Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of New South Wales, 1999. / Also available online.

This thesis examines the ways in which Ulster Protestant identity has been explored in contemporary Northern Irish drama. The insecurity of the political and cultural status of Ulster Protestants from the Home Rule Crises up until Partition led to the construction and maintenance of a distinct and unified Ulster Protestant identity. This identity was defined by concepts such as loyalty, industriousness and ???Britishness???. It was also defined by a perceived opposite ??? the Catholicism, disloyalty and ???Irishness??? of the Republic. When the Orange State began to fragment in the late 1960s and early 1970s, so did notions of this singular Ulster Protestant identity. With the onset of the Troubles in 1969 came a parallel questioning and subversion of this identity in Northern Irish drama. This was a process which started with Sam Thompson???s Over the Bridge in 1960, but which began in earnest with Stewart Parker???s Spokesong in 1975. This thesis examines Parker???s approach and subsequent approaches by other dramatists to the question of Ulster Protestant identity. It begins with the antithetical pronouncements of Field Day Theatre Company, which were based in an inherently Northern Nationalist ideology. Here, the Ulster Protestant community was largely ignored or essentialised. Against this Northern Nationalist ideology represented by Field Day have come broadly revisionist approaches, reflecting the broader cultural context of this thesis. Ulster Protestant identity has been explored through issues of history and myth, ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality. More recent explorations of Ulster Protestantism have also added to this diversity by presenting the little acknowledged viewpoint of extreme loyalism. Dramatists examined in this thesis include Stewart Parker, Christina Reid, Frank McGuinness, Bill Morrison, Ron Hutchinson, Marie Jones, Graham Reid, Robin Glendinning and Gary Mitchell. The work of Charabanc Theatre Company is also discussed. What results from their efforts is a diverse and complex Ulster Protestant community. This thesis argues that the concept of a singular Ulster Protestant identity, defined by its loyalty and Britishness, is fragmented, leading to a plurality of Ulster Protestant identities.

This thesis examines the ways in which Ulster Protestant identity has been explored in contemporary Northern Irish drama. The insecurity of the political and cultural status of Ulster Protestants from the Home Rule Crises up until Partition led to the construction and maintenance of a distinct and unified Ulster Protestant identity. This identity was defined by concepts such as loyalty, industriousness and ???Britishness???. It was also defined by a perceived opposite ??? the Catholicism, disloyalty and ???Irishness??? of the Republic. When the Orange State began to fragment in the late 1960s and early 1970s, so did notions of this singular Ulster Protestant identity. With the onset of the Troubles in 1969 came a parallel questioning and subversion of this identity in Northern Irish drama. This was a process which started with Sam Thompson???s Over the Bridge in 1960, but which began in earnest with Stewart Parker???s Spokesong in 1975. This thesis examines Parker???s approach and subsequent approaches by other dramatists to the question of Ulster Protestant identity. It begins with the antithetical pronouncements of Field Day Theatre Company, which were based in an inherently Northern Nationalist ideology. Here, the Ulster Protestant community was largely ignored or essentialised. Against this Northern Nationalist ideology represented by Field Day have come broadly revisionist approaches, reflecting the broader cultural context of this thesis. Ulster Protestant identity has been explored through issues of history and myth, ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality. More recent explorations of Ulster Protestantism have also added to this diversity by presenting the little acknowledged viewpoint of extreme loyalism. Dramatists examined in this thesis include Stewart Parker, Christina Reid, Frank McGuinness, Bill Morrison, Ron Hutchinson, Marie Jones, Graham Reid, Robin Glendinning and Gary Mitchell. The work of Charabanc Theatre Company is also discussed. What results from their efforts is a diverse and complex Ulster Protestant community. This thesis argues that the concept of a singular Ulster Protestant identity, defined by its loyalty and Britishness, is fragmented, leading to a plurality of Ulster Protestant identities.

The study inquires into the dynamic relationship between Protestantism and culture in The Faerie Oueene. The American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr makes penetrating analyses of the relationship between man's cultural potentials and the insights of Protestant Christianity which greatly illuminate how Spenser searches for a comprehensive religious, ethical, political, and social vision for the Christian community of Protestant England. But Spenser maintains the tension between culture and Christianity to the end, refusing to offer a merely coherent system of principles based on the doctrine of Christianity.

This study revises a dominant narrative of the eighteenth-century, in which a secular modernity emerges in opposition to religious belief. It argues that a major challenge for writers such as Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe, and for English subjects generally, was to grasp the object world--including the modern technological object--in terms of its spiritual potential. I identify disputes around the liturgy and common prayer as a source of a folk psychology concerning mental habits conditioned by everyday interactions with devotional and cultural objects. Swift and Defoe therefore confront even paradigmatically modern forms (from trade items to scientific techniques) as a spiritual ecology, a network of new possibilities for practical piety and familiar forms of mental-spiritual illness. Texts like A Tale of a tub (1704) and Robinson Crusoe (1719) renew Reformation ideals for the laity by evaluating technologies for governing a nation of souls. Swift and Defoe's Protestantism thus appears as an active guide to understanding emotions and new experience rather than a static body of doctrine. Current historiography neglects the early modern sense that sectarian objects and rituals not only discipline religious subjects, but also provoke ambivalence and anxiety: Swift's Tale diagnoses Catholic knavery and Puritan hypocrisy as neurotic attempts to extract pleasure from immiserating styles of material praxis. Crusoe, addressed to more radical believers in spaces of trade, sees competent spiritual, scientific and commercial practice on the same plane, as techniques for overcoming fetishistic desires. Swift's orthodoxy of enforced moderation and Defoe's oddly worldly piety represent likeminded formulae for psychic reform, and not--as often alleged--conflicts between sincere belief and political or commercial interests. Gulliver's travels (1726) and A Journal of the plague year (1722) also link mind and governance through different visions of Protestant polity. Swift sees alienation from the national church--figured by a Crusoe or Gulliver--as refusal of common sense and problem solving. Defoe points to religious schism, exemplified by dissenters' exclusion from state church statistics, as a moral and medical failure: the city risks creating selfish citizens who also may overlook data needed to combat the plague. / text

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The Protestant community is articulated through liturgy, history, and drama. Liturgy teaches communal bonds and scripts their enactment, while narrative and dramatic depictions of the collective past appeal to the imagination of readers and viewers. Liturgy and literature are joined by the participation they invite, which engages parishioners, readers, and audiences with questions of affiliation and collectivity. Lack of attention to the ways Renaissance texts pondered over and produced bonds of commonality has sidetracked us from the communal nature of the period. We need to reevaluate such bonds to better understand how English culture imagined relationships between individual and community, and between people and institutions---including church and theatre. When orthodox writing is treated as doctrine and praxis, and not as a means for political indoctrination, we gain a different understanding of the potential for human relationships, one more generous and reciprocal than the model of coercion that has dominated literary studies. Such reciprocity is found in Church of England liturgy, and in the imaginative space of Foxe's Acts and Monuments, which seeks to forge the Protestant community through an ethics of reading. Imaginative space was also a public space, and Shakespeare's King John and Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris reflect upon religious affiliation in moments of war and atrocity; both plays represent very tangled lines of identification that do not endorse Catholic-Protestant factions but undo them. Religious writing and public theatre explored the precarious balance between community and individual, offering readers and audiences a vehicle for thinking about their own immediate lives and their sense of belonging.

My dissertation focuses on representations of women and ritual on the Renaissance stage, situating such examples within the context of the Protestant Reformation. The renegotiation of the value, place, and power of ritual is a central characteristic of the Protestant Reformation in early modern England. The effort to eliminate or redirect ritual was a crucial point of interest for reformers, for most of whom the corruption of religion seemed bound to its ostentatious and idolatrous outer trappings. Despite the opinions of theologians, however, receptivity toward the structure, routine, and familiarity of traditional Catholicism did not disappear with the advent of Protestantism. Reformers worked to modify those rituals that were especially difficult to eradicate, maintaining some sense of meaning without portraying confidence in ceremony itself. I am interested in how early Protestantism dealt with the presence of elements (in worship, daily practice, literary or dramatic representation) that it derogatorily dubbed popish, and how women had a particular place of importance in this dialogue. Through the drama of Shakespeare, Webster, and Middleton, along with contemporary religious and popular sources, I explore how theatrical representations of ritual involving women create specific sites of cultural and theological negotiation. These representations both reflect and resist emerging attitudes toward women and ritual fashioned by Reformation thought, granting women a particular authority in the spiritual realm.