Jacob Ridley

Thesis title: ‘Everyman Out: Personification Drama and the English Reformation’.

Supervisors: Professor Bart van Es and Professor Daniel Wakelin

My thesis, funded by the AHRC and the Clarendon Association, examines the final half-century of the English morality play, from the 1530s to the 1580s, and the effect of the new Protestant theology on its plot and characters. The morality genre is defined by personifications of human vices and virtues (so that Pride, Avarice, Charity, Humility all walk and talk onstage), and the Protestant Reformation spelled a major change to the understanding of human sin and salvation; despite this correlation, my project is the first to read the one through the other. My chapters look at how vice and virtue were personified to communicate distinctively ‘reformed’ ideas in plays for touring troupes, from John Bale’s anticatholic propaganda drive under Henry VIII to the social satires of the Elizabethan puritan movement, especially William Wager and George Wapull. I argue that, far from being an antitheatrical movement, the early puritans actually laid the groundwork for major theatrical genres: Calvin’s Geneva should be seen as a precedent for city comedy, and the evil figure of the reprobate for Ben Jonson’s comedies of humours. My starting point is the loss of the morality play’s defining character after the Reformation: the everyman, the representative of mankind as a whole. The everyman was an ‘interesting’ character – in the sense that he made every member of the audience an interested party or stakeholder in the action of the play. His displacement is thus a major moment in the disinteresting of the audience from the action: the creation of a self-contained play-world behind what is later known as a ‘fourth wall’. One use of my research is as a foreword to a broader consideration of disinterest as a crucial event in the movement from medieval to modern drama.

Publications: I have published on the earliest printing of English plays in The Review of English Studies; on the editing of Shakespeare in the eighteenth century and in today’s Arden series in Essays in Criticism; and on the reception of Scottish poetry by Restoration writers in The Seventeenth Century. I have a chapter forthcoming in The Routledge Companion to CS Lewis, on Lewis’s history of sixteenth-century literature, about which I am also co-organizing a conference at Magdalen in summer 2025, the ‘Oxford Drab Colloquium’. Another conference I co-organized, ‘Influence Revisited’ in 2023, marked the fiftieth anniversary of Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence, for which I am now co-editing a special issue of Textual Practice (forthcoming, 2025).