The Play of Paradox : Stage and Sermon in Renaissance England

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas. The Play of Paradox: Stage and Sermon in Renaissance England is a wide-ranging investigation of Tudor/Stuart drama, Reformation preaching, and the relations between the two. The cross-fertilization between the two kinds of performance engendered among audiences a ready receptivity to the rhetorical use of paradox. The two modes similarly capitalized on characteristic Renaissance syntheses of magic, drama, and religion to develop strategies for negotiating state control. In chapters that set comedies and tragedies by Shakespeare, Jonson, Webster, and others side by side with sermons by Hooker, Andrewes, Donne, and popular preachers whose works have not been reprinted since the early seventeenth century, Bryan Crockett argues that stage and pulpit performances elicited similar responses to the political and theological divisions marked by the incessant polemics of the age. Contents Preface Acknowledgments 1. Introduction: Bucer's Round Church and Shakespeare's "Wooden O"–The Circulation of the Reformation Sermon and the Renaissance Play Part I: Polemics and Irenics at Paul's Cross 2. The Pulpit Performance and the Two-Edged Sword 3. "Holy Cozenage" and the Renaissance Cult of the Ear Part II: Comic Edification and Inclusion 4. Satire and Social Structure 5. "Strange Tempests": The Rhetoric of Judgment in Field and Shakespeare Part III: Tragedy: Watershed and Confluence 6. The Mist and the Wilderness: Protestant Paradox in Gifford and Webster 7. Donne in on Shakespeare's Stage: The Theology and Theatrics of Renaissance Dying Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index