2025-11-27
Jordan Zajac
In her theory of moral exemplarity, philosopher Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski observes how every era and culture has recognized supremely good individuals, models who inspire admiration and imitation. On the early modern stage, Bess Bridges — heroine of Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West — emerges as one such magnanimous figure. Her virtuous exemplarity enkindles deep admiration in other characters, their mimetic responses leading to metanoia. This essay explores the moral psychology of admiration in Heywood’s play, the complex relationship between the passions and conversion, and early modern theatre as a school and fruitful site for the realization of virtue.
2025-11-27
Sheila Coursey
This article explores the stakes of discerning criminal conversion on the early modern stage, particularly when city comedies and domestic tragedies mediate contemporaneous London events. These plots offered an intersection between contemporaneous pamphlets that framed criminality as a distinct social identity and early English dramatic practices representing spiritual conversion. The Roaring Girl defended Moll Cutpurse’s criminal adjacency by framing her urban mediation as a hagiography akin to the Digby Play of Mary Magdalene . In contrast, domestic tragedies used hybrid personification to offer ambiguity about the spiritual or forensic state of mediators or go-betweens in criminal conspiracies. These paradigms offer diverging responses to antitheatrical warnings about the associative risks of playgoing.
2025-11-27
Emiy Parise
Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta presents religion and religious conversion as a tool of state power, rather than as a religious process. This play’s representation of false conversions lays bare the central paradox that plagued Reformation conversion narratives: how do you know someone has truly been converted? Marlowe’s play radically transforms acts of conversion into nonperformative speech. By staging coerced, dissembling, and honest conversions in a single play, with little ritualized action to distinguish one conversion from another, Marlowe challenges the religious work of conversion, exposing it as an early modern political tool that could be manipulated by both the state and individuals.
2025-11-27
Hannah Korell
Scholars often contextualize the faithful wife archetype as an iteration of the exhaustingly obedient ‘Patient Griselda’ trope. However, this essay demonstrates the significance of these characters to conversion narratives, showing the agency and power wives were granted to return their wayward husbands to family values, economic and sexual restraint, and the spread of Christianity through reproduction. The London Prodigal responds to topical discourses regarding women’s moral responsibility toward men, staging scenarios in which a wife tames her husband without threatening patriarchal structures and is celebrated for it. The play thus offers an important contribution for studying gendered patterns of conversion.
2025-11-27
Stephen Wittek
This introduction presents a new collection of essays examining the role of conversion in early modern English drama. Together, the contributions demonstrate how the theatre served as a space for dramatizing the political, theological, and psychological complexities of identity transformation. With case studies ranging from city comedy to colonial propaganda, the volume emphasizes conversion’s entanglement with race, gender, and performance. Drawing on recent scholarship, the authors highlight drama’s unique capacity to stage conversional doubt, sincerity, and dissimulation — establishing theatre as both a site of ideological reinforcement and a medium for interrogating the limits of belief and belonging.