Unsettled Toleration
Religious Difference on the Shakespearean Stage
Published on 24. March 2016
Book
Hardback
230 pages
978-0-19-875443-5 (ISBN)
Description
Unsettled Toleration: Religious Difference on the Shakespearean Stage historicizes and scrutinizes the unstable concept of toleration as it emerges in drama performed on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stages. Brian Walsh examines plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries that represent intra-Christian conflict between mainstream believers and various minorities, analyzing the sometimes explicit, sometimes indirect, occasionally smooth, but more often halting and equivocal forms of dealing with difference that these plays imagine can result from such exchanges. Through innovative and in some cases unprecedented readings of a diverse collection of plays, from Chapman's An Humorous Day's Mirth, Middleton's The Puritan Widow, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, and Pericles, and Rowley's When You See Me You Know Me, Walsh shows how the English stage in the first decade of the seventeenth century, as a social barometer, registered the basic condition of religious "unsettlement " of the post-Reformation era; and concurrently that the stage, as a social incubator, brooded over imagined scenarios of confessional conflict that could end variously in irresolution, accommodation, or even religious syncretism. It thus helped to create, sustain and enlarge an open-ended public conversation on the vicissitudes of getting along in a sectarian world. Attending to this conversation is vital to our present understanding of the state of religious toleration the early modern period, for it gives a fuller picture of the ways religious difference was experienced than the limited and inert pronouncements on the topic that officials of the church and state offered.
Reviews / Votes
I enjoyed the book and the considerable amount of detailed interpretation. * Lorenzo Zucca, Bulletin of the Comediantes * Walsh's study offers new perspectives on both familiar and unfamiliar texts... he successfully indicates the extent to which artistic licence could explore a more flexible and accommodating response to confessional differences than was possibleor permissible in a more public political context. * Paul Dean, The Journal * Walsh's excellent book recognizes fine distinctions often overlooked within presentations of religious discourse. It reminds us that the Reformation was an unsettled period that both marginalized and integrated competing theological beliefs and practices." --Richard Finkelstein, Modern Philology ... takes a fresh look at the well-established notion that Renaissance plays tend to be religiously polyvocal rather than expressing a single theological or confessional stance ... What makes his book important is the way it expands the critical vocabulary we use to talk about theater and religion. * Kevin Curran, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 * Walsh is equally confident working inside and outside the canon, showing the subtlety in plays that are seldom read or taught, and not afraid to discuss them at length. * Alison Shell, Times Literary Supplement * Following in the footsteps of Jeffrey Shoulson and David Scott Kastan, Walsh undertakes an important consideration of Shakespeare and religion. * N. Birns, New York University * The title of Brian Walshs book, Unsettled Toleration, seems especially resonant in the context of contemporary anxieties about religious difference. Focusing on an intra-Christian conflict between dominant and minority believers, Walshs thesis re-engages with the relationships between faiths in early modern drama ... Walsh analyses the instrumental role that the theatre played to create, enlarge, and sustain an openended public conversation on the vicissitudes of getting along in a sectarian world. Walshs argument is not that Shakespeares theatre produced liberal versions of religious pluralism but rather that the stage hatched imagined scenarios of confessional conflict. * Charlotte Scott, Shakespeare Survey *More details
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
05/2016
1st Edition
OUP eBook
€56.99
Available for download
E-Book
05/2016
1st Edition
OUP eBook
€48.99
Available for download
Person
Brian Walsh has taught at Rutgers, the University of Illinois, and Yale University. He is the author of Shakespeare, The Queen's Men, and The Elizabethan Performance of History (Cambridge University Press, 2009) as well as several articles and book chapters on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. He has also edited a collection of essays on The Revenger's Tragedy for Bloomsbury Publishing.
Content
Introduction: The Turn to Toleration on the Early Modern Stage
1: De Facto Pluralism, Toleration, and The Massacre at Paris
2: Happy (Enough) Endings: Puritans and Everyday Ecumenicity in Early Modern City Come
3: "O Just But Severe Law! ": Weighing Puritanism in Twelfth Night and Measure for Measure
4: Rowley and the Lutherans: Reformation Histories and Religious Identities in When You See Me You Know Me
5: 'A Priestly Farewell': The Catholic and the Reformed in Pericles
Conclusion: "Private Spleene " and "Pious Zeale ": The Vicissitudes of Toleration
1: De Facto Pluralism, Toleration, and The Massacre at Paris
2: Happy (Enough) Endings: Puritans and Everyday Ecumenicity in Early Modern City Come
3: "O Just But Severe Law! ": Weighing Puritanism in Twelfth Night and Measure for Measure
4: Rowley and the Lutherans: Reformation Histories and Religious Identities in When You See Me You Know Me
5: 'A Priestly Farewell': The Catholic and the Reformed in Pericles
Conclusion: "Private Spleene " and "Pious Zeale ": The Vicissitudes of Toleration