to find a welcoming reception in England only covertly, in such places where moderate  humanism had been a strong presence, particularly at Cambridge.’1 During 80

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the first three decades of the sixteenth century, it is fair to say that while Lutheranism may have been ready for England, England was not yet ready for it. Historians  Peter Marshall and Alex Ryrie sum up current thinking on the matter, writing that ‘in the first decades of the Reformation the religious situation itself was fluid and indeterminate. Boundaries were unclear where they existed at all, and identities were nascent and contested’.2 In no small part, the history of sixteenth-century England is the history of those who tried to establish and maintain those boundaries. Given such cultural circumstances, it is unsurprising that Lutheranism did not flourish in the ways that many early English Reformers might have hoped. The tentative advances made under Henry VIII, and more zealously under Edward VI, were counterbalanced by Mary’s fervent Catholicism and Elizabeth’s theological caution. The fact that each of these Tudor monarchs associated Lutheranism with theological dissent and political turbulence meant that its assimilation was always likely to be at best partial.3 The principle that the ruler of the state determined the religion of that state  (cuius regio, eius religio) is hard to understate in early modern Europe.4 In broader terms,  Lutheranism was also fighting a rearguard action during the mid-sixteenth century. The impact of  the Council of Trent, the Catholic Church’s attempt to counter the Reform movement, on Lutheranism’s fortunes cannot be understated either.  Indeed, one scholar explains, ‘With the death of Luther (1546) and the defeat of the Schmalkaldic League (1547), Lutheranism became intellectually moribund, increasingly weakened by severe internal dissent and land-locked within German territories. Luther’s little system had had its day’.5  Yet if this describes the gradual pan-European decline of Lutheranism’s political fortunes from the highpoint of the 1520s and 1530s, we must equally be careful not to downplay the extent to which it retained a crucial intellectual importance in theological debate across Europe. This is especially the case in respect of its animating relationship to Calvinism. In the words of Alister McGrath: ‘It is certainly true that there were doctrinal differences between them; yet most of the differences between Lutheranism and Calvinism were so subtle that is was difficult for a non-theologian to grasp them.’6 So while it would not be true to claim that the assimilation of Calvinist thought by English intellectuals in the latter part of the sixteenth century was also the belated victory of Lutheranism under another guise, it is the case that Calvinism utilises, develops and modifies many of the Lutheran concepts that I have already introduced. Like Lutheranism,  Calvinism  is also a deeply Christocentric religion. Indeed, as  McGrath observes, ‘If there is a centre of Calvin’s religious

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thought, that centre may reasonably be identified as Jesus Christ himself’.7 Much literary scholarship has traditionally approached and understood Calvinism in terms of hard-line strictures on predestination,  providence and free will, and so approaching Calvinism through the lens of Christ may represent something of a departure. It can also be said that Calvinism gained a foothold in early modern England because, like many of his contemporaries, much that is important within Calvin’s thought emerges from his own engagement with the devotio moderna as well as the broad humanist lineage mentioned in earlier chapters. In common with other major strands of Christian doctrine in sixteenth-century Europe, Calvinism is characterised by a strongly Christocentric focus as well as a concern with the  political relationship between  individual and society. Bearing in mind what I have already said about the continuing tradition of Christocentric devotion in post-Reformation England, it seems reasonable to conclude that the ‘Christ-centred’ nature of Calvinism would have helped its adoption in that country. Moreover, in terms of the concerns of this book, by viewing Calvinism as a Christocentric religion it is also possible to see how, as Debora  Shuger has put it, ‘Calvinist anthropology . . . mirrors (and may derive from) its Christology’.8 Indeed, after the publication of the Heidelberg Catechism in 1563 and the Harmony of Confessions in the 1570s, English Reformers could be justified in seeing themselves as part of a pan-European confession, which although it had its differences, was resolutely Christocentric in theology.9 Calvinism  first makes its influence felt in England as Lutheranism is declining as a political force. The impact of Calvin’s thought can be indir­ ectly discerned as early as the 1530s in the acerbic anti-Catholic plays  of John Bale.10 But it was not long before the actual writings of the Genevan reformer appeared in England.  Elizabeth I herself translated Chapter 1 of  the Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1545.11 Part of the same work (Book 3, Chapters 6 to 10) first appeared in 1549 in Thomas Broke’s Communicacion of a Christen Man, and the whole of the Institutes were translated twelve years later in the important edition of Thomas  Norton. Various abridgements of the Institutes soon followed, the first by Edmund  Bunney in 1576. This was soon superseded in popularity by William  Lawne’s edition published in 1583.12  Calvin’s thought was also disseminated via his biblical commentaries, his catechisms and especially his sermons, for example, his extremely popular sermons on Timothy and Titus first published in 1579. In addition to the works of Calvin, ‘second generation’ doctrinal Calvinists such as  Peter Martyr, Wolfgang  Musculus, Girolamo Zanchi, Theodore Beza and William  Perkins, as well as those of a myriad of lesser known

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preachers and polemicists were also widely read in England and helped to spread the Calvinist word in the latter half of the sixteenth and into the seventeenth centuries, a point that I will return to later.13 Calvin’s  own particular stress throughout his writings on the discip­ linary function of the church within Christian society was to prove especially appealing in countries like England where the  political legitimacy of religion was intimately tied up with institutional structure and function of worship.  So although it is probably unwise to speak of a ‘Calvinist consensus’ in late Tudor and Jacobean England, it remains the case that during the period that this book is concerned with, Calvinism offered the intellectual community a dominant set of conceptual tools that were used to explore topics as diverse as salvation, providence, church discipline, and political authority.  More generally, like all great religious systems it represented a controversial and shifting means of understanding the subject’s relationship to the divine; how that relationship affected his or her perception of the world; and how the subject represented that relationship to/in the world. Calvinism offered early modern society a heterogeneous and philosophically challenging account of the divine/subject dialectic and how that was represented, one that was used critically, and often sceptically, by adherents and non-adherents alike: it was not necessary to be a Calvinist to engage seriously with its premises, a fact that is reflected across the religious spectrum. The adoption of Calvinism in England was certainly abetted by some influential lay support. Alistair Fox writes: Calvinist beliefs were espoused by many of the most powerful figures in the lay and clerical establishments, including the Queen’s favourite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and his circle (Philip Sidney among them), her Secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham, and her chief minister, William Cecil, Lord Burghley.14

And at both Oxford and Cambridge universities, Calvinist doctrine was taught to aspiring ministers.15 But although Calvinism had the imprimatur of political and educational respectability, it would be a mistake to see its presence in early modern England as one of unproblematic acceptance from all quarters. As Peter  Lake says of what some have termed the Elizabethan Calvinist ‘consensus’: ‘hegemony is not monopoly. Despite Calvinist predominance, there were anti-Calvinists in the Elizabethan and Jacobean church.’16 The beginnings of anti-Calvinist sentiment in England can be traced back to academic disputes in  Cambridge during the 1570s.17 Most notably, the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at that university, Peter  Baro, opposed the Calvinist doctrine concerning the

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denial of human free will. The controversy did not, however, reach a head until 1595. In that year, Baro’s disciple William  Barrett preached a controversial sermon asserting that man may not be assured of his salvation. He was supported by scholars like Lancelot  Andrewes and John Overall, both of whom were later to be associated with the anti-Calvinist Arminian wing. They in turn were vigorously opposed by powerful figures like the Puritan don Laurence  Chaderton and the eminent Calvinist William Whitaker who each held the strict Calvinist line that human  free will was incompatible with salvation,  exemplifying that, as Brian  Cummings notes, ‘Confident assurance of salvation was . . . essential to the doctrine of predestination’.18 The dispute came to head with the  Lambeth Articles of 1595, which state unequivocally the Calvinist doctrine of the Elizabethan Church (although Elizabeth herself refused to sanction them).19 Crucially, many of these disputes centred around Christ, specifically on the question of Christ’s atonement. On the one hand, most Calvinists held to the belief that because man is incapable of participating in his own salvation and because Christ’s death is only effectual for the elect so, de facto, his sacrifice is only applicable to that group. In the words of the Calvinist Pierre du Moulin, ‘We acknowledge that Christ died for all; but we denie, that by his death saluation and forgiuenesse of sinne is obtained for al men’.20 Christ, in other words, did not die for all. Opposed to this were another group, many of whom either took their lead from or aligned themselves with the Dutch theologian Jacob  Arminius and who would later come to be known as  Arminians, or anti-Calvinists. They held that man could participate in his own  salvation and that Christ died for all men: crucially, the Arminians were also much more likely to stress, in opposition to the Calvinists, that grace was not irresistible, that man may choose to accept or reject God’s grace and that assurance of salvation was not guaranteed.21  Again to quote du Moulin: ‘The Arminians are of the opinion, that Christ by his death obtained & got remission of sins, reconciliation, & saluation for all, & particular men.’22 Most of the objections of the ­anti-Calvinists did not begin to have a sustained political effect until the final years of James I’s reign and the accession of Charles I in 1625: the outbreak of the  Thirty Years War is central to the fissures between Calvinists and Armininas that characterise the late Jacobean and Caroline periods. But as Nicholas Tyacke points out, in the period in which this book deals, ‘Calvinism was the de facto religion of the Church of England’.23 Still, even if the tensions between Calvinists and anti-Calvinists did not come to a head until later, they still represent an important moment in the history of early modern England, centred as they are on Christ and paralleling as

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they do almost exactly the development of the commercial theatre and the careers of all the Elizabethan and Jacobean writers dealt with in this book. As such, they deserve a little more explication. I want to preface further discussion of the situation in England by first examining how these tensions might arise in Calvin’s own thought. By looking at Calvin’s Christologically based anthropology of man, its potential faultlines, and also at how literary criticism has approached Calvin’s system, it will be possible to contextualise these debates more fully. By way of illustration, I also draw throughout my discussion more fully on the work of Fulke Greville, early modern politician, member of Sir Philip Sidney’s inner circle and Calvinist. Greville’s work is important as it affords us an insight into how an educated English Calvinist assimilated and grappled with the intellectual challenges presented by the polymath of Geneva. II In  Chapter 1 I introduced one of the central pillars of Protestant orthodoxy, the duplex cognitio Dei (twofold knowledge of God), which asserts that any move towards perception of the world is inextricably bound to our perception of the divine.24 This principle is most famously exclaimed in the opening line of John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion: ‘Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.’25  Undoubtedly, defining the precise nature of this ‘knowledge’ and what kind of relationship might emerge from it is far from straightforward. Still, I want to argue in what follows that the impulse towards self-knowledge is always a double impulse: selfhood is mediated through the relationship with the divine, and as the one  mediator between man and God, Christ plays a  critical role in determining that relationship. To appropriate François  Wendel’s phrase, this relationship is predicated upon: ‘the absolute transcendence of God and his total “otherness” in relation to man.’26 Another way of thinking about this is to say that the extent of one type of knowledge (human) is necessarily limited by the illimitability of the other (divine). This is important because one of the most enduring views of Calvin, at least in literary studies, is that more than any other major Reformed theologian he placed great emphasis on the  depravity of the human subject before God and on the divine’s utter transcendence. In Jonathan Dollimore’s well-known formulation: ‘Calvin’s own graphic portrayal of adversity, his insistence on the incomprehensibility of  providence and the extent of people’s and nature’s

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inherent corruption, actually fuelled despair, nihilism and, even, the “censure [of] God”.’27 He quotes Calvin on the subject’s degradation after the fall, noting that God’s  image is ‘so corrupted that anything which remains is fearful deformity’.28 For Dollimore, such a view of mankind’s potential or rather lack of it, points towards certain inherent contradictions  within  Protestantism. He concludes his discussion by stating: ‘Protestantism thus intensified religious paradox. In a sense this was intentional: for Calvin faith was generated on the axis of paradox and from within experienced contradiction.’29 Popular though this view undoubtedly still is, I want to preface my examination here by asking: is it entirely accurate? In the first place, it is important to say that I agree with the ideological thrust of Dollimore’s reading of Calvinism. Viewed in isolation, Calvin’s anthropology of man can seem both harsh and unyielding.30 In terms of people’s lived experience, scholars like Dollimore, as well as Alan  Sinfield and John Stachniewski have demonstrated that, in its more extreme manifestations, Calvinism could lead to an unpleasantly  deterministic view of humanity. That it was utilised, often knowingly, occasionally not, in the politically coercive strategies of state power is hard to deny. Moreover, significant numbers of people reacted with extreme violence to  Calvinist doctrine in early modern England.31 But for now I want to qualify Dollimore’s reading of early modern Calvinism, especially in relation to the place and function of the image of God within the subject. Though a strong case can be made for seeing Calvinism as Dollimore does, to characterise Calvinism in terms of nihilistic determinism is to miss some of the complexities within Calvin’s own position. To post-Enlightenment eyes, Calvinism may well be a fairly rebarbative system of thought, but it is important nonetheless not to reduce it to a discourse that early modern people inevitably found agnostic. In the words  of Cummings, ‘The Calvinist impulse towards an ever more certain process of  election and damnation is not meant to be either sadistic or depressing: on the contrary, it is supposed to give the Christian overwhelming comfort’.32 Whether it succeeds in this aim is another matter, as we will see.  Rather than being ‘generated on the axis of paradox’, we have to take Calvin seriously when he states that human knowledge of anything, even election, is generated on the dialectic between divine and human perception. Such a qualification may seem relatively minor. Yet it is one that Calvin, and those Calvinists who follow him, emphasise again and again in their exegetical writing, pastoral discourse and preaching. For example, as Calvin notes in a sermon on Christ’s passion: ‘if the heauens be much higher than the earth, much more must it needes be, that we should knowe and confesse, that God is more high than we, yea

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there is no proportion, or resemblance as it were betweene God and men.’33 By comparing two orders of knowledge, human and divine, Calvin points out that the limit of human comprehension can only be understood in terms of its relational but comparative distance from divine perception. Such formulations also have the advantage of allowing us to see the way in which the issue of  mimetic resemblance, corrupted or otherwise, emerges as a consequence of this dialectic and how it functions within the production of Calvinist identity. The result of this process may well be ‘experienced contradiction’ but it also enables us to reconsider precisely how those contradictions are produced. In Book II of the Institutes, Calvin states: God would not have us forget our original nobility, which he had bestowed upon our father Adam, and which ought truly to arouse in us a zeal for righteousness and goodness. For we cannot think upon either our first condition or to what purpose we were formed without being prompted to meditate upon immortality, and to yearn after the Kingdom of God. That recognition, however, far from encouraging pride in us, discourages us and casts us into humility. For what is that origin? It is that from which we have fallen. What is that end of our creation? It is that from which we have been completely estranged, so that sick of our miserable lot we groan, and in groaning we sigh for that lost worthiness.34

In what will come to be seen as a typically Calvinist move, the subject appeals to a particular locus of originary authority, in this case the condition of mankind before the fall, and in doing so reveals a fundamental estrangement that is nonetheless imputed to man, not God: ‘Our destruction . . . comes from the guilt of the flesh, not from God, inasmuch as we have perished solely because we have degenerated from our original condition.’35 This principle of degeneration also applies to free will for since mankind lost its original state due to the misplaced application of this faculty, so it cannot regain that state through the appliance of the faculty that caused it to be lost in the first place.  Fulke Greville puts this realisation like this in A Treatise of Religion (1670): But there remains such naturall corruption In all our powers, even from our parents seed, As to the good gives native interruption: Sense staines affection; that, will; and will, deed:    So as what’s good in us, and others too    We praise; but what is evil, that we doe.36

The central word here is ‘will’: free will is fundamentally perverted and, unlike in much early modern Catholic doctrine, ‘is not sufficient to enable man to do good  works’.37 Instead, ‘what is evil, that we doe’. So how does the subject potentially come to reconciliation with God? The answer is

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provided through Calvin’s doctrine of  grace, bestowed solely by God on those whom He chooses. If grace is given to the subject, then through the workings of faith that subject may potentially be regenerated. This does not mean, however, that the subject has a  voluntaristic influence over his or her own  salvation.  Similar to Luther, Calvin explains: ‘as  regards justification, faith is something merely passive, bringing nothing of ours to the recovering of God’s favour but receiving from Christ that which we lack.’38 The centrality of  Christ is noticeable here and François  Wendel summarises it in the following way: ‘Christ, by bringing salvation to us, does not free us from external constraint but . . . he has to renovate us in ourselves by rectifying our deformed will and orientating it towards righteousness.’39 As in  Luther’s seminal theologia crucis, Calvin places the disavowing encounter with Christ at the ontological centre of Christian existence.40  Calvin notes that Christ ‘is our glasse and patterne, not that (as I have said) there is in vs the like power, but yet although wee cannot come neere him, let vs notwithstanding strive to come as neere him as we may’.41 Note the hesitation here: it is significant that Christ does not provide the subject with repletion but only orientates him or her towards the good. Greville explains this in relation to grace: For though God gave such measure of his grace As might in fleshe fullfill the second table; Yet sinne against the first, did first deface Gods Image, and to rayse that who is able?    Betweene the fleshe, and grace that spirituall fight   Needs father, sonne, and their proceedinge might.42

We  might even notice a certain dialectic of masochism in operation here: the divine object that is desired is precisely that which cannot be attained. And yet this does not prevent the subject from attempting to restore the image of that object, despite knowing that such an attempt will invariably end in disappointment: ‘to rayse that who is able?’ More than any other manifestation of Reformed theology, Calvinism dialectically contrasts man’s potential for doing good and attaining grace against the sordid reality that while grace is certainly possible, it is more likely that man will fail to fulfil that potential. The dialectical importance of Christ in Calvin’s thought demonstrates that to present Calvinism as inscribing an immutable opposition between the magnificent  transcendence of God and the depraved immanence of the subject is to set up a false dichotomy.  As Calvin regularly and routinely maintains, humanity did not always exist in a depraved state, a fact

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that enables the workings of grace. In book one of the Institutes he repeatedly notes that at the point of Creation, humanity was the most exalted of God’s accomplishments: ‘among all God’s works here is the noblest and most remarkable example of his justice, wisdom and goodness.’43 Such goodness pertains to inward knowledge of the self: ‘knowledge of ourselves lies first in considering what we were given at creation and how generously God continues his favor toward us, in order to know how great our natural excellence would be if only it had remained unblemished.’44 Such originary ‘excellence’ plays a key role for Calvin and one that should be stressed. Because it raises the structural possibility of the subject’s potential ‘excellency’, it is a crucial aspect of Calvinist dialectics. This realisation also negates, at least in part, the commonly held belief in much literary criticism that Calvin saw no goodness at all in humanity and that his theology is utterly condemnatory from the outset. As he writes of humanity: ‘what a great variety of gifts they possess from his liberality. They are compelled to know – whether they will or not – that these are the signs of divinity.’45 This recognition of human potential, even though it may be more significant at a structural level than in terms of lived experience, is also important since the prodigality of the divine’s gifts impels consideration of subjectivity in relation to Calvinist epistemology. As the parenthetical aside in the above quotation makes clear, the subject’s awareness of self is inevitably tempered by his or her dialectical and contrary awareness of the power of the divine to prescribe and proscribe the limits of epistemological possession. Consider this passage on human perception: When  we so condemn human understanding for its perceptual blindness as to leave it no perception of any object whatever, we not only go against God’s Word, but also run counter to the experience of common sense. For we see implanted in human nature some sort of desire to search out the truth to which man would not aspire had he not already savored it. Human understanding then possesses some power of perception, since it is by nature captivated by love of truth. The lack of this endowment in brute animals proves their nature gross and irrational. Yet this longing for truth, such as it is, languishes before it enters upon its race because it soon falls into vanity. Indeed, man’s mind, because of its dullness, cannot hold to the right path, but wanders through various errors and stumbles repeatedly, as if it were groping in darkness, until it strays away and finally disappears. Thus it betrays how incapable it is of seeking and finding truth.46

This quotation starts by affirming the subject’s perceptual capacities only to end by denying those capacities outright: Calvin rejects the very ­potential that he putatively starts by rescuing from condemnation. If

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we were to follow  Dollimore’s lead here in viewing Calvin’s logic here and elsewhere in terms of ‘contradiction’, then I suggest it is best understood in the terms set out by the Marxist philosopher Theodor  Adorno. He writes as follows: ‘Contradiction is non-identity under the aspect of identity; the dialectical primacy of the principle of contradiction makes the thought of unity the measure of heterogeneity. As the heterogeneous collides with its limit it exceeds itself. Dialectics is the consistent sense of non-identity.’47 Adorno’s Hegelian-inspired formulation is useful here since the subject’s falling away from God can be seen as a kind of dialectical ‘non-identity’ that is nonetheless structurally unavoidable. The fact that Calvin errs theologically on the side of God’s transcendence in contrast to man’s depravity cannot be denied. Yet this does not mean that the dialectical potential of God’s immanence and man’s goodness is sidetracked by Calvin  and can therefore be ignored in our critical consideration of how Calvinism operates. Whatever way it is conceptualised, the dialectic of Calvinist ‘non-­identity’ always presupposes its own negation in both positive and ­negative terms. This perhaps explains why, for Calvin, saving  grace can only ever be extended to the elect. The problem is that, in coming to terms with God after the fall, the subject necessarily comes up against the fundamental absence of natural correspondence between human perception or experience, and that of the divine. Greville notes: Then judge pore man! God’s Image once, ’tis true, Though nowe the Devills, by thine owne defection, Judge man, I say, to make this Image newe, And clense thy fleshe from this deep-dy’de infection, What miracles must needes be wrought in you, That thus stand lost in all thinges but Election?    What living death, what strange illumination    Must be inspir’d to this regeneration?48

The possibility of restoring the ‘Image newe’ within the interior is faint indeed. Because of the subject’s depravity, and in lieu of regeneration, it is more likely that he or she will find solace in the false image: ‘because all of us are inclined by nature to hypocrisy, a kind of empty image of righteousness itself abundantly satisfies us’ (‘Quia eaim ad hypocrisin natura propensisumus omnes, ideo inanis quaedam iustitie species pro iustitia ipsa nobis abunde satisfacit’).49 So when the subject considers the divine and then attempts to account either perceptually or linguistically for that encounter, this impels the perceiver into a necessary recognition of the lack of

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correspondence between fallen humanity and God. Writing of the divine law in Book 2 of the Institutes, Calvin points out: The law is like a  mirror. In it we contemplate our weakness, then the iniquity arising from this, and finally the curse coming from both – just as a mirror shows us the spots on our face. For when the capacity to follow righteousness fails him, man must be mired in sins. After the sin forthwith comes the curse. Accordingly, the greater the transgression of which the law holds us guilty, the graver the judgement to which it makes us answerable.50

As in Luther’s work, the condemnatory mimetic encounter with the divine law (‘Ita Lex instar est speculi’) results in a simultaneous disavowing alienation from self and from the divine.51 Calvin also says: that primal worthiness cannot come to mind without the sorry spectacle of our foulness and dishonor presenting itself by way of contrast, since in the person of the first man we have fallen from our original condition. From this source arise abhorrence and displeasure with ourselves, as well as true humility; and thence is kindled a new zeal to seek God, in who each of us may recover those good things which we have utterly and completely lost.52

Originary worthiness and present unworthiness are the essential components of the Calvinist dialectic. It is only through this struggle between ­‘primal worthiness’ and present ‘foulness’ that ‘abhorrence’ comes about: subjectivity is mimetically produced by confronting the memory of an originary worthiness now perceived as primal lack, present humility and the desire for grace. In Greville’s hesitating, almost despairing formulation: ‘For what else is Religion in mankinde,/ But raisinge of Gods Image there decaid?’53 It is here that Calvinism’s debt to the late  medieval Nominalism associated with William of Ockham is perhaps most apparent. Because our fallen perception can never equate to epistemological ‘possession’ of the divine, as an expression of our perceptual faculties,  language is naturally incapable of adequately embodying that relationship: in a post-lapsarian world such a possibility cannot be countenanced. Indeed, for Calvin the fact that we are able to say and think anything about the divine at all is as a condition of what theologians have termed the ‘principle  of  accommodation’. Alister McGrath explains this idea by saying that it ‘is an act of divine condescension, by which God bridges the gulf between himself and his capacities, and sinful humanity and its much weaker abilities’.54 Such an understanding contextualises the next section where Calvin examines the wonder of God’s created universe: The final goal of the blessed life, moreover, rests in the knowledge of God. Lest anyone, then, be excluded from access to happiness, he not only sowed in men’s

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minds that seed of religion of which we have spoken but revealed himself and daily discloses himself in the whole workmanship of the universe. As a consequence, men cannot open their eyes without being compelled to see him. Indeed, his essence is incomprehensible; hence, his divineness far escapes all human perception. But upon his individual works he has engraved unmistakeable marks of his glory, so clear and so prominent that even unlettered and stupid folk cannot plead the excuse of ignorance.55

This is a fascinating yet deeply problematic quotation, one that points up the ‘experienced contradiction’ of Calvinism. We might explain this as follows. God is the end of all human perception. Before the fall, divine perception and human perception were potentially contiguous. But because of humanity’s depravity and God’s majesty, the subject’s perception must now necessarily fall back upon a secondary realm of fallen signification. As a consequence of this, God accommodates himself to us through the signs that we read in the world around us. We cannot approach God and so are impelled to ‘view’ him obliquely through the secondary signs that he has ‘engraved’. Such an accommodation can never preclude humanity’s depravity. Due to our fallen nature we remain constantly in danger of taking the signs offered to us by the divine and fashioning God according to our own ‘presumption’.  Greville explains this fact in the following way: For they Gods true Religion (which a state, And beinge is, not taken on, but in) To bottomlesse hypocrisie translate; The superstitiouse doth with feare beginne, And so deceiv’d, deceives; and underrates His God, and makes an idol of his sinne: The politique with craft enthralles mankinde, And makes his bodee sacrifice his minde.56

This verse makes clear the inexorability of the subject making ‘an idol of his sinne’: he can do nothing else.  Seen in this way, the subject’s reliance upon mimetic and potentially  idolatrous signs is both a necessary marker of limits and a terrible sign of depravation where, as  Cummings observes, ‘“Flesh” is made impervious to “faith”’.57  The subject may repent, prevenient grace may be granted, but only the elect will be given saving grace. Because the subject lacks God and because his or her turning towards God only serves to affirm that distance, the subject is propelled by the double-bind of Calvinist dialectics into a world of  mimetic  images that stand as a secondary, oblique, but inescapably necessary substitute for that lack. What is so interesting about Calvin’s thought is that, though he often

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describes the route towards God, his anthropology of the subject is theologically weighted towards the profound difficulty of such a union ever taking place. It is not that this union is necessarily impossible. As I have shown, his dialectical understanding forestalls this as a structural possibility through the operation of grace. But the odds are nonetheless stacked against its occurring. Consider in full a passage quoted earlier: Again,  it is certain that man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he has first looked upon God’s face, and then descends from contemplating him to scrutinize himself. For we always seem to ourselves righteous and upright and wise and holy – this pride is innate in all of us – unless by clear proofs we stand convinced by our own unrighteousness, foulness, folly, and impurity. Moreover, we are not thus convinced if we look merely to ourselves and not also to the Lord, who is the sole standard by which this judgement must be measured. For, because all of us are inclined by nature to hypocrisy, a kind of empty image of righteousness in place of righteousness itself abundantly satisfies us.58

The subject possesses a  ‘natural’ knowledge of God that has been profoundly altered by our present fallen knowledge.59 The ‘empty image of righteousness’ in fact acts as a surrogate for this foundational loss.  What McGrath calls this ‘epistemic distance between God and humanity’60 represents the fundamental grounds of Calvin’s epistemology and therefore his anthropology. It also animates the most problematic aspects of his theology more generally. Because of the magnitude of  original sin, the accessibility of the divine within in the subject is severely compromised, indeed almost lost completely. But although the  image of God is lost in the fall, this loss is never complete. What remains, as we have seen in both Calvin and Greville’s writings, is a remnant of that image, a revenant that stands in for that foundational  alienation from the divine.  Greville memorably explores this realisation in Sonnet XCIX of Caelica: And in this fatall mirrour of transgression, Shewes man as fruit of his degeneration, The errours ugly infinite impression, Which beares the faithlesse downe to desperation;   Depri’d of humane graces and diuine,    Euen there appears this sauing God of mine. (7–12)61

That we choose to identify with ‘The errours ugly infinite impression’ is both an inevitable consequence and marker of our estrangement, yet is also that which theoretically enables both Greville and Calvin to avoid sundering divine and subject completely: the ‘sauing God’ appears, presumably offering the subject grace.  Having said this, we might also note that God ‘appears’ to the speaker. This implies the emergence of an object

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that was not there previously. Indeed, as  Elaine Ho notes, ‘the torments are conceived as non-verbal processes’ and they ‘rest on the repetitions of the visual: “Euen there appears this sauing God of mine”.’62 The Calvinist subject, it seems, cannot escape the lure of the image. The difficulty for Calvinism is essentially a mimetic one and it concerns the  referential status of signs. Despite the mutilation of the image, there is some remnant of the image present in the subject: it is ‘almost blotted out.’ To quote the extraordinary passage referred to earlier by  Dollimore in full: Now  God’s image is the perfect excellence of human nature which shone in Adam before his defection, but was subsequently so vitiated and almost blotted out that nothing remains after the ruin except what is confused, mutilated, and disease-ridden. Therefore in some part it now is manifest in the  elect, in so far as they have been reborn in the spirit; but it will attain its full splendor in heaven.63

The  image can only ever be properly acknowledged and recognised in terms of a vague memory of what it once was. What is left is the ‘ruin’ of that image which, while it points to the perfection of the image as it used to be, is also inextricably that with which the subject is forced to identify with (‘ut nihil ex ruina nisi consusum, mutilum, labeq; infectum supersit’).64 Even then, complete identification with the ruined image is only possible for the ‘electis’ who, having saving  grace, operate in the realm of ‘spiritu’. In proper Augustinian fashion, true identification with the restored image will only come in the context of the eschatological (‘it will attain its full splendor in heaven’). As Calvin states, ‘when Paul discusses the restoration of the image, it is clear that we should infer from his words that man is made to conform to God, not by an inflowing of  substance, but by the grace and power of the Spirit’.65 We see the rejection of immanent ‘substance’ in favour of ‘spiritus gratia’.66 Unlike for a thinker such as Erasmus where the spirit could be reached through matter, the fallen subject is now left with a mutilated image of the divine, which in comparison to its originary glory is both shameful and self-alienating. Certainly the mutilated image is not a sign of righteousness for the elect. Yet even though it is a pale shadow of the originary image of God, this mutilated image as remnant remains as a reminder of the dialectically constitutive nature of Calvinist subjectivity: despite everything, the image signifies, mocking the subject in its insufficiency. These difficulties are explored in Calvin’s construction of  Christ as an image of God and the way in which man  ‘mirrors’ that imaging. In Book I, Chapter 15, of the  Institutes, Calvin acknowledges that ‘we do not

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have a plain definition of “image” if we do not see more plainly those faculties in which man excels, and in which he ought to be thought the reflection of God’s glory’.67 Again, we notice the language of mimetic semblance (‘imaginis’) and reflection (‘speculum’): it seems that the very justification for speaking of man as an image of God is that he necessarily reflects God’s glory. Having said that, Calvin quickly problematises any one-to-one reflected relationship between man and the divine: the ‘reflection’, such as it is, ‘can be nowhere better recognized that from the restoration of his [man’s] corrupted nature’. Calvin explains: There is no doubt that Adam, when he fell from his state, was by this defection alienated from God. Therefore, even though we grant that God’s image was not totally annihilated and destroyed in him, yet it was so corrupted that whatever remains is frightful deformity. Consequently, the beginning of our recovery of salvation is in that restoration which we obtain through Christ, who also is called the Second Adam for the reason that he restores us to true and complete integrity.68

In order to restore potentially the image of God (‘Dei imaginem’) within man, he needs to turn to Christ, himself a second ‘true’ image of that corrupted first image, Adam. All we are left with is ‘frightful deformity’ (‘horrenda sit deformitas’).69 Of course, at the resurrection, all such defacings and monsterings are to be made perfect. The difficulty for the subject is that Calvinism seems to overly stress present ‘deformity’. Drawing upon Saint Paul’s assertion in Colossians that ‘the new man is renewed . . . according to the image of his Creator’, Calvin goes on to say in a fascinating passage that God’s image was visible in the light of the mind, in the uprightness of the heart, and in the soundness of all the parts. For although I confess that these forms of speaking are synecdoches, yet this principle cannot be overthrown, that what was primary in the renewing of God’s image also held the highest place in the creation itself . . . Now we see how Christ is the most perfect image of God; if we are conformed to it, we are so restored that with true piety, righteousness, purity and intelligence we bear God’s image.70

We bear the image, but never directly, only obliquely.  But the most interesting aspect of this passage is Calvin’s recognition that to acknowledge and conceptualise God’s image in man, he needs to rely upon synecdoche (‘synecdochicas’). This  is significant because, drawing upon the formulations of classical rhetoriticians such as Cicero and Quintilian, early modern rhetorical thought commonly understood synecdoche as more than taking the part for the whole, or vice versa. Rather, as George  Puttenham points out, the

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synecdoche is a word that ‘drive[s] the hearer to conceive more, or less, or beyond, or otherwise than the letter expresseth’.71 Puttenham’s formulation implies that to utilise synecdoche is also to concede that the word and the object to which it refers may be inherently discontiguous: the true location of the ‘image’ is always extra to the word that otherwise stands in for the ‘image’. In the realm of poetics and metaphoricity, this may not matter very much. But in terms of a theology that had a profound and contested impact on early modern England, I would argue that it matters a great deal. In the case of Calvin, he is acknowledging that, as synecdoche, the language that we use to speak of the ‘image’ only ever has an oblique or substitutory relationship to the ‘image’ proper. It therefore follows that, just as the subject conforming to Christ as the ‘most perfect image of God’ (‘Christus perfectissima sit Dei imago’) must involve a dialectical recognition that the subject is impelled into the realm of the mimetic, so the mimetic image as locus of identification points to the gap between perception and recognition, between subject and object. More generally, it is perhaps worth noting here the way in which Protestant exegetes would often fall back on synecdoche as a way of explaining what are otherwise contradictory biblical passages. For example, in the Gospel of St Matthew, we are told about the high priests, scribes, elders and Pharisees mocking Christ on the cross. In the Protestant  Geneva Bible, the verse after this reads: ‘The selfe same also the theieues which were crucified with him, cast into his teeth’ (Matthew 27:44). Now in order not to contradict the fact that in the Gospel of St Luke, Christ saves one of the thieves, the marginal note explains that this verse ‘is spoken by the figure of Synecdoche, for there was but one of them that did reuile him’.72 Used in these theological contexts, synecdoche stands as a rhetorical admission that the referentiality of signs is not always conveniently directed, and that a theologically problematic gap may exist between the sign and its implied referent. In  relation  to Calvinism, this gap can be accounted for in relation to an important and overlooked theological formulation known as the extracalvinisticum.73 At the heart of this is the Christological formula, ‘distinctio sed non separatio’, which maintains that Christ’s two natures are distinct yet not separated. As Stephen Edmondson explains: Calvin argues that though Christ’s divinity is united to his humanity and is fully present therein, it nonetheless is not contained by that humanity in its finitude, but is ubiquitously present outside (extra) it. In other words, the natures of Christ remain distinct, so that the divine nature retains its infinity and human nature its finitude.74

In most forms of orthodox Christianity, the unity of Christ’s human and divine natures is privileged over their potential division. For example,

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Calvin writes in the Institutes that ‘from Scripture we plainly infer that the one person of Christ so consists of two natures that each nevertheless retains unimpaired its own distinctive character’.75 Or as he notes in his Commentary on Romans when  discussing Paul’s conception of Christ in Chapter 9: ‘Paul distinguishes the two natures in Christ in such a way as to unite them at the same time in His very person.’76 Having said this, a nagging question remains in respect of the extra calvinisticum: why make any kind of distinction at all between Christ’s natures? In doing so, is it not possible that distinction might indeed become separation? As we will see shortly, this is a critique of Calvin’s Christology that has been mounted by two of the most distinguished theologians of Calvinism, Karl  Barth and François Wendel, but that has not been picked up by literary scholars writing on Calvin. What makes Calvinism so remarkable is that, in many places, it does in fact press distinction to breaking point. Moreover, it uses the idea of the image to do this. Consider the following passage from Calvin’s sermons on Timothy and Titus. In a discussion of the relationship between Christ and God, Calvin adheres to this distinction by foregrounding the status of the image as a measure of incomprehension: let vs be content, to know that which we haue lerned in the schole of our Lorde Iesus Christ: he is the image of God, yea the perfect image, wherewith there is no fault to be found. It is not a draft halfe drawen, for in him dwelleth all the fulnes of the godhed [sic] . . . Yet notwithstanding, our Lord Iesus Christ sheweth vs God his father, so far forth as we are able to bear him, that is to say, so far foorth as we are able to vnderstand . . . for he that wil be too curious, & would surmount the schole of our Lord Iesus Christe, will cleane drowne himselfe.77

Here it could be said that Calvin’s argument draws upon a distinction but not a separation between God and Christ, or rather between Christ’s divine and human natures. Just as we are the fallen ‘image’ of the div­ ine, so Christ is the analogous ‘image’ of God. Nonetheless, this analogy only goes so far. Instead, it is more helpful to think of this relationship in terms of  synecdoche: Christ may be the ‘image of God’, but any comprehension of what that ‘image’ is or signifies goes beyond the word that is used to express it. It is noticeable that humans only understand in so far as they can and that their ‘accommodation’ to this knowledge never precludes the structural gap between the seeking subject and the divine image. We might put the issue like this: while at the level of epistemology the subject and the divine are structurally distinct, implying a potential connection, at the level of ontology they must always remain separate and can never be connected in the fallen realm of the world. Even when  saving grace is granted, it is in the spiritual realm and then only to the elect.

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In this Protestant-inspired understanding of identity, both fallen language and sense perception resolutely fail to offer that subject emotional or epistemological certitude. But perhaps what terrifies Calvinists most is the failure to  achieve  a unified feeling of fixity within the self. III In order to explore the importance of this realisation more fully as well as its theological and cultural consequences, it is necessary to return to the reception of  Calvinism in England, and in particular those discussions concerning Christ’s atonement that were such a feature of late sixteenthand early seventeenth-century theological debate. In 1979  R. T. Kendall published Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649, a book that has played a critical role in the way in which scholars have debated Calvin’s reception in England. Fundamental to Kendall’s thesis is his reading of Calvin’s doctrine of the atonement. According to Kendall, the Reformer believed ‘that Christ died indiscriminately for all men’.78 However, as he also goes on to note, even though ‘Calvin . . . thinks that Christ dies for all’, it is the case that ‘all are not saved’.79 This theological double bind in Calvin’s work opened the way for his followers to develop the logical consequences of this theology in relation to the atonement. Accordingly, argues Kendall, Calvin’s successor in Geneva Theodore  Beza promulgated the notion that ‘Christ died for the elect only’,80 a doctrinal distinction that has given rise to the scholarly notion of  ‘Calvin against the Calvinists’.81 In England, Kendall argues, many theologians took up the Bezan position on socalled limited atonement. Theologically speaking, this is the belief that while Christ’s death may be  sufficient for all, it is only effectual for the elect. Or in Tyacke’s words: ‘God’s predestination consists of a double and absolute decree, whereby both election and reprobation are unconditional. Concomitantly saving  grace is only granted to the elect.’82 Such a position is outlined in 1598 by the Dutch Calvinist Jacob Kimedoncius: following the old distinction wee affirme, that Christ surely exhibited that which was sufficient to haue taken away all sins, as so they are taken away, and that all are redeemed, as touching the sufficiencie or greatnes and power of the price, as Augustine expoundeth. But as touching efficiencie, we say that by the death of Christ, the sinnes onely of the elect are blotted out, who beleeue in him; and sticke vnto him as members to the head: but such as are not incorporated into Christ, cannot receiue the effect of his passion.83

The most important theorisations of this doctrine are found in the work of William  Perkins, the pre-eminent Calvinist divine. As he notes, Christ

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is a ‘ransome for the sinnes of the elect’.84 As a result of this theological position, the debate in England shifted to  assurance of election and reprobation, or ‘soteriology’ to give it its theological name: did Christ die for all men or not? Did Christ die for me? If he did, how might I know? If he did not, what shall I do? This is a notoriously slippery topic. In the first place, to offer unconditional assurance was potentially to diminish the weight of both God’s law, individual conscience and the workings of grace. Calvin stated that man could be assured of his salvation but he also warned of the potential dangers for preachers and individuals alike in exploring this matter too deeply. He was attacked on this matter by a number of theologians, most famously Jerome  Bolsec. Spurred by this controversy, Calvin’s successor Theodore Beza tried to clarify the doctrine. He insisted that assurance could be achieved and once gained, it could not be lost. However, to be saved and know assuredly that one was saved were not quite the same thing.  Cummings is correct when he notes that this doctrine ‘place[s] enormous strain on the concept of assurance’.85 It is the subject who mediates this tension. Where Calvin had warned of the dangers of too much introspection on such matters, second generation Calvinists like Beza or his English disciple William  Perkins actively encouraged inward scrutiny. But the problem is that this inward turn necessarily foregrounds those perceptual faculties of the subject and their capacity for rational self-­reflection and understanding that Calvinism held to be so problematic. The doctrine of complete assurance was compromised by the ­subjective scrutiny that it demanded.  For example, in the middle of discussing the assurance of election, Perkins suddenly warns that in fact those who believe they are justified ‘may be reprobates and . . . no more true members than are the noxious  humours in a man’s body’.86 For this reason, the argument was often debated from the standpoint of reprobation. As Kendall notes, the reprobate may believe that they are saved though in fact they are damned: ‘The ineffectual calling of the non-elect is . . . so powerful that the subject manifests all the appearances – to himself and others – of the elect.’ He also rightly points out that ‘The pastoral implications of such a teaching are enormous’.87 It is important to state at this point that it does not follow from this last quotation that assurance of reprobation was necessarily any easier to attain than assurance of election. If either of these possibilities were the case, then Calvinism would not have held the great authoritative and affective power that it did. While personal piety was encouraged, subjective introspection was both necessary but fraught with dangers. Certainty of one’s predestined

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status was only truly confirmed after death: Reformed soteriology is always eschatologically focused. As we have seen, these issues are not limited to  ‘covenant theologians’ such as Perkins: grace is a hotly contested topic across the early modern religious spectrum.88 Kendall’s reading of Calvin against the Calvinists has provoked fierce debate. On the one hand, in Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c.1590–1640 Nicholas  Tyacke has argued that in early modern England, a Calvinist consensus focusing on limited atonement can be defined broadly along the same lines outlined by Kendall.89 From the late 1570s onwards, this doctrine was propagated through countless sermons, treatises and official proclamations, and it reached its apogee in the Lambeth Articles of 1595. On the other hand, it is of course true to say that not every Calvinist approved of or adhered to limited atonement.90 As mentioned earlier, there was theological opposition to this doctrine both in the universities and within government. There is also the Catholic context to bear in mind. In many Catholic treatises, whether by medieval writers such as  Bernard of Clairvaux,  Bonaventura or by early modern Jesuits such as Vincenzo Bruno, Fulvio  Androzzi or Gaspar de Loarte, it was possible to find accounts of Christ’s sacrifice and its application that did not invoke a concept of limited atonement and that promulgated a more capacious understanding of free will and grace.  If a theologically inclined reader wanted competing accounts of these contentious aspects of Christian theology, he or she could certainly find them. To this end, scholars such as Paul Helm in Calvin and the Calvinists and Peter  White in Predestination, Policy and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War have rejected Kendall’s argument.  Noting that both  Elizabeth and James legislated against the preaching of hard-line limited atonement, White argues that there was no  ‘Calvinist consensus’ in the early modern period and that scholarly usage of the term predestination ‘was usually a synonym for election, and excluded reprobation’.91 While this might be true in a strictly defined theological sense, in practice, in the casuistry manuals and sermons of the period as well as much imaginative writing, White’s literalist approach is not generally  maintained. 92  For every Calvinist who holds to Calvin’s own line as John  Dove did in a sermon preached at Paul’s Cross in 1596, stating that ‘Though the death of Christ were  sufficient for the redemption of all mankind, yet he dyed not effectually for all’,93 there are others who are prepared to maintain the Bezan line on limited atonement as Richard  Swaine did in 1615: ‘Neither did Christ pray vpon earth,

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nor now meditate in heauen, for the reprobate; but onely for the elect beleeuers.’94 Whether or not a majority of individuals subscribed to such doctrine is not as important as the fact that, for adherents and opponents alike, the Reformed doctrine of  justification by faith is predicated upon a doctrine of saving  grace that only applies to the elect. Men like Swaine were simply developing to its logical conclusion this central premise  of Reformed theology. This tension directly or indirectly animates many of the most well-known works of early modern popular piety. Texts such as William  Perkins’ A Treatise Tending Unto A Declaration (1590),  Robert  Linaker’s A Confortable [sic] Treatise such as are afflicted in conscience (1595),  Arthur  Dent’s A Plaine Man’s Path-Way to Heauen (1601),  George  Meriton’s A Sermon of Repentance (1607) or Bishop  Lewis Bayly’s extremely popular The Practice of Piety (1612) attest to a deep-seated cultural need for such works of personal edification.95 The dedicatory epistle of Bayly’s work gives some idea of what was at stake: ‘without piety there is no internal comfort to be found in conscience, nor external peace to be looked for in the world.’96 The pious can only be worldly (a fraught state) if they are first godly: only then might grace be granted. Such a marked dichotomy often gave rise to startling metaphors of assault upon, and warfare within, the individual conscience. ‘The combat is a mutual conflict of them that fight spiritually’, declared William Perkins.97 At the root of this outlook was a deeply dialectical understanding of the affective consequences of Protestant discourse. In a sermon on Simeon the Puritan preacher  Henry Smith memorably expresses this antagonism. Observing that ‘Simeon feared God’, Smith continues: ‘Religion may well be called feare, for there is no religion, where feare is wanting: for the feare of the Lord is the beginning of wisedome.’98 When such stark positions were translated into practice, there was only one option for the religious subject: repentance. Repentance was the first and most difficult step on the road to sanctifying  grace and assurance of justification. By far and away the most popular work offering guidance along that road in early modern England was Arthur  Dent’s A Sermon of Repentance. From the year of its publication in 1582, it was reissued no less than twenty times up to 1638, and as such, can be viewed as a representative example of the tensions surrounding early modern debates about justification. Dent’s sermon clearly demonstrates high  Calvinist/Puritan sympathies, but its very popularity means that it would have been read and meditated upon by people across the religious spectrum. Ostensibly, the purpose of the sermon is to aid the hearer in his or her journey to becoming ‘grafted into Christ by Faith’.99 Dent offers his

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audience a rhetorical and conceptual division of his ‘subject’. According to the preacher: Repentance is an inward sorrowing, and continuall mourning of the  heart  and conscience for sinne, ioyned with faith, and both inward, and outward amendement. Inwarde I say, in chaunging the thoughtes and affections of the heart: and outward in changing the woordes, and workes, from euill to good.100

Interestingly, Dent takes Calvin’s Lutheran-inspired assertion that there exists ‘a twofold government in man’,101 one that pertains to the spiritual and one to the political, and applies it not only to the subject but also to conscience. It is conscience that mediates the inward and outward ‘amendement’ of the subject. But whereas Calvin develops his notion of the ‘twofold’ subject in relation to the broader question of political jurisdiction, for Dent the issue is somewhat different.102  He says of the repentant conscience: Here then we haue a glasse to behold our selues in, whether euer we haue repented, or no. For if we finde not this change and alteration in vs, we haue not repented, and so consequently remaine vnder damnation. Therefore let euery man looke vnto himself for marke how much he is changed and altered from his former euill wayes, so much hath he repented.103

Drawing upon the humanist tradition of the body as the liber naturae,104 this interior gaze would appear to provide for Dent a reflexive checklist of the individual’s state of repentance. However, any potential comfort that might be offered by this inward ‘glasse’ is somewhat limited when we consider how Dent had begun his sermon. This is what he says: ‘Doest thou thinke that God’s mercy is common to all? And Christs death a bande for our sins: no, no, when it commeth to the upshot, thou shalt stop short.’105 Whether or not technically this represents an exposition of the Calvinist doctrine of limited atonement is, in a sense, beside the point.106 His auditors may or may not have been familiar with the niceties of this particular debate, but what cannot be doubted is that Dent’s message is informed by this debate and is an uncompromising one. It is almost tempting to ask why the preacher feels the need to waste his breath on such obvious degenerates. Yet such a question would not only betray a misunderstanding of his theological objectives, it would also miss the affective purpose inherent in his rhetoric of division and assault. Such rhetoric offers a practical manifestation of Calvin’s dialectically produced subject as it seeks to produce similar divisions in its auditors. To provoke the subject with questions about his or her relationship to the divine was to inculcate in practice the dialectical relationship between man and God

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described by Calvin: ‘we preach damnation to bring you to saluation.’107 This sermon and many others like it are best seen as the inevitable consequence of a culture where the universal applicability of Christ’s death was by no means a certainty. Dent is not only speaking to his auditors: he is speaking to a culture where the relationship between Christ and the subject was being stretched almost to breaking point. Significant in this respect is the very minor role that  grace plays in the sermon. When it is first mentioned, it is seemingly in a comforting, pastoral vein. Dent asks for his ‘deare brethren’ to pray they might be granted ‘endlesse comforte, throughe Christ Jesus, which grace he graunt vs’.108 However, as we later see, such assertions only extend to ‘the small number of those which shall be saued’.109 In the few other places when grace is mentioned, it is invariably in a negative context. Writing of the penitent sinner, Dent notes that he should ‘feareth always’ and be ‘priuy to his own infermities and weaknes (when God neuer so little withdraweth his grace, and leaueth him alone) [and] worketh his saluation with fear’.110 Certainly, there are repentance sermons and casuistical works that made much more than Dent of the operative function of grace and the jubilation that it might offer the subject. But the fact remains that the most popular works of this type in early modern England are high Calvinist/Puritan in tone and they commonly hedge any discussion of grace with a variety of qualifications. Even Richard  Hooker, commonly thought of as a much more moderate figure, writes in a sermon on the ‘Certainty and Perpetuity of Faith in the  Elect’ of the doubt that often attends faith: ‘they which are of God [the elect] do not sin either in this, or in any thing, any such sin as doth quite extinguish grace, clean cut them off from Jesus Christ.’111 The message is clear: saving grace only extends to the elect. In Lewis Bayly’s The Practice of Piety,  his exploration of the issue is preceded by a discussion of ‘the misery of man in his state of corruption, unless he be renewed by grace in Christ’, one that is fairly close to Dent’s sermon in its condemnatory tone.112 He notes that ‘The godly man whose corrupt nature is renewed by grace in Christ and become[s] a new creature’.113 This renewal can certainly lead the sinner to sanctification, righteousness and  assurance of election as a ‘regenerate man’.114 That said, in common with all pre-Arminian discussion of this matter in early modern England, the regenerate man can only be of the ‘elect’.115 The main difference between these high Calvinist/ Puritan tracts and those at the more moderate end of the spectrum is that the former generally make this point explicit; the latter generally do  not. Hooker does not dwell on the punitive aspects of faith as Dent and Bayly do, but the theology underpinning his sermon is effectively the same: the

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difference is one of tone and emphasis, not of fundamental doctrine. These high Calvinist/Puritan tracts may strike us as theologically unpleasant and culturally divisive. But at least they are direct about the uncompromising message of the Reformed doctrine of justification. More generally, these texts help to demonstrate that the ‘Calvin against the Calvinists’ camp are only partially correct in their assumption that Calvin taught a doctrine of universal  atonement and that later Calvinists departed from this teaching. Indeed, both White and Helm show that, as Helm puts it, ‘Calvin taught that Christ’s death procured actual remission of sins for the elect, and that in dying Christ died specifically for the elect’.116 As Calvin says, ‘the doctrine of salvation, which is said to be reserved solely and individually for the sons of the church, is falsely debased when presented as effectually profitable to all’.117 John  Stachniewski explains what Calvin means by this: ‘although Christ’s death was sufficient to atone for their sins, they had been denied the faith to benefit from this, not being of the elect.’118 Indeed, for those who followed Calvin, the logical consequence of statements like this was an endorsement of limited atonement. In relation to the question of  justification, then,  assurance of election becomes even more pressing if man is taught that, as  Beza puts it in 1572, Christ ‘is with his electe and shalbe vntill the ende of the world’.119 But this does not mean that man may be completely assured of his salvation: ‘To be assured of our saluation by faith in Iesus Christ, is nothing lesse than arrogance or presumption’, notes Beza.120 It is almost as if this is man’s punishment for the inevitable frailty of those inward faculties upon which the possibility of assurance might rest. Nor can the reprobate be secure in their status. As Peter  White observes, ‘Beza agreed with Calvin that one could never be certain who belonged to the ranks of the reprobate’.121 It often seems that if the Reformers allowed the subject knowledge of their predestined status then this would, in some way, correspond to allowing them to actively participate in their own salvation, a possibility that could not be countenanced. Such a shift came at a cost. Second generation Calvinists like Beza  and Perkins did teach limited atonement but in so doing they were developing, not departing from, a particular strand of Calvin’s theology.122  Wolfgang Musculus  writes  that  ‘grace is geuen to the elect onely, whome God hath chosen in Christ Jesus before the beginning of the worlde, vnto that ­purpose, that the glorye of hys grace may be auaunced [sic] in them’.123  Or as Girolamo  Zanchi, like Beza a favourite writer of early modern English Calvinists, argues in 1599, ‘although the grace of redemption, saluation and eternall life which God bestoweth, be earnestly . . . offered vnto all men by

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the preaching of the gospell’ it is only ‘communicated . . . vnto those who (being from the beginning chosen and predestinate vnto it in Christ, as in the head of all the elect, that they should bee his members and so made partakers of saluation)’.124  Importantly,  such a theological shift did not just pertain to interior scrutiny.  It also had broader implications for national self-image, bound up as it was with the expression of ‘covenant theology’, a system that aligned the elect with those biblical peoples to whom God had extended his promise. Patrick Collinson has suggestively argued as follows: The Calvinism which dominated the English church after the mid-sixteenth century retreated from  universalism. By stressing and elaborating the doctrine of exclusive election and the correlative principle of covenant, Calvinism tended to restrict the divine plan of salvation to a single nation or people, Israel.125

For many early modern English Calvinists, Christ died only for the elect and that elect group constituted a covenantal nation under God.  The demands of the Reformed doctrine of  justification by faith meant that Protestants of all hues could not ignore the rigorously particular applicability of grace. Some may have found joy and comfort in this doctrine: very few were willing to concede the  universal applicability of saving  grace to all sinners including, it must be said,  Arminius himself. John  Pelling warned in a sermon of 1607 that this doctrine was ‘not a matter of speculation, but of practice’.126  And  because  that practice centred on the cultural status and applicability of Christ and his works, it was a matter for Reformed Christians to consider, wherever they stood on the  religious spectrum. To take another example, this is what Theodore  Beza has to say on the atonement: it standeth in two points, the one whereby we knowe Christ, in general, beleuing the storie of Christ, and the Prophecies which are writ of hym, the which part of faith, as we shall declare in due place, is sometimes giuen to the reprobate. The other, which is proper, and onely belongeth to the elect, consisteth in applying Christ (who is vniuersally and indifferently preached to all men) to our selues, as ours.127

The conclusion could not be more starkly expressed: Christ only applies, both literally and figuratively, to the elect. Whether one was a proponent of limited atonement or not, the application of Christ is so fraught in early modern writing precisely because to extend this possibility freely to all men is also to affirm the  universal sufficiency and efficacy of Christ’s death. The Calvinism that dominates late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England cannot countenance such a possibility. It is undoubtedly the

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case that a number of writers chose not to address the issue directly, or to fudge the question with vague blandishments on grace and salvation. But it is equally important to note that others were not so circumspect.  For Zanchi, the matter is easily resolved: We exclude therefore from the names of the Church all the reprobate, and hypocrites, which are indeed in the Church, but are not of the Church as there are excrements in a mans bodie, but are not of the body. The true Church therefore, that is, the spouse of Christ, is the company of the elect onely, wherein yet there are many hypocrites also found.128

Here the logic of the  extra calvinisticum, distinct but not separated, is stretched beyond the boundaries of credulity. If it is true, as the English Calvinist Richard Swaine stated in 1615, that ‘Christ is the Aduocate of the elect onely’,129 then it follows that, for many, the distinction must become separation. Critically, this realisation stems from a theological shift on Calvin’s part from the work of Augustine, Erasmus and Luther. Instead of seeing, as his theological predecessors had, Christ’s work as mediator performed primarily in his  humanity, Calvin sees this work only within the purview of Christ’s divine nature.130 He writes as follows: In so far as he is God, he cannot increase in anything, and does all things for his own sake; nothing is hidden from him; he does all things according to the decision of his will, and can be neither seen nor handled. Yet he does not ascribe these qualities solely to his human nature, but takes them upon himself as being in harmony with the person of the Mediator.131

Calvin explains that Christ’s mediatory work does not take place in his human nature but solely in his divine nature. This is important because in doing this, he rejects once and for all the potential for an ontological connection between human and divine through Christ as mediator. As we have seen, this is a possibility that animated the work of  Augustine, Erasmus and, to a lesser degree, Luther. For Calvin and for many of his followers, the mediatorship is now relegated merely to the level of epistemological structure.  This is what allows Calvin to hold on to the otherwise contradictory position that Christ’s death is sufficient for all but only effectual for the elect. It is also this distinction that allows more moderate Protestants to make much of the joyful potential of prevenient grace without necessarily pursuing the consequences of whether grace is universally applicable to all sinners. When Calvin writes that ‘our Lorde Jesus hath always played the office of a mediator, although he neuer shewed him selfe in our human nature’,132 he is marking a fundamental shift away from

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the potential for affective connections between man and divine, likeness and unlikeness, immanence and transcendence that had characterised late medieval modes of popular piety and had played such a central role in the early stages of the Reformation. To take another example,  Christopher Sutton explains in 1604 that when the crucified Christ calls out to Elijah, ‘The doubling of the voice, sheweth his double nature, his Deitie spake not this, which was impossible’.133 Calvinism places an ontological space between divine and human that cannot be breached by the human subject and that renders grace only applicable to the elect. Furthermore, as Calvinism is taken up and developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is this ‘doubling’, to use Sutton’s term, which enables the doctrine of limited atonement to be promulgated. Calvinism is so important because it represents a fundamental shift in Western metaphysics by not only re-imagining the relationship between divine subject and human object but by raising the possibility that the distinction between the two may in fact be separation. The centrality of Calvinism in early modern England meant that individuals across the religious spectrum were obliged to engage with this fact, whether or not they agreed with it. IV As François  Wendel pointed out in 1963, ‘we may . . . wonder whether, by thus accentuating the distinction between the two natures, he [Calvin] did not endanger the fundamental unity of the person of Christ, and whether some of the affirmations he made would not tend towards somewhat unorthodox conclusions’.134 This potential unorthodoxy can be seen in the work of a number of Calvinists. For example, in a passage on Christ’s passion, Daniel Heinsius says: When I thinke vpon my Sauiours Humanitie, then mee thinke, I see him faultering vnder the burden of his Crosse; When I thinke vpon his Deitie, then me thinke, I see him walking vpon the Galleries of Heauen. When I thinke vpon his Humanity, then mee thinke I see him lying in the dust, and weltering in his owne gore: When I thinke vpon his Deity, then mee thinke I see him flying vpon the winges of the glorious Seraphims. Oh how different are these two natures of Christ! And yet how soeuer the Χάσμα betwixt them bee so great, and the disparity so euident, yet notwithstanding in him are they both combined. For although he be not one nature, yet is a one in Person, one Christ, one Mediator, one Redeemer, one Sauiour.135

In his desire to emphasise the fundamental difference between Christ’s divine and human natures, like a number of Calvinists, Heinsius comes

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close to flirting with Nestorianism, the Christological heresy that insisted upon the separation of the two natures in Christ. Modern theologians have often acknowledged such a possibility, with Karl  Barth writing as long ago as 1922 about ‘the Nestorianism of Reformed christology’,136 and in particular that of Calvin. Perhaps it was this perceived unorthodoxy that the anti-Calvinist Arminians were reacting against? Calvinism wants divine  transcendence on the one hand and total human abjection on the other. In formulations like the extra calvinisticum, Calvinism also attempts to hang on to some metaphysical connection, however faint, between man and the divine. Yet at the point where human identification with the divine seems possible, this transcendent Christ renders that identification, at best, partial. At worst, by insisting upon man as the imperfect, opaque image of a Christ who mediates only in his divinity and whose grace only extends to the elect, it engenders an elemental division between divine subject and human object that this figurative image tries to account for. It is this ambivalent point of identification with Christ that animates the texts examined above. I am pointing up here a vital conceptual faultline within dominant modes of Protestant thought, one that marks a significant moment in the history of Western religious practice. Before Calvin, the trope of man  as image of God can certainly be read as constitutive of a subject caught between likeness and unlikeness, immanence and transcendence, but at least implying a potential union between these polarities. After Calvin, the trope of man as image of God still constructs the subject as caught between likeness and unlikeness, immanence and transcendence, but in such a way that in many strains of Calvinism, any potential union is at best fraught, and at worst, nigh on impossible. Indeed, taken to its logical conclusion, the trope of man as image of God has almost reversed its dominant pre-Reformation significance, becoming instead the marker of a subject fatally uncoupled from his or her divine moorings. Such arguments are not simply the preserve, as is sometimes still claimed, of extreme high Calvinist/Puritan theologians. Rather they underpinned the theology of the  Church of England because they constituted the fundamental basics of what it meant to be a Reformed Christian. Between the 1580s and the 1620s, when the intellectual and affective ramifications of this uncoupling were being most keenly felt and debated, it is thus hardly a surprise that, as John Stachniewski puts it, these ‘Calvinist obsessions did not confine themselves to puritan strongholds . . . but infiltrated the mental life of the nation’.137 High Calvinists certainly foreground such doctrines; but they were a fundamental fact of Reformed Christianity.

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That such beliefs have a philosophical and historical lineage that can be retrospectively traced to central intellectual streams in late medieval and early modern Europe does not make them any less contentious. Some in Tudor and Jacobean England may have believed that Christ died for all men; some may have believed that he did not; some may not have known whether he did; and some (probably a minority) may not have cared one way or the other. The crucial point is that, whatever individuals might have personally believed, the possibility that Christ’s death (and thus  his grace) is only for the elect and that his sacrifice is not applicable to all relies upon an ontological uncoupling of divine subject from human object. Once that move has been countenanced at a theological and cultural level then it is very hard to reinstate. Indeed, we might go even further than this in recalling a comment made by Michael  Walzer in his famous 1966 book The Revolution of the Saints. Here, Walzer argued that Calvin ‘wrote what might be called a theology anti-theological’.138 But whereas Walzer defines Calvinism’s ‘anti­theological’ thrust in terms of its deliberately non-speculative ethos, I identify its ‘anti-theological’ consequences in its transformation of the divine subject and human object relationship. Consequently,  what we witness in the following chapters is a similarly obsessive concern with inwardness and interior scrutiny that we find in Dent and others, as the subject, divided from its divine origin and reading a variety of inward and outward images, comes to terms with the ramifications of this ‘anti-theological’ construction. Therefore, in the next chapter and as a way of moving beyond these foundational debates on Christ, I look at how the concerns raised in these debates are extended more generally in early modern culture. I examine how the elemental division between divine subject and human object was broadly played out in writings on the function and limits of human  sense perception, especially in relation to the category of the fantasy. As we have seen in the examples from  Greville, Calvinism undoubtedly sharpened many people’s thinking about the extent and limits of human perception. This also extends to the various faculties of the mind and especially the mind’s capacity for undermining or making strange that which we ­seemingly perceive in the external world.

chapter 4

Perception and fantasy in early modern Protestant discourse

Disguised shapes, which giue great terror vnto the heart.

(Timothy Bright)

I  Patrick  Collinson has argued that during the difficult decade of the 1590s ‘there was a profound alteration in religious culture, amounting to the full internalization of the theology of John Calvin . . . Religion was an act of continual and deliberate submission to the divine will and purpose’.1  Whether or not it is possible to identify the processes of cultural internalisation as confidently as Collinson does, it is certainly the case, as we have seen in the previous chapter, that Calvinist divines such as William  Perkins or Arthur Dent charted the movements of this cultural internalisation, providing for the godly (or the would-be godly), a nascent Protestant psychological schema. In this chapter, I want to pursue these concerns further in order to argue, as I put it in the previous chapter, that both language and sense perception resolutely fail to offer the Protestant subject emotional or epistemological certitude, and that this opens up the space of fantasy.2  As a way into this, perhaps it might first be useful to say a little more about how this psychological schema operated and how it was coloured by these Protestant concerns. First, although the soul was of primary import, a perception or  cogitation was believed to originate in the heart, the centre of being in this predominantly Aristotelian model of the body. Often the cogitation emanated at the behest of the brain. As William  Perkins explains, ‘there is a concord and consent betweene the heart and the braine, the thoughts and the affections: the heart affecting nothing but that which the minde conceiueth’.3 Then, through excess of one of the four  humours, the conception moves through the body to contaminate the perceptory faculties of the subject. Indeed, when a malign perception entered 110

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the ‘minde’, any number of faculties could be affected. There were perhaps two that were considered more important than any other. The first was the fantasy, a faculty that, according to Dr Timothy Bright’s 1586 tract A Treatise of Melancholie, ‘forgeth disguised shapes, which giue great terror vnto the heart’.4 Like Fulke Greville, Bright was a friend of Sir Philip  Sidney and indeed was with him in Paris on 24 August 1572, where they witnessed the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of French Protestants. It is certainly the case that the beliefs of this committed Protestant filtered into his ‘medical’ work.5 To return to the quotation above, we might note here the use of the word ‘disguised’: like crypto-Catholics, who outwardly professed the new religion but secretly adhered to the old, the inner workings of this figurative fantasy were often masked. Nonetheless, unlike any of the other internal faculties, it was considered possible that an image forged by the fantasy could materialise externally. This sentient image, then, could be compared to Macbeth’s ‘fatal vision’, a clearly perceptible object to him before he calls it a ‘false creation’, an imaginary ‘dagger of the mind’ (II.i.38).  As Antony Nixon observes, fantasy ‘is alwaies occupied in dreaming and doting; yea, euen about those things which neuer haue beene, can, or shall bee’.6 The other important faculty that might be affected is the  imagination. Perkins notes: ‘Now when the minde hath conceiued, imagined, and framed within it selfe fearefull thoughts; then comes affection and is answerable to imagination. And hence proceed exceeding horrours, feares, and despaires.’7  The self works against the self, in other words. Similar to the fantasy, this faculty allows the subject to see things internally that are not. In this Protestantinspired understanding of the subject, both language and experience resolutely fail to offer that subject emotional or epistemological certitude.  But perhaps what terrifies these writers most is the failure to achieve a unified feeling of fixity within the self. This proposition can be demonstrated further in relation to Bright’s work on melancholy. Writing of the ‘melancholick humour’, he notes that it ‘counterfeteth terrible obiectes to the fantasie, and polluting both the substance, and spirits of the brayne, casueth it without externall occasion, to  forge monstrous fictions’.8 For Bright, as for many other early m ­ odern thinkers, fantasy was not the vaguely creative, illusory concept that it is commonly understood to be in a post-Romantic context, but rather a deeply unsettling aspect of subjectivity. Such an understanding derives from  Aristotle’s De Anima (c. 350 BCE). As Katharine   Park has shown,  Aristotle’s ideas on this subject were most commonly disseminated (via medieval thinkers such as Aquinas, Scotus and Ockham) through  Gregor Reisch’s immensely

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popular late fifteenth-century Margarita philosophica. Following Aristotle, Reisch argued that the soul was the origin of all  perceptual faculties.9  He noted that  the soul had three parts: vegetative, intellective and sensitive. In the case of the sensitive soul, fantasy was one of five internal senses that perceived ‘absent sense objects’.  Park explains as follows:  Common sense compared the individual data – described as similitudes or images – gathered by the various external senses, and perceived qualities such as size, shape, number and motion that fell under more than one sense. Imagination stored these data before passing them on to fantasy, which acted to combine and divide them, yielding new images, called phantasmata, with no counterparts in external reality.10

As an objective description of how the fantasy operates, Park’s account is admirable. However, given the concerns of this book, it is interesting to note the way in which the fantasy mediates between perceived external objects in the world and phantasmatic representations of those objects that have no necessary relationship to ‘external reality’. Certainly this mediatory function can be accounted for within the ambit of Reisch’s Aristotelian schema. As Parks explains, ‘Because the internal senses were less bound to the actual experience, they acted to bridge the gap between external sensation, limited to the knowledge of particulars, and the highest cognitive operation of intellection, which dealt with universals ’.11 However, the difficulty for men such as Bright is in marrying this Aristotelian model with the rather different exigencies of Protestant thinking on such matters: we must not forget here the residual mistrust of Aristotle that derives from  Luther and that periodically crops up in Protestant tracts.12 In particular, the possibility that any perceptual faculty that fallen man possessed might adequately ‘bridge the gap’ between the particular and the universal, or the subject and the object, was necessarily a compromised one.13  Although Bright’s treatise is ostensibly concerned with the emanation and impact of melancholy on the subject, it is also possible to read it as a more general comment on the difficulty of how sense perception might operate within a Protestant context. For example, in a section entitled ‘How melancholy procureth feare, sadness, dispaire, and such other problems’, he writes: For where that naturall and internall light is darkened, their fancies arise vayne, false, and voide of ground: euen as in the external sensible darkenes, a false illusion will appeare vnto our  imagination, which the light being brought in is discerned to be an abuse of fancie: now the internall darknes affecting more nigh by our nature, then the outward, is cause of greater feares, and more molesteth vs with terror . . . This causeth not only phantasticall apparitions wrought by

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apprehension only of  common sense, but fantasie, an other parte of internall sense compoundeth, and forgeth disguised shapes, which giue great terror vnto the heart, and cause it with the liuely spirit to hide it selfe as well as it can, by contraction in all partes, from those counterfeit goblins, which the brayne dispossessed of right discerning, fayneth vnto the heart.14

Here the melancholic fantasy is not one that mediates between particular and universal, but rather a faculty that ‘forgeth disguised shapes’ to the perception. The figurative dissimulation performed by this faculty is noticeable here, as is the assertion that the heart and spirit try their best to hide from the ‘counterfeit goblins’ produced by fantasy. Whether constructed as an interior vision, sign or image, ‘fantasy’ is understood as a figurative fiction that the subject acknowledges must in some way be accounted for internally. The melancholic fantasy is dangerous because it appears to invest figurative images with a degree of ontological truth. Unable to distinguish between an ‘abuse of fancie’ and ‘counterfeit goblins’, in Bright’s text the figurative becomes the melancholic’s perceptual reality. It is interesting that Bright should use the adjective  ‘monstrous’ to describe the effects of fantasy. As Patricia  Parker has shown, the discourse of the monstrous in early modern writing is very often constructed around a desire ‘to bring before the eye something unseen, offstage, hid[den]’.15 Parker connects this desire to three elements in early modern culture: first of all with ‘the function of the delator or informer as secret accuser’; secondly to ‘the anatomical context of uncovering, dilating, or opening the secret or “privy” place of women’; and lastly with the ‘early modern fascination both with monster literature and with narratives of the “discovery” of previously hidden worlds’.16  I agree with each of these analyses, but it is also possible to situate this discovery of hidden, frightening aspects of the subject within a fourth discourse. This can be seen in Bright’s construction of the fantasy as a faculty that offers various ‘fictions’ to the self. As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, the Greek derivation of the word ‘fantasy’ means ‘to make visible’,17 but Bright’s faculty discloses the possibility that the subject may be eclipsed or even constituted in some way by internal, fictive counterfeits. It also hints that the fantasy might reveal something that should have remained hidden from view. In another context, these hidden aspects of the subject would be reconfigured as the  unconscious. But while I would not want to adopt this Freudian tag outright, perhaps the texts examined here might be said to contribute in some way to a pre-history of the unconscious. The thought that the subject may be constructed of nothing more than various images is doubly terrifying

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in a Protestant context, for as we have seen, the iconoclastic impulses of the Reformation ostensibly sought to distance the Protestant subject from the dangers of mimetic representation. What is conspicuously absent in Bright’s account of the subject is ‘fact’, associated with iconoclastic Protestantism and its rejection of signs as embodiments of the represented object.  There is a gap at the heart of the subject that is constituted by the figurative fantasy, what Bright calls this ‘internall darknes’.  Essentially, we see in Bright’s text a ‘medicinal’ reworking of largely the same paradigm that we saw in operation in the last chapter where the figurative, however it might be conceived, ‘stands in for’ a direct ontological relationship between the divine subject and the human object. Such an understanding also offers an implicit challenge to the Aristotelian model outlined above. As Aristotle explains in De Anima, the natural telos of all sense perception is ‘that the sense is the recipient of the  perceived forms without their matter’. 18 This is to be understood less as a division between form and matter and more, as Hugh  Lawson-Tancred explains, in terms of ‘the idea that perception is a kind of mean between extremes and thus capable of judgement as between the extremes’. 19 So within an Aristotelian purview, it is not a question of privileging form over matter but of finding a mean or accommodation between the two. Yet in Bright’s Protestant-informed text, the danger is always that the form is taken for the thing itself: that form is mistaken for matter.  David  Hawkes offers an explanation of this problem in relation to the issue of idolatry. He writes as follows: In the Christian tradition, the critique of idolatry has generally been made on Aristotelian grounds. Idolatry transgresses against natural teleology because it misconstrues the telos of the material sign, mistaking it for the spiritual referent. Such a misconstruction is symptomatic of a more general misunderstanding of the proper relationship between spirit and matter, and thus of the psychological tendency we would call “objectification”. Idolatry is fetishism of the sign, which is a  synecdoche and paradigm of a more general tendency to pay attention to mere appearance, to the material world as it is empirically given to us. It makes little theoretical or ethical difference whether the fetishized sign is financial, linguistic, erotic, or iconic.20 

To this list of signs we might add: internal. Although Bright does not implicitly associate the  ‘monstrous fictions’ produced by the fantasy with the idolatrous sign, he still has great difficulty in accounting for the operative existence of these fictions. In the following passage, Bright talks about the effect that these fictions can have internally on the melancholic:

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Neither only is  common sense, and fantasie thus ouertaken with delusion, but  memory also receiueth a wound therewith: which disableth it both to keepe in memory, and to record those thinges, whereof it tooke some custody before this passion, and after, therewith are defaced. For as the common sense and fantasie, which doe offer vnto the memory to lay vp, deliuer but fables instead of true report, and those tragicall that dismay all the sensible frame of our bodies, so eyther is the memory wholly distract by importunity of those doubtes and feares, that it neglecteth the custody of other store: or else it recordeth and apprehendeth only such as by this importunity is thrust thereupon nothing but darknes, perill, doubt, frightes, and whatsoeuer the harte of man most doth abhor.21

Both commonsense and fantasy are overtaken by what Bright calls a ‘delusion’, but this delusion is powerful enough to ‘disableth’ and ‘deface’ both faculties.  The critical section in this extract is where he notes that memory offers the subject ‘fables instead of true report’. If these delusions are indeed only fables, why then do they have the power to cause the subject to either forget (‘neglecteth the custody of other store’) or to conjure up ‘whatsoeuer the harte of man most doth abhor’?   II  A lthough ostensibly a ‘medical’ text, Bright’s treatise draws upon a number of the common tropes of casuistical literature, especially in its focus on conscience, sin and the question of salvation. The most popular English works of early modern casuistry, such as those by  William Perkins or Richard Greenham, are also those that are most commonly examined by scholars concerned with early modern subjectivity, and rightly so. Nevertheless, I want to shift attention here to a more amorphous group of works that were also circulating in early modern England at this time. These texts were, broadly speaking, also concerned with similar issues of interior processes and the truth of subjective knowledge. But there is one important difference. The style of Perkins and Greenham has often been noted for its pastoral tone, and to this end their use of a third-person narrative voice is an important rhetorical strategy in their works, guiding their readers along the path to potential  assurance of election. Yet a small but important sub-group of writers abandon this approach altogether. They utilise instead at a literary and, I suggest, an affective level the first-person interior voice or  monologue.22 Perhaps as a self-conscious development of the popular repentance tracts examined in Chapter 3, these writers present their readers with a Protestant subject calling into question, for himself and for the reader, the ontological veracity of his own sense perceptions.

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Is it also too much to conjecture that the writers of these texts borrowed a trick or two from the  theatre, that arena of studied polyvocality? For if what Mikhail  Bakhtin calls ‘Internally polemical discourse’23 has the power when voiced as theatrical monologue to move its hearers to distraction, in a resolutely texual culture, how much more power might an internal monologue read to the self have? One such text concerned with these questions is Richard  Kilby’s The Bvrthen Of a loaden conscience Or The Miserie Of Sinne: Set forth by the confession of a miserable sinner, printed in 1608 and reprinted many times up to 1630. Perhaps the most noteworthy feature of Kilby’s title is his use of the word  ‘confession’. The reformed community viewed the ostensibly Catholic practice of auricular confession with considerable suspicion. As William  Bouwsma points out, ‘The burdens of the confessional figured centrally among the original complaints of the Reformers against the papal church’.24  But away from doctrinal disputation, the confession was a religious and literary trope with a rich heritage. Specifically, it finds its ­provenance in classical texts like  Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations (first century CE) and, of course, in Saint Augustine’s highly influential Confessions (c. 397–398 CE). During the European ‘Dark Ages’, scholars have suggested that the affective temper of Augustine’s work did not appeal to thinkers of this period. 25 After the twelfth-century watershed in philosophical and cultural thought, the Confessions became the focus of medieval concerns with the interior life. However, its popularity waned during and after the Reformation, no doubt as a result of the theological associations noted earlier. Indeed, its first early modern translation did not come about until Sir Toby  Matthew’s edition of 1620. Significantly, its next translator (William  Watts in 1631) seems to have been moved to take up his pen because he found Matthew’s long prefatory introduction ‘so arrantly, partially Popish’.26 Any early modern writer appropriating the trope of the ‘confession’ would almost certainly have been acutely attuned to the ideological, theological and literary possibilities of such a choice. In the case of Kilby’s text, he makes a virtue of the oppositional thrust of Protestant discourse, fashioning from it an interior voice that is both accusatory and reformatory. It is also a voice that plays with the  epistemological status of the figurative fantasy. By using the trope of the confession, Kilby engages simultaneously with the Augustinian presentation of self that is found in the Confessions, and the fear of the subject being inadequately constituted from within by figurative signs. The hybrid narrative that this produces is intriguing, but in order to understand it better, a further Augustinian excursus is

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required. In Book 10 of the Confessions, Augustine constructed a guide to interior existence that differed radically from anything that had gone before. Charles  Taylor observes that the saint ‘was the first to make the first-person standpoint fundamental to our search for truth’.27 But unlike in modern psychoanalysis, for example, the Augustinian search was not for truth about the subject per se, but instead for God: ‘Let me know you, for you are the God who knows me.’28 Where Augustinianism does perhaps connect with psychoanalytic models of the subject is in its presentation of the subject in a perpetual state of unsatisfied desire or in Augustinian terms, caritas. Augustine declares: ‘It is you [God] whom I love and desire, so that I am ashamed of myself and cast myself aside and choose you instead, and I please neither you nor myself except in you.’29 Crucial here is the idea of the self as something to be overcome. Yet the reason that this is not possible is, according to the saint, due to the affective power of  memory. He says of this faculty: ‘In it I meet myself as well. I remember myself and what I have done . . . Although it is part of my nature, I cannot understand all that I am.’30 Memory constitutes the subject figuratively at the point that memory fails. What I mean is that memory renders both awareness of sin and, because of this, a subjective internalisation of the absence of God that is based not on the original memory itself, but on a memory of that originary memory. As he goes on to say, memory ‘is in my mind: it is my self. What, then, am I my God? . . . Where am I to find you? If I find you beyond my memory, it means that I have no memory of you. How, then, am I to find you, if I have no memory of you?’31 The Augustinian epistemology of self in Book 10 of the Confessions constructs memory as a figurative entity that, in tandem with sin, animates self, as well as that faculty which renders the subject divided from his maker. It is this epistemology that Kilby appropriates and gives a Protestant slant.   Like Augustine, Kilby’s narrator begins his account at the originary state of subjective development,  childhood. He writes: ‘When I was a child, and first began to vnderstand and speake, then was the foundation laide of my miserie.’32 He then goes on: ‘As I grew in age, so I increased in  sinne.’33 While this narrative might be read simply as a variation on a theme of original sin, I think there is more to it than this. As John  Stachniewski has noted, ‘It was the puritan view that children (since even elect children were as yet unregenerate) were limbs of Satan’.34 The reasons for this cultural belief are complex. But perhaps it is fair to state that the deeply ambivalent patriarchal figures of the period (John  Donne’s punitive and loving ‘three-personed God’35 for example) reflect a cultural and emotional

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difficulty that many Protestants had in deciding whether the rod or a kind word would best bring the child out of its sinful state. Effectively, what was at issue here was the embodiment of original sin. For Calvin, original sin is not an imitation of the first transgression, nor is it caused by a lack of righteousness in man. It is rather a disease that infects the whole of man’s being: ‘the whole man is overwhelmed – as by a deluge – from head to foot, so that no part of him is immune from sin and all that proceeds from him is to be imputed to sin.’36 Or as one English Calvinist expressed it, ‘Sinne is such a canker that it spreadeth secretly’.37 Again, the figurative assertion of something internal constructing the subject raises these claims above the level of mere trope. Sin, as signifier of the human condition actively constitutes man, and children only served to remind many Protestants of this fact. What this means in terms of subjective existence is well expressed by Linda Gregerson: ‘The self that properly sees the self as sign reads in the self a double image: at once the likeness of God and the sin that has rendered that likeness obscure.’38 By beginning his text, so to speak, at the beginning, Kilby sets up a number of oppositions central to his narrative strategy. In explicitly associating childhood with transgression, loss and division, he actively impels his readers to embrace the dichotomy of which Gregerson writes. Reading the text becomes almost the same as regarding the unregenerate Protestant child. Moreover, Kilby knew that by calling his text The Burthen of a Loaden Conscience, he would attract those readers interested in, or perhaps wishing to attain, sanctification. His title is deliberately similar to popular casuistry manuals like  Perkins’ The Cases of Conscience or  Greenham’s A Sweet Comfort for an Afflicted Conscience. Yet what he gives his readers is something very different, something that skilfully manipulates the narrative expectations of the genre. Significantly, Kilby eschews the conventional narrative form of the casuistry manuals by consistently returning throughout the text to remember either his childhood or his parents. This is no accident. So when the narrator admits that ‘I horriblie dishonoured my father and mother even from my birth untill they were dead, and buryed’,39 he is admitting to more than conventional filial ingratitude. He is showing, by his adoption of the child’s subject position within patriarchy, that sin is the essence of Protestant being.   Kilby is fantasising a subjectivity in which personal and political fantasy coalesces in such a way that determining the ontological veracity of any statement that he makes becomes almost impossible. He goes on: ‘I became a recusant, was receiued into the Church of Rome by a Seminarie Priest, and did what I could to perswade manie others to leane that waie.’40

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Yet almost immediately after, he claims: ‘I doe often wonder at my self, how feruent I was, first a Protestant, then a Roman Catholike, afterwards a Prescian, so that I tooke vpon me to rebuke many.’41 Striking here is the similarity between the confessional profligacy of Kilby’s narrator and the kind of accusation often made by Catholics against their Protestant opponents. For example, here is the great Catholic proselytiser Thomas  Harding talking about the leaders of the Reformed movement: The most famous were at debate with them selues. Bucer with Bucer, Melancthon with Melancthon, Luther with Luther, Caluine with Caluine, Peter Martyr with Peter Martyr. What a doo had Bucer to keepe him selfe in credite with any side, who, after he ranne out of his Cloister, and tooke vnto him a Yokefellow, first became a Lutheran, after that a Zwinglian, and againe a Lutheran, and last of all, after he came into England, as it is wel knowen, nor perfite Lutheran, nor perfite Zwinglian, but an vncertaine, and ambiguous Mongrel between bothe? Melancthon, as the worlde hath seene, and as may be proued by sundry his editions of his Common places . . . was so mutable in his Faith, that he seemeth to haue made him selfe a slaue subiecte to al occasions of mutations . . . To declare how Luther disagreed with him selfe, bothe in deedes and writings, it would require a whole book.42 

This is highly effective polemic but it raises a serious point. Protestants were not only in danger from the external Catholic adversary, but from a much more nebulous, interior enemy that might be associated with Catholicism, but equally, might not be. This tension is repeated in much discourse of the period such as Kilby’s. His fantasy narrator effectively becomes the contradictions that structure the texts I have been exploring here, inviting the reader to work out which subject position is ‘true’ and which is a fictive falsehood. The varying subject positions that the narrator lays claim to are in themselves a function of this mode of fantasy. As Slavoj  Žižek notes, fantasy ‘creates a multitude of “subject-positions” among which the (observing, fantasizing) subject is free to float, to shift his identification from one to another’.43 This is certainly the case in Kilby’s text. But fantasy also does more than this. The awful weight of Augustinian  memory in a Reformed context (‘I doe often wonder at my selfe’) along with the Protestant inspired fear of the figurative status of potentially all truth claims (‘I was first a Protestant, then a Roman Catholike’) shows how subjectivity allows a space for fantasy to flourish, and in doing so, renders the constitution of that subject open to question. This last point accounts, I think, for the schizophrenic narrative voice of Kilby’s text. One moment the narrator is telling the reader that he ‘Neuer kept holy the Sabbath day’ or that he ‘was once a naughtie servant’.44 Then,

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almost in the next breath, he exhorts ‘Meddle not with state-matters above your calling’, ‘Striue to liue quietly: So shall you escape many troubles, preuent much mischeefe, and inioy many blessings’ and advises his reader that his ‘heart must be wholly set vpon God, always desiring to enioy his grace and fauour’.45 These narrative juxtapositions signify a writer ostensibly at the centre of the Reformed tradition offering a satirical but powerful critique of the way in which Protestantism produces subjectivity. When the narrator says ‘Desire not to be singular, not to differ from others: for it is a signe of a naughtie spirit’,46 the paradox structuring in Kilby’s text is foregrounded. To be singular is also to be forced to face the figurative construction of the Protestant subject, and the possibility of that subject being constituted by the figurative image within. Yet not to be singular, to embrace community and conformity, is paradoxically to adopt those very spheres of reality like politics, ideology and religion, which divide the subject in the first place. The narrator may advise that ‘Whenever you are about to thinke, to say, or to doe any thing, praie vnto God, that he will for Christs sake giue you the grace to thinke, saie, and doe his will’, but we are surely left wondering whether this injunction has worked for the narrator himself.47 Grace is invariably presented conditionally: ‘It is a great fauour of God, if hee vouchsafe to giue you the grace to suffer any wrong for his sake.’48 Kilby’s narrator violates any sense of subjective fixity or religious certainty. He fragments, like the narrative, into a series of statements and positionalities that ultimately lack both cohesion and coherence.   To understand this paradox better, I want to return to the question of  memory and fantasy. If memory is, according to Sir John  Hayward, ‘a storehouse of corruption, whereon my wicked fantasy hath always fed’49 and if, as we have seen, the fantasy is an inherently problematic faculty, then where exactly does  the subject find refuge? Some may find succour in the possibility of prevenient  grace. Yet as I have argued, structurally the Reformed doctrine of  justification by faith invariably predicates the limited applicability of saving  grace, whether this is made explicit or not by such writers. Other Protestant thinkers find a haven in what might be called interior apocalypticism. This is a kind of text that takes the eschatological focus of so much self-writing of the period and does two things in particular. One, it imagines the  body as a literal text upon which signs of salvation or (more commonly) reprobation might be read. For example, writing in 1616 Antony Nixon speaks of those who ‘have perswaded themselves to have hornes or Serpents in their bodies, or to be made of glass, and so imagined, that whosoeuer pusht against them would strike them in

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peeces’.50 For such subjects, the distinction between reality and ­figurative fiction has clearly collapsed. Even more gruesome than this, in 1599 Richard  Greenham tells of a man who began to ‘mislike his calling’. He goes on to recount what happened to this particular unfortunate: He felt on a time a great paine in his leg, and being desirous to goe from his bed to his table for a booke, he could not, his leg remaining sore: then remembering that it was said in the Scripture, if thy foote offend thee cut it off; he straight way laying his leg on a block, and taking a hatchet in his hand, stroake off his leg, not feeling paine, the veines being so torne, hee could not but bleede to death: howbeit he died very penitently.51 

These examples illustrate what happens when the delicately achieved ­balance between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ existence implodes, often due to a crisis of faith. The inner self ruptures, as it were, ending up in terrible outward violence done to the body. More than this, we might also say that Greenham’s example shows a shocking inability on the part of the individual he describes to distinguish between the figurative and literal injunctions of scriptural Protestantism. Like Nixon’s man of glass, the figurative has become bodily reality.  Though these are obviously examples drawn from the high Calvinist/ Puritan end of the religious spectrum, they do suggest that the internalisation of Protestantism could lead to an encounter with figuratively constructed internal demons. Crucially, this encounter points up a profound ontological gap between divine and human that these figurative signs are only partially able to ‘stand in for’. Indeed, the second characteristic of this eschatological mode of self-writing projects subjectivity forward to that moment of salvation or damnation that all Christians must experience. Indeed, even the godly, according to  Greenham, ‘shall be assaulted with euill motions, suspitions, delusions, vaine fantasies and imaginations’.52 For many, it seems that the figurative image produced by the fantasy had greater ontological meaning and import than the image of the divine. One of the most baroque examples of this is found in Sir John Hayward’s The Sanctuarie of a troubled Soule. Probably written around 1601 in the Tower of London where Hayward was imprisoned for writing the seditious tract The First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII, the narrative voice takes on an ostensibly Augustinian/Reformed tone.53 In typically Calvinist fashion, the narrator notes that he had found ‘a few sparkes’ of Christ’s  ‘image within me’ but that ‘they were few indeed, and of little force’. He continues, ‘Alas, how am I deformed? How am I defiled?  . . . I

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would faine intreate thy mercie to heale me, but I am loath to offend thy maiesty in beholding me’.54 The gaze of God is simultaneously desirable and horrifying. Also noticeable here is that, unlike Augustine’s reflective narrator who seems to stand both for the saint and for humana naturae, Haywood’s narrator is an accusatory voice, and also an egotistical  voice. The focus is on the ‘I’ far more than it is on God. God almost becomes a secondary player in this internal drama: ‘Alas, what have I done? whom have I offended? whom have I prouoked?’55  This grand egotism, a process that John  Stachniewski has identified as central to the Protestant ‘process of self-formation’56 is perhaps best expressed in the narrator’s imaginative account of himself at the Day of Judgement. The overwrought rhetoric of internal and external assault is painful in its intensity: Who, where, what thing shall then be my comfort, when shall I bee included in these extreme streites? hauing, on one side, my sinnes accusing me; on the other Iustice threatening me; aboue, an angrie Iudge condemning me; beneath, hell open, and the boiling furnace readie to deuoure me; before, the deuils with bitter scoffes and upbraydings hayling me; behind, the Saints and my nearest friends, not onely forsaking me, but reioycing, and praising God for his iustice in my damnation; within, my conscience tearing me; without, the powers of heauen shaken and dissolued, the elements shiuered in pieces, the whole world flaming, and all damned soules crying and cursing round about me.57

In this extraordinary scene, memory plays no part and temporal markers of place and space no longer have any resonance. The rhetoric concerned with discovering or confronting the figurative image within focuses on memory and looking in and back. This mode of discourse emphasises what has been called the persecutory imagination,58 a trope bound up with a strange looking-forward to the predestined moment of salvation or damnation. It is a discourse that finds graphic expression in Haywood’s text. But more than this, it produces a subjectivity that confronts a fundamental absence, the gap at the centre of the subject that cannot be assuaged and for which the figurative image only stands as an inadequate substitute. The narrator says that ‘the paine of sense, is farre surmounted (as diuines hold opinion) by another paine, which they terme the paine of losse; and that is to be depriued, both of the societie and sight of God’.59 The very insufficiency of the subject’s perceptual faculties is only a mirror of his inadequacy in the face of the divine. But this is not the end.  The narrator goes on to advise the subject: ‘Withdraw thy selfe into thy selfe, euen into the most secret closet of thy conscience; shut out all things

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but onely God, who both filleth and encloseth all things.’60 With this instruction, then, it seems that the only way to come to terms with this manifestation of Protestant subjectivity is to desire a relationship with the ultimate Other, the deity himself. This is surely a type of  death drive whereby what the subject desires is not in fact subjective repletion but a perverse relationship with the Law itself. As Žižek writes: in contrast to the ‘normal’ subject, for whom Law functions as the agency of prohibition that regulates (the access to the object of) his desire, for the pervert, the object of desire is the Law itself; the Law is the Ideal he is longing for, he wants to be fully acknowledged by the Law, integrated into its functioning.61

To come face-to-face with God is perhaps the ultimate Christian fantasy, a fantasy that generates the dialectical axis of identification and repudiation upon which the Protestant subject is produced. Furthermore, if fantasy is fundamentally a political category as Žižek suggests, then Haywood’s narrator reveals the political consequences of this aspect of early modern subjectivity.  Emphasising as many Protestant theologians did the unworthiness of man and the transcendence of God, it is consequently the subject’s knowledge of his distance from the deity, not his proximity, that determines the success of Protestant internalisation. Fantasy, therefore, can be read as a function of early modern subjectivity that seeks to account for that gap, to negotiate the reality of this gap within the fallen realm of human transactions when grace seems inadequate. Ultimately, to desire to be ‘shut up’ with God within the self is to desire the Law. And the Law is what institutes as it destroys the subject of fantasy.    III  The lineaments of this process are deeply felt in the drama of the period, especially at the level of language and dramatic structure. Plays such as John  Marston’s The Malcontent (c. 1604), William Shakespeare’s Othello (c. 1604), Thomas  Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (c. 1606) or  Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling (1622) to name but a few are all deeply concerned with the troubling presence of the figurative sign at the level of interiority. For example, given the context that I have been outlining above, Iago’s ‘green-ey’d monster which doth mock/ That meat it feeds on’ becomes more than a trope: for him, the figurative is ‘reality’. (III.iii.167–8)62 Staying with Othello, we might consider the way in which Shakespeare constructs  ‘thought’ in this play as something monstrously figurative that can never

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be shown. This is Othello’s speech to Iago in Act III after the ancient first plants the seeds of doubt in the Moor’s mind: Think, my lord! By heaven, thou echo’st me As if there were some monster in thy thought Too hideous to be shown. Thou dost mean something; I heard thee say but now thou lik’st not that When Cassio left my wife: what didst not like? And when I told thee he was of my counsel In the whole course of wooing, thou criedst ‘Indeed?’ And didst contract and purse thy brow together As if thou then hadst shut up in thy brain Some horrible conceit. If thou dost love me Show me thy thought. (III.iii.109–19)

The relationship between concealment and interiority is extremely suggestive in this speech. Here, the thought that Othello desires to see is, paradoxically, not a thought, but Iago’s sordid fantasy life. Iago is Othello’s external opponent, but lago’s thoughts are his master’s internal antagonist. Othello’s interior life is dominated by a purely figurative interiority to which he has no access, namely Iago’s. Indeed, Iago’s projected interiority is both a false copy of reality and Othello’s fantasy. But as  Žižek notes, ‘the moment the subject comes too close to its fantasmatic core, it loses the consistency of its existence’.63 It is no mistake that Iago’s last words to Othello, ‘What you know, you know./ From this time forth I never will speak word’ (V.ii.300–301), constitute both a denial of interior access and an affirmation that his machinations have forced Othello to construct his own figurative fantasy narrative, finding Desdemona false without ‘ocular proof’. Iago will ‘show’ but not ‘tell’: revelation is shockingly withheld.   This example demonstrates that the transmutatory potential of this figurative image is central to these early modern discourses. It also shows how drama draws signifying power from such discourses. The possibility that subjectivity might be constructed in the fundamental gap between likeness and being is constitutive of all the plays that I will examine in the second half of this book. As we will see, figurative fantasy is a means of negotiating that gap, a negotiation that is invariably viewed with considerable scepticism.  In Žižek’s words, ‘It is never possible for me to fully assume (in the sense of symbolic integration) the fantasmatic kernel of my being’.64 This last point raises what are, I think, essentially intractable epistemological problems for Protestantism, problems that become the very stuff of early modern drama. These concern not just the status of fantasy, but also how a figuratively constructed object might in fact constitute the

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subject. Does figurative fantasy ‘stand in for’ a gap between the subject and object of perception as I have suggested, or does it in fact constitute the ‘reality’ of that perception? For if fantasy is in some way credited as possessing an operative, ontological truth then might this not call into question the veracity of the subject that produces that fantasy? Indeed, is the most troubling conclusion not in fact that Protestant sense perception itself is potentially nothing more than an idolatrous fantasy with no solid ontological basis in reality?    In order to address these questions, Part II of this book focuses on the theatre. 

Part II

chapter 5

Anti-drama, anti-church: debating the early modern theatre

The perfectest image is that, which maketh the thing to seeme, neither greater nor lesse, then [sic] in deede it is.

(Stephen Gosson)

I If  those English writers on signs whose work was informed by Reformed theology shared one trait, then it was their focus on human misrepresentation, distortion, and falsification when man came to view the world. For many Protestant thinkers, this meant stressing the essential artificiality of all communicative discourse, especially speech. According to  George Puttenham in The Arte of English Poesie (1589): ‘Speech is not naturall to man sauing for his onely habilitie to speake, and that he is by kinde apt to vtter all his conceits with soundes and voices diuersified many maner of wayes.’1 In The Art of Rhetoric (1553), Thomas Wilson explains the reasons behind Puttenham’s assertion. Due to the Fall and ‘by the corruption of this our flesh, man’s reason and intendment were both overwhelmed’. But when God gave ‘the gift of utterance’ as Wilson calls it, it was not to all men but to the ‘faithful and  elect’.2 The logical question is: what of those who do not fall into this category? Indeed, when combined with a commitment to  the imitatio Christi, early modern thinkers found themselves in something of a quandary when trying to explain – or imitate – the most magnificent image of them all, God’s created universe. This problem is doubly applicable when considering the early modern theatre. What, for example, happens when the Protestant subject gazes upon an actor? After all, the theatre brings together res and verba, written language, spoken language and outward signs in a form of secular ­imitation. It does so through the potentially transgressive figure of the actor,  a personage who is both the imitator and the imitated. Perhaps the most important point to recall here is that imitation was a branch of 129

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r­ hetoric, and as  Arthur  Kinney remarks: ‘In promoting the study of rhet­ oric . . . language [was seen] as a logomachy, or contention, and ­promoted the study of antilogy, the ability to argue either side of a question with comparable ease.’3 This quotation demonstrates that an actor was dangerous precisely because he used the tools of rhetoric not necessarily to argue ‘either side of the question’, but to persuade the viewer of the veracity of the imitation, even to the point of making the imitation seem more ‘real’ than ‘reality’ itself. A case in point is ‘The Mousetrap’ in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (c. 1601), a play that replicates Claudius’ murderous actions on stage as he watches.  Disturbed by the ‘false fire’, he abandons the theatre, calling for light. This (temporary) disorder engendered by the players in Elsinore might well be connected to the commonplace Puritan complaint that plays were a catalyst for social unrest.  As Margot Heinemann points out, the ruling classes’ ‘fear of the “many-headed multitude” reflected itself in the demand to control, to limit and to censor what appeared in the popular  theatres’.4 If ‘The Mousetrap’ can be seen as an expression of popular (anti-)theatre, then Claudius’ actions might be seen as an attempt to censor, to forestall the unrest that further exposure of his actions might  possibly engender.5 In De  Oratore (46 CE), a text central to the early modern humanist ­tradition, Cicero explores the transgressive potential of representation that so disturbs Claudius. He notes that the orators ‘are the players that act real life’ but that they have ‘been taken over by the actors themselves’.6 This is a hazardous shift for Cicero because the actors can be seen to be actively appropriating the wiles of the orators themselves. He continues to say of the art of the orator that all these emotions must be accompanied by gesture – not this stagy gesture reproducing the words but one conveying the general situation not by mimicry but by hints . . . everything depends on the countenance, while the countenance itself is entirely dominated by the eyes . . . this is the only part of the body capable of producing as many indications and variations as there are emotions.7

It is the attractive combination of rhetorical persuasion and physical gesture that is so dangerous here. In the case of the actor on the stage, the threat is heightened not simply because the actor is both the imitator and the imitated, the sign and the thing signified;8 the problem is the scandalous persuasiveness of this secular form of imitatio. This issue was to provide the basis for a number of virulent attacks on the secular stage in early modern England. Scholars such as  Patrick Collinson, Paul Whitfield White and Peter Lake have shown that from the mid 1570s onwards, the most important

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line of anti-theatrical condemnation was against religious drama. The first generation of Protestant  Reformers had been content to harness the persuasive power of drama, particularly religious drama. But as a sign of hardening confessional divisions within the established Church as well as legislation against Mystery plays and religious drama, from the late 1570s writers attempted to highlight the fundamental incompatibility of human and divine signs in relation to the secular stage. In the words of Collinson: ‘To represent the Word of God mimetically rather than expound it faithfully was to turn it into an object of mockery.’9 In many respects the point at issue here is also the catalyst for the Reformation at large: who possesses the ideological authority to legitimate signs? Indeed, in England by the late 1570s, ‘The  popular theatre now began to be perceived as a kind of alternative church or  anti-church’.10 In a Reformed context, then, to be persuaded by an actor was to fall even further from God. To acquiesce to the actor was to reject the imitatio Christi in favour of a secular imitatio whose boundaries and limits were new and still being tested. Though religiously inspired drama did not disappear completely from the early modern stage, the more secularly oriented plays emerging from the late 1570s onwards would have required an audience used to primarily sacred drama to adjust their expectations and assumptions not only about the form and function of drama, but about the institution of the theatre itself and its social and ideological purpose.11 Unsurprisingly, this is one of the main issues addressed by those antitheatrical  writers who attacked the Elizabethan stage. For example, writing in 1582 against Thomas Lodge, Stephen Gosson observes: The perfectest image is that, which maketh the  thing to seeme, neither greater nor lesse, then [sic] in deede it is. But in Playes, either those thinges are fained, that neuer were . . . or if a true Historie be taken in hand, it is made like our shadows, longest at the rising and falling of the Sunne, shortest of all at hie noone.12

Gosson’s view is directly opposed to that of Sir Philip Sidney in the Apology for Poetry.13 In this work,  Sidney notes that the poet ‘coupleth the general notion with the particular example. A perfect picture, I say, for he yieldeth to the powers of the mind an image of that whereof the Philosopher bestoweth but a wordish  description’.14 But  for Gosson, the gap between the image and the shadow replicates the gap between God and fallen humankind. Spatially, a play and an actor throw this metaphysic into confusion by  externalising the ‘distinction of  that which is conioyned’ through outward signs. In  order to understand these issues better,  I want to examine the interesting connections between the debates surrounding

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ecclesiastical apparel and the clothing worn by actors on the Elizabethan stage. Both debates arise in relation to questions of authority and they are very much concerned with the limits and propriety of what clothes might signify in certain contexts.15 More interestingly than this, they also externalise the tension at the centre of the Reformed attitude towards signs where we witness the cultural primacy of the  model  coming  under  threat from that of the figurative copy. II After Queen Elizabeth I ascended the throne in 1558, her first priority was to secure the theological and political unity of the English church.16 As discussed in Chapter 3, one of the most  far-reaching effects of the legislation passed by her government was a vigorous and often poisonous debate as to the best form of church governance. The question at the centre of this increasingly bitter divide within Elizabethan society was: how should the church be governed; along Episcopalian or Presbyterian lines? Since 1559, the official structure of church governance had been Episcopalian. Essentially, this meant that the Queen stood at the head of the church and underneath her the Bishops who determined all aspects and forms of worship. All ministers were expected to subscribe to the church’s injunctions and faced expulsion from their posts if they did not conform. In opposition to this centralised system, the Presbyterian wing wanted an organisation whereby ministers and elected elders governed their own congregations, preached their own sermons and decided their own form of worship. What the Presbyterians really sought was, in the words of Donna Hamilton, ‘a model for church governance that bypassed royal authority’.17 In 1590, the Presbyterian John Penry outlined these  opposing positions – not entirely without bias: To speake more plainly, by reformation we mean, first the rooting out of our Church, of al dumb and vnpreaching ministers, all nonresidents, Lord Arch – bishops and bishops, commissaries, officials, chancellors, and all the rest of the wicked offices that depend vpon that vngodly and tyrannous hierarchie of Lord Bishops, together with their gouernment . . . Secondly, by reformation we meane the placing in euerie congregation within England (as far as possible able men can be provided) of preaching pastors and Doctors, gouerning elders, & ministring Deacons . . . And these are the onely matters that we meane by the reformation.18

Penry’s exposition  highlights the division between the practical Elizabethan reality of an Episcopalian system, and a godly, high Calvinist, Presbyterian structure. Indeed, as Patrick Collinson has written of the

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Presbyterian wing: ‘They conducted  themselves sometimes like separatists, sometimes like tenacious if aggrieved members of the establishment, and the discomfort of this ambiguous position was virtually  chronic.’19 It was also ‘chronic’ because the frequent deprivations meted out to those on the Presbyterian wing led many of them to conclude that society did not contain any kinds of structures to validate their ideological beliefs. Such feelings gave rise to the bitterly polemical tone  that characterises  much separatist discourse. One of the requirements  of Elizabeth I’s early ecclesiastical legislation was that all ministers conformed to the Prayer Book. Instituted in Edward VI’s reign, but revived and revised under Elizabeth, it was considered by many clerics, especially those with Puritan leanings, to be ‘an imperfect book, culled and picked out of that popish dunghill, the mass book full of all abominations’.20 Issues of contention in the Prayer Book centred on the administration of the sacraments, holy days, baptism, kneeling at communion, transubstantiation, as well as on the order of the service. But the most factious issue was the injunction concerning what ecclesiastical clothing the minister could wear. The so-called Admonition controversy ran almost the whole length of Elizabeth’s reign.21 As the Injunctions of 1559 state, her majesty being desirous to have the prelacy and clergy of this realm to be had as well in outward reverence . . . willeth and commandeth that all archbishops and bishops . . . or that be admitted into vocation ecclesiastical . . . shall use and wear such seemly habits, garments, and such square caps, as were most commonly and orderly received in the latter year of the reign of King Edward the Sixth.22

By wearing the prescribed clothing, ministers identified themselves with the centralised Church and legitimised its authority. More interesting than this is the idea that wearing a particular set of clothes imbues the wearer with an outward authority that he or she might not otherwise possess. Whereas in the pre-Reformation period, the Priest in his ecclesiastical garments could be seen as literally embodying the role of Christ at the Last Supper, Reformed attitudes to the same ceremony were much more likely to stress the memorial function of the mass and thus the relative unimportance of what the celebrant wore. Because clothes are nominally only outward signifiers, the possibility arises in the Injunction that the clothes themselves might be said to contain an inherent authority. Unsurprisingly, this was precisely the possibility against which the Puritans railed. Published in 1572, The View of Popish Abuses says this of the prescribed ecclesiastical apparel: There is no order in it, but confusion: no comeliness, but deformity: no obedience, but disobedience, both against God and the prince . . . there are as the ­garments

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of the idol, to which we should say, avaunt and get thee hence. They are the garments of Balamites, of popish priests, enemies to God and all Christians.23

The language of theatrical and Popish  idolatry is significant here. By appropriating the discourse of obedience and inverting the authoritative correlations of official doctrine in relation to ecclesiastical garments, the View argues that authority resides not in clothes but in  man-made laws. Peter Lake notes that while the ‘true’ religion was avowedly logocentric, ‘popery and the theatre seduced their victims into sin and damnation through inherently fleshly appeals’.24 To wear these garments is disobedience only if the outward signifier  correlates  with  the inward ‘truth’ of the law. Clearly for many Protestants, it did not. A number of scholars have examined the signifying power of early modern clothing, and in particular the use of (former) ecclesiastical clothing within the playhouse. For example, in his book Shakespearean Negotiations, Stephen Greenblatt  asked: ‘What happens when the piece of cloth is passed from the church to the playhouse?’ He goes on to answer as follows: ‘A consecrated object is reclassified, assigned a cash value, transferred from a sacred to a profane setting, deemed suitable for the stage.’25 Or as Peter Stallybrass  has argued: ‘In their assumption of clothes from court and church, the actors put the meaning of these clothes in crisis. They thus subordinated the rituals of the church and the state to the protean play of the marketplace.’ As he concludes, ‘clothing could carry the absent body, memory, genealogy, as well as literal and material value’.26 While it is easy to dispute both these accounts on the grounds of evidence (the fact that the anti-theatricalists make almost no reference to actors appropriating ecclesiastical clothing is significant here), Greenblatt and Stallybrass are surely correct in locating the public theatre as a place where the constitutive function of signs was interrogated in an often-radical way. However, both scholars only make a causal link between the controversies surrounding the function of clothes in the ecclesiastical and dramatic arenas, with the latter location being the most important in terms of their cultural and critical focus. In their desire to understand the processes of cultural and economic exchange from the sacred to the secular, Greenblatt and Stallybrass do not pay enough attention to the fact that, in the church as much as on the stage, the debate was not so much about exchange from one location to another as it was about the deeply fraught semiotic system engendered by  Reformed religion. Perhaps the stage was such a contested space of cultural dialogue because it provided  the outlet for ideas and attacks that could not be expressed more directly elsewhere.  When Phillip Stubbes and Stephen Gosson railed against cross-dressing on the

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early modern stage, is it not at least possible that they were also indirectly commenting on a repressive state apparatus that forced their like-minded brethren to wear clothes that they considered had the idolatrous potential to alter the self, preventing the subject from spiritually imitating Christ? If actors were free to circumvent sumptuary laws and effectively wear what they liked, why was the same freedom  not extended to non-conformist ministers? Like many non-conformists, the anti-theatrical writers of the period were deeply concerned with ‘proper’ standards of dress, and not just on the stage. For example,  in The Schoole of Abuse published in 1579, Stephen Gosson asked: ‘How often hath her Maiestie with the graue aduise of her honorable Councell, sette downe the limits of apparell to euery degree, and how soone againe hath the pride of our harts ouerflowed the chanel?’27 And in his The Second Part of the Anatomie of Abuses (1583),  Phillip Stubbes writes that ministers ‘are knowen and discerned from others also, by exteriour habite, and attire, as namely by cappe, tippet, surplesse, and such like’.28 There is something curious occurring in both of these examples. Stubbes was a well-known Puritan minister and  Michel Massei has argued that Gosson’s work ‘clearly illustrates the Puritan manner of reasoning’.29 Therefore, why should these Puritan writers utilise precisely the same kind of arguments that were consistently being deployed against their non-­conformist brethren in the High Commission?30 This question is further complicated by the fact that, in a reply to Gosson,  Thomas  Lodge – certainly no Puritan – finds one of his few points of agreement with his opponent in his attitude towards clothing. Lodge observes that ‘as for the state of apparrell and the abuses therof, I see it manifestly broken and if I should seeke for example, you cannot but offend my eyes . . . a simple cote should be fitted to your backe’.31 What do these apparent contradictions signify? The answer lies in the common application of the term ‘Puritan’ to denote the anti-theatrical writers. If ‘Puritan’ is taken to mean a zealous, non-conformist extremist opposed to any form of theatre, then the term holds.32 Nonetheless, Patrick  Collinson has pointed out that ‘It should never be forgotten that “Puritan” began life as a term of more or less vulgar abuse and continued as a weapon of increasingly  sophisticated stigmatization’.33 It is important not to allow the partisan derivation of the term ‘Puritan’ to cloud our critical judgement as to what the appellation actually meant in practice.  Furthermore, Collinson’s suggestion that we adopt ‘a sense of Puritanism which is at once polemical and nominalistic’34 is useful because it  connects Puritanism with a philosophical position in respect of signification to which I have been drawing attention throughout

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this book. Therefore,  both Gosson and Stubbes’s assertions that there is nothing inherently wrong with the theatre are important because they draw attention to the uses, or abuses to which the theatre is put, particularly in respect of its various signifying practices: both men were conforming, moderate Puritans. Whitfield White is thus surely correct when he argues that ‘we need to resist the commonplace notion that the views of Gosson, Stubbes, and Prynne typified the mainstream or even “the left wing” or so-called “Puritan” segment, of Protestant  opinion’.35 Gosson, Lodge and Stubbes utilise the same arguments in respect of  apparel because each man was engaged in the same highly complex debates surrounding what Huston Diehl has termed the  ‘iconoclastic agenda of the reformed religion’ itself.36 In order to explore further what this ‘agenda’ might entail, I want to look in a little more detail at the works of a writer  who brings together the Admonition and anti-theatrical controversies surrounding apparel, the Calvinist minister Phillip Stubbes.37 Probably the most  significant texts in the war against the playhouses were his The Anatomie of Abuses (1583) and The Second Part of the Anatomie of Abuses (1583), books which should be seen less as the rantings of an extremist and more as the expositions of a ‘moderate’, conformist Puritan. Furthermore, these are the only anti-theatrical texts to make an explicit connection between the controversies surrounding ecclesiastical apparel and the  transvestite stage. For all these reasons, Stubbes’ writings are uniquely positioned to offer an insight into the connections between these two debates.38 In The Anatomie of Abuses, he first addresses the signifying potential of clothing itself. Importantly, he does so in an explicitly religious context. He notes that there is ‘No holynes in apparell’, a view that would have certainly been held by the  authors the View of Popish Abuses. Stubbes then goes on to ask: ‘why do they than [sic] attribute that to the garments, which is neither adherente to the one nor yet inherente in the other?’39 In the ecclesiastical realm, these signs appear fairly straightforward: man can only  imitate Christ spiritually, not through outward signs. But in the context of the playhouse, Stubbes’ arguments possess other resonances. As he writes of cross-dressed actors: to weare the Apparel of another sex, is to participate with the same, and to adulterate the veritie of his own kinde. Wherefore these Women may not improperly be called Hermaphrodita, that is, Monsters of both kindes, half women, half men.40

The key phrase here is ‘the veritie of his own kinde’ which in modern English might read ‘the truth of his own nature’. According to  Whitfield White, in passages such as this, Stubbes is able to argue that ‘theatrical

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impersonation impiously subverts one’s God given  identity and place in the sexual and social order and counters the biblical mandate to imitate Christ in all things’.41 This is certainly true, but I want to focus on another aspect of Stubbes’ argument. Why  should ecclesiastical garments have no effect upon the wearer, whereas garments worn upon the stage are said to have the power to unfix radically the identity of the wearer? The answer lies in Stubbes’ deeply contradictory, even paradoxical epistemology of outward signs. He acknowledges, as he must, that  God ‘created man, after his own similitude’.42 However, after the Fall, men were given clothes – much in the same way that for most Protestant rhetoricians men were given language – ‘to couer our shame . . . & not to feed the insatiable desires of mens . . . luxurious eies!’43 In practical terms, this means that ‘the attyre of Adam, should haue beene & signe, or patterns of mediocritie vnto vs’.44 But Stubbes’ problem is that to assert that clothes are a ‘signe’ of anything at all, even ‘mediocritie’, is necessarily to call into question the semiotic and affective divide between man and God instantiated by the founding narrative of the Fall. This assertion can be made clearer by reference to the writings of William Perkins. Noting that Adam bequeathed to man ‘a depravation of knowledge in the things of God’, Perkins observes: The remnant of God’s  image in the conscience is an observing and watchful power like the eye of a keeper, reserved in man partly to reprove, partly to repress the unbridled course of his affections. That which the conscience hath received from Adam is the impureness thereof. This impurity has three effects. The first is to excuse sin, as if a man serve God outwardly he will excuse and cloak his inward impiety . . . The second is to accuse and terrify for  doing good . . .  The third is to accuse and terrify for sin.45

Perkins demonstrates the complex divide between man and God in Reformed theology to which I have been drawing attention. On the one hand, man is separated from God through sin. But, on the other hand, there is a ‘remnant’ within man of the deity, an ‘image’ that, however faint, institutes a connection between the two. At the semiotic level, this means that the signifier might potentially have the affective potential to alter the signified, both on the stage and in the pulpit. ‘It is trulye said’, observes Stubbes, that ‘sublata causa, tollitur effectus: But not, subrepto effectu tollitur causa. Take away the cause, and the effect falleth, but not contrarylye’.46 By downgrading the relative theological and cultural authority of the model, Protestants find themselves having to negotiate with an imperfect, fallen and avowedly figurative image.

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It appears that there is a much stronger connection than many scholars have acknowledged between the ecclesiastical debates concerning apparel and the scandal of cross-dressing on the London stage. It is also significant just how similar the  anti-theatricalists’ discussion of  cross-dressing is to those Protestant controversialists who railed against Catholic ecclesiastical clothing. This is Robert  Crowley, veteran polemicist and editor of Piers Plowman, writing of Catholic apparel in 1566:47 How these garments haue bene abused, is manifest to as many as haue considered the doings of Idolaters, sorcerers, & coniurers. For all these doe nothing without them. The Idolater dare not appeare before his Idoll to offer any sacrifice, vnlesse he be in his sacrificing garmentes.48

The idolatrous stage and the idolatrous old faith go hand in hand in respect of the discourses used to attack them and in terms of their transgressive signifying power. Indeed, the influential Calvinist divine and Professor of  Divinity at Cambridge, William Whitaker, states explicitly what Crowley implies: ‘Our religion is not like yours [the Catholics], consisting in outward shew of gestures, garments, and behauiour: so that our externall Ornaments may be changed, without any alteration or change of our doctrine.’49 The argument is unmistakable: certain clothes, worn in certain places (and not just on the stage) have the potential ability to ‘alter’ the inward state of the wearer and to draw him spiritually  further from Christ. In  The Second Part of the Anatomie of Abuses, Stubbes highlights this realisation. In a reply to a query as to whether it is ‘lawfull for a minister of th[e] Gospell to weare a surplesse, a tippet or forked cappe’, one of the interlocutors replies: As they are commanuded by the Pope the great Antichrist of the worlde, they ought not to weare them, but as they be commaunded, and inioyned by a Christian Prince, they maie weare them without any scruple of conscience. But if they should repose any religion, holinesse or sanctimonie in them, as the doting Papists doe, than [sic] doe they greeuouslie offend, but wearing them as things meere indifferent (although it be controuersiall whether they bee things indifferente or not) I see no cause why they maie not vse them.50

For such a normally effective polemicist, Stubbes’ tortured logic and strained equivocating only serve to highlight the faultlines within his argument. Although ostensibly a passage about the various authorities of secular and ecclesiastical rulers, the pith of the matter lies elsewhere. Stubbes cannot escape the Calvinist-inspired realisation identified in the last chapter: while at the level of epistemology res and verba are structurally distinct,

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implying a potential connection, at the level of ontology they must always remain separate and can never be connected. The perception that clothes are not ‘things indifferente’ exposes a much wider cultural anxiety predicated upon the dialectical imperatives of Reformed signification itself. In this regard, Stubbes’ work demonstrates what I called in the last chapter a dialectical Calvinist ‘non-identity’ that is nonetheless structurally unavoidable: wearing these clothes in the ecclesiastical realm always threatens to make the wearer a papist through the power of the figurative. But this is only ever an epistemological possibility: ontologically, any ­connection must be predicated upon the inherently dubious figurative image. In this way, the identity of the minister wearing the tippet and surplice, or the actor wearing woman’s clothes, was open to a radical deconstruction.  Indeed, translated into the secular realm in the plays of Marlowe, Shakespeare and Middleton, and their exploration of the representative function of signs, this theologically  derived  anti-theological  subjectivity  was to provide the very stuff of dramatic representation itself.

chapter 6

Consummatum est: Calvinist exegesis, mimesis and Doctor Faustus

My God, my God, look not so fierce on me.

(Doctor Faustus)

The relationship between Christopher Marlowe and the discourses of later Elizabethan Protestantism remains one of considerable complexity. One of the main reasons for this difficulty is that many traditional readings of his dramatic achievement have sought to locate his work somewhat outside this cultural mainstream. Originating with Harry  Levin’s influential 1952 study Christopher Marlowe: The Overreacher, a significant number of critics have drawn attention to the striving,  overreaching  heroic figure of Marlovian drama, in particular Faustus, Edward II or Tamburlaine. According to these critics, figures like these are heroic because they reach the boundaries of permitted thought, knowledge and action in the fields of, for example, learning, love and conquest. But rather than engaging with the limitations of these boundaries or fashioning a new subject position in relation to them, these critics commonly find that the heroic figure transcends these structures by various means. For example, Levin writes that for Faustus at the end of the play, ‘Damnation is an unlooked-for way of transcending limits and approaching infinity; it is immortality with a vengeance.’1 Such an approach to Doctor Faustus (c. 1588–92), and to Marlovian drama more generally, remains implicit in much contemporary scholarship.2  Yet Levin’s Faustus does not demonstrate, I would argue, a mode of subjectivity produced through an engagement with the discourses of late Elizabethan Protestantism but rather an identity associated with post-Enlightenment liberal humanism. The exigencies of religion, politics and social existence are overwritten by the transcendent humanity of the central character and the argumentative strategy of the humanist critic finds its terminus ad quem in that individual humanity. Much work has been done in recent years to dismantle such critical ­methodologies.3 But in respect of Doctor Faustus I believe it would be wrong to dismiss readings such as this out of hand. Clearly, such a large 140

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group of scholars must be responding to something potent in the play’s makeup. Indeed, I will argue that this appeal by many critics to a free­ standing, ­transcendent hero is an important consequence of Doctor Faustus’ ­unusually powerful rhetorical strategies. But I intend to approach this issue from a rather different angle. Powerful though it undoubtedly is, the play’s emphasis on the individual should not be taken as an excuse for adopting a ­similarly solipsistic approach to criticism of Marlowe’s dramatic achievement in the play. Indeed, the presentation of subjectivity in Doctor Faustus offers a powerful critique of what might be called the  relational model of early modern selfhood, one that is outlined here by Katherine  Eiseman Maus: ‘the inwardness of persons is constituted by the disparity between what a limited, fallible human observer can see and what is available to the hypostasised divine observer’.4 The play achieves its critique of this model by foregrounding the way in which relationality is dealt with in Calvinist theology. In short, where other critics of Doctor Faustus might read metaphysical transcendence, I emphasise an urgent and contingent engagement in the play with the exigencies of late sixteenth-century Calvinism, especially the double bind of the early modern subject caught between the possibilities of  election or reprobation and facing an increasingly absent  Christ. I  Calvin and many of the Protestant reformers who followed him were less inclined than some medieval theologians had been to draw a sharp exegetical distinction between the events of  the Old Testament and those of the New. Rather, the Calvinist tradition understood the New Testament as an unbroken affirmation of what the Old had promised.5 This is part of a broader Protestant shift away from allegorical interpretations of the Bible in favour of typological readings. For Reformers, typology promised the manifestation of a truth that will reveal ‘in the timeless eternal something that has always lurked somewhere behind, beyond, or mystically within the figura of events in history.’6 For this reason, Faustus’ exclusive engagement with New Testament texts in his opening soliloquy might be seen as an exegetical move that shifts the focus towards endings, towards divine completion. He says: Jerome’s bible, Faustus, view it well, Stipendium peccati mors est. Ha! Stipendium, etc. The reward of sin is death. That’s hard.

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Protestantism and drama in early modern England Si peccasse negamus, fallimur Et nulla est in nobis veritas. If we say that we have no sin, We deceive ourselves, and there’s no truth in us. Why then belike we must sin, And so consequently die. Ay, we must die an everlasting death. What doctrine call you this? Che sera, sera, What will be, shall be? Divinity, adieu! (I.i.38–50)7

Crucially, Faustus quotes here incompletely in Latin from two New Testament texts, St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans and the First Epistle of St. John. The complete verse of Romans 6:23 is ‘For the wages of sinne is death: but the gift of God is eternal life, through Iesus Christ our Lord’. And 1 John 1:8, which Faustus quotes, is followed by two verses that read: ‘If we acknowledge our sinnes, he is faithfull and iust, to forgiue vs our sinnes, and to cleanse vs from all vnrighteousnesse. If wee say, we haue not sinned, wee make him a liar, and his word is not in vs.’ This omission has the striking effect of bringing together two biblical passages that, taken out of context, offer the sinner little hope of salvation within a predestined  metaphysic. In both cases, the doctrinally softer, antithetical alternatives to the harsh message of the verses Faustus quotes are left out. But to what end? Traditionally, scholars have resorted to what might be termed the ‘character flaw argument’, seeing this omission as evidence of Faustus’ personal/ biblical ignorance. For example, Wilbur  Sanders finds that Faustus’ rejections represent ‘the mental history of a shallow mind – a sophist’s mind . . . the investigation is no more than a  façade’.8 Or as G. M.  Pinciss has argued more recently: ‘Despite all of his advanced studies and perceptive questions, Faustus is completely unaware of his ignorance and blinded by self-conceit.’9 Both of these readings, similar as they are, present a number of difficulties. Like  Levin, these critics explain away Faustus’ flaws by appealing to chinks in the magician’s subjective armour. But as A.D. Nuttall  has recently pointed out, ‘To suggest that Faustus simply forgets the remainder of the quotation is to make Faustus into an ignorant fool . . . Could we be missing something?’10 Nuttall’s own proposition is that the magician’s exegetical error brings together ‘certain moral opposites’11 within a Calvinist context and that Faustus is placed at the centre of these paradoxical  forces. While this is certainly true, it is equally important to draw attention to what in exegetical terms Faustus might be trying to occlude in this structurally important speech.

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As I remarked earlier, the beginning of the play focuses on endings, a rhetorical turn where according to one scholar, ‘every telos is realized as a finis’.12 In his opening soliloquy, Faustus first rejects logic: Is to dispute well logic’s chiefest end? Affords this art no greater miracle? Then read no more; thou hast attained the end. (I.i.8–10)

It soon becomes apparent that whatever subject position the magician had previously fashioned for himself is no longer tenable. The seemingly unbounded intellectual possibilities available to the early modern humanist scholar have been exhausted. He goes on to renounce medicine: ‘The end of physic is our body’s health./ Why Faustus, hath thou not attained that end?’ (I.i.17–19). Finally he rejects law: Exhaereditare filium non potest pater nisi – Such is the subject of the Institute And universal body of the Church. His study fits a mercenary drudge Who aims at nothing but external trash – Too servile and illiberal for me. (I.i.31–6)

The elliptical Latin tag from Justinian’s Institutes (533 CE), ‘a father cannot disinherit his son unless –’, may be read as an ominous portent of what is to come, but again, scholars disagree as to why Faustus systematically rejects all these areas of inquiry. One possible reason is that this opening speech is concerned with the pathological ramifications of the ending as well as its relationship to the magician’s construction of a new subject position. Writing about endings, Jacques Derrida has observed that ‘Plenitude  is the end (the goal)’ and this is certainly the case for Faustus in his first soliloquy. ‘O, what a world of profit and delight,/ Of power, of honour, of omnipotence,/ Is promised to the studious artisan’ (I.i.55–7). But, as Derrida also goes on to note, if this plenitude was attained, ‘it would be the end  (death)’.13 This is exactly the premonitory divination that Faustus finds when he returns to the most important area of intellectual inquiry that he will attempt to disavow, namely theology . Alan  Sinfield has argued that the theological and affective scope of Faustus’ exegetical omission in his opening soliloquy is well in keeping with mainstream Calvinism. He writes: Faustus’ conclusion is bold in form, but it catches correctly the consequences of Reformation theology. Just these passages of Scripture were offered as evidence of  election and reprobation . . . God chooses to save the elect despite their depravity;

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the others go to hell. Faustus’ summary, “What will be, shall be”, is doctrinally satisfactory.14

Sinfield is correct in arguing that the two passages quoted by the magician were associated with the debate surrounding election and reprobation, but it is also important to keep in mind the broader context within which they were utilised. Traditionally,  Protestant exegesis of both New Testament texts from which Faustus quotes was deeply concerned with what François  Wendel has called ‘the relation between the redemptive work of Christ and predestination’.15 This is particularly the case in relation to the biblical commentaries of John Calvin, not only extremely popular in early modern England, but which would have been available to Marlowe during his time at  Cambridge.16 The importance of the theological relationship mentioned by Wendel is outlined in the first words of Calvin’s Commentary on 1 John  (1551) when he notes that throughout this text the apostle ‘puts forward the life exhibited to us in  Christ’.17 Clearly, this is a model of selfhood that places Christ at the centre of the Christian life. Such a strategy is important because Calvin then goes on to write that ‘Christ’s intercession is the continual application of His death to our salvation’.18  Both quotations emphasise that Christ, and more specifically the doctrine of his atonement, are at the forefront of the doctrine of election; the two cannot and should not be viewed in isolation from each other.  Interestingly, in A Case of Conscience (1595) by William  Perkins, he explores in a dialogue between John (Ioh.) and Church (Ch.) the ramifications of 1 John: 8–10 for the Calvinist subject.19 The similarities with Faustus’ speech are intriguing, as is its Christological focus: Ch.Some among vs are come to that page, that they say they haue no sinne: and that this estate is a signe of fellowship with God. Ioh.If we say we haue no sin, we deceiue our selues, [imagining that to be true which is otherwise] and truth is not in vs. Ch.How then may we know that our sinnes are washed away by Christ? Ioh.If we confess our sinnes [namely with an humbled heart desiring pardon] he is faithfull and iust [in keeping his promise,] to forgiue vs our sinnes, and to cleanse vs from all vnrighteousness. If we say [as they before named do] we haue not sinned, we make him a lier [sic] [whose word speakes the contrarie], and his word is not in vs [his doctrine hath no place in our harts].20

It is the  connection made here between  Christology and election that is missed by critics who focus on predestination exclusively and fail to see this doctrine in the play, and elsewhere, in terms of the broader relational structures provided by early modern Protestant soteriology.21

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Moreover,  if Barker  and Hulme are correct when they observe that ‘different readings struggle with each other on the site of the text, and all that can count . . . as knowledge of a text is achieved through this discursive conflict’,22 then surely it is equally unhelpful to focus, as many critics do, only on the gloss that Faustus puts on his selective quotations. He quotes incorrectly not because he has a bad memory but because he is offering one reading of these biblical texts in the course of trying to occlude another. Indeed, this scene might well be read as a meditation on the complex ideological and affective processes of early modern  internalisation. But the occluded reading is, in cultural and theological terms, the dominant one. In order to bring this reading to light, what must be deinstituted is Faustus’ own exegetical appeal to subjective interpretation, an appeal replicated by many critics in their own theoretical readings of the play. The first text that Faustus quotes from is Romans 6:23, the first part of which notes that ‘the wages of sinne is death’. His comment on this is a rather blunt ‘That’s hard’. But the exegetical gloss on this text is far wider than this limited reading, as is shown in the classic Protestant reading of John Calvin. At the beginning of his interpretation of this passage, Calvin notes that ‘Throughout this chapter the apostle maintains that those who imagine that Christ bestows free  justification upon us without imparting newness of life shamefully rend Christ asunder’.23 The last three words are the key here. What Calvin insists upon, grace, regeneration, potential justification and new life in Christ,  are precisely what Faustus omits in his speech. It is also wryly ironic that in a soliloquy concerned with endings it should be the endings of each biblical quotation that the magician omits. But more than this, Faustus denies the centrality of Christ, rending him asunder in his reading of the Calvinist doctrine of justification. Significantly, Calvin goes on to warn of the perils of just such a move: We ought not to be astonished if, when the flesh has heard of justification by faith, it strikes so often against different obstacles, since every truth that is preached of Christ is quite paradoxical to human judgement . . . [but] Christ is not to be suppressed because to many He is a stone of offence and a rock of stumbling. As He will prove to be the destruction of the ungodly, He will likewise be resurrection for the godly.24

This passage contains the contextual and exegetical field that Faustus attempts to airbrush out of his first soliloquy. The magician suppresses any conventional engagement with the saviour, substituting instead subversive  parody. It  is no mistake that the moment in Act II when he identifies through parody most strongly with Christ’s sacrifice, crying

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‘Consummatum est’ (II.i.74), is also the point in Christ’s life that institutes the historical reality of election and reprobation. At this moment his flesh ‘strikes against’ him most violently, as the mysterious writing on his arm appears exhorting ‘Homo fuge!’ (II.i.77). It is deeply ironical, then, that the state to which Faustus aspires, a  subjectivity unbound by the exigencies of Calvinist metaphysics, is attained by denying Christ, the very guarantor of those metaphysics .25 He cannot fully deny divinity, but the rhetoric of denial, both particular and universal, is that which inscribes Faustus as a pathetically human parody of Christ bound to  eternal  solipsism. My contention, therefore, is that like Faustus, criticism on the play has largely tended to underestimate the fact that the doctrine of election and reprobation as it was most commonly understood in early modern England was a deeply Christological doctrine. To explain more fully the ramifications of this realisation, I want to turn now to Jonathan Dollimore’s important discussion of Doctor Faustus in his book Radical Tragedy. Noting that the play is ‘an exploration of subversion through transgression’, Dollimore goes on to observe: ‘Faustus is constituted by the very limiting structure which he transgresses and his transgression is both despite and because of this fact.’26 While I agree with this conclusion, I disagree with the way in which Dollimore reaches it. His position moves beyond that of Sinfield in that he sees a total cultural collapse of the structures that separate God and man as the prime cause of Faustus’ stark solipsism. He writes as follows: Faustus’ pact with the devil, because an act of transgression without hope of liberation, is at once rebellious, masochistic and despairing. The protestant God . . . demanded of each subject that s/he submit personally and without  mediation. The modes of power formerly incorporated in mediating institutions and practices now devolve on Him and, to some extent and unintentionally, on His subject: abject before God, the subject takes on a new importance in virtue of just this direct relation.27

The difficulty with this reading is the assertion that any kind of mediator, be it the early modern conscience, the institution of the Church or Christ, is not important to the Calvinist conception of  subjectivity that is interrogated in the play. To adopt this critical position is surely to disregard the fact that the ubiquitous word used by reformed theologians to describe Christ is the very term that Dollimore rejects: ‘mediator’.28 In his seminal study Christ and the Decree: Christology and Predestination from Calvin to Perkins, Richard  Muller has noted that ‘the work of Christ as mediator occupies the center of Calvin’s thought’ and that ‘Protestant orthodoxy did not depart from this emphasis’.29 However, in keeping with

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the conclusions of earlier chapters, it is only when this Calvinist mediator, Christ, is internally displaced (or even denied) that the magician achieves the apogee of being, of overreaching  subjectivity that has fascinated critics of the play for so long. This represents a striking dramatic coup on the part of Marlowe. Ironically though, it is this dislocation of Christ that also spells the end for the Calvinist subject. Calvin explains the masochism that underpins this dislocation when he writes about Christ in his Commentary on Romans that ‘we die in ourselves, that we may live in him’.30 This passage calls on the Calvinist subject to internalise the desolation of death, and perhaps also to acknowledge the structural distance between the divine and the subject as a prerequisite of selfhood. But Faustus refuses to do this and in so doing, effectively attempts to efface the Christological context of the theological discourses he has conjured. To invoke death in this way is also to invoke that which, at the level of ontology, is always separate despite his structural presence in the play’s dramatic framework, namely Christ. Yet as the play progresses, the practical reality of living inside such a structure invariably comes back to haunt  Faustus.   II In his treatise A Declaration Of The Trve manner of knowing Christ Crucified (1611), William  Perkins argues that the subject must ‘labour to feele thy selfe to stand in need of Christ crucified, yea to stand in excessiue neede euen to the very least drop of his bloud, for the washing away of thy sins’.31 The practical ramifications of this ‘excessiue need’ are made apparent when Perkins explains how the subject should view the passion: ‘euery man must be settled without doubt, that hee was the man that crucified Christ; that he is to bee blamed as well as Iudas, Herod, Pontius Pilate, and the Iews: and that his sinnes should be the nayles, the speares, and the thornes, that pierced him’.32 The most remarkable thing about this passage is the fact that Christological identification is a form of misrecognition. The subject is exhorted to identify not so much with Christ but with those people or objects that cause Christ’s  suffering. The possibility that Christ always stands oblique to the subject is also hinted at when Perkins tells us: ‘thou must looke vpon him [Christ] first of all as a glasse or spectacle, in which thou shalt see Gods glorie greater in thy redemption, then in thy creation’.33 Not only do we notice the way in which Christ is discussed in terms of potential redemption, but the essentially mimetic basis of the subject’s identification with Christ is foregrounded. As Perkins puts it a little earlier, ‘Christ crucified must be vsed of vs as a  myrrour or looking-glasse,

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in which wee may fully take a view of our wretchednesse and miserie, and what wee are by nature’.34 Certainly the trope of Christ as our mirror or glass is a ubiquitous one in Christian  theology. As  Calvin  frequently states, Christ ‘is the mirror wherein we must, and without self-deception may, contemplate our own election’.35 However, this Christological principle is complicated by the biblical source of the trope,  St  Paul’s references in Corinthians. The first is found in 1 Corinthians: ‘For nowe we see thorow a glasse darkely: but then shall wee see face to face. Nowe I know in part: but then shall I knowe euen as also I am knowen.’36 In Thomas  Timme’s 1577 translation of Calvin’s Commentarie vpon S. Paules Epistles to the Corinthians, the Reformer observes that the saint’s reference to the glass here ‘is the application of the similitude, the manner of knowledge which we haue nowe, dooth belong to imperfection, as it were to childhoode’.37 In keeping with the principle of accommodation introduced in Chapter 3, our knowledge of Christ is necessary imperfect, or to develop Calvin’s metaphor, childlike. Yet Calvin’s greatest difficulty is with Paul’s contradictory and commonly disregarded alternative reading of the mirror in 2 Corinthians 3:18. In this reading, the saint says: ‘we all behold as in a mirrour the glorie of the Lord with open face.’ This assertion stands in direct opposition to 1 Corinthians. Accordingly, Calvin notes: Paule sayth, that we behold the glory of God with his face open: and in the former Epistle hee sayde, that wee dyd not see God now, but as it were in a glasse, and in a darke speaking. In these woordes there seemeth to be some contrariete: yet notwithstanding they doo agree together very well. The knowledge of God now is obscure and bare, in comparison of that glorious light which shall be in the last commyng of Christ. Notwithstanding God offreth himselfe to vs now to be seene so farre foorth as is necessarie for our saluation, and as our capacitie will comprehende. Therefore the Apostle maketh mention of profyte and goyng forwarde, forsomuch as there shall be then a perfection, when Christ commeth.38

Again,  it is noticeable that the subject appeals to the defining source of authority, in this case God, and is only able to understand/identify with that figure partially (‘as our capacitie will comprehende’). It is also significant that Calvin can only explain the Apostle’s ambivalent stance by resorting to eschatological discourse (‘there shall be then a perfection, when Christ commeth’). But what is most important is that, as in Perkins, the opacity of figurative similitude is utilised in such a way as to make knowledge of the divine necessarily ‘obscure and bare’. The  promise of grace is, it seems, not enough.

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Returning to Perkins, we observe just how violent and self-cancelling this mode of Christological identification can be. For example, he notes the following in a passage on the Christian dying: When thou commest to die, see  before thine eies Christ in the middest of all his torments on the crosse: in beholding of which spectacle to thy endles comfort, thou shalt see a paradise in the middest of hell: God the Father reconciled vnto thee, thy Sauiour reaching out his hands vnto thee, to receiue thy soule vnto him, and his crosse as a ladder to aduance it to eternall glorie.39

In a sense, what Perkins describes here is what could happen to Faustus at the end of the play if only his repentance is followed by the granting of grace.40 But the very fact that Perkins describes the dying subject’s vision of Christ as a ‘paradise in the middest of hell’ should also give us some pause for thought. For this extraordinary phrase encapsulates the fact that, affectively, Christ is essentially ‘dead’ to the subject under this Calvinist dispensation. The  burden that this places on grace and on individual faith is almost  intolerable, a fact that Marlowe explores in his play. This realisation also underpins much contemporaneous poetry that deals with the implications of Christ’s passion and death. It is especially striking how the violence and subjective desolation found in these theological texts are mirrored in these poems, as well as in Doctor Faustus. Most significantly it is Christ who is the locus of this desolation, operating as he does as an  object of exclusion, estrangement and the denial of grace. As discussed, even joyous responses to grace in early modern Reformed theology must acknowledge, tacitly or not, that the doctrine of  justification by faith can only ever extend  saving grace to the elect. Mere omission of the point does not preclude its structural centrality within Reformed theology. Here we might think of John Donne’s  tortuous Divine Meditations (c. 1609–11),41 poems that may well have as their axis the fissured ­exigencies of Calvinist theology.42 This is Donne’s famous ‘Batter my heart’: Batter my heart, three-personed God; for, you As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend; That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new. I, like an usurped town, to another due, Labour to admit you, but oh, to no end, Reason your viceroy in me, me should defend, But is captived, and proves weak or untrue, Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain, But am betrothed unto your enemy,

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Protestantism and drama in early modern England Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again, Take me to you, imprison me, for I Except you enthral me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me. (1–14)

Though formally a sonnet, the form most closely associated in the period with the exploration of erotic love, there is surely nothing erotic about this poem. Or if there is, then it is an erotics of  masochism. We are presented with a sexualised, religious battle scene. In the first place, God batters the speaker into submission. But this struggle does not take place externally on some field of battle, but rather internally, in the speaker’s ‘heart’. He (or is it a ‘she’?) realises that s/he is ‘betrothed unto your enemy’, becoming a kind of romance hero caught between two lovers. Or perhaps that should be anti-romance hero as the combatants are not, for example, Arthur and Lancelot. Possibly they are God and the Devil: possibly they are the speaker and his sin. Or they could be each of these couplings simultaneously. Whatever the case, there can be little doubt that this is a battle to the death. How, then, is the speaker to, as s/he says, ‘break that knot again’? In order for him to ‘rise’ (a word whose sexual connotations are complicated by the religious voluntarism that the term may also invoke), s/he must first become, as Luther and Calvin might note, utterly submissive to the divine: ‘o’erthrow me, ‘and bend/ Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new’. The insistent alliterative force of the line (‘bend, break, blow, burn’) is halted by the promise of renewal held out in the words ‘make me new’. Yet this promise only delays the battle for that meagre half line. Once more we are plunged into the thick of combat: ‘I, like an usurped town, to another due,/ Labour to admit you, but oh, to no end.’ The interior self is the battleground upon which the question of salvation or damnation is fought out because, similar to a piece of land upon which a battle is pitched or a woman in ‘Labour’, the self has no choice in the matter. God must first destroy the speaker’s identity before he can become one with God: the self must be obliterated. As Francis Quarles puts it in a poem called ‘On Christ and our selves’: ‘Lord, keepe me from my Selfe; ‘Tis best for me,/ Never to owne my Selfe, if not in Thee.’43 In keeping with these texts’ Protestant temper, it is the divine who makes all the moves. Yet as these texts also make clear, it is this very necessity that is the most terrifying thing of all. This realisation is summed up in these dizzying, shocking lines: Take me to you, imprison me, for I Except you enthral me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

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In each of these lines, the speaker simultaneously moves towards and away from God with a kind of appalled fascination. Notice how in every verbal swerve towards God, there is an antithetical swerve away from him. The only verbs that count, and therefore the only actions that matter here are the ones that are done to the speaker: he ‘never shall be free’. We might consider the terrible irony enclosed in this half line. In order to ‘be’, a crucial verb in this poem implying as it does self-definition and volition, the speaker needs to be the one thing he is not, summed up in the adjective that opposes ‘be’, namely ‘free’. The salvation that he so fervently desires is predicated upon an utter submission, which is so terrible and yet so necessary. Assonance seems to connect ‘be’ and ‘free’: it is theology that divides them. This realisation is reflected in that crucial word ‘ravish’, which pivots on the twin meanings of love and rape: mercy and grace seem a long way off here. Indeed, we might well ask: if this is how God’s love manifests itself then who would want it? Another no less fascinating example of the problems of engaging with the Protestant Christ is found in a poem that appears in Donne’s A Litany, probably written in 1609: O son of God, who seeing two things, Sin, and death crept in, which were never made, By bearing one, tried’st with what strings The other could thine heritage invade; O be thou nailed unto my heart, And crucified again, Part not from it, though it from thee would part, But let it be by applying so thy pain, Drowned in thy blood, and in thy passion slain. (1–9)

The speaker wishes Christ to undergo the crucifixion again and would have him ‘nailed unto my heart’. But in the lines ‘Part not from it, though it from thee would part’, it is far from clear what ‘it’ is. Does ‘it’ refer to the speaker’s heart, to the cross or, more generally, to death? While ‘it’ refers to the heart of the speaker, it remains the case that the heart, as emblem of both humanity and flesh, is precisely that which the speaker fears might ‘part’ from Christ. Consider the last couplet: ‘But let it be by applying so thy pain,/ Drowned in thy blood, and in thy passion slain.’ The implication seems to be that the speaker is applying the passion to himself. But once more, what is ‘it’ here? Possibly the sense of the line is one of imprecation (‘let it be’) but the slipperiness of the syntax at least allows for the possibility of resignation (‘let it be’). The speaker is asking Christ to apply his agony to the speaker’s heart, to submerge his errant heart in the redemptive ‘blood’ that will be spilt in the Passion. Sigmund Freud

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famously noted that ‘the death instinct which is operative in the organism . . . is identical with masochism’.44 The masochism inherent within this poem is so interesting since in a Calvinist context this primal death seems only to operate at the level of subjective desolation. Death is justified only through violence and struggle. Donne’s is only part of a much larger body of poetry that I have drawn on at various points throughout this book that deals with Christ’s passion and death. Many of these poems are extremely lurid, almost to the point of being pornographic, in their focus on Christ’s beatings, piercing, sweating, bleeding and agony. Interestingly, Debora  Shuger has astutely observed about these Calvinist passion narratives that ‘a logic of  identification replaces the logic of substitution . . . Christ’s agony is like the sufferings of the elect’.45 In order to test this important hypothesis, I want to turn to a poem  entitled ‘A Crucifixe’ by Christopher Lever, which was published in 1607. The speaker asks: May I (sweet Iesu) view in euery part, The secret closet of thy thoughts within; The Speare hath made passage to thy Heart; The entrance then is open; let me in To see the merite that hath vanquished sin. Do not thy mercie gate against me locke, For I will euer at thy Mercy knocke. 46

Here the speaker performs a perverse anatomy on Christ’s body, desiring to enter him to view his ‘euery part’. Much could be made of the erotics of this and similar depictions, but perhaps the desire to enter Christ speaks to a broader cultural attempt to compensate for an increasingly absent, transcendent father and a son whose promise of grace only extends to the elect? To that end, we might note the interesting use of the theological term ‘merite’ in this poem and the speaker’s desire to view ‘the secret closet’ of Christ’s thoughts, perhaps to determine his elect  status once and for all. In  another text written by Sir John Hayward called Christs Prayer Vpon the Crosse, for his enemies (1623), there are a number of speeches that bear out Shuger’s hypothesis in ways that are redolent of contemporaneous debates on Christ’s  atonement. For example, Christ asks: ‘But O holy Father! Do I die only for small offenders Is my death sufficient for all.’47 The fact that Christ shortly goes on to state ‘let not any man be deprived of the benefit of that, which is amply sufficient for all’48 does not, as I have observed, preclude the possibility that his sacrifice may only be efficient for the elect.

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Indeed, the possibility that he may not be counted amongst that group seems to animate the agonised speech of the narrator towards the end of the text: O heauenly FATHER! there is nothing in my selfe, which I dare presume to present vnto thee. For what can proceed from this carion, which is not noisome? what fruit canst thou expect from this earth, which thou hast cursed from the beginning, but thornes and briers? And therefore I offer this my SAVIOVR and Redeemer, thy most blessed Son; and the vnmeasurable loue whereby thou didst send him into the world, apparelled with my flesh, to free mee thereby from eternall death.49

This passage is intriguing for the way in which Shuger’s assertion that Christological substitution becomes identification is on one level affirmed, but on another denied. The  statement relies upon the fact that there can be no substitution without identification. But if the opening statement (‘O heauenly FATHER! there is nothing in my selfe, which I dare presume to present vnto thee’) is in any way true, and given Hayward’s Calvinist inclinations we assume it has to be operative in some meaningful sense, then in what way is it possible for him to identify with Christ? The answer lies in Christ’s substitutory act of  sacrifice. However, we notice the way in which this substitution is in fact an act of mimetic imitation (‘thou didst send him into the world apparelled with my flesh’). Apparelled might imply substitution: equally, it might imply a temporary act of imitation that is sufficient but not effectual for the subject. The fact that we are left wondering which possibility is the case points to the double bind of the early modern subject when contemplating Christ’s passion. It is not just in relation to Christ or the passion narrator that these narratives are played out. In line with  Perkins’ earlier comment, many of the other actors in the passion story such as Saint John, Mary Magdalene, Saint Peter and Judas offered early modern writers scope to pursue the subjective ramifications of election, reprobation and atonement. In the case of the last two named, we might draw first upon an anonymous poem  called Saint Peters Ten Teares published in 1597. Here, Peter reflects upon his betrayal of Christ and raises the possibility that, like those who condemn Christ, he will be counted one of the reprobate: ‘O let me once possesse that ioyfull place,/ And separate me from their sinful race.’50 He says at greater length elsewhere: Like beaten rocks my bones do weare within, and make my flesh to tremble with the noise: That withered, pale, and wan, dooth looke my skin,

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Clearly,  such a speech does not have a biblical provenance as such and so Peter’s predicament allows the poet not only scope to improvise a monologue for the apostle, but also to provide a fascinating comment on the struggles of the elect in early modern England. Peter pleads with Christ to account his tears within the ‘booke of life’ but also worries that when the day of judgement comes, ‘then, because thy volume shal be full,/ Ille weepe’. Such sentiments are doubly ironic given Peter’s status as the founder of the Church and undoubted position, for anyone reading the poem with a modicum of theological knowledge, as one of the elect. But as Peter’s doubts nicely demonstrate, even the elect must rely upon defective interior scrutiny to ascertain their status: definitive knowledge of election or reprobation was a contentious issue in early modern England and this poem uses one of the central players in Christ’s passion to demonstrate this to startling effect. Another intriguing poem is The Betraying of Christ (1598) by Samuel  Rowlands that, in addition to speeches for Christ and Peter, also contains a number of imaginative speeches assigned to Judas Iscariot. For example, in a section entitled ‘Judas in  despaire’, Rowlands constructs Judas as suffering from the theological fate common to all who question their elect status. To despair was to lose sight of God, and as such, was the theological and affective state believed to lead to  suicide. As John Calvin wrote: ‘if a man be once desperate, he gieuth himself from euill to worse, and becometh voyde of all shame.’52 In a society with an almost obsessive focus upon the ars moriendi, the art of  dying well, the only thing worse than the thought of evil was the thought of an evil death, a possibility that Judas is undoubtedly correct to consider.53 Indeed, according to John  Stachniewski, by the beginning of the seventeenth century such was the proliferation of suicides in England that the situation was believed by many to have reached ‘epidemic levels’.54 This anxiety was not just personal; it was also soteriological. Or rather, it was personal because it was soteriological. As Robert Burton  notes: ‘It is controverted by some whether a man so ­offering violence to himself, dying desperate, may be saved, ay or no?’55

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Rowland’s poem thus offers a fascinating imaginative window onto the interiority of the despairing subject through the historical lens of the most notorious suicide of all, Judas. The ‘Judas in despaire’ section begins with these verses: My dying soule, refusing liuing meane, Denies with heav’nly manna to be fed A sea of teares can neuer rince it cleane, Yet could one drop, that drop should ne’re be shed. What teares, what praiers can his atonement make, Whose portion is in vengeance fearfull lake? Mine inward conscience doth soules ruine tell, Authentike witnesse, and seuere accuser, Where I abide, I feeling find a hell Tormenting me, that am selfe torment chuser: Sound conscience well is said like wall of brasse; Corrupted, fit compar’d to broken glasse. 56

In the first verse, it is important that Judas’ ‘dying soule’ is refused access to ‘heav’nly Manna’ since this is then followed by the syntactically ambiguous lines: ‘A sea of teares can neuer rince it cleane,/ Yet could one drop, that drop should ne’re be shed.’ Presumably ‘it’ refers to the ‘dying soule’ and if this is the case then while ‘one drop’ could refer to the ‘teares’ shed, it might also refer to the ‘heav’nly manna’ that is Christ’s spiritual grace. Here Judas might also recall Marlowe’s Faustus in his despairing final speech invoking Christ’s sacrifice: ‘See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!/ One drop would save my soul, half a drop. Ah my Christ!’ ( V.ii.78–9). Viewed in this way, Judas’ question ‘what praiers can his atonement make’ is also double edged, referring as it does to the potential atonement that he himself might make for his sin, but also to the atonement of Christ that he has been pivotal in effecting but that will not, presumably, be effective for him. In this way we might notice the alignment of atonement with ‘vengeance’ in the last line: this could refer to the futility of Judas trying to excuse what he has done, but equally it could refer to the ‘vengeance’ of the divine whose limited atonement has irrevocably condemned him to this course of action. Indeed,  Judas’ assertion that ‘Where I abide, I feeling find a hell/ Tormenting me, that am selfe torment chuser’ may also invoke the Faustian paradigm of despair, recalling Mephistopheles’ ‘Why this is hell, nor am I out of it’ (I.iii.78). Whatever the case, this poem makes it clear that the reality of hell is a terrible experience of interiority caused by the  fundamental absence of Christ from the sinner, an aptly Faustian punishment and one that contextualises the discourses explored in Marlowe’s play.

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Pompa  Banerjee has written that ‘Faustus is reduced to a caricature, diabolically parodying the divinity he can never attain, emulating Satan who is himself a failed imitation of God’.57 I concur with this aspect of Banerjee’s important reading and will return to it shortly. Yet  the feeling remains that throughout her essay she underplays some of the more overtly Christological  aspects of the play. Faustus’  selfhood may well be achieved ‘in a subversive coalition with Mephastophilis [sic]’ but it is surely going too far to suggest that the magician’s subjectivity ‘may be said to originate in satanic emulation’.58 If Faustus’ subjectivity originates anywhere then it is in his problematic relationship with his putative saviour. To appropriate Derridean terminology, Christ and Calvinist theology inscribes Faustus and the Devil as supplements to his originary  plenitude. Yet, as Derrida notes, ‘The sign is always the supplement of the thing itself’.59 Christ  is the permanently displaced derivation of the play’s metaphysic, and the mimetic chain he institutes inscribes the origin of either divine plenitude or human subjectivity as a painfully shifting supplement, one from which the magician cannot extricate himself. So when Mephistopheles appears to Faustus, it soon becomes clear that whether or not the magician ‘confounds hell in Elysium’ (I.iii.61), the focus of the drama shifts from the outward world of learning and advancement to an inward, solipsistic realm where the mimetic function of  Christian signs and actions begins to assume a higher importance in the play. In an extraordinary exchange, Faustus and his tempter share a disquisition on the relationship between hell and interiority: Mephistopheles. Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed In one self place, for where we are is hell, And where hell is must we ever be. And, to conclude, when all the world dissolves, And every creature shall be purified, All places shall be hell that is not heaven. Faustus. Come, I think hell’s a fable. Mephistopheles. Ay, think so still, till experience change thy mind. (II.i.124–31)

The ontology of hell presented here is very similar to that presented in Calvin’s Commentary on 1 John.60 The passage in question runs as follows: It is very important to be quite sure that when we have sinned there is a reconciliation with God ready and prepared for us. Otherwise we shall always carry

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hell about within us. Few consider how miserable and unhappy is a wavering conscience. But in fact, hell reigns where there is no peace with God.61

What is most noteworthy about this parallel is the avowedly structural discursive field it invokes. In the first place, Calvin comments relatively infrequently on hell in any extended way, either in his commentaries or in the Institutes. Moreover, he remained somewhat outside the Reformed mainstream by preferring to stress the metaphorical bases of any biblical references to hell.62 Marlowe, I believe, made much of this difference, as John Milton  was later to do in Paradise Lost (1667).63 But more interestingly, Calvin is commenting above on 1 John 1:9, ‘If we acknowledge our sinnes, he is faithfull and iust, to forgiue vs our sinnes, and to cleanse vs from all vnrighteousness’. Crucially, this is the biblical verse that Faustus neglects to quote in his Act I soliloquy when he recites only 1 John 1:8 (‘Si peccasse negamus, fallimur/ Et nulla est in nobis veritas’). By abjuring 1 John 1:9, Faustus not only offers a partial reading of the biblical text’s message, he also commits himself to the individual hell that Mephistopheles sets before him. By having Mephistopheles describe a Calvinist hell from Calvin’s own exegesis of the very passage that Faustus selectively ignores, both text and sub-text are set against Faustus in a movement that will lead to his destruction.64 In this way, Calvin’s exegesis of 1 John 1:9 becomes rather more than a straightforward parallel. It can also be read as an example of a writer utilising his biblical sources in a way that replicates the cultural conditions of an Elizabethan subject’s  internalisation (indeed occlusion) of Calvinist doctrine. Another important aspect of Mephistopheles’ vision of the underworld is that it points to an important connection made in Protestant  daemonology between devilish subjectivity  and mimesis. In his Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft (1618),  William  Perkins says this of the Devil: ‘Now that hee might shewe forth his hatred and malice, he takes vpon him to  imitate God, & to counterfeit his dealings with his Church.’65 In this mimetic schema, the Devil is a threat precisely because of his lack of distinctness. This is why  Perkins warns in another text that ‘we must bee as unlike the Devill as may be’.66 Devilish subjectivity is a mimetic parody of divine subjectivity. But it is terrible not because the Devil is, as Banerjee puts it, ‘the great demonic Other’67 of the age, as this implies a rather more complete metaphysical and affective separation of God and the Devil that is not really congruent within the play’s Calvinistic framework. Rather, devilish subjectivity is terrible because the demon must suffer the pain of his unlikeness to Christ while at the same time desiring to be like Christ

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and to be reconstituted within the corpus ­mysticum. When Mephistopheles says that Faustus’ demands ‘strike terror to my fainting soul’ (I.iii.84), the intention is to explore this mimetic order from the inside out, that is to say, from the position of the devilish subject, or would-be devilish subject. Significantly this intention first appears as parody. At his first appearance, Faustus asks Mephistopheles to ‘return an old Franciscan friar’, noting that ‘That holy shape becomes a devil best’ (I.iii.26–7). Apart from making use of a popular if somewhat cheap anti-Catholic gag, Mephistopheles’  ironic religious apparel underlines that it is not his distance from the Godhead that is so terrible but his very proximity. So when Faustus claims, ‘Had I as many souls as there be stars,/ I’d give them all for Mephistopheles (I.iii.104–5), he is doing more than simply identifying with the Devil. He is identifying with Mephistopheles’ subject position and mimicking the Devil’s paradoxical desire for repletion within this mimetic order. Mephistopheles’ warning that ‘this is hell nor am I out of it’ (I.iii.78) is more than a portent of what is to come; it is a warning to the magician. Separation from the saviour is not nearly as terrible as the desire for a dimly recalled plenitude. Perkins  writes that when a witch makes a pact with the Devil, ‘he gives to the deuill for the present, either his owne handwriting, or some part of his blood, as a pledge and earnest penny to bind the bargaine’.68 Faustus gives both, conflating signifier and signified within his own material body. Signing in his own blood, Faustus says in a daring parody of Christ’s dying words ‘Consummatum est. This bill is ended,/ And Faustus hath bequeathed his soul to Lucifer’ (II.i.74–5). This is clearly a wicked, transgressive act. But Faustus is not, as many critics have argued, ‘wicked because he is damned’.69 As Sinfield  notes, the play refuses any easy dichotomy between ‘predestinarian and  free will readings’.70 For Faustus to definitively know his fate would require a cultural context where such questions were uncontroversially settled. In the words of Ralph  Hancock, ‘Certainty  is not a subjective experience in the present but the objective promise of immortality in the future’.71 The decree is always deferred. As  François Wendel reminds us, it is not possible to ‘clearly distinguish the righteous from the reprobate’.72 Or as Martha Rozett puts it, knowledge of election or reprobation ‘cannot be externally validated or confirmed’.73 For this reason, our attention is surely being drawn elsewhere. According to  Calvin, Christ’s last words were spoken in order to show that ‘by his own sacrifice all that pertained to our salvation has been accomplished and fulfilled’.74 Christ’s sacrifice redeems man from sin and death because he was able to transcend death ultimately through his

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divine and human natures. Yet by imitating Christ at the moment of His death, Faustus assumes the role of devilish parodist prepared for him by Mephistopheles. In this way he effectuates his own spiritual death.  But as Calvin argues in his Commentary on Romans (1540), Paul specifically exhorts man not to imitate Christ’s death because ‘Our death . . . is not the same as Christ’s but similar to it, for we are to notice the analogy [analogia] between the death of this life and our spiritual renewal’.75 For analogy, read ontological exclusion. Denied to Faustus is Calvin’s ‘spiritual engrafting’ to Christ and what opens up before him is a vision of unremitting  ­solecism. Faustus cannot imitate Christ. As a failed ‘type’ of Christ, his punishment perhaps also stands as a comment of the difficulties of Protestant typology more generally. Writing of allegorical and typological biblical reading in the period, Thomas  Luxon has shown that Protestant exegesis tries but fails to maintain a distinction between the two. Protestantism rejects allegory and promotes typology as offering a concrete historical reading of that which the Bible promises. But rather than bringing forth the actual manifestation of biblical types in history, typological exegesis invariably fails to vouchsafe the promise. This is because, as Luxon writes, ‘The real reality signified in typology turns out to be every bit as ahistorical, spiritual, eternal, timeless, ever present (and so, historically speaking, ever absent) as God and his majesty, the very things typology was first defined as prohibited from figuring’.76 In  the absence of typological history, the figure stands as emblem of a fundamental absence. Now the extent of Faustus’ actions becomes clear. His  body becomes a marker of his terrible offence as he asks: But what is this inscription on mine arm? ‘Homo fuge!’ Whither should I fly? If unto God, he’ll throw thee down to hell.My senses are deceived; here’s nothing writ.I see it plain. Here in this place is writ ‘Homo fuge!’ Yet shall not Faustus fly. (II. I. 76–81)

Faustus has staked a claim through parodic representation to imitate Christ at the moment of his death. The writing on Faustus’ body exhorts him to fly from this delusion, yet he has negotiated a position where, of necessity, the only entity he can fly to is himself. Jacques  Derrida has shown that ‘Writing is dangerous from the moment that representation there claims to be presence and the sign of the thing itself’.77 As  such, the writing becomes a representation of a typological ‘Other’ which is, paradoxically, himself. The repudiatory inscription on his arm constantly defers the plenitude of the magician’s desired subjectivity by refusing to

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let him fully centre the ‘Other’ in himself as Christ does via his divine/ human nature. This is central for, as  Slavoj Žižek points out, ‘the subject emerges via the externalisation of the most intimate kernel of his being (his fundamental fantasy)’.78 In other words, the writing on Faustus’ body becomes an externalisation of the cultural and sublimated internal fantasy of Christ as mediator and of the desire for the unattainable historical subject position that he represents, pinning the magician on a typological axis between transcendence and contingency, between being a man and being a God. The final act of the drama makes the ramifications of this diabolic inscape clear. The magician is given the opportunity to repent by the Old Man who tells him that ‘mercy, Faustus, of thy Saviour sweet’ is necessary for salvation and, importantly, that Christ’s ‘blood alone must wash away thy guilt’ (V.i.46–7). But Faustus cannot bring himself to beg for Christ’s mercy here because he can only identify with the parodic subject position that he has negotiated. This is evinced  in his ‘despair’, understood by Protestants, as we have seen, as an utterly subjective theological state that only comes about when the individual loses sight of God: ‘Damned art thou, Faustus, damned! Despair and die!’ (V.i.49). The end is upon the magician and in a speech where time seems to contract towards the solipsism Mephistopheles outlined in Act I, Faustus cries: The stars move still; time runs; the clock will strike The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned. O, I’ll leap up to my God! Who pulls me down? See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament! One drop would save my soul, half a drop. Ah, my Christ! (V. ii.75–9)

These extraordinary lines are perhaps the cruellest in what is a cruel play. Whereas Christ was able to transcend death because of his divine/human nature, all that constitutes Faustus is Faustus. It is therefore he that pulls himself down. He does not see Christ, only an image, or to recall Luther’s analogy in Chapter 2, a  mirror of his own terrible interiority. His Christ is he. This is an audacious parody of the discourse of mediation and the subjective logic it implements. Faustus is caught between himself and God but his entry into death will not save him through grace but only destroy him. Yet even at this desperately late stage he does not abjure imitation. This is perhaps the most daring moment of all. Faustus cries ‘My God, my God, look not so fierce on me’ (V.ii.120) replicating what Christ says in the Gospel before he says ‘Consummatum est’.79 Why does the ­magician ­continue to imitate Christ right up to the moment of his death?

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He does so, surely, because imitation is a mode of interior and, ultimately, ­ideological creation. But it is not Christ who must die in order to save Faustus; it is Faustus who must perish in order to  create Christ. In the words of Emmanuel Levinas: The infinite is unassimilable otherness, absolute difference in relation to everything that can be shown, symbolized, announced and recalled – in relation to everything that is presented and represented, and hence “contemporised” with the finite and the same.80

Faustus and Christ are one and the same and yet they are profoundly not. The magician has now entered a symbolic field within which he can no longer be symbolised. Indeed, his tragedy could also be read as an instance of a powerful epochal trauma for which he stands as sacrificial scapegoat. This is why his last words ‘Ah, Mephistopheles’ (V.ii.123) are so necessary. Faustus’ death cruelly illustrates that unlikeness to Christ is perhaps the most radical consequence of Reformed  Christology and its typological logic. For at the moment of the magician’s death, the Devil seems less of a representation than Christ does.   

chapter 7

Shakespeare on Golgotha: political typology in Richard II

Is any man naturalie born a kinge?

(Christopher Goodman)

In  studying the Passion we are struck by the role played by quotations from the Old Testament . . . The early Christians took these references seriously, and the so-called allegorical or figural interpretation in the Middle Ages involved the expansion and appropriate amplification of the New Testament practice. Modern c­ ritics generally, and mistakenly, have no interest in this. (René Girard)1

If Marlowe was primarily concerned in Doctor Faustus with the interior ramifications of trying to be ‘like’ Christ within the context of related divine and demonological discourses, then Richard II (c. 1595),  William Shakespeare’s reply to another play by  Marlowe, Edward II (c. 1592), examines the political as well as the interior difficulties inherent in pursuing an analogue between a secular ruler and Christ. It is this analogue that I will examine in this chapter. On the face of it, such an approach to the play is not an especially new one. Critics and editors alike have long observed the pervasive presence of Christological rhetoric and imagery in Richard II. Victorian scholars like Henry  Reed, Walter  Pater and C. H. Herford all commented on the connection between Richard and Christ in the play, and it is one that later informs the editorial work of the first Arden editor of the play, Ivor B.  John, who notes in the deposition scene that Richard ‘leaps to a comparison of himself with Christ’.2 The fairly straightforward analogy between king and divine exemplar that characterises this first wave of criticism on the play is emblematic of a broader world-picture of early modern culture that has been extensively critiqued in recent years .3 However, I want to ­re-examine this analogy in the light of previous chapters .

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I In  1957 two studies were published that examine the comparison between Richard and Christ further, one by Ernst Kantorowicz that remains influential today, and one by J. A. Bryant that does not. Drawing explicitly on the work of Walter Pater as well as early modern juridical theory, in The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology Kantorowicz calls Richard II ‘that tragedy of dual personality’.4 Richard’s realisation is that he is both a divine king and a man, but that to hold to both positions simultaneously is an impossibility. Writing of Act III, Kantorowicz puts it like this: A curious change in Richard’s attitude – as it were, a metamorphosis from “Realism” to “Nominalism” – now takes place. The Universal called “Kingship” begins to disintegrate; its transcendental “Reality,” its objective truth and godlike existence, so brilliant shortly before, pales into a nothing, a nomen.5

Where there had once been a union of subject and object in the divine body of the King, now a separation exists that has far-reaching political consequences. Similarly, in an article published in the same year as Kantorowicz’s book, J. A.  Bryant finds that the play offers us ‘a double image of Richard – Richard microchristus and Richard microcosmos, Richard the Lord’s Anointed and Richard Everyman’.6 Although Bryant’s article pursues this point in relation to the various allusions to Adam, Cain and Abel that litter the play, his conclusion that Richard II offers us ‘a typological interpretation of history’7, albeit a fraught one, links his argument with that of Kantorowicz. For both critics take it for granted that, whatever the difficulties inherent in making that connection might be, there is sufficient evidence for an analogical link between king and Christ in early modern discourse to warrant a typological interpretation of this particular play. Moreover, this reading of Richard II points in a particular political direction. Richard can either be a Christ-like figure or a man: he cannot be both simultaneously, and this realisation heralds a political breakdown that impacts upon the political utility of monarchy more generally. As I have been arguing throughout this book, the typological logic that underpins the assumption that man may ever be ‘like’ Christ comes under sustained interrogation in the period. But I also want to suggest that this realisation has important historical and political ramifications that are not fully considered by either Kantorowicz or Bryant. We can read Richard II as a form of political typology, but in different ways to those suggested by these earlier scholars.

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In an important article published in 1996, David  Norbrook explores the historiographical assumptions that underpin The King’s Two Bodies as well as the way in which early modern scholars have often unknowingly assimilated its tacit political agenda. He argues that: Kantorowicz’s reading of Richard II was rooted in a long tradition of counterr­ evolutionary discourse. And that paradigm of a fall from unified organic symbols into chaos forms a sub-text in the discussion of English history in The King’s Two Bodies, working in tension with its deference to Whiggish views of the triumph of Parliamentary sovereignty. Critics who have drawn heavily on Kantorowicz have therefore unwittingly inherited a set of assumptions which they might be reluctant to endorse explicitly.8

Norbrook goes on to show that while the theory of the ‘king’s two bodies’ was certainly extant in early modern England, for example in debates from the 1580s onwards concerning who might succeed Elizabeth, it is nonetheless the case that ‘Those who invoked the theory at this time tended to want the succession to be determined without Parliament, following the strict principle of primogeniture and avoiding any kind of interregnum . . . It is therefore difficult to see the theory as a major origin of the English Revolution.’9 To conceptualise kingship in such terms was more likely to ‘work against a more radically abstract concept of the state. Those who were uneasy about the exaltation of the royal prerogative tended to look for other kinds of rationale for resistance’.10 This point brings Norbrook back to Richard II. Noting the possibility that the play may have been staged by supporters of Robert  Devereux, the Earl of Essex before his abortive coup in 1601, he argues that we need to see ‘beyond royal bodies and take account of the strength in the 1590s of differing currents of constitutionalist and republican thought’. For example, he notes that the Percies who were involved in the Essex rebellion commonly ‘looked back to the medieval past not as a lost world of symbolic unity but as the scene of a continual struggle between aristocratic and constitutional liberties and a monarchy that kept trying to appropriate public resources for its private interests’.11 If Norbrook is correct, then I believe that the famous connections made in the play between Richard and Christ need to be looked at again in the light of this political  context. For one thing, Richard II is still most commonly examined in relation to Essex’s rebellion. But what critics often fail to emphasise is that the play was probably written around 1595, a full six years before the rebellion. So although the later Essex connection is certainly important, it is the political and theological ambitions of those

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reading and debating alternative forms of political organisation in the mid 1590s that may provide new lenses through which to view the play’s  politics. Not the least of these impacts upon why Shakespeare should choose to align a deposed king with Christ. The most recent Arden editor of the play, Charles  Forker, argues that ‘Shakespeare raises the concept of Richard as alter-Christus only to undermine it by wry equivocations and strategies of scepticism’.12 While I agree with the broad thrust of this point, I want to go further by suggesting that this scepticism has a clearly defined political purpose. Whereas in the context of Christian eschatology the ‘deposition’ of Christ at least has a redemptive purpose, there is little that is redemptive about Richard’s fall. As I will argue, the alliance of Richard with Christ should be read as a form of political typology that positions the play not as avowing republican ideology but as offering a deeply ambivalent confirmation of monarchical absolutism. II To many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political thinkers, the reign of Richard II represented a critical historical period when the form and function of England’s various political institutions were tested to their limits. In the period following the civil wars of the fifteenth century that were precipitated by Richard’s  deposition, establishing the  political ­legitimacy of any given monarch, no matter what the relative status of his or her political and personal claims, became an increasingly fraught ­problem. Indeed, claim and counterclaim to legitimacy continued to define the English monarchy throughout the sixteenth century and this reached its apogee during the final decade of Elizabeth I’s rule. It is certainly the case that all the  Tudor monarchs were acutely aware of the arguments against the legitimacy of their line. But within the context of Shakespeare’s history plays, the reign of the last Plantagenet offered interesting parallels with that of the last Tudor, parallels that were not lost on Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Andrew Hadfield notes: Shakespeare’s history plays written in the 1590s represent only one ‘anointed king’, Richard II, and he is deposed despite his faith in his status . . . This stubborn reality of English history, reproduced faithfully from Shakespeare’s sources . . . does not simply haunt the surviving records of the reigns of English kings, but was also directly related to the situation of the incumbent monarch Elizabeth I. Elizabeth was the granddaughter of Henry VII, and so her claim was arguably as problematic as that of Henry VI, even though her grandfather claimed to unite the Houses of York and Lancaster and so end the bloody civil wars.13

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This is significant for two reasons. Whatever the sensitivities of an aging Elizabeth and her courtiers might have been, they could not deny that Richard II was a divinely anointed monarch who was overthrown. Nor could they always prevent those with sufficient historical knowledge from using this fact to undermine, tacitly or not, the present legitimacy of the Queen. Legitimacy provided the line of attack in 1594 for the Jesuit  Robert Parsons, the probable author of the so-called ‘Doleman’ tract concerning the succession. It is often noted that this tract is dedicated to  Essex, a fact that caused him considerable embarrassment. Less often commented upon is that  Richard II’s deposition runs through ‘Doleman’ like a leitmotif and Parsons uses it to offer the reader a long political and historiographical analysis of the consequences of this act.14 Parsons argues that both the Houses of York and Lancaster ‘easily agree’ that ‘a King upon just causes may be deposed’.15 This is an interesting strategy on the part of the priest since it slyly aligns both English ruling houses with a general position associated with the controversial work of the sixteenth-century resistance theorists, both Catholic and Protestant. In the case of the former, both Parsons and his mentor Cardinal William  Allen were well known for their writings on political resistance.16 Many English Protestants also pursued this line. For example, writing in 1556, the Protestant John  Ponet argues that ‘the manifold and continuall examples that haue ben . . . of the deposing of kinges, and killing of tyrantes, doo most certainly confirme it to be most true, iust and consonaunt to Goddes iudgement’.17 He goes on to mention the ‘iust causes’ upon which ‘Richard the seconde was thrust out, and Henry the fourth put in his  place’.18 These kinds of arguments for resisting an anointed ruler were contentious enough as I will examine further in the last chapter. But in Parsons’ case, he wants to do more than argue that a monarch may be justly deposed. Instead, he aims to show how the exigencies of real politick and the ossifications of chronicle history undermine the claims of both York and Lancaster, and that the question of resistance is central to each. For example, exploring whether ‘King Richard was esteemed worthy to be deposed’, Parsons writes: in this second point much more difference there is betwixt York and Lancaster, and between the white Rose and the Red, for that the House of York seeking to make the other odious, as though they had entred by tyranny and cruelty, doth not stick to avouch, that King Richard was unjustly deposed; but against this the House of Lancaster alledgeth, first that the House of York cannot justly say this . . . for so do write both Stow, Hollingshead and other Chroniclers of England, that those Princes of the House of York did principally assist Henry Duke of Lancaster in getting the Crown, and deposing King Richard . . . the House of Lancaster alledgeth for the justifying of this deposition, the opinions

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of all Historiographers, that ever have written of this matter, whether they be English, French, Dutch, Latine, or of any other Nation or Language, who all with one accord do affirm, that King Richards Government was intolerable, and he worthy of deposition.19

Whatever the differences between York and Lancaster might be, both must argue that Richard’s deposition is justified since each derives immediate political benefit from this act. Political expediency thus leads each House into tacitly defending a doctrine of resistance that also implicitly undermines any political legitimacy that each may lay claim to. The final twist of the knife for Parsons is the fact that this contradiction is confirmed by the state sanctioned history found in the likes of Stow and Holinshed. That said, Parsons has a further aim, namely to align the House of Tudor firmly with the Lancastrian side. He claims that because their authority stems from being the more crafty exponents of a real politick based upon resistance to legitimate authority, their present status as incumbents of the throne is rendered all the more contingent. For this reason, the Jesuit does not treat the Wars of the Roses as an event that is a matter for the disinterested historical record and whose divisions have been reconciled by the accession of the Tudors. Rather, the political ramifications of the Wars are still unresolved features of the contemporary political scene, with the House of York (which he associates with Richard II) very much the losers. For example, he writes in relation to Elizabeth’s grandfather that at King Henry the seventh his coming in to recover the Crown from the House of York, as from usurpers for having had the victory against King Richard [III], they Crowned him presently in the Field in the right of Lancaster, before he married with the House of York, which is a token that they esteemed his title of Lancaster sufficient of it self, to bear away the Crown, albeit for better ending of strife he took to Wife also the Lady Elizabeth Heir of the House of York.20

The ironic tone here is unmistakable, and the ambiguous placing of the word ‘usurpers’ arguably stands as a rebuke to repeated Tudor claims that the accession of Henry VII healed the ‘strife’ of the wars. Parsons also applies this logic to Elizabeth’s father Henry VIII, who ‘passed all the rest in cruelty, toward his own kindred, for he weeded out almost all that ever he could find of the Bloud Royal of York’.21 The conclusion is unavoidable: the  hereditary principle that underpins the Tudors’ claims to legitimacy and absolute power is a deeply compromised one. The fact that  Richard’s deposition was sanctioned by  parliament was a matter of critical import for Parsons and not simply because it suited his argument. By invoking this Parliamentary precedent he was also contributing to, or more properly, attempting to stir up one of the most controversial

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topics in England during the 1590s. The potential right of Parliament to proscribe the power of the monarch took on especial pertinence in relation to the question of the succession. Elizabeth had steadfastly refused to name an heir from the very beginning of her reign.22 Although Mary, Queen of Scots had been executed in 1587, there were a number of possible claimants during the 1590s, the most compelling of which were Isabella, daughter of Philip II of Spain and James VI of Scotland, son of Mary, Queen of Scots. Unsurprisingly, Parsons favoured Isabella and rejected James’ claims. Significantly, he did this on the basis of an appeal to the electoral powers of parliament, arguing that ‘after Her Majesties decease every man is free untill a one will be established by the  Comonwealth, which establishment doth not depend upon the appointment or will of any few, or upon any mans proclaiming of himself . . . but upon a general consent of the Whole Body  of the Realm’.23 Though the reference here to the ‘will of any few’ probably refers to the Privy Council, the underlying rejection of absolutist  ideology is unmistakable. We might also note Parson’s use of the word ‘Comonwealth’: in the 1590s this term was synonymous  with  republic.24 In opposition to the ‘King’s Two Bodies’, Parsons sets the ‘Body of the Realm’. This was also a matter raised in and around Parliament during the 1590s by MPs such as Peter  Wentworth, Humphrey  Winch, Richard Stephens, Henry  Apsley, Richard Blount and Oliver St.  John.25 Indeed, Wentworth raised the matter during the 1593 Parliament and was sent to the Tower for his troubles. He also responded to ‘Doleman’ in a tract that argued for James as successor and which maintained that ‘Kingship was a combination of hereditary right and contract’.26 That this was a potentially seditious opinion is evinced by the fact that Wentworth’s tract was only published after his death in the  Tower. In each case, the spectre raised is that of republicanism. The difficulty for Elizabeth and the Privy Council was that once some of the monarch’s powers had been ceded to Parliament, where did that arrogation stop? If Parliament had the right, for example, to determine the succession, what was to prevent the same body, now or in the future, from demanding the removal outright of an unpopular or tyrannous monarch? As Quentin  Skinner has shown, this is a topic that has its roots in continental debates on  resistance during the 1570s.27 Parsons’ argument for the constitutional right of parliament to arraign the tyrant aligns him with Catholic resistance theorists as well as those on the Protestant side such as  the author of the  Huguenot  Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos (1579). In a section devoted to explaining how ‘the wife of Edward the second King of England, assembled the Parliament against her husband, who

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was there deposed’,  this text also includes a marginal note advising as follows: ‘Reade the manner of the deposing of Richard the  second.’28 And although Shakespeare is somewhat reticent about directly invoking parliament in Richard II, Annabel  Patterson has persuasively argued that in one of Shakespeare’s major sources, Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587), ‘Holinshed . . . did everything he could to imply that “Parliament,” kingless or not, was in fact the scene, the spirit, and the instrument of the deposition’.29 If the will of parliament is seen as more efficacious than the will of an anointed sovereign, then justification for the absolutist  underpinnings of the divine right of kings becomes harder to maintain. As increasing numbers of Shakespeare’s contemporaries were asking themselves in the 1590s: could a version of republican governance be the answer to England’s political and social difficulties? This included the assemblage of aristocrats and commoners surrounding the Earl of  Essex. As David  Norbrook has shown, ‘some members of Essex’s circle do seem to have been toying with republican ideas, or at least wishing that there were more constitutional constraints on the monarch’.30 In the context of the  succession, this was a significant matter and it was one that ‘Doleman’ took full advantage of, not least in his dedication to Essex. Interestingly, in this he may well have been inspired by the example of Peter  Wentworth himself, who in 1591 unsuccessfully tried to present Essex with a copy of a tract he had written on the  succession.31 This demonstrates not only that the Earl and his circle were noted for their exploration of controversial republican ideas, but that this circle were seen as a potentially public outlet for others interested in similar notions. In a recent book, Andrew  Hadfield has argued that early modern republicanism ‘constituted a number of different elements and languages, not all of which were exactly congruent or fitted together perfectly’.32 Nonetheless, he does identify six main strands common to much republican thought, including a disavowal of tyranny, the study of classical ­political structures and institutions, an emphasis on political virtue and scepticism towards the hereditary principle, a keen interest in the history of the Roman republic, the use of ‘natural rights’ theory and, lastly, a focus on the political import of the citizen within a public realm working alongside  parliament.33 Most of these elements can be found to varying degrees in another important text concerning Richard’s reign, Sir John Hayward’s The First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII. Though written in 1599, after Shakespeare’s play, it is significant for a number of reasons. Leeds Barroll and Arthur Kinney have argued that in all likelihood it was this text and not Shakespeare’s play that caused the  Queen to famously

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compare herself to  Richard II.34 Yet Haywood was obviously an assiduous reader of both Shakespeare’s play and the other extant sources concerning Richard II’s reign. In any case, the text upset the authorities sufficiently for Hayward to be jailed and interrogated in the Tower. It appears likely that the Privy Council took special exception to the contemporary application of Richard’s deposition and Bolingbroke’s accession. The Calendar of State Papers for February 1600 contains notes by the Attorney-General  Edward Coke ‘to prove that it [The First Part] was aimed at the present times and intended as an attack upon the government’35, and later there is a passage on  Essex that notes that ‘These things appeared by the book written on Henry IV., making this time seem like that of Richard II., to be reframed by him [Essex] as by  Henry IV’.36 Eyebrows may also have been raised by Hayward’s invocation under examination of  Boethius, whose ‘distinction is that where the Government is democratical or aristocratical, the subject is bound to the State rather than to the Prince, but where it is monarchical, it is to the Person of the Prince’.37 Though the political division outlined is commonplace enough, Hayward’s claim that he drew it from Boethius is worthy of note since his most famous treatise, The Consolation of Philosophy (c. 524 CE), was well known for being written while the author was being held in prison for treason and was subsequently executed on the orders of an autocratic ruler. Though Hayward’s invocation of the Roman is risky, it may also be a coded warning to his interrogators.38 In these examples, the  concern that history is politically appropriable through an ideologically focused reading of the past aligns Hayward’s text with the new mode of historiography derived from the Roman historian   Tacitus that was so crucial in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.39 This mode of writing history can be observed in the Preface to Hayward’s book, where he writes: Among all sortes of humane writers, there is none that haue done more profit, or deserued greater prayse, then they who haue committed to faithfull records of Histories, eyther the gouerment of mighty states, or the liues and actes of famous men: for by describing the order and passage of these two, and what euents hath followed what counsailes, they haue set foorth vnto vs, not only precepts, but liuely patterns, both for priuate directions and for affayres of state.40

We might notice first the relationship between the ‘gouerment of mighty states’ and ‘the liues and actes of famous men’, one that implies that individual biography and a focus on individual actions is as important as governmental matters. Also of importance is the assertion that history does not merely offer the reader ‘precepts’ but what Hayward calls ‘liuely patterns’. In other words, it might be incumbent upon the writer of such Tacitean

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history to point out those ‘patterns’ to the reader. If this is the case, what is to stop him from pointing out ‘patterns’ that may run contrary to the dominant political ideology of  those in power? Hadfield has suggested that such Tacitean associations did not necessarily have to imply a critique of absolutism or an espousal of republican values during the period.41 But in the case of Hayward, it seems that such possibilities certainly crossed the minds of his interrogators. For example, what might the effect be of such history on the general populace? As the Lord Chief Justice asked in preparation for the interrogation: ‘Might he [Hayward] think that this common history would not be very dangerous to come amongst the common people?’ Even more worryingly he wondered: ‘What moved him to maintain, with arguments never mentioned in the history, that it might be lawful for the subject to depose the King, and to add many persuadings in  allowance thereof?’42 The republican conclusions that might be drawn from such implications seem clear enough. When Hayward came to answer these charges, it is his approach to the writing of history that stands out. Examined by Sir John Peyton and  the Attorney-General about his Preface, he reportedly said that ‘The preface to the Reader was of his own inditing’ and that he: Spoke in it generally of histories and intended no particular application to present history. Read in  Fox’s book of Acts and Monuments that King Henry II. never demanded subsidy of his subjects, that he left in treasure 900,000l., besides jewels and plate. Inserted the same in the History of Henry IV., because he takes it to be lawful for any historiographer to insert any history of former time into that history he writes, though no other historian has mentioned the same.43

Hayward’s admission that he intended no present application of Henry IV’s accession is undermined by his simultaneous assertion that the historian may ‘insert any history of former time into that history he writes’. History is not a matter of simply ‘recording’ past events but of reading in the present a variety of past events, individuals and implications from across historical periods. So when Hayward argues that ‘it is a liberty used by all good writers of history to invent reasons and speeches’ or that in his various sources he ‘found the matter not the very form of words’,44 it becomes clear that this Tacitean-inspired history could provide early modern readers with politically inflected narratives within which to imagine, indeed re-imagine, their early modern present. This can be seen in Hayward’s invocation of the Roman past at the very start of The First Part. Writing of the sons of Edward III, he notes that

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while the  King’s many children ‘were such ornaments and such stayes to his estate’, their offspring spread contestation and strife: but as a mans owne bloud cleaueth close vnto him; not so much in the blisses of prosperitie, which are equally imparted to others, as in the crosses of calamity, which touch none so neere, as those that are neerest by nature. But in succeeding times they became in their offspring the seminarie of diuision and discord, to the vtter ruine of their families, and great wast and weakning of the whole Realme: for they that haue equall dignitie of birth and bloud, can hardly stoope to termes of soueraigntie, but vpon euery offer of occasion wil aspire to indure, rather no equall then any superiour, and for the most part, the hatred of those that are nearest in kinde, is most dispitefull & deadly if it once breake forth. The feare of this humor caused  Remulus, to embrewe the foundations of the Cittie and Empire of Rome, with the bloud of his brother Remus. According to which example, the tyrants of Turkie, those butchers of Satan, doe commonly at this day beginne their raigne, with the death and slaughter of all their brethren.45

This is a fascinating passage. Immediately noticeable is the alignment of bloodline and governance, one that calls the hereditary  principle  into question. Significantly, the Plantagenet house’s narrative of decline from ‘prosperitie’, to ‘vtter ruine’, to tyranny, is read through the lens of Roman history, and in particular the murder of Remus by his brother Romulus (I will return to the ‘Turkish’ context later). Politically speaking, there was a variety of ways of reading this foundational murder. Though according to tradition Romulus instituted a monarchical system, as  Thomas Aquinas noted the ‘first kings [of the Roman Republic] were driven out by the Romans when they would no longer support the burden of their rule – or rather, of their tyranny. Then they set up for themselves consuls and other magistrates to rule and guide them: wishing thus to change from a monarchy to an aristocracy’.46 When this system in turn failed, monarchy was reinstated. The last king of Rome, Tarquinus Superbus, was subsequently himself deposed by the Romans ‘because of his and his children’s tyranny, and substituted the lesser or consular power instead’.47 Yet while he is critical of tyranny and aware of the variety of political formulations that followed in Rome, Aquinas’ reading of Roman history still leads him to conclude that monarchy is the best form of government. Those more critical of monarchy offer a different perspective on the political trajectory that follows from Remus’ murder. For example in the Discourses (1513–17),  Niccolo Machiavelli notes that ‘Romulus and the rest of the kings made many good laws quite compatible with freedom; but, because their aim was to found a kingdom, not a republic, when the

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city became free, it lacked many institutions essential to the preservation of liberty’.48 Since the political structure implied by Romulus’ actions was incompatible with a truly republican ‘preservation of liberty’, his foundational role has to be rethought. This is particularly the case in relation to his ­murder of Remus. For Machiavelli, Romulus should not be blamed for taking the kind of action ‘which may be of service in the organizing of a kingdom or the constituting of a republic. It is a sound maxim that reprehensible actions may be justified by their effects, and that when the effect is good, as it was in the case of Romulus, it always justifies the action’.49 The considerations of real politick must override any moral considerations. Machiavelli concludes this Roman excursus by comparing the political legacy of Romulus and the Tarquins: That Romulus was a man of this character, that for the death of his brother and of his colleague he deserves to be excused, and that what he did was done for the common good and not to satisfy his personal ambition, is shown by his having at once instituted a senate with which he consulted and with whose views his decisions were in accord . . . It is clear, too, that when the Tarquins were expelled and Rome became free, none of its ancient institutions were changed, save that in lieu of a permanent kin there were appointed each year two consuls. This shows that the original institutions of this city as a whole were more in conformity with a political and self-governing state than with absolutism or tyranny.50

The point could not be more clearly put. The systems put in place by the first king and inherited by the last were structurally always predisposed away from tyranny and towards republicanism, a system held in place by the balance provided by senate or consuls. Or as the author  of Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos concludes in a section that compares the rules of Romulus, Tarquinus Superbus, Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero, ‘Kings were at the first constituted by the people’.51 Returning to Hayward’s invocation of Romulus and Remus in relation to the children of Edward III, we can push the politics implicit in the analogy a little further. Certainly Hayward’s observation that ‘they that haue equall dignitie of birth and bloud, can hardly stoope to termes of soueraigntie’ draws a connection between the variety of political systems experienced by Rome between the reigns of Romulus and Nero, and the political uncertainty of the Wars of the Roses that follow the deposition of the legitimate  Richard II. But more than this, he adds another layer of complexity to the Machiavellian assertion that Roman monarchy is inherently republican in structure by noting that the murder of Remus is bloody yet unavoidable for the constitution of the state. Whether or not Hayward

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is himself advocating republicanism outright is open to debate, but his declaration that it was necessary for Romulus ‘to embrewe the foundations of the Cittie and Empire of Rome, with the bloud of his brother Remus’ is still a significant one. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the verb ‘embrewe’ has invariably violent or even sacrificial connotations that involve soaking an object with blood.52 This is a point recognised in Richard II by the Duchess of Gloucester when she tells John of Gaunt that ‘Edward’s seven sons, whereof thyself art one,/ Were as seven vials of his sacred blood’ and laments that her son Gloucester, whom she calls ‘One vial full of Edward’s sacred blood’, is now ‘cracked, and all the precious liquor spilt’ (I.ii.11–19). Though there is much blood spilt between the houses of  Lancaster and York over the course of the first and second tetralogies, it is noticeable that when Richard II opens, the spilling of blood is precisely what Richard cannot be seen to acknowledge. At this point, we might recall  Parsons’ earlier assertion that, like Romulus and the ‘tyrants of Turkie’, Henry VIII ‘passed all the rest in cruelty, toward his own kindred, for he weeded out almost all that ever he could find of the Bloud Royal of York’. But in Richard II’s case, Bolingbroke’s accusation that Mowbray ‘did plot the Duke of Gloucester’s death’ (I.i.100) cannot be addressed directly by the King, since to do so would (in the popular Tudor construction of the story at least) implicate him in the murder of Thomas of Woodstock. Indeed, it is the inability or refusal of Richard to account adequately and symbolically for this spilling of blood that precipitates the broader political crisis in  Richard II. Richard is construed as a tyrant in a number of places and a number of figures in the play make it clear that he needs to be arraigned in some way. I mention this point here because it raises a broader issue about how this play is commonly read. While critics are happy to read Richard II through the lens of the 1601 Essex rebellion and Devereux’s own interests in republican thought, if we remove this lens and view the play in the moment of its historical production around 1595, it is in fact much more equivocal about the question of republicanism. Though the play is wryly sceptical about the  hereditary principle and although it flirts with the idea that the monarch might be constrained by  parliament and populace, unlike some other sixteenthcentury texts dealing with Richard’s reign, it falls far short of advocating an outright republican ethos. Instead, it reasserts the political utility, even expediency of monarchy, while at the same time subjecting its inner workings to a forensic critical demystification. This is particularly the case in relation to  Richard’s self-­identification with Christ. Scholarship on the play often overlooks that many of

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Richard’s Christological usages are explicitly apocalyptic in ­orientation, referring variously to the atoning function of blood, Judas Iscariot’s betrayal, Pontius  Pilate and the  second coming. Although it is part of the equation, such invocations do not only represent self-indulgence on Richard’s part. An important part of Christ’s eschatological function was to instantiate in the second coming a renewed and ultimate social and political order. The potential political implications of this were not lost on a number of millennial thinkers associated with republican circles in the 1590s.53 For example, in a book of sermons on Revelation dedicated to the Earl of  Essex, George  Gifford wrote of the second coming as follows: we shall bee raysed vp from death in great triumph and glorie, to raigne for euer and euer with our head Iesus Christ. We were the children of wrath, through our vncleannes; hee hath washed vs in his bloud, and made vs the sonnes of God, and that is, hee hath made vs great kings. For the children of Emperours and kings here in the world inherite riches and glorie, and are borne princes. All the kings of the earth are but beggars, being compared vnto him; then must his children of necessitie, all of them, be great kings and princes: and who is able to expresse with any words, the riches and the glorie, which they shal inherite?54

In other cultural contexts, such scripturally inspired words would seem unremarkable. In the context of the 1590s, the idea that Christ will wash his subjects in blood and raise them up higher than kings, and that hereditary or inherited glory is nothing compared to Christ’s inheritance could be viewed in terms of an ideal ‘monarchical republic’.55 I use  Patrick Collinson’s phrase deliberately here, for although a republican trajectory may be read into this account, it is necessary to also note that Christ is still construed (as he must be) as the ‘head’ or monarch of this impending dispensation. The apocalyptic implications of such a reading can be linked to those Protestant resistance theorists who often invoked Christ’s example as a justification for radical political action. For example, Christopher Goodman asks: How shuld the Apostles and all other faithfull martyrs, which by their deathes in all ages, haue geuen glorie to Christ, haue left behinde them so worthie monuments, and comfortable writings, besides the notable examples of constancie in sealing vp their doctrine with the sheading of their bloud, if they had yealded or shronke in excecutinge their office for feare of anie power. And in our miserable Countrie, where Antichrist this day is againe for our synnes exalted, if commandements of tyrants shuld haue taken place in all men, as it did with many hirelinge preachers, some most shamefully denying their Maister Christe, taking vpon them the marke of the beaste . . . if in all others (I saie) as in these, the vngodlie decrees of men shulde haue taken place: how coulde we haue had these worthie examples of so many hundered martyrs.56

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Goodman sets the justification for radical political action in an ­eschatological framework where Antichrist is present and is waiting to be  overthrown. Indeed, the author of  Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos takes this point further. Writing against those who deny that it is lawful to bear arms against a tyrannous ruler, he states: our Saviour Christ during all the time that he conversed in this world, tooke not to him the Office of a Judge, or a King; but rather of a private person, and a Delinquent by imputation of our transgressions so that it is an allegation besides the purpose, to say that he hath not managed Armes . . . I would willingly demand of such exceptionists: whether they think that by the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh, that Magistrates have lost their right in the sword of Authority?57

Again we notice the focus on the second coming. It is also clear that with the arrival of Christ to judge the quick and the dead, a perfect form of monarchy will be re-instituted that overrides the claims of secular magistrates and kings. The writings of resistance theorists and republican thinkers overlapped in important ways, but we must not forget the broader eschatological framework within which these debates were commonly situated. We might recall  Gifford’s assertion that ‘All the kings of the earth are but beggars, being compared vnto him’ as well as  Goodman’s statement: ‘For what is a Kinge, Quene, or Emperour compared to God?’58 Such claims were not merely the expressions of eschatological commonplaces but the imagining of an imminent and alternative political order under Christ. So while these thinkers might invoke radical political solutions to contemporary political structures, it remains the case that the ultimate aim of political apocalypticism is the instantiation of an  absolutist deity. Christ will come, judge, save and condemn in an ultimate display of absolute authority.59 Such a reading has a defined historical basis that can be connected interestingly to Roman politics. As Luke 2:1 and 3:1 make clear, Christ was born in the reign of the first Roman emperor Augustus Caesar, and carried out his ministry and died in the reign of Tiberius. His life thus straddles a crucial moment in Roman history. Hadfield points out that the danger of imperial government is tyranny, as Rome soon discovered, when the reign of the problematic but essentially public-spirited Augustus was followed by those of Tiberius, Caligula and Nero. And, as the works of  Tacitus so frequently demonstrate, secrecy, plotting and conspiracy become the way of life under the rule of a tyrant.60

The historical Christ lived at a moment when the values of the republic were being gradually eroded by the dissipate absolutist emperors who

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followed Augustus. Seen in this context, Christ’s advocacy of a  second coming can be understood as presenting an alternative form of absolutism in the future. In the ultimate political dispensation promised by Christ, monarchy is thus vouchsafed. Unlike the example of Roman history that was in the past and could be used in order to read the early modern present, Christ’s promise of a second coming was precisely that: a promise. Although Christ’s utterance was historically congruent with this period of Roman history and although the promise of the second coming may have been construed as imminent in early modern terms, it was also still to come. It is small wonder that such a possibility should also appeal to Richard II. Might we not read Richard’s apocalyptic invocations of Christ as a significant if flawed attempt to reassert his  absolutist pretensions? As I will argue, Richard’s apocalyptic alignment with Christ not only fails to materialise politically, it also raises the spectre of Rome’s descent from republicanism into tyranny, a spectre mirrored in the play’s analogous descent into the confusion of civil war. So in order to track this important political subtext, I want to re-examine the Christologically inflected political typology of Richard II. III In the opening scene of the play, Bolingbroke accuses Mowbray of treason and murder and each man appeals to the king for judgement. These are the appellant’s first words to the king: BOLINGBROKE   Many years of happy days befall   My gracious sovereign, my most loving liege! MOWBRAY   Each day still better other’s happiness   Until the heavens, envying earth’s good hap,   Add an immortal title to your crown! (I.i.20–4)

Significantly, both men’s opening lines invoke the monarch’s temporal contingency: this is a king whose reign is, as it were, on the clock. An Elizabethan audience would be aware of the irony implicit in Bolingbroke’s greeting, neatly summed up in the double-edged word ‘befall’, and Mowbray’s desire that the king will achieve a crown in heaven, though commonplace, might tacitly suggest a ruler coming to the end of his allotted span. The temporality implicit in each man’s greeting could also suggest a ruler whose symbolic power is under threat. Naomi Conn  Liebler has argued that ‘Richard II opens with an aborted ritual, the joust between

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Bolingbroke and Mowbray whose cancellation appears to illustrate Richard’s inability to rule.’ This, she notes, is ‘one of several ritual events depicted in the play whose close observation mark the normative relationship of king and state but here, in Richard’s crisis of kingship, are aborted or evacuated of meaning’.61 This point is well taken, yet it is important not to overlook the degree of political authority that is invested in these ­ritual forms too. As mentioned earlier, the symbol of  blood, or more exactly the precise symbolic function of blood is to the fore in the opening scene. Mowbray initiates a complex discussion of this issue in the following way: Let not my cold words here accuse my zeal. ’Tis not the trial of a woman’s war, The bitter clamour of two eager tongues, Can arbitrate this cause betwixt us twain; The blood is hot that must be cooled for this. Yet can I not of such tame patience boast As to be hushed and naught at all to say. First, the fair reverence of your highness curbs me From giving reins and spurs to my free speech, Which else would post until it had returned These terms of treason doubled down his throat. Setting aside his high blood’s royalty, And let him be no kinsman to my liege, I do defy him, and I spit at him, Call him a slanderous coward and a villain; (I.i.47–51)

Here Mowbray claims that it is Bolingbroke and his own blood that is at stake in this dispute, setting this in contrast to the supposed ‘clamour’ of mere ‘words’. However, it is interesting that Mowbray should also state that Richard’s presence prevents him from giving full vent to ‘free speech’. Harry  Berger has argued that: ‘In the opening scenes of Richard II, the inflation of speech is no more conspicuous than the silences it constitutes as hidden behind it . . . ritual speech is being used to hide, mystify, or justify other motives than those  expressed.’62 This is true up to a point. But this argument misses the fact that the very presence of a king within the ritual setting of the accusation demands ritual speech from the appellants as well as their explicit acknowledgement of the king’s ritual status as monarch. Here, Richard’s absolutism is the only thing preventing the outbreak of violence that shimmers under the carefully coded exchanges. Mowbray goes as far as he possibly can, calling his adversary ‘a slanderous coward and a villain’. But as Franco Moretti explains: ‘Sovereignty is a power that,

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having its origins in itself, is thereby released from any control; it is “selfdetermined”, as Hegel will say.’63 The ritual may ultimately be disregarded, but it does serve an important function in the first scene of the play. If he were allowed ‘free speech’, then Mowbray would literalise the threat that he cannot yet carry out. Monarchical absolutism is unavoidably invoked here as a conventional idiom and as a means of protecting Mowbray (and the king); yet it also draws our attention to the degree to which the political validation of ‘speech’, and thus of ‘blood’ is, at this point at least, contingent upon the king’s absolute self-determination. Significantly then, Bolingbroke mounts a direct challenge to this monarchical self-determination in his account of Mowbray’s alleged crimes: Further I say, and further will maintain Upon his bad life to make all this good, That he did plot the Duke of Gloucester’s death, Suggest his soon-believing adversaries, And consequently, like a traitor coward, Sluiced out his innocent soul through streams of blood – Which blood, like sacrificing Abel’s, cries Even from the tongueless caverns of the earth To me for justice and rough chastisement. And by the glorious worth of my descent, This arm shall do it, or this life be spent! (I.i.98–108)

This is a crucial speech. The voice that is invoked is not that of the speaker, Bolingbroke, but is instead that of the dead Gloucester. Criticism of this passage commonly circles around which of the figures is to be associated with Cain and which with  Abel. Harry  Berger wonders why Gloucester’s blood should cry to Bolingbroke as brother unless ‘he is replacing the father [Gaunt] whose consenting silence amounts to symbolic fratricide . . . It is to these lines that Richard/Cain responds’.64 This is a suggestive reading pointing up as it does the agonistic potential of the Abel reference for an early modern audience. Drawing in this way upon the first murder, Bolingbroke attempts to make a typological connection between the biblical narrative and the present crisis. The agonistic potential inherent in this connection is well summed up by Naomi Conn Liebler: ‘Sibling rivalry for God’s blessing, the urgency of redifferentiation, fratricide, and the establishment of a new dynasty: these are among the emphases Shakespeare found in the drama of Cain and Abel that linked the crisis of the Tudor monarchy with the history of the  world.’65 As all of these elements play a central role in Richard II, Bolingbroke’s reference to Abel makes symbolic sense. Writing of the Cain and Abel story, Regina Schwartz  puts it this

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way: ‘Children divided ensure that parents are ­unassailable’, a precept that could almost stand as an epitaph for the first and second tetraologies.66 However, recalling another analogous fratricidal and foundational ­murder, that of Romulus and Remus, might force us to view Bolingbroke’s speech in a rather different light. Yes, like Romulus, Cain’s murder of his brother is condemned. But in the same way as the legendary Roman figure had to be incorporated politically into the narrative of the founding of Rome, so Cain has to be integrated within the overall narrative of Genesis, telling as it does of the establishment of God’s chosen people, and anticipating as it must the events of the New Testament. Both Romulus and Cain are inconveniently necessary  fratricides. An overly agonistic reading of Bolingbroke’s reference to Abel is in danger of overlooking another possible interpretation implied by this realisation. This is signalled in the lines: ‘Which blood, like sacrificing Abel’s, cries/ Even from the tongueless caverns of the earth/ To me for justice and rough chastisement.’ Notice here that Bolingbroke refers not to the blood of ‘sacrificed Abel’ but to the blood of ‘sacrificing Abel’. This present participle construction of the verb locates the sacrifice not in the past, but instead in a conditional present or future. This is crucial because it implies not only that the murder has yet to be avenged but also that its symbolic and political effects have yet to be realised. Such a reading chimes interestingly with conventional early modern typological exegesis. As any biblically aware audience member might have recalled, Abel was conventionally identified with  Christ and Cain was conventionally identified with the Jews who crucified him. J. A.  Bryant points out: In Shakespeare’s time there was nothing particularly esoteric about such an identification. The New Testament provides ample authority for it . . . there is a reference to it in the Canon of the Mass; and frequent use of it is made in the writings of the Church Fathers. Amongst Shakespeare’s audience there must have been at least a few who encountered it in contemporary exegetical works and a great many who knew about it from pictorial representations in the familiar Biblia Pauperum.67

Although he makes the typological connection between the Old Testament story and its New Testament manifestation, Bryant does not pursue its typological or political consequences any  further. By speaking on behalf of Abel, Bolingbroke is, typologically, speaking on behalf of Christ. He is thus tacitly appropriating for himself the  symbolic role and function that should properly only belong to the king. Bolingbroke’s assertion that Gloucester’s blood ‘cries/ Even from the tongueless caverns of the earth/ To me for justice and rough chastisement’

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also draws upon Genesis 4:10. This is the verse where God asks Cain: ‘What hast thou done? the voyce of thy brothers blood crieth vnto mee, from the earth.’ In his exegesis of this book,  John Calvin, while acknowledging the evil of Cain’s actions, also has to incorporate them within a broader exegetical framework. As he writes: God first shows that he is cognizant of the deeds of men, though no one should complain of or accuse them; secondly, that he holds the life of man too dear, to allow innocent blood to be shed with impunity; thirdly, that he cares for the pious not only while they live, but even after death.68

The purpose of Cain’s death is to impel us to a typological consideration of what is to come. Calvin goes on: ‘Abel was speechless when his throat was being cut, or in whatever other manner he was losing his life; but after death the voice of his blood was more vehement than any eloquence of the orator.’69 If we read Bolingbroke’s invocation of Abel through this passage of Calvin, and given my earlier comments about free speech and the ritual limits imposed by the monarch, then Bolingbroke’s appropriation of Gloucester/Abel’s voice sets up a rival ritual framework to that of the king, one which promises the political liberation of a voice to come. Bolingbroke’s claim that ‘This arm shall do it, or this life be spent!’ is not just a conventional flourish, as it may also implicitly invoke an alternative political arrangement, parallel to that promised in the next life. Indeed, further on in his exegesis of Abel’s murder, Calvin writes: ‘Nor does this doctrine apply merely to the state of the present life . . . but it elevates us by the hope of a better life; because we must conclude that those from whom God cares shall survive after death.’70 As this quotation shows, it is the  eschatological function of  Christ, which the murder of Abel prefigures, that is typologically and politically crucial. In the early modern  Geneva Bible, readers are directed by the marginal note to Genesis 4:8, which describes the murder of Abel, to Matthew 23:35. Here Christ warns the Scribes and Pharisees: ‘vpon you may come all the righteous blood that was shed vpon the earth, from the blood of Abel the righteous, vnto the blood of Zacharias the sonne of Barachias, whom ye slew betweene the Temple and the  alter’. The only person who can atone for this spilling of blood is, of course, Christ himself. Until this eschatological moment arrives, it is Christ’s kingly representative on earth who assumes this symbolic function. Therefore, by aligning himself with Abel, Bolingbroke not only invokes a typological and political narrative that ends with the atoning function of Christ, he arrogates the symbolic function and power that should properly belong to the king.

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In Matthew 23, Christ berates the Scribes and Pharisees for their ­ ypocrisy. In keeping with the comments above, this is an avowedly apocah lyptic chapter, with Christ  promising at its conclusion that ‘yee shall not see mee henceforth till that ye say, Blessed is he that commeth in the Name of the Lord’. Calvin points out in his commentary on this passage that ‘as long as Christ appears to us in the Father’s name . . . He is not to be taken merely on our lips to honour, but sincerely desired as the One who shall put us and all the world under Himself’.71 The exegetical conclusion of the Cain and Abel story points ultimately to a new political dispensation that overrides the claims of any secular monarch. Christ will be ‘the One who shall put us and all  the  world  under Himself’. Whether  he understands this implied trajectory or not, Richard’s comment ‘How high a pitch his resolution soars!’ (I.i.109) certainly acknowledges that Bolingbroke is overreaching his political station. When the king later vows to Mowbray that Bolingbroke’s ‘nearness to our sacred blood/ Should nothing privilege him nor partialize/ The unstooping firmness of my upright soul’ (I.i.119–21), he is simultaneously trying to reassure Mowbray, set himself apart from Bolingbroke and also warn him that his ‘privilege’ is contingent upon the partiality of the king’s sacral status. Nonetheless, it is Richard’s professed inability to vouchsafe the shedding of blood through his sacral status that marks the key turning point in this scene and in the abortive combat scene. Once Mowbray and Bolingbroke have picked up each other’s gage, Richard says: Wrath-kindled gentlemen, be ruled by me: Let’s purge this choler without letting blood. This we prescribe, though no physician; Deep malice makes too deep incision. Forget, forgive, conclude and be agreed; Our doctors say this is no month to bleed. (I.i.152–9)

The king’s belief that the enmity between the two men can be assuaged ‘without letting blood’ is both a negation of the political and social validity invested in the ritual engagement as well as an evacuation of the sacral function of  kingship. He makes a similar point to Bolingbroke before the combat in Act I, scene 3: ‘Farewell, my blood, which if today thou shed,/ Lament we may, but not revenge thee dead’ (I.iii.57–8). And as he says to the gathered assembly after he stops the combat: ‘our kingdom’s earth should not be soiled/ With that dear blood which it hath fostered’ (I.iii.125–6). Yet as René Girard points out in Violence and the Sacred, ‘Blood serves to illustrate the point that the same substance can stain or cleanse, contaminate or purify, drive men to fury and murder or appease their anger and restore them to life’.72 Richard attempts to ‘cleanse’, ‘purify’ and ‘appease’ without

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realising the contrary symbolic and political implications of his role  as ‘physician’. Instead, at the close of scenes 1 and 3 Richard reverts back to absolutist posturing, banishing both men in the latter and concluding the former thus: ‘We were not born to sue but to command’ (I.i.196). Despite Richard’s attempt to close down these threatening symbolic appropriations, Bolingbroke’s assertion of a rival ritual framework that invokes Christ’s atoning status has had some effect. As Richard also says in his final speech in scene 1: ‘Since we cannot atone you, we shall see/ Justice design the victor’s chivalry’ (I.i.202–3). The use of the verb ‘atone’ is striking here. Shakespeare uses the word relatively infrequently in his works, and while the obvious meaning is a reconciliation between two parties, given the framework that I have been outlining it surely also invokes a sense of  Christ’s atoning function. The fact that Richard cannot atone for the appellants points to a crisis of his political  absolutism, but also to an oblique recognition that his sacral status as Christ’s representative on earth is under threat. So when Richard attempts to bypass this threat by banishing Bolingbroke and Mowbray, it is Mowbray’s invocation of the book of Revelation that strikes the most interesting note: No, Bolingbroke. If ever I were traitor, My name be blotted from the book of life, And I from heaven banished as from hence! But what thou art, God, thou and I do know; And all too soon, I fear, the King shall rue. (I.iii.201–5)

Commenting on these words, the most recent  Arden editor of the play is puzzled, noting that Mowbray’s invocation of Revelation 3:5 here is somewhat disjunctive since ‘his apparent sincerity seems further to obfuscate both his and Richard’s morality in the matter of Gloucester’s death’.73 But this reading misses the fact that Mowbray is directing these words, and hence the biblical reference contained within them, at Bolingbroke. Mowbray may well be complicit in Gloucester’s murder, but he also shows himself to be an excellent reader of Richard and Bolingbroke’s competing political theologies. To this end, he is canny enough to select a verse from the beginning of Revelation that itself prefigures  Christ’s second coming: ‘He that ouercommeth, shall be cloathed in white array, and I will not put out his Name out of the booke of life, but I will confesse his name before my Father, and before his Angels’ (Revelation 3:5). George Gifford writes of this passage in 1596: Woe bee to all those that shall bee found naked and vncouered, not hauing these white garments, which stand to bee iustified not by free forgiuenes of sins, or by free imputation of Christs righteousnes through faith, but by their owne workes:

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for albeit their deedes seeme to be many, and to bee very glorious, yet before God they shall bee found nothing else, but euen as a polluted and defiled garment, yea euen like donge.74

This representative exegesis enables us to see that Mowbray is criticising Bolingbroke for presuming that by his ‘owne workes’ and ‘deedes’ he can usurp the ‘white garment’ of Richard’s sacral status. Bearing in mind that, as Gifford notes, Jesus at the second coming will ‘appeareth in vision vpon a white horse, and all the warriors on his side, are also vpon white horses’,75 and recalling that Richard’s own chivalric emblem is that of the white hart, the series of proleptic symbols that Mowbray is invoking become clear.76 Mowbray no more believes in Richard’s divine status than he does Bolingbroke’s, but his real politick appropriation of Revelation here points up the fact that, whatever ‘coming’ might ensue, any political purchase that he may have had was contingent upon siding with the only king willing to vouchsafe his name in the ‘book of life’, Richard. With Richard in Ireland and the nobles vying for political position in his absence, Bolingbroke returns to initiate his rebellion. Significantly, his first substantive action, the condemnation and execution of Richard’s followers Bushy and Green, is undertaken via a careful appropriation of biblical language: Bushy and Green, I will not vex your souls – Since presently your souls must part your bodies – With too much urging your pernicious lives, For ‘twere charity; yet to wash your blood From off my hands, here in the view of men I will unfold some causes of your deaths. (III.i.2–7)

This passage strikes an immediate contrast with Richard in Act I. Unlike him, Bolingbroke is fully prepared to shed blood ‘here in the view of men’. For this reason, his appropriation of Pilate’s actions and words at Matthew 27:24 (‘hee tooke water and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this iust man: looke you to it’) takes on a number of resonances. First, Pilate is of course referring to Christ, whereas Bolingbroke is speaking about the followers of a Christ-like figure, Richard. This represents a subtle shift in Bolingbroke’s political theology: from the locus of atonement in Act I to its vehicle in Act III. But while this shift may serve Bolingbroke’s political ends, traditional Protestant exegesis of this passage points in a contrary direction. Pilate is a necessary part of the narrative of Christ’s atonement even though his actions are to be  condemned. This is why, writing of the washing of  hands, Calvin notes: ‘The water, which was no use to Pilate for cleansing dirt, should today

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have a different and very good use, to clear our eyes of all that hinders us from seeing lucidly, in the midst of condemnation, the righteousness of  Christ.’77 Reading this passage in relation to Bolingbroke’s actions provokes a double response: on the one hand, Bolingbroke/Pilate is behaving in a way that, historically, is unavoidably necessary in relation to Richard/ Christ. This only serves to remind us that the ‘inheritance of free descent’ (II.iii.136) that Bolingbroke claims can only be validated by initiating, Pilate-like, the evacuation of the  sacral and political power held by Richard. As with  Cain and Remulus’ murders, so with Pilate’s: the action is to be condemned, but the action nevertheless still has to be incorporated within the historical reality to which it gives rise.78 The gradual evacuation of Richard’s sacral status is first brought to the audience’s attention on his return from Ireland. This is the beginning of his first speech after arriving at Barkloughly Castle:    I weep for joy To stand upon my kingdom once again. Dear earth, I do salute thee with my hand, Though rebels wound thee with their horses hoofs. As a long-parted mother with her child Plays fondly with her tears and smiles in meeting, So weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth, And do thee favours with my royal hands. (III.ii.4–11)

Richard here obliquely invokes a complex set of biblical images. In the first place, the figure of a mother weeping over a child may well have connoted Mary weeping at the foot of the cross. As Samuel  Rowlands put it in a poem published in 1598: ‘Thy weeping eies, Sorrows right methode shows,/ Sonne bath’d in blood, and Mother washd in teares,/ A dying Sonne, repleat with fathers hate,/ A pensiue Mother most  disconsolate.’79 But if Richard’s Marian self-feminisation connotes the passion, it is an earlier event in Christ’s life that this speech also invokes in parallel. Notice the earth is personified as a child that Richard wants to protect and nourish with his tears and smiles. Indeed, it is this very desire that forces him to say to his followers: Mock not my senseless conjuration, lords. This earth shall have a feeling, and these stones Prove armed soldiers, ere her native king Shall falter under foul rebellion’s arms. (III.ii.23–6)

In these speeches, Richard’s Christ-like weeping, his actions and his rhetoric can all be associated with the raising of Lazarus from the dead, and in particular the shortest verse in the Bible: ‘And Iesus wept’ (John 11:35). To

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this end, we might point to the use of the word ‘conjuration’ in the speech above. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that that the verb ‘to conjure’ had a number of meanings in early modern England. It can refer to the swearing of an oath, to enact something with a magic spell, to exorcise spirits and was often used opprobriously by the Reformers when speaking of the Catholic practice of consecration of the host.80 In this context, Shakespeare’s use of the word here deliberately undercuts Richard’s chosen mode of self-identification. Like Jesus, Richard wants to conjure an inanimate form into life or even perform a kind of resurrection, in his case to fight on behalf of the ‘native king’ who has been dispossessed. Unlike Jesus, Richard’s action fails, as the magical, indeed idolatrous connotations of the term ‘conjuration’ suggest it might. Not only has Richard’s sacral status been undermined by Bolingbroke’s return, crucially, as any number of Protestant commentaries on John 11:35 demonstrate, to invoke Jesus weeping is to invoke a fundamental division between man and God. In a sermon preached in 1622, John  Donne offers an extended analysis of this biblical verse. He says as follows: And those teares, Expositors of all sides referre to the Passion, though some to his Agony in the Garden, some to his Passion on the Crosse; and these in my opinion most fitly; because those words of S. Paul belong to the declaration of the Priesthood, and of the Sacrifice of Christ; and for that function of his, the Crosse was the Altar; and therefore to the Crosse we fixe those third teares. The first were Humane teares, the second were Propheticall, the third were Pontificall, appertaining to the Sacrifice.81

Donne significantly notes that the tears Jesus weeps over Lazarus prefigure the passion. In the case of Richard, this is doubly ironic. At the moment that he tries to reclaim his kingdom and reanimate the very earth to serve his own cause, he is undermined by the mocking lords (prefiguring Christ/ Richard’s later mocking during their respective ‘passions’, perhaps) and by the commonplace exegesis of the biblical verse invoked. Indeed, this reading is given further credence by Donne, who goes on to note that the fact that Christ sheds human tears should not be taken to imply that there is any necessary connection between man and God: But then every Christian is not a Christ; and therefore as he that would fast forty dayes, as Christ did, might starve; and he that would whip Merchants out of the Temple, as Christ did, might be knockt downe in the Temple; So he [that] knowing his owne inclinations, or but the generall ill inclination of all mankind, as he is infected with Originall sin, should converse so much with publicans and sinners, might participate of their sins. The rule is, we must avoid inordinatenesse of affections; but when we come to examples of that rule, our selves well understood

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by our selves, must be our owne examples; for it is not alwaies good to go too far, as some good men have gone before.82

Richard’s ‘inordinatenesse of affections’, manifested in his inability to recognise that the political capital invested in his Christologically oriented sacrality is on the wane, is another important example of the play subjecting Richard’s sacral self-projections to sceptical interrogation. If, as Donne suggests, ‘our selves well understood by our selves, must be our owne examples’, then Richard’s various imitations of Christ speak to a cultural moment where the politics of  imitatio are being gradually subsumed by the claims of  representation.  Calvin’s own commentary on this biblical verse makes this point neatly: it is important for us to distinguish between man’s first nature, as it was composed by God, and this degenerate nature which is corrupted by sin. When God created man, He implanted emotions in him, but emotions which were obedient and submissive to reason. The fact that those emotions are now disorderly and rebellious is an accidental fault. But Christ took upon Him human emotions, yet without άταξία. For he who obeys the passions of the flesh is not obedient to God. Christ was indeed troubled Himself and was strongly agitated; but in such a way that He kept Himself under the will of the Father. In short, if you compare His passions with ours, they are as different as pure, clear water flowing in a gentle course from muddy and thick foam.83

For Richard to arrogate a Christological identification at this point in the play may have a certain poetic resonance: but structurally and ideologically speaking, it prefigures his downfall. Richard makes one last attempt to co-opt the eschatological force of Christ’s second  coming when faced with Bolingbroke’s assault. Drawing upon the metaphor of the sun (complete with its implied pun on sun/ son), the king summons the ‘searching eye of heaven’ that ‘lights the lower world’ (III.ii.37–8). Richard is, quite literally, invoking a process of revelation here. The idea is further developed when he says of the sun: But when from under this terrestrial ball He fires the proud tops of the eastern pines And darts his light through every guilty hole, Then murders, treasons and detested sins, The cloak of night being plucked from off their backs, Stand bare and naked, trembling at themselves? So, when this thief, this traitor, Bolingbroke, Who all this while hath revelled in the night Whilst we were wand’ring with the Antipodes, Shall see us rising in our throne, the east, His treasons will sit blushing in his face,

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This extract is filled with imagery and ideas drawn from the book of Revelation. In the first place, Richard’s status as ‘anointed king’ seems to be connected with a specific geographical point, namely the east. In Revelation 7:2–3, St. Paul mentions four Angels appearing at the four corners of the earth and then says as follows: And I saw another Angel come vp from the East, which had the seale of the liuing God, and he cryed with a loud voice to the foure Angels to whom power was giuen to hurt the earth, and the sea, saying, Hurt ye not the earth, neither the sea, neither the trees, till we haue sealed the seruants of our God in their foreheads.

Like Richard’s speech, these biblical verses mention the east, earth, sea, trees and the anointing or sealing of God’s chosen. The reference to the east is particularly important since it is traditionally believed that Christ will come from the east to judge the living and the dead. Not only does the sun rise in the east, the son of God will emerge from that location. Indeed, in his commentary on Revelation, George  Gifford makes this very point in relation to Revelation 7:2–3: ‘This Angel comming vp from the East, is the blessed Lord Iesus himselfe, as ye shall see it plaine by this, that he hath the seale of the liuing God to set vpon all the elect . . . He commeth vp from the East, for he is the sonne of righteousness that ariseth and shineth vpon his Church.’84 Moreover, Christ himself prefigures this coming earlier in the New Testament. Significantly, this occurs in Matthew 24, the section that follows the verse alluded to earlier in Bolingbroke’s Abel reference. This is clearly part of a carefully patterned web of biblical allusion, all located around the idea of revelation and the second coming of Christ. But on whose side are the audience invited to come down? Speaking in Matthew 24:24 of his second coming, Christ first warns of the dangers that will immediately precede it: ‘For there shall arise false Christs, & false prophets, & I shall show great signes & wonders, so if it were possible, they should decieue the very elect.’ The difficulty for an audience listening to Richard’s speech is in deciding whether they are being deceived by his Christological claims. Is he the true Christ or one of the false Christs promised in the biblical verse? Put in these terms, the conclusion might tend towards the latter. Nonetheless, the issue is not as straightforward as this. In fact, the Christological language of Richard’s

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speech contains a further layer of complexity that we need to unpick. As Christ also notes at Matthew 24:27: ‘For as the lightening commeth out of the East, and is seene into the West, so shall also the comming of the Sonne of man be.’ In his commentary on this passage,  John Calvin offers a fascinating gloss on how this verse might be interpreted by a Protestant thinker, one that throws significant light on Richard’s speech: To get the true sense readers must note the antitheses between the shadows and the revelation of the Kingdom of Christ in its unbounded extent. How sudden and unexpected it is, like the reach of lightening from the rising of the sun to its setting. We know the false ‘Christs’ (as suited the crass stupidity of that race) drew off whatever forces they could into the desert recesses or caves or any hidden corners, to shake off the yoke of the Roman imperium by force of arms. The meaning is, then, that any who gather their forces into a secret locality to regain freedom by fighting are falsely putting themselves up as Christ, for the Redeemer is sent to spread His grace over every region of the world instantly, when none expect it.85

Calvin’s exegesis helps us to see the double-edged nature of Richard’s Christological rhetoric. If the king is to be identified with Christ then this would construct Bolingbroke as one of the ‘false Christs’ attempting to resist the king by force of arms. The politics implicit in this eschatological matrix are clear enough, as is its Roman context. However, it is also crucial that Richard calls Bolingbroke a ‘thief’. Normally, this word might not invoke particular comment, but in the context of the discourses that I am reading the play through, it takes on a special significance. In 1 Thessalonians 5:2 and 2 Peter 3:10, we are told in the words of the former: ‘For ye your selues know perfectly, that the day of the Lord shall come, euen as a thiefe in the night.’86 Viewed in terms of the eschatological framework that Richard has himself invoked, the thief who comes in the night is always associated with Christ’s second coming. As Calvin puts it, ‘the day of Christ will come suddenly and unexpectedly, so as to take unbelievers by surprise, as a thief does those who are asleep’.87 Of course, the ultimate typological expression of this reality is again found in Revelation, first at 3:3 (‘I will come on thee as a thiefe’) and secondly at 16:15 (‘Behold I come as a  thief’).88 Seen in this light, Bolingbroke might be one of the ‘false Christs’, but equally he may be the true Christ come to take the ungodly Richard by surprise. The critical point is that Richard’s messianic Christology is undercut from within. The speech foregrounds the politically double-edged nature of the apocalyptic discourse invoked in his speech. It is not that the king is a perfect imitatio Christi contrasted with his anti-Christian usurper, but that Richard and Bolingbroke each represent aspects of these antithetical opponents.

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As the reality of Bolingbroke’s usurpation becomes more apparent to Richard, he alternates between the  absolutist of old stating ‘Is not the King’s name twenty thousand names?’ (III.ii.85), and a more politically abject subject position that also recalls  Marlowe’s Edward II: ‘I live with bread like you, feel want,/ Taste grief, need friends. Subjected thus,/ How can you say to me I am a king? (III.ii.175–7). So when, in Act III, scene 3 Richard and Bolingbroke meet for the first time since the banishment in Act I and the king is persuaded to go to London to abdicate, the rhetoric of apocalypticism is still to the fore, but here it serves to mark a fundamental shift in political power. At Richard’s first appearance, Bolingbroke ostensibly grants him the now familiar Christological rhetoric associated with a second coming: See, see, King Richard doth himself appear, As doth the blushing discontented sun From out the fiery portal of the east, When he perceives the envious clouds are bent To dim his glory and to stain the track Of his bright passage to the Occident. (III.iii.62–7)

Yet although the sun/son is pictured as coming from the east in eschatological fashion, it is also noticeable that Bolingbroke has already proscribed his passage towards the Occident, or the west. Richard’s  sacral status is not millennial but rather deeply politically riven. If Richard is an alter-Christus then it is a status that only signifies as a passing  imitation whose glory is dimming like the setting sun. This is confirmed by York’s equivocal words that follow: Yet looks he like a king. Behold, his eye, As bright as is the eagle’s, lightens forth Controlling majesty. Alack, alack for woe That any harm should stain so fair a show! (III.iii.68–71)

While York’s first sentence could mean that Richard retains the kingly status that he held before, notice that word ‘like’, implying that Richard is a mimetic copy of a king, not the thing itself. His fear that ‘any harm should stain so fair a show!’ also draws upon a sense that the king has passed from the realm of imitation, which implies a connection between subject and object, to being a mere show or representation. A further irony might also be hinted at in York’s use of the ‘eagle’ metaphor. Earlier I quoted Matthew 24:27, ‘For as the lightening commeth out of the East, and is seene into the West, so shall also the comming of the Sonne of man be’, and noted how the eschatological promise inherent in this verse is undercut by its use in

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the play. This is important, as the verse that follows this (Matthew 24:28) reads: ‘For wheresoeuer a deade carkeise is, thither will the Egles be gathered together.’ In the classic Protestant exegesis of this passage,  Calvin observes that this verse refers to the gathering of believers to Christ: ‘In my opinion Christ argued from the lesser to the greater. If the birds are so wise than many come together form distant regions over one corpse it would be shameful for the faithful not to be drawn to the Author of life, from whom alone they take true  nourishment.’89 Though it is clear that York is not directly invoking this biblical idea, it is nonetheless suggestive that in a passage filled with the idea of representational division between subject and object, those gathering to Richard are in fact the scavenging eagles, congregating in order to ultimately reduce him to a mere corpse from which they will derive their political ‘nourishment’. Richard seems to understand this point, drawing attention to his supposed irreducibility to the merely corporeal: ‘For well we know no hand of blood and bone/ Can gripe the sacred handle of our ­sceptre,/ Unless he do profane, steal or usurp’ (III.iii.79–81). In this respect, it is unsurprising that Richard should once more summon up apocalyptic threats against his adversaries: Yet know: my Master, God omnipotent, Is mustering in His clouds on our behalf Armies of pestilence, and they shall strike Your children, yet unborn and unbegot, That lift your vassal hands against my head And threat the glory of my precious crown. Tell Bolingbroke – for yon methinks he stands – That every stride he makes upon my land Is dangerous treason. He is come to open The purple testament of bleeding war; But ere the crown he looks for live in peace, Ten thousand bloody crowns of mother’s sons Shall ill become the flower of England’s face, Change complexion of her maid-pale peace To scarlet indignation, and bedew Her pastor’s grass with faithful English blood. (III.iii.85–100)

In terms of the first and second tetralogies, this is obviously an importantly proleptic speech. It is also significant that Richard’s apocalyptic threats revert to drawing largely upon Old Testament paradigms. Although the assertion that the ‘complexion’ of ‘England’s face’ will alter to ‘scarlet indignation’ may invoke the archetypal Whore of Babylon ‘arrayed in purple and scarlet’ (Revelation 17:4), Richard draws his apocalyptic imagery

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from the second book of Kings (II Kings 6:15; 19:35). This is noteworthy since neither of these passages were particularly understood to prefigure typologically either the coming of Christ or the second coming. Even Richard’s apocalyptic discourse is gradually becoming evacuated of any serious political purchase, located as it is at a temporal distance from any typological resonance that might give his words force, a realisation encapsulated in his lament: ‘Or that I could forget what I have been,/ Or not remember what I must be now!’ (III.iii.138–9).90 Richard finally relents and decides to submit himself to Bolingbroke’s authority. He does so in a speech with both fascinating and under­appreciated resonances: Down, down I come, like glist’ring Phaëton, Wanting the manage of unruly jades. In the base court? Base court where kings grow base To come at traitors’ calls and do them grace. In the base court? Come down? Down court, down king! For night-owls shriek where mounting larks should sing. (III.iii.178–83)

It is usually noted by critics that, in drawing from Ovid’s Metamorphoses for the story of Phaëton, son of Helios the sun God who stole his father’s chariot and was killed by Zeus, Shakespeare chose this image since, as Robert P.  Merrix puts it, Richard’s ‘assertions of divinity are frenzied attempts at self-euphemism – quite similar to Phaëton’s – which become even more frequent after his fall’.91 Like his mythical cousin, Richard threatens an apocalypse that, nonetheless, never quite materialises.92 However, there is a political resonance to this reference that has not been noted before. In a section in  Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos entitled ‘Subjects are the Kings Brethren, and not his slaves’, the author writes as follows: In what esteeme shall we hold that Prince which takes such pleasure in the massacring [of] his Subjects, (condemned without ever being heard) that he dispatched many thousands of them, in one day, & yet is not glutted with blood: Briefly who after the example of Caligula (surnamed the Phaeton of the world) wisheth that al his people had but one head that he might cut it off at one blow?93

The political association of Phaëton and Caligula is first made in a text that Shakespeare certainly knew,  Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars (c. 117­–­138 CE).94 But more  interesting than this, apart from condemning him for his tyranny and cruelty, many early modern writers specifically arraigned Caligula for his assumption that he was like a God. For example,  John Foxe writes that Caligula ‘commaunded himselfe to be worshipped as God’, Philip du Plessis  Mornay notes that ‘Caligula tooke vpon him to haue Altars erected

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and sacrifise offered vnto him’, and Richard  Rainolde observes that ‘This Caligula was the first Emperour that put on his head a Crowne or Diademe, and commaunded himselfe to be called Lord’.95 Both Caligula and Richard demand in various ways ‘to be called Lord’, but a superior political force ultimately halts both. Suetonius tells us that the day before Caligula’s death, ‘he dreamt that he was standing in the heavens next to Jupiter’s throne and that Jupiter pushed him with the big toe of his right foot so that he fell headlong to earth’.96 Like Phaëton and Caligula, Richard must ‘Come down’ to the ‘base earth’ (III.iii.191), while he enjoins Bolingboke in the opposite direction: ‘Up, cousin, up’ (III.iii.194). If Richard’s allusion to Phaëton can be read in these terms, then what we have is a powerful political elision of the Plantagenet king with the Roman tyrant, and one that implies a certain political reading. Caligula was deposed and replaced by Claudius Caesar. This is critical, for as Hadfield  notes, ‘Claudius, although not the most pernicious of Roman emperors, was nevertheless represented as brutal and conniving by both Tacitus and Suetonius.’97 And what followed Claudius was, of course, far worse, namely Nero and a host of other tyrannous or weak emperors. Read typologically alongside Richard II, this Roman narrative makes sense. The English political reality that both Richard and Bolingbroke give birth to is itself analogous to the Roman imperium following the death of Caligula, with figures such as Henry VI and Richard III on the horizon. As Patricia Parker has noted, Shakespeare’s history plays themselves follow a ‘pre-posterous’ logic, since the ‘events of the first tetralogy come chronologically later than events of the second’. Such a process goes beyond the remit of the play, working as it does against the implied narrative logic of Shakespeare’s chronicle sources. Parker continues as follows: The reversed chronological ordering of the two tetralogies – starting with a son, Henry VI and ending with the father, Henry V; moving from the triumphant telos of Richard III to the beginnings of the discordant history in Richard II – undercuts the sense in Hall, for example, of linearity leading towards a punctuating point, historical end or period.98

The sense of linear disruption identified here is central to the Roman allusions tied up in Richard’s self-identification as Phaëton. Bolingbroke is Claudius to Richard’s Caligula, and following the logic that we have already seen at work in the play, both are politically suspect figures yet ones whose place within the overall narrative of the Wars of the Roses need to be accounted for in what amounts to a form of historical and political prolepsis.

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The consequences of this typological reading develop as the king falls further. Before the deposition scene, the Bishop of Carlisle is appalled at Bolingbroke’s assertion that he will ‘ascend the regal throne’ (IV.i.114) and decides to confront the usurper directly. He states: Disorder, horror, fear and mutiny Shall here inhabit, and this land shall be called The field of Golgotha and dead men’s skulls. (IV.i.137–44)

The speech that these lines are situated in has often been read somewhat unproblematically as an  absolutist apologia for divine right kingship that prepares the ground for Richard’s  ritual decoronation as a debased Christ/King later in the scene. For example,  Kantorowicz observes: ‘it is the bishop who, as it were, prepares the Biblical climate by prophesying future horrors and foretelling England’s Golgotha . . . The bishop, for his bold speech, was promptly arrested; but into the atmosphere prepared by him there enters King  Richard.’99 Or as Margaret Loftus  Ranald argues: ‘before the actual abdication, or  deposition, scene begins, Shakespeare inserts the Bishop of Carlisle’s speech on the supremacy of kingly power, as a means of dictating the tone of the succeeding actions . . . the placing here implicitly questions the legality of the proceedings and sets up a correspondence between Richard and  Christ’.100 In both of these readings, Carlisle’s speech has a structural and symbolic necessity, not so much on its own terms but because it provides the audience with the required exegetical framework to make sense of Richard’s  Christological rhetoric elsewhere and throughout the deposition scene. However, this particular reading of Carlisle’s speech is problematic on two fronts. In the first place, it assumes that the only deposition scene in the play occurs in Act IV, scene 1. Yet, as Naomi Conn Liebler has pointed out, in the play: ‘There are actually two “deposition” scenes. The first is . . . at Flint Castle before Northumberland as Bolingbroke’s emissary. The second is . . . the formal deposition before  Parliament.’101 Certainly, both scenes are infused with Christological symbolism. So while to a certain degree Carlisle’s Golgotha speech contextualises for the audience Richard’s identification with Christ in the deposition scene in Act IV, it might equally serve to remind an audience of the way in which the King’s various Christological identifications that have preceded it have gradually been undermined. Secondly, and leading on from this, both  Kantorowicz and Ranald downplay the fact that the Golgotha section of the speech is not really about Richard at all. Certainly on one level Carlisle is ­projecting or, to use Kantorowicz’s term, ‘foretelling’ well beyond Richard’s deposition

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into the forthcoming reign of Bolingbroke. Nevertheless, the difficulty for Shakespeare’s audience is that they know that what Christ/Richard  and Pilate/Bolingbroke will bequeath to posterity is not a revivified political order, but instead the exposure of England to the bloody  vicissitudes  of absolutist monarchy and war. In order to explain this point further, it is necessary to set the Golgotha passage within its broader context. After stating ‘Would God that any in this noble presence/ Were enough noble to be upright judge/ Of noble Richard’ (IV.i.118–20), Carlisle goes on to say:     O, forfend it, God, That in a Christian climate souls refined Should show so heinous, black, obscene a deed. I speak to subjects, and a subject speaks, Stirred up by God, thus boldly for his king. My Lord of Hereford here, whom you call king, Is a foul traitor to proud Hereford’s king. And if you crown him, let me prophesy The blood of English shall manure the ground, And future ages groan for this foul act. Peace shall go sleep with Turks and infidels, And in this seat of peace tumultuous wars Shall kin and kind with kind confound. Disorder, horror, fear and mutiny Shall here inhabit, and this land shall be called The field of Golgotha and dead men’s skulls. (IV.i.137–44)

In the first place, we might note the unusual placing of the word ‘refined’ at the end of the second line. In the other two plays where Shakespeare uses this word, Love’s Labour’s Lost (c. 1594) and King John (c. 1595), ‘réfínéd’ is pronounced as a trisyllable, but in Carlisle’s line, the use of the disyllabic ‘clímáte’ as opposed to, say, the monosyllabic ‘lánd’, impels the actor to pronounce ‘réfíned’ as a disyllable too in order for the iambic pentameter to hold. ‘Climate’ is thus an odd word to use in this context: why not ‘land’ or ‘realm’? Metrically and syntactically it is somewhat out of place. The Bishop is not referring to the specific climactic features of England, but is rather constructing England as a geographically distinct ‘region of the earth’ (Oxford English Dictionary, Def. 1b). His locution deliberately positions England as a geographically remote space to be discoursed upon, in a way that reference to a ‘Christian land’ or ‘Christian realm’ would not similarly accomplish. This is further emphasised when usurpation is described as ‘black’. While this probably operates as a conventional synonym for ‘evil’, Ania

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Loomba’s  recent work has demonstrated that ‘the devil, the Saracens, and other enemies of Christianity were represented as black; so were Jews, allies of the feared Mongol emperors, or the Turks’.102 Indeed, this last association is explicitly made by Carlisle: ‘Peace shall go sleep with Turks and infidels.’ On one level this refers to the contemporary fear of a Christian ‘turning Turk’, but it also constructs Bolingbroke’s usurpation as a kind of reverse Turkish crusade where the ‘field of Golgotha’, located of course in the Holy Land, will be transferred to England. His assertion that ‘Disorder, horror, fear and mutiny/Shall here inhabit’ suggests that usurpation will go hand in hand with a kind of religious conversion. This is doubly significant because as Loomba writes, ‘Conversions of Jews and Muslims, it was believed, would catalyse Christianity’s ultimate triumph over all humanity’.103 Conversion, in other words, precedes the apocalypse, a point not lost on commentators on Revelation like George  Gifford. But what the Bishop describes is, of course, a reverse conversion, with Golgotha displaced to England as a marker of the political and religious ‘horror’ that the land has descended into. Carlisle’s vision of England’s reverse conversion also makes clear the preposterous nature of his Golgotha reference. After all, Golgotha is the place where Christ sacrifices himself for the sins of man. Theologically, exegetically and typologically, this can only be understood as a singular, unique event, one that cannot be repeated.104 It obeys the narrative teleology set out in the Athanasian Creed, familiar to all early modern Christians from the state-endorsed Prayer Book: I believe in God the father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth: And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, Born of the Virgin Mary, Suffered under Pontius Pilate, Was crucified, dead, and buried, He descended into hell; The third day he rose again from the dead, He ascended into heaven, And sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.105

So if Golgotha can only happen once, the only second coming that England can look forward to is that of civil strife and war. Richard/Christ has been displaced and, unlike in the Christian narrative, he/He will not come again. Once more, we see how apocalyptic discourse has lost its purchase, not only for Richard but for his followers too. This is reflected in Richard’s words before the deposition:    Yet well I remember The favours of these men. Were they not mine? Did they not sometime cry ‘All hail’ to me?

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So Judas did to Christ, but He in twelve Found truth in all but one; I, in twelve thousand, none. God save the King! Will no man say ‘Amen’? Am I both priest and clerk? Well then, Amen. God save the King, although I be not he, And yet Amen, if heaven do think him me. (IV.i.168–76)

Richard’s invocation of Judas’ betrayal refers to the initiator of yet another morally questionable murder that nonetheless is structurally necessary within the narrative framework of Christian eschatology. More subtly, Richard also invokes theological discourse in this speech. When he calls himself a king and a priest, he is drawing upon part of a distinction concerning Christ’s offices that can be traced back at least to Thomas Aquinas, but that is also central to Reformed theology. As  Calvin explains, ‘the office enjoined upon Christ by the Father consists of three parts. For he was given to be prophet, king, and priest’.106 It is critical that Richard does not lay claim to Christ’s office as prophet, or if he does, it is as a form of bathos. He realises that the eschatological promise that underpinned his earlier uses of apocalypse is an empty one. Where Calvin writes of Christ that ‘the perfect doctrine he has brought has made an end to all prophecies’,107 all that is left for Richard is to herald the dispensation of a new king via bathetic and, as we know, inaccurate prophecy: ‘“God save King Henry”, unkinged Richard says,/ “And send him many years of sunshine days!”’ (IV.i.220–1). When the former king states that his ‘substance’ now consists of an ‘unseen grief/ That swells with silence in the tortured soul’ (IV.i.297–8), we see that Richard’s subjectivity is no longer predicated upon Christological imitation but upon an inner representation that, paradoxically, is unrepresentable. When at the end of the deposition scene Aumerle bluntly asks ‘You holy clergymen, is there no plot/ To rid the realm of this pernicious blot?’ (IV.i.324–5) and the Abbot recommends that King Henry ‘take the sacrament’ (IV.i.328), the audience understand that while the  sacral status of this new kingship is still important, it is now much more blatantly tied to political expediency. Therefore, when Christological discourse is invoked after the deposition and in the final act, it is very much in terms of the political tumult that the audience know is to come. For example when Northumberland, who Richard calls a ‘ladder wherewithal/ The mounting Bolingbroke ascends my throne’ (V.i.55–6), comes to part Richard from his Queen, Northumberland says: ‘My guilt be on my head, and there an end’ (V.i.69). As the  Arden editor notes, this is an allusion to Matthew 27:25, and refers to the so called

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‘blood curse’ of the Jews who are implicated in Jesus’ crucifixion.  Calvin make clear in his ­reading of the passage a similar exegetical line to the one that we have seen in play throughout this chapter: for Calvin the Jews’ culpability must be acknowledged, yet it must also be incorporated within the broader narrative framework: As God would never have allowed this voice of cursing to have left the people’s lips unless their impiety were already desperate, so justly in after time did He avenge it, with fearful and unparalleled means: yet, in a wonder beyond belief, He left Himself some remnant, lest His covenant should be extinguished by the ruin of the whole race.108

Yet another murder: yet another politically expedient justification. In terms of the typological paradigms invoked throughout this play, this is just the latest in a long line, one that anticipates the Wars of the Roses that will follow. A ‘remnant’ will undoubtedly emerge after this in the form of the Tudor dynasty but as we have seen, this will be a deeply compromised, politically haunted ‘race’. As for Richard, he retreats into a comforting, if futile, world of Christologically inspired parables: ‘Come, little ones’ (V.v.14) and ‘It is as hard to come as for a camel/ To thread the postern of a small needle’s eye’. (V.v.16–17). He becomes subject to the exigencies of unfettered representation without a locus, stating ‘Thus play I in one person many people,/ And none contented’ (V.v.31–2). When he dies, his invocation ‘Mount, mount, my soul! Thy seat is up on high,/ Whilst my gross flesh sinks downward here to die’ (V.v.111–12) is significant. It is predicated upon a division that we know to be  Pauline in origin. However, the king’s splitting at the moment of his death derives ultimately from his exposure to the political uses to which his enemies have ruthlessly put those dualisms. Indeed, this dualism is immediately used in the service of a breathtaking piece of hypocritical real politick on the part of the new king. Learning in the next scene of Richard’s death, Henry says to the murderer Exton: They love not poison that do poison need, Nor do I thee. Though I did wish him dead, I hate the murderer, love him murdered. (V.vi.38–40)

Here, finally, we get a direct expression of the expedient ethics that have governed the politics of this play throughout.  Abel, Remus, Christ and Richard: in each case, the phrase ‘I hate the murderer, love him murdered’ is shockingly apt. More broadly, it reveals the ideological determinations that always underpin monarchical government.

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It is therefore no mistake that Henry should banish Exton in the f­ ollowing terms: ‘With Cain go wander through shades of night,/ And never show thy head by day nor light’ (V.vi.43–4). The same man who in Act I had spoken on behalf of Cain’s victim now finds himself in Cain’s own position. But rather than expiating the crime, he disperses the sacrificial guilt onto  another. While this action may effect a temporary relief, as we saw with Richard and as the audience will see in Henry IV 1 & 2, the long-term effects of the  sacral inability to atone for  blood spilt will be politically apocalyptic: ‘my soul is full of woe/ That blood should sprinkle me to make me grow’ (V.vi.45–6). The final action of the play also brings us back to apocalypse, but in a slightly different way. Henry states: ‘I’ll make a voyage to the Holy Land/ To wash this blood off from my guilty hand’ (V.vi.49–50). The image of washing blood from the hands reminds us of Pilate, and we are thus free to consider the precariousness of the new  king’s sacral  status. Moreover, the fact that Henry never actually makes it to the Holy Land demonstrates, if demonstration were needed, that the apocalyptic typology of the first and second tetralogy is focused firmly on ‘This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England’ (II.i.50). It is not the second coming of a Christ or even the possibility of a republic that Richard II vouchsafes. Rather, it is the early modern lived reality of ideologically constituted and politically riven monarchical governance. In a strange way, this last point also brings us back to the fate of  Essex and to one final piece of political typology. In a letter written a week before the Earl’s execution on 25 February 1601, a contemporary noted the following: Order was taken the Sunday following that the preachers at Paul’s cross and other churches in London should deliver the same matters from the pulpit, and decry the Earl as a hypocrite, Papist, and confederate with the Pope and King of Spain, to make him King and bring in idolatry. But as is usual in such cases, they, from malice or desire to please, amplified it beyond all probability. On the one side they cry “Crucify”; on the other there is such a jealousy of light and bad fellows that it is rumoured the preachers of London will rise and deliver him out of  the Tower.109

Though Christologically inspired dualism could fuel radical political thinking, its adherents too often forgot that Rome came down squarely on the side of Barabbas.

chapter 8

Mimesis, resistance and iconoclasm: resituating The Revenger’s Tragedy

I must sit to be killed, and stand to kill myself.

(The Revenger’s Tragedy)

I Throughout this book I have explored the problems that arise in Protestant discourse when a  figuratively constructed object comes to constitute the subject. I have also asked whether that object might ‘stand in for’ a gap between the subject and object of perception or in fact represent the ­‘reality’ of that  perception. In this chapter, and drawing upon the work done so far, I aim to pursue this issue further in relation to Thomas Middleton’s play The Revenger’s Tragedy (c. 1606). So although this chapter (and this play) does not focus specifically on Christ or Christological models, my previous ­explication of these is implicit in what follows. In  a seminal article first published in 1980 on The Revenger’s Tragedy, Jonathan  Dollimore argues that the philosophical distinction between  ­metaphysical transcendence and immanence is crucial for any ­understanding of early modern literary theory and drama. I have examined how this tension operates in Christological Protestantism and how it was manifested in the broader cultural arena. However, Dollimore situates his discussion of  mimetic theory in the ­sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in terms of a much older structural tension between ­competing Platonic and Aristotelian categories. As he observes: ‘The distinction between the metaphysical reality which is transcendent, and that which is immanent, remains at the centre of Western theology and philosophy, especially in the period under discussion.’1 Inspired by both humanism and Reformed theology, early modern English thinkers were, essentially, putting a contemporary spin on what was an ancient Greek problem. To this end, and drawing on the work of Philip  Sidney, Fulke Greville and Francis Bacon amongst others, Dollimore argues persuasively for a conflict during the 200

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period between what he calls  ‘idealist mimesis versus empiricist mimesis’.2 In terms of early modern dramatic practice, he sees this conflict as being especially pertinent. For example, by looking at the ways in which The Revenger’s Tragedy deals with the question of mimesis, Dollimore argues that the play both subverts and  parodies idealist mimesis (associated  with providential discourse), while at the same time finding no comfort in an emergent empiricist account of ‘reality’. Put plainly: in the play ‘there is no ideal metaphysical order, transcendent, or immanent’.3 Dollimore’s argument, expressed both in this article and, more widely, in his book Radical Tragedy has proved both influential and ­persuasive. More broadly, it offers an account of early modern conceptions of mimesis that leads to a memorable characterisation of the ‘sensibility’ of the age as ‘that of a subversive black  camp’.4 But, attractive as such a ­reading might be, I think that there is also an inherent danger of overplaying the ­decadent, self-conscious  artificiality of a play like The Revenger’s Tragedy. In large part, this is achieved by correspondingly underplaying the ­explicit ­political  violence that structures both this play and the genre more ­generally.5 Whatever else happens in a revenge tragedy, the secular figure of  authority, whether it is a king, Prince or Duke, is nearly always the focus for violent attack, and more often than not is killed. In dealing with this radical political act, and also with the bloodbath that generally ensues, to a degree it makes sense to say that this excess must become a self-conscious parody: how else might the eight dead bodies that litter the stage at the end of a play such as The Revenger’s Tragedy be explained? The older critical alternative, which understood the dramatic and narrative thrust of plays in terms of a traditional affirmation of ‘order’ and political status quo, scarcely seems credible today. Like most other revenge tragedies of the period, the structural ­teleology of the genre is fuelled by a violent interrogation of various forms  of ­absolutism. This particular connection has been explored by a number of critics.6 One of the most important of these, Franco  Moretti, finds that the examination of absolutism in Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy can be aligned with the creation of a ‘public’ that ‘assumed the right to bring a king to justice’.7 He goes on to argue that the genre itself: ‘disentitled the absolute  monarch to all ethical and rational legitimation. Having deconsecrated the king, tragedy made it possible to decapitate  him.’8 From a ­historical perspective, absolutism is understood as a process giving way to the ‘deconsecration of sovereignty’, a shift that, in itself, also seems to imply what might be called an anticipatory political logic. Radical ­political ­discourse is part of a telos that achieves its apogee in 1649. By

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this stage, early modern society was not prepared to accept Charles I’s ­absolutist assertions that he was God’s representative on earth, nor the metaphysical assumptions that structured such assertions. For Moretti, it is not so much the institutions of absolutism that this drama exposes: rather, it is ‘its ­culture, its values, its ideology’.9 The reasons behind this claim impacts upon the symbolic capital of absolutism. To quote in full a passage ­mentioned in the previous chapter: Here the legitimacy of social power derives from a form of divine investiture. Power is founded in a transcendent design, in an intentional and significant order. Accordingly, political relations have the right to exist only in so far as they reproduce that order symbolically . . . Sovereignty is a power that, having its origin in itself, is thereby released from any control; it is ‘self determined’, as  Hegel will say. Sovereignty is a universal power, reaching and defining every part of the  body politic, whose destiny is therefore enveloped within it.10

In the plays that Moretti examines like Gorboduc, King Lear, Measure for Measure, Macbeth and Hamlet, the legitimacy of this ­transcendent ­sovereignty is devastatingly undermined. As he summarises: ‘Fully ­realized tragedy is the parable of the sovereign inserted in a context that can no longer understand it. It is a text that lacks an adequate interpretative function and in which the final “judgement” must be enormously poorer than that on which it is passed.’11 In contradistinction to Dollimore’s selfreflexive reading of the genre, Moretti sees tragedy in anticipatory terms, containing a radical potentiality that it cannot quite account for yet. In viewing tragedy as anticipating a secular political moment that deconsecrates the sovereign as alter Christus, paradoxically tragedy is collapsed into a transcendent reflection of a politically inevitable/desirable reality, albeit one understood from the historically retrospective viewpoint of the critic. Such a view clearly has implications for any understanding of mimesis: a shift from mimesis as  ‘parodic reflection of reality’ to mimesis as ­‘anticipation of a desired reality’, perhaps? If the work of Jonathan Dollimore and Franco Moretti offers ­competing views of early modern theatrical mimesis as irreducibly ­parodic or ­irredeemably anticipatory, in this chapter I want to argue for a reading of mimesis that builds on this work but which also departs from it. I suggest that it is possible to combine Dollimore’s focus on the fraught ­connection between  immanence and transcendence with Moretti’s interrogation of absolutist political forms. But I want to suggest a different t­ heoretical endpoint for this combination. Rather than finishing in ­parody or ­anticipating future realities, I argue that the endpoint of the kind of early modern representative practices examined here is violent mimetic  iconoclasm.

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Furthermore, this is an iconoclasm that finds expression in the theatre because the roots of early modern debates surrounding both absolutism and iconoclasm foreground the deeply contested mimetic status of signs. As I will show, many important strands of early modern political theory that dealt with questions of absolutism and rebellion consistently fall back on a mimetic conception of kingship and authority that pivots between notions of immanence and transcendence. The fact is that revenge tragedy ­re-emerges in England during the latter part of the sixteenth century, a time when many early modern political thinkers were deeply engaged in debating the mimetic and political function of the literal body of authority, the secular ruler.12 Put simply, if the secular ruler was God’s representative on earth, and if that secular ruler was attacked, was the assault not also an explicit attack upon God? To answer in the affirmative in this instance, as many in the period did, would appear to reinstate the mimetic distinction between the immanent and the transcendent that Dollimore seeks to problematise. Linking the secular body of the king with the ­divine body of God implies  a mimesis of transcendence.  Alternatively, to insist on the distinction, as another group of early modern thinkers maintained, would seem to deny the possibility of mimesis altogether. If the king has no ­connection with the divine then what exactly does a king signify? Building upon the work done in chapters one, two and seven, this chapter will argue that this constitutive tension leads to iconoclasm, and that the mimetic practice of early modern revenge tragedy can be understood as theatrical iconoclasm in practice. By examining early modern political discourse and the ways it conceives of the relationship between figures like the king, the father and the son, I end by offering a reading, via Shakespeare’s Hamlet, of The Revenger’s Tragedy in the light of these observations. II For  many years, political theorists have been debating the emergence of theories of resistance against tyrannical rulers during the Reformation.13 For some scholars, resistance theory is  Lutheran in inspiration and ­development. Others have pointed to  Calvinist groups such as the French Huguenots as the real progenitors of political resistance. Perhaps the most influential example of the former view is found in Quentin  Skinner’s study, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Here, Skinner argues that when it comes to judging the origins of political resistance during the Reformation, we should look not to the work of John Calvin but to that of Martin Luther. Specifically he argues that as they developed a ­number

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of Luther’s political insights, Lutherans such as Philip Melancthon, Justus Jonas, Gregory Brück, and texts such as the famous Magdeburg Confession of 1550, initiated a politically radical Reformism and specifically a defence of religious resistance.14 As Skinner notes, ‘By contrast with the Calvinists, the Lutherans found little difficulty in defending the idea of active resistance to their lawful overlord’.15 It is certainly true that there were many Lutheran thinkers who actively supported this kind of resistance by developing aspects in the work of medieval thinkers such  as William of Ockham and  Marsilius of Padua. In the case of the ­famous Magdeburg Confession, for example, the Lutheran pastors of that city went so far as to direct their resistance against the Emperor himself, Charles V. Skinner’s views have proved to be significant to the extent that they have instituted a certain reluctance to see  Calvinism as politically ­radical at all. Understood in this way, Calvinism is often viewed as a ­politically quiescent movement. However, there is a body of scholarly opinion that disagrees with the Skinner line on this issue. In the work of Carlos  Eire, Christopher  Elwood and Ralph  Hancock, it is Calvinism, not Lutheranism, which provides the political engine of resistance theory. For these ­scholars, one crucial point divides Lutherans from Calvinists over the question of ­rebellion.16 Moreover, this is also the point that  Skinner underplays. Crucially, as Eire argues, in terms of political structures, ‘The Lutherans never broke completely with the older notion of all power being divinely  ordained’.17 In other words,  the office and the ­person of the ­secular ruler are inseparable because the authority upon which the ­legitimacy of both rests is God given. As Luther stated in 1523, ‘If the ­governing ­authority and its sword are a divine service . . . then everything that is ­essential for the ­authority’s bearing of the sword must also be divine service’.18 Therefore, according to this  absolutist logic, any attack on the secular ­authority is ultimately an assault upon God. This may not seem like much of a ­distinction when thinking about questions of rebellion. But it was to prove ­absolutely crucial in the context of sixteenth-century ­theology and ­politics. Indeed, what makes Calvinist theory in this respect so distinctive and so suggestive is that Calvinist thinkers did insist ­precisely upon the metaphysical division of office and person that a Lutheran standpoint would not allow. Yet this division is far from straightforward and is in fact replete with political difficulty. According to the logic of those Calvinists writing on resistance, ­dividing the office and person as conceptual categories makes it both possible and permissible to attack the corrupt person while still maintaining the integrity of the office.19 In one respect, this appears to be a logical extension of

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Calvinist metaphysics. We have noted the ways in which Calvinism insists upon the division between man and God by contrasting the ­transcendent magnificence of the deity with abject, fallen, immanent  humanity.20 Understood in this way, resistance theorists such as John  Knox, Theodore Beza, Pierre Viret, Peter Martyr, Philippe  du Plessis-Mornay, Hubert Languet, François Hotman, George  Buchanan, Christopher Goodman and John Ponet cannot be seen either as cranks or as crypto-Lutherans.21 Although they undoubtedly drew upon Lutheran ideas and writings, they might also be said to represent a very distinct development of certain theoretical precepts in the thought of John  Calvin himself. Calvin may not have been a political radical, but, similar to his doctrine of the atonement, that did not stop his followers from ­developing the radical implications of his thought, in this case his conception of ­political  ­resistance.22 Indeed, in developing theories of resistance against tyrants, these thinkers also pressed the distinction between person and office to breaking point. To put it slightly differently, it is not just in the work of the Classical ­republican theorists and certain Italian ­humanists that it is possible to find the development of what Robert  Weimann has called ‘an intense and quite revolutionary principle of legitimation, in which the dualism of subject and object was religiously, ethically, and philosophically sanctioned’.23 The distinctions that it made may have been fine ones, but Calvinist resistance theory was a political movement in its own right. Indeed, one of the prime reasons that Queen  Elizabeth I viewed Calvinism with such caution was the connection that she made early in her reign between Calvinism  and resistance.24 It is certainly the case that the ideas of these Calvinists were known in early modern England, particularly amongst the  Sidney circle, as David  Norbrook has shown.25 And Alan Sinfield has persuasively read  Shakespeare’s Macbeth in the light of George Buchanan’s writings on monarchical tyranny and rebellion.26 More prosaically, it was possible during the reigns of Elizabeth and James to find a defence of rebellion in the marginal notes of the popular  Geneva Bible, notes that emanated from the Reformed English and Scottish diaspora who fled to the continent during the reign of Mary Tudor, and who included men such as Ponet, Knox and Goodman. Mary’s reign was also the catalyst for perhaps the most notorious ­resistance tract of the period, John  Knox’s The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558). It is most commonly the ­misogyny of this text that garners scholarly comment. But of equal ­importance are the political arguments Knox uses, both here and elsewhere, to justify rebellion. As he apparently said to Mary, Queen of Scots

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when discussing this tract with her, if princes ‘exceed their bounds’, then ‘they may be resisted, even by power’.27 This is contentious enough, but consider the reasoning behind this assertion. Knox says: ‘God craves of Kings that they be, as it were, foster-fathers to His church’ because, as he puts it, ‘this subjection . . . is the greatest dignity that flesh can get upon the face of the earth’.28 Whether this amounts to a Calvinist distinction between  office and person or not is a moot point. What is noticeable is that the ruler is a ‘foster-father’, a substitute figure of authority, not one who shares a direct bloodline with his ‘sons’. Emphasising the distance, slight though it may be, between secular ruler and the divine makes an attack upon that ruler more palatable. This kind of logic is further explained by John  Ponet who writes as ­follows in A Shorte Treatise of politike power (1556): ‘for as much as ther is no ­exprese positiue lawe for punishment of a Tyranne among christen men, the question is, whether it be laufull [sic] to kill such a monster and ­cruell beast couered with the shape of a man.’29 For Ponet, the tyrannous ruler is an unlawful image, ‘couered with the shape of a man’, who must be destroyed. Of course, all political writing during this period makes ­metaphorical connections between the secular ruler and the divine. But the point is that resistance theorists of whatever religious persuasion ­foreground this metaphorical inheritance as a justification for rebellion. Ponet and Knox do not say, as  James VI & I does in his Basilicon Doron (1599–1603), that a  king is made ‘a little GOD to sit on his Throne, and rule ouer other men’.30 Whereas the justification of absolutist forms relies upon the ­political synthesis provided by metaphorical formulations  such as King James’, resistance theorists are much more likely, explicitly or implicitly, to fall back on the political disjunction afforded by figurative discourse: the king is like, as opposed to the king is. Again, this separation may seem like so much quibbling and not really a substantive political difference. Yet Ponet and Knox’s ­suggestive texts point towards the possibility that the ‘foster-father’ and the ‘cruell beast’ are essentially parasitic upon the ­absolute  authority of the divine father.  If the king is only like, then it is equally only a short conceptual leap to stating that the king is unlike. His authority, such as it is, is achieved not through direct divine ordination as it is for James, but through a strange form of secular mimesis. By saying that the  office and person of the secular ruler are in fact distinct entities, resistance theorists like Ponet and Knox seem to be edging towards a form of conceptual  Nominalism whereby the perceptual and linguistic gap between the corrupt world of fallen signs and the ever distant realm of metaphysical referentiality is insisted upon to such a

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degree that the one can draw no authority from the  other. If the ­secular ruler can draw no ­direct authority from the transcendent status of his office, then it would seem to follow that God no longer ratifies the immanent realm of human politics: in the place of divine ratification, the image and mimetic imitation. For a religion that made much of Catholicism’s supposed idolatry of the sign, this conclusion is problematic, if hardly surprising. It is significant that many resistance theorists associated resistance to tyrants with the act of preaching  Christ crucified: Christ was the ultimate freedom fighter, a political rebel who embodied radical action.31 Indeed, it is possible to make an even more startling link. Whether the attack was upon the idolatrous statue or the corrupt tyrant, the logic behind that attack was essentially the same. As Carlos  Eire has noted, ‘It can be argued . . . that by consistently urging the people to hate idolatrous worship and abstain from it,  Calvin was implicitly advising civil disobedience.’32 The status of the image was about more than abstract theory: in the case of resistance theory and iconoclasm, questions of mimesis were explicitly questions of political authority. Michael  O’Connell has argued that iconoclasm emerges from ‘a clash between religious systems, one based on  an incarnational ­structure of ­religious understanding and the other resting on the ­logocentric assumptions of early modern humanism empowered by print culture’.33 Protestantism was no different from any other form of orthodox Christianity in stressing the importance of the incarnation, the doctrine that God became man in order to save mankind. Nevertheless, as has been shown, the problem for the Reformers was that this doctrine is singularly ill suited to a purely logocentric or mimetic exposition. It might be useful here to remind ourselves of what John Calvin has to say on the idolatrous impulse: ‘Daily experience teaches that flesh is always uneasy until it has obtained some figment like itself in which it may fondly find solace as in an image of God.’34 As with the earlier quotation from Knox, we notice the inheritance of the  immanent flesh being foregrounded in favour of the transcendent  spirit.35 But it is also interesting to note that the separation of flesh from spirit is the basis upon which idolatry can be avoided. Still,  Calvin cannot completely disavow the mimetic. As he goes on: ‘only those things are to be sculptured or painted which the eyes are capable of ­seeing: let not God’s majesty, which is far above the perceptions of the eyes, be debased through unseemly representations’.36 Even Calvin seems to accept that imitation and  metaphor are unavoidable. How else can fallen ­humankind signify, either visually or verbally, without falling back in some way upon the figurative, which is always potentially idolatrous? As O’Connell observes, the incarnation implies ‘the

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belief that God, in taking on a human form, became subject to representation as an image’.37 As with resistance theory, iconoclasm demonstrates a constitutive tension between doctrine and practice, between the word and the representational expression that it implies, between immanence and transcendence. Pursuing this strand of Protestantism to its logical conclusion, there is a separation of word from thing, flesh from spirit, office from person, a separation that also implies a negation of the mimetic. In a sense, then, iconoclasm offers Protestantism a default position from the difficulties of the mimetic. So if  Lutheranism instituted a political and theological realignment of the human subject in relation to both divine and secular authority, Calvinism went further by foregrounding that distinction at the level of the sign. In terms of both iconoclasm and political theory, this shift also raised the possibility that the fallen world is constructed of nothing more than images and that mimesis is nothing more than a desperate attempt to reinstate some kind of metaphysical connection between divine and human. For example, in Book 4 of  Vindiciae contra Tyrannos, which was published in England in 1588, the year of the Armada, the author noted that ‘we should cut short any prince, inuading the kingdome of Christ, any tyrant afflicting his own people, any king throwing downe the props and stayes of his common wealth’.38 The reference to the kingdom of Christ is quite deliberate. By aligning the rule of the king with the kingdom of Christ, the Father necessarily slides further away from the realm of man. Against a backdrop of absolutist political ideology, resistance theory looks to divide office and person, thereby seeking to justify rebellion against the Father.39 Nevertheless, to kill a king is to commit resolutely and ­violently to the frailty of the flesh. To put it another way, this justification of regicide implicitly relies upon the ideological import of iconoclasm: the two cannot be seen in isolation. Moreover, in the context of the cultural dislocation between image and word engendered by the Reformation, it is noticeable that this iconoclastic impulse should foreground the constitutive status of both  Father and son as iconoclastic signs. No matter how hard it tries, Reformed religion always falls back upon the image, and therefore upon a mimetic understanding of the world caught between immanence and transcendence.40 Commenting  in the Institutes on the part of the second commandment that refers to visiting ‘the iniquity of the fathers upon the children’, Calvin observes: it is to be understood that the Lord’s righteous curse weighs not only upon the wicked man’s head but also upon his whole family. Where the curse lies, what else can be expected but that the father, shorn of the Spirit of God, will live most ­disgracefully? Or that the son, forsaken by the Lord on account of the father’s

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iniquity, will follow the same ruinous path? Finally, that the grandson and greatgrandson, the accursed offspring of detestable men, will rush headlong after them?41

For Calvin, lineage, especially patriarchal lineage, is to be understood as a curse. The law of the ever-distant Father is, he says, ‘no brief and ­simple revenge, but one that will extend to the children, the grandchildren, and the great-grandchildren, who obviously become imitators of their father’s impiety’.42 According to Calvin, the subject is caught between the trauma of a law that he is forced to imitate and the reality that this curse ­perpetuates an iconoclastic chain of imperfect  signification.43 As with the other Protestant theologians examined here, Calvin restates the tension between logocentric inheritance and the imperfection of signs in terms of the individual subject’s relation to an authoritative  Father  figure. But ­perhaps the most interesting fact of all is that Calvin returns us to the imperative towards revenge. As I have mentioned, the rise of reformed religion and the development of  revenge tragedy are virtually synonymous in early modern England. Nearly all of these plays deal with the deposition or murder of a ­tyrannous figure and many of them, including  The Revenger’s Tragedy, display modes of signification that are often violently iconoclastic. So in what follows, I want to argue for an iconoclastic reading of The Revenger’s Tragedy, one that foregrounds the profoundly unsettled nature of Reformed signs, both ­verbal and mimetic. It is not that the play ends in  parody or that it necessarily anticipates future political systems. Rather, it demonstrates once more that at the level of epistemology, the subject and the object of discourse are structurally distinct, implying a potential connection; but at the level of ontology, they must always remain separate and can never be connected. The development across early modern Europe of theories of ­political resistance to tyrannous rulers goes hand in hand with a metaphysical reordering of the relationship between the divine, the ruler and the ­subject. By suggesting that the bad ruler is only ever a bad copy of the divine, or what John  Ponet sceptically calls ‘images of God here in earthe’,44 the way is opened for thinkers to examine in more detail the extent to which political authority can ever be metaphysically sanctioned. By examining The Revenger’s Tragedy via Hamlet, focusing on the literary and political status of the Father and the son, I aim to show how the mimetic inheritance of Reformed theology might be manifested in the play’s violent  iconoclasm. To this end, André  Green’s observation on the sacred and the tragic is apposite. He says the following: One cannot forget that the sacred, which is the implicit aim of the tragic, is not . . . a primary reference, or an ultimate one . . . but is itself the memory, the recall of an act that it commemorates, the murder of the primal father. The sacred as

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the fundamental expression of the religious is inseparable from the prohibition that establishes a particular category of objects to which sexual reverence is due because in them the presence of the dead man is signified. The dead man is given once more the power that death took away, a power to which homage must be paid in order to obviate any possible hostile act of revenge on his part.45

This is not to suggest that there is some kind of sublimated religious ­discourse in operation in The Revenger’s Tragedy. It is to suggest, though, that the play, with its deeply uneasy juxtaposition of images and words, offers an interesting comment on the challenges presented by Reformed semiotics. All language, verbal or visual, carries a political charge ­during the period, because, as one  scholar has put it, ‘Symbols . . . create social worlds and regulate communal life’.46 It is only by understanding these Reformed symbols in their political and mimetic contexts that we can recover a sense of the political authority invested in them. Or rather, only by understanding the failure of these systems can we recover a sense of the political fragility that the revenge genre explores. III In Hamlet  the audience has to wait until Act V of the drama to get a glimpse at the  skull beneath the skin; but in The Revenger’s Tragedy the skull is unapologetically revealed to the audience as the play begins. This is just the first of a number of well-known and self-conscious ­borrowings from Hamlet in the later play.47 But unlike in Hamlet where the sight of Yorick’s bones leads the prince into a philosophical disquisition on ­mutability, the presence of the skull at the start of The Revenger’s Tragedy is part of a ­complex strategy of memorialisation that self-consciously reflects the practices of the earlier play, but which also radically ­reinterprets those  practices. Just as Hamlet has rightly been seen as the progenitor of The Revenger’s Tragedy, so Hamlet retains its own shadowy begetter in the shape of the text known as the  Ur-Hamlet, an earlier ­version of William Shakespeare’s great tragedy.48 The exact status and authorship of this ­Ur-text are of secondary importance. What is relevant, however, is the structural function of the relationship between the Ur-Hamlet, Hamlet and The Revenger’s Tragedy. It might be possible to view this bond as a  ­familial triad: the Ur-Hamlet as ghostly ‘father’ of Hamlet and The Revenger’s Tragedy as offspring of Shakespeare’s play. Since the latter two plays are indebted to their predecessor, they are also forced to acknowledge their parentage, their dramatic lineage, through similarities of language, theme and  plot. However, the two later texts signify in their own right

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and as such also evince a strenuous textual and thematic attempt to grapple with this lineage, to rewrite the story that they were bequeathed. This tension between  memorialisation and generation is crucial in both Hamlet and The Revenger’s Tragedy. Significantly, it manifests itself at a structural level in terms of a familial triad that mirrors or imitates the relationship between the texts described above. For example, in Hamlet this group consists of Old Hamlet, Hamlet and Claudius. Interestingly, the Ghost’s injunction to Hamlet, ‘Remember me’ (I.v.91), only serves to ­highlight the contested nature of this masculine triad.49 In the first place, it is only by hearing the Ghost’s story that Hamlet (and the audience) understands that what has come to pass since his father’s death is essentially a false narrative that goes against the ‘normal’ narrative of monarchical succession. Claudius should not be where he in fact is. For this ­reason the Ghost’s tale runs against the political and narrative thrust of the play itself. It is a retrospectively recounted story that, until he acts upon it, only really ­signifies in Hamlet’s  memory.50 The prince says that he will ‘wipe away all trivial fond records’ from ‘the table of my memory’ and that the Ghost’s ‘commandment all alone shall live/ Within the book and volume of my brain,/ Unmix’d with baser matter’ (I.v.98–104). But until he translates memory into the signifying realm of action, Hamlet is unable to generate a ­narrative that will counter Claudius’. The false father will continue to dominate and the ghostly father  will  remain dismembered. Largely because it builds upon Hamlet’s foundational presentation of these issues,  there is arguably no play that takes these concerns further during the period than The Revenger’s Tragedy. As it opens, the audience is presented with three separate yet interrelated ‘bodies’: Vindice, the  skull of his dead lover Gloriana and the ruling body. Vindice desires revenge on the Duke for poisoning Gloriana: Duke; royal lecher; go, grey-hair’d adultery; And thou his son, as impious steep’d as he; And thou his bastard, true-begot in evil; And thou his duchess, that will do with devil:   Four excellent characters. (I.i.1–5)

This complex representation, drawing as it does on the Vice tradition of medieval drama and the discourse of memento mori so central to late medieval and early modern traditions, situates Vindice at the very outset as both a part of the world he describes and as a metadramatic ­malcontent who attempts to locate himself outside this realm in order to comment upon it.

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This distinction (if that is what it is) will become more and more critical as the play progresses, but at this stage Vindice’s ­primary objective is to pass sardonic judgement on the body politic. And ‘body’ is the key word here. An early modern audience familiar with the official church homilies would also have been familiar with one of the most ­ubiquitous political metaphors of the Tudor and Stuart ideological machine, which stated that ‘the whole body of every realm, and all the members and parts of the same, shall be subject to their head, their king’.51 But what the ­audience are ­presented with at the beginning of the play is a ­representation that, in a similar way to resistance theory, undermines this popular ­political metaphor. Furthermore, in Vindice the audience have a counter-­ideological propagandist who destabilises the essentialist rhetoric ­implicit in this metaphor. If the body is shown to be politically unstable then so, it ­follows, are the ‘characters’ that inhabit those bodies. Moreover, if ­‘character’ is shown not to be an essence then the body becomes a ­signifier that may have various contingent political meanings written upon it. Vindice desires vengeance on the Duke for poisoning his lover Gloriana52 and for destroying his father. As the play begins, Vindice enters, ­carrying the skull of Gloriana. The early modern emblem of death par excellence, the iconography of the skull seems fairly straightforward. Yet it is worth remembering that death is what we commonly expect at the end of a revenge tragedy. Unlike Hamlet who enters with the memory of his dead father and who ruminates on the skull in the final act of the play, Vindice actualises  memory, making death a shockingly present iconic image from the outset. It seems that revenge is not a position to be worked towards so much as an element more pervasively constitutive of this ­culture.53 Interestingly, this realisation is strikingly paralleled in Alex  Cox’s 2002 film version of the play, which opens with Christopher Eccleston’s Vindice emerging from a bus full of corpses, and then paying a visit to the local charnel house to collect Gloriana’s skull. By starting with the carnage that should properly conclude any self-respecting revenge tragedy, the film reminds us that this play’s tragic practice is anything but  straightforward. Developing his theme, Vindice says this of the Duke:   O, that marrowless age Would stuff the hollow bones with damn’d desires, And ‘stead of heat, kindle infernal fires Within the spendthrift veins of a dry duke, A parch’d and juiceless luxur. Oh God! – one That has scarce blood enough to live upon, And he to riot it like a son and heir? (I.i.5–11)

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The physical decrepitude of the Duke is particularly noticeable, but even though he has ‘scarce blood enough to live upon’, he is still able to ‘riot it like a son and heir’. This more than anything else seems to be what rankles with Vindice. As he continues: ‘O, the thought of that/ Turns my abused heart-strings into fret’ (I.i.12–13). Vindice’s sense that the Duke is occupying his rightful place is the key to the complex interplay between body and revenge in these  lines. He sees the Duke as a dangerous patriarchal figure that he must destroy. Yet his description of the Duke as a ‘son and heir’ not only confuses this aim, it also draws a curious parallel between revenger and patriarch. As Vindice notes sardonically, ‘old men lustful/ Do show like young men, angry, eager, violent,/ Outbid like their ­limited performances’ (I.i.34–6). The Duke is almost too masculine and too angry. In many respects, it seems that he possesses those very qualities that the revenger lacks. Vindice says of his own position: ‘My life’s unnatural to me, e’en compelled/ As if I liv’ d now when I should be dead’ (I.i.120–1; my emphasis). As Vindice means ‘Vengeance’ and as vengeance must ­inevitably end in death, the inversion in this line is doubly ironic. Revenge ­functions as a kind of secular parody of the eschatological imperative that we have seen in operation in early modern culture. While the Father retains his symbolic centrality in the processes of identity formation, the signifying chain he institutes is predicated upon, and reproduces, terrible  iconoclastic violence. To this end, consider this passage from John  Calvin’s popular Sermons . . . on the Epistles of S. Paule to Timothie and Titus, first published in 1579. In the first sermon, Calvin offers a fascinating analysis of the genealogy of the term ‘Father’: This name father is so honorable, that it belongeth to none, but to God onely. Yea in respect of our bodies. And therefore, when we say, that they which have ­begotten vs, according to the flesh, are our fathers, it is an vnproper kind of speech: for no mortall creature deserueth this so high and excellent dignitie: yet so it is, that God of his singular goodnesse aduaunceth men, to this so high a steppe, that he will that they be called fathers: and he doth it to this end and purpose, that they should acknowledge them selues to be so much more bound vnto him.54

As Calvin makes clear, the role of Father is only grudgingly bequeathed to fallen humankind. Because it is only ever a fallen, fleshy and immanent copy of God’s patriarchy, the name of the Father represents, at best, a surrogate title, and at worst, traumatic abandonment. In effect, this form of subjectivity is predicated upon a prohibition of the name that structures early modern society: Father, pater, Deus. As Leo Bersani has argued: The fascination of our civilization, from Job to Kafka, with an absolutely impenetrable Law which refuses to allow itself to be obeyed is perhaps . . . the

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displaced version of a uniquely human distress: the distress of being inhabited, and even constituted, by the wholly inaccessible and wholly inescapable, alien and ­a lienating, objects of our desires.55

According to Reformed theology, it seems that even if the status of Father is given in order that man might be ‘so much more bound vnto him’, this cleaving to God does not offer stability. As Calvin explains in another ­sermon, ‘when we thinke we are well disposed to serue God, there is always some thing, I cannot tell what, that holdeth vs backe’.56 Like the Father, God signifies as an absent (mimetic) presence. With Lussorioso, the Duke’s son, in prison, Vindice gets his ­opportunity to kill the Duke, to take his resistance to its logical conclusion. The ­revenger explains to his brother:     the old duke, Thinking my outward shape and inward heart Are cut out of one piece (for he that prates His secrets, his heart stands o’ th’ outside) Hires me by price to greet him with a lady In some fit place, veil’d from the eyes o’ th’ court. (III.v.8–13)

Here, Vindice acts as ironic anatomist both of himself and of his intended victim. In the case of the Duke, this verbal anatomy (‘His heart stands o’ the outside’) stands in ironic counterpoint to the terrible ­physical violence that will be visited upon him shortly. Hippolito asks ‘where’s that lady now?’ (III.v.28) and Vindice replies ‘O, at that word/ I’m lost again, you cannot find me yet’ (III.v.28–9), reaffirming the connection between Gloriana and Vindice’s subjectivity. He has placed her  skull atop a ­mannequin and put poison on the lips of the ‘bony lady’ (III.v.121), ­hoping to lure the Duke into kissing it. He outlines his rationale: Now to my tragic business; look you, brother, I have not fashion’d this only for show And useless property; no, it shall bear a part E’en in its own revenge. (III.v.99–102)

In Vindice’s theatre of death, theatricality is invoked in an ironic  ­parody of the world-as-stage topos, a parody that implicates the gaze of the ­audience as they try to distinguish the lineaments of the dialectical struggle between representation and ‘reality’. In The Revenger’s Tragedy, this gap is mediated by and through the iconoclastic  image of the skull that ‘writes’ as effectively as any verbal sign.57 Vindice and his brother succeed in tricking the Duke into k­ issing Gloriana’s skull, which they have poisoned. As the Duke lies dying,

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Vindice says to him, ‘Look, monster, what a lady hast thou made me/ My once betrothed wife’ (III.v.166–7). In attacking the false Father with the skull, the potent symbol of the sexual fulfilment he was never able to attain, the son highlights, in Leo  Bersani’s words, the terrible way in which, in the arena of violent Oedipal desire, ‘objects of desire become agents of punishment’.58 By making the Duke kiss the body of Vindice’s lover, this act symbolises the reasons behind his personification as Vengeance. Indeed, when Vindice says to the Duke ‘What? is not thy tongue eaten out yet? Then/ We’ll invent a silence’ (III.v.194–5), the inversion becomes sharper. The Duke has been silenced, verbally poisoned by the lady, and now holds an analogous position to her. The silent, iconoclastic body of Vindice’s lover subverts the body of patriarchy by taking away its voice, its ability to confer names upon subjects. By ­writing voicelessness upon the Duke’s body, the skull enables us to see that the ­political rhetoric of patriarchal signification is not as iconoclastically robust as it  seems. Both the sons avenge the  father, something that Hamlet does not  get to do until his dying moments. They also force the Duke to watch his Duchess cuckolding him with his bastard son. Vindice says to Hippolito:     Brother, If he but wink, not brooking the foul object, Let our two other hands tear up his lids, And make his eyes, like comets, shine through blood; When the bad bleeds, then is the tragedy good. (III.v.201–5)

First, these lines profoundly disrupt a crucial political and ­symbolic expectation. James VI & I famously wrote in Basilicon Doron that kings ‘are as it were set (as it was said of old) vpon a publike stage, in the sight of all the people; where all the beholders eyes are attentiuely bent to looke and pry in the least circumstance of their secretest  drift’.59 The gaze ­according to James is a one-way process and it objectifies the monarch as the authoritative Other. But in The Revenger’s Tragedy, the Duke does not share the privileged signifying status of the monarch. Vindice’s insistence that the Duke’s gaze ‘shine through blood’ inscribes him as the primary spectator of the action he watches (his bastard son with his wife). The gazed-at becomes the gazer. He becomes objectified as the intended audience of the representation and the audience in the ­theatre become the objectifying Others in relation to his own personal drama. As Philip  Armstrong puts it, ‘Theatre . . . perpetually contaminates the position of pure ­spectatorship, precipitating its audience into [the]  action.’60 Vindice’s actions not only politicise the play’s mimetic practice, they show both audiences that

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representation is ultimately an unstable basis for law. Vindice’s political iconoclasm disrupts the mimetic basis of authority. His self-mocking comment, ‘When the bad bleeds, then is the tragedy good’, serves to highlight that any claims in this play for art as a ‘representation of reality’ are disrupted by the mimesis of political iconoclasm. The ­‘reality’ of this play, such as it is, always lies further on, elsewhere. In Act V, the play proceeds hastily to a violent denouement. Vindice is hired by the Duke’s son to kill Piato, Piato being the name Vindice assumed when working for him. Vindice gets around the problem of ­having effectively to kill himself in a wonderful coup de théâtre. He dresses the dead Duke’s body in Piato’s clothes and stabs him. Vindice ruminates on the ridiculousness of the situation in which he finds himself. Regarding the Duke’s body dressed in Piato’s clothes he says: I must kill myself. Brother, that’s I; that sits for me; do you mark it? And I must stand ready here to make away myself yonder – I must sit to be killed, and stand to kill myself. (V.i.4–7)

In these lines, Vindice identifies with his ‘mirror image’ and says that he will ‘kill’ it, as in fact he does. As Michael  Neill puts it, ‘it is as if Vindice too were facing the image of his Death’.61 It is a remarkable moment. The linguistic split in Vindice’s speech parallels the visual division on the stage between the subject of enunciation (the dead body) and the enunciating subject (the revenger). Indeed, this is perhaps the nearest the play gets to a complete iconoclastic divorce between the  word and the image.62 After stabbing the dead body, Vindice says in an important aside: This much by wit a deep revenger can, When murder’s known, to be the clearest man. We’re furthest off, and with as bold an eye Survey his body as the standers-by. (V.i.92–5)

Vindice’s use of the collective pronoun ‘We’re’ attempts to locate him and the  audience as omniscient spectators to this act. They are all supposedly ‘standers-by’, regarding what has and is happening on stage. Yet surely the audience’s role is more problematic than the revenger allows at this point? Vindice continues to personify himself as Vengeance, a form of ­dramatic disguise. He also desires that the audience acknowledge him as ‘one of them’, standing by, observing, detached. But his dramatic disguise ‘Piato’ has been displaced onto the Duke. More than this, in ‘killing’ the Duke, he has also ‘murdered’ Piato his alter ego. We might say that the audience is gazing at Vindice, who is gazing at his alter ego, his mirror of self, and refusing to acknowledge it as such. Vindice can only be ‘a deep revenger’ if

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he has someone or something to avenge. Yet he has carried out every act of revenge that he set out to accomplish: the trauma he has suffered has, structurally at least, been accounted for.63 When he regards the Duke/Piato, what he sees staring back at him can only ever be, like revenge tragedy, a mimetic representation constituted by and through violence. Vindice’s alter ego, the Duke, positioned him as a traumatised subject for the nine years that he planned his revenge. But the Duke’s death is also the revenger’s death. For where the Father generates progeny, all that Vindice generates is resistance and violence; an iconoclastic surplus of meaning that fuels the discourse of revenge drama but which eventually becomes non-meaning. The ­brutally farcical ending of the play, with the brothers gleefully confessing their crimes and being hastily taken for execution, would appear to confirm this. In this play, representation, fuelled by a culture that symbolises revenge as an unremitting mimetic chain, is predicated upon a division between word and image. But although the play, like all revenge tragedies, destroys the tyrant and ends with a slaughter that would seem to affirm such a d ­ ivision, nonetheless the division remains problematical. Vindice ultimately signifies ‘Vengeance’ and in broader terms, revenge tragedy. Yet the one lineage he cannot avenge is the violent lineage of the mimetic tradition to which he belongs.64 As he signifies in (mimetic) violence, so he dies by (mimetic) violence. For these reasons, perhaps the play’s iconoclastic impulse, and that of Reformed theology more generally, should be read not as a disavowal of the image as such but as a manifestation of what Jean Joseph  Goux calls ‘sanctified emptiness’.65 It is useful here to recall Calvin’s words on the sins of the Father: it is ‘no brief and simple revenge, but one that will extend to the children, the grandchildren, and the great-­grandchildren, who obviously become imitators of their father’s  impiety’. In The Revenger’s Tragedy, the tragedy of the revenger is revenge. For as Vindice declares at the end of the play in a final expression of iconoclastic immolation: ‘‘Tis time to die when we are ourselves our foes’ (V.iii.110). When there is no longer a distinction between subject and object, death is perhaps the only state that makes ideological sense. IV The Revenger’s Tragedy is a play that delights in perversity of various kinds, a fact that has been well commented upon by critics.66 We might also say that the play revels in exploring, through the  father/son relationship, a perverse version of the Christological paradigm that I have been ­exploring throughout this book. As the abandoned son, it is small wonder that

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Vindice takes active delight in the freedom afforded him by a ­dazzling variety of figurative forms. Throughout the play, the figurative offers him a way of constructing a subject position and of gaining his revenge. But, as we have seen, any  subject position predicated upon the figurative copy must also acknowledge the precarious and fundamentally surrogate ­status of the figural. The insistent theatricality of the play and its q­ uestioning of the distinction between subject and object of action is part of this strategy. At a broader cultural level, the play also speaks to a form of ­representation that draws upon but also makes manifest the paradoxes of a religious ­system that defined the lives of many of those watching the play. If early modern tragedy refracts Protestant theological concerns in such a way that the object fails to offer the subject repletion, it does so by transforming, as Vindice does, into an image that reflects the subject’s own exclusion  back upon itself.

Afterword

Towards the end of his career, Thomas  Middleton turned increasingly in plays such as Women Beware Women (1621), The Changeling (1622) and A Game at Chess  (1624) to address the fraught religious landscape of the final years of  James I’s reign. The balance that James had managed to maintain between moderate and more militantly minded Protestants in the first two thirds of his reign was, by 1618–20, crumbling.1 The reasons for this are complex and interrelated. The onset of the  Thirty Years War and the disastrous involvement of James’ son-in-law  Frederick, Elector Palatine constituted one important factor. Militant Protestants saw the political instability in the Hapsburg-controlled lands of central Europe as providing the ideal opportunity to take on the might of Spain. Significantly, those advocating a less bellicose response tended to be of the Arminian faction and they used the uncertainty of these years in order to consolidate their position within the Church. In the aftermath of the defeat of Frederick’s Protestants just outside Prague in 1620, English militant Protestants found themselves ideologically and politically on the back foot. The possibility of a Spanish wife for Prince  Charles was important in this regard, not least because Charles was known to be receptive to the  Arminian theology of clerics like the up-and-coming  William Laud. This  is where theological differences also played their part. As I have shown throughout this book, Calvinist strictures on justification by faith, free will and grace were nothing if not controversial. I have also demonstrated that the understanding of such strictures is intimately bound up with  the political and linguistic discourse of the period across the religious spectrum, a fact expressed and explored in the drama. The assumption that the Arminians offered a version of Calvinism that appeared to modify the more hard line strictures held by many militant Protestants caused a clash of religion and politics that was to define the parameters of debate for the rest of the seventeenth century and  beyond.2 This  remained an age of fundamentalist debate. With the accession of 219

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Charles, the ascendancy of the Arminians began in earnest. They took up the central positions in the Church and at court and reformed practices of worship and devotion in a way that for many was all too redolent of long abandoned popish practices. Indeed, one recent commentator has called this period ‘an attempt at Counter-Reformation without the Jesuits’.3  In any case, from the early 1620s to the outbreak of the Civil War, many felt that the work of the Reformation was being undone in favour of a cryptoCatholic dispensation.  So when in  Middleton’s  Women Beware Women, we find references to ‘your saintish king there’ (II.ii.306) or to the construction of a central ­figure as a ‘court-saint’  (IV.i.76), I suggest that this marks a broader ideological shift in how those dramatists engaged with  Calvinism explore and utilise the problem of the figurative.4 In the latter part of Elizabeth’s reign and the first part of James’ that I have been examining, such writers were more inclined to examine the internal, subjective difficulties involved in sustaining a Calvinist identity as well as engaging in anti-Catholic  polemic, a feature of the drama that I have only touched on here. But during the later years of James’ reign and those of Charles, while external confessional divisions continue to define the politics of dramatic production, new internal political divisions within the Protestant confession increasingly animate debate and provide the basis for the exploration of identity politics.  For a number of writers, the figurative, ‘saintish’ practices of  Arminianism threaten to render the subject further from God as they encourage him to re-inscribe the external sign as the basis for worship and subjectivity. In terms of Middleton’s work, it is interesting that in the play that marks the terminus of his career, A Game at Chess, he is obliged to adopt the figurative conceit of the chess game in order to comment politically on the danger of a Spanish match for Charles and the encroachment of Arminian worship, an  irony that would not have escaped the dramatist’s notice. The ramifications of the scandal caused by this play cannot be overestimated.5 After A Game at Chess, writers were understandably much more cautious about conducting  overt political commentary on the stage. This  is not to say that religio-political commentary vanished altogether, or that the problematic legacy of Reformed theology did not continue to animate the representative and linguistic practices of late Jacobean and Caroline drama. But they did so in ways that we are still coming to terms with. Despite  the excellent scholarship of Martin  Butler, Gordon McMullan, Lisa Hopkins, Ivo Kamps and  others, much more work is

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needed on the ways in which the plays of  Webster, Massinger, Shirley, Fletcher, Brome, Ford, Davenant and Marmion  engage in their different ways with the ­discourses that I have outlined in this book.6 Calvinism in its various forms certainly takes on a less dominant, more embattled position in the late Jacobean/Caroline period, but the political and subjective consequences of this shift need to be more fully explored in relation to the drama. To take one final example, John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1629–33) examines the incestuous relationship of Giovanni and Annabella: ­pregnant with his child, Annabella is stabbed by Giovanni and he enters the final scene with her heart on a dagger. This relationship and its apotheosis can be read as a parodic conflation of the Immaculate Conception and the  Passion. Giovanni’s statement that the dying Annabella is ‘over­glorious . . . in thy wounds’ (V.vi.103) positions his sister’s wounds as a site of ­excessive religious signification, a strangely gendered Christological assertion. Indeed, these words also offer a comment upon the cultural difficulty of assigning ideological signification to  the imitatio Christi.7 The metonymic symbolism of the heart in the final scene (‘ ’tis a heart,/ [. . .] Look well upon’t; d’ee know’t?’ (V.vi.29)) conflates the figural/secular symbol of love and the figural/divine symbol of Christ’s  sacred heart by making it a shockingly literal presence. Indeed, the sacred heart is commonly a symbol of Catholic worship, and this may position the theology of the play in a certain light. However, it is the dying words of both figures that render this theological identification more problematic. Annabella’s last words are ‘Mercy, great Heaven – O! – O!’ (V.v.93) and Giovanni’s are ‘Where’er I go, let me enjoy this  grace,/ Freely to view my Annabella’s face’ (V.vi.107–8). Both figures cry for mercy and grace. It is unclear whether they are asking for grace because they expect it or calling in this way because they are unsure that they will receive it. Such a doubt is not peculiar to Calvinists. Nevertheless, it is surely interesting that the dying Giovanni, who ‘bleed[s] fast’ (V.vi.104), who embraces death’s ‘wounds’ in order to achieve ‘grace’, and whose ‘deed/ Darkened the midday sun’ (V.vi.22–3) is constructed as a kind of apocalyptic  imitatio Christi.  But interestingly, he is a  Christ whose time is still to come.  He asks the collected audience ‘Have you all no faith/ To credit yet my triumphs?’ (V.vi.56–7, my emphasis). In my view, Ford understood the problem of Reformed theology all too well. If it is to achieve its ideological purchase, then the promise of Christ must be invariably deferred. Moreover, this Christological temporality is what renders

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confessional positions in society so fraught. In Christ’s absence, ­politics, sex, class or perversity provide the stuff of dramatic subjectivity. But this absence also draws attention to the fact that the figurative must ultimately bear the burden of representation, a realisation that renders ­subjectivity terribly impermanent, and that Ford emblematises in the bleeding heart with horribly sensitive skill.

Notes

I n t roduc t ion 1 Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London and New York: Verso, 2000), 157. 2 Robert Jenison, The Christians Apparelling By Christ . . . (London: Augustine Matthewes and Iohn Norton, 1625), 71. 3 Unless noted, all biblical references are to the Geneva Bible: The Bible, That Is, The holy Scriptures conteined [sic] in the Olde and Newe Testament . . . (London: Christopher Barker, 1599). 4 As Richard Muller has noted, the imitatio Christi is a ‘central theme in Christian piety and spirituality from Ignatius of Antioch in the early second century onward’. Richard A. Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Terms: Drawn Principally from Protestant Scholastic Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1985), 146. 5 Throughout I seek to revise Jonathan Dollimore’s claim that ‘in the Renaissance God was in trouble’. Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries ­(London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), xxix. 6 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, 1968), 154. 7 Ibid., 151. 8 Ibid., 151. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 184. 11 Ibid., 185. 12 Ibid. 13 See Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Reformation: Europe’s House Divided (London: Penguin, 2003), 115–57 on Luther’s impact. For more on this, see Alister McGrath’s Luther’s Theology of the Cross: Martin Luther’s Theological Breakthrough (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990) and The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). 14 Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, 121.

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Notes to pages 5–8

15 Gary Shapiro, ‘The Writing on the Wall: The Antichrist and the Semiotics of History’, in Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins, eds., Reading Nietzsche (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 200. 16 Ibid., 202. 17 Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, 185. 18 See Thomas Betteridge, Tudor Histories of the English Reformations, 1530–83 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 2–3, 19. 19 See Alison Shell’s Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and chapters 6, 7 and 8 of Peter Lake and Michael Questier’s The Anti-Christ’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2002). 20 Katherine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 29. 21 Andrew Pettegree, ‘Introduction: The Changing Face of Reformation History’, in Andrew Pettegree, ed., The Reformation World (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 4. 22 Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 10. 23 Jean-Christophe Mayer, Shakespeare’s Hybrid Faith: History, Religion and the Stage (Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and Beatrice Groves, Texts and Traditions: Religion in Shakespeare 1592–1604 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007). 24 For more on post-revisionism in early modern historiography, see Christopher Haigh, ‘Rewriting the Reformation 1: So Why Did It Happen’, The Tablet, 20 April 2002, 11–12 and Patrick Collinson’s response, ‘Rewriting the Reformation 2: The World Did Move’, The Tablet, 27 April 2002, 11–12. 25 Mayer, Shakespeare’s Hybrid Faith, 5. 26 Antony Easthope, Privileging Difference, ed. Catherine Belsey (Basingstoke, Hants.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 34. 27 Ewan Fernie, Spiritual Shakespeares (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 7. For a critique of the ‘spiritual turn’ as bypassing a materialist sense of political responsibility and historical praxis, see Adrian Streete, ‘‘The Politics of Ethical Presentism’: Appropriation, Spirituality and the Case of Antony and Cleopatra’, Textual Practice, 22, 3, 2008, 405–31. 28 Easthope, Privileging Difference, 34. 29 I use the word ‘over-determined’ in its Marxist context as a counterbalance to the indeterminate ‘privileging of difference’ that Easthope sees as a marker of certain types of post-structuralism. See ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination: Notes for an Investigation’, in Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London and New York: Verso, 1999), 89–126. 30 The recent work of Alexandra Walsham explores the contours and limitations of religious ‘toleration’ in early modern culture. See her Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). See also Jason P. Rosenblatt, Renaissance England’s

Notes to pages 8–11

31 32 33 34

35

36 37

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Chief Rabbi: John Selden (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 158–81. The role of scepticism is relevant here too. Following the lead of the great French thinker Michel de Montaingne, early modern sceptics may have adopted, as Kevin  Sharpe notes, ‘a rationalist, undogmatic approach to religion’, but this was an intellectual pluralism adopted in the service of reason and not any particular ecumentical impulse. Kevin Sharpe, Politics and Ideas in Early Stuart England: Essays and Studies (London and New York: Pinter, 1989), 24. For Montaigne,  fideism confirmed faith rather than undermining it and his account of how knowledge is revealed by the divine is rather closer to Calvin’s than might be expected. See also Richard H. Popkin, ‘Theories of Knowledge’, in Charles Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, Eckhard Kessler and Jill Kraye, eds., The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 678–84. Lake with Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, 714. James Simpson, Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2007), 3. Easthope, Privileging Difference, 157. The same could be said for differences within English Protestantism too. See Peter Lake’s, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) and Anglicans and Puritans: Presbyterian and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), and Patrick Collinson’s, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Basingstoke, Hants: Macmillan, 1988) and The Reformation (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003). See also Donna B. Hamilton, Shakespeare and the Politics of Protestant England (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1992) and Nicholas Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism c. 1530–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). For a study examining the confluence of Erasmian humanism and Protestantism, see Margo Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). See too Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield, ‘“The Devil Citing Scripture”: Christian Perceptions of the Religions of the Book’, in Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield, eds., The Religions of the Book: Christian Perceptions, 1400–1660 (Basingstoke, Hants.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 1–15. Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c.1590–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 1. Cf. R.T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 79–93. See also  Tyacke’s comment that ‘The questions at issue here cannot be dismissed as . . . “finer points”. Rather they are fundamental.’ Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, 162. Simpson, Burning to Read, 5. See too Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) and Lisa Freinkel, Reading Shakespeare’s Will: The Theology of Form from Augustine to the Sonnets (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).

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39 For a discussion of the issue of grace and free will, see William Perkins, A Treatise of Gods free grace, and mans free will (Cambridge: Iohn Legat, 1601). See also Tyacke’s Anti-Calvinists and Aspects of English Protestantism. 40 It is significant that challenges to Calvinism throughout this period invariably centre around the issue of justification and grace, and that the rise of the Arminian faction in the late 1610s and 1620s is powered by its acute critique not simply of Calvinism’s inadequate doctrine of grace, but of this inadequacy within Protestantism more generally. If my discussion of Reformation theology appears pessimistic in places, this is because Reformation theology is itself pessimistic about man’s capacity for good. Despite what might be said about grace, the simple fact is that much English Reformed theology is fundamentalist in its truth claims and while its more extreme adherents certainly did not go unchallenged, even moderate Calvinists had difficulty with a number of aspects of Calvinistic theology. 41 See, for example, Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Christopher Marsh, Popular Religion in Sixteenth Century England: Holding Their Peace (Basingstoke, Hants: Macmillan, 1998); Theodora Jankowski, Women in Power In the Early Modern Drama (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Christine Peters, Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender, and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 42 Susan Zimmerman, The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare’s Theatre (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 195–6. 43 See Thomas Docherty’s John Donne, Undone, (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), which in chapters 4 and 5 examines Donne’s use of Christological models and ‘The Death of Christ’, in Debora Kuller Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 89–131. 44 In making this point, I am indebted here and elsewhere to the seminal work of Alister McGrath. 45 Caroline Walker Bynum, Christ as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1984); Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); David Aers and Lynn Staley, The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics, and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 1996). 46 Beckwith, Christ’s Body, 41. 47 As the medievalist David  Aers rightly noted in 1992, early modern critics can be too quick to caricature the medieval period in the service of a narrative charting the emancipation and emergence of a partially defined early modern ‘subject’. That said, the emphasis of some degree of discontinuity and innovation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially in terms of modes of subjectivity, is inevitable in a project such as this. It

Notes to pages 13–16

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is possible to be aware of and take seriously earlier modes of ­subjectivity while also recognising that the early modern period does instantiate modes of thinking about the self that, while implicated in these earlier modes, turn in new directions. See David Aers, ‘A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or, Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the “History of the Subject”’, in David Aers, ed., Culture and History 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1992). 48 See Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 558. I am grateful to Professor Green for drawing my attention to relevant sections of his work. 49 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 3. 50 Ibid., 78. 51 Although Greenblatt does quote William Tyndale and Archbishop Sandys on the ways in which the subject might imitate Christ. 52 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 79. 53 Ibid., 9. 54 This is not to imply that every expression of subjectivity during this period took place in relation to Christ or to Christocentric models: in the face of the evidence that Greenblatt and others have produced, such a claim would be palpably absurd. 55 Henry Smith, The Wedding Garment (London: E. Allde, 1590), 25. 56 Francis Clement, A brief discourse of mans transgression [an]d of his redemption by Christ, with a particular surueigh of the Romish religion (London: Richard Field, 1593), 71. 57 Samuel Walsall, The Life And Death Of Iesus Christ (London: Thomas Thorpe, 1607), sig. B1v. 58 Ibid., sig. F4v. 59 William Perkins, A Declaration Of The Trve manner of knowing Christ Crucified (London: Iohn Legate, 1611), 25. 60 Docherty, John Donne, Undone, 136. 61 One of the frequently made charges against  Greenblatt’s model of selffashioning is that it presupposes a pre-existing self which is the foundation for the cultural and internal fashioning that then takes place. See Cynthia Marshall, The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts (Baltimore, OH and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 26. But the Protestant imitatio Christi disrupts this kind of foundational model of identity. 62 The book was printed forty-seven times between 1503 and 1640. 63 Naturally à Kempis’ text was not the only medieval Christological manual that continued to be read in post-Reformation England. For example, the Meditations of Bernard of Clairvaux and the Vita Christi attributed to Bonaventura were printed and read, although neither attained the level of popularity that à Kempis’ text did.

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64 See Richard Muller, Christ and the Decree: Christology and Predestination in Reformed Theology from Calvin to Perkins (Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1986) and Susan Wabuda, Preaching During the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 65 Green, Print and Protestantism, 307. 66 Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ (London: J.M. Dent, 1937), 61. 67 Ibid., 197. 68 Ibid., 230. Interestingly, it was this kind of passage that Protestant translators of à Kempis regularly expurgated from their texts, smacking as it did of Catholic Eucharistic theology. 69 Ibid., 113. 70 See Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin, 1961), especially Book X. 71 Thomas à Kempis, Of the Imitation of Christ, trans. Thomas Rogers (London: Henry Denham, 1580), 7r–8v. Aside from being a translator, Richard Rogers was also a minister and chaplain to Richard Bancroft, the Bishop of London and later Archbishop of Canterbury. As such, he was part of the conforming Calvinist establishment of the Church of England. 72 Arthur F. Kinney, Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century England (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 11. 73 à Kempis, Of the Imitation of Christ, 3r. 74 Ibid., 4r. 75 Ibid., 6r. 76 Ibid., 7 v. 77 Brian Vickers provides a good summary of the issue: ‘In approaching the Renaissance debate over imitation we must be clear that this refers not to mimesis, literature as an ‘imitation’ or representation of the human world, a function of poetry and drama attacked by Plato in his Republic and ­legitimised by Aristotle in the Poetics. Rather, it refers to imitatio, the use of models in learning to write, from the elementary stages of languagelearning to advanced composition.’ Brian Vickers, ‘Introduction’ to Brian Vickers, ed., English Renaissance Literary Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 22. 78 Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 101–2. 79 Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), 30. 80 Roger Ascham, Extract from The Schoolmaster in Vickers, English Renaissance Literary Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 141. 81 On literary imitatio see Rosemary Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery: Renaissance Poetic and Twentieth-Century Critics (Chicago and London: Chicago Press, 1963) and Ann Moss, ‘Literary Imitation in the Sixteenth Century: Writers and Readers, Latin and French’, in Glyn P.

Notes to pages 21–26

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Norton, ed., The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Vol. III: The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 82 Thomas Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 46. 83 See, for example, Hillel Schwartz’s The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York: Zone Books, 1996). 84 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. James Hutton (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1982), 46. 85 Docherty, John Donne, Undone, 176. 86 On Sidney and Protestantism, see Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 181–213 and David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, rev. edn. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 82–96. 87 Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry in Laurie Magnus, ed., Documents Illustrating Elizabethan Poetry (London: Routledge, 1906), 53. 88 See Vickers, ‘Introduction’ to English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 16–17. 89 Ibid., 22. 90 Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, 44. 91 Ibid., 52–3. 92 This understanding draws upon well-known Aristotelian principles. See the section on Imagination in book three of Aristotle’s De Anima, trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (London: Penguin, 1986), 196–201. 93 Sidney, An Apology for Poetry,78–9. 94 Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 79–98. 95 This is a rather simplified account of Plato’s interest in representation, and it is important to note that he did not dismiss the mimetic outright, distinguishing as he did between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mimesis: on this see Roger Starling, “Scenes from the life of one who is suited for nothing:’ Shakespeare and the Question of Mimesis’, in Jonathan Holmes and Adrian Streete, eds., Refiguring Mimesis: Representation in Early Modern Literature (Hatfield, Herts.: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2005), 22–7. 96 Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, 75. 97 Mark Robson, ‘Defending poetry, or, is there an early modern aesthetic’, in John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas, eds., The New Aestheticism (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), 126. 98 Robert Weimann, Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse, ed. David Hillman (Baltimore, OH and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 3. 99 Ibid., 5. 100 Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, 45. 101 Weimann, Authority and Representation, 5. 102 Ibid., 35.

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103 Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London and New York: Methuen, 1984), 24. 104 Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 7. 105 Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation, 51. 106 For the relationship between earlier Tudor drama and the Reformation, see Paul Whitfield White, Theatre and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage and Playing in Tudor England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 107 Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), 4. 108 Michael O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in EarlyModern England (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 99. 109 Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 157.

1  C h r i s t, S ubj e c t i v i t y a n d R e pr e s e n tat ion i n Ea r ly Mode r n Di scou r s e 1 This critical approach originates with Georg  Hegel’s 1832 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion and is common to much subsequent materialist critique, including that of Karl Marx. As Hegel writes, for Protestants, ‘priests are not privileged to be the sole possessors of divine revelation, and still less does there exist any such privilege which can belong exclusively to a layman . . . we should have a rational knowledge of this divine will, and such knowledge is not anything particular or special, but belongs to all’. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Vols. I–III (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), Vol. I, 249. 2 Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 154. 3 Ibid., 158. 4 Ibid., 158–9. 5 Ibid., 163. 6 Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, 2nd edn., (London and New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), 158. 7 Katherine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and the Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 23. However, Maus’ idea that a lack of mediation can be associated with radical Protestantism is a problematic one. 8 Ian McAdam, ‘The Spanish Tragedy and the Politico-Religious Unconscious’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 42, 1, 2000, 35. 9 To this end, the influence of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London and New York: Routledge, 2000) and R.H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, 1966) is palpable.

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10 Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 558. 11 ‘The Queen’s Injunctions, 1559’, in G.W. Prothero, ed., Select Statutes and Other Constitutional Documents Illustrative of the Reigns of Elizabeth and James I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1944), 186, punctuation in original. Beatrice Groves also discusses this passage and its emphasis on memory in Texts and Traditions: Religion in Shakespeare 1592–1604 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 1–4. 12 ‘Sion’, in George Herbert, The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. C.A. Patrides (London: J.M. Dent, 1991), 120. 13 On Herbert and Protestantism, see Gene Edward Veith Jr., Reformation Spirituality: The Religion of George Herbert (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1985) and Harold Toliver, George Herbert’s Christian Narrative (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 1993). 14 Green, Print and Protestantism, 559. See also 308, 310, 322–5, 558–9. 15 ‘Deniall’, The English Poems of George Herbert, 57. 16 ‘Grace’, The English Poems of George Herbert, 79. 17 See Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1992) and also Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001). The term ‘mediator’ has New Testament origins. See 1 Timothy 2:5 and Hebrews 8:6, 12:24 and, especially, 9:15, which reads: ‘And for this cause is he [Christ] the Mediatour of the newe Testament, that through death which was for the redemption of the transgressions that were in the former Testament, they which were called, might receiue the promise of eternall inheritance.’ Not only does Christ as mediator unite the secular and the spiritual realms, he also reconciles the Old and the New Testament through the legalistic function of the atonement. 18 Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 256–7. 19 Ibid., 19. 20 ‘Deniall’, The English Poems of George Herbert, 58–9. 21 This kind of point is usually made in relation to Eucharistic debates of the period. See Christopher Elwood, The Body Broken: The Calvinist Doctrine of the Eucharist and the Symbolization of Power in Sixteenth-Century France (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 22 Martin Luther, extracts from The Bondage of the Will, in Martin Luther, Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, ed. Timothy F. Lull (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1989), 211. 23 In this chapter, I use the word ‘mediator’ and its various cognates to refer to 1) the mediatory apparatus of the Catholic Church such as statues and saints; 2) to the function of Christ as the one mediator between man and God. Though I draw upon these distinctions in the chapter, it will be clear that at a structural level the various uses of the term are interrelated. More broadly, questions of ‘mediation’, however they are manifested, can be seen as symptomatic of a Europe-wide concern with the ideological signifying function

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of signs and the relationship between man and God that different signifying systems necessarily imply. 24 John Calvin, Calvin’s Commentaries: The Second Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians and the Epistles to Timothy, Titus and Philemon, trans. T.A. Smail (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1996), 210. 25 ‘Fifth Session celebrated on the seventh day of June, 1546. Decree Concerning Original Sin’, in The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, trans. H.J. Schroeder, O.P. (Rockford, IL: Tan, 1978), 22. 26 Jacob Kimedoncius, Of The Redemption of Mankind Three Bookes . . . trans. Hugh Ince (London: Felix Kingston, 1598), 4. 27 Richard Fowns, Trisagion Or The Three Holy Offices Of Iesvs Christ . . . (London: Humpfrey Lownes, 1618), 119 28 Caelica, Sonnet CV, in Fulke Greville, Poems and Dramas of Fulke Greville First Lord Brooke, Vol. I, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (London and Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1938), 149. 29 Fowns, Trisagion, 121. 30 See Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 565–93. 31 William Perkins, A Declaration Of The Trve manner of knowing Christ Crucified (London: Iohn Legate, 1611), 52–3. 32 Christopher Sutton, Disce Vivere. Learning To Live. . . (London: E. Short, 1604), 67. 33 This biblical phrase is often discussed in early modern sermons on baptism. See Robert Jennison’s sermon The Christians Apparelling By Christ (London: Augustine Matthewes and Iohn Norton, 1625). But it was also used as a more general example of the need to imitate Christ in all things. See Henry Smith’s The Wedding Garment (London: E. Allde, 1590). 34 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (London: Westminster, 1961), 262. See also Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 49–53. 35 The Thirty Nine Articles, in David Cressy and Lori Anne Ferrell, eds., Religion and Society in Early Modern England: A Sourcebook (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 63. 36 On covenant theology, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided (London: Penguin, 2003), 389–91. For a discussion of grace and Calvinism, see Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c.1590–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). See also gratia in Richard A. Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Terms: Drawn Principally from Protestant Scholastic Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1985), 129–30. 37 William Perkins, A Treatise of Gods free grace, and mans free will (Cambridge: Iohn Legat, 1601), 52. 38 Ibid., 62. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., 88. 41 Ibid., 90–1.

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42 Ibid., 94. 43 Ibid., 151, 153. 44 Ibid., 29–30. 45 Sutton, Disce Vivere, 558. 46 Paul Helm, John Calvin’s Ideas (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 2. 47 See Alister McGrath, The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 167–81. 48 Ibid., 175. 49 See Richard Muller, Christ and the Decree: Christology and Predestination in Reformed Theology from Calvin to Perkins (Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1986), 13. 50 Augustine of Hippo, The City of God (De Civitate Dei), Vol. II, trans. John Healey (London: J.M. Dent, 1947), 58. 51 Ibid., 405. 52 Augustine of Hippo, The City of God (De Civitate Dei), Vol. I, trans. John Healey (London: J.M. Dent, 1947), 38–39. 53 Ibid., 265. 54 For the Nicene Creed, see Henry Bettenson, ed., Documents of the Christian Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 26. 55 Augustine of Hippo, De Civitate Dei, Libri I–X, in Corpus Christianorum: Series Latina (Turnhout: Brepols, 1955), 262. 56 Stephen Edmondson, Calvin’s Christology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 24. 57 Ibid., 24–7. 58 Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 45. 59 Augustine of Hippo, Extract from De Agone Christiano in Henry Bettenson, ed. and trans., The Later Christian Fathers: A Selection from the Writings of the Fathers from St. Cyril of Jerusalem to St. Leo the Great (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 218. 60 Augustine of Hippo, De agone christiano, in Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiastocorum Latinorum, Vol. XLI (Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1900), 120. 61 In fact, as Stephen  Edmondson notes, Augustine’s Christ mediates only in his human nature, not his divine: ‘it is the human nature that mediates; the divine nature, we might say, only enables this mediation’ (Edmondson, Calvin’s Christology, 24). As we will see in Chapter 2, it is Calvin’s rejection of this principle that animates his conception of Christ. 62 Nowhere does Augustine deny that language is potentially an immanent source of divine truth. But there are clearly tensions within Augustinian semiotics. See Augustine of Hippo, On Christian Teaching (De Doctrina Christiana), trans. R.P.H. Green (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 41–5. 63 On this point more generally, see Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana. See also Christopher Kirwan, Augustine (London and New York: Routledge, 1989),

234

Notes to pages 45–49

35–59 and Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1996), 7–9. 64 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 127. 65 Lisa Freinkel, Reading Shakespeare’s Will: The Theology of Figure from Augustine to the Sonnets (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 17. 66 For kenosis see Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Terms, 169. 67 Martin Elsky, Authorizing Words: Speech, Writing, and Print in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1989), 73. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid., 74. 70 Louis Althusser, Essays on Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1993), 53. 71 Michael Hanby, ‘Desire: Augustine Beyond Western Subjectivity’, in John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward, eds., Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 120. 72 Augustine of Hippo, De Trinitate, trans. Stephen McKenna (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1963), 478. 73 This could be viewed as a proto-Derridean shift. See Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, OH and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) and Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). 74 Augustine of Hippo, De Trinitate, Libri XIII–XV in Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina (Turnhout: Brepols, 1968), 488. 75 Augustine of Hippo, De Trinitate, 478. 76 The full sentence in Latin reads: ‘Sic accedit quantum potest ista similitude imaginis factae ad illam similitudinem imaginis natae qua deus filius patri per omnia substantialiter similis praedicatur.’ Augustine of Hippo, De Trinitate, Libri XIII–XV, 488. 77 Hanby, ‘Desire: Augustine Beyond Western Subjectivity’, 120. 78 Lacan notes in Écrits that ‘Saint Augustine foreshadowed psychoanalysis’ in respect of his exploration of childhood jealousy. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), 22. One scholar who has drawn fruitful connections between Lacan, Augustine and Protestantism is Douglas  Trevor. See his ‘George Herbert and the Scene of Writing, in Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor, eds., Historicism, Psychoanalysis and Early Modern Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). 79 Lacan, Écrits, 192. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid., 166. 82 Ibid., 169. 83 See Roman Jacobson and Morris Halle, ‘Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances’, in Roman Jacobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1971), 90–6. For

Notes to pages 49–52

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a critique of their work, see Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, OH and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 95–6. 84 Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (London and New York: Verso, 1990), 120. 85 Lacan, Écrits, 170. 86 Dews, Logics of Disintegration, 121. 87 Ibid. 88 More importantly for Lacan, this process operates primarily at an unconscious level. For these reasons, it is in metaphor and metonymy that we in fact encounter the potential expression of the unconscious. Such signifiers represent more than simply linguistic indicators. In the constitutive elements of mimetic discourse, we find the fundamental split between conscious and unconscious processes. 89 Augustine of Hippo, De Trinitate, 479. 90 Augustine of Hippo, De Trinitate, Libri XIII–XV, 489. 91 For more on the duplex cognitio Dei, see Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Terms, 97. 92 Calvin, Institutes, 35. 93 John Calvin, Diuers Sermons of Master Iohn Caluin, concerning the Diuinitie, Humanitie, and Natiuitie of our Lorde Iesus Christ: As also touching his Passion, Death, Resurrection, Ascention: together with the coming downe of the holy Ghoste vpon his Apostles: and the first Sermon of S. Peter (London: George Byshop, 1581), Sig. E4v. It should be noted here that Calvin’s understanding of Christ’s mediatory office is rather different to that of Augustine and Luther – I say more about this in Chapter 2. 94 See Ignatius Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises in Ignatius Loyola, Personal Writings, trans. Joseph Munitiz and Philip Endean (London: Penguin, 1996). 95 Gaspar de Loarte, Meditations Of The Life And Passion of our Lord and Sauiour Iesus Christ With the Art how to Meditate (England: Fr. Garnet’s second press, 1596), Sig. A7 v–r. 96 On the difference between a tropological and typological imitatio Christi, see Martin Elsky’s article ‘History, Liturgy, and Point of View in Protestant Meditative Poetry’, Studies in Philology, 77, 1980, 67–83. 97 Desiderius Erasmus, Enchiridion militis christiani, in Collected Works of Erasmus, Vol. LXVI, ed. John W. O’Malley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 86. 98 In part at least, this kind of mimetic distinction might be understood as emanating from the discourse of Protestant  meditation that has been outlined by Barbara Lewalski. As Lewaski notes, Protestant meditation: ‘calls for the application of the subject [of mediation] to the self – indeed for the subject’s location in the self’. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 149.

236

Notes to pages 53–56

99 Paul Cefalu, Moral Identity in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 98–9. 100 Carlos M. Eire, War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 36. 101 These questions recast the ancient issue of defining and distinguishing res and verba. In early modern literary theory, writers generally tended to follow their classical counterparts by privileging res over verba. See Brian Vickers, ed., English Renaissance Literary Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 40. 102 Brian P. Copenhaver and Charles B. Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy (Oxford and New York, 1992), 152. 103 Bryan Crockett, The Play of Paradox: Stage and Sermon in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 124. 104 For more on the Nominalist heritage of Lutheran theology, see McGrath, The Intellectual Origins, 70–85, Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) and Heiko Oberman’s The Dawn of the Reformation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1992), esp. 52–65. 105 The study of Nominalism has provoked considerable controversy. For the sake of brevity, I have provided a necessarily selective reading because the basic point I am making – that these late medieval and early modern theories of language posit a gap between the semiotic realms of res and verba – is broadly agreed upon. 106 Heiko Oberman, The Reformation: Roots & Ramifications (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), 197. 107 William of Ockham, Summa totius logicae, in Philosophical Writings, ed. Philotheus Boehner, rev. ed. Stephen Brown (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1990), 48. 108 Elsky, Authorizing Words, 30. 109 See also Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, (London and New York: Routledge, 2002) for an account of the epistemic shift between ‘classical’ and ‘modern forms of signification. Such a shift has been challenged by Timothy J. Reiss, Knowledge, Discovery and Imagination in Early Modern Europe: The Rise of Aesthetic Rationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 41. See also Hugh Grady, ‘Introduction’ to Hugh Grady, ed., Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Millennium (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 7. 110 Debora Kuller Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 44–5. 111 Ibid., 44. 112 See Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). 113 On the early Church councils see Francis M. Young, From Nicaea to Chalcedon: A Guide to the Literature and Its Backgrounds (London: SCM Press,

Notes to pages 58–61

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1983) and for documents pertaining to those councils, see Henry Bettenson, ed., Documents of the Christian Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967).

2  L ocat i ng t h e S ubj e c t : E r asmus a n d L u t h e r 1 John Foxe, A Sermon Of Christ crucified, preached at Paules Crosse the Friday before Easter, commonly called Goodfryday (London: Iohn Daye, 1570), Sig. A4v–r. 2 Debora  Shuger has called Foxe’s text a ‘Lutheran exemplar’ of the passion sermon. Debora Kuller Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice and Subjectivity (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1994), 225. 3 Foxe, A Sermon Of Christ crucified, Sig. A4v. 4 Ibid., Sig. A4v. 5 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 236. 6 Antonio de Guevara, The Mount of Caluarie. . . (London: Adam Islip, 1595), Sigs. BIIIv–r.. 7 Fulvio Androzzi, Meditations Vppon The Passion Of Ovr Lord Iesus Christ (Douai: P. Auroi, 1606), 5–6. 8 Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 149. 9 Robert Southwell, Marie Magdalens Fvnerall Teares (London: Adam Islip, 1594), 19. 10 William Perkins, A Declaration Of The Trve manner of knowing Christ Crucified (London: Iohn Legate, 1611), 52. 11 ‘The Second Sermon of the Passion’, in Certain Sermons or Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches in the Time of Queen Elizabeth of Famous Memory (London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1843), 453. 12 The literature on early modern iconophobia is considerable, but see Carlos M. Eire, War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts: Vol. I, Laws Against Images (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); Sergiusz Michalski, The Reformation and the Visual Arts: The Protestant Image Question in Western and Eastern Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 1993); Linda Gregerson, The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1997); Michael O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early-Modern England (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); David Hawkes, Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580–1680 (New York and Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave, 2001).

238 13 14 15 16

Notes to pages 61–66

Foxe, A Sermon Of Christ crucified, Sig. A3r. O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye, 8. Foxe, A Sermon Of Christ crucified, Sig. P3v. For more on the relationship between stage and pulpit, see Bryan Crockett, The Play of Paradox: Stage and Sermon in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995). 17 Gregerson, The Reformation of the Subject, 3. 18 Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 394. 19 See chapter 1 of Alison Shell’s Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 23–55, for a reconsideration of Reformed and Catholic opinions on idolatry. 20 On the relationship between idolatry and the sign, see Hawkes’ Idols of the Marketplace. 21 Gregerson, The Reformation of the Subject, 3. 22 Ibid., 4. 23 Ibid., 6. 24 Ibid. 25 Eire, War Against the Idols, 5. 26 For the impact of Erasmian humanism in early modern England see Margo Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 27 On this point, see Anthony Levi’s Renaissance and Reformation: The Intellectual Genesis (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2004) where he notes that ‘Only recently has a reasonably reliable picture of his [Erasmus’] early development emerged’, 176. 28 For more on the devotio moderna and the Brethren of the Common Life, see Roland H. Bainton, Erasmus of Christendom (London: Collins, 1969), 20–4 and Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490–1700 (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 22–4, 90–3. 29 Levi, Renaissance and Reformation, 144. 30 A similar point is made by Henning Graf Reventlow in The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1985), 41. 31 Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ (London: J.M. Dent, 1937), 1. 32 Susan Wabuda, Preaching During the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 33 Ibid., 148. 34 Erasmus, Enchiridion militis christiani, in Collected Works of Erasmus, Vol. LXVI, ed. John W. O’Malley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 16. 35 Ibid., 57. 36 Eire, War Against the Idols, 34. 37 Erasmus, Enchiridion, 22. 38 Ibid., 14–15.

Notes to pages 66–72

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39 Alister McGrath, The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 51. 40 Eire, War Against the Idols, 40. 41 Erasmus, Enchiridion, 57. 42 Ibid., 52. 43 Reventlow, The Authority of the Bible, 41. 44 Erasmus, Enchiridion, 70. 45 For a complimentary reading of Erasmus, see O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye, 36–7. 46 Erasmus, Enchiridion, 33. 47 Ibid., 41. 48 Ibid., 84. 49 Lisa Freinkel, Reading Shakespeare’s Will: The Theology of Figure from Augustine to the Sonnets (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 141. 50 Cf. Eire, War Against the Idols, 52. 51 Freinkel, Reading Shakespeare’s Will, 141. 52 See Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London and New York: Verso, 2000) and Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003) for two contemporary philosophical reworkings of Pauline theology. 53 Erasmus, Enchiridion, 72. 54 See Alister McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross: Martin Luther’s Theological Breakthrough (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). I am indebted to McGrath’s work in what follows. 55 A.S. McGrade, The Political Thought of William of Ockham (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 221. 56 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Vol. II: The Age of Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 50. 57 Martin Luther, Von Weltlicher Oberkeit (On Secular Authority) in Luther and Calvin on Secular Authority, ed. Harro Hopfl (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 5. 58 Ibid., 10–11. 59 Ibid., 12. 60 Debora Kuller Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics and the Dominant Culture (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 103. 61 Martin Luther, A Meditation on Christ’s Passion in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, ed. Timothy F. Lull (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1989), 166. 62 See Bernard M. G. Reardon, Religious Through in the Reformation, 2nd edn. (London and New York: Longman, 1995), 45. 63 Luther, The Bondage of the Will, in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, 186–7. 64 McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross, 159.

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Notes to pages 72–77

65 Luther’s theologia crucis also needs to be seen in the broader context of his ongoing debate about the nature of political authority and the Christian’s place within the political order. For Luther, humanity is subject to two distinct kingdoms or regiments, the secular and the heavenly. See Robert Weimann, Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse, ed. David Hillman (Baltimore, OH and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 37. 66 Luther, Two Kinds of Righteousness in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, 155. 67 Ibid. 68 McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross, 158. 69 Luther, Two Kinds of Righteousness in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, 156. 70 ‘Perseverance’, in The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. C.A. Patrides (London: J.M. Dent, 1991), 204. 71 Luther, Two Kinds of Righteousness in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, 157. 72 Ibid. 73 Alister McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 201. 74 Luther, Heidelberg Disputation in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, 43–4. 75 Fulke Greville, Sonnet CIX, in Poems and Dramas of Fulke Greville First Lord Brooke, Vol. I, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (London and Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1938), 152. 76 Luther, Two Kinds of Righteousness in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, 44. 77 McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross, 161. 78 Greville, Sonnet CIX, 153. 79 This tension may also explain in part the emphasis on bodily disgust that is such a feature of early modern discourse: the subject examines himself or herself and, in the gap between divine exemplar and human reality, turns the failure to reconcile this gap inwards as a kind of bodily abjection. For a different discussion of the issue, see Ewan Fernie, Shame in Shakespeare (New York and London: Routledge, 2002). 80 Gregerson, The Reformation of the Subject, 66. 81 Cynthia Marshall, the Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts (Baltimore, OH and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 20. Marshall does examine Christ as early modern avatar, though primarily in relation to the influence of Jesuit meditative models. 82 Luther, A Meditation on Christ’s Passion, in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, 172. 83 Ibid., 169. 84 Ibid., 167. 85 Ibid., 168. 86 Freinkel, Reading Shakespeare’s Will, 155. 87 Luther, A Meditation on Christ’s Passion, in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, 169.

Notes to pages 78–82

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88 In Lacanian psychoanalysis, this shift would be configured as the progression from the imaginary to the symbolic order. See Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), 71–2; 215–19. 89 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 51. 90 Eire, War Against the Idols, 2. 91 Cf. Stephen Edmondson, Calvin’s Christology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 211. 92 Lisa Freinkel argues that ‘rather than banish dualism or promote a more integrated worldview, Luther’s vision instead entails a still sharper – indeed a total – sense of the rift between flesh and spirit. In his view, the two are utterly incommensurables’. Freinkel, Reading Shakespeare’s Will, 140. Although I agree that Luther radically rethinks the relationship between immanence and transcendence, I do not find in his theology the ‘total’ split observed by Freinkel. Luther and Calvin after him are interested in the constitutive but disavowing Christ, one who pivots between the realms of flesh and spirit. If a total split between flesh and spirit is to be found anywhere, then it is surely in the theology of Zwingli and Oecolampadius, especially in relation to their Eucharistic theology. 93 Martin Luther, Special And Chosen Sermons Of D. Martin Luther. . .(London: Thomas Vautrollier, 1578), 70. 94 See Hugh Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), esp. 1–23. 95 See Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London and New York: Verso, 1999), especially chapter 1, ‘The Concept of Enlightenment’, 3–42.

3  R e pr e s e n t i ng t h e S ubj e c t : C alv i n, C h r i s t a n d I de n t i t y 1 Susan Wabuda, Preaching During the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), my emphasis. 2 Peter Marshall and Alex Ryrie, ‘Protestantisms and their Beginnings’, in The Beginnings of English Protestantism, ed. Peter Marshall and Alex Ryrie (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 6. 3 For a good summary of Lutheranism in England and Scotland, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided (London: Penguin, 2003), 198–204. 4 Ibid., 274–6. 5 Alister McGrath, A Life of John Calvin: A Study in the Shaping of Western Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 197. 6 Ibid., 211. 7 Ibid., 149.

242

Notes to pages 82–84

8 Debora Kuller Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice and Subjectivity (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1998), 90. 9 MacCulloch, Reformation, 353–358. 10 See Paul Whitfield White, Theatre and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage, and Playing in Tudor England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 4–83. 11 See Elizabeth I: Collected Works, ed. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 10–13. 12 See the ‘Introduction’ to John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. J.T. McNeil and trans. Ford Lewis Battles (London: The Library of Christian Classics, 1961) for further information on the various editions of the Institutes, xlii–l. 13 On Martyr, see Frank A. James’s Peter Martyr Vermigli and Predestination: The Augustinian Inheritance of an Italian Reformer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) and especially John Patrick Donnelly’s Calvinism and Scholasticism in Vermigli’s Doctrine of Man (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1976). As Donnelly notes, ‘after Calvin, Martyr did more than anybody else to establish the doctrine of predestination’, 125. He also observes that ‘more of Martyr’s books were translated into English than into any other vernacular’, 174. On Musculus, see his Common Places of Christian Religion (London: Reynolde Woulfe, 1563), a popular work in early modern England. On Zanchi, see his Confession Of Christian Religion (Cambridge: John Legat, 1599). Legat was also the printer of William Perkins’ works. There is an important discussion of Zanchi’s doctrine of predestination in Richard Muller’s Christ and the Decree: Christology and Predestination in Reformed Theology: From Calvin to Perkins (Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1986), 110–25. 14 Alistair Fox, The English Renaissance: Identity and Representation in Elizabethan England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 61. 15 See H.C. Porter, Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 101–276 and Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and The Elizabethan Church, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 1–15 and 116–68. 16 Peter Lake, ‘Calvinism and the English Church 1570–1635’, in Articles on Calvin and Calvinism. A Fourteen-Volume Anthology of Scholarly Articles, ed. Richard Gamble (New York and London: Garland, 1992), 282. 17 In what follows I am indebted to Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c.1590–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) and to Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 18 Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation, 290. 19 On the Lambeth Articles, see Victoria C. Miller, The Lambeth Articles: Doctrinal Development and Conflict in Sixteenth Century England (Oxford: Latimer House, 1994). See also Nicholas Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism c. 1530–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 162.

Notes to pages 84–90

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20 Pierre du Moulin, The Anatomy Of Arminianism (London: Thomas Snodham, 1620), 226. 21 See MacCulloch, Reformation, 376. 22 Du Moulin, The Anatomy, 224. 23 Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, 7. Arminianism did not really gain a foothold in England until the ascendancy of Archbishop William Laud. For more on these debates, see Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, 9–86. 24 For more on the duplex cognitio Dei, see Richard Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Terms: Drawn Principally From Protestant Scholastic Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1985), 97. 25 Calvin, Institutes, 35. 26 François Wendel, Calvin: The Origin and Development of his Religious Thought, trans. Philip Mairet (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1973), 151. 27 Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, 2nd edn. (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), 104. 28 Ibid. The italics are Dollimore’s own. 29 Ibid., 105. 30 See Dollimore, Radical Tragedy and Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 31 See John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 32 Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation, 292. 33 John Calvin, Diuers Sermons. . .concerning the Diuinitie, Humanitie, and Natiuitie of our Lorde Iesus Christ (London: George Byshop, 1581), Sig. B1v. 34 Calvin, Institutes, 244. 35 Ibid., 253. 36 Fulke Greville, A Treatise of Religion, in The Remains: Being Poems of Monarchy and Religion, ed. G.A. Wilkes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 206. 37 Calvin, Institutes, 262. 38 Ibid., 768. 39 Wendel, Calvin, 191. 40 Alister McGrath puts it as follows: ‘faith may be said to play its part in justification by insisting that it does not justify, attributing all to Christ’. Alister McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 225. 41 Calvin, Diuers Sermons, Sig. Q1v. 42 Greville, A Treatise of Religion, 221. 43 Calvin, Institutes, 183. 44 Ibid., 242. 45 Ibid., 55. 46 Ibid., 271. 47 Theodor Adorno, Extract from Negative Dialectics, in The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 57.

244

Notes to pages 90–96

48 Greville, A Treatise of Religion, 213. 49 Calvin, Institutes, 37–38. John Calvin, Institutio Christianae Religionis (London: Thomas Vautrollier, 1576), 1. 50 Ibid., 355. 51 Calvin, Institutio, 156. 52 Calvin, Institutes, 242. 53 Greville, A Treatise of Religion, 214. 54 McGrath, A Life of John Calvin, 131. 55 Calvin, Institutes, 51–2. 56 Greville, A Treatise of Religion, 207. 57 Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation, 303. 58 Calvin, Institutes, 37–8. 59 The question of Calvin’s ‘natural theology’ has provoked considerable controversy. See David Steinmetz ‘Calvin and the Natural Knowledge of God’, in David Steinmetz, Calvin in Context (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 23–39. 60 McGrath, A Life of John Calvin, 154. 61 Fulke Greville, Sonnet XCIX, in Poems and Dramas of Fulke Greville First Lord Brooke, Vol. I, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (London and Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1938), 144. 62 Elaine Y.L. Ho, ‘Fulke Greville’s Caelica and the Calvinist Self’, Studies in English Literature, 32, 1, 1992, 51. 63 Calvin, Institutes, 190. 64 Calvin, Institutio, 76. 65 Calvin, Institutes, 191–2. 66 Calvin, Institutio, 76. 67 Calvin, Institutes, 189. The Latin reads: ‘Nondum tamen data esse videtur plena imaginis definitio, nisi clarius pateat quibis factultatibus praecellat homo, & quibis speculum censeri debeat gloriae Dei.’ Calvin, Institutio, 75. 68 Calvin, Institutes, 189. 69 Calvin, Institutio, 75. 70 Calvin, Institutes, 189–90. 71 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie in Brian Vickers, ed., English Renaissance Literary Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 246. 72 Marginal note to Matthew 27:44, in The Bible, That Is, The holy Scriptures conteined [sic] in the Olde and Newe Testament . . . (London: Christopher Barker, 1599). This issue is also central to Erasmus and Luther’s debate on free will. See Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther, Discourse on Free Will, trans. Ernst F. Winter (London and New York: Continuum, 2005), 111–12. 73 See Carlos M.N. Eire, War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 2–3; Christopher Elwood, The Body Broken: The Calvinist Doctrine of the Eucharist and the Symbolization of Power in Sixteenth-Century France (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 70–5; and Crawford Gribben, The Puritan Millennium: Literature and Theology, 1550–1682 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), 21.

Notes to pages 96–101

245

74 Stephen Edmondson, Calvin’s Christology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 211. 75 Calvin, Institutes, 1402. 76 John Calvin, Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries: Romans and Thessalonians, trans. Ross Mackenzie (Grand Rapids, MI: Wme. B. Eerdmans, 1995), 196. 77 John Calvin, Sermons of M. John Calvin on the Epistels of S. Paule to Timothie and Titus (London: G. Bishop and T. Woodcoke, 1579), 92. 78 R.T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 13. 79 Ibid., 15. 80 Ibid., 29. 81 For a summary of these debates, see Sean Hughes’ essay ‘The Problem of “Calvinism”: English Theologies of Predestination c. 1580–1630’, in Susan Wabuda and Caroline Litzenberger, eds. Belief and Practice in Reformation England (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 1998), 229–49. 82 Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, 162. 83 Jacob Kimedoncius, Of The Redemption of Mankind Three Bookes (London: Felix Kingston, 1598), 38. 84 Quoted in Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649, 57. For more on Perkins, see Norman Jones, The English Reformation: Religion and Cultural Adaptation (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 180–7. 85 Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation, 292. 86 William Perkins, A Golden Chain, in The Work of William Perkins, ed. Ian Breward (Abingdon, Oxon: The Sutton Courtenay Press, 1970), 227. 87 Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism, 7. 88 Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, 162. See also Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation, 252–64. 89 See Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism, 1, 29. 90 For the Lambeth Articles, Miller, The Lambeth Articles. 91 Peter White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 5. 92 Richard Muller, Christ and the Decree, 19, has shown that it is impossible to isolate predestination in discussion of Calvinist theology. So while it is true that ‘predestination has as its intention the salvation of the elect’, in works of ‘popular’ religion in early modern England, this point is discussed in a ­variety of ways. 93 John Dove, A Sermon preached at Paules Crosse, the sixt of February. 1596 (London: T. Creede, 1597), 63. 94 Richard Swaine, A table concerning Christ our aduocate (London: Henry Bell, 1615), n.p. See Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, 162–3. 95 For more on the casuistical tradition, see Camille Wells Slights, The Casuistical Tradition in Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert and Milton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), esp. 3–66. 96 Lewis Bayley, The Practice of Piety: Directing a Christian How to Walk, that He May Please God (Morgan: Soli Deo Gloria Publications, 1995), xxxv.

246

Notes to pages 101–104

97 William Perkins, A Golden Chain, 238. 98 Henry Smith, Ten Sermons Preached By Maister Henry Smith (London: Richard Field, 1596), Sig. A3r. 99 Arthur Dent, A Sermon of Repentance (London: I. Windet, 1585), Sig. B2v. 100 Ibid. Sig. A6r. 101 Calvin, Institutes, 847. 102 However, as Shuger notes elsewhere, ‘These divisions between public and private domains are not . . . central to Calvinism, which historically resisted the bifurcation of religious existence from social order’. Debora Kuller Shuger, ‘“Subversive Fathers and Suffering Subjects”: Shakespeare and Christianity’, in Donna B. Hamilton and Richard Strier, eds., Religion, Literature and Politics in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 66. 103 Dent, A Sermon of Repentance, Sig. B3v. 104 See Keir Elam, ‘“In what chapter of his bosom?” Reading Shakespeare’s Bodies’, in Terence Hawkes, ed., Alternative Shakespeares. Vol. II (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 140–63. 105 Dent, A Sermon of Repentance, Sig. B3v. 106 However, Dent does say the following: ‘He therefore that is not of the church he that is not grafted into Christ by Faith, he that is not a member of his misticall body can enioy nothing by Christs death.’ Sig. B2v. 107 Ibid., Sig. C3r. 108 Ibid., Sig. B1r. 109 Ibid., Sig. C8r. 110 Ibid., Sig. B7r. In a later section, he speaks of ‘all the cursed enemies of Gods grace’. Sig. D3v. 111 Richard Hooker, A Learned and Comfortable Sermon of The Certainty and Perpetuity of Faith in The Elect, in The Works of That Most Learned and Judicious Divine, Mr. Richard Hooker, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1850), 591. Hooker does not dwell on the punitive aspects of faith as Dent and Bayly do, but the theology underpinning his sermon is effectively the same. The difference in emphasis is one of tone not fundamental doctrine. 112 Bayly, The Practise of Piety, 28–45. 113 Ibid., 45. 114 Ibid., 45–8. 115 Ibid., 52. See also the long section in Bayly’s text on the ‘Hindrances to Piety’, particularly the section on the ‘presumption of God’s mercy’ and the difficulty of judging the truth of repentance, 76–101. 116 Paul Helm, Calvin and the Calvinists (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1998), 11. 117 Calvin, Institutes, 944. 118 Stanchniewski, The Persecutory Imagination, 25. 119 Theodore Beza, A Briefe and piththie sum of the Christian faith, made in forme of a confession, with confutation of all such superstitious errours, as are contrary there vnto (London: William How, 1572), Sig. D3r.

Notes to pages 104–110

247

120 Ibid., Sig. D8v. If anything, the theology of both Beza and Perkins is even more Christocentric than that of Calvin. 121 White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic, 22. 122 This view is endorsed by Alister McGrath in Iustitia Dei, 298–302. 123 Musculus, Common Places, Fol. 201r. 124 Zanchius, Confession, 76. 125 Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Basingstoke, Hants: Macmillan, 1988), 22. 126 John Pelling, A sermon of the providence of God, cited in Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 15. It is worth noting here that both the ‘Thirty-Nine Articles’ of the Elizabethan Church and the ‘Lambeth Articles’ of 1595 can be read as promulgating a doctrine of limited atonement (though not, it should be said, without a certain verbal ambiguity, probably designed to maintain a political via media). For more on this, see Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, 3–4 and 31. 127 Theodore Beza, A Briefe declaration of the chiefe poyntes of Christian Religion, set foorth in a Table (London: T. East, 1575), sig. B4v–r. 128 Girolamo Zanchi, An Excellent And Learned Treatise, of the spirituall marriage betweene Christ and the Church, and every faithfull man (Cambridge[?]: John Legate, 1592), 122. 129 Swaine, A table concerning Christ, n.p. 130 Cf. Edmondson, Calvin’s Christology, 28–39. 131 Calvin, Institutes, 484. 132 Calvin, Diuers Sermons, Sig. G7r. 133 Christopher Sutton, Disce Vivere. Learning To Live. . . (London: E. Short, 1604), 449–50. 134 Wendel, Calvin, 225. 135 Daniel Heinsius, The Mirrovr Of Hvmilitie Or Two eloquent and Acute Discourses vpon the Natiuitie and Passion of Christ, full of diuine and excellent Meditations and Sentences, trans. I.H. (London: Bernard Alsop, 1618), 82–3. 136 Karl Barth, The Theology of John Calvin, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids , MI: Wme. B. Eerdmans, 1995), 329. 137 Stanchniewski, The Persecutory Imagination, 12. 138 Michael Waltzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study of the Origins of Radical Theology (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966), 24.

4  Pe rc e p t ion a n d Fa n tasy i n Ea r ly Mode r n Pro t e s ta n t Di scou r s e 1 Patrick Collinson, English Puritanism (London: The Chameleon Press, 1983), 34. 2 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn. (London and New York: Verso, 2006), 1–7,

248

Notes to pages 110–116

for the relationship between the fantasy of an ‘imagined community’ and nationhood. 3 William Perkins, The Whole Treatise Of The Cases Of Conscience (Cambridge: Iohn Legat, 1606), 194. 4 Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie. . . (London: Thomas Vautrollier, 1586), 103. 5 See ‘Timothy Bright’, Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 6 Antony Nixon, The Dignitie Of Man, Both In The Perfections Of His Sovle And Bodie, (Oxford: Joseph Barnes for John Barnes, 1616), 32. 7 Perkins, The Whole Treatise, 194. 8 Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie, 102. 9 In examining the soul as the originator of sense perception, Reisch also adopted an important role for the brain and heart in sense perception, as Bright does too. Katharine Park, ‘The Organic Soul’, in Charles Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, Eckhard Kessler and Jill Kraye, eds., The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 468–71. 10 Ibid., 471. 11 Ibid. 12 As Luther put it in his Disputation Against Scholastic Theology, ‘the whole Aristotle is to theology as darkness is to light’. Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, ed. Timothy F. Lull (Minneapolis, MI: Fortress Press, 1989), 16. Later Protestants such as Beza were more receptive to Aristotle. 13 See Donald R. Kelly, The Beginnings of Ideology: Consciousness and Society in the French Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 59–60. 14 Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie, 103. 15 Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 245. 16 Ibid., 231. 17 The Oxford English Dictionary, Prepared by J.A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 568. 18 Aristotle, De Anima, trans. and ed. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (London: Penguin, 1986), 187. 19 Ibid. 20 David Hawkes, Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580–1680 (New York and Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave, 2001), 53. 21 Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie, 104. 22 Thomas Nashe’s The Terrors of the Night, or A Discourse of Apparitions (1594) could come under this heading. See Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works, ed. J.B. Steane (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, 1972), 208–50. 23 Mikhail Bakhtin, Extract from Problems of Doestoevsky’s Poetics in The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov, ed. Pam Morris (London and New York: Arnold, 1997), 108.

Notes to pages 116–120

249

24 William Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 43. 25 As John Benton notes, ‘Until the beginning of the twelfth century no reader of the Confessions dared or was moved to write a self-examination in the same mode.’ John Benton, ‘Consciousness of Self and Perceptions of Individuality’ in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. Robert Benson and Giles Constable with Carol Lanham (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 265. 26 Cited in ‘Introduction’ to Saint Augustine, Confessions, ed. R.S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin, 1961), 16. 27 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 133. 28 Augustine, Confessions, 207. 29 Ibid., 207. 30 Ibid., 215–16, my emphasis. 31 Ibid., 223–24. 32 Richard Kilby, The Bvrthen Of a loaden conscience: Or The Miserie Of Sinne: Set forth by the confession of a miserable sinner (Cambridge: Cantrell Legge, 1608), 1. 33 Ibid., 5. 34 John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 97–8. 35 John Donne, ‘Sonnet XIV’, in Alasdair Fowler, ed., The New Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 118. 36 Calvin, Institutes, 253. 37 Richard Greenham, The Workes Of The Reverend And Faithfull Servant Of Iesus Christ M. Richard Greenham, Minister and Preacher of the word of God (London: Felix Kingston, 1599), 52. 38 Linda Gregerson, The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton and the English Protestant Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 66. 39 Kilby, The Bvrthen, 37. 40 Ibid., 9. 41 Ibid. 42 Thomas Harding, A Detection of Svndrie Fovle Errovrs. . . (Lovanii: Ioannem Foulerum, 1568), 34b–35a. 43 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Fantasy as a Political Category’ in The Žižek Reader, ed. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 92. For a reading of the ‘positive’ aspects of fantasy, see Jacqueline Rose, States of Fantasy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). 44 Kilby, The Bvrthen, 31; 41. 45 Ibid., 40; 51; 11. 46 Ibid., 90. 47 Ibid., 17. 48 Ibid., 22.

250

Notes to pages 120–131

49 Sir John Hayward, The Sanctuarie of a troubled Soule (London: H. Lownes for Cuthbert Bur, 1604), 129. 50 Nixon, The Dignitie, 34. 51 Greenham, The Workes, 5–6. 52 Ibid., 259. 53 See John Manning’s entry for ‘Sir John Hayward (1564–1627)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Bibliography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 54 Hayward, Sanctuarie, 15. 55 Ibid., 21, my emphasis. 56 Stachniewski, The Persecutory, 85. 57 Hayward, Sanctuarie, 22. 58 I take the phrase from the title of John Stachniewski’s book The Persecutory Imagination. 59 Hayward, Sanctuarie, 38. 60 Ibid., 124. 61 Žižek , ‘Fantasy as a Political Category’, 94. 62 William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. E.A.J. Honigman, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Thompson Learning, 2003). 63 Žižek, ‘The Fantasy in Cyberspace’, in The Žižek Reader, 119. 64 Žižek, ‘Fantasy as a Political Category’, 97.

5   A n t i-Dr ama , A n t i- C h u rc h: De bat i ng t h e Ea r ly Mode r n T h e at r e 1 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (Menston, Yorks.: The Scholar Press, 1968), 119. 2 Thomas Wilson, The Art of Rhetoric, in Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric, ed. Wayne Rebhorn (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2000), 175. 3 Arthur Kinney, Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in SixteenthCentury England (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 21. 4 Margot Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 32. 5 See Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet Without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 188. 6 Cicero, De Oratore, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Library (London: William Heinemann, 1960), 171. 7 Ibid., 177. 8 Another reason why the anti-theatricalists attacked actors so severely was that they saw them as usurping many of the functions of the preacher, a person who in many respects was the early modern version of the classical orator. 9 Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Basingstoke, Hants: Macmillan, 1988), 113.

Notes to pages 131–134

251

10 Paul Whitfield White, Theatre and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage, and Playing in Tudor England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 172. See also Peter Lake with Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 425–79. 11 On the theatre and religious culture, shifting audience expectations and the emergence of the public stage, see the essays by Paul Whitfield White and Ann Jennalie Cook in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan, eds., A New History of Early English Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 133–51 and 305–20. Although the expression of religious language and themes was subject to prohibition by legislation during the period, all the evidence shows that far from ignoring religious topics and themes, dramatists actively pursued such matters in the drama. One obvious way is through the extensive use of biblical quotation, reference and allusion, a phenomenon that is much more politically subversive than is commonly thought. The question, as Whitfield White puts it, is ‘what happens to religious rhetoric and representations of the self when fictionalized’ in the drama of the period? Whitfield White, ‘Theatre and Religious Culture’, A New History of Early English Drama, 148. 12 Stephen Gosson, Plays Confuted in Five Actions (New York and London: Johnson Reprint, 1972), Sig. D5v. 13 This is unsurprising as Sidney’s Apology was written against Gosson who had dedicated his School of Abuse to Sidney without permission. 14 Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry in Laurie Magnus, ed., Documents Illustrating Elizabethan Poetry (London: Routledge, 1906), 52. 15 Judy Kronenfeld’s King Lear and the Naked Truth: Rethinking the Language of Religion and Resistance (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1998) gives a good account of contemporary debates on apparel, esp. 17–91. 16 For more on these debates in general, see Peter Lake’s Anglicans and Puritans: Presbyterian and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988). 17 Donna B. Hamilton, Shakespeare and the Politics of Protestant England (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 6. 18 John Penry, A Treatise Wherein Is Manifestlie Proved. . . (Edinburgh[?]: Robert Waldegrave, 1590), Sig. B3r. 19 Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), 132–133. 20 A View of Popish Abuses Yet Remaining in the English Church, in David Cressy and Lori Anne Ferrell, eds., Religion and Society in Early Modern England: A Sourcebook (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 83. 21 For Presbyterianism and Episcopalianism, see Lake, Anglicans and Puritans, 13. 22 G.W. Prothero, ed., Statutes and Constitutional Documents: 1558–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1944), 188. 23 A View of Popish Abuses, 89.

252

Notes to pages 134–136

24 Lake and Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, 453. 25 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 113. 26 Peter Stallybrass, ‘Worn Worlds: Clothes and Identity on the Renaissance Stage’, in Margreta De Grazia, Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass, eds., Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 306; 310. 27 Stephen Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse (New York and London: Garland, 1973), Sig. C6r. 28 Phillip Stubbes, The Second Part of the Anatomie of Abuses (New York and London: Garland, 1973), Sigs. P1r – P2v. 29 Michel Massei, ‘Stephen Gossson: Playes Confuted in Five Actions. A Critical Introduction to the Pamphlet and Its Background’, Cahiers Elisabethains, 2, 1972, 45. 30 The High Commission dealt, as Prothero notes, with ‘the maintenance of the ecclesiastical supremacy’, and in particular, with issues of (non-)conformity. Prothero, Statutes and Constitutional Documents, xl. 31 Thomas Lodge, A Reply to Gosson’s Schoole of Abuse (New York and London: Garland, 1973), 44. This may also allude to the flouting of early modern sumptuary laws designed to regulate social hierarchy by prescribing what different classes could and could not wear. 32 For the difficulties of defining the term ‘Puritan’, see Christopher Hill’s Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (London: Mercury Books, 1966), 13–29 and M.M. Knappen, Tudor Puritanism: A Chapter in the History of Idealism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939), 487–93. 33 Patrick Collinson, ‘A Comment: Concerning the Name Puritan’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 31, 1980, 486. 34 Ibid., 488. 35 Whitfield White, Theatre and Reformation, 173. 36 Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), 66. As Diehl has also observed, ‘apologists for the stage also appropriate basic tenets of Calvinist theology to wield against their opponents, a phenomenon that has for the most part been ignored in the critical literature’. Huston Diehl, ‘“Infinite Space”: Representation and Reformation in Measure for Measure’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 49, 1998, 396. 37 The public stage was a particular ‘abuse’ that the authorities both inside and outside the city were enjoined to do something about. Indeed, there is some evidence that the London city fathers actively encouraged polemics opposing the playhouses. See Anthony Munday, A second and third blast of retreat from plays and Theaters (New York and London: Johnson Reprint, 1972), 73. 38 Stubbes was not simply an anti-theatrical writer; he was a Christian moralist whose focus was on the range of ‘abuses’ afflicting Elizabethan society. 39 Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuuses, Sig. D2v. 40 Ibid., Sig. F6v.

Notes to pages 137–142

253

41 Whitfield White, Theatre and Reformation, 140. 42 Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses, Sig. C4v. 43 Ibid., Sig. C4r. 44 Ibid., Sig. C6v. 45 William Perkins, A Golden Chain, in The Works of William Perkins, ed. Ian Breward (Abingdon: The Sutton Courtenay Press, 1970), 193. 46 Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses, Sig. D2r. 47 Crowley was also one of the leaders of those Puritans who objected to proscribed ecclesiastical dress during the Admonition controversy mentioned earlier. For more on Crowley, see Knappen, Tudor Puritanism, 198–9; 209–10. 48 Robert Crowley, A brief discourse against the outwarde apparell and Ministring garmentes of the popishe church (London [?], 1566), 34. 49 William Whitaker, An Answere To A Certeine [sic] Booke, Written by M. William Rainolds (London, 1585), 7. 50 Stubbes, The Second Part of the Anatomie of Abuses, Sig. P3v.

6 

c o n s u m m at u m e s t :

C alv i n i s t E x e g e s i s, M i m e s i s a n d

d o c tor faust us

1 Harry Levin, Christopher Marlowe: The Overreacher (London: Faber & Faber, 1953), 153. 2 Witness the somewhat contradictory recent assessment of Patrick Cheney that ‘Christopher Marlowe enters the twenty-first century the enigmatic genius of canonical dissidence’, a formulation that seeks simultaneously to pin Marlowe down to specific historical contexts, while also allowing him dissident (or overreaching) freedom from those very contexts. Patrick Cheney, ‘Introduction: Marlowe in the Twenty-First Century’, in Patrick Cheney, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 18. 3 For a concise overview of these debates, see Stephen Cohen’s essay ‘“(Post)modern Elizabeth”: Gender, politics, and the emergence of modern subjectivity’, in Hugh Grady, ed., Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Millennium (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 20–39. 4 Katherine Eiseman Maus, Inwardness and the Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 11. 5 See David Steinmetz, Calvin in Context (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 168; 210. 6 Thomas H. Luxon, Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation Crisis in Representation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 52. 7 All references are to the A text. Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, A – and B – Texts (1604, 1616), ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993). 8 Wilbur Sanders, The Dramatist and the Received Idea: Studies in the Plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 224–5.

254

Notes to pages142–146

9 G.M. Pinciss, ‘Marlowe’s Cambridge Years and the Writing of Doctor Faustus’. Studies in English Literature, 33, 1993, 256. 10 A.D. Nuttall, The Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton and Blake (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 37. 11 Ibid., 38. 12 Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 208. See also Mark Thornton Burnett, ‘Doctor Faustus and the Form and Function of the Chorus: Marlowe’s Beginnings and Endings’, CIEFL Bulletin, 1, 1, 1989, 33–45. 13 Jacques Derrida, ‘Afterword: Towards an Ethic of Discussion’, in Samuel Weber (trans.), Limited Inc. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 129. 14 Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 117. 15 François Wendel, Calvin: The Origin and Development of his Religious Thought, trans. Philip Mairet (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1973), 229. 16 G.M. Pinciss has shown that Marlowe was in all probability exposed to the writings of Calvin and contemporary Calvinists during his time at Corpus Christi College. The concerns of theologians like Calvin and William Perkins are comparable to those discussed in the play, as Pinciss also notes. 17 John Calvin, Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries John 11–21 & 1 John, trans. T.H.L. Parker (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1994), 233. 18 Ibid., 243. 19 Pinciss notes that Perkins and Marlow overlapped at Cambridge. Pinciss, ‘Marlowe’s Cambridge Years’, 252. 20 William Perkins, A Case of Conscience (London: John Legat, 1595), 2–3. 21 A.D. Nuttall has asked, ‘Does Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus ever equate himself with Christ?’ He answers: ‘Yes he does . . . The play itself is theological, through and through. Of course Faustus offers us a hideously distorted version of Christ’s assertion. But with that distortion comes a frightening echo. For Christ on the cross, likewise, was paying a debt, had made a pact with the Devil. The violence is, so to speak, a deeply structured violence.’ Nuttall, The Alternative Trinity, 45. I owe much to Nuttall’s argument, here and elsewhere. 22 Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, ‘Nymphs and reapers heavily vanish: the discursive con-texts of The Tempest’, in John Drakakis, ed., Alternative Shakespeares (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 194. 23 John Calvin, Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries Romans and Thessalonians, trans. Ross Mackenzie (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1995), 121. 24 Ibid., my emphasis. 25 This irony probably originates with Calvin. For despite the metaphorical/ supplementary logic of the mediator, Calvin insists in Book 4, chapter 17 of the Institutes that Christ’s physical body would be contained in heaven until the Day of Judgement. Nonetheless, in so far as Faustus can be seen as a parody of Christ, it seems reasonable to suppose that the magician’s immolation operates according to the dialectic of divine sacrifice and atonement. Indeed,

Notes to pages 146–152

255

at the end of the B text of the play, we are told that ‘Faustus’ limbs [are],/ All torn asunder by the hand of death’ (V.iii.6–7). The focus on terrible corporeal retribution completes the parodic circle: Christ’s body as the locus of salvation is contrasted with Faustus’ body as the site of transgression. 26 Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, 2nd edn (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), 109; 110. 27 Ibid., 114, my emphasis. 28 See under ‘Mediator’ in Richard Muller’s Dictionary of Latin and Greek Terms Drawn Principally from Protestant Scholastic Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1985). The basis of this doctrine is biblical. See Paul’s First Epistle to Timothy 2:5–6. Calvin’s exegesis of this passage in his Commentary on the First and Second Epistles of Paul the Apostle to Timothy, trans. T.A. Smail (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1996), 210–12, is particularly illuminating. 29 Richard Muller, Christ and the Decree: Christology and Predestination from Calvin to Perkins (Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1986), 10. 30 Calvin, Romans, 124. 31 William Perkins, A Declaration Of The Trve manner of knowing Christ Crucified (London: Iohn Legate, 1611), 4. The phrase ‘drop of his bloud’ is interestingly paralleled in the play in both the 1604 and 1616 versions, albeit with different phrasing. 32 Ibid., 35. 33 Ibid., 53. 34 Ibid., 43. 35 Calvin, Institutes, 970. 36 I Corinthians 13:12. The OED records 1548 as the first figurative use of the word ‘glass’. The Oxford English Dictionary, J.A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). 37 John Calvin, A Commentarie vpon S. Paules Epistles to the Corinthians, trans. Thomas Timme (London: John Harrison and George Byshop, 1577), Fol. 156r. Calvin’s exegesis is also indebted to Humanist models of perception. See Marsilio Ficino, The Philebus Commentary, ed. and trans. Michael J.B. Allen (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1975), 210. 38 Calvin, Commentarie vpon S. Paules Epistles to the Corinthians, Fol. 231v–r. 39 Perkins, A Declaration, 64. 40 I say this while cognisant of the fact that the A and B texts end differently: my interpretation leans more on the A text at this point. 41 All references to John Donne: The Complete English Poems, ed. A.J. Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976). 42 On Donne and Calvinism, see John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (London and Boston, MA: Faber & Faber, 1981), 240–4. 43 Francis Quarles, ‘On Christ and our selves’, in H.R. Woudhuysen, ed., The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse (London: Penguin, 1993), 574. 44 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’, in On Metapsychology, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1991), 418.

256

Notes to pages 152–157

45 Debora Kuller Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice and Subjectivity (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1998), 96. 46 Christopher Lever, A Crucifixe (London: VS for Iohn Budge, 1607), sig. E4v. 47 Sir John Hayward, Christs Prayer Vpon the Crosse, for his enemies (London: John Bill, 1623), 23. 48 Ibid., 24. 49 Ibid., 132–3. 50 Anon, Saint Peters Ten Teares . . . (London: Gabriel Simson, 1597), Sig. C2r. 51 Ibid., Sig. B4r. 52 John Calvin, Sermons of M. John Caluin, on the Epistles of S. Paule to Timothie and Titus. Translated out of French into English by L.T. (London: G. Bishop, 1579), 118. 53 On dying and death in the period, see Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 1–48. 54 John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 46. 55 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholie ed. Holbrook Jackson (London: J.M. Dent, 1936), 408. Henry Smith says in a sermon: ‘Christ is called ­saluation, because no man should despaire, and because it is impossible to be saued without him, for saluation is onely in him.’ Henry Smith, Ten Sermons Preached By Maister Henry Smith (London: Richard Field, 1596), Sig. D3r. 56 Samuel Rowlands, The Betraying of Christ . . . (London: Adam Islip, 1598), Sig. C1r. 57 Pompa Banerjee, ‘I Mephastophilis: Self, Other and Demonic Parody in Doctor Faustus’, Christianity and Literature, 42, 1993, 225. 58 Ibid., my emphasis. 59 Jacques Derrida, ‘. . . That Dangerous Supplement . . .’, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 83. 60 For more on this connection, see Adrian Streete, ‘Calvinist Conceptions of Hell in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus’, Notes and Queries, 245, 2000, 430–2. 61 Calvin, 1 John, 240. 62 See Philip C. Almond, Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 92. 63 See Satan/Milton’s reworking of Faustus/Marlowe/Calvin in Book IV of Paradise Lost: Me miserable! Which way shall I fly Infinite wrath, and infinite despair? Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell; (IV. 73–5) John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Penguin, 1989). 64 The idea that the devil might employ Scripture for his own purposes is itself scriptural (see Matthew 4:6). But it was also part of a much larger discursive field in the early modern period, including the drama.

Notes to pages 157–164

257

65 William Perkins, A Discovrse Of The Damned Art Of Witchcraft . . . (Cambridge: Cantrell Legge, 1618), 615. 66 Perkins, The Combat, 399. 67 Banerjee, ‘I Mephastophilis’, 221. 68 Perkins, A Discovrse, 615. 69 Alan Sinfield, Literature in Protestant England 1560–1660 (London and Canberra: Croom Helm, 1983), 14. 70 Sinfield, Faultlines, 236. I am grateful to Professor Sinfield for pointing out a misreading of his position on the play in an earlier version of this chapter. 71 Ralph C. Hancock, Calvin and the Foundations of Modern Politics (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1989), 133. 72 Wendel, Calvin, 298. 73 Martha Tuck Rozett, The Doctrine of Election and the Emergence of Elizabethan Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 44. 74 Calvin, Institutes, 1432. 75 Calvin, Romans, 124. 76 Luxon, Literal Figures, 53. 77 Derrida, ‘. . . That Dangerous Supplement . . .’, 83. 78 Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (London and New York: Verso, 1996), 36. 79 See Mark 15:34. Of course, such a reading requires a conflation of Matthew and Mark’s account of Jesus’ death with that of John. 80 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘A Man-God’, in Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (London: Athlone Press, 1998), 57.

7  S h ak e spe a r e on G olgo t h a : P ol i t ical Typology in r ich a r d ii 1 René Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore, OH: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 102. 2 Ivor B. John, From an Introduction to Richard II (1912), in Charles R. Forker, ed., Shakespeare: The Critical Tradition. Richard II (London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: The Athlone Press, 1998), 475. See this volume too for Reed, Pater and Herford. 3 See John Drakakis’ ‘Introduction’ to John Drakakis, ed., Alternative Shakespeares (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 1–25. 4 Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 39. 5 Ibid., 29. 6 J.A. Bryant, ‘The Linked Analogies of Richard II’, The Sewanee Review, LXV, 1957, 425. 7 Ibid., 426. 8 David Norbrook, ‘The Emperor’s New Body: Richard II, Ernst Kantorowicz, and the Politics of Shakespearean Criticism’, Textual Practice, 10, 2, 1996, 342.

258 9 10 11 12

Notes to pages 164–170

Ibid., 343. Ibid., 344. Ibid., 349. William Shakespeare, King Richard II, ed. Charles R. Forker, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Thompson Learning, 2002), 78. All subsequent references to the play are taken from this text. 13 Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics (London: Thompson Learning, 2004), 40. 14 For more on Essex and ‘Doleman’, see Paul E.J. Hammer, The Polarization of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–1597 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 15 Robert Parsons, A Conference About the Next Succession To The Crown of England (R. Doleman, 1681), 48. 16 See Susan Brigden, New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors 1485–1603 (London: Penguin Books, 2001), 332. 17 John Ponet, A Short treatise of politicke power . . . (Menston, Yorks.: Scholar Press, 1970), sig. G3r. 18 Ibid. 19 Parsons, A Conference, 49–50; 51. 20 Ibid., 83. 21 Ibid., 78. 22 See Brigden, New Worlds, Lost Worlds, 226. 23 Parsons, A Conference, 185. 24 See Hadfield, Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics, 8. 25 See J.E. Neale’s Elizabeth and her Parliaments 1584–1601 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1957), 251–66 as well as Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, 7. 26 Ibid., 263. 27 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Vol. II: The Age of Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 302–9. 28 Anon., Vindiciae contra Tyrannos . . . (London: Matthew Simmons and Robert Ibbitson, 1648), 125. 29 Annabel Patterson, Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 114. 30 David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, rev. edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 116. 31 Neale, Elizabeth and her Parliaments, 255. 32 Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, 52. 33 Ibid., 52–3. 34 See Leeds Barroll, ‘A New History for Shakespeare and His Time’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 39, 4, 1989, 441–64, and Arthur F. Kinney, ‘Essex and Shakespeare Versus Hayward’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 44, 4, 1993, 464–66. 35 Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Elizabeth, 1598–1601, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (London: Longmans, Green, 1869), 405.

Notes to pages 170–176

259

36 Ibid., 555. Punctuation in original. 37 Ibid., 540. 38 In a passage on informers and how good and bad rulers have employed them, Bartolomeo Sacchi notes that ‘Boethius, a most learned and innocent man, was deprived of life on the orders of King Theodoric, due to the urging of informers.’ Bartolomeo Sacchi, Extracts from On the Prince, in Jill Kraye, ed., Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts. Vol. II: Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 93. 39 See Norbrook, Poetry and Politics, 152–3 and Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, 43–4. 40 Sir John Hayward, The First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie the IIII (London: Iohn Woolfe, 1599), Sig. A3r. 41 Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, 44. 42 Calendar of State Papers, 404. 43 Ibid., 539. 44 Ibid., 540. 45 Hayward, The First Part, Sig. B2v. 46 Thomas Aquinas, On Princely Government, ed. A.P. D’Entreves, trans. J.G. Dawson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1959), 21. 47 Ibid., 33. 48 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Discourses, ed. Bernard Crick, trans. Leslie Walker (London: Penguin, 1998), 110. 49 Ibid., 132. 50 Ibid., 133. 51 Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, 50. 52 The Oxford English Dictionary, Prepared by J.A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 817. 53 See Bernard Capp, ‘The Political Dimension of Apocalyptic Thought’, in C.A. Patrides and Joseph Wittreich, eds., The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 98–9, and Norbrook, Poetry and Politics, 117. 54 George Gifford, Sermons Vpon The Whole Booke Of The Revelation (London: Thomas Man and Toby Cooke, 1596), 17. 55 Patrick Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, in Elizabethans (London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2003), 31–57. It would be odd if Essex’s interest in republicanism extended to a complete disavowal of monarchical power. 56 Christopher Goodman, How Svperior Powers Oght To Be Obeyd. . . (Geneva: John Crispin, 1558), 67–9. 57 Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, 43. 58 Goodman, How Svperior Powers, 46. 59 Such eschatological expectations are more commonly associated by critics with the post- Civil War period, but they are undoubtedly operative earlier. See Capp, ‘The Political Dimension of Apocalyptic Thought’, and Thomas H. Luxon, Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation Crisis in

260

Notes to pages 176–186

Representation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 8–33. 60 Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, 57. 61 Naomi Conn Liebler, Shakespeare’s Festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 60. 62 Harry Berger, Jr., ‘Psychoanalyzing the Shakespeare Text: The First Three Scenes of the ‘Henriad’’, in Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare, ed. Peter Erickson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 152. 63 Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. David Forgacs (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 45. 64 Berger, ‘Psychoanalyzing the Shakespeare Text’, 154. 65 Liebler, Shakespeare’s Festive Tragedy, 79. 66 Regina M. Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 114. 67 Bryant, ‘The Linked Analogies of Richard II’, 429. 68 John Calvin, A Commentary on Genesis, trans. John King (London: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1965), 207. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid., 208. 71 John Calvin, A Harmony of the Gospels: Matthew, Mark and Luke and the Epistles of James and Jude, trans. A.W. Morrison (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1995), 71. 72 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (London and New York: Continuum, 2005), 38. 73 Forker, in King Richard II, 224. 74 Gifford, Sermons Vpon The Whole Booke, 88–9. 75 Ibid., 377. 76 On the white hart as Richard’s symbol, see Forker, King Richard II, 132–3. 77 Calvin, A Harmony of the Gospels, 188. 78 To this end, we might also think of the moment in Act III when Richard thinks that Bushy, Bagot and Green have gone over to Bolingbroke’s side and he calls them ‘Three Judases, each one thrice worse than Judas!’ (III.ii.132). This is another moment where the murderer is condemned, yet the murder has to be justified and incorporated within a broader narrative teleology. 79 Samuel Rowlands, The Betraying of Christ . . . (London: Adam Islip, 1598), sig. E4r. The most famous and extended use of the ‘weeping’ metaphor is found in the poetry of Richard Crashaw. See, for example, ‘Sancta Maria Dolorum or The Mother of Sorrows’ and ‘Sainte Marie Magdalene or The Weeper’, in The Poems English, Latin and Greek of Richard Crashaw, 2nd edn., ed. L.C. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). 80 The Oxford English Dictionary, 316. 81 John Donne, ‘John 11:35. Iesus Wept’, in John Donne’s Sermons on the Psalms and Gospels with a Selection of Prayers and Meditations, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1963), 158.

Notes to pages 187–196

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82 Ibid., 162. 83 John Calvin, Calvin’s Commentaries: The Gospel According to St John 11–21 and The First Epistle of John, trans. T.H.L. Parker (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1994), 12. 84 Gifford, Sermons Vpon The Whole Booke, 144. 85 Calvin, A Harmony of the Gospels, 91. 86 In the marginal note to 2 Peter 3:10 in the Geneva Bible, the reader is, significantly, directed back to Matthew 24:44. 87 John Calvin, Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries: Romans and Thessalonians, trans. Ross Mackenzie (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1995), 367. 88 George Gifford’s exegesis of these passages in Revelation is very similar to Calvin’s exegesis of Thessalonians quoted above. 89 Calvin, A Harmony of the Gospels, 92. 90 Richard’s temporal dislocation can also be observed in his desire to revert to a very Catholic-sounding subject position as a kind of anchorite or perhaps mendicant, swapping all his worldly glory for a ‘set of beads’, a ‘hermitage’, a ‘almsman gown’, a ‘dish of wood’, a ‘palmer’s walking staff’ and a ‘pair of carved saints’ (III.iii.147–52). 91 Robert P. Merrix, ‘The Phaëton Allusion in Richard II: The Search for Identity’, English Literary Renaissance, 17, 1987, 282. 92 See Book II, Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation, ed. John Frederick Nims (Macmillan: New York and London, 1965), 32–43. And in The Mirror of the Gods: Classical Mythology in Renaissance Art (London: Penguin Books, 2006) Malcolm Bull notes that ‘by the late Middle Ages it [the Phaëton myth] had become a warning to those in authority – first ecclesiastical, then secular – about the abuse of their power’, 148. 93 Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, 80. 94 See Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, trans. Catharine Edwards (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 140. 95 John Foxe, Acts and Monuments . . . (London: Iohn Daye, 1583), 30; Philip du Plessis Mornay, A woorke concerning the trewnesse of the Christian religion . . . (London: Thomas Cadman, 1587), 388; Richard Rainolde, A Chronicle of All the Noble Emperours of the Romaines . . . (London: Thomas Marshe, 1571), Fol. 32v. 96 Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, 166. 97 Hadfield, Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics, 91. 98 Patricia Parker, Shakespeare From the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 37. 99 Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 35. 100 Margaret Loftus Ranald, ‘The Degradation of Richard II: An Inquiry into the Ritual Backgrounds’, English Literary Renaissance, 7, 1977, 191. 101 Conn Liebler, Shakespeare’s Festive Tragedy, 58. 102 Ania Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 36.

262

Notes to pages 196–203

103 Ibid., 26. 104 Interestingly, it is a commonplace in medieval and early modern apocalyptic tradition that Golgotha marks the site of the final battle between Christ and the Devil. 105 The Book of Common Prayer (Oxford: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1841), 39–40. 106 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. J.T. McNeil, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (London: The Library of Christian Classics, 1961), 494. 107 Ibid., 496. 108 Calvin, A Harmony of the Gospels, 189. 109 Calendar of State Papers, 584.

8  M i m e s i s, R e s i s ta nc e a n d Iconoclasm: R e s i t uat i ng t h e r e v e n g e r ’ s t r a g e dy 1 Jonathan Dollmore, ‘Two Concepts of Mimesis’: Renaissance Literary Theory and The Revenger’s Tragedy’, in James Redmond, ed., Themes in Drama: Drama and Mimesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 31–2. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., 38. 4 Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, 2nd edn., (London and New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), 149. 5 See Andrew Hadfield, ‘Shakespeare and Republicanism: History and Cultural Materialism’, Textual Practice, 17 (2003), 461–83. 6 For a good overview, see Rebecca W. Bushnell, Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). 7 Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs and David Miller (London and New York: Verso, 1988), 42. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 43. 10 Ibid., 44–5. 11 Ibid., 55. 12 In this chapter I focus solely on Protestant resistance theory. But it is important not to disregard those theories of resistance that have a Catholic provenance, and with which there is some important overlap. For an overview of this topic, see J.H.M. Salmon, ‘Catholic Resistance Theory, Ultramontanism, and the Royalist Response, 1580–1620’, in J.H. Burns, ed., The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 219–53 and Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 34–5.

Notes to pages 203–206

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13 For an overview, see Robert M. Kingdon, ‘Calvinism and Resistance Theory, 1550–1580’, in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 193–218. 14 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: Volume Two: The Age of Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 193–238. 15 Ibid., 194. 16 Carlos M.N. Eire, War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Christopher Elwood, The Body Broken: The Calvinist Doctrine of the Eucharist and the Symbolization of Power in Sixteenth-Century France (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Ralph C. Hancock, Calvin and the Foundations of Modern Politics (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1989). 17 Eire, War Against the Idols, 302. 18 Martin Luther, Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, ed. Timothy F. Lull (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1989), 677. 19 Eire, War Against the Idols, 302. 20 See Hancock, Calvin and the Foundations, 105–9. 21 Languet was not a Calvinist in the strict doctrinal sense, but worked for influential Calvinists throughout his career. 22 See the controversial final sections of Book 4 of John Calvin’s Institutes; these sections have given rise to no end of dispute as to the extent of Calvin’s political radicalism. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. J.T. McNeil, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (London: Library of Christian Classics, 1961), 1518–21. 23 Robert Weimann, Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse, ed. David Hillman (Baltimore, OH and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 2. 24 For example, in John Calvin’s 1559 letter to Elizabeth I’s Secretary of State, William Cecil. In this letter, Calvin sought to distance himself from theologians like his friend John Knox who were at the forefront of developing theories justifying political rebellion against both civic magistrates and, famously in Knox’s case, female monarchs. See Letters of John Calvin Selected from the Bonnet Edition (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1980), 211–213. 25 David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, rev. edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 84. 26 Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 95–108. 27 John Knox, On Rebellion, ed. Roger A. Mason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 178. 28 Ibid., 179. 29 John Ponet, A Short treatise of politicke power . . . (Menston, Yorks.: Scholar Press, 1970), sig. G3r.

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Notes to pages 206–210

30 James VI & I, Basilicon Doron in Political Writings, ed. Roger A. Mason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 12. 31 See Christopher Goodman, How Svperior Powers Oght To Be Obeyd . . . (Geneva: John Crispin, 1558), 64, and Vindiciae contra Tyrannos . . . (London: Matthew Simmons and Robert Ibbitson, 1648), 16–17. 32 Eire, War Against the Idols, 288. 33 Michael O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early Modern England (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 58. 34 Calvin, Institutes, 108. 35 Here, we might bear in mind the crucial distinction that St. Paul makes in Romans between the flesh and the spirit. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans was perhaps the most important biblical text for the Reformed movement, especially in relation to the question of political resistance. In more general terms, Paul emphasises that man should aim to live according to the Spirit, noting in Romans 8 that ‘if ye liue after the flesh; yee shall die’. (Romans 8:13). This is an example of what Calvin has to say on Romans 8 in his Commentary on Romans published in 1540: ‘The kingdom of the Spirit is the abolition of the flesh. Those in whom the Spirit does not reign do not belong to Christ; therefore those who serve the flesh are not Christians, for those who separate Christ from His Spirit make Him like a dead image or corpse.’ John Calvin, Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries: Romans and Thessalonians, translated by Ross Mackenzie (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1995), 164. This is an extraordinary passage. Even in his assertion of the Spirit, Calvin raises the spectre of the flesh and, more suggestively, the death of the King. And in one important respect, this is precisely what resistance theory also insists upon. 36 Calvin, Institutes, 112. 37 Ibid., 10. 38 Hubert Languet, A Short Apologie for Christian Souldiours . . . (London: Iohn Wolfe, 1588), sig. B7 v. 39 In Moses and Monotheism, Freud notes that in introducing the idea of the Son of God as expiator of his Father’s death, Pauline Christianity is predicated upon the displaced sacrifice of Judaic religion. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones, (Letchworth, Herts.: Garden City Press, 1939), 140–2. 40 See O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye, 51–2 on the important ‘first generation’ of iconoclastic Reformers, such as Karlstadt and Zwingli. 41 Calvin, Institutes, 386. 42 Ibid., 384. 43 This Calvinistic dualism is a good example of what Mark Breitenberg has recently called ‘anxious masculinity’. Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinities in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 44 Ponet, A Short treatise of politicke power, sig. B3r. 45 André Green, The Tragic Effect: The Oedipus Complex in Tragedy, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 235. 46 Elwood, The Body Broken, 7.

Notes to pages 210–216

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47 All references are to Thomas Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy, ed. R. A. Foakes, The Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980). See, for example, at I.i.116–18, I.iv.56–64, II.i.118, II.ii.91, III.v.163, and V.i.19. Most scholars now accept Middleton’s authorship of the play, and it is included in OUP’s recent complete works of Middleton. 48 For a sceptical reading of the Ur-Hamlet, see Emma Smith ‘ “Ghost Writing”: Hamlet and the Ur-Hamlet’, in The Renaissance Text: Theory, Editing, Textuality, ed. Andrew Murphy (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 177–90. 49 All references are to William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins, The Arden Shakespeare (Walton-on-Thames, Surrey: Thomas Nelson, 1997). 50 As Francis Barker has observed in a complex discussion of the play, Hamlet’s great difficulty is that he must negotiate with the fantasy of representation, a fantasy that inscribes Claudius as ‘a questionable copy of a copy of the king’ but which also, through its focus on memory, displaces the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father by opening ‘a gap within “natural” self identity “itself”’. For Barker, Hamlet’s representational politics ‘provide the organising metaphors for the impossibility of memory as such’. Francis Barker, The Culture of Violence: Essays on Tragedy and History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 35; 37; 41. 51 ‘The Third Part of the Sermon of Obedience’, in Certain Sermons or Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches in the Time of Queen Elizabeth of Famous Memory (London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1843), 121. 52 As has often been noted, calling Vindice’s dead lover Gloriana is a striking ploy, bearing in mind that this was one of the noms de plume of the recently deceased Elizabeth I. 53 On this point, see Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 1–48. 54 John Calvin, Sermons of M. John Caluin, on the Epistles of S. Paule to Timothie and Titus. Translated out of French into English by L.T. (London: G. Bishop, 1579), 9–10. 55 Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 97. 56 Calvin, Sermons. . .Timothie and Titus, 992. 57 There is an obvious connection between the transcendent God of Protestantism who sees all, and the early modern conception of death that touches everyone regardless of status, sex or age. See Neill, Issues of Death. 58 Bersani, The Freudian Body, 97. 59 James VI & I, Basilicon Doron, 4. 60 Philip Armstrong, ‘ “Watching Hamlet watching”: Lacan, Shakespeare and the mirror/stage’, in Terence Hawkes, ed., Alternative Shakespeares, Vol. II (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 229. 61 Neill, Images of Death, 84.

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Notes to pages 216–221

62 There are a number of other purely verbal moments like this such as Vindice’s ‘What brother, am I far enough from myself?’ (I.iii.1) and his odd comment on Piato at the end of the play: ‘’Tis well he dies, he was a witch’ (V.iii.119). 63 It is noticeable that in the final act, it is a ‘mask of revengers’ that kills Lussurioso and three other unnamed nobles after performing a dance. Who kills whom is not specified in the play’s stage directions, a suitably apocalyptic ending. 64 As the New Testament God states: ‘Vengeance is mine: I will repay’ (Romans 12:19). 65 Jean Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 147. 66 See, for example, Karin S. Coddon, ‘ “For Show or Useless Property”: Necrophilia and The Revenger’s Tragedy’, ELH, 61, 1994, 71–88.

A f t e rwor d 1 In what follows, I draw upon Adrian Streete, ‘An old quarrel between us that will never be at an end’: Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women and Late Jacobean Religious Politics’, The Review of English Studies 60, 244, 2009, 230–54. 2 As Peter Harrison has pointed out, ‘Calvinism and Arminianism between them delimit the range of Protestant orthodoxy during the Enlightenment.’ Peter Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 26. 3 Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided (London: Penguin, 2003), 517. 4 Thomas Middleton, Women Beware Women, 2nd edn, ed. William C. Carroll (London: A&C Black, 2002). 5 See Margot Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) and A.A. Bromham and Zara Bruzzi, The Changeling and the Years of Crisis, 1619–1624: A Hieroglyph of Britain (London and New York: Pinter, 1990). 6 Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 1632–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), Gordon McMullan, The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John Fletcher (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), Lisa Hopkins, John Ford’s Political Theatre (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), Ivo Kamps, Historiography and Ideology in Stuart Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). The Christological impulse of many radical groups during the Civil War is an area that has been examined extensively, but the possible ideological relationships between it and Caroline drama have not yet been explored. 7 John Ford, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, ed. Brian Morris (London: A & C Black, 2000). Giovanni’s religious scepticism is important throughout the play too.

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Index

Abel, identified with Christ 180–2; see also Cain and Abel story absolutism: divine 176, 177, 206 monarchical 165, 168, 169, 178–9, 183, 190, 194, 195, 202, 204–6 and resistance theory 204, 208 in revenge tragedy 201–3 accommodation principle 91–3, 148 actors: and clothing 131, 139 and imitation 129–32 Admonition controversy 133, 136 Adorno, Theodor 90 Aers, David 13, 226 alienation: in Calvin 91, 93 in Luther 75–6, 77 Allen, Cardinal William 166 Althusser, Louis 47 Amerbach, Johannes 43 Andrewes, Lancelot 84 Androzzi, Fulvio 60, 100 Anselm of Canterbury, St 44 anti-Calvinism see Arminianism antinomies, Christian 56–7 apocalypticism, interior 120–1 Apsley, Henry 168 Aquinas, St Thomas 44, 172, 197 Aristotle: De Anima 111–12, 114 and fantasy 111–12, 114 Poetics 21, 22 Arminianism 11, 219–20 as anti-Calvinism 83–4, 84–5, 98–107, 108 and subjectivity 220 Arminius, Jacob 84, 105 Armstrong, Philip 215 artificiality, in Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy 201 Ascham, Roger, and imitatio 20

285

assurance, of election and reprobation 99–100, 104, 115 atonement: effectual 101, 107 limited 84, 98–107, 152–3, 155 in Marlow’s Faustus 144–7, 155, 158 in Shakespeare’s Richard II 183, 184 sufficient 98, 101, 107 universal 104, 105, 106 Augustine of Hippo, St: and communication 46–7 Confessions 116–17 and correspondence 45–6, 48 De Agone Christiano 45 De Civitate Dei 43–4, 45 De Doctrina Christiana 46 De Trinitate 47–8, 50 and figurative language 45–8, 50 and imitation of Christ 78 and Lacan 48–50 and Neo-Platonism 45, 53 and politics 43–4, 70 and Reformation 42–51 authority: and clothing 131, 133–4 of model and copy 23–6, 131, 137 and office and person 204–5, 206, 208 in revenge tragedy 201 sacred and secular 70–1 see also monarchy; resistance Bacon, Francis 200 Bakhtin, Mikhail 116 Bale, John 82 Banerjee, Pompa 156, 157 Barker, Francis 26, 211 Barker, Francis and Hulme, Peter 145 Baro, Peter 84 Barrett, William 84 Barroll, Leeds 169 Barth, Karl 97, 108

286

Index

Bayly, Lewis, The Practice of Piety 101, 103 Beckwith, Sarah 13, 44 Benton, John 116 Berger, Harry, Jr. 178, 179 Bernard of Clairvaux 100 Bersani, Leo 213–14, 215 Beza, Theodore 83 and assurance 99, 104–5 and limited atonement 98, 101, 105 and resistance theory 205 Bible: and Calvinist exegesis 141–5, 145–6, 159, 162 use in drama 131 blood symbolism, in Shakespeare’s Richard II 178–83, 199 Blount, Richard 168 body: of state 168, 202, 211–12 as text 120–1, 159–60 two bodies of monarch 163–5 see also flesh and spirit Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus 170 Bolsec, Jerome 99 Bonaventura, St 44, 100 Bouwsma, William 116 brain, and perception 110 Breitenberg, Mark 209 Brethren of the Common Life: and Erasmus 64 and Luther 71 Bright, Timothy, and fantasy 110–5 Broke, Thomas 82 Brome, Richard 220–1 Brück, Gregory 204 Bruno, Vincenzo 100 Bryant, J. A. 163, 180 Buchanan, George 205 Bull, Malcolm 192 Bunney, Edmund 82 Burton, Robert 154 Butler, Martin 220 Bynum, Caroline Walker 13, 19 Cain and Abel story, in Shakespeare’s Richard II 179–82, 185, 198–9 Caligula, in Shakespeare’s Richard II 192–3 Calvin, John: and Augustinianism 43 and Cain and Abel story 181, 182 and Christ as mediator 38, 52, 85, 106–7, 146 Christology 12, 96–8, 106–7, 184–5 and depravity of the subject 85–98 and despair 86, 154–5, 160 and duplex cognitio Dei 51, 85–98 exegesis 141, 144, 145, 181, 191

Father and son image 208–9, 213–14, 217 and good works 88 and grace 40, 52, 88–9, 90 and hell 156–7 and humanism 82 and idolatry 207 and image of God 86, 93–8, 108–9 and imitation of Christ 158–9, 187 Institutes 40, 82, 85, 87, 89–90, 91, 94, 95, 106 and the Jews 198 and mimesis 91, 93–8, 207–9 and Nominalism 54, 91–2 and politics 83, 205, 207 and revenge 208–9 and second coming of Christ 189 and threefold offices of Christ 197 see also original sin Calvinism 9–12 and absenting Christ 28, 141 as anti-theological 109 as Christocentric 82, 88–9 cultural internalisation 12, 13, 110, 157 and determinism 86 and English Reformation 80, 82–5, 86, 98–107 and grace 11–12, 40–1, 105, 219, 221 high 10–1, 101, 102, 103–4, 132 and Nestorianism 107–8 and politics 82, 83, 105, 204–10, 219 and resistance theory 203, 204–10 and salvation 84, 88, 104 and subjectivity and representation 80–125, 220 typological exegesis 141–5 see also Arminianism Cambridge University, and antiCalvinism 83–4 caritas, in Augustine 46, 48, 50 casuistry manuals see Kilby, Richard; Perkins, William Catholicism: and à Kempis 16–18 and atonement 100 devotion 60, 61 diversity in 7 and mediation 33 and meditation 52, 58–61 and polemics 9, 220 and subjectivity 6–9 Cefalu, Paul 53 certainty, and Protestant subjectivity 33–4, 110, 111, 115–23, 158 Chaderton, Laurence 84 Charles I: and Arminianism 219, 220

Index and drama 220–2 Cheney, Patrick 140 childhood, and interior monologue 117–18 Christ: Abel identified with 180–2 as absent 28, 63, 74–5, 141, 155, 221 and authority of the model 25–6 death as sacrifice 3–4, 5, 38 disavowal 13–14, 14–15, 56–7, 74, 75, 76, 79, 91 encountering and faith 2–3, 21 and feeling 1, 13, 21 as human and divine 12–13, 18–19, 38, 44–5, 56–7, 59–61, 96–8, 106–7 identification with 58–60, 174–7 as image of God 95–8 philosophia Christi 16–17 and representation 26 representation of 39, 59–61, 76 and resistance theory 207 as sacramentum 53 second coming 175–6, 177, 182, 183–4, 187–92, 196–7 as signifier and signified 50–1, 63 threefold offices 197 see also atonement; Christology; imitation of Christ; Passion of Christ Christ as mediator 35, 37–8, 79 in Augustine 43–5, 46, 50–1, 107 in Calvin 38, 52, 85, 106–7, 146 in Erasmus 68, 107 in Luther 37–8, 51, 78, 107 in Marlowe’s Faustus 146–7, 160 in Perkins 149 and self-knowledge 52–5 Christianity: as ‘original sin’ 4–5 and philosophical antinomies 56–7 Christology: of Calvin 12, 96–8, 106–7, 184–5 and election 144–7 of Erasmus 64–9 of Luther 69–79 and Marlowe’s Faustus 144–7, 156, 161 and Shakespeare’s Richard II 162, 163–5, 174–7, 180, 182–3, 184–93, 194–5, 196–8 Church of England: and Calvinism 109 and Elizabeth I 132–4 governance 132–3 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, De Oratore 130 civic society, in Erasmus 65–6 Clement, Francis 15

287

clothing: ecclesiastical 131, 133–4, 137, 138–9, 158 theatrical 131, 139 cogitation, and heart and brain 110 Coke, Edward 170, 171 Collinson, Patrick: and Calvinism 105, 110 and Presbyterianism 132–3 and Puritanism 135 and religious drama 130 and republicanism 175 common sense, and fantasy 111–13, 115 Commonwealth, and republic 168 communication, in Augustine 46–7 concepts, mental, and language 54–5 conciliarist movement 69 confession, interior monologue as 116–17 conscience: in Dent 102–3 in Luther 70 in Perkins 101 see also confession consciousness, rational and participatory 55–6 contemplation see meditation Copenhaver, Brian P. and Schmitt, Charles B. 54 correspondence: in Augustine 45–6, 48 in Erasmus 68 covenant theology 41, 100, 105 Cox, Alex 212 Crockett, Bryan 54 cross-dressing, theatrical 134–5, 136, 138–9 Crowley, Robert, and clothing 138 cuius regio eius religio principle 81 Cummings, Brian 27, 84, 86, 92, 99 daemonology, Protestant 157–9 Davenant, Sir William 220–1 death and dying 154–6 death drive 123 Dent, Arthur: and cultural internalisation of Calvinism 110 A Plaine Man’s Path-Way to Heauen 101 A Sermon of Repentance 102–3 Derrida, Jacques 143, 156, 159 despair: and Calvinism 86, 154–6 in Marlowe’s Faustus 155, 160 determinism, and Calvinism 86 devil: devilish subjectivity 157–61 and imitation of Christ 157–9 devotio moderna 16, 19, 64–5, 82 devotion: Christocentric 64–5

288 devotion: (cont.) and feeling 1, 2, 13 and interiority 61–4 and metonymy 60 and volition 76 Dews, Peter 49–50 Diehl, Huston 27, 136 disorder, social, and popular theatre 130–2 Docherty, Thomas 12, 16, 21 Doleman tract see Parsons, Robert Dollimore, Jonathan 2 and Calvin 85–6, 90, 94 and Marlowe’s Faustus 146 and Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy 200–1 and poetry 23 and relational identity 34 Donne, John 12, 117 ‘Batter my heart’ 149–51 and Christology 16 First Anniversary 34 A Litany 151–2 Sermons 186–7 Dove, John 101 drama: anti-Catholic 82 and fantasy 123–5 religious, opposition to 131 use of Bible 131 see also Marlowe, Christopher; Middleton, Thomas; Shakespeare, William; theatre Du Moulin, Pierre 84 Du Plessis-Mornay, Philippe 192, 205 dualism: and Erasmus 66–9, 94 and Luther 78 and St Paul 4, 198, 207 see also flesh and spirit Duffy, Eamon 36, 59 duplex cognitio Dei 51–5, 85–98 Easthope, Antony, and post-structuralism 7, 8 Edmondson, Stephen 44, 97, 233 Edward II, deposition 169 Edward VI: and Lutheranism 81 and Prayer Book 133 egotism, and Protestant self-formation 122 Eire, Carlos M.: and Erasmus 65, 66 and idolatry 63 and Luther 78, 204 and matter and spirit 53, 55 and resistance theory 207 election: in Calvin 10, 40, 84, 86, 90, 94–5

Index in high Calvinism 103–4, 109, 141 and limited atonement 98–107 and Marlowe’s Faustus 143–4, 144–7, 158 and Saint Peters Ten Teares 153–4 and saving grace 40, 90, 92, 94, 97, 98, 101, 103, 105, 149 see also assurance; predestination; reprobation Elizabeth I: and Calvinism 82, 84, 205 Injunctions of 1559 34–5, 36, 133 legitimacy 165–7 and limited atonement 100 and Prayer Book 133 self-comparison with Richard II 169–70 and succession 168, 169 and unity of English Church 132–4 Elsky, Martin 46, 55 Elwood, Christopher 204, 210 Episcopalianism 132–3 epistemology see knowledge Erasmus, Desiderius: and Christ as mediator 68, 107 and civic society 65–6 and imitation of Christ 20, 52, 69, 71, 72, 78 and man and signifier 48–9 and matter/spirit dualism 66–9, 94 and philosophia Christi 64–9, 71 and political theory 65–8, 70 and religious differences 9 and Spiritualism 66–9 and subjectivity and representation 64–9 eschatology, and politics 175–6, 181, 187–92, 196–7 Essex, Robert Devereux, Earl of 175 and Parsons 166 and Richard II 164–5, 169, 170, 174, 199 exegesis, Calvinist 141–5, 145–6, 159, 162, 181, 191 experience, and epistemological certainty 110, 111 experience, religious, in Protestantism 33–42 extra calvinisticum 96–8, 106–7, 108 faith: and feeling 1, 2–3, 5–6, 21 and fideism 225 and Luther 5 and reason 72 see also justification by faith fantasy: and Bright 110–5 and drama 123–5 and Kilby 116–20 and knowledge 110, 111, 116–17 and memory 115, 119, 120–3 and the monstrous 111, 113, 114 and perception 110–5, 123–5

Index as political 123 and reality 123–5 and subjectivity 111–15, 120–3, 123–5 father-son relationship: in Calvin 208–9, 213–14, 217 in Hamlet 210–1, 215 in Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy 213–17 in revenge tragedy 209–10 feeling: and à Kempis 17 and devotion 1, 2, 13 and faith 1, 2–3, 5–6, 21 Fernie, Ewan 7 fideism 225 flesh and spirit: in Calvin 207–8 in Nietzsche 4 in Paul 4, 198, 207 Fletcher, John 220–1 Ford, John, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore 221–2 Forker, Charles 165, 183, 197 form, and matter 114 Foucault, Michel 68, 78 Fowns, Richard 38 Fox, Alistair 83 Foxe, John: Acts and Monuments 171, 192 and subjectivity and representation 58–60, 61–4 Frederick, Elector Palatine 219 free will 219 degeneration 87 in Marlowe’s Faustus 158 and predestination 84 Freinkel, Lisa 46, 68, 77, 241 Freud, Sigmund 152, 208 fundamentalism, origins 8 generation, in Hamlet 211 Geneva Bible, marginal notes 96, 181, 205 Gifford, George, Sermons Vpon the Whole Booke Of The Revelation 175, 176, 183–4, 188, 189, 196 Girard, René 162, 182 Goodman, Christopher 162, 205 How Superior Powers Oght To Be Obeyd 175–6 Gosson, Stephen: and cross-dressing 134–6 and opposition to theatre 129, 131–2, 134–6 The Schoole of Abuse 135 Goux, Jean Joseph 217 grace: in Calvin 40, 52, 88–9, 90 in Calvinism 11–12, 40–1, 105, 219, 221 in Dent 103

289

and election 10, 109 in Herbert 35–6, 56 irresistible 41, 84 and justification by faith 11–12, 40, 105–6, 120, 149 in Kilby 120 in Luther 71, 73 and Lutheranism 10 in Perkins 149 prevenient (sufficient) 41, 93, 107, 120 and salvation 9, 10 sanctifying 101 saving 40, 93, 94, 98, 101, 103, 105, 120 universal 105, 107 and word and matter 56 see also election Green, André 209–10 Green, Ian 16–17, 34, 35, 40 Greenblatt, Stephen: and imitation of Christ 13–14, 227 and mediation 36 and purgatory 36 and self-fashioning 16 and theatrical clothing 134 Greene, Thomas 20–1 Greenham, Richard 12, 115 and fantasy 121 and sin 118 A Sweet Comfort for an Afflicted Conscience 118 and third-person narrative 115 Gregerson, Linda 62–3, 75, 118 Greville, Fulke 12, 109 Caelica 38, 74, 75, 93–4 and fallenness of mankind 87, 90, 91, 92, 93–4 and grace 56, 88 and mimesis 200 A Treatise of Religion 87, 88, 90, 91, 92 Groote, Geert 64 Groves, Beatrice 7 Guevara, Antonio de 60 Hadfield, Andrew 165, 169, 171, 176, 193 Halle, Morris 49 Halpern, Richard 20, 25, 29 Hamilton, Donna B. 132 Hanby, Michael 47, 48 Hancock, Ralph C. 158, 204 Harding, Thomas 119 Harrison, Peter 219 Hawkes, David 114 Hayward, Sir John 12, 120 Christ’s prayer Vpon the Crosse 152–3 The First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henry IIII 169–72

290

Index

Hayward, Sir John (cont.) The Sanctrarie of a troubled Soule 121–3 Hegel, G. W. F.: and religious experience 230 and sovereignty 179, 202 Heinemann, Margot 130 Heinsius, Daniel 107–8 hell: in Calvin 156–7 in Marlowe’s Faustus 156–61 Helm, Paul 43, 100, 104 Henry VIII, and Lutheranism 80, 81 Herbert, George 12 ‘Deniall’ 35–6 and grace 35–6, 56 ‘Grace’ 36 ‘Perseverance’ 73 ‘Sion’ 35 ‘The Sinner’ 37 Herford, C. H. 162 hero figure, in Marlowe 140 High Commission 135 historicism, new 3, 6, 13 historiography, and political appropriation 170–4 Ho, Elaine Y. L. 94 Holinshed, Raphael, Chronicles 167, 169 Holy Name cult 65 Hooker, Richard, and grace 103, 104 Hopkins, Lisa 220 Hotman, François 205 Huguenots, and resistance theory 168, 203; see also Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos humanism: and Calvinism 82, 143 and imitatio 18, 19, 20 and Lutheranism 80 and philosophia Christi 16–17, 64 humanity, as fallen 87, 90, 91, 92, 93–4, 137 humours 99, 110 melancholy 111–15 iconoclasm 34–5, 39, 136 in Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy 202–3, 209–10, 213, 214–17 and resistance theory 207–10 and revenge tragedy 209 identification: with Christ 58–60, 174–7; see also Shakespeare; William; Richard II and substitution 152–3 identity: and clothing 133–9 hybrid 7 see also subjectivity idolatry: and Calvin 207

and Catholic devotion 60, 61 and ecclesiastical clothing 134 and image of God 2 and mediation 35, 36, 38, 52 and signs 92, 114, 207 and theatre 138 verbal 63 image, figurative: as ideological construct 21–6 and truth 23–4, 24–6 see also fantasy; language, figurative image of God: in Althusser 47 in Calvin 86, 93–8, 108–9 Christ as 95–8 in Hayward 121 and idolatry 2 and Nietzsche 4–5 in Perkins 137 and self-fashioning 15 semiotic and religious status 55 and subjectivity 1–3 in Sutton 42 imagination: and fantasy 111, 112 persecutory 122 imitation: and actor 129–32 and authority of the model 24, 25, 131 dialectical 20–1 literary 18, 19, 20, 22, 24 and mimesis 17, 19–26, 50 and representation 16, 19, 24, 187, 190 imitation, as rhetoric 130 imitation of Christ (imitatio Christi) 2, 13–19, 129 in à Kempis 16–19 as anti-volitional 15, 52–5 in Augustine 78 in Calvin 158–9, 187 and clothing, 136–7 and devil 157–9 and devotio moderna 16 and divinity and humanity of Christ 12–13, 18–19 in Erasmus 20, 52, 69, 71, 72, 78 in Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore 221 in Luther 53, 78 in Marlowe’s Faustus 159–61 in Nietzsche 4 and philosophia Christi 65 and representation 52, 60–1 and subjectivity 16, 26–7 as volitional 69, 71 immanence and transcendence:

Index in Augustine 47 in Calvinism 26, 85–6, 89, 90, 107, 108–9, 205, 208 in Erasmus 68 and figurative language 26, 52, 78 in Foxe 60 in Luther 78 and Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy 200–1, 202, 203 and nature of Christ 48, 60 incarnation, and divinisation of matter 53 individual and society, in Calvinism 82 Injunctions of 1559 34–5, 36, 133 interiority: and despair 155 and hell 156–61 and imitation of Christ 33–42, 52, 53 and Protestant devotion 61–4 introspection 99–100, 109 Jakobson, Roman 49, 50 James VI of Scotland and I of England: and limited atonement 100 and Protestantism 219 and sacral status of monarch 206, 215 Jenison, Robert, The Christians Apparelling By Christ 1, 6 Jesus Christ see Christ; Christology John of Damascus 53 John, Ivor B. 162 Jonas, Justus 204 justification by faith 9, 10, 219 in Calvin 88, 101, 145 and election 104 and grace 11–12, 40, 105–6, 120, 149 in Luther 72, 73 and repentance 101–4 Kamps, Ivo 220 Kantorowicz, Ernst 163–4, 194 Kempis, Thomas à: De Imitatione Christi 16–19, 20, 64–5 Protestant translations 17, 18–19 Kendall, R. T. 98–100 Kilby, Richard, The Bvrthen Of a loaden conscience 116–20 Kimedoncius, Jacob 38, 98–9 Kinney, Arthur F. 18, 130, 169 Knapp, Jeffrey 7 knowledge: in Calvin 51–5, 85–98 and fantasy 110, 111, 116–17 and uncertainty 33–4, 110, 111, 115–23, 158 Knox, John: The First Blast of the Trumpet 205–6

291

and resistance theory 205 Kyd, Thomas, The Spanish Tragedy 34 Lacan, Jacques, and man and signifier 48–50 Lake, Peter 8, 83, 130, 134 Lambeth Articles (1595) 84, 100, 105 Lancaster, House of 166–7, 174 language: analogical theory 72 and epistemological certainty 110, 111 figurative 42–51, 62–3 in Augustine 45–8, 50–1 in Calvin 91, 96–8, 148 and immanence and transcendence 26, 52, 78 in Luther 75–8 and mimesis 45–6, 96–8 in Perkins 148 and representation 222 and subjectivity 56, 63–4, 75, 77, 200 and truth 23–4, 24–6 see also fantasy and matter 53–5, 56, 59 as mediatory 46–51 and Nominalism 54–5, 135, 206–7 and signification 54–5, 78, 79, 92–3 theological 26–7, 49 see also rhetoric Languet, Hubert 205 Laud, William 84, 219 Law, and subjectivity 123 Lawne, William 82 Lawson-Tancred, Hugh 114 Lever, Christopher, ‘A Crucifixe’ 152 Levin, Harry 140, 142 Levinas, Emmanuel 161 Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer 60 liberalism, origins 8 Liebler, Naomi Conn 177–8, 179, 194 likeness, and image 55 Linaker, Robert, A Confortable Treatise 101 literary criticism, and religion 6–19 Loarte, Gaspar de 52, 100 Lodge, Thomas 131, 135 Lombard, Peter 44 Loomba, Ania 196 Luther, Martin: and Aristotle 112 The Bondage of the Will 71 and Christ as mediator 37–8, 51, 78, 107 and faith 5 and grace 71, 73 Heidelberg Disputation 73 and imitation of Christ 53, 78 A Meditation on Christ’s Passion 71, 76–7 and Nietzsche 4–5 and Nominalism 54

292

Index

Luther, Martin: (cont.) and Paul 4 and politics 69–71 and subjectivity and representation 1, 69–79, 75–9 and theologia crucis 12, 69–79, 88 Two Kinds of Righteousness 72–3 Lutheranism: and English Reformation 80–1 in Europe 81 and grace 10, 11 and humanism 80 and resistance theory 203–4 Luxon, Thomas 159 McAdam, Ian 34 MacCulloch, Diarmaid 220 McGrade, A. S. 69 McGrath, Alister 72, 73, 74–5, 81, 82 and accommodation principle 91 and justification by faith 88 and limited atonement 105 McMullan, Gordon 220 Machiavelli, Niccolo, and monarchy 172–3 Magdeburg Confession (1550) 204 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 116 Marlowe, Christopher 12 Doctor Faustus 29 and atonement 144–7, 155 and Calvinist exegesis 140, 144, 145–6 and Christology 144–7, 156 Edward II 162, 190 Marmion, Shackerley 220–1 Marshall, Cynthia 75 Marshall, Peter and Ryrie, Alex 81 Marsilius of Padua: and resistance theory 204 and via moderna 69 Marston, John, The Malcontent 123 Martyr, Peter 83, 205 Mary Tudor, and resistance theory 205–6 masochism, in Donne 150–2 Massei, Michael 135 Massinger, Philip 220–1 materialism, cultural 3, 6 matter: and form 114 and spirit in Calvin 94–5 in Erasmus 66–9, 72 in Luther 241 and words 53–5, 56, 59, 63, 138 Matthew, Sir Toby 116 Maus, Katherine Eiseman, and subjectivity 6, 9, 34, 141

Mayer, Jean-Christophe 7 mediation: in Catholic theology 33 by Christ see Christ as mediator as idolatry 35, 36, 38, 52 and memory 36–7 in Protestant theology 34–42, 78 semiotic 46–51 meditation: in Catholicism 52, 58–61 on Passion of Christ 58–64, 76–7 in Protestantism 61–4, 76, 235 melancholy, and Bright 111–15 Melancthon, Philip 119, 204 memory: affective power 117 and fantasy 115, 119, 120–3 in Hamlet 211 and mediation 36–7 in Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy 212 Meriton, George, A Sermon of Repentance 101 Merrix, Robert P. 192 metaphor: in Augustine 45, 46, 47 in Calvin 207 in Lacan, 49–50 metonymy: in Augustine 46, 47 in Catholic devotion 60 in Ford 221 in Lacan 49, 50 Middleton, Thomas: A Game at Chess 219, 220 The Revenger’s Tragedy 12, 30, 123, 200–18 and artificiality 201 father and son imagery 213–17 and Hamlet 210–1 and iconoclasm 202–3, 209–10, 213, 214–17 and idealist vs. empiricist mimesis 201 and political violence 201 Women Beware Women 219, 220 Middleton, Thomas and Rowley, William, The Changeling 123, 219 Milton, John, Paradise Lost 157 mimesis 2 and authority of the copy 24–6 in Calvin 91, 93–8, 207–9 and feeling 1 and figurative language 45–6, 96–8 idealist vs. empiricist 200–1, 202, 209 and image 55 and imitation 17, 19–26, 50 in Luther 76 in Marlowe 147–8, 157–9

Index mimetic iconoclasm 202–3, 207–10, 214–17 pre-Reformation 2 in Protestant theology 40 and representation 22, 24, 25–6, 27, 114 and subjectivity 78, 79, 87, 91, 147–8, 157–9 mirror imagery 79 in Augustine 50–1 in Calvin 91, 95–6, 148 in Dent 102 in Greville 75 in Luther 77 in Marlowe’s Faustus 160 in Paul 148 in Perkins 147–8 in Shakespeare 28 modernity, and subjectivity 78 monarchy: and divinity and humanity 162–5 hereditary 167, 168, 172, 174 and legitimacy 165–7, 198, 201 and office and person 204–5, 206, 208 and parliament 167–9, 174 and Romulus and Remus 172 sacral status 182–7, 190, 197, 199, 203, 206, 209 and second coming of Christ 175–6, 182, 183–4, 187–92 see also absolutism monologue, interior 115–20, 154 and concealment 123–5 as confession 116–17 in literature 154–6 monstrous, the, in Bright 111, 113, 114 Montaigne, Michel de 225 More, Sir Thomas, and imitation of Christ 14 Moretti, Franco, and absolutism 178–9, 201–2 Muller, Richard A. 2, 101, 146 Musculus, Wolfgang 83, 105 Neill, Michael 216 Neo-Platonism: and Augustine 45, 53 and Erasmus 67, 68, 71 Nestorianism, and Calvinism 107–8 Nietzsche, Friedrich The Anti-Christ 3–5 and Christianity as ‘original sin’ 4 and image of God 4–5 and Luther 4–5 and reason 5 and St Paul 3–4 Nixon, Antony 111, 120 Nominalism: and Calvin 54, 91–2 and language 54–5, 206–7 and Puritanism 135

293

non-identity, in Calvin 90 Norbrook, David 164, 169, 205 Norton, Thomas 82 Nuttall, A. D. 142, 144 Oberman, Heiko 54 object, exclusionary 27–8, 50–1, 149, 218 O’Connell, Michael 28, 61, 207 Oecolampadius, Johannes, and matter/spirit dualism 241 original sin: in Calvin 93, 118 in Luther 73 in Nietzsche, 4–5 in Perkins 137 Overall, John 84 Papacy, and Nietzsche 4 Park, Katharine 111 Parker, Patricia 113, 193 parliament, and monarchy 167–9, 174 parody: in Marlowe 145–6, 157–61 in Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy 201, 209, 214 Parsons, Robert: and deposition of Richard II 166–9 and Henry VIII 174 and parliament and monarchy 167–9 and political resistance 166–7 Passion of Christ: in Calvin 187 in Donne 151–2 and Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore 221 in Hayward 152–3 in Lever 152 in Luther 74–5 meditation on 58–64, 76–7 in Perkins 61, 149, 153 Pater, Walter 162, 163 Patterson, Annabel 169 Paul, St: and flesh/spirit dualism 4, 198, 207 and Luther 4 and mirror imagery 148 and resistance theory 207 and sacrifice 3–4 and two natures of Christ 97 Pelling, John 105 Penry, John, and Presbyterian governance 132 perception 109, 125, 200 and the brain 110 and epistemological certainty 110, 111 and fantasy 110–15, 123–5 and interior monologue 115–20 and the soul 112

294

Index

perfection, in Erasmus 65 Perkins, William 12, 16 and atonement 99, 101, 105 and Calvinism 83 A Case of Conscience 144 The Cases of Conscience 118 The Combat 157, 158 and conscience 101, 137 and cultural internalisation of Calvinism 110 A Declaration Of The True manner of Knowing Christ Crucified 39, 61, 147–8 Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft 157 and figurative language 148 A Golden Chain 137 and imagination 111 and introspection 99–100 and Passion of Christ 61, 149, 153 and Protestant daemonology 157, 158 and subjectivity 147–8 and third-person narrative 115 and thought and brain 110 A Treatise of Gods free grace 41 A Treatise Tending Unto A Declaration 101 Pettegree, Andrew 6 philosophia Christi 16–17 and Erasmus 64–9, 71 philosophy, and Reformed theology 3 Pilate, Pontius, in Shakespeare’s Richard II 175, 184–5, 195, 199 Pinciss, G. M. 142, 144 Plato, and mimesis 23 plenitude 63, 77, 143, 156, 158 pluralism, religious 6–19, 26 poetry: and image and shadow 131 as imitatio 19, 22–4 as mimesis 24 and Sidney 22–4, 131 and truth 23–4, 24–6 politics: and Augustine 43–4, 70 and Calvin 83, 205, 207 and Calvinism 82, 83, 105, 204–10, 219 and Erasmus 65–8, 70 and eschatology 175–6, 181, 187–92, 196–7 and fantasy 123 and historiography 170–4 and Luther 69–71 and Reformed theology 3 and religious polemic 9 and theatre 220 and typology 162, 177–99 see also monarchy; resistance theory; violence, political Ponet, John: and resistance theory 166, 205, 209

A Shorte Treatise of politike power 206–7 post-structuralism 7 Prayer Book, and ecclesiastical clothing 133 predestination 10, 11, 41 and free will 84 in Marlow’s Faustus 142–7, 158 and Tyacke 98 see also election; reprobation Presbyterianism 132–3 and clergy apparel 132–4 Protestantism: and à Kempis 16–19 and authority of the model 25–6 as Christocentric 12, 13, 15, 19, 35, 39, 51 cultural internalisation 12, 13, 110, 115–23, 145 diversity in 7, 9 and knowledge of God and self 51–5, 85–98 and locus of authority 25 and mediation 34–42 and meditation on Christ 61–4 as original sin 4–5 paradox of 86–98 and philosophia Christi 16 and poetry 22–4 and polemics 9, 220 and reason 5, 7 and religious experience 33–42 and representation 27, 40, 61–4, 114 and sin 34, 40–1 and subjectivity 6, 33–4, 110, 111, 115–23, 158 see also Arminianism; Calvinism; Lutheranism; Reformed theology proto-structuralism 47 providence 82, 83, 86, 201 purgatory 36 Puritanism: and anti-theatrical writers 135–9 see also Calvinism; high Puttenham, George 96, 129 Quarles, Francis, ‘On Christ and our selves’ 150 Rainolde, Richard 193 Ranald, Margaret Loftus 194 reality: and empiricist mimesis 201, 202, 214 and fantasy 123–5 reason: in Luther 72 and Protestantism 5, 7 and subjectivity 55 Reed, Henry 162 Reformation: and Augustinianism 42–51 and religious pluralism 6–9 and resistance theory 203–9

Index and subjectivity 2–3, 6, 27–8 Reformed theology: as deeply Christocentric 12, 13 and philosophy 3 and politics 3 as rigorous 10, 11–12 see also Calvinism Reisch, Gregor, Margarita philosophica 111–12 relationality 141 relationship with God: and interiority 33–42 in Luther 72 mediated 33 religion: in contemporary literary criticism 6–19 and the secular 5–6 repentance, and justification 101–4 representation: of Christ 13–16, 39, 59–61, 76 and correspondence 45–6 and imitatio 16, 19, 24, 187, 190 and mimesis 22, 24, 25–6, 27, 114 in Protestantism 27, 40, 61–4, 114 and social disorder 130–2 and subjectivity 78, 79, 222 and Calvinism 80–125 and Erasmus 64–9 and Foxe 58–60, 61–4 and Luther 1, 69–79, 75–9 see also language, figurative; signification reprobation: and limited atonement 98–101, 104–5, 141 and Marlow’s Faustus 143–4, 158 and Saint Peters Ten Teares 153–4 republicanism 168, 169–77 resistance theory 166–7, 168–9, 175–6, 203–9 in Calvin 207 and iconoclasm 207–10 revenge, and Calvin 208–9 revenge tragedy: and absolutism 201–3 and iconoclasm 209 Reventlow, Henning Graf 67 revisionism: and Luther 4 and Reformation 6–9 rhetoric, imitation as 130; see also synecdoche Richard II, deposition 165, 166–7, 167–71, 173 righteousness: alien 72–3, 74, 76 divine 72–4 human 71 proper 73–4, 75 Robson, Mark 24 Rogers, Thomas, translation of à Kempis 18–19 Romulus and Remus:

295

and monarchy 172 and Shakespeare’s Richard II 180, 185 Rowlands, Samuel, The Betraying of Christ 154–6, 185 Rozett, Martha Tuck 158 Rubin, Miri 13, 27 Sacchi, Bartolomeo 170 sacred heart symbolism 221 sacred and secular, in Luther 69–71 sacrifice: Christ’s death as 3–4, 5, 38 in Luther 71, 72, 77 substitutionary 153 in Nietzsche 3–4, 5 St. John, Oliver 168 Saint Peters Ten Teares, and election 153–4 salvation: and Arminianism 84 and Calvinism 84, 88, 104 by grace 9, 10 in Luther 73–4 and Lutheranism 10 and predestination 84, 142 and volition 53, 71–3, 74, 75–6 see also assurance; atonement; election; grace, saving; reprobation Sanders, Wilbur 142 Saussure, Ferdinand de 50 scepticism 225 Schwartz, Regina M. 179 secularism, and religion 5–6 self-fashioning: and egotism 122 and image of God 15 and imitation of Christ 13–15, 18 secular 14 self-knowledge, and duplex cognitio Dei 51–5, 85–98 semiotics: of Augustine 42–51 Nominalist 54–5, 135 separatism: Presbyterian 133 Puritan 7 Shakespeare, William 12 Hamlet 130, 210–1 Macbeth 111, 205 Othello 123–4 and religious pluralism 7 Richard II 28, 29–30 and absolutism 177, 183, 190, 194, 195 blood symbolism 178–83, 199 Bolingbroke as Abel 179–81 Bolingbroke as Pilate 184–5, 195

296

Index

Shakespeare, William (cont.) Cain and Abel story 179–82, 198–9 and Christology 162, 163–5, 174–7, 180, 182–3, 184–93, 194–5, 196–8 deposition scenes 194–5 and Essex’s rebellion 164–5, 169, 170, 174, 199 identification with Christ 162, 163–5, 174–7, 180, 182–3, 184–93, 194–5, 196–8 and monarchy and republicanism 174 and Phaeton and Caligula 192–3 and political typology 162, 177–99 ritual events 177–8, 194 and Ur-Hamlet 210 Shapiro, Gary 5 Sharpe, Kevin 225 Shirley, James 220–1 Shuger, Debora Kuller: and atonement 152–3 and Calvinism 82, 102, 152 and Foxe 237 and Luther 70 and rational and participatory thought 55–6 and subjectivity 12 Sidney, Sir Philip 111 An Apology for Poetry 22–4, 131 and mimesis 200 and resistance theory 205 signification: and Arminianism 220 and authority of model and copy 23–6, 131, 137 Christ as signifier and signified 50–1, 63 and clothing 133–9 and idolatry 92, 114, 207 in Lacan 48–50 and language 54–5, 78, 79, 92–3 in Marlowe’s Faustus 156–61 referential status of signs 94, 206–7 and religious drama 131 and secular drama 129–32 see also Nominalism; representation Simpson, James 8, 11 sin, and childhood 117–18; see also original sin Sinfield, Alan: and determinism 86 and Marlowe’s Faustus 143–4, 158 and relationship with God 33–4, 39 and resistance theory 205 Skinner, Quentin, and resistance theory 168, 203–4 skull, in Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy 210, 211–12, 214–15 Smith, Henry 15, 101

society and individual, in Calvinism 82 sola scriptura principle 9 soul: and perception 112 in Reisch 112 Southwell, Robert 61 Spiritualism 7–8 and Erasmus 66–9, 71 Stachniewski, John 109 and determinism 86 and salvation 104 and self-formation 122 and sin 117 and suicides in England 154 Staley, Lynn 13 Stallybrass, Peter 134 Stephens, Richard 168 Stubbes, Phillip 134, 136–9 The Anatomie of Abuses 136–7 The Second Part of the Anatomie of Abuses 135, 138–9 subjectivity: and alienation 75–6, 77, 91, 93 and Arminianism 220 and authority of the copy 24, 137, 218 and Catholicism 6–9 and certainty 33–4, 110, 111, 115–23, 158 as depraved 85–98 devilish 157–61 and exclusionary object 27–8, 50–1, 149, 218 and fantasy 111–15, 120–3, 123–5 and figurative language 56, 63–4, 75, 77, 200, 222 in Foxe 58–60 and hero figure 140 and imitation of Christ 16, 26–7 and interior monologue 115–20, 154–6 in Luther 1, 69, 72, 73, 75–9 in Marlowe’s Faustus 140, 146, 147, 156 in medieval world 3 and mimesis 78, 79, 87, 91, 147–8, 157–9 and modernity 78 in Nietzsche 3–5 and post-Reformation plurality 8–9 and reason 55 and Reformation 2–3, 6, 27–8 relational model 34, 141 and representation 78, 79, 80–125, 222 and Calvinism 80–125, 220 in Erasmus 64–9 in Foxe 58–60, 61–4 in Luther 1, 69–79, 75–9 and self-fashioning 13–15

Index and submission 149–51 see also image of God; memory; plenitude substitution, and identification 152–3 Suetonius (Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus), Lives of the Caesars 192 suicide, and despair 154–5 Sutton, Christopher, Disce Vivere 39, 42, 107 Swaine, Richard 101, 106 synecdoche 114 Calvin’s use of 96, 97–8 Tacitus, Publius Cornelius 170–1, 176 Taylor, Charles 45, 117 theatre: as alternative church 131 and cross-dressing 134–5, 136, 138–9 and interior monologues 116 and mimetic iconoclasm 202–3 opposition to 130–2, 135–9 and political commentary 220 and social disorder 130–2 and spectatorship 215, 216 and subjectivity 3, 6, 27–8 theatrical clothing 131, 139 theologia crucis (Luther) 12, 69–79 and righteousness 71–4, 88 and subjectivity 69, 72, 73, 75–9 and suffering of Christ 74–5 theology, and Marlowe 143–7 Thirty Nine Articles: and analogical language 72 and grace 40 and subjectivity 72 Thirty Years War 84, 219 Thirty-Nine Articles 105 Thorpe, William, and imitation of Christ 14 thought: and fantasy 123–4 and heart and brain 110 rational and participatory modes 55–6 Timme, Thomas 148 transcendence and immanence: in Augustine 47 in Calvinism 26, 85–6, 89, 90, 107, 108–9, 205, 208 in Erasmus 68 and figurative language 26, 52, 78 in Foxe 60 in Luther 78 and Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy 200–1, 202, 203 and nature of Christ 48, 60 Trent, Council 38, 81 Trevor, Douglas 234

297

truth: and fantasy 123–5 and the figurative 23–4, 24–6 Tudor dynasty, legitimacy 165–7, 198 Tyacke, Nicholas 10, 84, 225 and limited atonement 98, 100 typology: Calvinist 141–5 political, in Shakespeare’s Richard II 162, 177–99 religious, in Marlowe’s Faustus 159 uncertainty see certainty unconscious, the 113–14 via media, of Church of England 105 via moderna 69 Vickers, Brian 19 A View of Popish Abuses 133–4, 136 Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos 168, 173, 176, 192, 208 violence, political, in Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy 201, 217 Viret, Pierre, and resistance theory 205 volition: and devotion 76 and salvation 53, 71–3, 74, 75–6 voluntarism: and Calvinism 88, 150 and Erasmus 71, 72 Wabuda, Susan 65, 80–1 Walsall, Samuel 15 Walsham, Alexandra 224 Walzer, Michael 109 Watts, William 116 Webster, John 220–1 Weimann, Robert 25, 26, 29, 205 Wendel, François: and atonement 107, 144, 158 and Christology 88, 97 and transcendence of God 85 Wentworth, Peter 168, 169 Whitaker, William 84, 138 White, Peter 100–1, 104 Whitfield White, Paul: and imitation of Christ 136–7 and Puritanism 135 and religious drama 130, 131 will: degeneration 87 and imitation of Christ 15, 52–5, 69 William of Ockham: and resistance theory 204 and signs and concepts 54–5

298 William of Ockham: (cont.) and via moderna 69 see also Nominalism Wilson, Thomas 129 Winch, Humphrey 168 word: and concept 54–5 and image 216, 217 and matter 53–5, 56, 59, 63, 78, 138, 208 and mediation 46–51 Word of God, in Luther 77 works: in Calvin 88 in Luther 73, 74 worship, and feeling 2

Index writing, in Marlowe’s Faustus 159–60 York, House of 174 and deposition of Richard II 166–7 Zanchi, Girolamo 83 and election 105, 106 Zimmerman, Susan 12 Žižek, Slavoj and fantasy 119, 124, 160 and Law 123 and subjectivity 1, 29 Zwingli, Huldrych, and matter/spirit dualism 241