Apocalypse and Anti-Catholicism in Seventeenth-Century English Drama

Adrian Streete is Senior Lecturer in English Literature, 1500-1780 at the University of Glasgow. He works on early modern literature and religious culture, and was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to write Apocalypse and Anti-Catholicism in Seventeenth-Century English Drama. He is author of Protestantism and Drama in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2009), editor of Early Modern Drama and the Bible: Contexts and Readings, 1570-1625 (2012), co-editor of three other books, and author of numerous articles.

• Introduction; 1. Anti-Christ and the whore in early modern England – cultures of interpretation; 2. 'What news from Babylon?' Marston's The Dutch Courtesan (1605) and the Spanish peace; 3. 'Mere idolatry'? Resistance and Rome in Middleton's The Lady's Tragedy (1610); 4. 'Occultus Rex': Caroline politics and imperial kingship in Massinger's Believe as You List (1631); 5. 'Purple Pride' – war, episcopacy, and Shirley's The Cardinal (1641); 6. 'Rebellion Orthodox' – arbitrary rule and liberty in Dryden and Lee's The Duke of Guise (1682); Conclusion.

'Its comprehensiveness is staggering: en route to close reading particular plays, Streete provides numerous examples and quotations from a variety of contemporaneous plays, poems, speeches, and sermons, making it the most crossgeneric monograph this reader has seen and enjoyed. Streete's sensitivity and command of early modern culture is unparalleled … Streete's ability to trace ripples of fear through his encyclopaedic grasp of the period's publishing history makes his argument virtually airtight.' Kyle Sebastian Vitale, The Review of English Studies