Spreading the Word: Theater, Religion, and Contagious Performances

Abstract

While early modern religion is often pigeonholed alongside antitheatrical writers as an ideological counterpart to early modern theater, by understanding both theater and religious sermons in terms of audience experience, this chapter suggests that both performances rely heavily on the rhetoric of contagion to successfully disseminate their ideas; both seek to not only reach diverse audiences, but to leave a mark on them, to impress them so as to insure a continuity of sorts through communal disseminative practices. Both must draw intended crowds to designated public spaces and expose them to their respective narratives. Yet, plays and sermons also carry the inherent expectation that audience members will leave as carriers of ideas, information, or doctrines and disseminate them in their respective communities. The success of such a process relies on widespread (yet mostly scientifically inaccurate) ideas about contagion that circulated in the period; people knew contagion was fast and powerful, and both theater and religion rely on this fact to impress their ideas unto audiences. Such an understanding of early modern audiences is found in not only in sermons themselves, but in theological writings about the aims of preaching, as well as within plays themselves.