Redeeming Time: Messianism and Opportunism in the Development of the English History Play

This dissertation considers the generic development of the English history play as an on-going response to the crises of political jurisdiction and temporal imagination inaugurated by the English Reformation, where the competition between Catholic and Protestant claims to universalism manifested as a dialectic between messianism and opportunism. For Protestants, the English monarch became the divine defender against a demonic papacy motivated by a lust for power and wealth, while Catholic loyalists applied the same terms to the state's sacrilegious encroachment upon the Church's privileges and properties. I argue that English dramatists responded to this crisis by pressing traditional theological concepts into service for articulating newly emerging secular realities. Construing the present as the end of days, English Protestants shifted the terms of the traditional politico-theological figure of katechon (the restrainer of Antichrist mentioned in Paul's 2nd letter to the Thessalonians) from a figure of deferral to one that legitimates political authority by the demands of the future rather than the customary practices of the past. This refashioning prompted the history play's exploration of the nature of temporality itself, which coalesced around kairos, the Greek notion of qualitative time as opposed to the more quantitative concept of chronos. Initially appearing in its theological register as a moment of providential revelation, kairos eventually became the site of the history play's reflections on the dynamics of immanent opportunity.;This dissertation examines how the history play's evolving strategies for dramatizing kairos created and legitimated various forms of katechonic authority. Chapter 1 establishes the long arc of political and temporal secularization in early modern England through close readings of the period's evolving iconography, beginning with the semiotics of Last Judgment and concluding with the secular imagery of the emblem book tradition and Hobbes's Leviathan. Chapter 2 explores the dialectic between allegory and history in the birth of the history play, reading John Bale's Kynge Johan and Nicholas Udall's Respublica as two competing responses to the Reformation crisis of temporal jurisdiction. In Chapter 3, I revise the standard reading of Shakespeare's Richard II as a drama of medieval disenchantment, arguing instead that Shakespeare actually discovers a method of secular re-enchantment through his manipulation of tragic and comic modes. Chapter 4 investigates theological and financial forms of credit across both parts of Thomas Heywood's If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, a work traditionally associated with the history play's decline.