Performance and Religion in Early Modern England

"In its exploration of the religious basis of early modern theatrical experience, Matthew Smiths study recalibrates our understanding of the periods theater and plays. This is Mankind and Marlowe both, and an argument worth our careful attention." Douglas Bruster, University of Texas at Austin "This is the only book I know that pays such careful attention to the specific performance conditions of so many modes and the intertheatrical relationships among them. Matthew Smith has gathered a diverse set of performance materials into a project of real magnitude, coherence, and consequence. Every chapter of Smith's book delivers new insights, judicious reframings, and dazzlingly original connections that bring together familiar and unfamiliar texts. This is the kind of book that could well win acclaim for its originality, learning, ambition, and argumentative contribution."Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, Irvine "Matthew Smith's Performance and Religion in Early Modern England ranges widely and imaginatively over the landscape of late medieval and early modern performance, urgently blurring the boundaries between festival and secular theater, and between theater and sermons, ballads, and jigs. What emerges is a crucial imagining of the critical interplay of presence and representation, and of the critical porousness of early modern performance as well." W. B. Worthen, Alice Brady Pels Professor in the Arts, Barnard College, Columbia University "The central argument is one that many scholars will need to absorb and contemplate, as it reorients how we think of theatricality. This is a book that should be widely read and digested." Religion and Literature "Performance and Religion in Early Modern England strongly reinforces the interconnectedness of the religion and the theatrical in the Shakespearean era."Anglican & Episcopal History * Anglican & Episcopal History *

Matthew J. Smith is associate professor of English at Azusa Pacific University.

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Prelude 1. Early Modern Theatricality across the Reformation 2. The Real Presence/Absence of God in the Chester Cycle Plays 3. Henry V and the Ceremonies of Theater 4. Gods Idioms: Sermon Belief in Donnes London 5. Performing Religion in Early Modern Ballads 6. The Devils Among Us: Intertheatricality in Doctor Faustus and its Afterlives Postlude: Ending with a Jig Notes Bibliography Index