In his introduction, Timothy Rosendale focuses on free will and unfree will, discussing Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and A Midsummer Night's Dream, along with Milton's Paradise Lost. He raises a crucial question: “What can I do?” This question can be read actively—what course of action can I take now?—or passively—what, after all, could I possibly ever do? Rosendale then links these two senses of the question to the difficult relationship of grace and predestination, as he presents cogent accounts of the treatment of human agency in ancient and early modern literature and thought, with examples ranging from the Bible to Sophocles, to Augustine, Aquinas, Hume, and Hamlet. Rosendale organizes the rest of the book into a history of agency in Christian thought, with examples of the conflicts over agency playing out in Marlowe, revenge tragedy (Thomas Kyd, Shakespeare, and John Ford), George Herbert and John Donne, and John Milton.

The first chapter starts by considering the biblical debate between Paul and James over the relative values of faith and works for salvation, noting that “even outside the Pauline writings, the Bible seems to declare quite clearly that all meaningful saving agency is in the hands of God” (33). However, as Rosendale argues, “there is an equally prevalent strand of biblical discourse that seems to teach precisely the attainability of human righteousness” (34). Rosendale suggests a fundamental incommensurability at the root of the debate before moving on to Augustine and Pelagius on the possibility of free will. Pelagius argues for the necessity of human cooperation with the divine will (and thus for a form of free will), while Augustine argues for a view of human will as entirely enslaved to sin. Rosendale traces, through Aquinas, the way seemingly defeated Pelagian arguments never really disappeared. As Rosendale notes, if “Augustine gives us a picture of humanity as we fear we are, Pelagius offers us a portrait … of what we hope we are” (49). Rosendale then moves on to the early modern versions of the Augustinian argument, the debates between Luther and Erasmus, and Calvin and the anti-Calvinists of the sixteenth century.

In his second chapter, Rosendale turns to Christopher Marlowe, identifying the great pleasure of experiencing characters like Barabas, Tamburlaine, and Faustus as “the thrill of following a single, vital, spectacularly solipsistic human will” (80). Rosendale suggests that arguments reading Doctor Faustus “as a direct critique of soteriological determinism” (85), never really demonstrate their case: “virtually all of the evidence in the play that is typically taken to indicate determinism is arguably suspect” (86). For Rosendale, Marlowe's play “is not a tragedy of fate, but of choice” (92), in which “God has not excluded [Faustus]; [Faustus] has excluded God” (94).

In his third chapter, Rosendale argues that revenge tragedy demonstrates “the problematic conditions, limitations, and responsibilities of human action” (109). Rosendale reads Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy as a conflict between a “Christian and providentialist understanding” and a “bloody, activist and materialist impulse” (111), illustrating Elizabethan “conflicts regarding the wrongness of private revenge” (114). Rosendale sees Hamlet as being “about the … implications of willed action” (127). This perspective leads to a consideration of Hamlet's “will” as expressed in his first soliloquy; his use of the play within the play; and his speech to Horatio on “will” and “divinity” just before his final revenge, which Rosendale characterizes as a usurping of “the absolute prerogative of God” (136). The most valuable point in this section may well be the recovery of an “older, explicitly religious reading” of the play, against the plethora of modern readings which see Hamlet as a “fragmented,” or “decentered” or “alienated” and even “poststructuralist” character (142). In contrast, Rosendale reads Giovanni, from Ford's ’ Tis Pity She's a Whore, as an anti-Hamlet, almost Faustian in his insistence on his own will and desires. Giovanni “operates in the context of the divinity he explicitly denies” (146), and Hamlet's problem is that he “lacks … a confident belief in the proper relation of human and divine agency” (147).

In his fourth chapter, Rosendale argues that George Herbert “suggests … that productive human volition is almost entirely generated … by God's sovereign will” (148) before returning to a discussion of Luther and Calvin. Rosendale then argues that John Donne's poetry often “reserves the option of soteriological self-fashioning” (162), and displays a “mistrust of grace” while asking powerful “questions regarding the justice and even goodness of God” (163). Rosendale ends by noting Donne's own comparison, in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, of himself to the biblical character Job (183).

In his final chapter, on Milton, Rosendale maintains that “the God of Christianity and the Bible is fundamentally understood as being uniquely eternal, omnipotent, and purely and infinitely good” (185), before turning to a discussion of Milton's Paradise Lost colored by that problematic argument (understanding that when, where, and by whom are only the first of the questions one might raise). In this discussion, Rosendale's critical leanings become most evident. He does excellent interpretive work on Satan and his relations to and self-negotiations over will and agency (204–14). Before that, however, Rosendale surveys the frequently covered territory of the arguments over the poem. Rosendale describes Stanley Fish's take on the poem as “monomoniacal” but also “truer to the poem and … less interpretively arrogant or violent than … . Empson, Shelley, or Blake” (198). In that line, an academic critic describes the take of poets on a poem (Empson was a poet as well as a critic) as “interpretively arrogant.” While there is much valuable work here, that moment in the long-developed argument gives me pause. How might that view color the treatments of poetry in the rest of the book? Nonetheless, Theology and Agency in Early Modern Literature has much to recommend it, perhaps more specifically for its work on intellectual history than for its readings of the literature itself.