SOURCE: An Introduction to Jacobean Drama Studies: Religion and the Artifice of Jacobean and Caroline Drama, edited by Dr. James Hogg, Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1977, pp. 1-28.

In the following essay, Mullany discusses what he perceives as the increasing artificiality, sensationalism, and dissociation from reality that characterized drama of the Jacobean period.

Religion is a perennial concern of literature and appears in a variety of uses. Not infrequently we find it used for sentimental effects in the saccharine entertainments produced for television and movies. In the popular media religion provides on many occasions a counter eliciting automatic responses in much the same fashion as such standard topics as family, patriotism, political institutions, and crime. Money in the novels of Sinclair Lewis, for example, immediately suggests the evil of capitalistic oppression of society's underdogs. Each age has its particular emotional counters which produce...