Afterword

Abstract

The idea of the pure secularity of Elizabethan–Jacobean theatre is no longer tenable. It is true that explicitly biblical drama was relatively uncommon on London public stages, though Philip Henslowe’s Admiral’s Men had a presumably successful run of biblical plays between 1590 and 1602, including Robert Greene’s The Tragedy of Job, George Peele’s David and Bethsabe, and the anonymous Nebuchadnezzar, Samson, Pontius Pilate and Jephthah, and, as Beatrice Groves outlines, the Chamberlain’s Men staged the story of Jonah in the late 1580s in Thomas Lodge and Greene’s A Looking Glass for London and England.¹ The public theatres were not the only show in town, however, and London was not the only town in England. Puppet plays, for instance, are easy to ignore, since no play-texts for them survive, but records indicate that biblical topics were regular subjects for the ‘motions’, and they were to be seen not just at Bartholomew Fair (as in Ben Jonson’s play), nor just in London. ‘The Fall of Jerusalem’ was played many times in Coventry, and an epic 1628 puppet play in Oxford featured Adam and Eve in Eden, the Expulsion from Paradise, Cain and Abel, Abraham and Isaac, Nebuchadnezzar and the Fiery Furnace, the Nativity and the Adoration of the Three Kings, the Flight into Egypt and the Slaughter of the Innocents, and the parable of Dives and Lazarus.