Sam Kaufman

The theological challenges of the cosmological distortions introduced by the “new philosophy” are well-attested in the work of 17th-century poets like John Donne and John Milton. Yet despite a recent religious turn in the study of early modern drama, comparatively little attention has been paid to its theological registering of the Scientific Revolution. “Science and Secularization” examines dramatic articulations of the relationship between theological and cosmological systems at the turn of the 17th-century, a period in which both were developing under the influence of English church politics and new astronomical observations. Prefaced by a brief treatment of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (c. 1592), my study focuses on three plays, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1596) and The Tempest (c. 1611), and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (c. 1614). These plays are linked by a mutual concern not only with spiritual agents – devils, fairies, and airy spirits – but also with the moon’s traditional role as a cosmological linchpin, the boundary between the Aristotelian spheres of immutability and change, and the most obvious source of astrological influence over the tides and the humours of the body. Yet two of the plays closely follow the publication of Galileo’s Starry Messenger (1610), whose telescopic observations fueled Copernican speculations and presented a vivid new picture of the moon. The sequence of plays provides a historicized view of theological accommodations to this striking scientific development. “Science and Secularization” engages theories of secularization to read the plays. I read the plays’ different understandings of spiritual agents as reflecting processes of “desacralization” and “resacralization,” the shifting locii of supernatural activity in nature and the human body, including the senses and feelings. Yet the plays consider these immanent understanding of supernatural activity within quite distinct providential frameworks that ground their own social and political theories. In both immanent and providential terms, I suggest ways gender works in the plays to resist certain claims of secularization theory. I also suggest that in dramatizing both immanent and providential effects, the plays imagine and enact the theatre’s own shifting role in the theological cosmologies they articulate.

Delzant's theorem for symplectic toric manifolds says that there is a one-to-one correspondence between certain convex polytopes in $\mathbb{R}^n$ and symplectic toric $2n$-manifolds, realized by the image of the moment map. I review proofs of this theorem and the convexity theorem of Atiyah-Guillemin-Sternberg on which it relies. Then, I describe Honda's results on the local structure of near-symplectic 4-manifolds, and inspired by recent work of Gay-Symington, I describe a generalization of Delzant's theorem to near-symplectic toric 4-manifolds. One interesting feature of the generalization is the failure of convexity, which I discuss in detail. The first three chapters are primarily expository, duplicate material found elsewhere, and may be skipped by anyone familiar with the material, but are included for completeness.

If Faustus dramatizes Calvinist cosmology, my first chapter treats A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a cosmology based on the theology of Richard Hooker. Rather than the tragedy Faustus locates in the paradoxical mixture of voluntarism and predestination, Midsummer is a comedy grounded in Hooker’s assumption of God’s rationality expressed as love and the enabling of creaturely virtue (Spinks 111-112). For Hooker the universe is structured according to a hierarchy of laws, including the laws of reason, nature, and scripture; crucially, ritual practice is embedded in these general laws and is part of the ordinary functioning of the universe. This universe, therefore, is anything but arbitrary. Following Peter Lake’s analysis of the trends within the Elizabethan church Hooker was responding to, particularly a Calvinist stress on predestination and a quietist approach to ritual practice (Lake 145-6), I begin by locating these trends in the interference of Duke Theseus and Egeus, sovereign and father, with the marriage plans of the young lovers Hermia and Lysander. This reading is possible because the play frames the problems of marriage and love as metonyms for the problems of free will, predestination, and grace in relationship to religious ritual.
This reading of Athenian patriarchy pits a Calvinist political theology against the natural world outside Athens and the play’s enchanted fairies. The “hiccups” Poole alludes to in Hooker’s theorization of natural law generate the metaphysical structure of the play; the most prominent hiccups are fertility’s uncertain relationship to lunar influence and the fairies’ unpredictable magic. The fairies are partly legible as theatrical allegorizations of natural processes, but their chaotic agency and appeal to higher powers makes them more than that. Against the natural or astral determinism that Faustus attacks in his final scene, the natural world of Midsummer is decidedly irregular; yet whereas the arbitrariness of cosmic structure made it meaningless for Faustus, the constrained unpredictability of nature in Midsummer creates its significance. By making love and fertility unpredictable but not completely arbitrary the play suggests they may be read as visible signs of grace, an extension of the traditional definition of the sacraments. Marriage’s reformation from sacrament to institution and the complex echoes of its sacramental origin still present in English custom and law make marriage the ideal test-case for a Hookerian understanding of ritual’s relationship to nature.
Ritual is therefore one way Midsummer’s fairies can be distinguished from Faustus’s metaphysical demons. The fairies are located in space and time and sometimes act through evidently natural means (their love-potions have precise floral origins). But though their internal arguments can ramify into natural disorder, they do not cause this disorder directly. Instead Titania’s speech culminating in the anger of “the moon, governess of floods” (2.1.103) describes natural disorder’s inextricable but obscurely acausal connection to disturbances of both human and fairy rituals. In other words, this particular occasion of natural order is only a large-scale case of a more general ambiguity in the functioning of ritual, which, like nature, only sometimes works as intended. Along with the fairies’ awareness of higher levels of existence – for example in their allusions to Venus and Cupid – their own dependance on unpredictable ritual expresses the limitations of fairy power. Whereas in Faustus ritual, pace the neoplatonist magicians, was meaningless ceremony, in Midsummer meaningful but unreliable ritual is everywhere.
While the fairies may offer something of an explanation for human ritual, their own use of ritual with its own unpredictable results means that their explanatory power is only partial. They cannot therefore be considered as merely theatrical allegories; their one moment of frame-breaking, the metamorphosis of Bottom, is the exception or Hookerian “hiccup” which proves the rule.  Though this metamorphosis and other aspects of the fairies are Ovidian, they are in Ovidian in different sense than Faustus’s demons. In other words, the phenomenology Poole describes can apply equally well to both plays, but with quite different metaphysical or theological underpinnings. In particular, Faustus’s tension between predestination and voluntarism can be accommodated by Midsummer’s treatment of ritual. Because fairy ritual in Midsummer is only partly predictable, it can accommodate the tension Nicholas Tyacke has identified between Calvinists and anti-Calvinists over the relationship between predestinatory and sacramental grace. Fairies are agents of both nature and grace, but though they can directly affect the will (like Faustus’s God but unlike Faustus’s demons) with their love-potions they can preserve both apparent human and divine freedom by virtue of their unpredictability. 
While the play locates its understanding of natural irregularity primarily in the moon and fertility, and uses natural irregularity to theorize how rituals can be partly efficacious, it also considers how ritual can be used to tame social discord. I argue that the play tempers its Hookerian understanding of ritual efficacy with a Pauline treatment of religious adiaphora (things indifferent to scripture) that associates different attitudes towards ritual practice with different degrees of spiritual maturity. While examples are distributed throughout the play, the most striking are the heterogeneous responses to the mechanicals’ performance of Pyramus and Thisbe. Through a series of allusions to controversies over ritual practice and the myth’s own Christianization in the Ovid moralisé tradition, the play-within-a-play presents theatre as a form of religious ritual which, due to general uncertainty about ritual efficacy, can be at once sacramental or merely edifying to various participants – as long as it avoids giving offense. But the truly spiritual, the play suggests following St. Paul’s elaboration of Christian liberty, are not offended so easily; the can interpret away potentially misleading material signs when necessary.
In an ideologically complex strategy of compensation, the play suggest that its female characters (human women or gendered fairies) are in this sense generally spiritually superior its males, and that this spirituality may help them endure the offenses associated with their social subordination. The play therefore adopts the quietist view of Christian liberty which defines freedom with respect to ritual practice while preserving the subjugation of women and servants. Yet this spirituality also allows women, as they mature, to transcend the narcissistic desire for material likeness evident in the intense, near-identification of Hermia and Helena, and to accept more substantial differences in their older friendships – for example that of Titania and her Indian votaress, a friendship between a fairy queen and her mortal servant. Unlike Faustus’s intense homonormativity, narcissism, and desire for transubstantiation, the superior “spirituality” of the women in Midsummer is not a question of their substance, but, again following St. Paul, a question of their attitude towards ritual and society, manifesting in a superior capacity for friendship.
Again, in the play’s treatment of the social role of ritual, Bottom’s “translation” is the exception that proves the rule. Bottom’s humility and eventual restoration to his human shape contrasts with Faustus’s alignment of transubstantiation and an antisocial desire for uniqueness. Bottom’s theatrical impulse, however inept, is towards charity and social unity. Bottom views the aesthetic constructs of the theatre as socially salutary rituals that even in misfiring are controlled by a theological discourse that allows offense to be interpreted away. This understanding of art is incompatible with Faustus’s view of it as an aesthetic distraction from invisible grace or inevitable damnation; theatre in Midsummer is either easily neutralizable or edifying, if not sacramental. This understanding of theatre is possible because its efficacy (like all ritual, according to Hooker) is metonymically linked with lunar influence through their common effects on the imagination. Puck and Oberon’s verbal juxtapositions of fruitfulness and imagination when discussing the lovers’ dream-like experience in the woods, and again in the epilogue discussing the audience’s experience in the theatre, presents these two domains of experience as fungible. In both cases, these pseudo-dramatists aim to contain the negative feelings produced by bad or offensive ritual by simply interpreting them away as dreams. Rather than Faustus’s polarization of art against excrementality, in Midsummer artistic ritual, when misfiringly infertile, is at worst inoffensively neutral.
Midsummer thus is legible as a local response to Calvinist cosmology, which works by partly reversing the nominalist/voluntarist uncertainties that motivate Faustus; it reconstructs a meaningful cosmology.  In a recent historiographical review of Max Weber’s thesis of the Reformation’s “disenchantment of the world,” Alexandra Walsham argues for more local attention to processes of “desacralization and resacralization” (“Reformation”); comparison of these two plays can help make Walsham’s point. In Faustus, in a supposedly strictly Calvinist universe, demons are (equally supposedly) all-powerful and unbound by natural laws; in Midsummer, a much less Calvinist work, fairies are everywhere but identified with a precariously regular nature.

This chapter presents The Tempest as a partial solution to The Duchess’s paradoxical mixture of disenchanted physics and Protestant affective spirituality offering no guides in the world of post-Machiavellian politics. Politically and theologically, The Tempest’s solutions are predicated on a greater faith in both divine providence and worldly monarchs; however this faith is used, at least nominally, to constrain rather than provide unlimited license to the worldly action of kings and deities.
To begin, I show how the assertion and discernment of providential action is central to the play’s discussions of political legitimacy. Confronted by an apparently materialist world like that of The Duchess, the play dramatizes attempts to build up politics and ethics from materialist principles, particularly through the resurrected philosophies of Stoicism and Epicureanism.  But, the play argues, these philosophies are powerless to account for a Christian providence. The dramatization of this failure mostly involves the pranks Ariel plays on the Neapolitans and rebels; since Ariel is a spirit, this naturally suggests that for The Tempest the discernment of providence centrally involves the discernment of spirits.
Like The Duchess, however, the Tempest suggests that discernment is not concerned with the substantive distinction between angels and demons. Unlike The Duchess, here spiritual beings, Ariel and his cohort, run around on stage. Yet these spiritual beings are definitively material – Ariel is an “airy spirit” – and are interpreted by different factions at different times as angelic and demonic. In essence, they are morally neutral. Moreover, though Ariel returns to nature at the end of the play, unlike the fairies of Midsummer he spends most of play the carrying out magical, if not miraculous, violations of nature. And unlike the devils of Faustus, Ariel’s relationship with Prospero is modelled on an employment contract which, though stretched, is never broken. 
Given the topicality in 1611 of King James’ recent failure to reach a settlement with Parliament framed as a “great contract,”  and Victoria Kahn’s study of the 17th-century development of contractual thinking in informing theories of political obligation (Wayward Contracts), I read the contractualism of the play as a framing cosmological principle spanning covenant theology, marriage, and politics. The contracting subjects in the play are not the theoretical independently consenting equals of liberal contract theory; for one, they may be coerced, or subtly materially influenced. Tthe play backs off from the affectively and epistemically isolated “buffered selves” of the skeptical Neostoics in The Duchess; Ariel and his cohort replace lunar influence with the material influence of the air, which is able to directly affect the humours and passions, for example in Ferdinand’s musical calming after his shipwreck. Yet unlike Midsummer, Prospero’s spirit magic can never directly affect the will of its victims, preserving a domain of voluntarism for the subject. The treatment of affect in the play is accordingly much more complex than in either Midsummer or The Duchess. Feelings, whether simple pleasure or pain, or more complex aesthetic responses, can appear as tokens in political contracts or theories of political obligation, complicating attempts at the affective discernment of spirits by conflating spiritual and political languages of obligation.
Yet I suggest that the play presents a possible criterion for spiritual discernment in a particular pattern of experience which exceeds political theories of obligation. Extending David Evett’s work on the play’s thematics of willing bondage, I suggest the play presents a model for discernment in the Christian spiritual experience of the imitation of Christ’s suffering and resurrection, phrased in the gospel terms of the “sign of Jonah” (Mt 12:24ff, 16:1-4; Lk 29ff), Christ’s own criterion of discernment. This models the way apparently coercive and painful obligations can transform in time to the experience of freedom, friendship, or love. It also models the way the play’s contracts can be understood as legitimate despite inequalities between the contracting parties. The marriage of Ferdinand and Miranda is the central example of eventually consenting contract between very different individuals, whether that difference is marked by gender or different degrees of worldliness or sophistication, aesthetic or political.
Therefore, unlike the skepticism of Dr Faustus or The Duchess about the possibility of relationships between beings of different substances or statuses, The Tempest grounds its politics in a theologically central paradigm of relationships between unequals. Yet it does so, I argue, without essentializing substance as The Duchess is wont to do. As Prospero’s famous “revels speech” suggests, human substance and perhaps cosmic substance is not characterized by the mechanical ugliness of The Duchess or the meaningless excrementality of Faustus; instead, it is “the stuff that dreams are made on.” The vagueness of the phrase reflects uncertainty about the ultimate constituents of physical reality. By aligning cosmological contingency with the aesthetic construction of Prospero’s spirit masque, the play redeems the aesthetic power of human creation. Yet human power and divine power are carefully balanced by covenantal understandings. Read in a Galilean context, the play’s lunar references appeal to the very same examples cited by Poole in her discussion of Calvin – the miracle at Gibeon, control over the tides – but do so in a way that reflects covenantal theology’s understanding of nature as a covenantal order temporarily transgressible in service of other divine covenants – either of nation, as in the case of Gibeon, or individual salvation, as in the case of Christ.
The politics of artifice this way extends to the cosmos, making the world lovable (pace Faustus) by making humans partners in its creation.  Moreover the transformation of covenants in the play reveal an awareness of theories of biblical accommodation, the way in which biblical cosmologies and promises are expressed in language suitable for the developing understanding of human beings over time. If Sycorax can control the tides and Prospero can dim the sun, Caliban must first learn their names and, later, learn that Stephano is not really the man in the moon. In this way the cosmological implications of Galileo’s observations, whether the Copernicanism against which the miracle at Gibeon was often cited, or the undermining of lunar influence, can be theologically absorbed. The understanding of the universe as a covenantal order subject to adjustment and accommodation but premised on a reciprocal relationship between God and humans is a kind of middle ground between Hooker’s cosmology and Calvin’s. To some extent the arbitrary acts of will underlying covenants cannot be understood rationally, and the possibilities of miracles carried out by the Ariels residual in nature cannot be ruled out. But on the other hand, covenants, even accommodated ones, mean that neither the constant miraculism of Calvin nor the predestination of Calvinism need be invoked.
This covenantal understanding extends to the play’s treatment of human fertility, which, through Miranda’s marriage, models the effects of both political and theological contracts. Though Miranda’s marriage is influenced by her father, it is not coerced; while other characters in the play suggest rape or various lunar meddlings, he makes no attempt to directly control Miranda’s fertility as in Midsummer or The Duchess. Similarly, the wedding masque’s hopes for Miranda and Ferdinand’s offspring are looser and less constraining than Midsummer’s blessing of the beds. In this way The Tempest’s treatment of fertility, like its understanding of grace, is temporally limited to a single generation; each generation requires its own covenantal renewals, political and theological.

This chapter reads John Webster's "The Duchess of Malfi" as a response to changing ontologies suggested by Galileo's lunar observations that reads them as strong evidence for a universe devoid of occult sympathies and influences; indeed almost completely devoid of supernatural interference, whether of demons or of God.

I begin by describing how the play subtly dramatizes the process of surveying the moon by using the concepts and imagery of the lunar observations to articulate the plot’s overt investigation of women. While the play’s metaphorical translation between the surfaces and substances of the moon and women is licensed by theories of lunar influence over women’s bodies, the disenchanting conclusion of the lunar investigations throws this license into doubt. Moreover, the new post-Keplerian theories of vision, involving the elimination of visual species bearing occult (and potentially lunar) influences, reinforce a sense of epistemic uncertainty and disenchantment.. As a result, the unstable epistemic and visual assumptions of the lunar investigations are juxtaposed with the misogynist assumptions of the investigation of women, grounding both not in metaphysical or theological certainties but in practical skepticism and dirty court politics.

Moreover, these investigations reveal a series of misogynist ethical double standards. The male investigators in the play, Ferdinand and Bosola, are prosecutors; they repeatedly attack women for deceitful inconstancy, usually marked as a form of hysteria, sexual or emotional incontinence linked to uterine disease and lunar influence. Men justify their own deceitfulness under the rubric of Neostoic constancy, an emotional and epistemic impermeability serving practical political ends, reflecting the popularity of Neostoic thought in England after the 1590s.    In one sense the male characters dramatize Richard Tuck’s description of the “new humanism” combining Tacitean politics, Neostoic theory, and philosophical skepticism, and flesh out some of Tuck’s arguments about the connection between the abandonment of virtue ethics and new theories of vision and non-essentialist physics. But the play ultimately constructs a theological and affective critique of Neostoicism. While Charles Taylor has argued for Neostoicism’s centrality in the 17th-century phase of secularization, providing a new sense of a “buffered self” free of impinging external forces which can work to achieve human good in the world, the play presents a much darker view. Its denouement presents Neostoicism as a kind of madness, a male melancholy equivalent to a newly psychologized female hysteria.  In Taylor’s terms, the epistemic buffering of Keplerian vision and the suppression of moral feeling counteract any activist benefits of a physical buffering.

Yet, despite accusations of hysteria, the women in the play are better able to balance the new moral philosophies of Neostoicism and Neoepicureanism with a morally salutary deference to their feelings. The play also presents women’s feeling as a mark of spiritual superiority. The Duchess in particular has a moment of religious conversion, marked as rejection of Neostoic consolations or contempt for the world, which enables her to accept both her attachments to the world and a particularly Protestant form of anti-materialist spirituality.  Yet the Duchess’s spiritual feelings only emerge in her captivity, and merely ease her through her inevitable death.

Indeed the play’s presentation of the male world of politics, service, and friendship repeatedly plays with the Renaissance discourses of friendship, using the play’s philosophical movement with Galileo towards a theory of matter without qualities to undercut any possibility of friendship, service, or love based on essential likeness. Though the plot dramatizes a weakening of all secular relationships of love, service, or friendship, which become only incompletely calculable through newer ideas of interest, the play’s movement towards an affective rather than substantive understanding of love suggests a glimmer of hope.

This hope is particularly tied up with the play’s stress on religious feeling.  Though not particularly Calvinist, the play’s setting in Italy on the eve of Reformation and anti-clerical tone give it a generally Protestant stance. The play contains several rich explorations of affective responses to images despite their material inertness. Similarly, the emotionally vivid details of the Duchess’s conversion, which involves a subtle rejection of the Catholic system of indulgences and martyrdom, and the similarly gripping failure of Ferdinand and Bosola to accomplish the penance and justice they desire, except as revenge, are all written in particularly anti-materialist terms. Together these explorations of religious feeling suggest that Protestantism provides the theological resources to cope with the double disenchantments of the lunar observations and the new politics.

Therefore, as an example of the resacralizations Alexandra Walsham describes, the sphere of supernatural activity in the play moves, as far as we can tell, to the realm of feeling. The world of the play seems mostly devoid of demons or miracles; demons are suggested only in passing and in association with melancholic delusions. The one or two suggestions of providential interference are similarly confined to private, potentially salutary visions. This movement may reflect the developing theological topic of the “discernment of spirits,”  in which affective and moral criteria rather than scientific ones were often determinative in discerning between spiritual experiences due to God or the Devil. Yet for practical purposes the play presents this movement as moot; men repeatedly fail to operationalize it in practice, and women only do so in their dying moments.

This two-part exploratory essay identifies Kabbalistic contexts, motivations, and themes in John Donne's Metempsychosis, including an explication of the stanza form and allusions to the Sefirot, Kabbalistic understandings of gilgul or transmigration, the Shekhinah or indwelling of God, and Kabbalistic hermeneutical principles. It also suggests the relevance of Donne's religious identity to his choice of imagery, and his skeptical attitude to the extravagant claims of the Christian Kabbalists.
*Author’s Note (2018)*: This is a draft that became my article Conceiving Bodies, Intertextuality, and Censorship in Metempsychosis (John Donne Journal 31, 2012). The JDJ was not particularly convinced by the discussion of Kabbalah, and this element was abandoned in favour of a deeper analysis of the poem’s structure and a more contextual interpretation. On rereading this draft years later, I would reframe many things and retract some of the interpretive claims. However, having left the academy and lacking the time to revise or pursue publication, I leave this as ground work for others interested in Kabbalistic motivations and ideas in Donne’s poem.

While A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s fairies are often read as ambivalent symbols of the imagination or of Catholic nostalgia, I consider the fairies alongside the play’s representations of ritual practices to propose that both be read as metaphysical necessities within a theological framework similar to Richard Hooker’s. Building on St. Paul’s understanding of Christian liberty, Hooker’s theology reclaimed ritual edification as a crucial form of religious practice less fraught with metaphysical or sectarian issues than Eucharistic sacramentality. Grounding my discussion in the fairies’ metaphysics, I analyze the play’s gendered representations of love and marriage ritual and its complex metatheatricality through the 1590s’ controversies about ritual edification.