The turn to religion in early modern English studies

Criticism

Volumn 46, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 167-190

  Jackson, Ken ^a   Marotti, Arthur F ^a  

^a WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60949210632     PISSN: 00111589     EISSN: 15360342     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/crt.2004.0031     Document Type: Review

References (145)

1. Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001)
2. idem, "Remnants of the Sacred in Early Modern England," in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 337-45
3. see also the discussion of the Eucharist in Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 75-109, 139-62
4. The first work has been criticized by (among others) Sarah Beckwith in "Stephen Greenblatt's Hamlet and the Forms of Oblivion," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33, no. 2 (2003): 261-80
5. See, e.g., Richard Mallette, Spenser and the Discourses of Reformation England (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997)
6. Meg Lota Brown, Donne and the Politics of Conscience in Early Modern England (Leiden: Brill, 1995)
7. Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001)
8. and Mary Ann Radzinowicz, Milton's Epics and the Book of Psalms (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989)
9. This statement can be found in the announcement of the group's first scholarly conference: 〈http://www.uniheidelberg.de/subject/hcl/fak7/hist/ cl/de/gen/gen/ grmnhist/log.started930301/mail-1.html〉
10. Fredric Jameson, "Religion and Ideology: A Political Reading of Paradise Lost," in Literature, Politics, and Theory, ed. Francis Barker (London: Methuen, 1986), 40
11. See, e.g., Christopher Hill, The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965)
12. idem, Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Oxford University Press, 1971)
13. idem, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (London: Allen Lane and New York: Penguin, 1993)
14. David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)
15. Leo F. Solt, Church and State in Early Modern England, 1509-1640 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)
16. Peter McCullough, Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
17. Lori Anne Ferrell, Government by Polemic: James I, the King's Preachers, and the Rhetorics of Conformity, 1603-1625 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998)
18. Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640-1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)
19. and David Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)
20. David Aers and Sarah Beckwith, "Introduction: Hermeneutics and Ideology," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33, no. 2 (2003): 211, have remarked: "In contemporary criticism, religion is apt to be seen as politics in another guise, and the task of political criticism will be to deliver the medieval or early modern text from its own illusions, to complete the partial insights which it had not the language to say in its own time."
21. See, e.g., Richard Strier, Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert's Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983)
22. Linda Gregerson, The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
23. Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
24. and Reid Barbour, Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
25. Debora Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990)
26. idem, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988)
27. idem, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)
28. and idem, Political Theologies in Shakespeare's England: The Sacred and the State in "Measure for Measure" (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001)
29. See also such recent collections of essays as Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger, eds., Religion and Culture in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
30. and Donna B. Hamilton and Richard Strier, eds., Religion, Literature, and Politics in Post-Reformation England, 1540-1688 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
31. Shuger, Political Theologies in Shakespeare's England
32. For a rich study of "political theology" and political crises in the period, see Richard C. McCoy, Alterations of State: Sacred Kingship in the English Reformation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002)
33. Certainly the interest in the history of the book, given great impetus by the work of such scholars as Elizabeth Eisenstein and Roger Chartier, has had an effect on the attention paid to early modern religion: Eisenstein, e.g., highlights the traditional association of print and Protestantism in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, 2 vols. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1979)
34. Chartier's influential work includes The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987)
35. One is not surprised to find that the first two chapters of the recently published volume of the Cambridge history of the book in Britain are devoted to religious publishing: The Book in Britain, vol. 4, 1557-1695, ed. John Bernard and D. F. McKenzie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 29-93
36. Kevin Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England: The Culture of Seventeenth-Century Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 3-38
37. Sharpe cites such works as J. S. Morrill's "The Religious Context of the English Civil War," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 34 (1984): 155-78
38. and Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982)
39. Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England, 389-90
40. Peter Lake, with Michael Questier, The Antichrist's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists, and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002)
41. Sharpe praises Michael Schoenfeldt's Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)
42. Elizabeth Skerpan's The Rhetoric of Politics in the English Revolution (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992)
43. and Thomas N. Corns's Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640-1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992)
44. This study was made easier with the appearance of two invaluable scholarly resources: the appearance of the 394-volume series of facsimile texts under the editorship of D. M. Rogers, English Recusant Literature (Menston, England: Scolar Press, 1968-79)
45. and Anthony Alison and D. M. Rogers's bibliography, The Contemporary Printed Literature of the English Counter-Reformation between 1558 and 1640, 2 vols. (Aldershot, England: Scolar Press, 1989-94)
46. John King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982)
47. idem, Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989)
48. idem, Spenser's Poetry and the Reformation Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990)
49. and idem, Milton and Religious Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
50. See also John Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 1563-1694 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Most of the scholarship on John Foxe and John Bunyan fits within the Whig master narrative
51. For a traditional Whig/Protestant view of the period, see A. G. Dickens's The English Reformation, 2nd ed. (London: Batsford, 1989)
52. See, e.g., Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992)
53. Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993)
54. idem, "The Continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation," Past and Present 93 (November 1981): 37-69
55. idem, "The Church of England, the Catholics and the People," in The Reign of Elizabeth, ed. Christopher Haigh (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984), 195-219, 284-85
56. and idem, "Success and Failure in the English Reformation," Past and Present 173 (November 2001): 28-49
57. See, e.g., John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570-1850 (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1975)
58. However, Ethan H. Shagan's recent book, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), tries to solve the conflict by arguing that the Reformation in England involved a complex process of negotiation between state authorities and the people
59. Peter Lake, "Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice," in Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603-1642, ed. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (London: Longman, 1989), 72-106
60. Carol Weiner, "The Beleaguered Isle: A Study of Elizabethan and Early Jacobean Anti-Catholicism," Past and Present, no. 51 (May 1971): 27-62
61. and Robin Clifton, "The Popular Fear of Catholics during the English Revolution," Past and Present, no. 52 (August 1971) : 23-53
62. Michael G. Finlayson, Historians, Puritanism, and the English Revolution: The Religious Factor in English Politics before and after the Interregnum (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 79-158
63. See also the essays in Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts, ed. Arthur F. Marotti (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999)
64. and Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England, ed. Arthur F. Marotti (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005)
65. Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy, and the English Literary Imagination, 1558-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
66. Raymond Tumbleson, Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination: Nationalism, Religion, and Literature, 1600-1745 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
67. and Frances Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999)
68. See also idem, "Gender and the 'Lost' Spaces of Catholicism," Journal of Interdisciplinary Study 32, no. 4 (2002): 641-65
69. and Ceri Sullivan, Dismembered Rhetoric: English Recusant Writing, 1580-1603 (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and London: Associated University Presses, 1995)
70. Shell, English Literary Imagination, 10
71. Elizabeth Cary, The Lady Falkland, The Tragedy of Mariam The Fair Queen of Jewry, with The Lady Falkland Her Life by one of her Daughters, ed. Barry Weller and Margaret W. Ferguson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)
72. See also Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland, Life and Letters, ed. Heather Wolfe (Cambridge, England: RTM Publications, 2001)
73. The best discussion of Margaret Clitherow is found in Anne Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535-1603 (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2002), 277-322
74. See also Arthur F. Marotti, "Alienating Catholics in Early Modern England: Recusant Women, Jesuits, and Ideological Fantasies," in Marotti, Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts, 5-9
75. and Megan Matchinske, Writing, Gender, and State in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 53-85
76. For a discussion of Mary Ward, see Henriette Peters, Mary Ward: A World in Contemplation, trans. Helen Butterworth (Leominster, Herefordshire: Gracewing, 1994)
77. and Lowell Gallagher, "Mary Ward's 'Jesuitresses' and the Construction of a Typological Community," in Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women's Alliances in Early Modern England, ed. Susan Frye and Karen Robertson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 199-217
78. Many studies have now turned to this group of neglected early modern women - including Deborah Aldrich-Watson's edition of Constance Aston Fowler's commonplace book (The Verse Miscellany of Constance Aston Fowler: A Diplomatic Edition [Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, for the Renaissance English Text Society, 2000])
79. and Heather Wolfe's study of the Benedictine nun Barbara Constable, as well as Jane Stevenson's essay on "Catholic Women and Latin Culture" (both in Catholic Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Ronald Corthell, Frances Dolan, Christopher Highley, and Arthur F. Marotti [under review])
80. See Marotti, "Alienating Catholics in Early Modern England," 1-34
81. See also the influential recent study by John W. O'Malley The First Jesuits (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993)
82. and Thomas M. McCoog, S.J., The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England, 1541-1588: "Our Way of Proceeding?" (Leiden: Brill, 1996)
83. See the chapter on Henrietta Maria in Dolan, Whores of Babylon, 95-156
84. as well as Caroline M. Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983)
85. Jonathan Scott, England's Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
86. Brad Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999)
87. Michel de Certeau, The Possession at Loudun, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), caption for figure 5, between pp. 108 and 109
88. Lake, The Antichrist's Lewd Hat, 714
89. Two recent publishing projects dealing with Shakespeare and religion have revived an old discussion about the playwright's Catholic background and his possible religious inclinations but have put them in the context of current scholarship on religious culture: Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England, ed. Dennis Taylor and David N. Beauregard (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003)
90. and the two volumes drawn from the proceedings of a 1999 conference on "The Lancastrian Shakespeare": Theater and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare and Region, Religion and Patronage: Lancastrian Shakespeare, both edited by Richard Dutton, Alison Gail Findlay and Richard Wilson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004)
91. See, e.g., Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 25. Beckwith, in a historically well articulated argument, concludes: "Shakespeare's theater does not represent the supercession and succession of religion, purgatory, and ritual action by a disenchanted theater, but the persistence of its historical concerns in the incarnation of performance" ("Greenblatt's Hamlet," 275)
92. See, e.g., C. John Sommerville's The Secularization of Early Modern England: From Religious Culture to Religious Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)
93. Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997)
94. Donna B. Hamilton, Shakespeare and the Politics of Protestant England (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992)
95. Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare's Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)
96. Lawrence Clopper, English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001)
97. Michael O'Connell, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early-Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)
98. See Patrick Collinson, From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia: The Cultural Impact of the Second English Reformation (Reading, England: University of Reading Press, 1986)
99. Cf. John Phillips, The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England, 1535-1660 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973)
100. and Margaret Aston, England's Iconoclasts, vol. 1, Laws against Images (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988)
101. For a discussion of the symbolic residue of Catholicism in early modern England, see also Elizabeth Mazzola, The Pathology of the English Renaissance: Sacred Remains and Holy Ghosts (Leiden: Brill, 1998)
102. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), 62
103. John Cox, "Shakespeare and the Mystery Cycles," in The Origins of Shakespeare, ed. Emrys Jones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 31-84, emphasizes the influence of the dramatization of the Passion in the mysteries on Shakespeare's tragic dramaturgy
104. See Erica Veevers, Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). There is a similar problem with the literary-historical fortunes of the poetry of Richard Crashaw, which, because of its Continental, Catholic qualities, did not fit into the "English" tradition
105. Using a "queer theory" approach, Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), connects Crashaw's work to the devotional languages of his time despite the cultural estrangement of Crashaw's work in literary history and criticism
106. Gallagher and Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism, 141
107. For a critique of Greenblatt's discussion of the Eucharist and of the shortcomings of New Historicism in relation to religious subject matter, see David Aers, "New Historicism and the Eucharist," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33, no. 2 (2003): 241-59
108. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980)
109. Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983)
110. Husserl's solution to the problem relied on analogy. The "other" is another me, another self, an alter ego. As Levinas points out, however, this analogy, even at its most empathetic, leaves no room for the other as other. To borrow the phrasing of Colin Davis, there is not enough "alter" in the concept of the alter ego. Levinas: An Introduction (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 26
111. The crucial Levinasian texts are Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969)
112. and Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1974)
113. See Derek Attridge's summary of Levinas in "Innovation, Literature, Ethics: Relating to the Other," PMLA 114 (1999): 20-32
114. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 153
115. Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 147
116. see also idem, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002)
117. Derrida makes clear that the possibility of God as absolutely other cannot be foreclosed or embraced. See The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997): "The event of revelation would reveal not only this or that - God, for example - but revealability itself. By the same token, this would forbid us saying 'God, for example.... Must one choose between these two orders? ... Must one choose between the priority of revelation (Offenbarung) and that of revealability (Offenbarkeit), the priority of manifestation and that of manifestability, of theology and theology, of the science of God and the science of the divine, of the divinity of God?" (18-19)
118. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)
119. See, in particular, John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997)
120. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001)
121. Slavoj Žižek recently has joined Badiou in offering a materialist response to the "ethical" or "religious" turn in Continental philosophy. See The Fragile Absolute - Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2000)
122. and The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003)
123. See also Badiou's Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003)
124. In many ways, this discussion is an extension of the old debate between Marxism and deconstruction. See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routlege, 1995)
125. and the "Marxist" response in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx (London: Verso, 1999) for context
126. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 211
127. Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Levinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 14
128. Julia Reinhard Lupton, "Exegesis, Mimesis, and the Future of Humanism in The Merchant of Venice," Religion and Literature 32, no. 2 (2000): 123-39, quote at 134
129. Some of these notions were sketched out in Lupton's Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography Typology, and Renaissance Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996)
130. Julia Reinhard Lupton, "Othello Circumcised: Shakespeare and the Pauline Dis-course of Nations," Representations 57 (Winter 1997): 73-89
131. Gil Anidjar, ed., Acts of Religion: Jacques Derrida (New York: Routledge, 2002)
132. idem, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003)
133. Lisa Freinkel, Reading Shakespeare's Will: A Theology of Figure from Augustine to the Sonnets (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 115
134. We recall that this scholarship corresponds with great advances in biblical scholarship and a significant rise in interest in " historical" Christianity and topics like "Jesus the Jew." See, in particular, Geza Vermes's Jesus the Jew: A Historian's Reading of the Gospels (1973; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981)
135. idem, The Religion of Jesus the Jew (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993)
136. idem, The Changing Faces of Jesus (New York: Penguin, 2000)
137. and E. P. Sanders's Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985)
138. and The Historical Figure of Jesus (New York: Penguin, 1993)
139. Freinkel, Reading Shakespeare's Will, 291
140. Richard Halpern, Shakespeare among the Moderns (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997)
141. Lowell Gallagher, Medusa's Gaze: Casuistry and Conscience in the Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). Gallagher is currently working on a new book, "Looking for Lot's Wife: Postmodern Itineraries of a Biblical Figure," a study that explores the relationship of current ethical thinking to our constructions of both the past and the future, the conflict between a "hermeneutics of suspicion" and the need for ethical action, the contradiction between the "radical contingency" of a figure such as Lot's wife and its transhistorical function as a catalyst for thinking about trauma, the possibilities of knowledge, and the problem of "alterity."
142. Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 35
143. Beckwith, "Greenblatt's Hamlet," 267, remarks: "Purgatory stands in for the past in this book, but it also stands in for religion itself, a religion that is at once a fiction and organized through the medium of fiction." She sees in Greenblatt's skeptical, rationalistic stance a "profound functionalism" (269)
144. Greenblatt alludes briefly to Derrida and Specters of Marx, saying only that the philosopher "has many acute observations about the functioning of the Ghost in Shakespeare's play" (Hamlet in Purgatory, 297 n. 17)
145. The last lines of Specters of Marx, 176. One might usefully compare Derrida's concluding citation with the last lines of Hamlet in Purgatory, where Greenblatt returns to a characteristic gesture of transforming "religion" into "theater": "He is not, of course, crying out from Purgatory; he is speaking from the stage. And in place of prayers, we offer the actor's ticket to bliss: applause" (261)