A BODY OF DIVINITY
or, The Sum and Substance of Christian Religion
By James Ussher, Bishop of Armagh. Church Society. 614 pages. £30.00 (post free in UK)
ISBN 978-0-85190-083-6
William Shakespeare died in 1616, some of his greatest dramas flowering in the previous decade; King Lear around 1605. A year later, Bishop Ussher of Armagh is asking, ‘What say you to interludes and stage plays?’ He notes their wantonness, filthiness, abuse of the body, and sin made a spectacle of laughter.
This is the world we enter here; look at modern theatre, and does he have a point (pp.196,355)? Yet there is something magnificently, pithily Shakespearean about the man’s very style; in those days they knew about words.
