ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern

Eucharistic Controversy and English Drama across the Reformation Divide

Jay Zysk

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780268102326
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Literatur & Kunst im Christentum

Shadow and Substance is the first book to present a sustained examination of the relationship between Eucharistic controversy and English drama across the Reformation divide. In this compelling interdisciplinary study, Jay Zysk contends that the Eucharist is not just a devotional object or doctrinal crux, it also shapes a way of thinking about physical embodiment and textual interpretation in theological and dramatic contexts.

Regardless of one's specific religious identity, to speak of the Eucharist during that time was to speak of dynamic interactions between body and sign. In crossing periodic boundaries and revising familiar historical narratives, Shadow and Substance challenges the idea that the Protestant Reformation brings about a decisive shift from the flesh to the word, the theological to the poetic, and the sacred to the secular. The book also adds to studies of English drama and Reformation history by providing an account of how Eucharistic discourse informs understandings of semiotic representation in broader cultural domains.

This bold study offers fresh, imaginative readings of theology, sermons, devotional books, and dramatic texts from a range of historical, literary, and religious perspectives. Each of the book's chapters creates a dialogue between different strands of Eucharistic theology and different varieties of English drama. Spanning England's long reformation, these plays—some religious in subject matter, others far more secular—reimagine semiotic struggles that stem from the controversies over Christ's body at a time when these very concepts were undergoing significant rethinking in both religious and literary contexts.

Shadow and Substance will have a wide appeal, especially to those interested in medieval and early modern drama and performance, literary theory, Reformation history, and literature and religion.

NOTES

Introduction

1.The term Eucharist (derived from the Greek εὐχαριστία, “thanksgiving”) has many applications and references, including “Corpus Christi,” “Blessed Sacrament,” “the Lord’s Supper,” “the sacrament of the altar,” and “Holy Communion.” While I focus on the Eucharist in liturgical, devotional, and ecclesiological contexts, I am chiefly interested in it as a source of theological controversy. These controversies, I argue throughout this book, constitute a domain in which questions about dramatic language, embodiment, and interpretation unfold within the long history of England’s religious reformations.

2.Brian Cummings lays important groundwork for such a discussion in The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002): “The historical events now known as the Reformation are bound up at every level with acts of literature both spoken and written, with the interpretation of language and with the practice of literary culture” (5–6). The crucial relationship of the Eucharist to issues of language, textual representation, and embodiment has been formatively established in medieval contexts by David Aers, Sanctifying Signs: Making Christian Tradition in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), and Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). See also Michal Kobialka, This Is My Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999); Cristina Maria Cervone, Poetics of the Incarnation: Middle English Writing and the Leap of Love (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Tamara Atkin, The Drama of Reform: Theology and Theatricality, 1461–1533 (London: Brepols, 2013); and Margaret E. Owens, Stages of Dismemberment: The Fragmented Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Drama (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005). Though Owens’s book covers medieval and early modern contexts, it reproduces a firm narrative of periodization with respect to both drama and religious history and grounds its claims about dismemberment principally in trauma theory. For work focused exclusively on early modern or “post-Reformation” contexts, see Stephen Greenblatt, “Remnants of the Sacred in Early Modern England,” in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Peter Stallybrass, and Maureen Quilligan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 337–45; Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher, “The Wound in the Wall” and “The Mousetrap,” in Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 75–109 and 136–62; Regina Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); Judith Anderson, Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamics of Cultural Change in Tudor-Stuart England (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 36–60; W. J. Torrance Kirby, Persuasion and Conversion: Religion, Politics, and the Public Sphere (Leiden: Brill, 2013); Timothy Rosendale, Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Sophie Read, Eucharist and the Poetic Imagination in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Kimberly Johnson, Made Flesh: Sacrament and Poetics in Post-Reformation England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). See also Debora Kuller Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 17–68; Evelyn B. Tribble, “The Partial Sign: Spenser and the Sixteenth-Century Crisis of Semiotics,” in Ceremony and Text in the Renaissance, ed. Douglas F. Rutledge (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), 23–34; David Coleman, Drama and the Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century England (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and Jennifer Waldron, Reformations of the Body: Idolatry, Sacrifice, and Early Modern Drama (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). For an approach to hermeneutics outside a Eucharistic context, see Ruth Nisse, Defining Acts: Drama and the Politics of Interpretation in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2005). For a discussion of more modern and postmodern approaches, see The Poetics of Transubstantiation: From Theology to Metaphor, ed. Douglas Birnham and Enrico Giaccherini (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

3.These periodic divisions have been championed by E. K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903), 2:68–105; Harold Gardiner, Mysteries’ End: An Investigation of the Last Days of the Medieval Religious Stage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1946); and Louis Adrian Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Early Elizabethan Theater (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Such arguments have been critiqued by Lawrence M. Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Paul Whitfield White, “Reforming Mysteries’ End: A New Look at Protestant Intervention in English Provincial Drama,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29, no. 1 (1999): 121–47; and John Parker, “Who’s Afraid of Darwin: Revisiting Chambers and Hardison . . . and Nietzsche,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 40, no. 1 (2010): 7–35. For recent studies addressing connections between medieval and early modern drama, see T. G. Bishop, Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Sarah Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); John Parker, The Aesthetics of Antichrist: From Christian Drama to Christopher Marlowe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007); Heather Hirschfeld, The End of Satisfaction: Drama and Repentance in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014); Kurt A. Schreyer, Shakespeare’s Medieval Craft: Remnants of the Mysteries on the London Stage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014); Ruth Morse, Helen Cooper, and Peter Holland, eds., Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Katherine Steele Brokaw, Staging Harmony: Music and Religious Change in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Drama (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016).

4.See Jay Zysk, “The Last Temptation of Faustus: Contested Rites and Eucharistic Representation in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 43, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 335–36. Throughout this book, I use semiotics (along with the related terms sign, signifier, and signified) in the general sense of sign theory, as developed in both structuralist and poststructuralist contexts, to address how textual signs—verbal and nonverbal, written and performed—are created, manipulated, and interpreted in both sacramental and dramatic contexts. As I discuss in chapter 1, a “Eucharistic semiotics” uniquely emphasizes the overlap between corporeal and linguistic signs and, especially in the context of theological controversy, illustrates how different religious confessions seek to assert a definite meaning between the sacramental signs (bread and wine) and the divine thing signified (Christ’s body). At the same time, however, the very texts that shape these controversies illustrate just how indeterminate and polysemous the semiotics of the Eucharist can be. Insofar as I am interested in how bodies operate as signs in drama, I draw on Keir Elam, who in The Semiotics of Theater and Drama (1980; repr., London: Methuen, 2002) extends semiotics (as Roman Jakobson and others do) to include stage properties, material objects, and the actor’s body. In individual chapters I draw on more specific semiotic concepts such as J. L. Austin’s theory of the performative utterance, which I relate to Eucharistic speech acts in chapter 4, as well as Derrida’s idea of the supplement and C. S. Peirce’s definition of the sign as icon, index, and symbol, both of which I use in my discussion of relics and bodily fragmentation in chapter 5. On the relations between medieval sign theory and contemporary literary theory, see Theresa Coletti, Naming the Rose: Eco, Medieval Signs, and Modern Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); for a recent discussion of semiotics as an approach to understanding material performances on the early modern stage, see Erika Lin, Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

5.While confessional markers such as traditional, reformed, and evangelical are admittedly fraught, they remind us that the broader terms Catholic and Protestant are more complex than commonly understood, not least because Protestant applies to many different r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Many Reformations
• ONE. Eucharistic Semiotics: The Body of Christ and the Play of Signs
• TWO: Words and Wounds: Christ Crucified and Coriolanus
• THREE. Sacramental Signs and Mystical Bodies in Lydgate, Bale, and Shakespeare
• FOUR. Father Faustus? Confection and Conjuration in Everyman and Doctor Faustus
• FIVE. Relics and Unreliable Bodies in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, The Duchess of Malfi, and The Changeling
• Conjured to Remembrance: Emmaus Plays, Jack Juggler, and The Winter’s Tale
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index