'Made like the times newes': Playbooks, newsbooks, and religion in Caroline England (Charles I, King of England)

This dissertation offers a new interpretation of the political significance of drama during the reign of Charles I. It analyzes the intertwined markets for printed plays and news pamphlets, which were often published by the same booksellers and targeted at the same readers, and argues that these two types of publications contributed to the religious polarization developing in England during the 1620s and 1630s in response to the Thirty Years' War and Charles I's controversial religious policies. Coranto newsbooks provided weekly updates on the war in Europe, and, as Ben Jonson suggests in The Staple of News, their reports were divided, like the war, into Protestant and Catholic sides. Corantos moreover were widely believed to cater to a Puritan readership, helping to exacerbate religious tensions in England between Puritans and Arminians. While printed drama did not supply news of the war's progress, playbooks did take sides in the struggle between these two Protestant religious factions. History plays written by Thomas Heywood, Samuel Rowley, and William Shakespeare---many of which were brought out by Nathaniel Butter, one of the two main publishers of newsbooks---supplied a crucial religious context for understanding the stakes of the continental war. These plays defended along Puritan lines what they portrayed as the foundations of English Protestantism: anti-Catholicism and support for the Protestant Cause in Europe. In contrast, rather than agitate in support of international Protestantism, Arminian religious authorities strove to cultivate what has been called "the peace of silence" in the church and public opinion. Plays by James Shirley, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, and Thomas Randolph incorporated plots that favored more ceremonial forms of worship in the Church of England, encouraged virulent anti-Puritanism, and avoided polemical attacks on the Catholic Church---all positions associated with the Arminian approach to opinion and news. Ultimately, by focusing on the pervasive topicality and historicity of these playbooks, this dissertation seeks to clarify not only the connection of drama to the news trade and religious politics, but also, more broadly, the vital part that printed drama played in the culture of Caroline England.