Changing everything: Religious conversion and the limits of individual subjectivity in early modern English drama

We cannot understand early modern drama's fascination with individual human subjectivity without considering plays in relation to the conversion experiences that characterize the English Reformation. Tensions surrounding Catholic and Protestant polemical writers' attempts to make their readers convert are reflected and interrogated in drama. Presenting conversion on stage enables playwrights both to create the illusion of subjectivity in their characters and to explore questions surrounding conceptions of individual identity. As such, this dissertation's study of ways that ideas about conversion existing in polemic intersect with those presented in plays tells us a great deal about the ways early modern individuals might understand themselves. The first chapter argues that the problematic ending of Shakespeare's All's Well that Ends Well represents on stage conflicting rhetoric within religious polemic. Such texts imagine the individual subject both as something that could be understood and changed by other people and as something unknowable to anyone but God. Bertram's opacity as a potential but untested convert makes a dramatic point out of these different definitions of subjectivity.; As the second chapter argues, conversions triggered by positive examples in Shakespeare's Pericles, Heywood's Fair Maid of the West, and Dekker's Honest Whore not only reflect a common trope in polemic but also expose the arguments presented by religious texts as overly simple. These plays present the ability of an individual to trigger conversions as limited by his or her gender, nationality, and class as well as his or her inherent virtue. In this way, the playwrights demonstrate that the early modern period possessed both interior and relational definitions of subjectivity.; The final chapter explores the culture's attempts to resolve tensions between these types of definitions in its uses of the discourse of martyrology. As Marlowe's Jew of Malta ridicules the idea of martyrdom, Cary's Tragedy of Mariam exposes the radical potential of even female martyrs, and Massinger and Dekker's The Virgin Martyr attempts to tame the tropes of martyrology for ecumenical purposes, all of these playwrights wrestle with the implications of martyrs for the early modern period's sense of what it meant to be an individual subject.