In the engrossing Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling: Theater in Post-Reformation London, Musa Gurnis, like many before her, presents the early modern theater as the locus of complex religious discourse. However, she rejects the usual approach of seeing plays either as dramatic representations of dominant religious paradigms, or as evidence of the confessional orientation of their authors. Rather, she argues that the playhouse offered a unique venue for writers, performers, and audience members of diverse backgrounds to experience a broad range of alternative ideological and religious perspectives from across England's heterogeneous confessional spectrum. Rarely doctrinally consistent with episcopal orthodoxy, plays in post-Reformation London were often the product of cross-confessional collaborations, authors whose varied and sometimes conflicting religious identities mirrored a similar diversity in the audience members they sought to entertain. The theater, Gurnis argues, did not merely reflect the religious culture of early modern England, but in offering a venue to reckon with the discursive messiness of post-Reformation doctrinal contradictions helped to shape it.

In her first chapter, Gurnis convincingly demolishes the notion that theatergoers in early modern England were primarily conforming Church of England Protestants, or that they would be particularly inclined to consume dramatic works that regurgitated mainstream orthodoxies. Rather, the early modern audience consisted of a diverse cross-section of England's polyvocal religious culture. Old clichés about theater-hating Puritans, for example, are complicated by evidence that “hot Protestants” formed a significant part of the theatergoing public; anti-theatrical polemic, meanwhile, could come from conforming ceremonial episcopal clergymen like Stephen Gosson as well as the godly (20). As evidence of the confessional diversity she asserts, Gurnis highlights the religious identities of several individuals known to frequent the theater, from the Puritan preacher Richard Madox to the recusant Catholic priest Thomas Lecke, along with “conforming” proto-Anglicans of various stripes and other more religiously marginal identities. While Gurnis risks succumbing to anecdotal fallacy in this chapter, her numerous examples effectively reinforce her claim that the commercial theater was a “mixed-faith” culture that brought “different confessional perspectives together cheek by jowl” (36).

Chapter 2 builds on its predecessor by examining the complex ways in which such mixed-faith audiences responded to and interacted with plays that frequently failed to align with their individual beliefs. Contra the rigidity we tend to associate with early modern religious conflict, Gurnis argues that playgoers could be highly adaptable for the space of time they spent watching plays. The theater provided audience members opportunities to imaginatively engage with “religious counter-factuals” or to flirt with the veracity of “subjectivities far removed from their own identity positions” in a way often not possible in other contexts (39). Gurnis explains this flexibility as a consequence of the material circumstances of theatrical production itself. Effectively rebutting critics who analyze the experiences of early modern audiences strictly through the lens of extra-theatrical cultural or ideological frameworks, Gurnis focuses instead on stagecraft, acting, and all the associated material components of theatrical production that collectively grant audiences access to otherwise unfamiliar or even oppositional ways of looking at the world. “Plays are not tracts,” booms the subheading of one section (46), a fact that Gurnis underscores at the conclusion of the chapter by examining the ideological fluidity of several “Spanish Match” plays.

Chapter 3, one of the work's strongest, examines the mixed-confessional identities of those who collaborated in theatrical productions: not just the authors who are the usual focus of scholarship, but also the performers, technicians, and even the state censors who contributed to plays’ final, public forms. Half of all plays produced in early modern England were collaborations, Gurnis reminds us, and even those by a single author involved performative contributions from across confessional boundaries. Collaborative authors adapted their habits of style or plotting to better mesh with their literary partners in a “dispersal of authority” (69). The texts they produced were further shaped by performance in ways both subtle (characterization) and overt (improvisation and modification). Out of this cooperative stewpot emerged works whose confessional identity is far more difficult to pin down than scholars would sometimes like to believe, not because individual contributors put their religious feelings aside in making plays, but because the agency of any one individual was mediated by the collaborating voices with which it negotiated, as well as by the market-driven pressures of theatrical form itself. What Gurnis offers in this chapter is a useful check on the tendency of some scholars to read plays as expressions of clear and consistent confessional attitudes. She concludes the chapter with skillful analyses of two plays, Sir John Oldcastle I (1600) and Sir Thomas More (c.1596), which lend textual support to the chapter's premise, the former for the complexity of its representation of Puritan martyrdom (particularly in dialogue with Shakespeare's popular Henry IV plays), and the latter in part for its surprising empathy toward a Catholic of conscience.

The final two chapters of the study are devoted to analysis of two individual plays: Thomas Middleton's A Game at Chess (1624) and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure (1604). Gurnis shines in these chapters as a close reader, clearly at home when presented with opportunities to dig into the nuances of syntax and diction. Her reading of A Game of Chess usefully unpacks the scheming plot within the context of the failed Spanish match between Prince Charles and the Spanish infanta. However, this chapter also at times felt only obliquely related to her overall thesis, as the play's rigidly anti-Catholic normativity puts it somewhat at odds with the confessional fuzziness she highlights throughout the book. Measure for Measure, a play of notoriously opaque and contradictory religious representation, is a far more natural match for the study as a whole. Her reading of Measure for Measure as in part a reflection of predestinarian anxieties about reprobation adds greatly to our understanding of the work.

Overall, Gurnis has provided us with one of the more satisfying and exciting studies of religion and the early modern stage to be released in recent years. Responding to scholarship that too often simplifies confessional orientation and representation, she offers a crucial reminder that, as she herself writes in the epilogue, the early modern stage reflects the “lived contradictions” of this “ideologically restless” world (160).