Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on the central questions to one degree or another on the theater's evolving relationship to its own constituent elements. It explains a set of readings that examine the theater's appropriations of religious codes of meaning in relation to its development as a particular form of secular cultural production. The book argues that the theater actively worked to destabilize polemical debates and ideological affiliations. Rather than providing answers to difficult questions about religious concepts or affiliations, theatrical scripts often responded to far more subtle cultural tensions and anxieties, even when invoking charged religious topics. Religion and Drama in Early Modern England offers new readings of religious content on the early modern stage by focusing on the effects of material conventions, by considering the social function of the drama, and by rethinking allusions that are seemingly contradictory or ideologically illegible.