If those English writers on signs whose work was informed by Reformed theology shared one trait, then it was their focus on human misrepresentation, distortion, and falsification when man came to view the world. For many Protestant thinkers, this meant stressing the essential artificiality of all communicative discourse, especially speech. According to George Puttenham in The Arte of English Poesie (1589): ‘Speech is not naturall to man sauing for his onely habilitie to speake, and that he is by kinde apt to vtter all his conceits with soundes and voices diuersified many maner of wayes.’ In The Art of Rhetoric (1553), Thomas Wilson explains the reasons behind Puttenham's assertion. Due to the Fall and ‘by the corruption of this our flesh, man's reason and intendment were both overwhelmed’. But when God gave ‘the gift of utterance’ as Wilson calls it, it was not to all men but to the ‘faithful and elect’. The logical question is: what of those who do not fall into this category? Indeed, when combined with a commitment to the imitatio Christi, early modern thinkers found themselves in something of a quandary when trying to explain – or imitate – the most magnificent image of them all, God's created universe.

This problem is doubly applicable when considering the early modern theatre. What, for example, happens when the Protestant subject gazes upon an actor?