This chapter questions the suggestion that has already been made of a spiritual convergence between George Herbert and St. François de Sales. The elimination of turbulence and urgency from the inner life certainly was a goal for St. François, but it was certainly not consistently or predominantly so for the George Herbert of the lyrics. But what of the “sweetness” connection? They both saw the religious life as providing pleasure, including in the Eucharist, or Holy Communion. But this does not mean that their Eucharistic theologies were identical, a consideration that must enter the comparison. There is a great deal more “affliction” in the religious life as Herbert presents it than as St. François does – which almost certainly derives from “doctrine,” from differing theological pictures of the postlapsarian human self. St. François, following the Catholic and especially Teresian mystical tradition, does not want to distinguish sharply between physical and spiritual “sweetness.” Herbert is clear on the distinction, though willing to use the analogy. Herbert’s deliberately contentious view and poetry contrasts with the staidness of much of what he reacted against in continental thinking. Close analysis of these texts indicates that, contrary to much recent criticism, doctrine matters, shaping the tenor and substance of life.

This chapter considers David Foster Wallace’s relationship to issues and images of performance by examining his frequent writing about technologically unmediated live theatre, often moments evocative of the Platonic dialogues, their theatrical elements, and the interplay of Socrates and the Sophists. On the basis of such Wallace scenes and Martin Puchner’s theories of philosophical theatre, the chapter argues that being a philosopher for Wallace is an art frequently, if not always, tied to performances of a certain exacting and humbling kind. The readings are grounded in moments from across Wallace’s oeuvre (though concentrated in Brief Interviews, with some attention paid as well to Infinite Jest and The Pale King) that occupy one or both of two major domains: first, expertly crafted scenes of dialogue that mark a twist on the Platonic dialogues and their dramatic staging of philosophical conflict, particularly when it involves the sophistry Wallace found dominating postmodernity; and second, moments that conjure not just performance but a particularly abject stage performer, showing that Wallace, while seeing no ultimate escape from the artifices of performance, would at crucial moments strategically strip performers down to a state of naked vulnerability. In crucial moments of powerful idea-making where he relies on theatrical metaphors, opposes live stage performance to the kind that TV and film offer, and plays with definitions of the performer to unseat an ensconced idea, Wallace is, this chapter argues, a philosopher-dramatist.

This chapter examines unexplored parallels between three French Protestant poets and George Herbert, noting signs of shared rhetorical and spiritual strategies of internal struggle. John Donne’s Sonnet XIV, “Batter my heart, three person’d God,” bears clear resemblances to Grévin’s third sonnet in the second part of the Gélodacrye. George Herbert, too, may have been influenced by some of Grévin’s sonnets, particularly when one considers the common coteries within which the Herberts and Donne moved. Close parallels in language and syntax between Herbert’s poems and poems by popular French Protestant poets of the time strongly imply influence. In all four poets, lively and contentious forms of communion are predicated on the radical inequality between the poet and God, answered by an adoptive call and look designed to transform and transport the poet and reader. Close parallels of insistent repetition, vehementia, and ternary correspondence are among the rhetorical similarities explored in detail.

This essay focuses on fathers and sons in the mid-seventeenth century, when the division between Catholic and Protestant was further complicated by the emergence of new sects and denominations. Religious tensions and conflict between parents and adolescent or young adult children could become a significant element in family life, one that remains relatively neglected in modern scholarship. This essay explores how such children attempted to reconcile duty to parents with the devotion they owed God, in struggles recorded in their diaries and autobiographies.

This chapter looks at foreign productions of Antony and Cleopatra played on stages in the UK and abroad, in English and in translation: Peter Zadek’s Berliner Ensemble production in a specially commissioned German translation at the Edinburgh Festival; Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s modern Dutch, modern-dress, high-tech production in Amsterdam; and in Washington DC and in Stratford, Ontario, productions in English that nevertheless saw Shakespeare with foreign eyes. In every case, this chapter discovers the ‘foreign’ to be a problematic concept, as demonstrated first with the production that sets up the subsequent discussion, Theodore Komisarjevsky’s Antony and Cleopatra at the New Theatre (London) in 1936.

Comparing Herbert’s inspiration and focus in The Country Parson with that of John Calvin’s Commentaries to the Pastoral Epistles makes Herbert’s purposes, concerns, and focus clearer. He is concerned with far more than mere outward marks of religious devotion. The pastor’s construction of an outward and visible manifestation of inward states for the edification of others need not be disingenuous or insincere. The pastor struggles in communion with God in order to avoid the contempt, and cultivate the faith, of others. It is only by linking George Herbert’s writing to continental thought and theology that we can fully understand his pastoral prospects for a comprehensive Church that sustains the needs of all its members (regardless of their social belonging) at a local level as well as universally.

This essay examines how early modern prisons in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could sometimes serve as sacred spaces. Through an engagement with elite and popular texts, this research draws the frequent connection between profane incarceration and the consecration of space achieved by an individual’s pious actions: self-examination, religious conversation, praying, reading and writing. It further posits that prison texts themselves, that recorded these devotions, might have been read more than other traditional Protestant works, thus propelling godliness across thresholds: from the prison into the booksellers, and finally into the home.

This brief consideration of South African memoirist and journalist Noni Jabavu focuses on her writing that engages with London in the 1960s. Jabavu’s divergence from her South African contemporaries Todd Matshikiza and Peter Abrahams is emphasised, and this difference is attributed not only to her gendered experience, but also to her particular class identifications and her deep immersion in South African and British liberal, middle-class circles. In her New Strand editor’s columns, Jabavu provides insights into her life in London and the tensions between her London working life and her connections elsewhere, including South Africa and Jamaica. The columns evince her dual ‘loyalty’ to South Africa and Britain, but even beyond this, a truly multi-locational perspective.

Just a few years later, during the Irish Civil War, the philosopher’s name would be evoked on the floor of the Dáil Éireann (lower house of parliament) to pose the relationship between the values of the Irish people and the draconian measures of their new government as ‘a case of Christianity vs. Nietzscheanism’. Drawing on an opposition made familiar by Kettle and Allied propagandists, the remark addresses, in the bluntest terms, the issues at stake for the national conscience as Ireland entered the era of independence. Chapter 5 demonstrates that Nietzsche, despite his drubbing in the public sphere, remained an important point of reference for the foremost Irish writers as they looked beyond the tumultuous intensity of the period and embraced prophetic modes of discourse. With a peculiar admixture of mythology, cosmology, eccentric historiography, and Nietzschean ideas, Yeats sought in A Vision (1925) to offer a systematic, if highly idiosyncratic, account of the patterns of human history that might reveal something about the future. Meanwhile, in his five-part play, Back to Methuselah (1921), Shaw attempted to translate the tenets of his philosophy of Creative Evolution into the legends of a new religion of human enhancement: legends that revise the story of the Garden of Eden, comment directly on the political failings of the present, and project a posthuman future some 30,000 years hence. After the war, like many of their contemporaries, Yeats and Shaw became increasingly enamoured with the potential of eugenics to overcome the counter-selective effects of the recent conflict and to breed the human race into a fitter political animal. Joyce, for his part, demonstrates considerable scepticism about such a potential, but he was nonetheless preoccupied with human breeding and the question of futurity in the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode of Ulysses. Among the many competing discourses that addressed these issues in Ireland and beyond, Nietzschean philosophy is again crucial, precisely because it remains open to multiple interpretations, multiple potentialities for the future of humanity, or rather a future beyond humanity, when at least certain individuals will live according to new codes, new values, and new ideals. One of the great achievements of Irish modernism, as we shall see, is that its leading writers accommodated these provocations to their own array of provocative images, metaphors, and myths, which repeatedly crossed the borders between art and society, aesthetics and politics.

Shortly after the publication of Man and Superman, Shaw was invited to contribute a play to the Irish National Dramatic Society by Yeats, who was in the first flush of his own life-long enchantment with Nietzsche. The coincidence is a telling one. Chapter 2 turns to Yeats and his newly founded theatre company to examine the ethos of a ‘proud hard gift giving joyousness’, which the poet and developing playwright derived from the German philosopher and placed in the service of a native cultural revival. Like Shaw, Yeats conceived the theatre as an arena where the conscience of a nation might be defined or redefined, but as he sought to impart his ideas of artistic value, cultural continuity, and noble generosity, he encountered an unreceptive audience that he came to refer as the ‘mob’ or ‘crowd’. His work as a playwright during the first decade of the century is best understood as a sustained attempt to appeal to the tastes and values of Irish theatre-goers without condoning what he viewed as their lower instincts. Throughout this period, Nietzsche’s writings were a constant companion and perhaps Yeats’s greatest resource, providing him with the means to reconceive the roles of both the individual artist and the dramatic arts in pursuing his communal project. As demonstrated by the multiplying drafts of his plays and his extensive correspondence with collaborators, Yeats strove persistently to realise a Nietzschean conception of generosity: beginning with his revisions to Where There Is Nothing and continuing through his composition of The King’s Threshold, he imagined heroes with a kind of haughty intensity, coupled with an overflowing fullness, who encounter audiences not yet ready to receive their messages. As he continued to read Nietzsche with great enthusiasm, Yeats went on to write – and repeatedly revise – two plays featuring the mythological hero, Cuchulain, as the exemplar of a renewed communal spirit, both proud and generous, hard and joyous. With the decade drawing to a close, however, he came to consider his efforts a failure, though the ambition remained to fashion a national conscience in the form of an aristocratic ethos suitable to his vision of the Irish people and their destiny.

Casting Judi Dench and Anthony Hopkins as his star couple, using an uncut text (taken not from any modern edition of Antony and Cleopatra but from the 1623 Folio), and referring to Harley Granville-Barker’s 1930 Prefaces to Shakespeare as his principal critical source, Peter Hall eschewed the orientalism of every production of the play on the English stage since 1953 to make this a very English Antony and Cleopatra, not least in his all-white casting, his near-religious attention to the text and his ‘iambic fundamentalist’ demands for the ‘correct’ speaking of the verse. Some reviewers heard the ‘true sound of Shakespeare’ in Hall’s large-scale production; others thought Hall’s ‘sumptuous nostalgia for the grand style’ lost something vital to Shakespeare – the rough, the raw, the immediate. All agreed that Dench and Hopkins gave performances of such ‘searing, wounded intimacy’ that they would ‘take you by the throat even played on a windy day on a Brighton pier’.