Medieval Saints and Sinners on the English Renaissance Stage

Abstract

Surviving manuscripts from the English Middle Ages indicate that the drama of the period was principally religious, falling into three general categories: mystery plays, morality plays, and saints’ plays. By contrast, the drama staged in the commercial, purpose-built playhouses that began operating in London in the late 1570s was interested in very different subject matter. The plays of Shakespeare, his contemporaries, and his successors are largely secular: they are tragedies that stage the ruin of great men, histories that dramatize English dynastic wars, bawdy city comedies, bloody revenge plays, love stories, and magical romances. Although these plays occasionally refer directly to the dramatic tradition that preceded them, their engagement with earlier religious literature is often more subtle. A number of plays from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries adapt plots, motifs, and questions from earlier religious literature to explore ostensibly secular subjects. Plays that demonize Jewish moneylenders, such as Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, disclose the economic underpinnings of Christian salvation dramatized in medieval Passion plays, where Christ’s body is figured as a currency that purchases souls from eternal damnation. The problem of human doubt staged in medieval Easter drama, in which Jesus’s followers are confronted with his risen body, reverberates across early modern plays that pivot on crises of faith, such as George Chapman’s The Widow’s Tears and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. The sensational violence of medieval martyr stories reappears, stripped of any explicit religious content, in the lurid spectacle of Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger’s The Virgin Martyr (1620). And motifs from saints’ plays and tales, like Chaucer’s Second Nun’s Tale and Man of Law’s Tale, recur in the penitential voyaging of Shakespeare’s Pericles. Early modern drama adapts elements of earlier religious literature to explore human problems that transcend Christian institutions or doctrine.