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A number of recent studies of the Elizabethan stage have emphasized its Christian dimensions. Debora Shuger writes, \u201cif it is not plausible to read Shakespeare\u2019s plays as Christian allegories, neither is it likely that the popular drama of a religiously saturated culture could, by a secular miracle, have extricated itself from the theocentric orientation informing the discourses of politics, gender, social order and history.\u201d In his 2002 Shakespeare\u2019s Tribe <\/i> , Jeffrey Knapp argues that these scholars do not go far enough. While they stress \u201cthe centrality of religion to the study of Renaissance drama,\u201d they accept part of the secular theater thesis they are opposing since they assume that \u201cRenaissance playwrights [are] \u2018Christian\u2019 only cognitively or subliminally, rathyer than purposively and devotionally.\u201d Thus not even recent revisionist scholarship \u201callows the possibility that Renaissance plays may have been intended and received as contributions to the cause of true religion,\u201d nor have they considered the possibility that \u201cShakespeare and his contemporaries were capable of envisaging their profession itself \u2013 their acting and playwrighting \u2013 as a kind of ministry.\u201d <\/p>\n
For his part, Knapp aruges that \u201cEnglish theology and ecclesiology shaped the drama at a fundamental level, in helping to determine the conceptualization of the player and the playwright as professions, and of the theater as an institution; these self-images in turn disposed theater people toward the enacting of certain confirmatory plots, themes, and characters on stage; and thus religion had a crucial say in the creation of plays, in their content, and, by extension, in their presumed social effects.\u201d In short, \u201creligion had a more direct role in the production of plays than as the deep structure of dramatized ideology; it provided the rationale and even motives for acting and playwrighting.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A number of recent studies of the Elizabethan stage have emphasized its Christian dimensions. Debora Shuger writes, \u201cif it is not plausible to read Shakespeare\u2019s plays as Christian allegories, neither is it likely that the popular drama of a religiously saturated culture could, by a secular miracle, have extricated itself from the theocentric orientation informing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature"],"yoast_head":"\n