Necessity, Between Tragedy and Predestination

Chapter 4 examines how Daniel Heinsius’ path-breaking treatise De Tragoediae Constitutione (1611) belongs not only to the Arminian Controversy but also to larger debates concerning providence and predestination in early modernity. Theologies of election and reprobation necessarily traffic in mystery, taxing the limits of the human understanding. Tragedy, however, enables readers to comprehend actions in terms of natural cause and effect; in this sense Heinsius renders divinity intelligible, even tentatively, when he develops Aristotle’s comments concerning necessity and probability (or verisimilitude) as well as his strictures regarding devices and dei ex machinis. In his tragedy Herodes Infanticida, moreover, Heinsius reframes Scripture as a tragedy, eschewing miracles and theological explanations, demonstrating instead how this key evangelical episode—Herod’s massacre of the innocents—is an all-too-human story of fear, power, ignorance, and interpretation.

Reformation Tragedy and Revelation

Chapter 1 explores how Reformed dramatists and theologians alike turned to tragedy to comprehend escalating tensions in Reformation Europe. Dramatic experiments like Thomas Naogeorgus’ Pammachius, Francesco Negri’s Tragedia intitolata Libero Arbitrio, and John Foxe’s Christus Triumphans reframed the events depicted in the book of Revelation in deliberately tragic terms; the influential Heidelberg theologian David Pareus, in turn, described Revelation itself as a tragedy, tracing the origins of the genre to Scripture itself, laying claim to tragedy’s prophetic and literary resources in the process. Pareus not only recruited poetic concepts for exegetical purposes, he asserted the fundamental relationship between Scripture, tragedy, and the shape of human history. Across these works tragedy is crucial to the experience of Reformation—requiring, for the tragedians, flexible and experimental notions of form and performance and, for Pareus, supple approaches to tragedy and typology.

Introduction

The Introduction illustrates how humanists like Desiderius Erasmus, Philipp Melanchthon, and Martin Bucer imported the study of drama into theology, mining antique poetics for exegetical and philosophical tools, recruiting tragedy in particular to pedagogical, theological, and devotional ends. Tracing the simultaneous development of Reformed poetics and original works of tragoedia sacra across the first half of the sixteenth century, the Introduction also foregrounds the emergence of a precise philosophical idea of tragedy under the influence of Aristotle’s Poetics. The Introduction illustrates just how important tragedy had become to diverse reformers and Reformers by 1550, underscoring the theological and philosophical purchase of tragedy and the Poetics in and beyond dramatic practice.

Conclusion

The Conclusion traces how Milton investigates the extent to which tragedy is able to render divinity intelligible. If Reformation tragedy offers pointed insight into probability and necessity in nature, or serves as an object lesson in immanent causality, Samson Agonistes troubles such pursuits, illuminating instead the fundamental limits of both tragedy and human comprehension. In Heinsius’ treatments of tragedy, for instance, miracles are rare, and intervening gods generally confound otherwise laudable attempts to understand causality in nature. Divine intervention is no less difficult to discern in Samson Agonistes; Milton is skeptical, however, of tragedy’s capacity to render either God or totality intelligible as such. The philosophical account of tragedy that emerges across this book reaches an impasse in Milton’s 1671 poems, works that nonetheless look forward to other philosophical horizons for tragedy in modernity.

Lodovico Castelvetro’s Heterodox Poetics

Chapter 2 explores how the heterodox Italian critic Lodovico Castelvetro appropriated Aristotle’s Poetics to religious ends in his influential 1570 commentary, the Poetica D’Aristotele Vulgarizzata, Et Sposta, a work that is seldom recognized as pious or polemical but which revises the ancient text with an eye to its meaning and utility in Reformed contexts. Castelvetro insists, after Aristotle, that tragedy is an exacting philosophical form, and the Poetics enables him to sharpen Reformed arguments concerning faith and authority. Castelvetro also affirms the importance of performance and, against Aristotle, contends that spectacle and stage-playing are integral to tragedy insofar as they accommodate otherwise difficult or forbidding concepts to diverse audiences. Castelvetro’s is a Melanchthonian interpretation of the Poetics, foregrounding accommodation and the edifying effects of performance, distinguishing between edifying, didactic tragedies and the meager capacities of their audiences.

Greek Tragedy and Hebrew Antiquity in John Milton’s 1671 Poems

Chapter 5 examines Milton’s detailed engagements with Reformation poetics that render tragedy a precise philosophical and theological resource. In his 1671 poems Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes Milton responds directly to Reformed poetics, pointing methodically to the limits of tragedy, exposing the extent to which divinity and its agencies exceed and confound the philosophical vision of the Poetics. In Paradise Regain’d, for instance, Milton’s Jesus relocates the birth of tragedy from Athens to the Levant, claiming that tragedy belongs first to the Hebrews. Greek tragedy is thus derivative and degraded; Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristotle, to say nothing of the traditions to which they gave rise, appropriated tragic forms and resources from Hebrew antiquity. Milton advances Pareus’ theses on tragedy and Scripture beyond the scope of Pareus’ own text, arguing for a more comprehensive Christian archive of tragedy as well as a daring account of tragedy’s sacred origins.

John Rainolds, Hamlet, and the Anti-Theatrical Aristotle

Chapter 3 demonstrates how the English Puritan John Rainolds followed the philosophical account of tragedy in the Poetics to the letter, mobilizing an anti-theatrical Aristotle against stage plays, an Aristotle for whom spectacle and histrionic performance are anathema to tragedy. In his heated exchanges with the Oxford jurist Alberico Gentili, Rainolds betrays his deep suspicion of spectacle and stage-playing as they relate to mendacia and other species of falsehood, offering a comprehensive defense of tragedy at the expense of histrionic performance, distinguishing licit recitative enactment from illicit modes of presentation that compromise the rhetorical and dialectical precision of tragedy. William Shakespeare, in turn, responded to Rainolds in Hamlet, defending the rich resources of spectacle and stage-playing available to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, offering a forensic vision of tragedy in The Murder of Gonzago that counters Rainolds’ Aristotelian assumptions about tragedy.