Stage and Picture in the English Renaissance: The Mirror up to Nature. John Astington. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. xii + 270 pp. $99.99.
on Judith Butler. For another, Macbeth’s air-drawn dagger surely extends its handle not to prick his conscience but to invite the act of murder, even if this imagined deed also fills him with horror. And third, the isolation of theology from popular culture tends to give undue weight to the Reformation. True, salvation by faith makes no space for the role Aquinas allots to the few sparks of reason that survived the Fall. In his Catholic account, these remain incorruptible, while in general the Protestant mind is entirely fallible. But the fifteenth-century moral playMind, Will and Understanding, for example, while it does not name conscience, already shows Mind, as the higher part of reason, to be capable of falling into sin. The consciousness that takes subjectivity as an object of knowledge is implicit in Anima’s self-contempt when the choices of her own mind have defiled her. Perhaps theology is more a symptom of cultural change than a cause. These are quibbles, however, topics for a discussion provoked by the strength and scope of an important, balanced, and textually based case.