Kenneth J. E. Graham and Philip D. Collington (eds.), Shakespeare and Religious Change.

Voss, Paul J.

Kenneth J. E. Graham and Philip D. Collington (eds.), Shakespeare and Religious Change. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Pp. 288

The early modern period in England witnessed a vast amount of religious controversy--before, during, and after Shakespeares lifetime. Even a casual survey of the magisterial Short-Title Catalogue of English Books 1475-1640 reveals a stunning array of religious texts, written from a variety of perspectives over many decades. It would be impossible for anyone living during this turbulent and fascinating period to escape such a powerful "circulation of social energy." Yet many scholars and critics working in the 1980s and 1990s conspicuously ignored the possibility of personal religious expression as an authentic and vital area of investigation.

During that expansive period of research and scholarship--and the ascendency of the New Historicism--any articulation of religious sentiment in literature simply masked a deeper yearning, often a substitute for simmering physical desire, frustrated professional advancement, base economic greed, turbulent political strife, or confused sexual identity. Religious expression qua religious expression, by contrast, seemed boring, parochial, and uninteresting.

The past decade, of course, has redressed that obvious myopia. Scores of scholars and critics have produced compelling and rich accounts, examining the various ways that the religious impulse might contribute to, and even enhance, the artistic impulse. The same desire that propels the worship of the ineffable, some now assert, may provide meaningful insight into artistic and poetic production.

The essays collected in this volume demonstrate the richness and diversity of religious expression in the early modern period. The essays seek to examine ways in which religion and religious experience might animate the works of Shakespeare (often considered to be agnostic or non-sectarian in terms of religion). The editors seek to "present a balanced view of the variety of religious identities" (3) available in this period (and they succeed admirably in this task) while placing Shakespeare in relationship to earlier religious theater. Toward that end, the editors group the essays into four sections: "Shakespeare and Social History," "Dramatic Continuities and Religious Change," "Religious Identities," and "Shakespeare and the Changing Theater."

Although a brief review cannot address each essay in detail, a few of the arguments merit attention. Richard Strier, always thought-provoking and insightful, examines "companionate marriage" in The Comedy of Errors. Although Shakespeare almost always uses the Catholic form of marriage in his plays (most marriages, for example, were contracted in the presence of a priest and treated as a sacrament), Strier argues that Shakespeare "presents a consciously Protestant conception" (17) of the married, domestic life (at least in this play). According to Strier, the abbey no longer remains a sacred site (as in the Catholic tradition), but is rather transformed into a "locus for a high form of ordinary social life, a feast" (31). Thus, personal sanctification comes not from the priestly class but from the quotidian activities of domestic life.

Elizabeth Williamson intelligently examines the various resurrection scenes found in early modern drama (the most famous, of course, occurring in The Winter's Tale). Williamson insightfully juxtaposes material and affective technologies employed by the theater in order to provoke wonder and suspense onstage. She examines the palpable power of the scene stripped of its Catholic trappings. One encounters this refrain frequently in these essays: the power of a vibrant Catholic past, still capable of producing a spiritual catharsis, but now refined for Protestant sensibilities. It's an intriguing argument, even if it, at times, confuses essential and accidental properties.

Phebe Jensen continues her impressive work on festive practices and mirth in the early modern period. Jensen establishes the significant role festivity (often called "feast days") played in Catholic culture and how Protestants tried to tame and even eliminate this cultural practice of mirth and revelry. According to Jensen, "Shakespeare's plays do not simply reflect a culture in which festivity is already entirely secularized; rather; they participate in debates about that ongoing process" (154).

Glenn Clark's essay--among the most intriguing in the collection--examines the methods used by ministers when preaching to their congregations. Such preaching, it turns out, is rhetorically complex and rife with competing aims: "English Protestant pastors faced a dilemma. They needed to follow their hearts, but they also needed hearts that would be both loving and comforting and angry and rebuking in quick succession. They needed to found pastoral anger in pastoral love" (182). Clark then effectively applies this tension to both Hamlet and Duke Vincentio (two obvious cases), but one wonders if it could function with Shakespeare's other clerics--Friars Lawrence or Francis, or the priest from Twelfth Night.

Essays by Tom Bishop (on the "Exodus" narrative and related texts of exile and prophecy), Jeffrey Knapp (especially good on the often-neglected history plays), and Debora Shuger (on zero-sum morality in Richard II) add to the depth and scope of the collection.

The volume ends, fittingly enough, with a polemical piece of metacriticism (far and away the most entertaining type of metacriticism) by Anthony Dawson, who finds the emergent religious slant bothersome. As with all such corrections, the revision may fall victim to the excess it seeks to redress. Might it be possible that the religious card is being over-played? Dawson answers with a resounding affirmative. The worst offenders, it seems, are scholars of a Catholic perspective (and he names names), but "sometimes those on the Protestant side, like their Catholic confreres, can also go overboard" (240). For Dawson, "the theater is a secular, and secularizing, institution" (240). Dawson points to the 1559 proclamation forbidding the theater to meddle in "matters of religion." True enough, but not all representation equals meddling and not all Elizabethans faithfully observed state proclamations. Dramatists especially tended to push boundaries.

As this volume clearly displays, a lively interest in religion--especially for a period and culture so steeped in religious sensibilities--can indeed provide fresh insights into the works of the most studied author of all time.

Paul J. Voss, Georgia State University