P's Religion Or Why Take Revenge on Revenge Tragedy: The Living & the Dead ...an Interdependent Community

[barbie gaze]

   1.

   Such regular dramatic dilemmas are well-known, but their controversial
   and religio-political import has received little attention. The dramatic
   dilemmas reflect the age's religious dilemmas - as a sketch of the period's
   religious developments in regard to the dead will illustrate. In R.A.
   Bowyer's words, "The medieval church conceived of itself as a great
   triangle of inter-dependent groups" in which "[t]he church on earth
   supplied the membership of the church in purgatory and in heaven, and
   relied on the help and intercession of the latter, while the souls in
   purgatory looked to the church on earth for prayers and masses to expedite
   their promotion to heaven, whence they would offer assistance to the church
   on earth." * *Moreover, as Eamon Duffy points out, such theoretical
   thinking manifested itself at the popular level of the man or woman on the
   street. For late-medieval parishioners, funerals were "intensely concerned
   with the notion of ... a community in which the living and the dead were
   not separated," while the week-by-week recitation of the bede-role at
   parish Masses reflect, as well as reinforced, a mentality in which the dead
   remained "part of the communities they had once lived in."
   2.

   For theological reasons, during 'the English Reformation' this changed.
   In Bowyer's words, the English church "formally severed diplomatic
   relations with the Other World, ceasing to invoke the aid of the saints in
   heaven, and ceasing to recognise its responsibility towards the souls of
   the dead in purgatory." England's sixteenth-century journey from
   Catholicism, through Lutheranism to Calvinism - according to Nicholas
   Tyacke the characteristic theology of the English Church by 1600* *-
   destroyed the idea that the living and the dead were an inter-dependent
   community, Calvinism's doctrine of double predestination in particular
   rendering the idea of praying for the dead redundant. Nor were such changes
   limited to theory: in the Prayer Book of 1549 - to be used by church-goers
   in their weekly attendance at service - congregations continued to speak to
   the dead directly, but in the Prayer Book of 1552 all communication between
   the living and the dead had disappeared. As Duffy puts it, "There is
   nothing that could even be mistaken for a prayer for the dead in the 1552
   rite." Though the Marian interval saw a brief reversal of such trends, in
   Philip Morgan's stark phrase, from 1552 "The dead, it seemed, must shift
   for themselves."
   3.

   To adapt Alan Sinfield's term, 1552 was a major 'faultline' of English
   Renaissance history. Prior to that point, the dead and the living
   officially inhabited the same community; after it the dead were officially
   'beyond the grave.' This faultline is even seen reflected in the divided
   mentalities of individuals. As late as 1642, Thomas Browne could write that
   in younger days he had been tempted by a heresy "which I did never
   positively maintain or practice, but have often wished ... had been
   consonant with truth, and not offensive to my religion, and that is the
   Prayer for the dead." Moreover, though he never "positively" practised such
   prayer, Browne adds that he could "scarce contain my prayers for a friend
   at the ringing of a bell," or even "behold a corpse without an orison for
   his soul."
   4.

   What Browne's example illustrates is that however it was reppressed, the
   originally medieval and Catholic view that the dead might remain part of
   the community of the living continued in England - albeit as a social
   undertone - well into the seventeenth century: if England's official
   religion no longer recognised the community of the dead as its own,
   individuals - even Protestant individuals - still to some extent did.
   Notice, moreover, how by reflecting acts of public suppression such private
   acts of repression imply the period's religious controversies: in 1629, for
   example, the Bishop of Carlisle was still trying to eradicate "praying for
   the dead at crosses ... or any other superstitious use of crosses, with
   towels, palms ... or other memories of idolatory at burials." Similarly
   Browne refrains from traditional impulses toward the dead because - as he
   is conscious - they are "offensive to my religion."
   5.

   Such religious sensitivity and controversy requires elucidation. Browne
   is responding specifically to the rise of an Anglican 'Via Media' and
   therefore to particularly Protestant influences, but the Via Media itself
   represents an attempt to create a Protestantism closer to (though by no
   means identical with) Roman Catholicism. As Christopher Haigh pointes out,
   such movement and figures were widely perceived by less moderate sections
   of the populace to be 'popish.' Indeed, the frequency with which that term
   was bandied around in the period is further evidence of contemporary
   Protestant concern with the insidious effects of such persistent 'Catholic'
   beliefs. Even Elizabeth's Archbishop of Canterbury John Whitgift - a
   clearly Protestant figure - could be popularly referred to as "the Pope of
   Lambeth."
   6.

   By repeatedly staging the dead on earth - and by inviting audiences to
   wonder at their reality and meaning - English Renaissance ghost plays, and
   particularly Revenge tragedies - so often set in continental, and so
   ostensibly Catholic, Europe - thus reflect on and intervene in the period's
   personally felt and key religious controversies over the dead. We do not
   need to know whether in *Hamlet* the ghost is telling the truth about
   Purgatory: by merely suggesting that the dead remained close to the
   community of the living, plays like *Hamlet* engaged with a central
   difference between Catholics and Protestants - as, derivatively, between
   Protestants - and the means by which they did so suggest the uncertainties
   and ideological differences of their authors. This broad picture of a
   considerable body of English Renaissance drama as enacted controversy is
   also illustrated in the detail of plays like *The White Devil* and *The
   Duchess of Malfi*.
   7.

   http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/09-1/ristdead.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20120305/33e5b3a5/attachment.html>