Tragedy, God, and Writing

“It is impossible to understand the concrete utterance without accustoming oneself to its values, without understanding the orientation of its evaluations in the ideological environment”: so Mikhail Bakhtin.1 My case on protestantism is not that writers were all Calvinists. Rather, this orthodoxy hugely influenced the ideological field within which they produced diverse relations—of incorporation, conformity, negotiation, disjunction, subversion, and opposition—between religious orthodoxy and other, divergent ideological formations. Theater may well have been at times a radical medium (and at other times not; there is no reason to expect stage writing, or any genre of it, to be harmonious in outlook).2 The church perhaps encouraged dissident tendencies in drama by forbidding it to deal with religious matters: theater was driven into the arms of secularism, which was just about ready to receive it. And although the censor could delete “See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament” from Marlowe’s Faustus, he could not so easily assess the general tendency of the action.

Aesthetics · Art · Drama · Ideology · Literature · Opposition (politics) · Orthodoxy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Theology · Tragedy (event) · Law · Philosophy · Samuel Beckett and Modernism · Theatre and Performance Studies