Religion and Drama in Early Modern England

Jane Hwang Degenhardt is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the author of Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage (2010). Elizabeth Williamson is Associate Professor of English at the Evergreen State College and the author of The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama (2009).

Introduction; Part I: Theatrical Materiality and Religious Effects; Chapter 1: The Idolatrous Nose: Incense on the Early Modern Stage; Chapter 2: Singing a New Song in The Shoemaker's Holiday; Chapter 3: “Looking Jewish” on the Early Modern Stage; Chapter 4: Muslim Conversion and Circumcision as Theater; Part II: Intersections of Popular Theater and Religious Culture; Chapter 5: Popular Worship and Visual Paradigms in Love's Labor's Lost; Chapter 6: “It is requir'd you do awake your faith”: Belief in Shakespeare's Theater; Chapter 7: Archbishop Whitgift and the Plague in Thomas Nashe's Summer's Last Will and Testament; Chapter 8: “Handling Religion in the Style of the Stage”: Performing the Marprelate Controversy; Part III: Beyond Allusion and Ideology; Chapter 9: Martyr Acts: Playing with Foxe's Martyrs on the Public Stage; Chapter 10: “The Juice of Egypt's Grape”: Plutarch, Syncretism, and Antony and Cleopatra; Chapter 11: Paul Shakespeare: Exegetical Exercises; Part IV: Coda; Chapter 12: Claudius at Prayer