"Moving Graces": Forms of Religious Persuasion in Early Modern Drama

How does one reach the hearts of others? This thesis situates the question in early modern England by investigating the activity of persuasion on the commercial stage, contending that, when plays sought to represent persuasion or be persuasive themselves, many of their tactics were borrowed from religious sources. The ongoing process of Reformation in England required an investment in persuasive methods for the purposes of religious education and conversion. Protestant reform may have instigated the persuasive practices, but the ensuing heterogeneity of belief enabled multiple confessional perspectives to compete for hearts and minds, creating a “culture of persuasion” that profoundly influenced early modern modes of communication, including dramatic ones. While religious conversion strategies could not be reproduced directly on the stage, I claim that playwrights made use of the form of such strategies. Overlaying these various forms with content relevant to the play, they capitalized on the persuasive meanings inherent in the forms without offending the censors or derailing the story. Chapter One begins with an investigation into the evangelical metrical psalms. I argue that the shape, sound and meaning of a musical psalm reverberates in a drinking song in The Shoemaker’s Holiday, evoking an exploration of the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in the creation of community identity. In Chapter Two, the Duke’s interactions in the jail in Measure for Measure follow the same scripts as the private conferences associated with the Jesuits, prompting questions about the ethical limits of efficacious persuasion. Chapter Three explores the goodnight ballad, considering the appearance of one in Eastward Ho as central to the play’s ongoing negotiation between sincerity and satire. My historical formalist examination of theatrical appearances of now-unfamiliar forms of religious persuasion contributes to conversations about the operation of religious meaning on the stage and the role of the commercial theatre in a religious culture. When found in various theatrical guises on the stage, these forms retain their persuasiveness and act as dramatic agents of political, social, institutional and personal strategy, deployed both within the dramatic arc of the story and beyond to work on the emotions of the audience.

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