This conclusion summarises the findings of the previous chapters and takes a global view on the relationships among early modern drama, religious dissimulation, and toleration. Rather than linking the theatre as an institution to one particular religio-political position on the issue of religious dissimulation, this conclusion emphasises the flexibility of the medium and the genuine religious diversity that it could express even on the commercial stage. In contrast to earlier research on toleration in early modern drama, however, this conclusion further argues that the theatre’s complicity in ideologies of persecution was in many cases more pronounced than has been previously recognised, for example by questioning whether comedy and its inclusive impetus imply per se a tolerant stance. Nonetheless, the stage could arguably also exploit the theatrical potential of religious dissimulation for the purpose of entertainment, as is evident, for instance, in the hypocrisy of the stage Puritan, and thereby trivialise the spectre of the secret dissenter and defuse religious tensions to some extent.

This chapter considers English writing about market values from the sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries – taking as its termini the dissolution of the monasteries, which began in 1536, and the trade depression of the early 1620s. The chapter portrays some of the give and take between proto-literary and proto-economic writing in this period by focusing on the emergent concept of productivity. It begins by outlining the changing material and ideological conditions that prompted writerly attention to money and trade from merchants, statesmen, and imaginative writers. It shows how apparently limited topics of monetary debate in the period – debasement, usury, and the export of bullion – were amplified into far-reaching critiques of value by imaginative writers. And it shows how these value critiques tended in turn to support an emergent arena of autonomous value in what we might recognize as literary production.

This chapter considers the treatment of ethnic and cultural identity in adaptations of two plays in which they are an integral element, The Merchant of Venice and Othello.Complex characterization is in danger of being short-circuited by unconscious bias, pulling audiences back to racial stereotypes, dehumanizing Shylock and Othello despite the efforts of well-intentioned filmmakers. In The Merchant of Venice anti-Semitism and its consequences in recent and current politics unavoidably complicate a play whose romantic elements are already made uneasy by issues of patriarchal control and materialism. In Othello the challenges of representing ‘the Moor’ himself are not simply resolved by casting an actor of colour in the role. Productions also have to deal with the manner in which agency is wrested from the titular hero by a villain who can seem to have taken charge of way the audience perceives the action.

What is confusion? And what does confusion have to do with emotion? This chapter argues that Shakespeare’s depictions of confusion elucidate the care with which he ties affective states and bodily conditions together with rational and intellectual processes. Confusion is a state that grips Shakespeare’s characters in their entirety. Deeper still, Shakespeare’s representations of confusion reveal one of the baseline assumptions in his understanding of human emotional life: no affect, passion, or emotion can ever appear on its own, in isolation. In Shakespeare’s view, feeling always involves mixture and mingling – that is, some degree of confusion. Tracing the contours of a philosophical tradition that illuminates the limitations and affordances of confusion, this chapter explores Shakespeare’s depiction of confusion in such plays as Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and Winter’s Tale, but focuses on Cymbeline, a play in which the lived, felt state of confusion takes centre stage.

This chapter presents a history of the emergence and ideological uses made of the sartorial equivalent of the linguistic ‘gallimaufry’: the figure of the Englishman dressed in a motley of foreign fashions. The normative centre of the ‘true’ Englishman is defined through exclusion of what it is not, and this is what the figure represents. Deriving from verbal descriptions linked to the first visual portraits of an Englishman, the figure acquires gender and class inflections and woven into a historical narrative charged with an implicit future project of a ‘true’ (protestant) commonwealth of ‘true’ (pious, ‘plain’ and temperate) Englishmen to be achieved through its exclusion. The centre of the ‘true’ Englishman is dissociated from the male elite at court, perceived as effeminate and of extravagant foreign habits. It is in this context that the four instances of the figure in the Shakespearean canon are discussed. While the first three are shown to resist the turn by which the ‘true’ Englishman becomes a function of normative cultural habits, the fourth, in All’s Well that Ends Well, is shown to be more ambivalent, an ambivalence that may be linked to the political watershed of 1603