Short Shrift: Religion and Materialist Criticism

Abstract

AbstractThis review essay examines the upsurge of materialist criticism in Renaissance literary studies over the last 20 years as well as the limitations of such criticism vis‐à‐vis religion. Sensitive to these limitations, two recent authors employ solid historical scholarship to uncover the mundane realities as well as the no less real, though harder to quantify, spiritual aspects of Renaissance religious practice. Ramie Targoff's Common Prayer (2001) examines the Reformation production and distribution of the Book of Common Prayer, paying special attention to how the reformers balanced both economic and devotional considerations. Second, Jeffrey Knapp's Shakespeare's Tribe (2002) challenges the prevailing view in contemporary scholarship that Shakespeare's stage was largely secularist, even secularizing. Knapp argues that a considerable amount of early modern drama, including Shakespeare's, was written with the sacramental purposes of uniting religious believers of various stripes and of illustrating by example on the stage many of the precepts of the religious life. Knapp specifically counters materialist accounts in which religion is either a mask for power politics or is simply eviscerated of its spiritual content by representing it on an allegedly profane stage. Implicit in Knapp's argument is the odd coupling of Puritan antitheatricalists such as Philip Stubbes and Anthony Munday with some current scholars who rely heavily on Puritan polemics as an accurate characterization of the Renaissance stage. Finally, I cite Stephen Greenblatt's biography, Will in the World (2004), for its reiteration of the claim that Shakespeare was a secular playwright who invoked the language and trappings of religion merely for comic, commercial entertainment; I suggest that the plays can be read in a more devotional light.