SOURCE: Hunt, Maurice. “The Religion of Twelfth Night.” CLA Journal 37, no. 2 (1993): 189-203.

[In the following essay, Hunt discusses the attitudes toward providence expressed by various characters in Twelfth Night, as well as the play’s satirical treatment of Puritanism.]

Much has been written about the Christian allusions in Twelfth Night, especially those to the Feasts of Epiphany and Candelmas. Foremost among critics adopting a Christian perspective is R. Chris Hassel, who has illustrated the relevance for the play of certain liturgical events in the Church year.¹ Recently Shakespeare's comic staging of the Annunciation has been demonstrated in Twelfth Night.² Yet despite these Christian allusions (and other, more generalized ones to the idea of being a good steward of one's talents), the religion of Twelfth Night is not as consistently Christian as might be supposed. Characters' references to Jove, Fate, Fortune, and Time as the providence of the play's world cause playgoers to question whether Shakespeare intended to represent a single deity consistently ruling the play's events. Not all of the allusions to non-Christian ruling forces can be interpreted as foils calculated to make the staging of the true doctrine of the Epiphany appear brighter. Several of the allusions, especially those spoken by Viola, make the Christian religion represented in Twelfth Night less doctrinaire than critics have claimed. In particular, Shakespeare satirizes certain self-serving Puritan notions of Providence in order to highlight a more authoritative Providence that works generally rather than specifically through the natural causation of Time and Fortune. While this idea of Providence appears in the prose romances underlying the plots of Shakespeare's comedies, it also conforms to Hooker's description of a somewhat vague, generalized Christian Providence that operates remotely through this world's natural agents, such as time and tempest. After satirizing traits of Puritanism, Brownism, and Catholicism in Twelfth Night, Shakespeare approximates an Anglican perspective on Providence, but only in an ambiguous manner.

While amounting to a kind of fantasy land, the Illyria of Twelfth Night appears to be under God's jurisdiction, as the theological overtones of the play's title implies. Characters as different as Viola and Sir Andrew swear by or mention the Christian God. When Olivia vainly lifts her veil to show Cesario her face, Viola exclaims that it is “Excellently done, if God did all” (I.v.239).³ When, at Sir Toby's urging, Sir Andrew pens a challenge to Cesario, he concludes by writing “Fare thee well, and God have mercy upon one of our souls” (III.iv.167-68). Confronted by the duellist whom Sir Toby has built up into a formidable adversary, Viola murmurs an aside, “Pray God defend me” (III.iv.307). Characters' references to the devil, heaven, and hell complement their allusions to God. For example, in his “catechism” of Olivia, Feste says of her dead brother, “I think his soul is in hell, madonna” (I.v.66); she replies, “I know his soul is in heaven, fool” (I.v.67). Perhaps surprisingly, the character who most often mentions God is not Viola but Feste. Concerning Maria's punning contest with him, Feste concludes, “Well, God give them wisdom that have it; and those that are fools, let them use their talents” (I.v.14-15). And when Malvolio judges that “Infirmity, that decays the wise, doth ever make the better fool,” Feste quips, “God send you, sir, a speedy infirmity, for the better increasing your folly” (I.v.76-77). Feste's catechism of Olivia and his repeated reference to her as “Madonna” deepen the Christian overtones of his character. And yet as the mockery of this catechism and his role as the false curate Sir Topas suggest, the association of Feste and Christianity does not appear a serious one.⁴ Characters such as Viola frequently depict Feste's wit as barren and dry. This barrenness qualifies the spiritual advice that, disguised as the bogus prelate, he gives Malvolio, who is confined to a dark room.

After Maria hurriedly tells him to put on a gown and beard and make believe he is Sir Topas, Feste jokes, “Well, I'll put it on, and I will dissemble myself in't, and I would I were the first that ever dissembled in such a gown” (IV.ii.4-6). By means of these remarks, Shakespeare calls attention to the falsity of Feste's Christian persona. The errors in his Christian doctrine compound this falsity. Supposedly testing Malvolio's sanity by asking him what he thinks of Pythagoras's opinion concerning wild fowl, Feste receives the correct reply—“That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird” (IV.ii.53-54). When he asks his dupe what he thinks of Pythagoras's opinion, Malvolio implicitly endorses Christian doctrine, which does not include that of reincarnation: “I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve his opinion” (IV.ii.56-57). Feste, however, affirms the non-Christian principle of reincarnation when he replies, “Fare thee well: Remain thou still in darkness. Thou shalt hold th' opinion of Pythagoras ere I will allow of thy wits, and fear to kill a woodcock lest thou dispossesss the soul of thy grandam. Fare thee well” (IV.ii.58-62). By speaking of the wild fowl as a woodcock, the Elizabethan aviary type of silliness, Feste indirectly calls Malvolio fool by heredity. Nevertheless, Feste's doctrine separates him from the Christian role he plays. In fact, his allusion to the transmigration of souls acts as a foil to the preferred epiphanies of the play. Rather than the sudden manifestations of a redemptive, hidden identity, such as those seen in Sebastian, Olivia, and Viola in the last scenes of the play, Feste's notion of reincarnation leads auditors away from the play's focus upon the epiphany of spiritual incarnation.

Regarded from the perspective of the topsy-turvy customs of Twelfth Night—a time when asses ceremoniously progressed down cathedral aisles and when “naturals,” or village idiots, impersonated the parish priest⁵—Feste's assumed and mistaken Christianity plays its part in a dramatic design with a relatively solemn religious conclusion: the celebration of the epiphanic occasion when divinity within mankind first became apparent.⁶ Nevertheless, specific challenges to Christianity as a whole within Twelfth Night question the conclusion that Feste's playing Sir Topas finds its place neatly within an orthodox Christian ritual. For example, at one point Sir Andrew asserts that he has “no more wit than a Christian or an ordinary man has” (I.iii.82-83). Equally qualifying of standard Christian orthodoxy read into the play are the characters' many allusions to different ruling deities and non-Christian schemes. Even characters who mention God speak of other providences, a fact which clouds readings that claim that the play categorically celebrated the Epiphany in secular forms.

“Thou has spoke for us, madonna,” Feste at one point tells Olivia, “as if thy eldest son should be a fool: whose skull Jove cram with brains” (I.v.113-15). Feste refers to the classical deity again in his response to Viola's gift of a coin: “Now Jove, in his next commodity of hair, send thee a beard” (III.i.45-46). Moreover, Viola, upon landing on the Illyrian seacoast, tells the Captain that she believes her brother “is in Elysium” (I.ii.4). Granted that the word “heaven” would not have juxtaposed itself as melodiously with the mention of Illyria in the preceding verse, Shakespeare makes his heroine's classical term for the afterlife more understandable by giving her initially a belief in Chance rather than Providence. “Perchance he is not drown'd,” she states; “What think you, sailors?” (I.ii.5). The subsequent dialogue stresses the absence of faith in Providence. “It is perchance that you yourself were sav'd,” the Captain remarks. “O my poor brother! and so perchance may he be.” Viola replies. “True, madam,” the Captain continues, “and to comfort you with chance,”

Assure yourself, after our ship did split,
And you and those poor number sav'd with you
Hung on our driving boat, I saw your brother,
Most provident in peril, bind himself
(Courage and hope both teaching him the practice)
To a strong mast that liv'd upon the sea;
Where, like Arion on the dolphin's back,
I saw him hold acquaintance with the waves
So long as I could see.

(I.ii.6-17)

Interestingly, Chance rules earthly affairs in the Captain's account; in his opinion, it is mankind, not God, who acts providentially in times of peril. “Provident in peril,” self-reliant Sebastian bound himself to a mast. If anything, the metaphysics implicit in the Captain's speech is existential. Rather than comforting Viola with Chance, the Captain has comforted her with a portrait of a hopeful, brave brother who enacts his own providence in a world of accident.

The Captain's portrait of shipwreck vaguely resembles Sir Philip Sidney's speaking picture in the Arcadia of Pyrocles and Musidorus afloat amid the wreckage of their ship. The nonspecific resemblance reminds the playgoer that the conventions of Elizabethan romance undergird Twelfth Night. John F. Danby has described Sidneyan romance (and the English Renaissance literature derived from it) as composed of a series of concentric rings, the innermost dominated by characters' mistaken belief in Chance and Fate and the outermost ruled by Nature and Christian Providence, which directs heroes to a prosperous end despite their erroneous trust in Fortune or Fate. In the literal unfolding of Sidneyan romance and its derivatives, the hero and heroine usually pass from the belief in Chance or Fate to the conviction of Providence, a guiding design which is Christian in its overtones if not always in its name.⁷ Granted Shakespeare's portrayal of Viola's endorsement of Chance, the playgoer might expect the later staging of her recognition of Providence as the Art of God that directs apparently lethal events such as shipwrecks to unexpectedly joyous conclusions.

That acknowledgement, however, does not occur in Twelfth Night. Or if it does, its staging is so ambiguous as to be unrecognizable. When she is not trusting her own quick wits, Viola relies upon Time and Fortune for her salvation. Once resolved to serve Orsino as Cesario, a musical eunuch, Viola exclaims, “What else may hap, to time I will commit” (I.ii.60). Her trusting Time in this case elaborates her previous wish that she “might not be deliver'd to the world” until she has made her “own occasion mellow” (I.ii.42-43)—where “mellow” connotes a benign ripeness created by Time. In Ilyria, Viola turns not to God or Providence but to Time as the agent of a ripening process, a process which will present her with opportune moments that might be seized and wrought into her happiness. In this respect, she is the female counterpart of the young man of the sonnets who read Shakespeare's carpe diem advice. When opportune moments do not materialize as quickly as Viola may have supposed, she never loses her faith in Time: “O time, thou must untangle this, not I” (II.ii.38), she laments concerning the barren love triangle formed by Orsino's, Olivia's, and her own unrequited affections. And when she first realizes that Olivia may have fallen in love with Cesario, she remarks, “Fortune forbid my outside have not charm'd her” (II.ii.17). These references in Viola's speech may convince playgoers that Shakespeare was either careless or unconcerned with dramatizing a single ruling deity in Twelfth Night, a deity comparable to the Jupiter of Cymbeline or the Apollo of The Winter's Tale.

Nevertheless, Shakespeare's sustained satire of a Puritan notion of Providence suggests that Twelfth Night, in its broader strokes, apparently conforms to a single metaphysical design, that of Elizabethan Anglicanism. An anti-Puritan bias surfaces in one of Sir Andrew's casual comments. Hearing Sir Toby maintain that only “some laudable attempt, either of valour or policy” on Sir Andrew's part can regain Olivia's supposed affection for the knight, Sir Andrew replies, “An 't be any way, it must be with valour, for policy I hate: I had as lief be a Brownist as a politician” (III.ii.29-31). In the words of G. L. Kittredge, a Brownist was a “follower of Robert Browne, an extreme Puritan, founder of the Congregational form of church government (59).⁸ Through Sir Toby's remark, Shakespeare associates Puritanism with the practice of an Italianate vice, policy.⁹ In The Picture of a Puritane (1605), a dialogue between a Protestant and a Puritan (to the extreme disadvantage of the latter character), Oliver Ormerod has the Protestant tell the Puritan, “For it is not unknown to any that hath had any dealing with you in wordly affairs, how crafty and subtle you are in all your dealing.”¹⁰ Malvolio, the puritanical character in the play, prides himself upon both his knowledge and practice of policy. “Marry sir, sometimes he is a kind of Puritan” (II.iii.140), Maria asserts. “The devil a Puritan that he is, or anything constantly, but a time-pleaser, an affection'd ass that cons state without book, and utters it by great swarths” (II.iii.146-49). Like Viola, Malvolio, in Maria's remark, trusts in time; pleasing time, however, is not the same thing as mellowing time or seizing the opportune moment. Shakespeare reverses the Elizabethan stock identification of policy as a “bad” Catholic (Italian/Spanish) practice by having Maria, whose name has Catholic overtones (especially strong in the context of the play's allusions to the Annunciation and Madonna), justly practice upon the Puritan Malvolio, “out-policying” and punishing the politician who delights in secret codes and love-games. Part of Maria's gulling of Malvolio invloves satirizing the narrow, self-serving idea of Providence as the economic reward of the religious elect.

In the case of Malvolio, this narrow idea is associated with the god Jove. Analysis of Twelfth Night discovers that passive or deluded characters regularly swear by Jove or Fate. For example, in act I, passive, withdrawn Olivia calls upon Fate to bestow Cesario upon her: “Fate, show thy force; ourselves we do not owe. / What is decreed must be: and be this so” (I.v.314-15). Sharply contrasting with Viola, who seizes the moment to disguise herself so that she may be protected by Orsino, inactive Olivia imagines Fate seizing Cesario and herself to forge a love bond. Likewise, Sebastian's depression over the loss of his sister and his worldly goods expresses itself in a belief in Fate. “My stars shine darkly over me,” he tells Antonio; “the malignancy of my fate might perhaps distemper yours” (II.i.3-5). Rather than Fate, Malvolio credits Jove with ruling his life, giving him Olivia as a wife. Herschel Baker has noted that English Puritans “insisted that providence be acknowledged as the surest sign of God's sovereignty.”¹¹ The delusion springing from Malvolio's self-love includes a non-Christian deity intent on materially rewarding the egotistical “Puritan.” Significantly, it is Maria who plants this idea of providence in his imagination. The first verses of the forged “coded” letter that Malvolio reads aloud name the father of the gods:¹²

Jove knows I love;
But who?
Lips, do not move,
No man must know.

(II.v.98-101)

In the letter itself, Malvolio reads, “Thy fates open their hands, let thy blood and spirit embrace them” (II.v.146-47). And at the end, he reads, “Go to, thou art made, if thou desir'st to be so. If not, let me see thee a steward still, the fellow of servants, and not worth to touch Fortune's fingers” (II.v.154-57). Maria signs the letter “The Fortunate Unhappy” (II.v.159). By implying that Fortune has given Malvolio the opportunity to woo Olivia, Maria has appealed to Malvolio's irreligious belief that Chance rules mortal affairs. Even before he sees the dropped letter, musing upon Olivia, he murmurs to himself, “'Tis but fortune, all is fortune” (II.v.23). And yet the letter's reference to Jove changes metaphysically irresolute Malvolio's idea of the deity ruling all human things. Deluded into believing that Olivia loves him, Malvolio thanks his stars, his horoscope, for his happiness, quickly qualifying his belief in astrological determinism by adding the name of the god appearing in the letter: “Jove and my stars be praised” (II.v.173-74). And when he continues to read and discovers that presumably Olivia would have him continually smile in her presence, he concludes, “Jove, I thank thee. I will smile” (II.v.178).

That Shakespeare intends these non-Christian references to manifest a certain irresoluteness, even error in religious belief, is indicated by a remark of Maria's in act III. Referring to Malvolio's yellow stockings, cross-gartering, and silly smiling, she tells her fellow plotters, “If you desire the spleen, and will laugh yourself into stitches, follow me. Yond gull Malvolio is turned heathen, a very renegado; for there is no Christian that means to be saved by believing rightly can ever believe such impossible passages of grossness. He's in yellow stockings” (III.ii.65-70). Kittredge notes that by the turn of the seventeenth century cross-gartering was a fashion associated only with old men and Puritans, while Queen Elizabeth disliked the color yellow because it appeared in the flag of Spain (48). Maria implies that her forged letter, which has been called an epistle, amounts to a religious tract testing the Christian faith of its reader. Crediting Jove and his stars rather than God or Providence for the gift of Olivia, Malvolio fails the test. Regarded from an Anglican viewpoint, Malvolio is a heathen, a renegade to the true English church. His stockings suggest allegiances to both the Puritan and Catholic faiths, a doctrinal impossibility in keeping with the mad atmosphere of Illyria.

Shakespeare focuses the crassness latent in some Puritans' notion of Providence by having Malvolio thank Jove for making him materially rich. Regarding Olivia's sending of Sir Toby to him as a veiled fulfillment of part of the letter, Malvolio assumes that he and Olivia have engaged in a secret duet of policy: “O ho! do you come near me now? No worse man than Sir Toby to look to me! This concurs directly with the letter” (III.iv.64-66). Malvolio's deity delights in the practice of policy and rewards subjects who do likewise for their own materialistic ends. “I have limed her,” Malvolio gloats, “but it is Jove's doing, and Jove make me thankful” (III.iv.74-75). “Well, Jove, not I, is the doer of this, and he is to be thanked” (III.iv.83-84). It will be recalled that Malvolio's selfish attraction to Olivia is not so much to her person as to her riches. His fantasies of married life with her revolve not around her beauteous person but around “Count Malvolio” (II.v.35), sitting in a “branched velvet gown,” “having come from a day-bed, where [he has] left Olivia sleeping,” later playing with “some rich jewel” while he lords it over Sir Toby and the lighter folk (II.v.47-81). Malvolio's thanking Jove for the expected fulfillment of a materially enriching destiny highlights the unchristian idea of a self-centered providence, one associated in Twelfth Night with Elizabethan Puritans rising through commerce and time-pleasing and thanking the supreme deity for their riches.

In The Redemption of Time (1606), the Banbury Puritan William Whatley argues that men should “buy out the Time, to traffique with it, as men do with wares … Good hours and opportunities and merchandize of the highest rate and price: and whosoever will have his soul thrive, must not suffer any of these bargains of Time to pass him, but must buy up, and buy out all the minutes thereof.”¹³ Concerning this passage, G. F. Waller has concluded that “the accommodation of Puritanism to the merchant's appreciation of the commercial value of time is plain” (24). For a Puritan like Whatley, God's Providence presents moments that the elect recognize and personally seize for their material gain. Foolishly Malvolio has made the discovered “epistle” signify what he selfishly wills it to mean; Shakespeare implicity satirizes the Puritan practice of interpreting scripture by no other light than that afforded by the solitary reader's crass needs and desires.

Olivia's belief that Satan possesses Malvolio after he has conformed his behavior to his willful reading of the epistle further defines Shakespeare's attitude toward the notion of Providence represented by the gull. When Sir Toby, Fabian, and Maria torment Malvolio by assuming that he is mad, they urge him to defy the devil through the power of prayer. “My prayers, minx?” (III.iv.122), Malvolio surlily responds to Maria. “No, I warrant you, he will not hear of godliness” (III.iv.123), she concludes, focusing the general irreligion apparent in Malvolio throughout the episode of his gulling. Olivia's single reference to Christian deity—“God comfort thee!” (III.iv.32)—addresses Malvolio's supposed madness; by altering Olivia's faith in this one instance, Shakespeare throws into relief the ungodly opinions that have prompted Malvolio to act as though he were possessed by the Devil. The playwright continues to stress the sacrilegious attitudes fueling Malvolio's “madness” when Feste in act V, referring to Malvolio's letter to Olivia, asserts, “[B]ut as a madman's epistles are no gospels, so it skills not much when they are delivered” (V.i.285-87). By couching his explanation of the tardiness of delivery in this religious language, Feste (and Shakespeare through him) reminds playgoers of the sacrilegious epistle catalyzing Malvolio's ungodly beliefs and behavior, which are based in an unpleasant egotism at odds with the charitable messages of the true gospel.

Nevertheless, Malvolio's only explicit reference to Christian deity appears in his “mad” epistle. His letter to Olivia begins “By the Lord, madam” (V.i.301). By this salutation, Shakespeare may be suggesting that Malvolio's suffering has amounted to a kind of purgatory, refining his faith into a less self-serving and more orthodox form of worship. Such a refinement of faith would complement that which occurs within Olivia in the later scenes of Twelfth Night. In keeping with the play's celebration of the Epiphany (the Festival of Light), Olivia characterizes her imminent marriage to Sebastian in the following terms: “Then lead the way, good father,” she tells the priest who will unite them; “and heavens so shine / That they may fairly note this act of mine!” (IV.iii.34-35). Not Fate, not the stars (those divine forces invoked by Olivia earlier)—but a true priest gives her Sebastian in wedlock, a marriage celebrated under a “consecrated roof” (IV.iii.25) in an orthodox religious fashion (V.i.148-61).

And what of Viola? Do the events of the play refine her faith into a conviction more recognizably Christian than her early references to Elysium, Fortune, and Time suggest? When Antonio first mistakes her for Sebastian, calling her by her brother's name, Viola, once she is alone on the stage, ecstatically exclaims,

He nam'd Sebastian. I my brother know
Yet living in my glass; even such and so
In favour was my brother, and he went
Still in this fashion, colour, ornament,
For him I imitate. O if it prove,
Tempests are kind, and salt-waves fresh in love!

(III.iv.389-94)

Tempests and the sea remain the most specifically defined agents of Providence in Viola's world view. She never moves beyond the outer ring of Nature of God, who, in the scheme of Sidneyan romance, orders Nature by his divine Art.

In this respect, Shakespeare's characterization has an Anglican, specifically a Hookerian cast. “Nature therefore is nothing else but God's instrument” Hooker argued in Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.¹⁴ What is Providence to God, working His will through natural agents and processes, goes by different names among men:

Only thus much is discerned, that the natural generation and process of all things receiveth order of proceeding from the settled stability of divine understanding. This appointeth unto them their kinds of working; the disposition whereof in the purity of God's own knowledge and will is rightly termed by the name of Providence. The same being referred unto the things themselves here disposed by it, was wont by the ancient to be called natural Destiny.¹⁵

Like Shakespeare in Twelfth Night, Hooker sees no contradiction between Providence and Destiny, simply because God works generally (that is, remotely) through natural agents such as sea tempests rather than by miracle or direct relevation to form designs that people at different times in different cultures name variously. “The manner of this divine efficiency, being far above us,” Hooker states, “we are no more able to conceive by our own reason, than creatures unreasonable by their sense are able to apprehend after what manner we dispose and order the course of our affairs” (159). Thus Viola, unable to grasp directly the pattern of Providence, reasons that its agents, tempests and salt waves, are fresh in love. Still, the joyous design is God's: “Those things which nature is said to do, are by divine art perform'd, using nature as an instrument; nor is there any such art or knowledge divine in nature herself working, but in the Guide of nature's work” (159). Performed most likely on Twelfth Night (January 6th) and definitely on Candlemas (February 2, 1602),¹⁶Twelfth Night, after all, celebrates in delightful secular form key events in God's design such as the Epiphany and the Purification of the Virgin Mary.

Along with salt waves and tempests, the Anglican God as defined by Hooker realizes His Providence through the agency of time, which Viola chiefly trusts to work her happiness. Unlike Malvolio's conception of Jove's providence, Viola's idea of providence has no place for the reward of narrow, self-serving motives. Tempests and sea storms reward the needs and wishes of suffering mortals when characters are self-sacrificing in the pursuit of others' happiness. Such an assumption may or may not have matched Shakespeare's idea of Anglican Providence. Viola's idea of providence is less knowable, more truly mysterious than Hooker's admittedly removed God. It looks ahead to the enigmatic agents guiding the characters on Prospero's island—and perhaps Prospero himself.

Notes

1. See both Renaissance Drama and the English Church Year (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1979) 77-89, 94-101; and Faith and Folly in Shakespeare's Romantic Comedies (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1980) 149-75, esp. 149-53, 162, 166-67.

2. Maurice Hunt, “Twelfth Night and the Annunciation,” Papers on Language and Literature 25 (1989): 264-71.

3. All quotations of Twelfth Night are taken from the Arden edition, ed. J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik (London: Methuen, 1975).

4. For the contrary view—that Feste's foolishness as curate exemplifies an Erasmian or Pauline wisdom—see R. Chris Hassel, Jr., Faith and Folly 149, 150, 153, 164-165, 169-75.

5. The topsy-turvy customs are described by C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (1959; Cleveland: World, 1963) 25; and by Marion B. Smith, Dualities in Shakespeare (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1966) 114.

6. The epiphanic motif in Twelfth Night has been elucidated by, among others, John Hollander, “Twelfth Night and the Morality of Indulgence,” Sewanee Review 67 (1959): 234; Barbara K. Lewalski, “Thematic Patterns in Twelfth Night,” Shakespeare Studies 1 (1965): 177-78; Smith 110-22; Richard Henze, “Twelfth Night: Free Disposition on the Sea of Love,” Sewanee Rivew 83 (1965): 267-68; Hassel, Renaissance Drama 77-86; and Cynthia Lewis, “Viola, Antonio, and Epiphany in Twelfth Night,” Essays in Literature 13 (1986): 187-99.

7. See Poets on Fortune's Hill: Studies in Sidney, Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Fletcher (1952: Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1966) 74-107.

8. Twelfth Night, ed. George Lyman Kittredge and rev. by Irving Ribner, The Kittredge Shakespeares (Waltham, MA; Ginn, 1966) 59. For negative contemporary portrayals of Brownism, including the belief that two notorious 1607 murderers (Wilson and Petterton) were Brownists, consult G. B. Harrison, A Second Jacobean Journal, Being a Record of Those Things Most Talked of During the Years 1607 to 1610 (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1958) 23, 112.

9. For the Puritanical case of Brownism, see G. B. Harrison, A Jacobean Journal, Being a Record of Those Things Most Talked of During the Years 1603-1606 (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1946) 176. In Basilikon Doron (1603), King James equates Brownists with Puritans: “Of this special sect I principally mean, when I speak of Puritans; divers of them, as Browne, Penrie, and others, having at sundry times come in Scotland, to sow their people amongst us …” (Lawrence Sasek, ed., Images of English Puritans: A Collection of Contemporary Sources [Baton Rouge: Louisiana UP, 1989] 219).

10. Quoted in Sasek 248.

11. The Wars of Truth (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1952) 15.

12. Harold Bayley, in A New Light on the Renaissance (1909; New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967), has demonstrated that secret paper codes were a practice of certain Medieval and Renaissance dissenting sects.

13. Quoted by G. F. Waller, The Strong Necessity of Time: The Philosophy of Time in Shakespeare and Elizabethan Literature (The Hague: Mouton, 1976) 24.

14. Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (London: Dent, 1907) 160.

15. Hooker 159-60. For a description of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant ideas of Providence, see Wilbur Sanders, The Dramatist and the Received Idea: Studies in the Plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1968) 110-20.

16. A performance of Twelfth Night on Candlemas, February 2, 1602, is noted in the diary of the lawyer and playgoer John Manningham.