The Virtual St Paul's Cathedral Project (VSPCP) (https://vpcathedral.chass.ncsu.edu/) is a collaborative Digital Humanities Project, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, that enables us to explore the lived religion of London in the post-Reformation period. By combining visual and acoustic digital modelling technology with recreations of early modern worship using contemporary musical settings of liturgical texts provided by The Book of Common Prayer, the Cathedral Project gives us access to the experience of specific occasions of worship and preaching in St Paul's Cathedral in early modern London.

The visual models achieve accuracy in their depictions of the buildings and spaces inside Paul's Churchyard by combining data from archaeological excavations of the original foundations left by the Great Fire of London (1666) with seventeenth-century measurements of these buildings’ interior dimensions and surviving visual depictions of the cathedral and its surrounding structures. Unlike many digital recreations of lost spaces which show the structures in pristine condition, our renderings of these models incorporate data about the relative ages of different structures as well as the effects of weather, time- and season-governed angles of light, and effects of acidic coal burned for cooking and heating. Acoustic models combine basic dimensions of the visual models with the acoustic properties of the materials used in their construction. Within these models, the Project brings together literary, religious, musical, and cultural histories of that period to recreate festive and ferial worship services using the liturgies of The Book of Common Prayer and music composed by musicians working at St Paul’s, with actors using scripts in original early modern pronunciation and musicians from Jesus College, Cambridge University standing in for their seventeenth-century predecessors.

An Odd Work of Grace

The Cathedral Project also enables us to take a fresh look at worship and preaching in the early modern period because it gives us the experience of worship and preaching scripted by The Book of Common Prayer as they unfold in real time, moment-by-moment, in models of the places in which it originally occurred. We are reminded, therefore, that the most important official documents of the English Reformation are pragmatic rather than doctrinal, concerned with enabling the organization and scripting of public worship rather than the making of dogmatic statements of belief.

THE narrative voice of Marlowe's Hero and Leander likes to express opinions about the events he recounts in this poem; in so doing, he employs the metaphor of sight for the act of knowing or believing. That is, he delights in telling us how we see things, or how we should see things, or how we are, inevitably, going to see things. The most famous of these opinions is, of course, the opinion he voices in line 176, when he asks “Whoever lov’d that lov’d not at first sight?” Marlowe's particular description of this widely shared experience of finding one's emotional and cognitive worlds suddenly reconfigured when one meets another person for the first time has, of course, become a commonplace. From Shakespeare’s borrowing of Marlowe's line to give Phebe words to articulate her newly discovered feelings for Rosalind in act 3 of As You Like It to Romeo and Juliet's ill-fated embrace of each other to Hippolyta's response to her first sight of a transfigured Bottom, to the lyrics of thousands of pop songs and to the doggerel verse in a million of last February's Valentine's Day cards, the idea that love, true love, love that is real, happens instantly, upon meeting one’s beloved for the first time.

In spite of the narrator's success in convincing many generations of readers that he is correct in his assertion about the beginnings of true love, however, the context in which this line appears in Hero and Leander suggests Marlowe wants us to take a more careful, even cautious, view of the narrator's claims. Line 176 comes, appropriately enough in Marlowe's poem, right after the narrator has described for us Hero's and Leander's first sight of each other, at an annual feast in Sestos, a feast dedicated to Venus's beloved Adonis, and in Venus's temple, where on this feast-day Hero is at work on her day job “sacrificing turtles’ blood” to the Goddess of Love (line 158); there “unhappily, / As after chanc’d, they did each other spy” (lines 133–34). As a result, we are told,

SHAKESPEARE'S King Lear ends oddly. It's not so much what happens that is odd, but what is said. Or, better, what isn't said. The play's action begins in division and winds its way to its inevitable consequences: lots of people die, and Edgar, Kent, and Albany are left to cope with the aftermath. We are used to lots of dead bodies on the stage at the end of Shakespeare's tragedies. And we are also accustomed to there being someone left behind to take over, to restore order, to say the last speech of the play. In Lear, Albany offers this part to Kent and Edgar, but Kent turns it down. Edgar does not reject the role, so we assume he accepts it, and so we reach at least a degree of return to stability at the end of King Lear. So far, so good. But what to me is odd is what happens next. Rather than state clearly his acceptance of authority, Edgar gives us his interpretation of the play's events. Describing the moment as a “sad time,” Edgar calls for us to “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say” (Lear, 5.3.325).

That's a bit odd for a closing remark, and then things get even stranger because, though Edgar says this is a time to “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say,” he does not actually use the language of feeling at all. What we get instead at the end of Lear is the language of description, of interpretation, of expectation: Edgar says, “The oldest hath borne most; we that are young / Shall never see so much, nor live so long” (Lear, 5.3.327). And then, still without a word of feeling, Edgar and the rest of the cast, or at least those whose parts in the play have not been killed off, march off the stage to “a dead march,” the slow beat of a drum. We in the audience are left with the bodies, and with the sound of the drum, and with the problem of what to make of what we have witnessed.

As Malcolm Gaskill has recently pointed out, “Teleological narratives suck drama from history, obscuring difficult choices behind final decisions and actions.” Nowhere is this truer than in the recent historiography of the English Reformation. Revisionist historians of the late twentieth century rightly criticized earlier historians for whom the English Reformation developed by design through an ordered process of reform along a “middle way” between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. Yet revisionists have introduced their own teleological narrative, one in which the Church of England—after an early Lutheran phase—rapidly became Calvinist, for all intents and purposes, and would have shed the inconvenience of its Book of Common Prayer if the book's editor, Thomas Cranmer, had only lived to spearhead a third revision. In this narrative, only Elizabeth I's liturgical conservativism saved any sense of continuity with, or reverence for, England's religious past, or any distinctive features of the emerging religious tradition we now call Anglicanism.

One would think it inevitable that, given the situation of the post-Reformation English Church as a national church, regular attendance to whose services was required by law and baptism into which every child born in England was required by law, there would be a variety of beliefs and styles of practice within it, as well as a variety of interpretations of its beliefs and practices. Milton is surely right that the sixteenth century in English religious life was a period of “conflict and change … of multiple reformations, multiple settlements, and multiple trajectories of religious change.” As a result of this, any concept of a single orthodox identity or teleology of development in the early days of Anglicanism is surely an ex post facto construction by one church party or another seeking authentication for its status in our world as the truly orthodox embodiment of Anglican identity.

A better approach to the question of the origins of Anglican identity might well be to attend to conflict and change, to explore key developments and their interaction over time, rather than seeking a moment of stasis or clarity, and especially to explore the experiences of change in England's religious life, not just their specific textual formulations.

When we think about Shakespeare's plays, we tend to think of them as closed worlds, each one a system of actions and interactions among characters involved in plots that begin, develop, and work their way to their conclusions. So our discussions about what happens in these plays are framed in terms that place the issues of the play and the sources of information needed to resolve those issues within the play itself, or in its originating culture—as phenomena “over there” in the world of the play, very much apart from us, who are “over here,” in our own worlds. This style of consideration is of course exacerbated in conversations among literary scholars because for us Shakespeare's plays are texts that appear to us as black marks on the white pages of scholarly editions.

Recent trends in theatrical performance, however, raise questions about whether this separation between the play—“over there” in its own world—and us—the play's readers or observers, in the case of actual performances—might be an artificial one. I’m thinking of the increasing interest among theater professionals in recovering original styles of performance practices for productions of early modern plays. At London's Globe Theater reconstruction, for example, or at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia, the “house style” of performance deliberately seeks to recreate— and to incorporate into their productions—the conditions of performance in early modern theatres. For productions at the Blackfriars Theatre in Staunton, for example, they “Do It With the Lights On,” while at the Wanamaker Theatre in London performances take place not just in uniform illumination but in a space litonly by candlelight. Less frequent, but in the same spirit of incorporating original theatrical and cultural practices, is the occasional practice of performing early modern drama in “Original Pronunciation,” using the hypothetical reconstruction of early modern London pronunciation devised by the linguist David Crystal.

One characteristic of productions done in the spirit of adopting “original practices” in contemporary performance has been to incorporate into stage productions an aggressive effort to efface the fourth wall that separates the world of the play in performance and the audience assembled to watch it.

This essay is about some poems by George Herbert, and especially about how the process of reading these poems offers us the opportunity to see the world as opening to us afresh, the closed text opening to new possibilities of meaning both within the text and in the world that surrounds us as we read. These are poems, mostly among those of Herbert’s poems called “shaped verse,” in which the form of the poem is in conversation with the experience of the text as it unfolds in the process of reading. These poems provide a distinctive reading experience, an experience different from the conventional experience of proceeding from letter to word and from word to line, as the poem unfolds from the upper left to the lower right of the poetic form. In these poems, form, visual appearance, and association inform, complicate, and enrich, even transfigure, our meaning-making engagement with the text.

To get to Herbert’s use of language and form in these poems, however, I need to start with bodies, in Latin, with carne, and thus with bodies in Christian doctrine, especially the doctrine of incarnation, or as the Church has put it ever since the Council of Nicaea met in 325 AD, that Jesus Christ, who is “of one substance wyth the Father,” was “incarnate by the Holy Ghoste of the Virgin Mary, And was made man.” This statement describes the figure of Jesus Christ as the embodiment of a bringing together, initiated by God, of two clusters of ideas, of concepts, of conditions, of words, of things. On the one hand there is the divine cluster, associated with the invisible, with spirit, life, breath, creativity, motion, and especially, language, for, in John’s Gospel, it is of course the Word by whom all things were made that “was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” On the other hand there is the human cluster, associated with the visible, with flesh, matter, form, finitude, mortality, and creatureliness. Christ as fully human and fully divine combines these two clusters; as the culmination of a narrative in which God becomes flesh, the invisible now becomes visible, the “unmade” Son becomes incarnate from the Virgin Mary his mother, assumes a human nature, the “unmade” now “made” a man in the person of Jesus, both the biological Son of God and the second person of the Trinity.