ABSTRACT

This chapter examines the language of the passions in Philip Massinger's 1631 tragicomedy The Emperor of the East. It outlines the contested religious and political context from which the play emerged and to which it responds. The chapter looks at the place of the passions in early Caroline religious thought, especially in relation to Calvinism and Arminianism, before offering a close reading of the interrelations between passions, politics and subjectivity in the play. Backed by a majority in parliament, the Calvinist wing of religio-political opinion was a large, heterogeneous and, broadly speaking, conformist grouping. As scholars such as Susan James and Christopher Tilmouth have shown the rehabilitation of the passions in seventeenth century moral and political thought no longer maintains the strict binary between reason and passion that tends to characterise much sixteenth-century thinking that drew heavily on neo-Platonic, neo-Stoic and Calvinist thought.