Abstract
This chapter shows the emergence of double predestination theology in early modern English drama. While medieval drama generally adopted Pactum (semi-Pelagian) theological principles and made grace a combination of reward for virtue and unmerited blessing (as with the Virgin Mary), signs of single predestination thinking (as with the story of Saul becoming Paul) are also seen. Later, a fully-fledged double predestination doctrine is visible in English dramas such as the History of Iacob and Esau (c. 1557/58), The Conflict of Conscience (1581), and Doctor Faustus (c. 1588–1592). All of these plays are located at a juncture between single and double predestination thinking, and all three can be read from both perspectives—the latter approach suggesting a more radical view of the divine–human relationship and one more associated with Protestant thinking.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
“Play 11: The Parliament of Heaven; The Salutation and Conception,” in Ludus Coventriae or The Plaie Called Corpus Christi, ed. K.S. Block , Early English Text Society (London, New York, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1922; rpt. 1974), 97–108. Lines 264, 280. Block shows that this detail of the N-Town text is taken directly (and at times quoted) from the popular religious text, Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ by Nicholas Love (c. 1410), lviii. Block’s belief that “the date 1468 … written at the close of the Purification play” (xv) is a general indication of the date of the manuscript is an assessment borne out by more recent scholarship.
- 2.
“The Conversion of Saint Paul [Digby],” in Medieval Drama, ed. David Bevington (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 664–86; see especially 673, 671 (lines 234–235, SD following line 182).
- 3.
Augustine writes of St. Paul, “he knew that he did not first give to God the beginning of his faith and received from God in return its increase, but that God who also made him an apostle made him a believer.” “The Predestination of the Saints,” in Works, I/26:151.
- 4.
Richard Beadle , editor of The York Plays (London: Edward Arnold, 1982), says “it is likely that the main scribe’s work on the manuscript took place sometime between 1463 and 1477,” 11. The Towneley pageants are harder to date, the most recent assessment being that the manuscript is relatively recent; as Peter Meredith reports, “The most recent paleographical study, by Malcolm Parkes and Alexandra Johnston, has now suggested a mid-sixteenth century date.” This factor might place the composition of at least some of the plays after the advent of Protestantism. Peter Meredith, “The Towneley Pageants,” in Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, eds. Richard Beadle and Alan J. Fletcher, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 155. Meredith also notes, “just under half of the York pageant is incorporated into Towneley,” 164–5. For more information on dating the Towneley cycle, see Barbara Palmer, “Recycling ‘the Wakefield Cycle’: the Records.” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 41 (2002), 88–130; also Theresa Coletti and Gail McMurray Gibson, “The Tudor Origins of Medieval Drama,” in A Companion to Tudor Literature, ed. Kent Cartwright (Chichester, U.K.; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 228–45.
- 5.
“Play 30: Judgment,” in The Towneley Plays, eds. Martin Stevens and A.C. Cawley , Early English Text Society. 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 1:402–4.
- 6.
“Play 24: The Last Judgement,” in The Chester Mystery Cycle: A New Edition with Modernised Spelling, ed. David Mills (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1992), 414–38; “Play 42: Doomsday,” in Ludus Coventriae or The Plaie Called Corpus Christi, ed. K.S. Block, Early English Text Society (London, New York, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1922; rpt. 1974), 373–7; “Play 47: The Last Judgement,” in The York Plays, ed. Richard Beadle (London: Edward Arnold, 1982), 406–15.
- 7.
Benedict XII, “The Beatific Vision of God and the Last Days (From the edict ‘Benedictus Deus,’ Jan. 29 1336),” in Sources of Catholic Dogma (Enchridion Symbolorum), ed. Heinrich Denzinger, trans. Roy Deferrari , 30th edition (St. Louis: Herder, 1957, rpt. Fitzwilliam, NH: Loreto Publications, 2002), 197–8.
- 8.
The “Damned Pope” in the Chester ‘judgment’ play refers to being “worse than ever I was/My body again the soul has/that long has been in Hell,” “Play 24: The Last Judgement,” 421; lines 174–6. The N-Town “Doomsday” play implies that the graves from which the damned emerge are also the pits of hell; they rise, clamoring, from under the earth (“subtus terram”) to endure more “endles peyne”; their sins are supposedly written on their foreheads. “Play 42: Doomsday,” 374–5; lines 26–8, 34, 76–8. Phoebe S. Spinrad suggests their frantic movements are contrasted to the “postures of reverence” of the saved. The Summons of Death on the Medieval and Renaissance English Stage (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1987), 52. The York play damned souls also refer to their certain knowledge of their fates and also, typically for the damned, decline to ask for mercy since they know none is forthcoming: “to aske mercy vs is no need./For wele I wotte dampned be we,” “Play 47: The Last Judgment,” 409; lines 125–6. For a different reading of the York ‘judgment’ play and its relationship to the Towneley one, see Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 111–3. Beckwith argues that the York ‘judgment’ play works to integrate the damned and saved souls onstage so that the play’s original audience would not “know whether the souls are destined for heaven or hell,” 112. Yet Beckwith also acknowledges that the York “evil souls” (“Anima Mala”) offer in their dialogue very different attitudes toward God and judgment day than those labeled as “good souls” (“Anima Bona”). The first lines of the two “Anima Bona” speeches are “Loued be þou lorde, þat is so schene” and “A, loued be þou, lorde of all”; the first line of the “Anima Mala” is “Allas, allas, þat we were borne.” “Play 47: The Last Judgment,” 408; lines 97,105, 113. Such obvious contrasts are what the Towneley “4 Malus” speech avoids, although they are present in other parts of the Towneley cycle ‘judgment’ play, including of course the passages taken from the York play.
- 9.
It should be noted that the 4 Malus also admits being guilty of murder (“mi neghburs for to slo/Or hurt”), as well as the additional sins of “my couetyse,/Myn yll will and myn ire” as well as pride (“Me thoght I had no peyre”). His claim (immediately prior to the admission of murder) that “Me thoght I did neuer ill” suggests the confused coexistence of two ways of thinking in the text. The 4 Malus fits into traditional mystery play theology which aggressively distinguishes the sinful from the saved (only sinful people commit murder), as well as suggesting the newer Reformation mode of thinking about sin: that everyone is almost equally sinful and a very bad man may still believe, by the light of community standards perhaps, that has not done ill. “Play 30: Judgment,” in The Towneley Plays, eds. Stevens and Cawley, 1:404; lines 105–6, 91–2, 96, 104.
- 10.
Lewis Wager, “Life and Repentaunce of Mary Magdalene,” in Reformation Biblical Drama in England, ed. Paul Whitfield White (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1992), 1–66.
- 11.
Paul Whitfield White, Theatre and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage, and Playing in Tudor England. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 87.
- 12.
In discussing this play, Paul Whitfield White cites passages from Calvin’s Institutes to show the play’s debts to Calvinist theology (“Appendix B”). Theatre and Reformation, 181–5. White uses the phrases “special grace” (a term also used by Reformers ) and “‘moderate’ Calvinist” to describe single predestination thought, 1156, 187. Also see White’s introduction to the play in Reformation Biblical Drama in England, xxxii–xxxiv. My comments on this play are indebted to White’s readings.
- 13.
W. Wager, “The Longer Thou Livest,” in The Longer Thou Livest and Enough is as Good as a Feast, ed. R. Mark Benbow (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), 1–78.
- 14.
This trope is presumably derived from the mystery plays where, for instance, Cain in the Towneley play thinks the voice of God is that of a hobgoblin (line 297), “The Killing of Abel,” in Medieval Drama, ed. David Bevington (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 284.
- 15.
For instance, there was a longstanding theological tradition, dating back as least as far as St. Jerome, that Judas’s despair in failing to ask for Christ’s mercy was a greater sin than his betrayal of Christ. See Jerome, “Homily 34: On Psalm 108 (109),” trans. Marie Ligouri Ewald, in Fathers of the Church. 129 vols. to date (Baltimore: Catholic University of America Press, 1947–), 48:259. The mystery plays tend to endorse this theology by dramatizing how the saved request mercy from God and Jesus while the damned are convinced their pleas for mercy will not be heeded.
- 16.
“The History of Iacob and Esau,” in Reformation Biblical Drama in England, ed. Paul Whitfield White (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1992), 67–113. Possible authors for this play include Nicholas Udall and William Hunnis . See John E. Curran Jr., “Jacob and Esau and the Iconoclasm of Merit,” Studies in English Literature 49.2 (2009), 285. Nathaniel Woodes, “The Conflict of Conscience,” in A Select Collection of Old English Plays Originally Published by Robert Dodsley in the year 1744, Fourth Edition, ed. William Carew Hazlitt . 15 vols. (London: Reeves and Turner , 1874–1876), 6:29–142. Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus A- and B-texts, eds. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993).
- 17.
Martha Tuck Rozett , The Doctrine of Election and the Emergence of Elizabethan Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 104.
- 18.
Timothy Rosendale , Theology and Agency in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 93–4.
- 19.
See Jennifer Waldron, Reformations of the Body: Idolatry, Sacrifice, and Early Modern Theater (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 93.
- 20.
Rosendale adamantly rejects the view that “the play’s God had decided before the foundation of the world to not give Faustus the prevenient grace he would need to willingly avail himself of full grace.” Rosendale , Theology and Agency in Early Modern Literature, 97. Rosendale’s aim is to minimize the significance of concepts such as prevenient grace in relation to the play, and Marlowe may indeed not wish to emphasize them. Nonetheless, prevenient grace was a widespread Protestant belief (and, through Augustine, shared even by the Catholic theologians at Trent); so any character in an English Renaissance drama who goes to Hell would necessarily, at least according to Protestant thought, lack prevenient grace.
- 21.
Curran , “Jacob and Esau and the Iconoclasm of Merit,” Studies in English Literature 49.2 (2009), 285–309. Curran writes, for instance, “The neighbors deem Esau an irredeemable sinner simply on the basis of his hunting too loudly too early in the morning… Can we brand a person indelibly with evil from such evidence?,” 293. To Curran , the figure of Isaac , “blind” to the distinctions between his two sons is the proper example to follow in relation to this narrative, 296; Curran concludes that, in this play, Esau “has done nothing to deserve reprobation,” 305.
- 22.
Curran , “Jacob and Esau,” 288 (referencing Calvin’s Institutes, 3.22). Gregory of Rimini also made this point about Jacob and Esau . Lectura super Primum et Secundum Sententiarum, 3:338.
- 23.
Perkins, William, “An Exposition of the Symbole ,” in Workes, 1:279.
- 24.
Curran , “Jacob and Esau ,” 290. The lines that follow in the prologue—“For it is not (sayth Paule) in mans renuing or will,/But in Gods mercy who choseth whome he will” (13–14)—refer to “mercy,” thereby returning the Prologue theology to the standard single predestination position where mercy is implicitly contrasted to the ‘justice’ of Esau’s fate.
- 25.
Cullen sees Calvin arguing this point, and he may be correct. Calvin writes that when Paul “raised the objection, whether God is unjust, he does not make use of what would have been the surest and clearest defense of his righteousness: that God recompensed Esau according to his own evil intention. Instead, he contents himself with a different solution, that the reprobate are raised up to the end that through them God’s glory may be revealed.” Calvin, Institutes, 3.2.11, 947. Nonetheless, the usual position (as in Perkins and perhaps for Calvin as well) is that eventually sinners such as Esau are damned for their own sins and not because of their prior reprobation.
- 26.
Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 237.
- 27.
The Old Man’s words are more likely intended by Marlowe as a mockery of those extreme Protestants (i.e. Puritans) who were part of the ‘experiental tradition’ and felt that obsessive immersion into the putrid depths of the soul would somehow produce purity in the long run.
- 28.
As Bevington and Rasmussen note (Marlowe , Doctor Faustus A- and B-texts), Faustus’s plea, “My God, my God, look not so fierce on me!” (A-text 5.2.120) echoes “Psalms xxii.1–2: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ and Mark xv.34,” 197.
- 29.
Sinfield, Faultlines, 237.
- 30.
Rosendale , Theology and Agency in Early Modern Literature, 92.
- 31.
Erin E. Kelly , “Conflict of Conscience and Sixteenth-Century Religious Drama,” English Literary Renaissance 44.3 (2014), 388–419. Kelly argues, cautiously, that the revisions (mainly to the prologue and the play’s final lines) were “effectively acts of censorship,” 398. See 398–402 for the evidence.
- 32.
Erin Sullivan, “Doctrinal Doubleness and the Meaning of Despair in William Perkins’s ‘Table’ and Nathaniel Woodes’s The Conflict of Conscience,” Studies in Philology 110 (2013), 547.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gleckman, J. (2019). Double Predestination in Early English Drama. In: Shakespeare and Protestant Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9599-5_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9599-5_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-32-9598-8
Online ISBN: 978-981-32-9599-5
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)