I sort of like David W-O's question. To say we don't worry about it
because there's also the House of Holiness in a Protestant epic (or a Friar
in Romeo and Juliet, or a St. George in a Protestant epic, etc.) is not so
much to answer the question as to expand it. Why is the literature of the
English Reformation, at least in the sixteenth century if not in the
seventeenth, so open to a specifically Christian syncretism in its
fictions? Why does same poet who (we think) supported the Leicester
faction on foreign policy allow his imagination to be so permeable to just
those fictions he wanted to exclude from ecclesiastical polity?
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