The Doctrine of Election and the Emergence of Elizabethan Tragedy

by Martha Tuck Rozett

Overview

This compelling argument for the link between Calvinism in English religious life and the rise of tragedy on the Elizabethan stage draws on a variety of material, including theological tracts, sermons, and dramatic works beginning with sixteenth-century morality plays and continuing through Marlowe's career and the beginning of Shakespeare's.

Originally published in 1984.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691612157
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #576
Pages:	342
Product dimensions:	9.10(w) x 6.10(h) x 0.80(d)

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The Doctrine of Election and the Emergence of Elizabethan Tragedy

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By Martha Tuck Rozett

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1984 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06615-8

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CHAPTER 1

Play and Audience

I. The Overlapping Audience

The medium through which the doctrine of election helped to shape the emergence of the tragic protagonist was the spoken word. In the London of the 1570s, 1580s, and 1590s, both the players and the preachers were attracting increasingly large audiences, and in both cases what they offered was a mixture of instruction and entertainment presented with considerable verbal artistry. Although there were pious sermon-goers who shunned the theatres and, conversely, pleasure-loving theatre-goers who attended sermons only when compelled to do so, the two audiences undoubtedly overlapped. The fact that preachers and moralists frequently expressed their hostility to the playhouses is the best evidence that they did; just as the adult companies fought to keep their audiences from defecting to the boy companies, using plays as their weapons, so the preachers and London authorities used sermons, tracts, and public proclamations in their battle to discredit the theatres. These efforts were not limited to Puritans; as Chambers points out, the writings against the stage, especially during the critical period from 1576 to 1583, are of a very heterogeneous character.

Evidence that the audiences overlapped abounds in the sermons and tracts of the 1570s and 1580s. The authors of the Marprelate tracts, for example, continually used theatrical jokes and allusions, assuming that their readers knew and enjoyed the plays. Neither they nor John Foxe, the celebrated author of The Actes and Monuments, better known as The Book of Martyrs, saw an innate antagonism between plays and religious zeal; as Foxe noted of one of the bishops, "He thwarteth and wrangleth much against players, printers, preachers. And no marvel why; for he seeth these three things to be set up of God, as a triple bulwark against the triple crown of the Pope to bring him down; as, God be praised, they have done meetly well already." There are verbal echoes of the plays in the sermons that suggest both an attempt on the part of the preachers to enter into competition with the playwrights and a pervasive influence of sermon rhetoric upon the playwrights. Still more evidence that the audiences overlapped can be found in the diary of John Manningham, a young gentleman law student at the Middle Temple in 1602-1603. Manningham's account of a performance of Twelfth Night, for which the diary is known to Shakespeare scholars, is juxtaposed with several summaries of sermons. For him, the sermon seems to have been a form of intellectual exercise, worth recording for its ideas and rhetorical presentation. He attended sermons delivered from pulpits throughout the city of London, by preachers as unlike one another as the Anglican Lancelot Andrewes and the Puritan Stephen Egerton. The interspersal of the summaries with jests and aphorisms, lines of verse and snatches of conversation, suggests that Manningham's interest was as much literary and rhetorical as it was pious.

Manningham is typical of the privileged playgoers Ann Cook describes in her recent study of the London theatre audience. Estimating that the "privileged" constituted 10 percent of the permanent population of London and 15 percent of the London populace when visitors are taken into account, Cook hypothesizes that they accounted for at least half of the audience at public and private theatres alike. Cook defines the "privileged" broadly enough to include London merchants, schoolmasters, clerics, soldiers, lawyers, writers, artists, students, wellborn apprentices, and the upwardly mobile yeomen and tradesmen who were acquiring wealth, land, and coats of arms in unprecedented numbers during the 1580s and 1590s. Not all the privileged were wealthy, but most were fairly well educated. Unlike most servants, laborers, and craftsmen, they had the leisure time to attend a play in the middle of the day. For the most wealthy and idle among them, attending a play may simply have been a way of passing the time; for the others, it was an experience as instructive as it was entertaining.

In the early years of the reform movement in England, the privileged were also the mainstay of the sermon audiences. They were intelligent, articulate, impatient with the laxness of the older, non-preaching clergy, and willing to support preachers out of their own pockets. The increased emphasis on preaching in Elizabeth's reign was a logical consequence of humanism, with its emphasis on learning, and of Puritanism, a movement led by the religious intellectuals of the day. These were men of education and advanced ideas who shared with their opponents the cultural legacy of the Renaissance. The fact that seventeenth-century Puritanism opposed the monarchy and espoused radical egalitarian political positions has sometimes led to the conclusion that Puritanism began as a popular mass movement. Elizabethan Puritanism was, in fact, an intellectual movement with a relatively small lay base, which attracted the patronage of many of the most important peers of the realm. William Cartwright, whose expulsion from Cambridge in 1570 is regarded by many as the first major event in the rise of Puritanism, was, as A. F. Scott Pearson observes, "... the mirror of the movement. He enjoyed the special patronage of statesmen like Leicester, Walsingham, Davison, etc., was regarded with sympathy by Burghley, and counted among his friends many of the leading gentry and parliamentarians. ... His well-wishers were scholars, ministers, and men of social influence, and it was such who were the mainstay of Puritanism." The Puritan nobility were particularly influential in enabling Puritanism to gain a foothold in the universities. Lawrence Stone calculates that "between 1565 and 1575 Cambridge produced no fewer than 228 Puritan ministers and schoolmasters to say nothing of the hundreds of young gentlemen who went out into the world with a firm belief in the need for a Puritan reformation of the Anglican Church." Noblemen like Leicester, Bedford, Huntingdon, Warwick, and Rich were sufficiently powerful to insure Puritan spokesmen access to publication and to protect them from being silenced. Hence a highly verbal minority emerged, composed primarily of preachers and patrons, its influence vastly disproportionate to its lay base. They were united not so much by a desire to change the form of church government or a common theological doctrine; rather, they were united by their conviction that preaching was, as Archbishop Grindal told the Queen, "the only mean and instrument of the salvation of mankind."

Thousands of sermons were preached in London in the 1570s and 1580s. There were 123 parish churches in London and its immediate suburbs, many filled to overflowing, according to Manningham, by crowds eager to hear sermons. In London, the percentage of regular parish clergy who preached rose from 27 percent to 88 percent between 1561 and 1601. Independent lectureships, approximately a third of which were held by Puritans, produced still more sermons; by 1600, lecturers were preaching 100 sermons a week. Like the theatres, the churches were meeting places, where business and social transactions took place, and where people gathered to talk and exchange news. According to contemporary accounts, sermons were disrupted by jests, laughter, and the showing off of new clothes, just as the plays were. Preachers whose sermons did not please were known to have been pulled from the pulpit, or, at the very least, harassed by coughing and heckling. The growing popularity of preaching, like that of playing, accounted for a dramatic increase in the number of publications during the 1570s and 1580s. The publication of printed sermons rose from nine volumes in the decade of the 1560s to 113 in the decade of the 1580s. Through pulpit and press, the attitudes of the preachers and the language that attached to those attitudes passed into the culture and became the common possession of playwrights and audiences alike. Whether or not these attitudes were consciously endorsed by the people exposed to them is unimportant; what matters is that their widespread influence gradually began to affect the way the plays were written and received.

The importance of the overlapping audience as a link between the pulpit and the stage predates the rise of Puritanism. An earlier wave of popular preaching, inaugurated by the friars of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, coincided with the emergence of the mystery cycles. G. R. Owst has speculated that the sermons, preached in the vernacular on outdoor scaffolds, helped bring about the "secularization" of the Latin liturgical drama which until then had been confined to the churches. The sermons contained "every variety of expression to be found in the plays — canonical and uncanonical, serious and humorous, satiric and tragic" — presented with a dramatic intensity that made them a truer antecedent of the medieval drama than the formal liturgical recitations of the priest. Responding to their audience's tastes, the preachers gradually incorporated more satire and comic exempla into their sermons. These corresponded to the comic interludes in the plays — they were designed "to plesen the puple," but with an eye to their ultimate edification.

What began as a process of mutual influence soon became a rivalry, as preachers and players competed for the same audiences. By the last decades of the sixteenth century, this rivalry was intense and frequently virulent, despite — or perhaps because of — the immense popularity of both forms of public entertainment. Threatened by the success of the plays, the preachers met "every attempt to justify players on didactic grounds ... by the retort that plays were the devil's sermons — a hideous mockery or antitype of true instruction." The efforts of the preachers, however, had no apparent effect on theatre attendance. Anthony Munday, who wrote A second and third blast of retrait from plates and Theaters pseudonymously, probably at the commission of the City of London, complained that although preachers denounced plays "daie by daie in al places of greatest resort," it was nevertheless the case that "infinite thousands of Christians doe dailie abide at the showes of vnseemlie things." So great was the appeal of the players that on feast days "the temple is despised, to run unto Theaters, the Church is emptied, the yeard is filled; wee leaue the sacrament, to feede our adulterous eies with the impure. ..." Munday represents theatre attendance as a hellish inversion or antithesis of church attendance. "How saie we that wee worship God in his Church, which serue the Diuel alwaies at plaies, and that wittinglie, and willinglie?" The theatre is "the destruction of our hope, and saluation," a despising of the Lord's table, the sin which replaces godliness, an uncleanness opposed to repentance, a filthiness opposed to purity of life.

The neat parallelisms of Munday1Stract suggest the extent to which the theatre was perceived as an alternative to the formal worship of God. Ironically, the reformers drove their audiences to seek in the theatre what the Church no longer provided. In their contempt for prelates as "stage players" engaged in "popish pageants," they had rejected the need for ritual and ceremony, for the incarnation of abstract beliefs in physical gesture, adornment, and symbolic objects, which is to be found in every culture. When the English Church ceased to fulfill this need, the drama began to take its place. Marlowe, who is reported in the Baines note to have said "That if there be any god or any good religion, then it is in the Papists' because the service of god is performed with more ceremonies ...," was among the first secular Elizabethan playwrights to recognize instinctively the existence of an audience whose need for dramatized ritual the Church could no longer satisfy. In Doctor Faust us, and again in subsequent Elizabethan tragedies, the ceremony of the mass is spectacularly, indeed blasphemously, transformed into secular drama. In a similar way, the controversy over vestments, certainly one of the defining tensions of Elizabeth's reign, is imaginatively mirrored in so many plays' preoccupation with clothing and its significance, and in the process of assuming and putting off robes which come to stand for identities in plays from Tamburlaine to Richard II to Macbeth.

But if the drama provided Elizabethan audiences with the theatricality that the reformers had banished from religious observance, it also provided them with a searching examination of character for which the popular tradition of preaching had helped to create a demand. The preachers spoke directly to their audiences' need for "physicians of the soul." William Haller describes their method in The Rise of Puritanism:

For centuries preachers had been analyzing the moral life into such categories as pride, envy, lust, avarice and their opposites. They diagnosed spiritual morbidity by identifying the species of sin with which the soul might be infected. Their method was to make war on wickedness by attacking its several varieties. They treated sinners by showing them how to detect each sin in the abstract under the infinite disguises which evil knew but too well how to assume. ... This often led the preacher — in the sixteenth and the seventeenth, as in the fourteenth, centuries — to more or less realistic description of actual manners and morals as well as to elaborate systematic allegorization of moral abstractions. ... Thus he came to depict the miser or the hypocrite instead of, or in addition to, defining or allegorizing the sins they embodied.

The Puritan preachers and lecturers, competing with the depictions of sin and folly offered by the players and confronted with audiences who "longed to know what they must do to be saved," produced sermons that spoke eloquently to their listeners' needs:

So they set out to describe the warfare of the spirit, to portray the drama of the inner life, to expound the psychology of sin and redemption. This, they found, was what the people would come to hear, and the more actively they responded to ever-increasing audiences the more they gave up abstractions in order to mirror the individual consciousness of spiritual stress, to convince the individual of sin in order to persuade him of grace, to make him feel worse in order to make him feel better, to inspire pity and fear in order to purge him of those passions.

"Had they but known it or been capable of admitting it," Haller adds, "precisely such a mirror was being held up to nature in the theatres, though not with quite the same intention or effect."

The notion that the drama and the sermon spoke to the same need felt by the Elizabethan audience receives support from no less a critic of the theatre than Stephen Gosson. Although he inveighs against the amorous scenes in the comedies, Gosson grudgingly admits that "nowe are the abuses of the worlde revealed, every man in a play may see his owne faultes, and learne by this glasse, to amende his manners." Indeed, while the declared purpose of The Schoole of Abuse was to be a criticism of poets, Gosson reveals himself to be just as preoccupied with gamblers and bearbaiters and other such characters. His main complaint against the plays seems to have been less concerned with their content than with the behavior of the audience: he speaks at great length of "suche heaving, and shoouing, such ytching and shouldring, too sitte by women ... such ticking, such toying, such smiling, such winking," in sum, such activity that the playhouse resembled "a generall Market of Bawdrie." His outrage implies that the innocent and well-intentioned were indeed present among the spectators, and could become corrupted by their environment.

The writings of Gosson and others indicate that the effort to subvert the theatres in sixteenth-century London was largely caused by an anxiety about the effects of assemblies in a compact and volatile community. Gosson accused the players of being instruments of the devil because they brought together multitudes of people. Ironically, Elizabeth regarded preaching in much the same way; the devil of sedition, she feared, was present wherever crowds were allowed to gather. Indeed, the complaints about playing and preaching in the sixteenth century sound remarkably alike, and are, as the following examples suggest, somewhat at cross purposes with one another. In the Lord Mayor's protest to the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1592, he complained that "the youth is greatly corrupted and their manners infected by the wanton and profane devices represented on the stages; prentices and servants withdrawn from their work; and all sorts in general from their daily resort to sermons and other godly exercise, to the great hindrance of the trades and traders of the City and the profanation of religion." Interestingly, the same argument had been used against preaching back in the 1550s; allegedly, Chancellor Rich had objected to the practice of preaching on working days on the grounds that it might "increase the people's idleness." By the 1580s, "gadding to sermons" had inspired more vehement complaints. One observer noted that William Dyke, a popular Puritan preacher, attracted "many of this gadding people [who] came from far and went home late, both young men and young women together." And another noted that at outdoor preaching exercises followed by formal "repetitions" or debates, "these discussions were often wont, as it was said, to produce quarrels and fights."

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• CONTENTS, pg. vii
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, pg. ix
• INTRODUCTION, pg. 1
• CHAPTER I. Play and Audience, pg. 15
• CHAPTER II. The Rhetoric of the Elect, pg. 41
• CHAPTER III. Morality Play Protagonists, pg. 74
• CHAPTER IV. The False Dawn of Tragedy, pg. 108
• CHAPTER V. The Conqueror Play, pg. 134
• CHAPTER VI. Revenge Tragedy, pg. 174
• CHAPTER VII. Doctor Faustus, pg. 209
• CHAPTER VIII. From History to Tragedy, pg. 247
• CHAPTER IX. The Tragic Choice, pg. 291
• BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 301
• INDEX, pg. 321