The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early-Modern England. (Reviews).

Michael O'Connell. The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm & Theater in Early-Modern England

New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. viii + 198 pp. $45. ISBN: 0-19-513205-X.

In The Idolatrous Eye, Michael O'Connell asks why the image caused so much anxiety in sixteenth-century England and why sixteenth-century iconoclasm has been the object of so much attention and interest since the 1980s. Answering the latter question, he notes how the increasing dominance of the cinematic, televised, and digitized image, including web sites inaccessible to text-only browsers, have fostered competition between word and image in our own culture. Like the sixteenth century, we too experience a situation in which "technologies of representation are in a state of transition" (5). In both historic moments, O'Connell argues, the anxiety and power of such competition and replacement can be attributed to a fundamental cognitive shift. In the early sixteenth century, the sign's imperial status was suddenly challenged by a combination of forces, certainly by changes in religious culture, but also by increased literacy rates and the availability of printed books.

Because O'Connell's first interest lies in how iconoclasm manifested itself in the theater, he leads with a chapter that begins by granting the value of Jonas Barish's work on anti- theatricality. But he distinguishes Barish's interest in psychic anxiety about the fluid, protean self' (and Stephen Orgel's related assumption that links anti-theatricality to pathology) from his own interest in shifts in "epistemology and aesthetic values" (17). For O'Connell, the aspect of the theater that made it a locus of this shift had to do with the theater's long term centrality as a cultural institution. In wondering why it was not possible for the post-reformation era -- which successfully revised liturgy, prayer books, and bibles -- to achieve a similarly satisfactory revision of the theater, O'Connell, chronicling the eventual 1570s shut-down of the medieval play cycles, examines documents that express the desire to change the system of representation, and particularly the representation of God. It was the "physical, visual portrayal of the sacred," especially when that included the representation and even enactment of Mary and of Christ, that required change. Doctrinal revision of the cycles, including the elimination of the Virgin Mary and the production of a Protestant version of Christ, ultimately could not save the cycles.

O'Connell's explanation for this wide-scale and continued opposition lies in the effect of literacy and print. In combination, the rise in literacy rates and "the use of the written vernacular in religious discourse "became the engines that drove the development of "a new technology of communication: English prose" (44). Beginning with the Lollards, the emphasis on the vernacular and the opposition to images are virtually inseparable, marking not only religious change, but a change in the degree to which the entire culture would become logocentric. Among the casualties of this epistemological shift was the degree of comfort with and dependence on the representation of the body of Christ in sculpture, painting, and plays; the elevation of the host; and the incarnational experience of being or observing a martyr. According to O'Connell, the rejection of images was not so much a reaction to the excesses and flaws in medieval religious practices as the inevitable result of "a clash between religious systems, one based on an incarnational structure... and the other... on the logocentric assumptions of Renaissance humanism empowered by print culture" (58).

Having laid out this provocative and interesting thesis in the Introduction and first two chapters, O'Connell turns in chapter three to examine the dramatic representation of the body of Christ and its relation to the incarnation, "the enfleshment of God in Christ" (71), a theological idea that manifested itself, for example, in mendicant orders where spiritual practices were formulated to identify with and enact the humanity of Christ. The York cycle expressed this focus on the body of Christ by way of twenty-seven imitation Christs "'preaching, blessing, suffering, judging, all day, on every corner"' (79). One of the most powerful aspects of this imitation involved the extensive representation of the body of Christ being tortured by figures of secular authority and power. Because incarnational theology emphasized the identification of the believer with God, much of the power of the cycle lay in its representing the oneness of each individual body in York with Christ's body, a system of identification that g ave the body of a suffering individual, including martyrs, a powerful moral status. In chapter four, O'Connell surveys the gradual textualization of God's body, as illustrated by the plays of John Bale and Arthur Golding. Curiously, as O'Connell notes, there was a "revival" of biblical theater in the 1590s and again in 1602 in plays using the Old Testament or the Apocrypha and written by Thomas Lodge, Robert Greene, George Peele, Samuel Rowley, William Byrd and others for Philip Henslowe and the Admiral's Men, but he offers no explanation for their sudden reappearance. Noting also a later group of plays -- Anthony Munday's I Sir John Oldcastle and Rowley's When You See Me You Know Me among them -- O'Connell labels these as "Foxian hagiographic plays" and wonders if they represented attempts to woo the different Protestant camps to the theater (113). O'Connell devotes chapter five to Jonson and Shakespeare, contrasting Jonson's humanist sensibility to Shakespeare's ability to assert "the identity of theater as a visual art" (125), his chief example for Jonson being Bartholomew Fair, and for Shakespeare Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, and The Winter's Tale.

In this fine book O'Connell seeks to identify and define large cultural patterns concerning the replacement of the image by the word that emerged and developed from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries in England. He suggests that eventually certain playwrights either returned to biblical texts for non-religious reasons or used the image to validate a visual aesthetic without making the aesthetic dependent on a theological tenet.

In the case of the former one wonders if the plays written in the 1590s to which he refers might be enlightened by taking into account the political-religious use of Old Testament stories. Examples from the Old Testament were staples of the religious controversialist literature of post- Reformation England, especially in debates over the relative authority of royal or papal supremacy. Such stories were particularly adaptable for critiques of government policy and were not limited to religious issues. As for O'Connell's decision to use the phrase "Foxian hagiographic plays" to categorize another set of lesser known works, that choice makes an over-generalized claim for authors and plays about which we know little and about which he has said little. That claim reminds me of the similar phrases -- "problem plays" or "elect nation plays" -- that held sway for a while and then were either discarded or discredited all around. As for Jonson, O'Connell's characterization of Jonson as fully aligned with a humanist age nda is useful and instructive, but less satisfactory is his conclusion that Jonson's work does not display his Catholicism and that his target was sectarianism instead. One might consider whether an attack on sectarianism was not in itself a wholly effective way to voice, or at least not exclude, a Catholic perspective, sectarianism being the force that had destroyed the unity of Christendom to which Catholics were committed. As for Shakespeare, O'Connell concludes that there is no straight line between anything he has studied that would suggest Shakespeare's religious belief. But he does credit Shakespeare with a double epistemology in which both image and word continually underpin his representations of reality. A thoroughly engrossing and for the most part convincing notion, O'Connell's evidence for its validity lies partly in the ending of The Winter's Tale, where the incarnation presumably represented by the statue of Hermione displaces religious ritual but nevertheless provides viewers with an idolatrou s moment directed not at religious experience but to an affirmation of hope and renewal in human life. Although this reading has the merit of compatibility with many other readings of this play, a better way to complete the thesis of his book might have been to read this moment as one in which Shakespeare, while representing a supposed image of the miraculous, relied on the force of iconoclastic assumptions to make his final skeptical point, that transformation and restoration cannot be depended upon to occur after moments of crisis and failure. That would be a better reading, especially if one considers the play, as I do, a commentary on the failed union of England and Scotland. But whatever one's interpretation, the scene reminds the audience that miracles do not happen and that the audience does not believe in them.

Despite these quibbles in interpretation, The Idolatrous Eye ranks with the books I have found the most valuable in the past two years. O'Connell makes us think again about a subject which we thought we knew. His discussions of the representation of the body of Christ and of the textualization of that body are unique, provocative, richly instructive, and useful. His emphasis on literacy and print as the driving force behind an increasingly logocentric religious culture is not only timely given our current preoccupation with the history of the book but is profoundly challenging to some of the commonplaces we reiterate about word-centered Protestantism.