attack on the theater, Histriomastix, for which he had lost his ears. “It is no disparagement for any man to alter his judgement upon better information,” Prynne writes, declaring “that Playes are lawfull things.”69 Prynne’s changes of heart show the value of looking at religious positions not as static and discrete entities but as entangled strands of a broader mixed-faith culture.
No One Is Normal
In the theaters as in local parishes, the zealous mixed with other members of the national Church. If we do not presuppose a normative, proto-Anglican via media in conflict with a puritan fringe, we can better understand the rival ceremonial and doctrinal tendencies within the Church of England, competing for centrality in a large, shared tent. Just as “puritan” was a capacious and contested term, used to describe individuals with significantly different ideas about ceremony, ecclesiology, and art, so too was the pseudoneutral category of religious “moderation” itself fraught and contentious. Ethan Shagan observes that “the golden mean was not merely a point on the spectrum but a condition of authority,” and he rightly warns against “allowing historical categories of debate [such as moderation] to masquerade as scholarly categories of analysis.”70 For example, playgoer Bishop Joseph Hall’s suggestively titled Via Media (ca. 1626) was not the irenic olive branch it rhetorically presents itself to be, but rather part of the Calvinist pushback against emerging, Arminian works of controversy.71 To the playwright and future clergyman John Marston, Hall was a “devout meale-mouth’d Preceisean.”72 To his more radical fellow theatergoer, and 1642 pamphlet war adversary, John Milton, Hall’s defense of the episcopacy was an endorsement of “plaine Popedom,” and Hall himself was guilty of “lukewarmenesse … [cloaked] under the affected name of moderation.”73
While claims to religious moderation were often confessional land grabs in disguise, there were playgoers who sought to negotiate the religious landscape, both doctrinally and interpersonally, in ways that were genuinely conciliatory toward other confessional groups. Although theatergoer John Newdigate III came from a godly family, he also maintained friendships with Arminians.74 Protestant playgoer Francis Bacon laments in a 1609 letter to his close friend, and fellow theater enthusiast, Catholic convert Toby Matthew “that controversies of religion must hinder the advancement of sciences.”75 Lucius Cary, Lord Falkland, scion of a mixed family, and center of a skeptical, Erasmian group of intellectuals, praises latitudinarian questioning as the path to religious truth: “I cannot see why he should be saved, because, by reason of his parents beleife, or the Religion of the Countrey, or some such accident, the truth was offered to his understanding, when had the contrary beene offered he would have received that.”76 Pacifist playgoer James Howell called for mutual restraint in religious conflict: “Good Lord, what fiery clashings have we had lately for a Cap and a Surplice! [What] bloud was spilt for ceremonies only … for the bare position of a table!”77 However, efforts to carve out more conciliatory positions were sometimes difficult to sustain in the context of confessional conflict. Howell was accused of lukewarmness and timeserving.78 Tolerant Cary was so grieved by the escalation of religious and political factionalism into outright civil war that in 1643 he committed battlefield suicide, saying that “he was weary of the times.”79
Even discourses and practices that established common ground among English Protestants (such as anti-Catholic prejudice and the shared liturgy) also marked fissures. Until the Laudian recuperation of the Roman Church as a true Church, English Protestants were broadly united by patriotic anti-Catholicism. As Christopher Hill says, the long Reformation “sublimated and idealized” English nationalism.80 For example, the overwhelming majority of his fellow playgoers would have applauded William Lambarde’s staunch commitment to a Protestant England. Lambarde’s Anglo-Saxon scholarship recovered historical foundations of English Protestantism; in Parliament in the 1580s, he made a bold attempt to prevent the possibility of a Catholic English monarch. His academic and political efforts epitomize a widely shared sense of national Protestant identity.81 However, it would be a mistake to treat popular, anti-Catholic nationalism as straightforward evidence of Protestant unity. Although the pope presented a common enemy against whom intra-Protestant groups could join in opposition, the perceived threat of popery within the Church—in myriad forms, from the episcopacy, to the surplice, to altar rails, to set prayers, to superstitious parishioners—was a major locus of internal division.82 For example, playgoer Lionel Cranfield’s ornate, private chapel would have satisfied Laudians devoted to the “beauty of holiness,” but been seen by the godly as dangerously popish.83 English Protestants generally agreed that popery was bad, but they fiercely disagreed as to what popery was.
Playgoer and prayer book Protestant Lady Anne Clifford represented a “significant minority [of] committed conformists” whose faith was embedded in the liturgy of the established Church.84 During the interregnum, Clifford continued to use the proscribed prayer book, although to do so put her in danger: “She had in the worst of times the liturgy of the Church of England duly in her own private chapel … though she was threatened with sequestration.”85 Clifford’s loyalty to the set prayers of the English Church defies what Maltby identifies as the “[false] assumption that non-conformists took their faith more ‘seriously’ than men and women who conformed to the lawful worship of the Church of England.”86 But standards of conformity were shifting and contentious; the prayer book itself was a mixed-faith document.87 Religious normativity was a moving target. Despite his self-presentation as an exemplar of orthodoxy, Bishop John Overall’s enthusiasm for ceremony and aversion to Calvinist doctrine were decidedly avant-garde for the Jacobean Church. Yet Overall’s visitation articles, establishing rubrics of conformity, would become the model for at least twenty other sets of articles used—albeit, still controversially—by Laudian divines in the later 1620s and 1630s.88
Moreover, even pious, conformist theatergoers such as Clifford were immersed in a broader, mixed-faith culture. Clifford’s eulogist praises her ability to sift “controversies very abstruse,” recalling how “she much commended one book, William Barklay’s dispute with Bellarmine, both, as she knew, of the popish persuasion, but the former less papal; and who, she said, had well stated a main point.”89 Julie Crawford has shown how Clifford, in her struggle to claim property from her husband and the King, drew on models of political resistance from puritan texts.90 This does not mean that Clifford was secretly inclining to either Catholicism or puritanism. The point, rather, is that even firm conformists did not live in an orthodox bubble, untainted by contact with the broader religious spectrum.
The long Reformation embroiled everything it touched in the unstable processes of cross-confessional appropriation. For example, theatergoer Richard Brathwaite’s Spiritual Spicery (1638) includes an anodyne Protestant autobiography, alongside translations of devotional material by Catholic theologians. Similarly, in the same year he published his famous appraisal of contemporary dramatists, Church of England deacon Francis Meres also translated the work of the Spanish, Dominican mystic Louis de Granada.91 These men were not crypto-Catholics. Brathwaite asserts the orthodoxy of “[extracting] flowers from Romish authors,” by labeling anyone who objects “a rigid Precisian.”92 It was common for committed Protestants to draw on Catholic devotional texts. The Jesuit Robert Parsons’s Christian Directory was adapted by the Calvinist Edmund Bunny into A Book of Christian Exercise, one of the most frequently reprinted books in Elizabethan England: Clifford read both Bunny’s version and Parsons’s.93 People across the spectrum of belief productively engaged with texts and practices coded as belonging to other confessional groups, often repurposing these cultural materials for radically different ends.
Catholics, Church Papists, and the Curious
English Catholicism was not simply a monolithic other, against which various English Protestants defined their own identities; this internally diverse, master category offered rich devotional and cultural resources to its various adherents and sympathizers.94
