Reformations of the Body

Idolatry, Sacrifice, and Early Modern Theater

J. Waldron

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137030047
• eBook ISBN: 9781137313126
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Social History

This project takes the human body and the bodily senses as joints that articulate new kinds of connections between church and theatre and overturns a longstanding notion about theatrical phenomenology in this period.

C H A P T E R 1

DEAD IDOLS AND LIVELY IMAGES: A GENEALOGY OF PROTESTANT ICONOCLASM

My Soul would gazing all amazed stand,

. . .

That thou, my Lord, that hast the Heavens bright

Pav’d with the Sun, and Moon, with Stars o’re pinckt,

Thy Tabernacle, yet shouldst take delight

To make my flesh thy Tent, and tent with in’t.

—Edward Taylor, “Meditation 24” (1697)¹

As a cultural form that combined verbal, visual, and bodily modes of representation, and as an institution that brought thousands of people together for acts of public witnessing, theater presented a particularly complex set of problems in post-Reformation England.² Opponents of the public theaters accused actors and playgoers of committing idolatry and enacting “sacrifices of the devil,” while influential playwrights such as Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson repeatedly alluded to religious debates during crucial metatheatrical moments.³ Yet how exactly did antitheatrical critics and playwrights translate Protestant systems of belief and practice into the domain of commercial theater? What were the structural, epistemological, and aesthetic modes through which these two institutions became aligned?⁴ I focus here on the human body and the bodily senses as joints that articulate new kinds of connections between church and theater (as well as acting as contested sites within both of these domains).

The Reformation opposition between godly words and idolatrous images has often been understood to structure the aesthetic dimensions of the antitheatrical attacks of this period: theater enlisted what Michael O’Connell called the “idolatrous eye” as opposed to the more indirect modes of word-based piety.⁵ However, even if we take the word-image opposition to be central to Reformation iconoclasm, Protestant approaches to the body are essential to theater because the bodies of actors are the primary medium for delivering both words and visual images (particularly in the absence of elaborate stage sets). Further, the living body should be considered as a medium in its own right, since one of the central moves of Protestant iconoclasm was to pit divine against human creations, lively images against dead ones. Human beings (in both body and soul) offered reformers a visible example of God’s creativity in the world, a “speciall temple” and “lively image” that remained standing long after waves of iconoclasm stripped churches and pilgrimage sites of holy figures now dismissed as “dead.”⁶ Correspondingly, the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries flourished not only in the disenchanted space left by the dismissal of Catholic beliefs and practices but also in complex relation to Protestant reenchantments of the human and the body.

This is substantially to revisit the terms in which Protestant iconoclasm is usually understood and to rethink its relation to late medieval critiques of superstition. Adapting an Erasmian humanist line of argument, Protestant iconoclasts often contrasted the emptiness and uselessness of Catholic rituals and consecrated objects not only with an “immaterial, disembodied, and invisible” God, but also with the potential sanctity of human beings themselves.⁷ In the Praise of Folly, Erasmus mocks useless rituals by comparison with more meaningful acts of pious living: “Think of the many who set up a candle to the Virgin, Mother of God, and at midday too, when it isn’t needed, and of the few who care about emulating her chastity of life, her modesty, and her love of heavenly things.”⁸ The material waste of the candle’s light parallels the waste of religious devotion on a useless ceremony.

While Erasmus had no interest in condemning rituals such as lighting candles to the Virgin as “idolatrous,” Protestants infused these same oppositions between empty rituals and holy life with profound theological and ecclesiological significance. As Euan Cameron has recently demonstrated in fine detail, reformers turned existing (Catholic) debates about popular “superstitions” toward a dismissal of the entire Catholic Church:

The Christian humanism of the European Renaissance built itself on an explicit critique of the allegedly “superstitious” quality of everyday Christianity as practiced by the uneducated. The sixteenth-century Reformation adapted, distorted, and transformed the late medieval rhetoric over “superstitions” with its charge that Catholicism was itself inherently—and not just accidentally, or when misunderstood—a particularly pernicious form of superstition.⁹

Alongside this turn toward interpreting Catholic “superstitions” as actively idolatrous, many Protestants also tended to stress the positive significance of holy living in the world: each side of the opposition took on an increased and diametrically opposed theological intensity. No longer was the pious life described by Erasmus simply a better option than lighting candles for the Virgin; the “godly” path was utterly opposed to these “idolatrous” Catholic practices.

For many English Protestants of this period, especially the self-defined “godly,” the domain of the sacred thus expanded to encompass any human act, as the stereotype of the puritan busybody suggests in refracted form.¹⁰ Thomas Stoughton, for instance, describes as components of true Christian sacrifice minute details of grooming, such as paring one’s nails and cutting one’s hair (short for men, long for women).¹¹ For many such “hot” Protestants, the body could not be given over to the domain of the secular but became a battleground in the fight against ungodliness. Yet even for conformists and “prayer-book Protestants,” the body was often understood as a consecrated material form, one freed from the taint of superstition by virtue of its divine origins and governance. In Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, for instance, John Donne describes how God has “consecrated our living bodies, to [his] owne Spirit, & made us Temples of the holy Ghost.”¹² Unlike outward signs such as clerical vestments, which conformists argued were “things indifferent” (adiaphora), the body remained a different kind of thing, still attached at its origins and its ends to its divine creator and savior.¹³ For Donne, as for most English Protestants, the disenchantment of Catholic objects of devotion did not correspond to a disenchantment of the entire material world. Rather the opposite: many reformers represented human “temples” as an entirely distinct and nonidolatrous location of the holy, one consecrated by God himself.

Critics have often attended to Protestant investments in the sanctity of the human being with suspicion, sensing a contradiction with the theological underpinnings of the Reformation. Alexandra Walsham, for instance, notes that the investment in the Protestant “saints” verges on a kind of “idolatry” of humans.¹⁴ If suspicion hangs over the case for sanctifying the whole human, in both body and soul, the body would seem to be an even weaker candidate for a Protestant “temple.” Radically extending Erasmus’s ridicule of certain crassly material elements of popular religion, for instance, many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English Protestants launched grotesque satirical assaults on the Catholic Church that seemed to degrade bodily functions by comparison with spiritual ones. They compared the outward ceremonies of the Catholic Church to the carnal trappings of the Whore of Babylon from the Book of Revelation; or they detailed the progress of the Catholic Host, containing the real presence of Christ, through the guts of countless worshippers during Mass.

Thomas Becon (1511–1567), for instance, ridiculed the doctrine of transubstantiation by describing exactly how the Eucharistic wafer was made and consumed: “Not many days past it was corn in the plough-mans barne . . . after yee have made him, yee tear him in pieces, yee eat him, yee digest him, and send him downe by a very homely place.”¹⁵ To a modern eye, such corporeality seems to play only a negative and skeptical role with respect to religious orthodoxy: Protestants seem to devalue bodily truth in relation to divine truth, accusing Catholics of placing too much value in material objects and bodily acts of worship. It would therefore seem that the human body could play no constructive role within Protestantism, given its associations with idolatry and sins of the flesh. For instance, Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher read the Eucharistic satires as paradoxical: “A skeptical, secular insistence on irreducible corporeality paradoxically originates in an attempt to save the Eucharist from the taint of the body.” They suggest that reformers sought to free the spirit “from the corrupting taint of the flesh.”¹⁶

More broadly, critics often read the central contrast between Catholic and Protestant modes of worship through an opposition between presence and absence, or between dangerously direct sacred images and the safely indirect Word of God. Jonathan Z. Smith describes the effect of Protestant reforms on how ritual acts were understood in this way, associating the Reformation with a fully rational approach to religious symbols: “A wedge was decisively driven between symbol and reality; there was no necessary connection between them.”¹⁷ The pure version of Reformation theology is here understood to be fully antimaterialist, as in Carlos Eire’s influential account of iconoclasm in this period. In Eire’s view, Calvin’s work is the culmination of a trajectory in which worship is cleansed of its dirty material accoutrements. Calvin is “cerebral” and “learned,” focused on interpretation of the material world rather than direct experience with the divine: “There is no intrusion of the divine, spiritual sphere into the material.”¹⁸ Eire’s metaphor of how various streams of piety ran during the Reformation is particularly telling: the Reformed stream was able “to run clear and strong, even through bad terrain, so it could relentlessly irrigate Europe with the uncompromising waters of transcendence, and thus wash away all the ‘idols’ from the map.”¹⁹ Here Eire presents the power of the Reformation not only in the purity of the water, but also in its status as a force of nature. In an image that is worthy of Calvin himself, the falsity of the idols seems to be proven empirically by their failure to stand up to these waters of transcendence.

Finally, even with the recent interest in the “materiality” of religion and “reenchantments” of the world, Protestant deviations from a fully antimaterialist view of the sacred are often taken as a contradiction in terms, or else as a covert return to Catholic modes of worship. This is no doubt true in many cases, for a great variety of practices might fall under the rubric of Protestant “reenchantment,” as Walsham and others have shown: incombustible portraits of Martin Luther; Protestant pilgrimages to holy wells; “logolatry” of books as relics and totems; or Laudian attempts to restore “the beauty of holiness” to the English Church.²⁰ Which of these represents a failure of Protestantism to eradicate “stubborn survivals” of Catholicism, and which can be understood to be part of a core set of values associated with the magisterial Reformation? I examine one part of this complex landscape by making a case for the living body as a special instance of consecrated materiality, one that had a strong theological framework and was integral both to Continental reformers such as Calvin and to English Protestants of various persuasions.²¹

To borrow the terms of Eire’s metaphor, for Calvin, God’s own manifestations in the world served as “waters of transcendence” that pushed against and revealed the weakness of the static forms of images and idols. Like water, however, Calvin’s version of transcendence still had strong ties to the order of nature and to a certain version of materiality. While the next chapter focuses on the body as a site for certain kinds of “lawful magic” in the Protestant sacraments, this chapter offers a genealogy of some of the cultural developments that led up to these attempts to sanctify the human and the body.

As it appears in the writings of the Lollards, Erasmus, Calvin, and the Elizabethan homilist, the opposition between lively and dead images underlines certain continuities between the Christian humanism of Erasmus and the Reformation emphasis on the superiority of living humans to dead objects. These very similarities, however, help to highlight the surprising turn in Calvin and the English homilies toward the suggestion not only that dead objects are theologically suspect, but also that liveliness is required for godliness. Rather than taking the work of Erasmus as a wayside shrine halfway through the pilgrimage toward complete disenchantment of the world, this genealogy of “lively” images suggests that his approach is rather more indifferent to material objects of devotion than is Calvin’s.²² For Calvin and many of the more strident English Calvinists, there was less—not more—room for “things indifferent.” The difference between objects (falsely) consecrated by humans and those consecrated by God himself was sharply po...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Reformations of the Body
• 1   Dead Idols and Lively Images: A Genealogy of Protestant Iconoclasm
• 2   Sacrament and Theater: Shakespeare’s Lawful Magic
• 3   Theatrical Authorship and Providential Bodies: The Case of Doctor Faustus
• 4   Revenge, Sacrifice, and Post-Reformation Theater: The Spanish Tragedy
• 5   Shakespeare and Revenge: Anthropologies of Sacrifice in Titus Andronicus and Othello
• 6   Virgin Martyrs and Sacrificial Sovereigns: Thomas Dekker’s Politic Bodies
• Epilogue: Iconoclastic Bodies and Literary Technique:    Oldcastle to Milton
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index