Monuments of superstition, memories of idolatry : early modern customary culture in Shakespeare and contemporaries

Reid, Jennifer Allport (2024) Monuments of superstition, memories of idolatry : early modern customary culture in Shakespeare and contemporaries. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

The thesis asks what literary and theatrical texts reveal about the role of customary culture in the lives and imaginings of early modern subjects, focusing upon England but with reference also to Scotland. The study considers a range of plays written between 1585-1640 including Robert Greene’s George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield; Anthony Munday’s The Downfall of Robert, Earle of Huntington; and William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, and Titus Andronicus. It frames these with reference to diverse sources containing evidence of festal customs and folkloric belief from 1500-1800, including antiquarian writings and polemical tracts. Commercial drama is approached as a form of performance which draws on and is in some ways parallel to traditional practices yet which, through its interplay between written and embodied representation, offers a conscious and reflective engagement with customary culture, spotlighting and making visible the latter’s themes, tensions, and preoccupations. The thesis is shaped by three key considerations: the interest in customary culture found in stage plays written around the turn of the seventeenth century; the elusive nature of customary activities in the source material; and the religious controversies they provoked amongst contemporaries. It begins by asking how instances of Robin Hood plays and games vary in form, function, and meaning, and what cultural work they undertake. The second chapter examines how the hunt’s ritualised breaking ceremonies are incorporated into drama, processions, dances, and fairylore. The third chapter asks how early modern belief in spirits and fairies reflect the religious changes of the Long Reformation, while the final chapter looks at the shifting meanings of the Rogationtide tradition of beating the bounds and its various supernatural functions. The Reformation gave striking focus to early modern experiences of customary practices and beliefs and to wider tensions between concepts of past and present. Setting late Elizabethan and Stuart drama alongside the evidence of customary culture found in antiquarian writings, imaginative literature, balladry, and polemic, this thesis approaches the interaction between literary and non-literary texts as an opportunity to investigate how early modern subjects understood their relationship with the past and tradition, through a close examination of various themes which, although not representing a comprehensive picture of customary culture, all held a crucially collective position in early modern English and Scottish cultural and communal life.

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