Pierced Hearts in Early Modern English Theater

Thomas J. (T.J.) Moretti 

Abstract:

This paper argues that hearts and hands, when staged as materials imagined, quick, or dead, could concretize and concentrate the sacred in the early modern English theater in ways beyond what was possible at other venues. Whether Blackfriars, the Globe, the torture room, the pulpit, or the stake, early modern stages offered hearts and hands in ways that problematize the Protestant / Catholic divide and our understandings of religious discourses in early modern England more broadly. But in theaters especially, spectators could share senses of horror, loss, or doubt, could be moved toward the kind of shared affect sought from the pulpit, the stake, the communion table, and the altar. Foxe, Andrewes, Shakespeare, and Ford, for different venues and ends, showcased hearts and hands in ways that, with different levels of success, shepherded readers and theatergoers into temporary experiences of shared faith and community.  In so doing, certain playwrights, preachers, and martyrologists signaled post-Reformation efforts to move beyond suspect fantasies of religious materiality, to relocate religion within the material, and to sanctify fragmented materials of the body.  

Works Cited Preview:

Monta, Susannah. Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,         2005).

Rowe, Katherine. “God’s Handy Worke: Divine Complicity and the Anatomist’s Touch,” in David          Hillman and Carla Mazzio, ed., The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corpeality in Early Modern           Europe (London: Routledge, 1997), 285-312.

Waldron, Jennifer, Reformations of the Body: Idolatry, Sacrifice, and Early Modern Theater (New          York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013).

Walsham, Alexandra, “Migrations of the Holy: Explaining Religious Change in Medieval and Early      Modern Europe,” in Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 44.2 (Spring 2014): 241-280.

Williamson, Elizabeth. The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama (Burlington, VT:      Ashgate, 2009.

Bio:

I am Assistant Professor of English at Iona College and Editor of The Shakespeare Newsletter.  My scholarly interests include temporality and phenomenology in early modern English theater and the interplay between religion and gender in early modern English dramas.  My writings have focused on religious mediation and gender performance in such works as the Henry VI plays, John Webster’s The White Devil, and Philip Massinger and Thomas Dekker’s The Virgin Martyr.  My most recent article on hospitality and temporality in King Lear will appear in Julia Lupton and David Goldstein’s collection of essays, Shakespeare and Hospitality (Routledge).