Poetry, Desire, and Devotional Performance From Shakespeare to Milton, 1609-1667

Poetry, Desire, and Devotional Performance from Shakespeare to Milton, 1609-1667 documents and analyzes the ways post-Reformation devotional and worship practices inflected early modern English poetic conceptions of erotic desire and intimacy. My study focuses on two specific Reformation religious developments—the official Anglican ceremonialism of the state church and the popular Reformed predestinarianism—each of which enjoyed a widespread following during the roughly sixty years bracketed by the lives of Shakespeare and Milton. While religious historians often treat state-sanctioned worship and popular divinity as contradictory or antagonistic, I demonstrate that both cultural arenas reveal one important commonality: each sought to prioritize the body as the most important means for externally verifying inner devotional affect. Whether sanctioned by the state church or only informally practiced, post-Reformation English devotional practices embodied the seventeenth-century’s deep suspicion of outward signs of inner affect—one that that coexisted with an equally powerful impulse to venerate those very outward markers of grace. In a religious culture that regarded outward performance as devotionally suspect, the body and the senses nevertheless remained vital to the way individuals could outwardly demonstrate and interpret their inward affect. I maintain that outward devotional performance did more than provide the material and external scaffolding by which individuals could conceptualize their relationship with God. Moreover, it provided early modern thinkers and poets with a lexicon and a conceptual apparatus for describing and interpreting devotional intention and access within the context of a wide range of earthly entanglements and fleshly negotiations. Most significantly, the religious developments of the English Reformation informed the way poets conceptualized access within decidedly secular, earthly, and erotic relationships—shaping the way English men and women read and interpreted the impulses and desires of both others and themselves. My project examines the role of the body—desired and desiring—at the crossroads of both erotic and devotional life in the poetry of Shakespeare, Donne, Greville, Herrick, and Milton. In these poems, God, dead wives, standoffish mistresses, exes, whores, homoerotic boy lovers, and even Satan play distinct parts as both antagonists and objects of longing. Within the space of a few decades of the early seventeenth-century century, the absolutism that characterized nearly every aspect of English religious life opened possibilities for thinking about the role of the body in matters both spiritual and secular that emerged not in opposition to, but as a direct result of, the limitations placed on the ways individuals could conceive of and express their most powerful desires. These articulations of devotional longing—whether for earthly lovers or for God—were enabled precisely by the spiritual and psychological constraints posed by the ever tightening restrictions on public worship and prayer.Englis