After years of reading about the American Puritans, then reading the Puritans themselves, I am now convinced that our history could undergo a scrupulous reappraisal that would cause us to consider things in a radically new light. My work brought me to the subject obliquely, first through an attempt to contextualize the burst of very great literature that came out of New England in the nineteenth century, then through an attempt to understand the audience for whom Shakespeare wrote, those crowds of “groundlings” who have provided employment for legions of professors and journal editors by standing through performances of…