What do historians and literary scholars have to say to each other? All too often, literary scholars use arguments and data by historians as though these were unproblematic, and vice versa. The other discipline provides the deceptively solid ground upon which we perform our admirably subtle interrogations of just such solidity. Just as often, we find ourselves disappointed with scholars who profess one discipline yet foray into the other, as in a panel I heard in the 1980s by Stephen Greenblatt and Natalie Zeman Davis, in which Davis donned the hat of a literary scholar and Greenblatt, that of a historian, neither with much success, even though their work is so closely allied methodologically. Peter Lake's mammoth new book does not make the mistake of trying to be literary criticism: he states clearly that insofar as he treats work that is traditionally labeled “literature,” he is writing as a historian, and with a historian's goals. Specifically, he is interested in complicating “revisionist” history's account of a number of post-Reformation dichotomies “between the godly and Grub Street, hot protestantism and the people” (p. xiv). He describes it as “an exercise in what one might term the old cultural history with the politics left in” (p. xxxi). What was the relation between popular, sensationalist pamphleteering and the drama, between the scripted performances of gallows confession and, say, the confessional impulse in Shakespeare? After exploring many fascinating byways, the study culminates in a reading of Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure as “theatrical anti-puritanism at its point of highest development and sophistication” (p. xxxii). What follows is written by a literary scholar and will therefore be methodologically limited in the ways already alluded to. Lake's book is immersed in popular literature and its relevance to the study of history, but, it seems fair to ask, what does his book offer to students of literature?

The first answer to that question is data, reams of it, in a densely printed book of nearly eight hundred pages that offers lavish excerpts from Elizabethan murder pamphlets full of salacious details about the crimes and their punishment; much new information about the rich prison culture of the period, which was sometimes controlled by the Catholic recusants who constituted a large part of the prison population; detailed accounts of Protestant and Catholic versions of a “good death” by execution and the connection of both with sermon literature, carnival, and theater; a juicily specific discussion of “godly” antitheatrical pamphlets, the Marprelate tracts, and their close ties with the theater itself.

For scholars with long immersion in the period, many of the popular materials will be familiar, but Lake's account often offers illuminating juxtapositions. He reads Hamlet and Macbeth as “murder pamphlets” in the same way that Arden of Faversham and The Witch of Edmonton are. The latter plays actually began their lives as “Grub Street” accounts of current events, but all four air similar conventions of providential belief: in a “sympathetic magic” by which the victim's blood cries out against the murderer; in omens and natural signs triggered by the unnatural act; in the gradual, inexorable workings of conscience in the murderer. Then too, the discussion of prison culture as the “ideological nerve center” of contemporary Catholicism (p. 205), a portion of the book written jointly by Peter Lake and Michael Questier, offers an illuminating context for any number of works of canonical literature, among them Measure for Measure. Winchester jail in the 1590s, for example, was a protective haven for Catholic ritual, with “altars vestments, candles, and liturgical and polemical books” that were banned in the world outside (p. 196); this is a suggestive link with the pervasive early modern literary pattern associating vestiges of the “old religion” with confinement and/or protected inner spaces.

In dealing with the thematically and structurally interrelated cultural forms of popular pamphlets, public executions, hortatory sermons, and plays, Lake repeatedly confronts the timeworn problem of subversion versus containment, at some points falling into the familiar outmoded binaries. He critiques the standard feminist reading that links cultural depictions of disorder with the actions of masterless women by pointing out that uncontrolled men have a similar impact within the pamphlet literature, but he sees the chief issue in both cases as “misrule” that needs to be redressed by a return to patriarchal order. That is certainly a prominent set of terms within which the pamphlets themselves operated, but do we necessarily have to accept their terms? Doing so leads him to more orthodox readings than the equivocal evidence of plays and pamphlets would frequently allow.

At other points in the discussion, such as Lake's account of the “theater” of public execution, he offers a suppler and more convincing account of the variety of effects achieved by cultural performance. How are we to understand the mingled moral horror and sadistic delight that underlies public response to execution—in terms of James Sharpe's Foucaultian emphasis on the display of the power of the state or in terms of Thomas Laqueur's more Bakhtinian insistence on carnivalesque celebration “left largely unscripted by the state” (p. 229)? Lake insists that we need to mediate between these opposed readings and recognize the “multivocality” and inherent instability of these occasions, which, although they may have been staged by the state, could be appropriated by dissident groups (like the Jesuits) for their own ends or shatter during their enactment into competing agendas “that no one group could hope entirely to dominate or control” (p. 239).

This flexible paradigm accords well with recent work in the field of early modern literary and cultural studies, which similarly tends to eschew overarching models in favor of more localized, specific analyses of the dynamics of power and agency. One of the great strengths of Lake's book is that it offers many different templates for just such remodeling as practiced by a leading historian. Yet, the book is long on detail and short on theory, to which Lake disarmingly admits he is “largely allergic” (p. xix). It is often difficult to follow the trail of an argument through the thick forests of evidence: much of the book has the feel of an early draft, in which the overarching argument is still underdeveloped and there is much backtracking and repetition. Some, not all, of the chapters have final sections labeled “Conclusion,” but these do not always serve as clear indicators of the stage of the argument that has been reached.

The “Conclusion” to chapter 8 begins, tellingly, “What, then, are we to make of all this?” (p. 308), and that “Conclusion” is immediately followed by a separate “Conclusion to Sections I and II” (covering roughly the first three hundred pages of the book) that desperately tries to pull its diverse materials together. Lake points out that he has illustrated “a number of openings and potential points of contact between perfect protestantism and attitudes and beliefs circulating among the people” (p. 315) and goes on to specify ways in which his evidence challenges previous interpretations by Christopher Haight, Alex Walsham, and Ian Green, among others. But the methodological questions need to shape the discussion from the outset. Similarly, the book ends in seeming afterthought—an “Afterword” about George Whetstone designed to underline Lake's emphasis on “a certain cultural and religious indeterminacy and instability” (p. 713)—but the afterthought should have been incorporated into the introduction, where Whetstone makes his first appearance. My desire for more narrative control on the part of the author may be symptomatic of my unfamiliarity as a literary scholar with some of the historiographical issues that drive the argument. Never having adopted the point of view of a revisionist historian, and having learned much from the likes of Christopher Hill and Patrick Collinson, I never doubted that Protestantism, like Catholicism, had to be closely in touch with at least some strands of “attitudes and beliefs circulating among the people” in order to have the enduring success it did. But I suspect that even historians for whom Lake's evidence carries a great deal of argumentative weight will be impatient with the belatedness of many of his conclusions. What could Yale University Press have been thinking? The book, for all its richness, needed careful pruning and editing, which, if not provided by the author, should have been the responsibility of the press.

There are other ways in which The Antichrist's Lewd Hat will prove disappointing to scholars on the literary side of our disciplinary divide. Lake is largely oblivious to literary intertextualities, particularly scriptural commonplaces that can often be seen underlying what he portrays as odd repetitions among his pamphlet texts: the idea of blood crying out for vengeance comes from the murder of Abel in Genesis; the reference to Satan roaring up and down like a lion for his prey is also biblical. Similarly, the temptation and death scenes from the pamphlets he discusses at length are often closely related to similar moments in Puritan autobiographies, which he oddly leaves out of the picture. Another sore point will be his failure to make use of any but the most recent and prominent works of literary interpretation. His discussion of the symbiotic relationship in pamphlets and plays between female “misrule” and male weakness would have benefited from a knowledge of Rebecca Bushnell's work on tyranny, which points out that the tyrant—and by extension the domestic tyrant—is characterized by a weakness that makes him incapable of governing his impulses. Lake's discussion of Bartholomew Fair is one of the capstones of the book, but it largely repeats, without citing, the work of literary scholars from the 1980s and 1990s, along with the work of Patrick Collinson, which he does acknowledge.

The final chapter (chap. 15), a discussion of Measure for Measure, is more successful in that it manages to bring together a number of themes from earlier chapters—the emphasis on sin, conversion, and a “good death” in contemporary murder pamphlets; Catholic work in the prisons; the problems and ambiguities attendant upon Puritan reform—while simultaneously saying pointed and important things about the play itself. Lake offers a reading of Measure for Measure as yet another sensationalist pamphlet—this one about the spectacular unmasking of a hypocritical Puritan judge named Angelo. But he overlays that predictable reading with another that shows how the play refuses to model cherished Jacobean beliefs about the “proper interconnection and collaboration between the secular and spiritual authorities of minister and magistrate” (p. 684). The duke's pardon of Barnardine is a “crucial defeat for the standard murder-pamphlet narrative” (p. 685), and the play as a whole, with its equivocal denouement, is a challenge to “central claims and arguments taken from James's own discussions of the nature of true Christian kingship” (p. 689). In the chapter's conclusion, titled “The Historian's Excuse,” Lake reiterates that his analysis of the play is not meant to elucidate “Shakespeare” or enhance our aesthetic appreciation of it but rather to mine the play for contemporary attitudes about predestination and reform, puritanism, and absolutism. Despite Lake's strangely limited view of what literary scholars do, his discussion is invaluable in that it provides a model for dealing with colliding discourses within a work of literature that refuse to cohere. He elaborates possible contemporary readings, then sets them off against each other in a way that is enlightening precisely because of its lack of pretty resolution—which may be another way of saying that Measure for Measure is indeed a problem play. In Lake's reading it becomes an interrogation of “royal platitudes and contemporary commonplaces” that creates “rhetorically … conditioned assemblages and syntheses” that can be described in lapidary detail but are “far from stable or coherent” as they jostle against each other and compete for dominance (p. 693). This is heady stuff, and a model for what literary historicists right now want to be doing themselves. If Peter Lake's book requires an outrageous amount of effort on the part of readers who may struggle to make their way through its densely packed pages, it also provides, at its best, ample rewards in terms of a supple, labile methodology for dealing in a historically responsible way with the complexity of cultural dissonance and ambiguity.