Frank Wortley, who would become an enthusiastic officer in the King’s army and pen a defense of the episcopacy.8 This ordinary occasion—when a crypto-papist, a puritan, and a pro-episcopal loyalist sat together, watching a play written by multiple convert Ben Jonson while he was still Catholic, with puritan actor John Lowin in the title role—demonstrates how thoroughly confessional heterogeneity permeated the production and reception of commercial drama. In Chapter 3, I discuss the complex and unpredictable effects of mixed-faith collaboration among actors and playwrights within theater companies. Here, the crucial point is not simply the fact of these playgoers’ confessional diversity but also the flexible imaginative engagement with London’s mixed religious culture enabled by the process of performance.
For example, early in Volpone Nano the dwarf and Androgyno the hermaphrodite entertain their employer with a rhyming exposition of the transmigrations of the soul of Pythagoras, which initiates the audience in the pleasures of transformation that are central to the play. While Volpone generally keeps religious issues peripheral, here they are underscored. Nano and Androgyno’s repartee begins with the question:
How of late [hast thou] suffered translation
And shifted thy coat in these days of reformation[?]9
The ensuing back-and-forth traces Pythagoras’s soul’s journey through the bodies of a “reformed … fool,” a Carthusian monk, a lawyer, a mule, a puritan, and a hermaphrodite. This tour de force of doggerel includes four lines of antipuritan satire. It would be po-faced and tone-deaf to assume that Sir Humphrey Mildmay, Sir Anthony Mildmay, and Sir Frank Wortley each found the antipuritan jokes funny or not funny in direct proportion to his real-world opinion of the godly. The jaunty couplets, the erratic “tumbling” meter, the range of subjects satirized, and the atypical physicality of the speakers themselves all give the zanies’ routine a sense of comic overflow that orients audience attention to the movement between forms of identity. The logic of the joke is accretive, accelerating slippages of confessional selfhood, chaotically mixed with transformations of other kinds—between sexes and between species. The cumulative energy of the “transmigration” encourages growing laughter across particular confessional jabs. In performance, the function of the zanies’ skit is not to divide playgoers along sectarian lines but to involve everyone in the quasi-erotic gratifications of variety and change. This kind of ideologically unruly grafting of religious culture and theatrical form permeates the extant corpus of early modern drama. In the playhouses, mixed-faith audiences shared theatrical experiences that transmogrify religious categories.
The real-world religious positions of audience members were part of the generative, confessional polyvocality of the commercial theater scene; yet these identities did not rigidly predetermine how people felt watching plays. Theater happens in the oscillation between “audiences” (actual groups of diverse and complex living people) and “the audience” (that imagined collective elicited in performance).10 Meanings are not produced solely by the ideological disposition of spectators, nor solely by the experiential impact of theatrical process, but by their mutual interaction. The varied, complex, and changeable confessional positions of playgoers, to which I now turn, do not fix limits to imaginative responses to theater but rather mark starting points from which to measure the possible imaginative and emotional distances traveled in the two hours’ traffic of the stage.
Mixed Audiences, or, People Are Different
Here, I illustrate the confessional diversity of early modern commercial theater audiences, using as examples the religious lives of about seventy known playgoers.11 Obviously, this tiny sample cannot give us any statistical information about the confessional demographics of audiences. It is estimated that at least fifteen thousand people attended the theaters weekly: totaling as many as a million visits a year, on average, over the nearly seventy years between the construction of the first, purpose-built playhouse in 1576 and the closing of the theaters in 1642.12 Even assuming that the confessional breakdown of the playgoing public reflected that of London, religious historians are rightly cautious when making demographic claims about confessional groups. The legal requirement of church attendance made sincere conformity often indistinguishable from its tepid simulation, and nonattendance could indicate anything from Catholic recusancy, to puritan sermon gadding, to an irreverent preference for the alehouse.13 Moreover, because confessional nomenclature was relative and often polemical, we cannot treat the religious subcategories used by contemporaries as neutrally descriptive.
That having been said, the shifting size and visibility of particular confessional groups has been widely canvassed. As Patrick Collinson summarizes, “Historians continue to disagree over the extent to which the English people took the new religion to heart and became more than what contemporaries called ‘cold statute Protestants.’ But it is now generally accepted that by the end of the [sixteenth] century the English nation was Protestant in the sense that (except for a repressed minority) it was no longer Catholic.”14 Maltby describes committed conformists or “Prayer-Book Protestants” as “nothing other than a minority, though a significant minority, on the religious spectrum.”15 The godly too were a minority, though one that also claimed for itself a normative role in the national Church.16 Puritanism bled into a wider Calvinist culture.17 London’s active puritan underground fostered the “miscegenation” of familist and antinomian ideas with more mainstream strands of puritan thought.18 An “avant-garde conformist” minority appeared even in the midst of the broad “Calvinist consensus” of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean Church.19 This group’s emphasis on ceremony and its movement away from Calvinist, predestinarian theology would gain traction in the Caroline Church with the rise of William Laud.20 Catholicism persisted in England, both through the survival (or mutation) of traditional devotional habits and through the efforts of post-Tridentine missionaries.21 Estimates vary, but recusant Catholics may have accounted for as little as 2 percent of the population of London.22 Beyond this visible sliver of engagés lay a larger number of committed Catholics, who avoided persecution through occasional conformity. Without windows into men’s souls, these strategic schismatics blend into a broader group of conforming parishioners with conservative, religious tendencies, whom hotter Protestants also described as “church papists.”23 While complaints about widespread religious ignorance and indifference were often polemical, there is also evidence of subdoctrinal, popular Pelagianism (“Be good, and you will go to Heaven”), as well as more actively irreverent, or irreligious, behaviors and attitudes.24 Alongside these competing and overlapping confessional cultures, there existed a muddily subconfessional, perhaps even sub-Christian, world of folk belief and magical practices.25 The religious spectrum was broad, and the positions people occupied along it were often slippery. “Orthodoxy,” or religious normativity, was contested and elusive territory.
If, as Alfred Harbage asked, we imagine the motley crowd pouring out of the Globe, we can never know how many in that audience were Catholic, or puritan, or converts, or had avant-garde attitudes toward ceremony. Then again—because confessional difference was often invisible but existed in every socioeconomic class, among both men and women, and in every age group—neither could they.26 (For this reason, debates about the class and gender composition of London theater audiences are not immediately relevant to this study.)27 Our inability to recover specific statistical information about the religious sympathies of playgoers, despite our awareness of the reality of confessional diversity, puts us in something like the position of audience members themselves, whose perceptions of the size and activities of both their own and other confessional groups could be highly subjective. Religious heterogeneity was greater than the sum of its parts. The confessional lives described next index the variety, complexity, and mobility of religious positions that audiences brought to plays. Collectively, they suggest the endlessly revisable possibilities of a mixed-faith culture.
Playgoing Puritans
The notion
