The Idolatrous Eye : Iconoclasm and Theater in Early-Modern England

by Michael O'Connell

This study argues that the century after the Reformation saw a crisis in the way that Europeans expressed their religious experience. Focusing specifically on how this crisis affected the drama of England, O'Connell shows that Reformation culture was preoccupied with idolatry and that the theater was frequently attacked as idolatrous. This anti-theatricalism notably targeted the traditional cycles of mystery plays--a type of vernacular, popular biblical theater that from a modern perspective would seem ideally suited to advance the Reformation project. The Idolatrous Eye provides a wide perspective on iconoclasm in the sixteenth century, and in so doing, helps us to understand why this biblical theater was found transgressive and what this meant for the secular theater that followed.

208 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Jonathan Gill · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is part of the movement in literary criticism known as "historical phenomenology", and to my mind it may be the most thorough contribution from this movement, with implications for a variety of discourses. The book roughly spans European history from 1100-1600s. What O'Connell charts is a profound shift in consciousness that took place in the religious and aesthetic thought over this period of the time.

The history he tells is the debate over the power of words and the power of the visual. What type of meanings do each allow access to? and which is more fitting to represent the divine? Partly in response to the rise of the Catharist heresy (who held that Jesus did not truly suffer, because God would not appear in flesh; it was just his "likeness", an illusion, that he suffered), the 12th-century church took on a much more incarnational structure of worship and devotion. Christ's body was seen as central to the teachings of Christianity; and the human body and its powers of perception were likewise elevated. This is also the origin of medieval European drama. The mystery and morality plays operated in the desire to represent biblical truth and divine presence onstage. They translated sacramental and incarnational worship into an aesthetic sensibility.

When the "iconoclasts" of the Reformation attacked this style of worship, they reopened the 12th-century debates between image and word. And their polemics were so successful in influencing Renaissance humanism that scholarship today still largely views the Reformation through the very way-of-thinking that the iconoclasts wielded. O'Connell believes this is responsible for the narrative that the medieval church collapsed from its own excesses and superstitions. But he doesn't think we should take Reformation hyperbole at face-value. What he prefers is to view the Reformation's (seemingly-unrelated) attacks upon the images, relics, cult of the saints, liturgy, sacraments, the Real Presence, and religious theater as interconnected in targeting the underlying system of late medieval incarnational worship. Zwingli was the leader, if an leader there was, of this iconoclasm. Calvin meanwhile demonstrated a remarkable synthetic understanding that the ideals of the Reform entailed an undermining of the entire structure of visual and perceptual worship.

The iconoclastic ideology entailed a new literalism toward Scripture, codified in the principle of sola Scriptura. Medieval drama was less concerned with literal fidelity to the words and events of Scripture than it was with "emotional engagement with its patterns of fall and redemption, judgment and salvation, with making present the life of the biblical narrative." In the environment of the 1520s, religious drama could not survive, charged with idolatry, blasphemy, and whorishness. Even when the theater was revived and secularized in the latter half of the 16th century, concerns regarding the idolatry of the image persisted. This is why Reformers criticized Catholics for being theatrical and the theater for being Catholic. Privileging the word and Word to represent the sacred meant downplaying the incarnation as well as the aesthetic and psychological appeal of the image. It also entailed a much more abstract and literal understanding of truth and hermeneutics.

In the final Chapter, O'Connell examines the debate between the word and image in the dramaturgy of Ben Johnson and Shakespeare, respectively. Johnson always had a preference for texts and reading; and thought of his plays as "poems". Shakespeare, O'Connell argues, creates an incarnational and phenomenological mode of theater, one that places emphasis on the embodied image. The late-Medieval focus on the wounded body of Christ has its legacy in Shakespearean tragedy, through Shakespeare's analogical sense of the phenomenological power of the wounded body and the tragedy of death.