This splendid collection of essays is presented as part of the “second wave” of the “turn to religion” that has characterized much study of early modern English drama during the twenty-first century (6–7). Overall, the essays, which employ a variety of methodologies and focus on a wide range of dramatic works created between the 1530s and the 1630s, succeed admirably in the editors’ goal of presenting “properly theorized” studies united by the care with which they scrutinize the texts of the plays in light of their historical contexts and consider the “experience and assumptions” of the plays’ original audiences (12, 18). The collection will be of interest not only to scholars focused on Renaissance theater, but also to researchers in other fields who are interested in exploring “staged negotiations between cultural memory, theology, and the psychology of English religious experience” (6).

In part 1, “Dramas of Doctrine,” William Slights examines how evolving Protestant conceptions of the conscience helped to mold late sixteenth-century drama. Daniel Cadman analyzes the “clash of dramatic genres” that results from Fulke Greville’s use in the closet drama Alaham of elements from both Christian morality plays and Stoic Senecan drama (61). Robert Hornback presents compelling evidence for Nicholas Udall’s authorship of the “five-act-Terentian-biblical-polemical-predestinarian comedy” Jacob and Esau and for the play’s Edwardian auspices (63–64). Hornback also maintains that the Jacob and Esau paradigm — not, as has often been assumed, the prodigal son plot — provides the foundations for later English city comedy.

In part 2, “Staging the Politics of Reform,” Elizabeth Pentland discusses the character Henry of Navarre in Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris as a reluctant Protestant revenger attempting to work within a “hostile, Catholic milieu” (107). Whereas most Anglo-American critics have looked to English-language accounts of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre as Marlowe’s sources, Pentland examines French-language sources, demonstrating that treatises by Huguenots reveal a crucial transition, especially after the 1572 massacre, “from a more passive rhetoric of martyrdom to calls for militant action,” a shift that she convincingly argues is evident in the structure and language of Marlowe’s play (108). Whereas earlier critics have complained of the inconsistency and passivity of Marlowe’s Navarre, Pentland demonstrates that he serves as “the near perfect embodiment of the principles of resistance” outlined in the Vindiciae, contra Tyrannos (130). Drawing upon discussions of conciliarism in chronicle histories by John Foxe, Raphael Holinshed, John Stow, and Edward Hall, among other sources, Adrian Streete explores ways in which Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s Henry VIII engages with debates about the relative authority of kings and of institutions such as general councils of the church, Parliament, and the Privy Council, debates that were as relevant during the reign of James, when the play was first performed, as they had been in the time of the play’s action. Brian Harries argues that although Shakespeare presents Henry VI as authentically devout and pious, his obsession with “dangerous Catholic symbolic objects” causes him to neglect affairs of state for solitary religious practices and to misunderstand his relationship with God and his role as king (140–41).

Part 3, “Performing Protestantism,” features two essays on Measure for Measure. Terri Bourus scrutinizes Thomas Middleton’s revisions to Shakespeare’s play, concluding that his adaptation speaks to religious and political concerns prominent in the early 1620s. Kathryn McPherson maintains that, in her persistent and probing questioning of Angelo’s “moral framework for administering justice,” Isabella assumes the role of a catechist, as McPherson shows that women could (165). Katherine Gillen analyzes Protestant anxieties about the theater in John Bale’s biblical plays from 1538 and in Shakespeare and George Wilkins’s Pericles, concentrating upon Baleus Proluctor and Gower as “two choric figures” whose commentary upon the action allows them to “mediate between the players and the audience, mitigating antitheatrical anxieties” (172). Yet, whereas Bale avoided surrendering “much responsibility for securing volatile theatrical signs” to the audience, the final acts of Pericles allow the audience to assume more of “the interpretive function” (191, 193).

In part 4, “Confessional Aesthetics and Nostalgia,” Lisa Hopkins maintains that Philip Massinger’s use of color symbolism in plays set in Hungary, Tunis, Malta, and Caesarea reveals his effort to recover “specifically Catholic forms of sanctity” by opposing them structurally not, as might be expected, to Protestantism but to Islam (219). Jay Zysk reads the four major spectacles in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII, along with the stage directions that introduce them, as emphasizing the “disconnect between Henry’s” reformations in politics and in religious doctrine and as questioning drama’s relationships to ceremony, ritual, and liturgy (242, 262).

Inevitably, the categories into which the essays are divided contain a certain amount of overlap, and not every essay is equally successful in demonstrating each of its claims; nevertheless, the collection as a whole coheres and significantly advances research in the field.