Unsettled Toleration: Religious Difference on the Shakespearean Stage

ISBN-13: 9780198754435 / Angielski / Twarda / 2016 / 256 str.

Brian Walsh

Opis

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.

Recenzje

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.

O autorze

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.