The play of paradox : stage and sermon in Renaissance England
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
Print Book, English, ©1995
University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, ©1995
Criticism, interpretation, etc
x, 213 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780812233162, 0812233166
32924167
Introduction: Bucer's Round Church and Shakespeare's "Wooden O": The Circulation of the Reformation Sermon and the Renaissance Play
2. The Pulpit Performance and the Two-Edged Sword
3. "Holy Cozenage" and the Renaissance Cult of the Ear
4. Satire and Social Structure
5. "Strange Tempests": The Rhetoric of Judgment in Field and Shakespeare
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