Title: Staging reform, reforming the stage
First published: 1997
Description: Huston Diehl sees Elizabethan and Jacobean drama as both a product of the Protestant Reformation - a reformed drama - and a producer of Protestant habits of thought - a reforming drama. According to Diehl, the popular London theater, which flourished in the years after Elizabeth reestablished Protestantism in England, rehearsed the religious crises that disrupted, divided, energized, and in many respects revolutionized English society.

Using as her central texts the tragedies of Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster, Diehl maintains that plays of the period reflexively explore their own power to dazzle, seduce, and deceive. Employing a reformed rhetoric that is both powerful and profoundly disturbing, they disrupt their own stunning spectacles. Out of this creative tension between theatricality and antitheatricality emerges a distinctly Protestant aesthetic.
Subjects: Religious aspects, Theater, English drama, English drama (Tragedy), History and criticism, Aesthetics, British, Christianity, Renaissance, British Aesthetics, Protestantism and literature, Religious aspects of Theater, History, English drama, history and criticism, early modern and elizabethan, 1500-1600, English drama, history and criticism, 17th century, Theater, religious aspects, Theater, great britain, history, Renaissance, england
Places: England
Time periods: 16th century, 17th century, Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1600
LC classification: PR658.P724 D54 1997