The early Stuart era begins with the 1604 disputation between the bishops’ party and the Puritans at Hampton Court and it ends thirty-seven years later in a civil war between much the same two groups, although over far more complicated issues. Throughout the period one finds religious tensions and conflicts, many with a marked political dimension. Early Stuart controversial divinity centres on issues of authority, jurisdiction, power, obedience, conformity and outward worship. The religious controversies respond to and are inseparably intertwined with the ecclesio-political crises of the age: the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and the subsequent imposition of the Oath of Allegiance; the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War in 1618; the dissolution of the 1629 Parliament that ushered in Charles’s eleven-year Personal Rule; the Bishops’ Wars of 1639–40; the English Civil War.

These crises spawned an immense corpus of religious polemic, including a fair amount of hate literature and the anti-Catholic, anti-Laudian conspiratorial fantasies that seem to have been largely responsible for the breakdown of Caroline rule. Yet these polemics also include Donne’s witty and searching anti-Jesuit satire, Ignatius his Conclave (1611); the providential, almost mystical, nationalism of Lancelot Andrewes’s Gunpowder Plot sermons, which, in their fusion of English Protestant triumphalism with radiant evocations of sacral monarchy and a deep abhorrence of religious persecution, gave expression to the ideals at the heart of James’s own pacifist and absolutist Christian politics; and William Chillingworth’s brilliant Religion of Protestants (1638), published only a few months after Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637), which radicalised theology via the same epistemic turn that Cartesianism gave to philosophy: a summa theologiae that treats not the objects of belief but the act of believing.

Before the late seventeenth century, the language of criticism develops within the rhetorical tradition. Renaissance discussions of style accordingly centre on prose, a focus reflecting the cultural priority of the humanist paideia over vernacular poetry throughout the period. The fullest and most important of such discussions occur in the great scholarly neo-Latin rhetorics, although these subsequently inform vernacular rhetoric, as well as poetics, music theory, and art criticism. Because stylistic concepts evolve within the pan-European culture of neo-Latin humanism, it seems possible to sketch a general outline of Renaissance stylistics; yet because the cultural and political functions of these rhetorical categories shift from country to country, such an overview needs to be supplemented by consideration of specific national contexts. This chapter will therefore examine the dominant trends in Renaissance stylistics but also their divergent ideological exfoliation in France and England.

Renaissance terminology for stylistic analysis draws upon four principal categories, all borrowed from classical rhetoric. Style may be described in terms of (1) the genera dicendi – the Roman categories of low/plain, middle, and grand style (or their Greek equivalents); (2) its classical prototypes; for example, a style may be labelled as Senecan, Tacitean, or Ciceronian; (3) its characteristic features, especially syntactic; Renaissance rhetorics thus classify styles as periodic, curt, copious, laconic, pointed, loose; and (4) the related distinction between Attic (brief), Asiatic (copious), and Rhodian (intermediate) styles. These categories are not exclusive; one may describe an author as using an Asiatic middle style or pointed Senecan brevity. Nor are they unambiguous. In Renaissance (as in classical) rhetoric, for example, the plain style includes an informal conversational manner, the type of speech characteristic of ‘low’ persons, the unartistic plainness of logical/scholastic argument, and a graceful cultivated urbanity.

SUBVERSIVE FATHERS

The recent lack of interest in the religious significance of Shakespearean drama stems in part from a suspicion that it possessed no such significance. As R. M. Frye showed many years ago, the notion of religious literature is alien to the humanist poetics of the sixteenth century, which valued “poesie” for its ethical rather than redemptive force. The royal proclamations censoring plays that touched on matters of religion (issued under Henry, Mary, Elizabeth, and James) seem to corroborate Frye's argument: Protestant Englishmen did not seem very enthusiastic about staging the mysteries of faith.

But if it is not plausible to read Shakespeare's plays as Christian allegories, neither is it likely that the popular drama of a religiously saturated culture could, by a secular miracle, have extricated itself from the theocentric orientation informing the discourses of politics, gender, social order, and history. The issue which has been ignored is not whether Shakespeare teaches Christian doctrine – this is either a red herring or twice-cooked cabbage – but how religious ideology, understood not as a uniquely privileged “key” but as part of a cultural system, functions in these plays.