Throughout this book I have explored the problems that arise in Protestant discourse when a figuratively constructed object comes to constitute the subject. I have also asked whether that object might ‘stand in for’ a gap between the subject and object of perception or in fact represent the ‘reality’ of that perception. In this chapter, and drawing upon the work done so far, I aim to pursue this issue further in relation to Thomas Middleton's play The Revenger's Tragedy (c. 1606). So although this chapter (and this play) does not focus specifically on Christ or Christological models, my previous explication of these is implicit in what follows.

In a seminal article first published in 1980 on The Revenger's Tragedy, Jonathan Dollimore argues that the philosophical distinction between metaphysical transcendence and immanence is crucial for any understanding of early modern literary theory and drama. I have examined how this tension operates in Christological Protestantism and how it was manifested in the broader cultural arena. However, Dollimore situates his discussion of mimetic theory in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in terms of a much older structural tension between competing Platonic and Aristotelian categories. As he observes: ‘The distinction between the metaphysical reality which is transcendent, and that which is immanent, remains at the centre of Western theology and philosophy, especially in the period under discussion.