Blood Running Down

Helen Cooper

The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theatre in Early Modern England by Michael O'Connell
Oxford, 198 pp, £30.00, February 2000, ISBN 0 19 513205 X

In 1644, the Puritan cleric John Shaw journeyed up to Westmorland to instruct the local people, who, he had been told, were sadly lacking in knowledge of the Bible. The need was confirmed when he interrogated an old man whose long life in the wake of the Reformation seemed to have left him entirely ignorant of all matters theological and ecclesiastical. When pressed as to whether he knew anything about salvation through Jesus Christ, the old man eventually recalled that he had once seen a play ‘where there was a man on a tree, and blood ran down’.

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Vol. 23 No. 15 · 9 August 2001 » Helen Cooper » Blood Running Down (print version)
Pages 13-14 | 3116 words

Letters

From John Coles

Helen Cooper (LRB, 9 August) suggests that we have inherited 'the alphabetical index … and buttons' from the Middle Ages. A better dating for buttons would be the Middle Bronze Age, or even earlier (say, 2500 bc), to judge by the evidence from a number of prehistoric burials where clothing perished but stone, jet and bone buttons survived.

John Coles
Thorverton, Devon

From Richard Andrews

In her review of Michael O'Connell's The Idolatrous Eye (LRB, 9 August), Helen Cooper gives an account of the qualities of embodiment which English Renaissance drama inherited from its pre-humanist antecedents. Italian humanists were determined to create a new classical drama, based on rules inherited (or invented) from ancient theory and example: what we think of as medieval theatre practices were seen as lacking in cultural correctness and social prestige. French classical drama, in its turn, followed the new style to the letter: English and Spanish actors and dramatists were more stubborn about retaining what they thought was useful from previous forms of theatre. But feelings of discomfort with theatre were not peculiar to Puritan or even Protestant cultures: there were writers just as fanatically opposed to theatre in Counter-Reformation France and Italy. This phenomenon cannot be explained by a Protestant-Catholic conflict, nor can it be approached through a study of English culture alone.

Richard Andrews
University of Leeds