"Antinomian" Hacket and the Dangerous Potential of Middleton's Puritans

• In Event: Rethinking Form in Early Modern English Drama

Abstract

This paper explores the way in which Thomas Middleton’s 1607 play The Puritan, while utilizing the mainstays of anti-Puritan satire like hypocrisy, also taps into deep-seated concerns about religious truth, one’s personal relationship with God, and the potential for religious anarchy. I examine Middleton’s Puritan servants through the lens of antinomianism while exploring the dangerous potential posed by contemporaneous “antinomian” figures like William Hacket, a treasonous heretic executed for his plot against Queen Elizabeth. By shading some of his Puritans as antinomians in this play, Middleton not only reveals the cracks he perceives in the Puritan facade, but also those in the religious identity—both individual and communal—of early modern England itself. In examining these subtleties, this paper demonstrates the centrality of an understanding of antinomian belief—as it actually existed and as it was imagined to exist—to an understanding of the early modern English religious landscape.

Author

• Judith Claire Coleman, Delta State University