Reviewed by:

• Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling: Theater in Post-Reformation London by Musa Gurnis
• Chloe Kathleen Preedy

In Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling: Theater in Post-Reformation London, Musa Gurnis offers a fascinating reevaluation of how dramatists writing for the commercial English theatre responded to the divisions within and plurality of post-Reformation Christianity. This subject has attracted considerable scholarly attention in recent years, but Gurnis’s monograph represents a unique and valuable contribution to the field. Whereas existing studies often draw binary distinctions between “Catholic” and “Protestant” authors or works, Gurnis argues for a more nuanced appreciation of the early modern theatre’s confessional range. Noting the polyvalency of contemporary English Christian identity, at a time when “subcultures of puritans, church papists, Laudians, recusants, ardent conformists, and converts” battled for the “soul” of the authorised Church (2), Gurnis explores the implications for a theatre whose playwrights, players, and paying customers came from across this confessional spectrum. On the one hand, Gurnis suggests, the fact that many early modern plays are the product of collaboration between two or more dramatists, as well as the “public” nature of the commercial playhouses, complicates the extent to which any one play might express a singular religious position. Thus these works were produced by and intended for consumption by “mixed-faith groups” of theatre professionals and playgoers (2). On the other hand, plays that featured characters of various faiths might in turn disrupt the “everyday religious orientations” of individuals by prompting them to engage imaginatively with unfamiliar confessional positions (3). Gurnis’s study evaluates the implications for post-Reformation drama’s depiction of spiritual themes and experiences, offering an informative, thought-provoking, and persuasive new perspective on this important topic.

This book’s refreshing alertness to the collaborative practices of the commercial theatre and the diverse socio-religious composition of its audiences is mediated through a strong cultural materialist emphasis on theatre’s “active” relationship to and influence on the wider world (5). Specifically, Gurnis emphasizes the post-Reformation theatre’s capacity to reflect and refract existing confessional affiliations and understandings. The first two chapters contain some of the book’s richest material, as Gurnis uses archival sources to explore contemporary audience composition and the ways in which actual playgoers responded to religious elements in early modern drama. In a compelling refutation of the common assumption that most or all post-Reformation playgoers were conforming Church of England Protestants (7), chapter 1 examines the faiths of those who are known to have attended performances at the commercial playhouses. Through their range and diversity, the case studies in this section persuasively demonstrate the “de facto pluralism of the post-Reformation religious scene” (10), while Gurnis further concludes that, regardless of their own faith, these playgoers might temporarily engage with the confessional positions expressed by dramatic characters in ways that allowed for a fluid interplay between the staged play’s fictional religious culture and that of the post-Reformation [End Page 254] England in which the dramatic work was produced and experienced.

Chapter 2 expands thoughtfully on this distinction between actual belief and the imaginative play that, Gurnis suggests, theatre enables. This argument is informed by recent work by Allison Hobgood, Steven Mullaney, and others on the affective dimensions of early modern playgoing, which contemporaries credited with a potentially transformative effect on the emotions of those involved. Gurnis illuminates this model’s prospective religious significance by examining recorded audience reactions to plays such as Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome’s The Late Lancashire Witches, and by considering the relevance of Anglo-Spanish politics to Thomas Dekker’s Noble Spanish Soldier and the collaborative drama The Spanish Gypsy, usually attributed to Thomas Middleton, William Rowley, John Ford, and Dekker. Despite the challenges associated with assessing early audience reactions, the wealth of supporting material assembled by Gurnis enables her to compare the responses of individual play-goers to any surviving evidence about their faith, demonstrating that audience members’ reactions to performances “were not always aligned with— or the outcome of—their individual beliefs” (38).

Gurnis’s...

审核人：

• 混合信仰和共同感受：穆萨·古尼斯（Musa Gurnis）的改革后伦敦剧院
• 克洛伊·凯瑟琳·普雷迪

在混合信仰和共享的感觉：剧院在岗位改革伦敦, 穆萨·古尼斯 (Musa Gurnis) 对为英国商业剧院写作的剧作家如何回应宗教改革后基督教内部的分歧和多元性进行了引人入胜的重新评估。近年来，该主题引起了学术界的广泛关注，但 Gurnis 的专着代表了对该领域独特而宝贵的贡献。尽管现有的研究经常在“天主教”和“新教”作者或作品之间进行二元区分，但格尼斯主张对早期现代剧院的忏悔范围进行更细致的评价。注意到当代英国基督教身份的多元性，在“清教徒、教会天主教徒、劳德人、退缩者、热心的循规蹈矩者和皈依者的亚文化”为获得授权教会的“灵魂”而战的时候 (2)，Gurnis 探讨了一个有剧作家的剧院，玩家和付费客户来自这个忏悔的范围。一方面，古尼斯认为，许多早期现代戏剧是两位或更多戏剧家合作的产物，以及商业剧场的“公共”性质，这使得任何一部戏剧可能表达的某种程度复杂化。单一的宗教立场。因此，这些作品是由戏剧专业人士和观众组成的“混合信仰团体”制作并供其消费的 (2)。另一方面，以不同信仰的角色为特色的戏剧可能会反过来通过促使他们富有想象力地参与不熟悉的忏悔立场而扰乱个人的“日常宗教取向”（3）。古尼斯的研究评估了宗教改革后戏剧对精神主题和经历的描述的影响，

这本书对商业剧院的协作实践及其观众的多样化社会宗教构成的令人耳目一新的警觉是通过强烈的文化唯物主义强调剧院与更广阔世界的“积极”关系和影响来调节的（5）。具体而言，Gurnis 强调了宗教改革后剧院反映和折射现有忏悔派别和理解的能力。前两章包含了本书最丰富的一些材料，因为 Gurnis 使用档案资料来探索当代观众构成以及实际观众对早期现代戏剧中宗教元素的反应方式。令人信服地驳斥了大多数或所有宗教改革后的玩家都遵从英格兰教会新教徒 (7) 的普遍假设，第 1 章考察了那些在商业剧场观看演出的人的信仰。通过它们的范围和多样性，本节中的案例研究有说服力地证明了“宗教改革后宗教场景的事实上的多元化”（10），而 Gurnis 进一步得出结论，无论他们自己的信仰如何，这些玩家可能会暂时参与戏剧人物表达的忏悔立场，以允许舞台剧虚构的宗教文化与宗教改革后的宗教文化之间发生流畅的相互作用[结束第254页]戏剧作品的制作和经历的英国。

第 2 章深思熟虑地扩展了实际信念和想象戏剧之间的区别，Gurnis 认为戏剧能够实现这种区别。这一论点是由艾莉森·霍布古德、史蒂文·穆拉尼和其他人最近关于早期现代游戏的情感维度的研究得出的，同时代的人认为这对参与者的情绪有潜在的变革性影响。古尼斯通过检查观众对诸如托马斯·海伍德和理查德·布罗姆的晚兰开夏女巫等戏剧的记录反应，并考虑英西政治与托马斯·德克尔的西班牙贵族士兵和合作剧“西班牙吉普赛人”的相关性，阐明了该模型的未来宗教意义，通常归功于托马斯·米德尔顿、威廉·罗利、约翰·福特和德克尔。尽管在评估早期观众反应方面存在挑战，但 Gurnis 收集的大量支持材料使她能够将个别观众的反应与关于他们信仰的任何幸存证据进行比较，表明观众成员对表演的反应“并不总是一致的与 - 或他们个人信仰的结果”（38）。

古尼斯的...