drift over the last decade toward readings in which plays simply register historical conditions is now being countered by a renewed emphasis on theatrical form—originally so crucial to the cultural materialist and new his-toricist project. The goal of this work was always to track living relationships between a society and its fantasies, not to spot discourses in texts as if pinning and labeling butterflies. While the newer critical moniker “historical formalism” usefully marks its affinities with new historicism and distinguishes itself from belle-lettrism,9 I retain “cultural materialism” in order to mark emphatically that my goal is not just to juxtapose literary texts and historical conditions in a way that richly describes both, but rather to show the active role of representation in the ongoing making of the world. The term stresses continuity with the insights of revisionist Marxists of the 1970s and 1980s (particularly Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, and Williams) regarding the transformative cultural work enabled by the semiautonomy of literary form. It maintains that representation is not merely reflective but constitutive, and it takes up the challenge of understanding the complicated ways that people and their societies make each other through language, with the belief that this model of culture is also why our own scholarly and pedagogic work matters.
Attending to such critical lineages enables genuine methodological growth, instead of pendulum swings by which merely reflective readings of texts are replaced by merely contextual treatments of history. “What will come after historicism?” is a question that misunderstands the methodology it looks to replace. The basic premise of cultural materialism, and of revisionist Marxism generally, is that the world as imagined and the world as lived create and constrain each other continually. To adapt the old “Mother Russia” joke: we can never be done with this dialectic, because it is never done with us. Understanding the always-changing, cultural feedback loop through which individual subjects and societies form each other is difficult, unending, and vital critical work. At its fullest, cultural materialism articulates a dense, formative matrix of human experiences, expressions, and activities in the world. It is a methodology adept at showing dynamic relationships between seemingly disconnected areas of social practice and culture. By insisting on the entanglement of the past and present, it demands continual methodological revision: “It is the eternally vigilant prophet proclaiming the relations between the tasks of the immediate present and the totality of the historical process.”10
Now, while we are watching the fire sale of the humanities in a university system that runs on the exploitation of an adjunct precariat, is a particularly suicidal time to abandon a methodology devoted to analyzing the relationships between social conditions, and the forms of knowledge production and cultural expression that subtend and change them. A country that elects a billionaire, reality television star as president cannot dispense with Marxist cultural studies. Creeping neoliberalism teaches us to assume that critical paradigms have built-in obsolescence after which they need replacing or rebranding. Looking for the “next thing” turns a capacious way of seeing the ongoing process of collectively making and being made by the world, into a “thing” that has outlived its market value. It is not progress to pursue a theater history that ignores social history, or to embrace pseudomaterialist criticism that describes “stuff” rather than social relationships.11 Cultural materialism is not an emaciated ghost, shuffling toward the dustbin of criticism. We need this politically useful, intellectually flexible, and profound way of looking at the mutually shaping relationships between humans, language, and the world.
In the chapters that follow, I flesh out the claims I have been making in this introduction, showing by close engagement with dramatic texts and performance practices how early modern theater drew mixed-faith playgoers into new relations with a complex religious culture. Refuting the common assumption that audiences consisted of conforming Church of England Protestants, Chapter 1 illustrates the confessional heterogeneity of theatergoers, through representative examples of the complex and changing religious lives of about seventy known playgoers. This sample presents a far more diverse set of confessional characters than previously has been imagined in playhouses.12 Alongside various kinds of fellow Protestants, and assorted types of Catholics, puritans attended the commercial theaters throughout the period. I demonstrate this fact—and discuss the critical persistence of the false notion that godly people hated plays. The religious position of individual playgoers informed, but did not narrowly determine, their responses to theater.
In Chapter 2, I argue for theater’s capacity to restructure playgoers’ experiences of confessional material. Early modern commercial drama fostered imaginative flexibility. Audiences were initiated in the pleasures of generic variety, experiments with staging conventions and genre, and the proliferation of dramatic subjects and perspectives available in the entertainment market. The emotional and mental elasticity cultivated by this theater culture extended to playgoers’ experiences of dramatized religious material. Recent work on theatrical response emphasizes uncued audience behavior and diverse appropriations of the drama.13 This scholarship tends to pit agential, individual playgoers against the supposedly totalizing force of stage spectacle. Yet the usual dichotomies drawn between active and passive, emotional and critical, individual and collective reception, are inadequate to describe the complex and fluctuating mixtures of these elements of response orchestrated by theatrical process. To illustrate how theatrical pleasure can reorient playgoers’ experiences of confessional content, I turn to a group of plays from the early 1620s that capitalize on popular interest in the Spanish Match. Unlike the rigid, oppositional religious binary into which A Game at Chess interpellates its audiences, other Spanish Match plays, such as The Noble Spanish Soldier, The Spanish Gypsy, and Match Me in London, invite more ideologically supple forms of identification and delight.
In contrast to work that seeks to identify the religious affiliations of individual playwrights, Chapter 3 focuses on mixed-faith collaboration. Religious differences among playhouse colleagues were common, and they had varied and unpredictable effects. Turning to a subgenre of stage hagiographies, I show how basic conditions of dramatic production, such as collaborative authorship, as well as the pressures of dramatic trends, generated confessionally hybrid plays. For example, the popularity of Falstaff led to the incorporation of the jolly English—and Catholic—thieving priest Sir John in the godly play Sir John Oldcastle. Playwrights with antipapist sentiments but expertise in the subgenre collaborated on a script sympathetic to the eponymous Catholic martyr, Sir Thomas More. Even in a genre that fosters plays with explicit religious loyalties, the working practices of the theater business produce mixed ideological formations.
In Chapter 4, on Thomas Middleton’s 1624 topical allegory A Game at Chess, I attend to the confessional and political work of surveillance in which the play enlists audiences. In contrast to existing criticism that focuses largely on identifying references to historical people and events, I show how the play’s structures of address and spacialization exercise theatergoers’ faculties of religious and political discovery, interpellating a Protestant collective out of a mixed-faith crowd. A Game at Chess does not simply publicize political and religious content but rather engages playgoers in the collective activity of being a confessionally and politically discerning public.
In Chapter 5, I take Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure as a case study in the capacity of theatrical process to shift habits of religious thought. The play inducts its mixed-faith audiences into a Calvinist hermeneutic of social and spiritual judgment, leading confessionally diverse playgoers to make assumptions on cultural grounds as to characters’ election or reprobation. Yet Measure for Measure’s reversals of plot and affect disrupt the predestinarian framework of thought and feeling that it initially asks mixed-faith audiences to adopt. Through such basic dramatic devices as soliloquies and dramatic irony, Measure for Measure activates—and unsettles—one of the most deeply entrenched practices
