The Play of Paradox: Stage and Sermon in Renaissance EnglandThe 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
The Pulpit Performance and the TwoEdged Sword | 31 |
Holy Cozenage and the Renaissance Cult of the Ear | 50 |
Satire and Social Structure | 73 |
Copyright | |
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antitheatrical argued Atheos audience audience's bearbaiting believers Ben Jonson Bosola Bucer California Press calls Calvin Cambridge character Chicago Christ church comedy Countrie Divinitie cultural discourse divine doctrine Donne's doth Duchess of Malfi early modern elect Elizabethan England English example faith force Geneva Bible Gifford God's godly hath Hieron holy human Iago ideological insistence interpretive Jacobean John Donne John Webster Jonson judgment and mercy Leontes London Luther MacLure Measure for Measure metaphysical preachers Moll Cutpurse moral Othello Oxford Paul's Cross Paul's Cross sermon play's Playfere playwrights polemic preached at Paules Prospero Protestant pulpit performances Puritan Reformation preachers religious Renaissance reprobation rhetoric Richard Richard III Roaring Girl root paradigms salvation satire says seems sense Sermon Preached Shakespeare simultaneously sixteenth century social drama sort soul spirit stage plays Stephen Gosson tension theater theatrical theological Thomas thou tion Tragedy University Press unto vols William Winter's Tale word York Zelotes