1. Gosson, Stephen, “ Plays Confuted in Five Actions (1582),” in Shakespeare's Theater: A Sourcebook, ed. Pollard, Tanya (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 84–114, at 91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. Holbrooke, William, Loves Complaint for Want of Entertainment, A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse (London: Printed for Nathaniel Butter, 1609)Google Scholar. Transcribed in Ecclesiastical London, ed. Erler, Mary C., Records of Early English Drama 21 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 270Google Scholar.

3. This larger argument unfolds in Knapp's Shakespeare's Tribe: Church, Nation and Theater in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)Google Scholar. In particular, see Chapter 4, “Preachers and Players,” 115–40.

4. See Strong's inaugural study, The English Icon: Elizabethan & Jacobean Portraiture (London: Mellon Foundation, with Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), xivGoogle Scholar.

5. See, for instance, Hans Holbein, Sir Thomas More, 1527, oil on panel, 29 1/2 × 23 3/4 in. (74.9 × 60.3 cm), The Frick Collection, New York; http://collections.frick.org/view/objects/asitem/items$0040:100, accessed 21 May 2017.

6. Strong, 8, 13.

7. Tittler, Robert, The Face of the City: Civic Portraiture and Civic Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007), 2Google Scholar.

8. Ibid.

9. John Ingamells catalogs Alleyn's portrait in Dulwich Picture Gallery: British (London: Unicorn, for Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2008), 19–21 Google Scholar.

10. See Cohen's, Sarah R. keynote address, “Showing the Heart: Love, Friendship, and Anatomy in Early Modern Portraiture,” in Masculinities, Childhood, Violence: Attending to Early Modern Women—and Men, Proceedings of the 2006 Symposium [of the Center for Renaissance & Baroque Studies], eds. Leonard, Amy E. and Nelson, Karen L. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, and Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), 21–76 Google Scholar.

11. See my article “Scorning the Image of Virtue: The Player Nathan Field's Letter to the Reverend Thomas Sutton, 1616,” Religion and the Arts 20.3 (2016): 267–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 272 n. 5. Knapp underscores the relative scholarly neglect by pointing to a longstanding secularization theory that depicts Shakespeare's theatre as self-separated from religious concern. He shows that men like Jonson and Shakespeare had deep religious convictions, and how these convictions were bound up in their lives and in the plays they wrote. Whereas Knapp stays anecdotally grounded, synthesizing a trove of archival research to make his case, Michael O'Connell draws on theological currents in Reformation thought—those concerned with religion and performance. In The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm & Theater in Early-Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar, O'Connell associates English iconoclasm with the period's antitheatrical prejudice and argues that the theatre's “incarnational” mode of expression was deeply problematic for the church (63–88). See also Religion and Drama in Early Modern England: The Performance of Religion on the Renaissance Stage, ed. Degenhardt, Jane Hwang and Williamson, Elizabeth (London and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011)Google Scholar.

12. Northbrook, John, “ A Treatise against Dicing, Dancing, Plays, and Interludes, with Other Idle Pastimes (1577),” in Shakespeare's Theater, ed. Pollard, , 1–18 Google Scholar, at 2–3.

13. Knapp, 116.

14. Greenblatt, Stephen, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1980] 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15. Ibid., 2.

16. Ibid., 7.

17. Ibid., from the 2005 edition's new “Preface: Fashioning Renaissance Self-Fashioning,” xi–xvii, at xiii.

18. See William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, act IV, scene 1.

19. Greenblatt, xv.

20. Ibid.

21. Gosson, 110–11.

22. Nathan Field, “Letter to Revd. Mr. Sutton (1616),” in Shakespeare's Theater, ed. Pollard, 274–8, at 276. The missive responds to a sermon that Thomas Sutton wielded from the pulpit in direct attack on Field and his profession. Field's letter is a rare instance in the record of an actor defending the theatre. He portrays a deft use of biblical parable and political prowess to indict Sutton as both a spiritual poison and enemy of the state. The original manuscript is found in the State Papers Domestic of James I, lxxxix, 105, Public Records Office, London. See my detailed treatment of the letter in “Scorning the Image of Virtue: Church and Theatre in Post-Settlement England” (Ph.D. diss., Graduate Theological Union, 2015).

23. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, act III, scene 2.

24. Bradbrook, M. C., The Rise of the Common Player: A Study of Actor and Society in Shakespeare's England (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962)Google Scholar.

25. See Bulwer, John, Chirologia; or, The Naturall Language of the Hand (London: Thomas Harper, 1644), 88Google Scholar. Bulwer was also a Baconian natural philosopher, and he proposed the first manuals and curriculum for instructing the deaf.

26. Strong further develops and broadens his analysis of English portraiture in The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London: Thames & Hudson, 1977), 56Google Scholar.

27. See a detailed identification of this portrait in Bolton, Charles Knowles, The Founders: Portraits of Persons Born Abroad Who Came to the Colonies in North America before the Year 1701… [1919], 3 vols. in 2 (Baltimore: Genealogical Pub. Co., 1976), 3: 1004–15Google Scholar.

28. Cohen, 21.

29. According to Janice Knight, “It was only with the Word as delivered by Richard Sibbes that Cotton's affections were turned. The sermon that so affected him was a meditation on regeneration, in which Sibbes rejected ‘negative righteousness’ or ‘mere civil, sober, honest blamelessness before men’ as an indication of grace received. Nor would Sibbes allow for the violent hammering of the heart as a preparation for grace. Instead Sibbes’ sermons stressed God's turning of the heart as witnessed by lively affections, a new relish and taste for divine things… . His words filled Cotton ‘with a sacred joy, which accompanied him unto the fulness of joy for ever.’ This was the doctrine Cotton had long awaited, the one that drew him from the study to the pulpit… . Legend has it that his heart was so immediately transformed by Sibbes’ gospel that on the next occasion of his own preaching, Cotton abandoned his former ornate rhetoric and spoke in the simple and affecting words of the puritan plainstyle, advertising to all the world his conversion.” See Knight, “A Garden Enclosed: The Tradition of Heart-piety in Puritan New England” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1988), 90–1.

30. Cohen, 21. See her example: Peter Paul Rubens, Self-Portrait in a Circle of Friends at Mantua, ca. 1602–5, oil on canvas, 77.5 cm × 101 cm. Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne; www.wallraf.museum/uploads/tx_imagecycle/Rubens_SelbstbildnisMantua_WRM_Dep_0248_01.jpg, accessed 21 May 2017.

31. Bulwer, 88.

32. Tanya Pollard, “Introduction,” in Shakespeare's Theater, ed. Pollard, x–xxv, at xiv.

33. See Haigh's The Plain Man's Pathways to Heaven: Kinds of Christianity in Post-Reformation England, 1570–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 20Google Scholar.

34. Ibid., 22–3.

35. In the popular mind, Twelfth Night’s Malvolio may be Shakespeare's quintessential puritanical hypocrite.

36. This oft-used quotation is from Philip Sidney's The Defence of Poesy (ca. 1579; published 1595), repr. as “An Apology for Poetry (1595),” in Shakespeare's Theater, ed. Pollard, 146–65, at 153.

37. Gosson, 96.

38. Field, 276.

39. See Thomas Lodge's “A Reply to Stephen Gosson's School of Abuse, in Defence of Poetry, Music, and Stage Plays (1579),” in Shakespeare's Theater, ed. Pollard, 37–61.

40. See Sidney, 150–1.

41. Perkins, William, The Arte of Prophecying (London: Felix Kyngston, 1607), 1–3 Google Scholar.

42. Knapp, 118.

43. See my 2016 article, “Scorning the Image of Virtue.” I provide literary and historical analysis of a letter from Field to Sutton, one that is addressed here only briefly. The letter attests to Field's religious commitments in the face of religious hypocrisy and the antitheatrical attack, and he extends his concerns on behalf of himself as well as his fellow players. Field's portrait read intertextually with his letter brings the religious iconography of the image into greater relief.