Unsettled Toleration: Religious Difference on the Shakespearean Stage, by Brian Walsh

Abstract

In 1605, the Bishop of Lincoln noted that no one would denounce his neighbours for religiously unorthodox opinions ‘unless he be very malicious’. William Chaderton was an enthusiastic pursuer of recusants, and no non-conformist himself, but even someone who spent much of his time dealing with the problem of religious heterodoxy recognised the way in which neighbourliness trumps other ideologies. In this book, Brian Walsh considers the importance of such ‘quotidian ecumenism’ (p. 54) in relation to the stage and argues that ‘the theater helped to create, enlarge, and sustain an open-ended public conversation on the vicissitudes of getting along in a sectarian world’ (p. 2). Walsh draws on a useful phrase from Willem Frijoff—‘the ecumenicity of everyday’—to express what, despite the religious difference on which historians focus, was the lived experience of many: ‘informal daily intercourse and peaceful co-existence among people, regardless of their confessional leanings’ (p. 9). Walsh analyses the language of religious division and queries ‘the cultural work’ (p. 20) done by labels such as Puritan, Papist or Brownist. One interesting example of the malleability of such labels is the name of Jonson’s character Win-the-Fight. Despite her humorously explicit Puritan name, Win-the-Fight goes by the diminutive ‘Win’, and therefore her religious affiliation can be misread—or is she intentionally distancing herself from her mother’s sectarian naming?—for ‘Win’ is also the diminutive of a popular Catholic saint (‘you thought her name had been Winifred, did you not?’ [Bartholomew Fair, 1.3.128–9]).