Drama and Religion in English Around 1925

This paper reflects on the interstices of religion and drama written in English around the year 1925. In this formative year for modernist literature, playwrights explored the relations among theater, religion, and ritual, developing theories of dramatic performance that persisted across the long twentieth century. As I show, 1925 marked an apogee of Anglophone dramatists’ diverse investments in religion. Authors from G. B. Shaw to Zora Neale Hurston, inquiring into the dramatic roles of religion in modernity, participated in a set of consummately modernist formal concerns, insofar as they sought to reinvigorate the theater by returning to its presumptive origins in devotional practice. These artists turned to religion to peer into the deep histories of their chosen art and to speculate about its potential futures. Their fascinations with religion – centrally, but not exclusively, related to medieval Christianity – served, paradoxically, to make modernist theater new.