WHEN we refer to Shakespeare, do we mean the man or the works? Contributors to this collection of essays on Shakespeare in his Christian context tend to focus on the latter, as the private beliefs of the former cannot be identified, and the biography is thin.
Ours is an age of radical indeterminacy: the age of the question mark. By analogy, we might describe the decades preceding Shakespeare’s birth as the age of the exclamation mark. As Paul Fiddes reminds us, “in one generation, from 1530 to 1560, they had experienced five different versions of official state religion.” The religious situation of Shakespeare’s time, Fiddes argues, gave the playwright a special opportunity to develop a “general spirituality” akin to an understanding, shared with most ordinary people, that they have more in common than not.
Most of the contributors have an association with the University of Oxford. (The affiliation of Beatrice Grove is given as simply “Trinity College”, as if there were no sister institution in the fens.) It may not be a coincidence, however, that the most confident commentators on Shakespeare’s beliefs are based in the United States, where faith matters. Michael Collins of Georgetown University takes us back to the book’s title in his essay on the parables and Shakespeare’s comedies: “Christian Shakespeare: Question Mark. In the end, the answer might be ‘yes,’ for Shakespeare, in the comedies at least, affirms the good news of the Christian Gospel — that we may dare, even in our fallen world, to live in hope.”
Similarly, Andrew Moran (University of Dallas) considers natural and supernatural happiness in The Taming of the Shrew, arguing that “Petruchio and Kate win the marriage contest because they have mastered the rulebook — Ephesians”: their “Pauline mutuality through hierarchy, on the model of Christ and the Church, is already developing at the end of act four.”
The comedies and problem plays attract the most attention in this book, while the leading characters are Falstaff, described by Groves as “Shakespeare’s most Biblically literate character”, and Shylock, whose negotiations with Christianity are fascinating. Rowan Williams suggests that, “since mercy is a gentle/Gentile affair, not a Jewish one, Shylock must step away from his fidelity to himself as a Jew so as to join the economy of forgiveness that Christians live by, so as to be (once again) recognizable to his Christian neighbors.” John Drakakis argues that Shylock’s behaviour is “shaped by Christian example, and he thus becomes a divided subject”.
The quest for “Catholic Shakespeare”, led by Richard Wilson and others, usually begins with Hamlet and its references to Roman doctrine and liturgy. Molly Clark offers an informative essay on Shakespeare and the morality plays, in which she considers Prince Hal’s significant use of rhyme and illustrates parallels between Richard III and the figure of Vice.
In an outstanding essay on Shakespeare, toleration, and the Oath of Supremacy, Clare Asquith (Lady Oxford) comments on the “perceived absence”, throughout the reign of Elizabeth, “of any serious intellectual or literary opposition” to the oath. “In spite of its quality”, she argues, “the dissenting work of the Catholic Oxbridge exiles published abroad or covertly circulated in England has until recently been almost entirely ignored.”
Although this book wears an academic gown, with plenty of bowing to precursors (“as so-and-so has said”, we keep being told), the contributors are rarely obscure and usually engaging. As Michael Scott puts it in his introduction, “Shakespeare was immersed in a Christian culture at war with itself over belief, practice, and moral behaviour. But what that culture meant — to Shakespeare and in his plays — will remain always the enigma: Christian Shakespeare: Question Mark.”
Dr Michael Wheeler is a Visiting Professor of English at the University of Southampton.
Christian Shakespeare: Question Mark: A collection of essays on Shakespeare in his Christian context
Michael Scott and Michael J. Collins, editors
Vernon Press £38.85
(978-1-64889-576-0)