Drama and Religion in English Provincial Society, 1485-1660

Paul Whitfield White begins this stimulating book with an account of the staging of the hit play Mucedorus at Witney (Oxfordshire) in 1652. It is an episode to which he returns at several points. The players were a troupe from the nearby parish of Stanton Harcourt and their performance might never have come to our notice but for the fact that several hundred audience members crowded into an upstairs chamber at the White Hart inn, causing the floor to collapse. There were six deaths, and the anti-theatrical minister, John Rowe, preached and published a sermon in which he portrayed the tragedy as an unmistakable example of divine judgement. White, armed with this example and many others, confronts all those who argue or assume that English provincial drama was in steep decline during the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Protestantism, he claims, did not crush the activities of provincial players. Anti-theatrical voices were loud and shrill, but the case they presented was never consensual, even among Puritans (some of whom were avid playgoers). Instead, local drama adjusted to the Reformation and held its nerve in a changing world. Even the great mystery cycles at Coventry, Norwich and Chester endured for a period, modified or re-written to suit the Elizabethan cultural climate. In Norwich, the portrayal of St George was banned at the start of the reign, ‘But for pastime the dragon to come In and shew hym self as in other yeares’ (p. 79). The people of Norwich were also treated to new prologues replete with biblical references, a fresh portrayal of Adam and Eve as a model married couple, and lines such as ‘Deth is overcum by forepredestinacion’ (p. 88). Many of England's governors understood the propagandist value of drama: even in the last decades of the sixteenth century, White argues, the Queen's Men were sent on tour in order to promote the monarchy and the established religion

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