1. M. M. Bakhtin and P. N. Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 121.

2. See Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, 2d ed. (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), pp. 22-28, et passim; Margot Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980); David Morse, England's Time of Crisis: from Shakespeare to Milton (London: Macmillan, 1989), chs. 5, 8, 9, et passim.

3. G. K. Hunter, "Seneca and English Tragedy," in C. D. N. Costa, ed., Seneca (London: Routledge, 1974), p. 170.

4. T. S. Eliot, Introduction, in Seneca, his Tenne Tragedies, ed. Thomas Newton (1581; New York: AMS Press, 1967), 1:xliii. See also pp. xxxix and xlvii-xlviii, and John W. Cunliffe, The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1965), especially pp. 9 and 54-55.

5. Quoted in Hunter, "Seneca and English Tragedy," pp. 171-72.

6. Seneca, his Tenne Tragedies, ed. Newton, 1:4-5; The Seventh Tragedie of Seneca entitled Medea, trans. John Studley (1566), prefatory letter (in Newton, vol. 2).

7. The Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney , ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 96.

8. The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke , ed. John Gouws (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 133.

9. Phillip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses , ed. Frederick J. Furnivall (London: Trubner for the New Shakespeare Society, 1877-79), 1:143-44. On Bale and Protestant attitudes to theater, see John N. King, English Reformation Literature (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 275-78 and ch. 6. On the later period see Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre, pp. 18-36.

10. See William R. Elton, "King Lear" and the Gods (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1968); Dominic Baker-Smith, "Religion and John Webster," in Brian Morris, ed., John Webster (London: Benn, 1970); H. A. Kelly, Divine Providence in the England of Shakespeare's Histories (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970); Paul R. Sellin, ''The Hidden God," in R. S. Kinsman, ed., The Darker Vision of the Renaissance (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1974); Robert G. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Mystery of the Gods (Athens, Ga.: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1976); Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, chs. 1, 5, 7.

11. Jew of Malta 5.5.125-26, in The Plays of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Roma Gill (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971). Marlowe's plays are quoted hereafter from this edition.

12. Thomas Kyd, The First Part of Hieronimo and The Spanish Tragedy, ed. Andrew S. Cairncross (London: Arnold, 1967): Spanish Tragedy 4.1.31-33.

13. Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 817. Earlier in the New

Arcadia, Pamela says, in Stoic manner, that she and her friends are "balls to injurious fortune"; she is dissuaded, with a Stoic argument, from suicide (ed. Evans, pp. 584-85).

14. Duchess of Malfi 5.4.51-54; 5.5.100-103, in The Selected Plays of John Webster, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983).

15. E. Gordon Rupp and Philip S. Watson, eds., Luther and Erasmus (London: SCM, 1969), p. 41.

16. William Lawne, An Abridgement of the Institution of Christian Religion, written by M. John Calvin, trans. Christopher Fetherstone (Edinburgh, 1587), pp. 223-24. See Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, pp. xxix-xxxii and ch. 5.

17. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy , ed. Holbrook Jackson (London: Dent, 1932), 3:419, quoting Matt. 20:16 and 22:14.

18. Ibid., p. 420, quoting 1 Tim. 2:4. Lawne's objector quotes this, but the reply is another text: "I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy" (Exod. 33:19, repeated by Paul, Rom. 9:15): Lawne, Abridgement , p. 230.

19. Institutes 1.3.2, 4.20.31; the opinion attributed to Marlowe is quoted from Paul Kocher, Christopher Marlowe (New York: Russell, 1962), p. 34.

20. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan , ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 398, quoting Job 38:4.

21. Hamlet is quoted from the New Arden edn., ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982).

22. Seneca, Moral Essays , trans. John W. Basore, Loeb ed. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), 1:36-39.

23. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Macmillan, 1960), p. 116. See also H. B. Charlton, Shakespearian Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1949), pp. 103-4.

24. Roland Mushat Frye, Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1963), p. 231. See also Ivor Morris, Shakespeare's God (London: Allen & Unwin, 1972), pp. 422-30.

25. Roy W. Battenhouse, Shakespearean Tragedy, Its Art and Its Christian Premises (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1969), p. 250. See also Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1930), pp. 141-47.

26. Kyd, Spanish Tragedy, ed. Cairncross, 3.13.1, 6-7; cf. Calvin, Institutes 2.2.24.

27. Seneca, De ira 1.12.2, in Moral Essays , trans. Basore, 1:136-37.

28. Seneca, his Tenne Tragedies, ed. Newton, 1:67.

29. Seneca, Ad Lucilium epistulae morales 24.25, trans. Richard M. Gunmere, Loeb ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1961), 1:180-81. The secular manner in which Hamlet discusses suicide (3.1.56-88) recalls the disputes between Oedipus and Antigone in Seneca's Phoenissae (1-319), and Deianira, the Nurse and Hyllas in Hercules Oetaeus (842-1030).

30. Seneca, De constantia 8.2, in Moral Essays, trans. Basore, 1:72-73.

31. Henry Smith, Works, with introduction by Thomas Fuller (Edinburgh, 1866), 1:205.

32. Marsilio Ficino, Platonic Theology, trans. Josephine L. Burroughs, Journal of the History of Ideas 5 (1944): 227-39, p. 238. See Ernst Cassirer, Paul

Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr., eds., The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1948).

33. Joseph Hall, Works, ed. Josiah Pratt (London: 1808), 5:292. However, in Heaven upon Earth (1606), Hall made a typically "puritan humanist" attempt to reconcile Stoicism and protestantism.

34. John Marston, Antonio and Mellida , ed. G. K. Hunter (London: Arnold, 1965), 4.1.68-69. For the argument here, it does not matter whether Hamlet or the Antonio plays were produced first.

35. John Marston, Antonio's Revenge , ed. G. K. Hunter (London: Arnold, 1966), 4.3.69-75. See Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, pp. 30-39; and, on the interaction of Senecan and providential ideas of tragedy, see Willard Farnham, The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1956), chs. 9-10 passim.

36. John Marston, Poems , ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 1961), p. 123.

37. Miriam T. Griffin, Seneca, a Philosopher in Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 177.

38. Arthur Golding, A Discourse upon the Earthquake (1580), repr. in Louis Thorn Golding, An Elizabethan Puritan (New York: Richard H. Smith, 1937), p. 190. See also Henry Bullinger, The Decades, ed. Thomas Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1849-52), 4:180, 194.

39. Rupp and Watson, eds., Luther and Erasmus, pp. 83-84.

40. Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body (London: Methuen, 1984), p. 39; see pp. 58-63 above.

41. Bullinger, Decades, 4:184.

42. Lawne, Abridgement, p. 49; Calvin, Institutes 1.17.4.

43. Perkins, "A Discourse of Conscience" (1596), in Thomas F. Merrill, ed., William Perkins (Nieuwkoop: B. dc Graaf, 1966), p. 9.

44. On Christian humanists, see pp. 144-52 above. For a good selection, including James Smith, W. W. Greg, J. C. Maxwell, Helen Gardner, Cleanth Brooks, J. B. Steane, and L. C. Knights, see John Jump, ed., Marlowe: "Dr Faustus": A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1969). However, Una Ellis Fermor found the God of Faustus to be "sadistic" and revolt against him only proper (Jump, ed., Marlowe , p. 43). For more recent attitudes, see Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning , ch. 5; Dollimore, Radical Tragedy , ch. 6; Simon Shepherd, Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre (New York: St Martin's Press, 1986), pp. 100-108, 136-41. I come shortly to Empson.

45. Kyd, First Part of Hieronimo and The Spanish Tragedy , ed. Cairncross: First Part of Hieronimo , 3.59-62.

46. King James I, Daemonologie (1597), Newes from Scotland (1591) (London: Bodley Head, 1924), p. 20.

47. Douglas Cole, Suffering and Evil in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1962), p. 198. Cole recognizes that Faustus's behavior is typical of the reprobate, but still believes he makes "his original choice by himself' (pp. 199-201). See also Helen Gardner and J. B. Steane, in Jump, ed., Marlowe , pp. 95, 181-82. Malcolm Kelsall says Faustus's tone and failure to complete his quotations show a superficial attitude and

"would be picked on by any school child" ( Christopher Marlowe [Leiden: Brill, 1981], p. 163). The texts are 1 John 1:8-9 and Rom. 6:23.

48. T. H. L. Parker, English Reformers (London: SCM Press, 1966), p. 111.

49. G. E. Duffield, ed., The Work of William Tyndale (Appleford, Berks: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1964), p. 175.

50. Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses , 1:190. However, Calvin seems uneasy at Institutes 3.3.24.

51. Rupp and Watson, eds., Luther and Erasmus, pp. 230-31, 64. Sidney's theory of poetry centers upon the claim that people are moved by it, but he accepts nevertheless that in Alexander Pheraeus, it "wrought no further good in him" beyond that he "withdrew himself from hearkening to that which might mollify his hardened heart" (Sidney, Miscellaneous Prose , pp. 96-97).

52. Perkins, "A Discourse of Conscience," in Merrill, ed., William Perkins , pp. 20-21; see Lawne, Abridgement , pp. 53, 72-73, 221. Apropos of the second commandment, where God promises to visit "the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation" (Deut. 5:9), Lawne's objector is told that children are justly punished for the iniquity they themselves commit ''when God taketh away grace and other helps of salvation from a family" (Lawne, Abridgement , pp. 86-87).

53. William Empson, Faustus and the Censor (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), p. 168 and ch. 6. Empson dismisses as insignificant Faustus's uncompleted biblical quotations (discussed above), on the ground that "to accept the promises of God requires a miracle" anyway, "and it had been vouchsafed to Luther but not to Faust" (p. 169).

54. In Parker, ed., English Reformers , p. 142.

55. Richard Baines's allegation, quoted from Kocher, Christopher Marlowe , p. 36.

56. Nathaniel Woodes, The Conflict of Conscience (Oxford: Malone Society, 1952), lines 2116, 2151. See Celesta Wine, "Nathaniel Wood's Conflict of Conscience, " PMLA 50 (1935): 661-78; Lily B. Campbell, " Dr Faustus: A Case of Conscience ," PMLA 67 (1952): 219-39.

57. Certain Sermons or Homilies (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1899), p. 568; Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, intro. C. Morris (London: Dent, 1969), 1:295. See also Calvin, Institutes 3.3.22; Ian Breward, ed., The Work of William Perkins (Abingdon: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1970), p. 254. And see Plays of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Gill, p. xxii.

58. Plays of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Gill, p. xiii.

59. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Discourses , ed. Bernard Crick (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 178.

60. Seneca, his Tenne Tragedies, ed. Newton, 1:40; 2:255. See Eugene M. Waith, The Herculean Hero (London: Chatto, 1962).

61. Shepherd, Marlowe , pp. 142-53.

62. Roy W. Battenhouse, Marlowe's Tamburlaine (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 116-17, 86-92, 131-33, 169-74. Cf. C. J. Sisson's belief that Hamlet is "God's justiciar in Denmark" ( Shakespeare's Tragic Justice [London: Methuen, 1963], p. 73 and ch. 3).

63. Calvin, Institutes 1.17.5; so Homilies , pp. 87-88, 595.

64. See Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning , pp. 194, 202-3; Sinfield, Literature in Protestant England , pp. 82-83; Shepherd, Marlowe , pp. 18-22, 149-52.

65. Hall, Works , ed. Pratt, 1:274.

66. Lancelot Andrewes, Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1841), 1:331. The hired razor is from Isa. 7:20.

67. Shakespeare, King Lear , ed. Kenneth Muir (London: Methuen, 1963), 5.3. 170-73.

68. Andrewes, Works , 5:224, 234; so also Edmund Grindal, Remains (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1843), pp. 113-14.

69. Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Routledge, 1985), p. 143 and chs. 5-7; F. P. Wilson, The Plague in Shakespeare's London (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963), p. 172. On the behavior of Andrewes in the plague of 1603, see Slack, p. 234.

70. Wilson, Plague in Shakespeare's London, pp. 72, 153-54; Slack, Impact of Plague, pp. 239-40, 305-9.

71. Shakespeare, Richard III, ed. Antony Hammond (London: Methuen, 1981), 5.3.109-15.

72. See Alan Sinfield, " King Lear versus Lear at Stratford," Critical Quarterly 24 (1982): 5-14.

73. See W. D. Briggs, "Political Ideas in Sidney's Arcadia ," Studies in Philology 28 (1931): 137-61, and "Sidney's Political Ideas," Studies in Philology 29 (1932): 534-42; Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 59-61, 78-87; Martin Bergbush, "Rebellion in the New Arcadia ,'' Philological Quarterly 53 (1974): 29-41; Calvin, Institutes 4.20.31.

74. Peter Womack, Ben Jonson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 135-37, quoting Wilson, Plague in Shakespeare's London, p. 52, quoting T. White preaching at Paul's Cross in 1577.

75. Greville, Prose Works, ed. Gouws, p. 133.

76. David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1984), p. 160, and ch. 6; see Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, pp. 78-82 and ch. 7.

77. Shakespeare, Richard II, ed. Peter Ure (London: Methuen, 1961), 3.3.85-88; 5.1.59-65.

78. Slack, Impact of Plague, pp. 228-44.

79. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie , ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1936), p. 33.

80. Greville, Prose Works , pp. 93, 131. Greville very likely altered his Alaham for similar reasons: see Ronald A. Rebholz, The Life of Fulke Greville (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 131-34.

81. Dollimore, Radical Tragedy , ch. 8.

82. See Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1984), pp. 44-58; Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre , pp. 36-47.

83. Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation , pp. 7, 11. On The Shepheardes Calender, see Norbrook, Poetry and Politics , ch. 3.

84. Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre, pp. 36-47.

85. See David A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), pp. 206-7; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1990), ch. 1; Alan Sinfleld, "Private Lives / Public Theatre: Noel Coward and the Politics of Homosexual Representation," Representations 36 (1991): 43-63.

86. Thomas Middleton, Women Beware Women , ed. Roma Gill (London: Ernest Benn, 1968), 4.2.7-10.

87. Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre , p. 45. See Peter Holland, " Hamlet and the Art of Acting," in Drama and the Actor, ed. James Redmond, Themes in Drama 6 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984): 39-61.

88. Bertolt Brecht, Plays (London: Methuen, 1962), 2:207. See Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy , rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1979), pt. 1.

1. Marcia Pointon, William Dyce, 1806-1864 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 93-95, 100. Prince Albert then commissioned Dyce to decorate the Queen's Robing Room in the rebuilt Palace of Westminster with frescoes of Malory's Morte d'Arthur . I'm grateful to Professor Pointon for discussing Dyce with me, and to Christine Barrow for showing me Grenada.

2. Pointon, William Dyce, p. 94. Raphael's Galatea (c. 1512), is in the Villa Farnesina, Rome; see Roger Jones and Nicholas Penny, Raphael (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1983), p1. 106 and pp. 93-97.