debunkings.28 As George Walker in his 1935 biography of puritan playgoer Richard Madox points out, “It is a modern fallacy that Puritans were enemies of the drama.”29 Unquestionably, some godly people rejected theater, not only because of its immoral subject matter and dissolute crowds but also because of its association with Catholic or residually popish ceremony. Certainly, the accusation of antitheatricalism was a common trope of antipuritan polemic. Nevertheless, antitheatricalism was not so widespread among the godly as to eliminate puritans from theater culture. My purpose here is to refute the tenacious falsehood that godly people were, by definition, enemies of theater, as well as to identify the underlying assumptions that keep this an intervention that must be repeated each time as if from scratch.
Several recent books, most notably Jeffrey Knapp’s Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England and Alison Shell’s Shakespeare and Religion, reassert the view of a London theater scene grounded in a via media religious culture, in which the godly had little to no part.30 In Knapp’s Shakespeare’s Tribe, early modern English theater is Erasmian, that is, minimally doctrinal and broadly inclusive—but separate from the world of puritans. He writes, “The godly in churches, the good fellows in alehouses and playhouses: these were the rival camps.”31 Unfortunately, this influential book repeatedly misidentifies divisive polemic that claims for itself the privileged position of moderation, as evidence of Erasmian toleration—which it is not.32 In other words, Knapp not only (like many others) ignores or minimizes evidence of puritan theater people; he homogenizes a wide range of real confessional differences among theatergoers and practitioners into an undifferentiated ecumenicalism. As the last thirty years of revisionist scholarship debunking the Whig narrative of the English Reformation as the successful installation of an anodyne, via media Anglicanism suggests, Knapp’s account does not accurately describe the diversity and complexity of post-Reformation confessional life.33
Shell offers an erudite version of a similar argument. She recognizes some forms of confessional diversity in the playhouses, affirming that “audiences were not homogeneous,” but also restates a qualified version of the familiar claim that “[puritans] stayed away from the theatre.” Shell goes so far as to suggest that “a typical London audience of the early seventeenth century [pre-1620s] might have contained, relative to the city’s population in general, a disproportionately large number of those who consciously recoiled from Calvinist doctrine.”34 This is an astonishing claim, since these decades are widely identified as a heyday of the Calvinist consensus, when anti-Calvinist innovations to doctrine and ceremony were still in a nascent stage of development. “Calvinist doctrine” was no fringe of radical religion, as one might suppose from Shell’s speculation here; rather, it was the theological core of the Church of England, as well as a pervasive part of post-Reformation popular culture. The archbishop of Canterbury was Calvinist, as were the many ordinary people who enjoyed godly broadsides and providential monster pamphlets. Essentially, Shell here acknowledges the continuum between puritanism and broader Calvinism, but she does so to reposition Calvinism itself as marginal rather than mainstream. To the contrary, if early Jacobean Calvinists had avoided plays, the theaters might have closed for lack of bums on seats. In short, both Knapp and Shell continue to treat positive forms of puritan engagement with drama as exceptional, rather than normal, and privilege semi-Pelagian, conforming, Church of England Protestantism as central to the theater culture. That is, these books resurrect an old narrative that ties (especially Shakespearean) drama to a merry old, doctrinally unfussed, sensibly Anglican England.
We know, however, that Parliament’s initial decision to close the theaters in 1642 had more to do with crowd control than with the spiritual threat of idolatrous spectacle.35 We know that not all puritans were antitheatricalists, and not all antitheatricalists were puritans.36 We know young John Milton liked going to plays.37 Yet the received narrative—that while earlier sixteenth-century English reformers, such as John Bale and John Foxe, embraced playing as a means of spreading the gospel, their puritan successors from the 1570s onward rejected theater as idolatrous—remains largely intact.38 However, Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean have shown that, in spite of some emerging criticism of playing within the puritan movement, godly statesmen Sir Francis Walsingham and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, formed the Queen’s Men touring company in 1583 to disseminate hot Protestant values.39 Michael O’Connell has demonstrated that Philip Henslowe was producing plays about Protestant heroes that targeted a puritan audience into the early 1600s.40 Margot Heinemann has identified godly investments in the drama as “evidence … [that puritans] must have been in the audience” through the 1610s and 1620s.41 Martin Butler has proved that puritans attended private playhouses in the last decade before the theaters’ closing.42 Together, these accounts demonstrate a sustained puritan presence in the early modern theater scene. Why then are puritan playgoers still widely regarded as unicorns: elusive creatures that either do not exist or, if real, are so rare that no one is sure they have seen one?
The expectation of a stark antipathy between godly people and theater people produces interpretive habits that confirm this foregone conclusion. It is common, indeed almost “common sense,” to point to the many plays containing antipuritan satire as indicative of a broad hostility between the theaters and the godly. However, this satire is often surprisingly affectionate toward its targets, and it has usefully been read in the context of more local conflicts, rather than as evidence of total war.43 Moreover, early modern plays are also full of anti-Catholic satire; yet few critics, if any, suggest that therefore most Catholics were enemies of theater generally. To the contrary, it is far easier for scholars to imagine English Catholic people attending plays, even when so many of them have papist villains, because of the strong connection between Catholicism and theatricality. This associative link, powerfully described by Huston Diehl and others, did affect the experience of theater (and of visual and material culture generally) for English people across the confessional spectrum in multiple ways.44 “Catholic theatricality” was a strong and pervasive discursive formation. However, it did not prevent all godly people from attending plays. The idée fixe that the playhouse was too popish for puritans to stomach generates scholarly practices that erase evidence of godly theatergoing. For example, Shell interprets in opposite ways similar calls from puritan and Catholic divines for the faithful to avoid the theater: as signs of godly absence and of Romanist presence. Why is the same type of evidence treated as descriptive in the former case but prescriptive in the latter? This interpretive discrepancy is an object lesson in the ways the expectation that we will not find puritans in the playhouses can keep us from seeing them there.45
In part, the continued critical reluctance to imagine godly people inside theaters rests on the mischaracterization of puritans as pleasure-hating outsiders. Although puritans habitually identified themselves as a beleaguered minority for theological reasons, as Collinson has shown, they were “not alien to … the English Church but [represented] the most vigorous and successful of religious tendencies contained within it.”46 Nicholas Tyacke and others have demonstrated how doctrinal consensus, and a shared sense of religious purpose, united English Calvinists who were otherwise divided on issues of Church ceremony and organization. Until the Laudian ascendency, the Calvinist consensus meant that the difference between Protestants and puritans was largely one of degree, not kind.47 For much of the period, the godly were like other Church of England Protestants—only more so—and the distinction between them was subjective. Part of the difficulty in discussing the relationship between puritans and theater is the highly relative nature of the confessional label itself.48 Playgoer Benjamin Rudyerd describes himself as “zealous of a thorow reformation,” but he understands this as a mainstream position.49 He objects to Laudian, ceremonial innovations and the recasting of devout Protestants as dangerous radicals: “They have so brought it to passe, that under the Name of Puritans, all our Religion is branded.”50 Simply put, modern scholars should not be more convinced that “puritans” avoided plays than early modern people themselves were certain, or in agreement, as to whom that term actually described.
The fluidity of puritanism as a category
