Performance and Religion in Early Modern England, Matthew Smith's intricate and multilayered account of early modern theatricality, joins a growing body of criticism that examines the influence of medieval and early modern religious culture on post-Reformation theater. Smith examines a wide range of early modern performances, including commercial theater, church liturgies, cycle plays, state spectacles, sermons, ballads, and jigs. Drawing on modern phenomenological theory, he calls attention to the shared theatrical strategies of these different performance types and how they incorporated, informed, and responded to one another. Smith's comparative approach allows him to bring into view an early modern performance culture defined by its interweaving of the theatrical and the religious to demonstrate the ways in which early modern drama self-consciously drew attention to its own theatricality to edify its audiences and animate their faith.

Smith illustrates what he sees as the core theatrical strategy of early modern performance through three examples drawn from a sermon, a coronation procession, and a Shakespearean play. Drawing on recent cultural performativity studies and theories of audience reception, he shows how each of the scenes is intertheatrical—overtly layering one kind of performance within another. Each achieves its performative effect by conspicuously moving its audience through its theatrical layers. For instance, in the case of Twelfth Night, Smith turns to the famous scene in which Viola, disguised as Cesario, woos Olivia of behalf of Duke Orsino. Olivia becomes convinced of Cesario's sincerity only when he abandons his prepared speech to speak earnestly. Yet, Smith observes, the scene simultaneously heightens the audience's awareness that, while Cesario is sincere, Viola (who is pretending to be him) is “only acting,” and that both characters are played by a boy actor. For Smith, the audience's perception of Cesario's authenticity—and the power of early modern theater more generally—resides in the anamorphic effect of being moved in and out of these theatrical layers.

One of Smith's central claims is that post-Reformation drama relied upon religious habits of mind that had their roots in the medieval sacramental and ritual practices, a claim he grounds in readings of theological and devotional texts written across the Reformation. He establishes this argument via a discussion of the Chester cycle—a Tudor adaptation of a medieval dramatic form associated with the Feast of Corpus Christi—in relation to medieval theologies of perception. Smith contends that whereas Catholic Eucharistic liturgy called upon celebrants to “see” Christ's real presence in the “accidents” of bread and wine, the post-Reformation Chester cycle foregrounded divine absence by conspicuously focusing on the human labor that produced it. Smith's engagement of trans-Reformational ideas and practices provides a sophisticated new understanding of how the post-Reformation Chester cycle transformed medieval forms of devotion; however, his characterization of medieval sacramentality sometimes gave me pause. Given his discussion of sacral (in)visibility, I wanted a stronger account of the rich engagement in medieval writing with divine absence on the one hand and the performative work of sacramental ritual—where sacraments “effect what they signify”—on the other.

Smith's reading of the Chester cycle lays the groundwork for one of the book's most compelling arguments. He claims that post-Reformation drama does not simply replace Catholic sacramentalism with Protestant iconoclasm; instead, it exhibits a strikingly “open acknowledgement of the theatricality of belief” (185), which, he submits, serves not to undermine faith but to excite it. Turning to Shakespeare's Henry V, a play often associated with Protestant iconoclasm and anti-ceremonialism, Smith notes that a prominent strain of criticism identifies Henry—with his disavowal of “idol ceremony” (4.1.237)—as an ideal of Protestant kingship. He suggests that while Shakespeare's play gives voice to contemporary concerns about the artificiality and duplicity of ceremony, it also demonstrates the dependence of both monarchy and theater upon it. By moving its audience through immanent and symbolic ways of seeing, he suggests, the play continually draws attention to its own theatricality, ultimately sanctioning both theater and ceremony's performative power.

Much of the strength of this argument lies in Smith's insightful accounts of how the events he describes marshalled the immediate conditions of their performance to shape audience engagement. This strength is illustrated in his chapters on John Donne's sermons and “godly” ballads that show how those forms harnessed the environmental conditions of their viewing to produce instructional and devotional effects. In Smith's account, Donne's sermons, preached outside Saint Paul's Cathedral in London, strategically utilized sermon-goers’ struggle against environmental distraction to listen to God's Word by recasting that struggle as itself act of faith. Likewise, Smith shows how godly ballads, performed amidst the hurly burly of everyday life, strategically deployed their (often denigrated) emotional immediacy and repetition of religious commonplaces in order to present auditors with opportunities to participate in a shared culture of godliness.

Smith closes by focusing on Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, using the play's textual and performance history as means of gauging its contemporary reception. Critics today debate whether Faustus's famous pact with the devil should be read as cautionary tale or subversive commentary; Smith argues that to settle this debate we must attend to the performative effect the play would have had on contemporary audiences. Like Faustus, the audience may be distracted by the devils’ histrionics; however, cast in the role of witness to Faustus's mistakes, the play's audience can see what Faustus cannot. Smith ultimately argues that the play's theatricality does not “belong to the devils” but to the “Protestant community present in its playhouse” (306); however, Marlowe's own reputed atheism troubles Smith's assertion that Faustus is a play aligned with the “cultivation of religious community” (307).

Smith's study makes an important contribution to our understanding of early modern theatricality and its relation to the English Reformation, providing fresh insights into the dramatic texts it considers. His theoretical sophistication and strong grasp of medieval and early modern theology and devotional practices give his account richness and depth. Both graduate students and scholars will benefit from this insightful and provocative, if sometimes dense, account of the integration of theatricality and religion in early modern performance culture.