Playing God's chosen: Protestants, Jews, and sixteenth-century drama.
Item
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Title
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Playing God's chosen: Protestants, Jews, and sixteenth-century drama.
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Identifier
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AAI3103130
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identifier
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3103130
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Creator
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Kwalbrun, Lara.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Richard McCoy
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Date
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2003
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, English | History, European | Religion, Biblical Studies | Theater
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Abstract
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As protestantism takes hold amongst the English populace in the sixteenth-century, increased focus on bible-reading and specifically the Old Testament, the literal hermeneutic, and the idea of God's covenant with a specific nation originating with Israel, converge to create a new cultural identification with the Jewish nation which departs significantly from late medieval anti-Semitic thought. In plays, sermons, poetry, travel narratives, and religious texts this identification is often made manifest through parallels of England and Israel's history and spiritual status, yet is problematized by the history of sin and subsequent exile with which God punished the Jews. Canonical texts such as Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, non-canonical drama, and cultural documents are re-examined along the lines of election affiliation and the more nuanced ideologies that result from protestants' ambivalent identification. The significance of biblical hermeneutics in an age where biblical figures and the history of God's paradigmatic chosen nation captured the imagination on stage and from the pulpit cannot be underestimated in determining not only ideas about England's national and individual election, but about contemporary Jews as well. The question comes to a climax in 1656 at the Whitehall Conference where Oliver Cromwell and his committee meet to determine the question of the readmission of the Jews to England. It is here, in the documented proceedings, and in the voice of Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel that the ideologies and images of the medieval past confront the identification (sometimes philo-semitism) produced by protestant hermeneutics.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
