Abstract
What is God like and what can we do about it? These are the questions that Timothy Rosendale addresses in Theology and Agency in Early Modern Literature. As questions go, they are about as large and multi-faceted as they come. They return to issues like predestination, free-will and the relationship between providence and human action that have been concerns for theologians and philosophers for many centuries. They are, as Rosendale acknowledges in the book’s conclusion, relevant to writing from many different periods. Even focusing on the early modern era doesn’t make them any less large. This is because they mattered to everyone. As Rosendale writes in the introduction, ‘for early modern Christians (that is, virtually everyone), religion was the foundation, horizon, and primary language of their existence’ (p. 9). One of the achievements of this book is to develop out of such complex and wide-ranging concerns an engaging, succinct and enjoyable argument about how early modern playwrights and poets wrote of divine rule and human action.
Rosendale’s focus is on agency and theology. He does not stray into arguments about political or social agency. His main interest is in soteriology. The book pursues an overarching argument about the relationship between human liberty and restraint with regards to the question of their salvation. The authors analysed here – Marlowe, Kyd, Shakespeare, Ford, Herbert, Donne and Milton – all, Rosendale argues, flirt with the idea that humanity has enough freedom to affect their salvation. But all, ultimately, come to similar conclusions that the freedom humanity imagines itself exercising is bound by larger, divine forces. In this sense, a thread that runs throughout the book is Rosendale’s chosen writers’ engagements with theologies of predestination. Rosendale’s readings tend to focus less on the terror of being powerless to affect one’s destiny and more on the comfort of divine grace that gives fallen humanity a hope of salvation they would otherwise never have had. In this way, the book provides a fresh take on the impact of Calvinist theology on early modern English writing. How writers, and the characters and speakers in their works, come to terms (or fail to come to terms) with God’s offer of grace is a central concern of Rosendale’s readings.
After a lengthy opening chapter that reviews the currents of theological and philosophical debates about freedom and agency from ancient epic and philosophy up to Renaissance theology, Rosendale devotes a chapter each to Marlowe, revenge tragedy, Donne (with some material on Herbert) and Milton. In what could be called an ‘anti-Faustus reading’ of Doctor Faustus (1592), Rosendale argues against critics who have seen the play as attacking a tyrannical Calvinist God who traps the heroic and defiant Faustus. Rosendale instead argues that Faustus is presented with the choice to repent but rejects it, partly because he must fulfil his contractual obligation to Mephistopheles but mainly because he is too wedded to the idea that he has the freedom to do what he wants and will not give anything up to a higher power, even if this ends in his own damnation. The next chapter on revenge tragedy picks up some of the themes of the chapter on Marlowe by examining firstly how Kyd and Ford present characters who push against divine limitations even if they come unstuck in the process. The exception that Rosendale draws out of the genre is Hamlet. Hamlet’s oft-discussed inaction is shown to be part and parcel of a belief that he can challenge overarching hierarchies. Yet it is the Hamlet of the final act whom Rosendale sees finally realising that he is bound by larger cosmic forces and it is then that he finds himself able to act. Rosendale thus draws out a paradoxical sense that in Shakespeare’s most famous play freedom comes from knowing one’s limitations.
Moving from theatre to poetry, the third chapter examines the works of Herbert and Donne. Rosendale’s suggestion that Herbert offers a more settled acceptance of divine power than Donne picks up on a difference between the speakers we find in their poems. But to me, what is also underestimated is the cumulative disquiet in Herbert’s frequent reiteration across different poems of speakers uncertainly struggling to understand God. The reading of Donne’s ‘Goodfriday, 1613’, however, was a highlight. Rosendale’s focus on the importance of the word ‘turn’ yields a fascinating, and quite dark, reading whereby the poem’s speaker is seen to be performing an act of penitence they think is expected of them rather than journeying to a state of true reconciliation with God. The final chapter explores blame in Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). Rosendale’s analysis addresses Satan’s deluded desire for freedom from God’s jurisdiction and examines the crucial exchange between Adam and Eve in Book IX.
Rosendale’s book returns frequently to the relationship between freedom and limitation and in this it echoes the paradigm of transgression and containment associated with the new historicist criticism of the 1980s, especially Stephen Greenblatt. Rosendale rightly chooses to engage with Greenblatt early in the introduction. He makes the point that a serious engagement with religion was missing from Greenblatt’s work, which often presented a secularised view of power. Rosendale’s subsequent claim that it was in theological writing where questions regarding the limits of freedom accorded to the self were addressed especially frequently is important. It leads him to the novel idea, exemplified in the reading of Hamlet (1602), that the self’s sense of being bound within a larger structure beyond one’s control might have been a source of freedom and peace for early moderns.
One question that remained for me was what the focus on poetry and drama brings particularly to a discussion of theological ideas. To be fair to Rosendale, he addresses this question in the introduction where he writes: Because it fuses the abstractions of philosophy and theology with the characters and actions of history, imaginative writing is the ideal medium for expressing and interrogating abstract principles in materially interesting ways – perhaps never more so than when it presses on the vexed question of human agency itself. (pp. 27–28)