Kristen Poole. Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Nonconformity
in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. xiii+272 pp. ISBN
0 521 64104 7 Cloth.
McRae, Andrew. "Review of Kristen Poole,
Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton." Early Modern Literary
Studies 7.1/Special Issue 8 (May, 2001): 13.1-7 <URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/07-1/revpoole.htm>.
In Elizabethan England, "puritan" was a term of abuse. The very category
of "puritanism" was constructed by the forces of religious orthodoxy as a
way of consolidating English Protestantism by delineating the boundaries of
nonconformity. Moreover, as Patrick Collinson has suggested, the category
was in part a product of a wealth of literary texts of the 1580s and 1590s,
a period when writers were exploiting the resources of satire as a genre of
discrimination and stigmatization. While life may not exactly have been imitating
art, the resources of art were at least lending shape and clarity to ecclesiastical
struggles.
In Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton, Kristen Poole embraces
the logic of such arguments, yet sets out to challenge preconceptions about
early modern constructions of the puritan. Indeed she argues that recent criticism
has misinterpreted the dominant stereotypes of nonconformity. While generations
of scholars have seized upon Shakespeare's Malvolio as "the puritan posterboy",
typical of a "somber, ascetic persona", Poole argues that this is merely one
side of a binary structure that juxtaposes purity with impurity, restraint
with excess (9). "If modern and postmodern critics have tended to emphasize
the puritans' retention at the expense of their indulgence," she argues, "early
modern authors were most likely to highlight quite the reverse; if contemporary
culture has come to identify as `puritanical' those opposed to the transgressive,
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture often used `puritan' to signify
transgression" (12). As a consequence, the figure of Sir John Falstaff is
proffered as a fresh and arresting image of the puritan, and Bakhtinian theory
is deployed to account for representations of excessive corporeality and transgressive
religious gatherings. Poole argues that the image of the puritan is overloaded
with associations of difference and disorder, as religious dissension itself
is stitched into a complex and interwoven network of cultural anxieties.
Although Poole loosely covers the years between the working lives of Shakespeare
and Milton, the book falls into two groups of three chapters, and begins with
a central focus on the theatre of Shakespeare's era. The first chapter sets
the Martin Marprelate controversy alongside Shakespeare's history plays, rehearsing
familiar arguments that the character of Falstaff was originally intended
as a representation of the Lollard Sir John Oldcastle, yet arguing innovatively
on this basis that Falstaff "both catalyzed and epitomized the early modern
representation of the stage puritan" (21). She makes the simple yet subtle
point that Falstaff, like the speakers in many contemporary verse satires,
may play "the role of satirist even as he is the object of satire" (39). The
second chapter considers a text more familiar in studies of puritanism, Ben
Jonson's Bartholomew Fair; her argument, however, confronts traditional
interpretations of the Banbury puritans as "hypocrites", and focuses interestingly
on Zeal-of-the-Land Busy as a character who rather "embodies competing desires",
conforming in part with contemporary images of "a puritan bellygod" (55).
The excellent third chapter concentrates on the Family of Love, a minor Elizabethan
sect kept alive in alarmist tracts (and translated onto the stage by Thomas
Middleton), partly because of anxiety surrounding their alleged endorsement
of "verbal perversions" such as equivocation and lying under oath. The subtle
attention devoted by Poole to the relation between linguistic disorder and
broader anxieties surrounding other forms of disorder - political, religious,
sexual - is indeed one of the most impressive and enlightening aspects of
this book.
In the second half, Poole turns to the Interregnum and Restoration: years
roughly spanning the career of Milton. The fourth chapter leaps into the fervid
milieu of the 1640s to examine Thomas Edwards's efforts to categorize nonconformity
in Gangr‘na, while the subsequent chapter considers Milton's arguments for
liberty of conscience in his antiprelatical tracts. A fascinating final chapter
moves forward again to discuss the significations of physical and discursive
nakedness in Paradise Lost, setting Milton's poem alongside representations
of the Adamites: a presumably mythical sect, related in the orthodox imagination
to the Ranters. While the Adamites were alleged to have conducted their sectarian
meetings in the nude as a way of signifying spiritual truth, numerous (respectable
and clothed) intellectuals of the time were equally concerned with identifying
the pure language spoken by Adam before the fall. Turning to Paradise Lost,
however, Poole argues that Milton acknowledges yet methodically frustrates
assumptions among his contemporary readers that nakedness might be equated
with purity of language, or vice versa. This, she argues, produces
a fundamentally challenging text: "While Milton entertains the concept of
a pure world exemplified by its nakedness, such a world - and even the very
concept of prelapsarian nakedness - remain unachievable through human means"
(181).
While Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton is provocative
throughout, it will inevitably meet with some resistance, especially from
readers concerned closely with religious history. The chapters on Falstaff
and Bartholomew Fair are perhaps the most engaging, yet also the most
contentious in the way that they deal with the relation between history and
literature. In relation to the former, for instance, readers might well question
the way in which Poole rather easily aligns Lollardy with puritanism, at a
time when many were claiming it as a signal precursor of orthodox Protestantism.
While she acknowledges contemporary debate over Oldcastle, she does not consider
at any length how this tension might inform Shakepseare's plays, but instead
seizes only on the identification of Falstaff/Oldcastle as a stigmatized "puritan".
And in relation to the latter, while she valuably sets the bloated body of
Busy alongside the more familiar instances of grotesque corporeality in the
play, her dismissal of the label of "hypocrite" for the puritan may seem overly
casual. The argument is not unconvincing, yet it overlooks not only centuries
of literary criticism but also the discourse of Jonson's own time, within
which "hypocrite" was accepted as a synonym for "puritan".
More fundamentally, this book is at times reckless in its disregard for
the subtle changes in the representation of religious differences across the
period from Shakespeare to Milton. Poole commonly reads pamphlets of the 1640s
alongside drama of the 1600s and 1610s, in a manner that tends to efface the
very possibility of change. Moreover, she pays remarkably little attention
to the 1620s and 1630s, and as a result overlooks the critical period within
which people began to identify themselves as "puritans": asking, with the
young George Wither, "Who are so much tearm'd Puritans as they / That feare
God most?" (Norbrook 210). Pamphleteers such as Alexander Leighton, William
Prynne, John Bastwick and Henry Burton pursued the logic underlying Wither's
question, forthrightly situating puritans in a position of rectitude, opposed
to the corruption of the Laudian Church and the Caroline court. As numerous
scholars have argued, this is a moment at which the religious and political
confrontations of the revolutionary years first take shape, and a time when
the uncertain relationship between "puritanism" and "nonconformity" becomes
especially murky. While it would be unfair to argue that Poole should have
immersed herself fully in such developments, it is inevitable that her chronological
leap causes problems when she reaches Edwards's Gangr‘na and Milton's
pamphlets. Here are writers who might well accept the label "puritan" for
themselves, but who stigmatize other "puritans" in an effort to situate themselves
in a position of orthodoxy. And this is, to say the least, a very different
environment to that of Marprelate and Shakespeare.
Yet this book never claims to be comprehensive in its coverage, and although
it may leave some unanswered questions and incomplete answers, it still has
much to offer. Its original interpretations of the three dramatic texts are
challenging and important, and it makes a relatively small yet nonetheless
significant contribution to our appreciation of Paradise Lost. Radical
Religion from Shakespeare to Milton is unquestionably a stimulating and
elegant book, which will demand the attention of scholars with an interest
in the relation between religion and literature in early modern England.
Works Cited
Collinson, Patrick. "Ecclesiastical Vitriol: Religious Satire in the 1590s
and the Invention of Puritanism". The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture
in the Last Decade. Ed. John Guy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. 150-70.
Norbrook, David. Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance,
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984.
Responses to this piece intended for the Readers'
Forum may be sent to the Editor at L.M.Hopkins@shu.ac.uk.
