Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage : : Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England / / Huston Diehl.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Archive Pre-2000
• VerfasserIn: Diehl, Huston,
• MitwirkendeR: Diehl, Huston,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2019]; ©1997
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (256 p.) :; 16 halftones

Huston Diehl sees Elizabethan and Jacobean drama as both a product of the Protestant Reformation—a reformed drama—and a producer of Protestant habits of thought—a reforming drama. According to Diehl, the popular London theater, which flourished in the years after Elizabeth reestablished Protestantism in England, rehearsed the religious crises that disrupted, divided, energized, and in many respects revolutionized English society. Drawing on the insights of symbolic anthropologists, Diehl explores the relationship between the suppression of late medieval religious cultures, with their rituals, symbols, plays, processions, and devotional practices, and the emergence of a popular theater under the Protestant monarchs Elizabeth and James. Questioning long-held assumptions that the reformed religion was inherently antitheatrical, she shows how the reformers invented new forms of theater, even as they condemned a Roman Catholic theatricality they associated with magic, sensuality, and duplicity. Using as her central texts the tragedies of Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster, Diehl maintains that plays of the period reflexively explore their own power to dazzle, seduce, and deceive. Employing a reformed rhetoric that is both powerful and profoundly disturbing, they disrupt their own stunning spectacles. Out of this creative tension between theatricality and antitheatricality emerges a distinctly Protestant aesthetic.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- A Note on Editorial Practice -- Introduction -- 1. The Drama of Iconoclasm -- 2. The Rhetoric of Reform -- 3. Censoring the Imaginary: The Wittenberg Tragedies -- 4. Rehearsing the Eucharistic Controversies: The Revenge Tragedies -- 5. Ocular Proof in the Age of Reform: Othello -- 6. Iconophobia and Gynophobia: The Stuart Love Tragedies -- 7. The Rhetoric of Witnessing: The Duchess of Malfi -- Epilogue -- Bibliography -- Index