[In the following essay, Konkle suggests that Gods Determinations could be classified as a verse drama rather than as poetry.]

Fifty years after the publication of The Poetical Works of Edward Taylor, there is still much to be said about Gods Determinations Touching His Elect: AND The Elects Combat In Their Conversion, AND Coming Up to God In Christ: TOGETHER WITH The Comfortable Effects Thereof (hereafter, Gods Determinations) regarding its generic classification, the literary influences upon its composition, and the textual manifestations of Edward Taylor's purview and rhetorical intention. Scholars who have taken up the issue of Gods Determinations' generic status have agreed, for the most part, that it does not qualify as literal drama: “But a dramatic analysis—satisfying and informative though it may be—belies the fact that Gods Determinations is not a play.”¹ However, if Gods Determinations is read without the narrow preconceptions of genre which continue to dominate academia even this late in the twentieth century, if it is read instead with a knowledge of theatre and drama broad enough to recognize that the Aristotelian aesthetic represents only one choice on the menu of dramatic styles (albeit the most common choice), then it can be seen that Edward Taylor, a Puritan writing in the second half of the seventeenth century, indeed wrote a play.

There are several reasons why it has been difficult for scholars to conceive of Gods Determinations as a play. First, as a literary artist Taylor is known to us primarily as a lyric poet, having produced two long series of preparatory meditations, as well as many individual lyrics and other works in verse. Gods Determinations is composed of thirty-six titled sections written in various meters, rhyme schemes, and stanza forms, but it hardly needs to be pointed out that in both ancient Greece and medieval Europe, as well as during the Renaissance, plays were written wholly or partially in verse. What previous studies have de-emphasized is that Gods Determinations imitates divine and human actions, and that dramatic dialogue is the predominant vehicle for representing those actions. Of Gods Determinations' 2,132 lines, 1,354 (or 64٪) are in dialogue form, 320 (or 15٪) are in monologue form (as soliloquy, prayer, and choral interlude), and 458 (or 21٪) are the narrator's exposition of events. Undeniably, Gods Determinations is an amalgamation of literary forms: drama, epic, lyric, allegory, sermon; my argument is that the drama genre subsumes the others.²

Another reason scholars have been unwilling to read Gods Determinations as a play is that they do not think it would be performable: “It could not conceivably be acted: narrative and dialogue are jumbled together; Taylor depends too much upon the titles of the individual poems; the central character ‘man’ assumes a constantly shifting role; and the speeches are tediously long” (Grabo 165). First of all, given that Taylor did not publish his poetry and was adamant that his family not publish it after his death, it is a reasonable assumption that he considered Gods Determinations to be closet drama. Even so, to classify a story written in dialogue as a play does not depend on the work's potential for stage performance.³ But even if performability were a definitive feature of all drama, none of the characteristics of Gods Determinations cited by Grabo preclude theatrical production. One can see performed today many classical, Renaissance, and twentieth century plays that contain all the elements Grabo thinks are unperformable.⁴

The infamous Puritan aversion to drama also makes it difficult to believe that a minister as conservative in matters of doctrine and devotional practice as Taylor was would have attempted to write, of all things, a play; however, this stereotype of the Puritan attitude toward drama is not altogether accurate.⁵ We know for a fact that university-educated Puritans including Taylor, read drama, as Donald Stanford has pointed out: “In grammar school [Taylor] had studied and perhaps acted in the Latin comedies of Terence and Plautus, and he had probably read various dialogues in Latin based on Bible stories.”⁶ There were also at least two Puritans who wrote dramatic works of which Taylor most likely would have been aware: Arthur Dent, an English Puritan divine, cast his best-selling devotional manual in dramatic form;⁷ and of course, John Milton, the most famous of all Puritan authors, wrote drama both early and late in his career.⁸ Finally, Taylor himself wrote, in addition to Gods Determinations, two metrical paraphrases of the Old Testament book Job, which is constructed mostly as a series of dialogues framed and occasionally interrupted by narration. In sum, there was ample precedent of Puritans appropriating drama for their own purposes to make plausible the present study's claim that Taylor chose to work in that genre.

The major reason scholars have been of the opinion that Taylor either did not write a play, or failed miserably in the attempt, is that their assessment is based upon a limited, monolithic paradigm of drama: “All the dramatic elements necessary for a play are present, but Taylor did not take advantage of them” (165). By this, Grabo apparently means Taylor did not assemble the elements into a play; however, if Taylor were working from an aesthetic of loose assemblage in which the parts retain a degree of independence while making up the constructed—rather than the organic—whole, then Taylor may have arranged his dramatic elements more artistically than Grabo realized.

The dramatic elements present in Gods Determinations are four major actions initiated by four characters (thus four candidates for protagonist): one, God creates the world and (assisted by his representatives Justice, Mercy, and Christ) salvages it after Man's fall; two, Satan tempts the elect away from Christ; three, the elect (“Soul”) seek assurance of election from the pious wise (“Saint”); and four, the narrator (an unidentified first person singular voice that speaks the prologue and narrates some of the action) strives to offer praise that does justice to God's greatness. None of these characters “hold the stage” long enough to unify the plot into one action. God and other divine agents exit after “Christs Reply”; Satan enters in “Satans Rage at them in their Conversion” and last appears in “The Third Rank Accused,” obviously functioning as antagonist to God and his representatives; Soul metamorphoses into plurality after Saint's sermon in “Difficulties arising from Uncharitable Cariages of Christians”; and though the narrator begins, interrupts, and ends Gods Determinations, it isn't always clear if the first person singular voice that speaks the segments praising God is a continuation of the narrator who invokes the Christian muse in “the Prologue” or if it is Soul. Granted, Gods Determinations does not fit the conventional notion of drama in terms of its plot construction and representation of characters, but in considering Gods Determinations' generic status it makes sense to draw upon the full range of dramatic theory and practice, for there has always been more than one aesthetic of playwriting.⁹

In the Poetics, which was still regarded as the definitive critical study of drama even as late as the seventeenth century when Taylor composed Gods Determinations, Aristotle favors the kind of play that features one protagonist, a single coherent plot, and—at least according to the Renaissance reading of the Poetics—a high degree of mimesis (i.e., verisimilitude) over the kind of play that has several protagonists, an episodic plot, and openly acknowledges its artifice. The less mimetic, more fragmented style of drama is commonly referred to by theatre/drama artists and scholars today as “epic theatre,” a term made famous by German playwright and director Bertolt Brecht, though he did not claim to have invented the concept or the practice: “From the standpoint of style, the epic theatre is nothing especially new. In its character of show, of demonstration, and its emphasis on the artistic, it is related to the ancient Asian theatre. The medieval mystery play, and also the classical Spanish and Jesuit theatres, showed an instructive tendency.”¹⁰ To clearly distinguish between the two poles of the dramaturgical spectrum, it is worthwhile to quote from Brecht at length:

Even by Aristotle's definition the difference between the dramatic and epic forms was attributed to their different methods of construction, whose laws were dealt with by two different branches of aesthetics. The method of construction depended on the different way of presenting the work to the public, sometimes via the stage, sometimes through a book; and independently of that there was the “dramatic element” in epic works and the “epic element” in dramatic. The bourgeois novel in the last century developed much that was “dramatic,” by which was meant the strong centralization of the story, a momentum that drew the separate parts into a common relationship … The epic writer Döblin provided an excellent criterion when he said that with an epic work, as opposed to a dramatic, one can as it were take a pair of scissors and cut it into individual pieces, which remain fully capable of life.

(70)

To briefly confirm Brecht's reading of the Poetics, Aristotle himself said “by an epic plan I mean a fable composed of many fables.”¹¹

Brecht's reading of the Poetics in relation to both Western and non-Western dramatic tradition constitutes a history of world drama in which epic theatre—though always an alternative aesthetic—was nonetheless available to Taylor in both theory and practice if he had sought, as artists are wont to do, a precedent or paradigm after which to model his play. Although no direct evidence exists that Taylor read the Poetics specifically, it is quite possible that he studied it along with Aristotle's other works while he was at the university in England or America or both.¹² From the Poetics Taylor could have derived, at least in the abstract, the form he needed for a specifically Puritan play, one that would suit the minister's didactic purpose and that—as a dramatic representation of Divine and human will and action—would not violate the Second Commandment.¹³

Taylor might also have learned about the kind of dramatic structure he used in Gods Determinations from medieval and renaissance plays which Brecht—or a scholar employing Brecht's anatomy of drama—would classify as epic theatre.¹⁴ Even if Taylor did not personally witness a theatrical performance, he might have known enough about the purpose and form of The Castle of Perseverance or Everyman from conversation or correspondence with those who had seen the plays acted or from the Puritan writings which described the subjects of their attack to have modeled his own Puritan morality play after them, as suggested by Nathalia Wright in one of the earliest studies of Gods Determinations' dramatic qualities.¹⁵

The dramatic from indigenous to the late Renaissance that best qualifies as epic theatre is the masque. Masques were most often court allegories and thus more abstract than mimetic in characterization, and their narrative construction was episodic, due, in part, to frequent interruption by songs praising the sovereigns for whom the masque was written and performed. However, the masque was not always a piece of decadent entertainment or propagandistic pageantry; it could manifest a spiritual theme as well, as did Milton's “Puritan masque,” Comus.¹⁶ In fact, Comus could very well have been Taylor's dramatic model for Gods Determinations. Although a close textual comparison might not result in enough concrete similarities to prove that Taylor was directly influenced by Milton's earlier work to any great degree, a number of analogies in character, action, and purpose do exist between the earlier famous Puritan masque and the later obscure one.¹⁷ If even pre-twentieth century critics described Comus in language similar to Brecht's definition of epic theatre—

Perhaps it would be useful to take Dr. Johnson seriously and ask if, as he called it, Comus is not “a drama in the epic style” … A drama written in epic style would first of all flow like a narrative poem, and secondly it would be a drama raised above the requirements of realistic decorum to a level of inspired, prophetic, or epic voice¹⁸

—then this much is certain: Taylor employed a dramatic style that was, so to speak, in the English aesthetic air before he emigrated to America.

Call Gods Determinations a masque, a morality play, or what you will; but if most plays are constructed in accordance with either the Aristotelian or epic theatre dramaturgy, it is the latter to which the only known example of New England Puritan drama belongs. An analysis of the formal characteristics of Gods Determinations in relation both to the tenets of Puritanism and to the specific rhetorical purpose inscribed in the text, as identified in previous studies, will demonstrate that Taylor's choice of the dramatic style that has come to be known as epic theatre was the perfect mating of form to content and intent.¹⁹

German drama theorist Peter Szondi's description of the alternative aesthetic made paradigmatic for the twentieth century by Brecht is especially applicable to the design of Gods Determinations:

The most successful of these Szondi calls “epic,” a term he applies to a wide range of experimentation of which Brecht is only one example. Such works point outside themselves, present a “microcosm representing a macrocosm” which is explained and set forth by an “epic I,” a creative presence that acknowledges an audience to whom this demonstration is directed.²⁰

From the outset the narrator of Gods Determinations avows the quintessential audience for this Puritan “demonstration”—God. However, one example of where Taylor's play points outside itself and acknowledges its human audience, thus calling attention to its own artifice vis-a-vis epic theatre, rather than disguising its artifice vis-a-vis Aristotelian or fourth-wall naturalistic theatre, occurs near the end of “A Dialogue Between Justice and Mercy” as Justice and Mercy shift their references to Man from third to second person. That is, suddenly they begin to address the “Humble and Haughty Souls” directly. Mercy says, presumably to the discouraged half-way members, “Though simple learn of mee; I will you teach / True Wisdom for your Souls Felicity.” Justice says, perhaps to those full members who presume their election, “You that Extenuate your sins, come see / Them in Gods multiplying Glass: for here / Your little sins will just like mountains bee,” followed by this final tender appeal from Mercy: “My Dove, come hither, linger not, nor stay.”²¹ Is this just a slip of composition, Taylor lapsing momentarily into the direct address of the sermon, or is it the same kind of playing to the audience that occurs in such morality plays as Everyman and Mankind?

Prior studies have described Gods Determinations structure in a variety of ways,²² but none have analyzed it by the procedure modern actors, directors, and playwrights employ in breaking down a play's action into smaller units (“beats” being the smallest) by determining which characters embody the plot-driving volition. Using this method, Gods Determinations divides into two sections of supernatural and human actions, which, thus, might as well be called acts. In the first act, God and his divine representatives (Justice, Mercy, Christ) battle with Satan for the soul of Mankind until Christ's final appearance on stage in “Christ's Reply,” in which he exorts Soul to “fight on” (64), and Satan's final speech in “The Third Rank Accused,” in which he makes a last ditch attempt to waylay Soul. Following this scene, there are no divine characters, either allegorical or literal, to urge Soul on, and there are no more external sources of temptation and doubt. In the second act, beginning with “A Threnodiall Dialogue between the Second and Third Ranks,” what happens in the narrative is the result of Soul's volition (his desire for salvation and his nearly paranoid fear of presumption of election). Such a shifting of the limelight from the supernatural to human protagonists can be read as a manifestation in narrative form of New England Covenant theology.²³

One can understand why Puritan lay men and women might be anxious about the destiny of their souls, given their Calvanistic beliefs; however, the New England Puritans, especially, found a way to humanize an impervious and sovereign God's predestination of the elect by means of a legalistic interpretation of the Covenant of Grace, as Perry Miller has discussed in his seminal works.²⁴ In Gods Determinations, what Taylor offered his half-way members who were not assured of their election was a dramatization of the Covenant in action; or, rather, the dichotomous structure of the action of Gods Determinations is itself a representation of Covenant theology, which one Puritan understood as follows: “that God had done His part and it was up to him now to do his” (Miller 387). By arranging their respective actions earlier and later in the plot, Taylor dramatized both God and the Elect holding up their respective ends of the bargain.

Epic theatre also allowed Taylor to represent the Puritans' understanding of the analogous relationship between providential and personal progress by combining the panoramic scope of epic and the psychological close-up of drama—“a microcosm representing a macrocosm.” As Leopold Damrosch says of John Bunyan's plot construction in The Pilgrim's Progress, which exhibits many of the same formal attributes for concretizing Puritan beliefs as New England Puritan narratives, “the biographical subplot is conflated with the cosmological main plot, and this frees the self from unescapable anxiety about election. Heilsweg is harmonized with Heilsgeschichte, the individual journey of the spirit with the universal history of God's elect.”²⁵ On the macrocosmic level, the plot of Gods Determinations depicts, in order, God creating the universe, mankind falling and the personified Man blaming it on his mate (following, obviously, the allegory of Adam—Man—in Genesis), Justice and Mercy devising a plan to redeem Man, Satan tempting and Christ encouraging the elect, and the elect making progress toward heaven as full members in the church. “Epic tends to confirm the order of history” (Damrosch 119), but historical progress was God's responsibility; the individual Puritan's duty was to concern himself with his own spiritual development one day at a time.²⁶

Epic theatre effectively represents the microcosmic level of the Puritan purview as well. The episodic structure of Gods Determinations appears most obviously in the titles of the thirty-six segments which comprise it. However, these divisions do not always correspond to the units of action. A single scene between two characters may extend through several titled segments (for example, the six segments in which Satan tries to comfort and preaches to Soul); or several events may take place in one titled segment (for example, “The Effect of this Reply [by Christ] with a fresh Assault from Satan”). Another indication of the divisions of the four major lines of action are the following recurring conceits: for God—a courtroom debate and a royal couch to fetch the invited guests to a feast; for Satan (and Christ)—military battle; for Soul—a pilgrimage and flowers grown in a garden; for the narrator—the apprentice musician striving to play well. These extended metaphors occur too frequently throughout the play and identify the characters and their actions too exclusively in some scenes to be granted lyric status only.²⁷ Each conceit represents progress on the human scale, but also relates analogously to the cosmic scale. “History is a narrative, but the narrative is built up out of timeless symbols” (Damrosch 62); surely vegetative growth, military battle, a pilgrimage, a coach ride and a feast, learning to play a musical instrument, even a courtroom debate are timeless symbols. Using the litmus test for epic theatre Brecht cited, one could disassemble Gods Determinations along these conceits, and not only would each one stand by itself structurally and thematically, it would also still express the macrocosmic theme of Gods Determinations in microcosmic form.

The episodic conceits in Gods Determinations also serve Taylor's didactic intention toward the half-way members of his congregation. Of the effect of epic theatre on the audience, Brecht says, “By means of a certain interchageability of circumstances and occurances the spectator must be given the possibility (and duty) of assembling, experimenting and abstracting” (60); in other words, the audience should be able to interact existentially with different aspects of the text. Taylor similarly invites the individual half-way member to respond to whatever metaphor of spiritual progress that will persuade her or him to become a full-fledged member of the church. He was saying, in effect, does it give you assurance to comprehend election as a courtroom debate and verdict? Do you want to see it as winning a military battle? As a flower growing? As an apprentice musician learning to play and praise? As riding in a coach to a great man's feast? However you see it, just be sure you do see it and come into full membership.

The crucial question for the consideration of Gods Determinations as a play is, in choosing what is normally the most public and mimetic of genres for his literary response to the crisis of the half-way covenant, did Taylor achieve dramatic effects, at least on the stage of his mind, that would not have been possible with other genres? The answer is yes. As both Colacurcio and Gatta have demonstrated, Gods Determinations is the most humanistic and empathetic of Puritan texts. Taylor achieves that relationship to his audience by the dramatization, however abstract, of not just the ideas of Puritan belief but also the emotions that accompany the attempt to live according to those beliefs. For example, In “A Dialogue between Justice and Mercy,” a personification allegory of contradictory concepts within Christian doctrine (if not within the divine nature itself), this exchange occurs:

JUSTICE
I'le take thy Bond; But know thou this must doe:
          Thou from thy Fathers bosom must depart,
And be incarnate like a slave below,
          Must pay mans Debts unto [the] utmost marke
          Thou must sustain that burden, that will make
          The Angells sink into th' Infernall lake.
Nay, on thy shoulders bare must beare the Smart
          Which makes the Stoutest Angell buckling cry;
Nay, makes thy Soule to Cry through griefe of heart,
          ELI, ELI, LAMA SABACHT[H]ANI.
MERCY
All this I'le do, and do it o're and o're,
          Before my Clients Case shall ever faile.
I'le pay his Debt, and wipe out all his Score,
          And till the pay day Come, I'le be his baile.

(37)

Taylor's choice of dramatic rendition over narration proves effective in this scene by vividly illustrating the doctrine that Christ is himself a divine personification allegory: “the word made flesh” (this scene dramatizes that the word is mercy). But the exchange between Justice and Mercy is not just point-counterpoint; it is, in dramatic form, a heated debate. The dialogue of these personified concepts is moving precisely because of the passion of their speeches, which manifest a slight sense of characterization. In order to reassure the doubting half-way member, Taylor dramatized not only “God's determinations” but also God's determination to redeem fallen Man.

The scene with which Taylor reaps the most benefits from the drama genre is “A Threnodiall Dialogue Between the Second and Third Ranks.” If there were any tone one would least expect to find in a Puritan text it would have to be farce, yet in this scene Taylor lampoons the too-humble half-way members of his congregation by representing Second and Third Ranks' exaggerated self-doubts in stichomythic dialogue:

SECOND
There's not a Sin that is not in our Heart,
And if Occasion were, it would out start.
There's not a Precept that we have not broke,
Hence not a Promise unto us is spoke.
THIRD
Its worse with us: The Preacher speaks no word,
The Word of God no sentence doth afford;
But fall like burning Coals of Hell new blown
Upon our Souls, and on our Heads are thrown.
SECOND
Its worse with us. Behold Gods threatonings all;
Nay, Law and Gospell on our Heads do fall.
Both Hell and Heaven, God and Divell Do
With Wracking Terrours Consummate our Woe.
THIRD
We'le ne're believe that you are worse than wee,
For Worse than us wee judge no Soul can bee.
We know not where to run, nor what to doe;
Would God it was no worse with us than you.
SECOND
Than us alas! what, would you fain aspire
Out of the Frying Pan and into the Fire?

(74)

The verbal slapstick continues, each Rank trying to top the other in laying claim to supreme unworthiness of grace. The choice of a gently mocking caricature of the half-way members, rather than a pulpit-thumping, Juvenalian lashing of those uninitiated Puritans for whom it had been necessary to devise a half-way covenant in the first place, testifies to Taylor's compassion. He implicitly acknowledges here and explicitly acknowledges later in the Soul-Saint scene that the Puritan way to salvation is hard. Taylor does not, however, apologize for nor deviate from the requirements of Puritan doctrine regarding church membership. A subtle cause of the half-way members' arrested spiritual development is revealed by this one-upmanship debate: their pride even in self-abasement. Again, the humorous affect and the didactic effect would have been reduced had Taylor chosen to narrate the conversation rather than to let the characters speak for themselves.

Taylor's use of comic techniques in Gods Determinations to uplift the spirits of his half-way members has been thoroughly analyzed by John Gatta, though perhaps he goes too far in his attempt to demonstrate tonal unity in Gods Determinations by reading humor into virtually every scene.²⁸ What even Gatta has failed to acknowledge is that Taylor's choice of a dramaturgy which allows so much variation in tone, characterization, and action represents a sophisticated solution to the particular aesthetic challenges presented by his Puritan beliefs and rhetorical intention. Only a paradigm of drama which does not require homogenity of parts, such as epic theatre, accurately describes Taylor's technique in Gods Determinations.

If my attempt to settle the issue of Gods Determinations' generic status once and for all has been successful, i.e. if it can be agreed that Taylor's work can and should be read as an actual play which embodies the doctrines of the New England version of Puritanism, then—at the very least—any future references to Gods Determinations' generic status should have no quotation marks around the term drama. Of course, where there is literal drama, the question of performance invariably arises. Given that no record of a production of Gods Determinations exists, that public performance was precisely the aspect of theatre which Puritans thought violated God's decree against imagemaking, and that Taylor, as far as we know, was without exception a closet artist, any speculation about a staging or oral reading of Gods Determinations—even under the auspices of a dramatic sermon, of which a few examples are known and have been discussed by scholars—would be unsupportable.²⁹

However, the probability that Taylor did not produce Puritan Epic Theatre does not preclude the possibility that in composition he intended Gods Determinations to be a Puritan Everyman, especially since his rhetorical purpose—to encourage the half-way members of his congregation to become full members—is so dramatically inscribed in the text, as Colacurcio's, Gatta's and the present study have shown. No absolute evidence can be found to support this speculation either, except that, as has been demonstrated here, Gods Determinations is—more than anything else—a play. Perhaps, then, it would not be going too far to suggest that histories of the American drama will have to be revised to give credit to Edward Taylor, whose artistic genius we are still learning to appreciate, as the author of the first play written on the North American continent.

Notes

1. Norman Grabo, Edward Taylor (New York: Twayne, 1961), 163. Grabo's comments quoted here and elsewhere are representative of previous scholarly considerations of Gods Determinations' dramatic form in that they entertain the possibility that Gods Determinations is a play but then retreat from that idea, assigning Taylor's work instead to a genre more commonly found in Puritan writing. For other studies besides Grabo's which have straddled the fence on the issue of Gods Determinations' generic status, see Willie T. Weathers, “Edward Taylor, Hellenistic Puritan,” American Literature, 18 (1946): 18-26; Austin Warren, New England Saints (Ann Arbor: U Michigan P, 1956); Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961); Jean L. Thomas, “Drama and Doctrine in Gods Determinations,” American Literature, 36 (1965): 452-62; Robert Arner, “Notes on the Structural Divisions of Edward Taylor's Gods Determinations,” Studies in the Humanities, 3 (June 1973): 27-29, Karl Keller, The Example of Edward Taylor (Amherst: U Massachusetts P, 1975); John Gatta Jr., “The Comic Design of Gods Determinations touching his Elect,” Early American Literature 10 (1975) 121-43; and Lynn Haims, “Puritan Iconography: The Art of Edward Taylor's Gods Determinations” in Puritan Poets and Poetics: Seventeenth-Century American Poetry in Theory and Practice, ed. Peter White (University Park: The Pennsylvania UP, 1985): 84-98.

2. Most studies of Gods Determinations' generic status have resolved the issue by labeling the work as a literary hybrid, but the difference between prior classifications and the present study's is one—and it is an all-important one—of emphasis. Where Thomas describes Gods Determinations as “dramatic homily,” I propose “homiletic drama”; where Pearce and other scholars regard Gods Determinations as a “dramatic poem,” I prefer “poetic drama” or “drama in verse”; where Haims emphasizes the “allegory or emblem” form, I subordinate it as “allegorical or emblematic drama,” and so on.

3. Most handbooks (for example, John Russell Taylor, The Penguin Dictionary of the Theatre. Baltimore: Penguin, 1966; Jack A. Vaugh, Drama A to Z: A Handbook. New York: Ungar, 1978; C. Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature. 4th ed. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1980) either do not define drama as a genre requiring performability or the authorial intention of performance; or if they do mention performability as a criterion, then in practice throughout the handbook they do not actually use “play” in that sense. I maintain that the term play should be applied to Gods Determinations because, unlike the more general terms “drama” or “dramatic work” which can describe novels, narrative poems, etc., play makes clear that Gods Determinations is a work in which action occurs in the present and is represented primarily in dialogue without speaker tags or description of characters' appearances.

4. The use of a theatrical narrator to set the scene, bridge a span of time, report action which has occurred off-stage, etc. dates back to classical drama. Just as dialogue does not disqualify a work as a novel or narrative poem and make it a play, neither does narration disqualify a work as a play and make it something else. For example, in Our Town the Stage Manager's narration constitutes a higher percentage of the text than do the lines of the narrator in Gods Determinations, yet no one denies that Wilder's work is a play. The Stage Manager also assumes different roles in the story, and though some of his speeches are quite long, Wilder's poetic prose, especially when spoken by a gifted actor, need not be tedious. Both Brecht and Wilder have employed scene titles on cards or projection screens in productions of their plays.

5. In Puritanism in America: New Culture in a New World. (New York: Viking, 1973), Larzer Ziff says, “Opposition to the theater was not opposition to drama but rather to the falsification to the point of obscenity of what was to be acted out by each man in his own person rather than by a class of men in assumed roles. Drama, indeed, as Wigglesworth and Thompson among others demonstrate, was of the essence of life” (168).

6. Edward Taylor. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1965, 26.

7. The Plain Mans Pathway to Heaven (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1975, reel 1376) reads more like Socratic dialogue than narrative drama, but Dent was aware of the similarity between his work and a play, as he explains in his “Epistle to the Reader”: “I am in a dialogue, not in a Sermon … For this Dialogue hath, in it, not the nature of a Tragedy, which is begunne with joy, and ended with sorrow: but of a Comedie, which is begunne with Sorrowe, and ended with joy.” Dent was writing at a time (1601) when Shakespeare and Elizabethan drama were at their zenith; it is significant, therefore, that he echoed the language of Aristotle's definition of tragedy from the Poetics, which was well-known in the Renaissance. The Plain Mans Pathway to Heaven even represents a human action and thus could be said to have a comic plot in that Philagathus undergoes “repentance, and true conversion unto God” (392) as the result of his dialogue with Theologus, a Puritan minister he meets on the road. One could not, however, make the same argument regarding generic classification for The Plain Mans Pathway to Heaven that the present study is making for Gods Determinations since Dent's devotional manual was book-length (398 pages), and was published in approximately 30 editions during the 17th century in a format obviously designed for personal use as a reference work (all but the last three titles in the six-page table of contents are discursive rather than narrative; a minimum of 20 of Gods Determinations' 36 segment titles describe actions rather than ideas, and Taylor did not write a table of contents).

8. “Arcades” (1633), Comus (1634), Samson Agonistes (1671). Like Dent, Milton makes direct reference to the Poetics in his preface to Samson Agonistes.

9. Among previous studies, John Gatta's discussion of Taylor's comic techniques comes the closest to identifying Gods Determinations literally as a play, but even Gatta could make the following statement only if he were working from a preconception of drama similar to Grabo's: “is it simply because Taylor lacks theatrical sense that so much of the work seems to be, at best, only half-way drama? … Yet it is possible that Taylor, aware of the crudity of his theatrics, is more often playing on the notion that his performance is nothing more than a comparatively inept staging of a very real and momentous drama … Granting this possibility, one finds an animating purpose behind the construction of dialogues and situations that may, on the surface, resemble shabby play-acting more than fully developed drama” (139-40, emphasis added).

10. Brecht on Theatre, John Willett, tr. (London: Methuen, 1964), 312. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.

11. Aristotle's Politics and Poetics, B. Jowett and T. Twining, trans. (New York: Viking, 1957), 246. As we shall see, Gods Determinations is a fable composed of many fables.

12. In the preface to The Poems of Edward Taylor (New Haven: Yale, 1960), Donald E. Stanford says, “In his sophomore year [at Harvard, Taylor] reviewed Hebrew, Greek, logic, and Rhetoric” (xl-xli), and Harvard's reproduction of Cambridge's curriculum included “A smattering of Classical belleslettres” (xli). As noted by Michael Colacurcio, “Gods Determinations touching Half-Way Membership: Occasion and Audience in Edward Taylor,” American Literature 39 (1967): 298-314, “For Taylor, as for all Puritans, poetry was a branch of rhetoric” (313), and thus any study of rhetoric may well have included the Poetics. In The Curriculum at Early Seventeenth-Century Cambridge (Cambridge: Harvard, 1958), William Costello says, “Rhetoric, the art of eloquent communication, included, informally, history, poetry, drama, epistolary prose, classical geography, ethical dialogues, and readings in sacred scripture, in so far as these were the sources of ideas and the models of phraseology which the eloquent man must muster” (39). Later, Costello says, “As examples of student proficiency in Greek, one may turn to a series of commonplace books kept in Trinity. … All of them are jammed with excerpts from the Greek of Aristotle particularly” (63). As noted above, we know of at least two other Puritans, Arthur Dent and John Milton, who were familiar enough with the Poetics to echo the language of passages on tragedy.

13. Lynn Haims notes, “In Gods Determinations we observe the struggle of the artistic sensibility to create within the confines of scriptural prohibitions against imagemaking” (85), and she also cites “The deliberately rough form of Gods Determinations” (96, emphasis added). Similarly, Roy Harvey Pearce says, “His Puritanism, like [his peers'], obliged him to put Art below Nature, and both below God, in the scale of being. Yet for that very reason, his Puritanism forced him to find—dare one say create?—an ‘artless’ art, one which in the hands of a master like him is art indeed” (54). Perhaps Taylor's obedience to the commandment to not hold up “graven images” accounts for his giving dialogue to every character in Gods Determinations except God, whose speeches are represented only through indirect discourse by the narrator.

14. Although Brecht mentioned the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as periods exhibiting epic or instructional theatre or alienation effects, he did not cite (or his editor-translator did not include) specific medieval, Elizabethan or Jacobean plays he regarded as examples of the aesthetic. However, morality plays—with their obvious didacticism, their abstract representation of character and action, their epic and episodic narratives—are undoubtedly what Brecht had in mind. In the Renaissance, presentational plays in which the chorus or prologue figures addressed the audience and narrated action (for example, The Spanish Tragedy, Henry V, Pericles) and metafarces, heroic plays, or tragicomedies in which there were multiple, episodic, or disjointed lines of action (for example, Knight of the Burning Pestle, Tamburlaine, A Winter's Tale), while not qualifying as pure examples of this type, do make use of epic theatre techniques.

15. In “The Morality Tradition in the Poetry of Edward Taylor,” American Literature 18 (1946): 18-26, Wright made the point that Taylor may have modelled Gods Determinations after morality plays, which, she claimed, were still being performed in the seventeenth century near where Taylor was born and raised. In “Drama and Doctrine in Gods Determinations,” Thomas counter-argues (453) that all such performances had ceased by the time of Taylor's childhood and that he wouldn't have seen them anyway since they were of Catholic origin. Again, the extremity of the stereotype of the Puritans as iconoclasts in their religion prevents an open-minded assessment of their art. Besides, scholars have observed traces of Catholic devotional themes and forms in Puritan devotional practices (see, for example, Charles Hambrick-Stowe's The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill: North Carolina, 1982) 48-51).

16. See M. C. McGuire, Milton's Puritan Masque (Athens: U Georgia P, 1983).

17. For example, the plot of Comus does correspond in the abstract to the overall plot of Gods Determinations: “Milton's dramatic vision of life found vivid expression in the central device of the masque—the journey.” As Maynard Mack suggests, the masque depicts a spiritual pilgrimage: it is “clearly in some sense an emblem of the perplexity and obscurity of mortal life which constitutes God's trial of the soul” (McGuire 67). The journey or pilgrimage references in Gods Determinations occur less frequently and have less substance than other representations of spiritual progress, but there are at least six instances of the Elect or Soul described as being on a journey; for example, “At my journies end in endless joyes / I'l make amends where Angells meet” (67). There is also an analogous relationship between the main characters of the two plays: Comus to Satan, The Lady to Soul, her two brothers to Second and Third Ranks, the Attendant Spirit to Saint. Finally, certain scenes in the two works have similar individual actions which also have similar relationships to their respective overall plots. For example, scene five in Fletcher's plot summary of Comus (168-75), the temptation of the Lady by Comus, reads quite a bit like and functions analogously to the scenes in Gods Determinations in which Satan rhetorically attacks and tempts Soul and Second and Third Ranks.

18. Angus Fletcher, The Transcendental Masque: an Essay on Milton's “Comus” (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1971), 148, 150 (emphasis added).

19. Colacurcio was the first Taylor scholar to demonstrate that Gods Determinations is, in fact, an occasional work: “The implied audience of the poem is precisely the half-way member of the Puritan congregation” (299). For those unfamiliar with the crisis of declining membership in Puritan congregations during the latter part of the seventeenth century and the attempted solution the half-way covenant represents, see, for example, Chapter Seven, “Half-Way Measures,” in P. Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge: Harvard), 1953. In brief, a half-way member was a Puritan man or woman who had not publicly testified to the experience of converting grace in his or her life, which would signify his or her status as one of the elect entitled to full participation in the devotional practices of the church. John Gatta further established that in this one work, at least, Taylor did not merely write with himself or God as the audience.

20. From Theorie des modernen Dramas, paraphrased in Marvin Carlson's Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey, from the Greeks to the Present (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984), 430.

21. Gods Determinations touching his Elect … in Poetical Works; subsequent references are cited parenthetically.

22. In dramatic terms, Grabo noted (162) five acts and Haims (84) four. Other schematics of Gods Determinations'structure have included conversion morphology (G. Sebouhian, “Conversion Morphology and the Structure of Gods Determinations,” Early American Literature (1981): 226-40), Christian paradox (S. Bush Jr., “Paradox, Puritanism, and Taylor's Gods Determinations,” Early American Literature 4 (1971): 48-66), and the Jawbones image (W. J. Scheick, “The Jawbones Schema of Edward Taylor's Gods Determinations,” in Puritan Influences in American Literature, ed. E. Elliott. Urbana: Illinois, 1979, 38-54).

23. Scholars acknowledged the presence of Covenant theology in Gods Determinations long ago, but they detected it primarily in expository passages and legal metaphors. For example, T. Johnson says in his preface to Poetical Works, Taylor “did not purpose to give epic effects to Chaos, Heaven, and Hell, but to justify Covenant theology by way of poetic exposition in highly wrought imagery” (20). My claim is that Taylor did purpose to give epic effects to Covenant theology, in part to justify it, but more importantly to reassure his half-way members of their election. For other comments on this, see Haims, Wright, Barbour, Keller, and Colacurcio.

24. In The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard, 1954), Miller says, “They achieved this remarkable feat without dethroning His omnipotence, without circumscribing His sovereignty, by the plausible device of attributing the instigation of the deal to Him” (379).

25. God's Plots and Man's Stories: Studies in the Fictional Imagination from Milton to Fielding (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1985), 119. Damrosch derived his title from a sermon by the New England Puritan minister, Thomas Shepard.

26. As Damrosch explains, “A traditional Anglo-Catholic philosophy [sees time] as a coherent structure with an Aristotelian beginning, middle, and end. But Puritan thought, in its quest for the epiphanic moment and its suspicion of human interpretation, is committed to admiring the grace that rescues each separate instant from the void, rather than tracing the pattern that connects one instant with another in temporal sequence” (60).

27. Addressing the genre issue, Damrosch also sees the boundary between narrative and lyric as nebulous: “The novel, far from occupying a position diametrically opposed to the subjective lyric, is in a certain sense its expanded expression” (13). One could substitute Taylor for Bunyan in the following statement and Damrosch's point would accurately describe the epic theatre design of Gods Determinations: “Bunyan's special genius is expressed in a union of emblem with mimesis that has as many affinities with lyric intensity as with novelistic breadth” (185).

28. For example, I read “The Third Rank Accused” as a chilling portrayal of Satan's subtlety, not the “comic reduction from his traditional epic stature” in the utterance of “wry quip[s]” (132, 133) as Gatta characterizes it

29. See, for example, Jean Thomas's general remarks (452-53) regarding dramatic aspects within the homiletic tradition; Charles Hambrick-Stowe's brief description (121-22) of a sermon Thomas Shepard preached as a wedding in which he, as minister, married the congregation to Christ, thus dramatizing the Biblical metaphor and Christian doctrine that Christ is the bridegroom and the church the bride; and Sargent Bush Jr.'s similar, though less radical argument than the present one, about Thomas Hooker's sermons: “Hooker, always the devout Puritan, plays the role of incipient dramatist, substituting narrative description for the actions and speeches of full-fledged stage creations. For the Puritans the imaginative, creative preacher could provide—probably without either his or his audience's realization—a substitute for other available forms of entertainment which for them were outlawed” in The Writings of Thomas Hooker: Spiritual Adventure in Two Worlds (Madison, WI: U Wisconsin P, 1984), 182.