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My response to David Miller's response to David W-O's question is that the poet's imagination is not subject to any political edict, hardly more than the general population. Royal edict may have changed England's official religion but not the the faith of the general population. Except, I guess, allowing that the Pope is Anti-Christ. That basic Protestant 'faith' remained until the mid-20th century when Communism became Anti-Christ, an impossible confusion because the Roman Catholicism was the enemy of Communism. What has happened now would be interesting to learn but that has nothing to do with the matter at hand. Bert Hamilton At 04:31 PM 2002-02-11 -0500, you wrote: >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? > > A.C.Hamilton [log in to unmask] Cappon Professor Emeritus Queen's University, Canada Phone & Fax: 613- 544-6759