Performing the Protestant State: Preaching and Playing from Marprelate to Milton

Abstract

Performing the Protestant State: Preaching and Playing from Marprelate to Miltonchallenges the prevailing literary-historical account of London’s theaters as an overwhelmingly secular force in England’s political discourse. I demonstrate that this secularizing narrative misses the importance of the stage’s productive dialogue with the city’s other great locus of live rhetorical performance, the public sermon. From Elizabethan professional drama to the court masques and theatrical pamphlets of the brewing Civil War, England’s leading playwrights were deeply engaged in responding to London’s prestigious preaching venues. Elite churchmen and rising stars would ascend the great outdoor pulpits at Paul’s Cross or Whitehall Palace and harangue audiences of four or five thousand on topics from the best way to spend their money to the latest news in international dynastic conflicts. London’s most talented dramatists were often among those audiences, enjoying the rhetoric and keeping their finger on the pulse of the latest religio-political conversations. In a culture with almost no line between sacred and secular, where citizenship and church membership were nearly coterminous, the work of playwrights like William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton often ventured into sermonic territory, at once borrowing from the pulpit and competing with it for market share in the London and national discourse. Skirting censorship intended to keep the plays from overtly commenting on national and ecclesial politics, the dramatists weighed in on everything from the dangers of domestic Catholic agents to the proper perspective on the latest theological disputes in the Netherlands. I demonstrate that these conceptual overlaps between stage and pulpit were intensified by the fact that they often shared physical locations and were responded to by shared audiences. Together, preachers and dramatists reflected, interrogated, and defined these audiences as a nationalist Protestant public on an international stage.