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1	Stage Witches During the Reign of King James I, 1603-1625 Verges, Linda Kay 01 1900 (has links) A re-evaluation of the king's writings combined with a detailed study of these Jacobean plays provides sufficient evidence to support the main contentions of this thesis. First, it presents the proposition that the interest of James in witches and witchcraft has been misjudged and frequently either maligned or disregarded. Second, it demonstrates that the king's views on witchcraft comprise a philosophy which is consistent with the balance of his political and religious thought and action. Third, it develops the idea that certain reflections of the king's interest in witchcraft are significantly evident in specific plays written during his reign. stage witches Jacobean plays King James I witchcraft
2	Agnostos Dei: staging Catholicism and the anti-sectarian aesthetic in early-Stuart England Doyle, Kerry Delaney 01 December 2013 (has links) My dissertation, Agnostos Dei: Staging Catholicism and the Anti-Sectarian Aesthetic in Early-Stuart England, traces over four chapters the emergence of a literary counter-aesthetic to the increasingly violent sectarianism of Post-Reformation England. I focus primarily on popular plays that dramatize the destabilizing effects of radical beliefs on a society, whether small town or royal court, culminating in blood and exile. I argue that the plays' destructive conflicts and redemptive moments suggest the potential worth of cross-sectarian belief and ritual. In doing so, John Fletcher's The Faithfull Shepherdess (1608), William Shakespeare and John Fletcher's Henry VIII (1613), Dekker, Ford, and Rowley's The Witch of Edmonton (1621), and John Ford's `Tis Pity She's a Whore (1629) participate in an aesthetic that rejects the disunity promoted by radical sectarians and revises the rhetoric of English Protestantism. Kings James and Charles promoted, ultimately unsuccessfully, a via media (middle way) for the Church of England, seeking reunification of divergent Christian sects. At the same time, these works used the theatre as a space of free play to consider the possibility of ecumenical success in fictionalized worlds removed from the clashing rhetoric of real kings and clergy. My project responds to the revitalized return to religion in the scholarship of early modern England, which has included a renewed interest in the English Catholic experience and a reconsideration of the variety of believers within the nation, loosely grouped into categories like Puritans and High Church Anglicans. My work presents a correlative- and counter-narrative to these well-established readings. I consider the historical and literary analogues of the plays and the contemporary religiopolitical realities of the times of their staging. Rather than attempting to discover crypto-sectarian messages in the tales or intentions of the playwrights behind them, I argue that such categorizations can reduce and obscure the broader, ecumenical implications of these works. In speaking to a range of sectarian audiences, these playwrights exceed the limitations of clear affiliation to address a wider Christian possibility. early modern ecumenicalism England King James I Post-Reformation theater English Language and Literature
3	Political Atheism vs. The Divine Right of Kings: Understanding 'The Fairy of the Lake' (1801) Post, Andy 30 April 2014 (has links) In 'Political Atheism vs. The Divine Right of Kings,' I build on Thompson and Scrivener’s work analysing John Thelwall’s play 'The Fairy of the Lake' as a political allegory, arguing all religious symbolism in 'FL' to advance the traditionally Revolutionary thesis that “the King is not a God.” My first chapter contextualises Thelwall’s revival of 17th century radicalism during the French Revolution and its failure. My second chapter examines how Thelwall’s use of fire as a symbol discrediting the Saxons’ pagan notion of divine monarchy, also emphasises the idolatrous apotheosis of King Arthur. My third chapter deconstructs the Fairy of the Lake’s water and characterisation, and concludes her sole purpose to be to justify a Revolution beyond moral reproach. My fourth chapter traces how beer satirises Communion wine, among both pagans and Christians, in order to undermine any religion that could reinforce either divinity or the Divine Right of Kings. / A close reading of an all-but-forgotten Arthurian play as an allegory against the Divine Right of Kings. John Thelwall (1764-1834) Romanticism Romantic literature Romantic poetry Romantic nationalism Romantic medievalism Romantic antequarianism Saxon antequarianism Norse/Viking antequarianism Celtic antequarianism Whig history Jacobinism political allegory closet drama Early Modern Christianity Church of England Anglicanism Loyalism Germanic paganism Anglo-Saxon England Britain Wales French Revolution Glorious Revolution English Civil War King James I &VI John Milton Algernon Sidney Samuel Taylor Coleridge William Wordsworth Robert Southey Edmund Burke Simon Cottle Torquato Tasso Edda Northern Antiquities King Arthur Arthurian Sir Walter Scott Classical republicanism republicanism radicalism anti-monarchism fire water beer cwrw wassail Eucharist Communion Gothic Divine Right of Kings Political atheism Judith Thompson Michael Scrivener

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