Abstract
Although the chronological coverage of this study concentrates chiefly on the years 1603 to 1688, the range and reference points are in fact very much more extended. Streete's ‘pre-history' of his subject takes us back to Ovid's Metamorphoses, Virgil's Aeneid and the book of Genesis, which all find a place in the introduction, as do John Wycliffe, John Foxe's Acts and Monuments and Christopher Marlowe's Dr Faustus. At the other end of his timescale, the shifting contours of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Whig and Tory divisions, the responses provoked by the Jacobite Risings of 1715 and 1745, as well as late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Gothic, come under discussion. A place is also found for the persistent anti-Catholicism in twenty-first century Northern Ireland and the blatant prejudices enshrined in the UK's Brexit vote. To say the least, the main subject matter here is well framed; the origins and legacies of anti-Catholicism are both treated at considerable length. The introduction and conclusion are substantial chapters in their own right. The subject matter is also approached and handled in a securely inter-disciplinary fashion. The references and bibliography make perfectly clear that Streete has kept abreast of scholarship in his field. There is as much engagement with the work of historians – Kevin Sharpe and Jonathan Scott, for example1 – as there is with the prolific output of writers drawn from within Streete's own English Literature camp.2 Although not stridently argumentative, this book politely but firmly takes issue with, questions and qualifies others' findings where the author sees the need.
The drama of this period is presented as variously providing political commentary, reflection, dialectics and intervention, and Streete repeatedly underlines his contention that the apocalyptic and anti-Catholic dramatic rhetoric on which he focusses was deeply and widely embedded in seventeenth-century English culture. Emphatically, however, the anti-Catholicism examined here was not an exclusively internal English phenomenon; as Streete makes clear, much of it needs to be seen as a nervous English response to Roman Catholic advances in mainland Europe, first under Spain and then under the France of Louis XIV. Nor can these sentiments be viewed as mere hysteria exclusively associated with puritans and nonconformists. (Here he takes issue with what appears to be Kevin Sharpe's interpretation.)3 Nor were they prominent only at moments of crisis like the Gunpowder Plot, the Great Fire of London or the Glorious Revolution. These were sustained convictions and assumptions which within the context of the time made perfectly rational sense to a great many across a broad spectrum. In this respect, as in others, Christopher Hill's Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England (1971) had it right.
A very large number of plays – including a large number of ‘lost plays' known only through others' summaries, echoes, re-workings or rejoinders – are referred to as Streete's survey proceeds. It is clear that this is a large and densely packed subject. The vast bulk of the text, however, consists of five chapter-length case studies of individual plays (none of them famous) ranging in date from 1605 to 1682. Streete's examples exclude the 1620s, 1660s or 1670s, though John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee's The Duke of Guise (1682) was a collaborative re-working of an earlier version of a play first written (though not performed) three years earlier. Streete makes high claims for all of these plays save the last, The Duke of Guise, parts of which he admits ‘amble' along and which reaches a distinctly ‘perfunctory conclusion' (p. 237). By contrast, he is struck with the ‘brilliance' of John Marston's The Dutch Courtesan (1605; p. 93) and its deliberately coded language – this author had learned the hard way the need to be cautious – and he dubs Thomas Middleton's The Lady's Tragedy (1610) ‘one of the most provocative plays of the Jacobean era' (p. 97). Philip Massinger's Believe as you List (1631) and James Shirley's The Cardinal (1641) also, in Streete's view, merit much closer attention than most scholars have previously given them.
All of these plays are systemically anchored in the precise circumstances of their particular times. In some cases, half a chapter is devoted to context before the author launches into a discussion of the individual play itself; the reader's patience can occasionally be tested as a result, especially when the contextualisation is perhaps not always sharply focussed. The bibliography and footnote references are not always carefully correlated. There is much use of the present tense in the author's treatment of the case study plays and much use of the first person, both of which are calculated to enhance the immediacy of the writing and foreground the interventions of Streete himself. In line with this, the author's style occasionally verges on the conversational. ‘Some of Massinger's contemporaries', we are informed, ‘may have found this conclusion [to Believe as you List] an unorthodox, moderate cop-out' (p. 163). And at the end of Chapter Five, we are told that Shirley could well be accused of ‘jumping on a popular bandwagon' (p. 198). Elsewhere, the writing style Streete adopts is severely academic and there are absolutely no concessions to the reader in the parade of Latin and Middle English quotations with which the introductory chapter is graced. It is as though the author is trying to face two ways – to an undergraduate audience in a lecture hall and to a stern, no-nonsense community of fellow academic specialists. The book's forbidding title, however, surely suggests that the lapses into casual expression are merely that.
In the end, Streete makes a telling case for using seventeenth-century drama as an important source – a very special one at that – for the study of seventeenth-century politics and religion and their frequent interactions as well as for the development of ‘Englishness'. His many perceptive interpretative suggestions and alternative readings of the selected plays also demonstrate the value, indeed the necessity, of a firmly grounded interdisciplinary approach to the subject matter under discussion both at the macro- and micro-levels. Apocalypse and Anti-Catholicism makes a good companion piece to the same author's earlier study of Protestantism and Drama in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2009). Streete has carved out a special niche for himself in this field.
Notes
1. Kevin Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England: The Culture of Seventeenth-Century Politics (Cambridge, 2000); Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677–1683 (Cambridge, 1994). 2. For example, Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Culture (Ithaca, NY, 1999) and Eric Griffin, English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of Spain: Ethnopoetics and Empire (Philadelphia, 2009). 3. Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England, p. 287.