Literature, protestantism, and the idea of community

The Protestant community is articulated through liturgy, history, and drama. Liturgy teaches communal bonds and scripts their enactment, while narrative and dramatic depictions of the collective past appeal to the imagination of readers and viewers. Liturgy and literature are joined by the participation they invite, which engages parishioners, readers, and audiences with questions of affiliation and collectivity. Lack of attention to the ways Renaissance texts pondered over and produced bonds of commonality has sidetracked us from the communal nature of the period. We need to reevaluate such bonds to better understand how English culture imagined relationships between individual and community, and between people and institutions---including church and theatre. When orthodox writing is treated as doctrine and praxis, and not as a means for political indoctrination, we gain a different understanding of the potential for human relationships, one more generous and reciprocal than the model of coercion that has dominated literary studies. Such reciprocity is found in Church of England liturgy, and in the imaginative space of Foxe's Acts and Monuments, which seeks to forge the Protestant community through an ethics of reading. Imaginative space was also a public space, and Shakespeare's King John and Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris reflect upon religious affiliation in moments of war and atrocity; both plays represent very tangled lines of identification that do not endorse Catholic-Protestant factions but undo them. Religious writing and public theatre explored the precarious balance between community and individual, offering readers and audiences a vehicle for thinking about their own immediate lives and their sense of belonging.

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