The Gospel According to Shakespeare.

Stephenson, Mimosa

The Gospel According to Shakespeare. By Piero Boitani. Trans. Vittorio Montemaggi and Rachel Jacoff. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-268-02235-8. Pp. xiii + 156. $27.00.

Piero Boitani's study of Hamlet, King Lear, and the four late romances is a beautiful work of literary criticism. The learning is prodigious, the prose elegant, and the insights thought-provoking and memorable. Boitani focuses on Shakespeare's Christian themes as developed in these plays; on characters who seem to be modeled on biblical figures, including Job, Christ, and God; and on biblical echoes in wording and in idea. The study leaves the reader with new insights regarding Shakespeare's works, and, with its focus on the Gospel, or Good News that the incarnation brought, should be of major interest not only to readers of Christianity and Literature but also to readers in general.

Boitani, an eminent Italian scholar and literary critic specializing in medieval literature, is Professor of Comparative Literature at the Sapienza University of Rome. Among his numerous books on Medieval literature and the classics are the Cambridge Chaucer Companion (1986), original essays by European and American scholars intended to introduce the reader to Chaucer's work, a collection which he edited with Jill Mann; and Medieval and Pseudo-Medieval Literature (1984), another series of essays by medieval scholars, though the subject matter is broader in including medieval European culture--this series edited with Anna Torti. In The Bible and its Rewritings (in Italian, 1997; trans. Anita Weston, 1999), Boitani anticipates The Gospel According to Shakespeare as he finds in Pericles' recognition of his daughter Marina a retelling of Mary Magdalene's recognition of the resurrected Jesus near the tomb in the Gospel of John. The Genius to Improve an Invention: Literary Transitions (1999 in Italian; 2002 in English) complements the previous Rewritings, continuing the theme of recognition in Shakespeare as it discusses Hamlet and King Lear. In 2002, Boitani was awarded the Feltrinelli Prize for Literary Criticism. Published in Italian in 2009, Il Vangelo Secondo Shakespeare was awarded the 2010 De Sanctis Prize for literature.

In this study, Boitani shows an incredible grasp of classical literature, medieval literature, Renaissance literature, and the Bible as well as literary criticism, both major works of the past and contemporary theory. He argues that in Hamlet and King Lear the Christian message of "faith, salvation, and peace" is presented as if from a distance but that in the romances "the themes of transcendence, immanence, the role of the deity, resurrection, and epiphany are openly, if often obliquely, staged" (xi). He relates the plays to Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, Parmenides, Gorgias, Virgil, Lucian, Marcus Aurelius, Dante, Appollonius, John Gower, and Christopher Marlowe (especially Doctor Faustus).

The chapter on Hamlet focuses on the change in Hamlet after his return from the aborted voyage to England with the pirates. Before that voyage, he was melancholy and indecisive, pretended to be mad, and failed to act; after Hamlet's return, the reader finds Shakespeare "meditating on providence, on forgiveness, and on goodness and happiness, and ... doing so in Christian terms" (2). Boitani points out that Hamlets pivotal speech in Act 5, Scene 2, when he tells Horatio that God is concerned with the fall of a sparrow, is an allusion to Jesus' statement, "Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground unperceived by your Father." When Hamlet continues that "the readiness is all," he is referring to the Christian's trusting Providence as "there's a divinity that shapes our ends." Boitani also notes that the "Let be" with which Hamlet ends the "readiness" speech means "amen" (20-21).

The chapter on King Lear focuses on sacrifice, suffering, and purification--themes developed further in the romances. Relating King Lear to Job and Christ, Boitani sees the play as exploring "the total gratuitousness of human suffering or of the existence of evil in the world" (25). Because of his folly at the beginning of the play, Lear becomes in the middle a victim of the tempest, both of Nature and of his own mind. Pointing out that Gloucester is symbolically resurrected after Edgar makes him believe he has fallen off a cliff and been miraculously spared, Boitani concentrates on the recognition scene between Lear and Gloucester, whose plots run parallel and complement each other as they both find "true knowledge, without a doubt, and true wisdom" (33). Boitani also sees in Lear's story a resurrection when he wakes from a healing sleep and realizes he has been reunited with Cordelia. Shakespeare has brought "Lear back to life, purified and accepting his newfound existence" (34). Boitani says that "Lear and Cordelia resemble the Christ who takes upon himself the evil of the world" (38). They have learned to endure, like Job and Christ.

Boitani's Pericles is another Job, "one of the afflicted, the meek, and the merciful spoken of in the Beatitudes" (44). In a sense Pericles, his wife Thaisa, and his daughter Marina all die and are resurrected: Pericles in leaving his kingdom and his eventual return; Thaisa in being encoffined and brought back to life by Cerimon, the priest of Diana; and Marina in supposedly being buried but being restored to her father. Boitani even states that "like John, Shakespeare does everything to make us believe that he is divinely inspired" (54). What happens in the play is that a family is put back together by divine action so that "the most human gesture of love and union ... subverts death ... going beyond and transfiguring it" (55).

Boitani finds in Cymbeline, set at the time of Christ's birth, another death and rebirth, both of Imogen and her brothers. He relates the drama symbolically to the schism between the English church and the Roman church at the time of its writing and a hoped-for reconciliation under King James. Imogen, disguised as Fidele, is "noble, saintly, angelic, divine, and ... a supreme human example of patience" (61) and "irradiates an aura of incomprehensible grace" (61). The play climaxes in a recognition scene (5.5) that ties all of the parts together, ending in "the harmony that comes after rebirth," in "splendor, shining in true Transfiguration" (71). Boitani even goes so far as to call Cymbeline a theodicy (72), concluding that "Shakespeare ... believes in repentance and forgiveness, in divineness, and in the hope of immanent transcendence" (73).

The chapter on The Winters Tale is titled "Resurrection" as Hermione and Perdita, though thought dead, are restored to the erring Leontes at the end of the play. To Boitani, Leontes, in his unprovoked jealousy presents "a compelling picture of the sickly gift of the knowledge of evil" (77). Boitani focuses in the chapter on Hermione's supposed statues coming to life in the plays last act, arguing for a supernatural resurrection as Leontes says that he had seen Hermione dead. Thus, "the tomb in effect is now empty, like Jesus of Nazareth's after three days" (84). Referring to Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief," Boitani concludes that Shakespeare suggests that if "we can believe in the miracle of art ... we can also believe in the resurrection of the dead, the mystery and miracle preached by Christianity" (85).

Boitani finds ephiphany in The Tempest. The island itself becomes at the same time an island in the Mediterranean, Africa, the New World, Heaven, and the Garden of Eden. Aware of the post-colonial interpretation of the play, and seeing Caliban's mistake in revering Stephano, Boitani relates the error to "the misunderstanding that often characterized the encounters between Europeans and natives in the New World" (97). Despite this awareness and in argument for a multi-faceted play, Boitani makes Prospero essentially the God of the island, one who renounces his art and chooses "to become a man again, to accept old age and death, to enter again into effective reality, into history!" (110), pointing out that Prospero in revealing himself as the Duke of Milan in Act 5, Scene 1, announces "I am Prospero" and calls himself "lord" of the island (111).Ina delightful insight, Boitani finds in Miranda's accusing Ferdinand of cheating during their game of chess a reference to the Fall of Adam and Eve as the couple returns to civilization, leaving their "state of pristine innocence" and entering "this game with its precise rules" (112). And Gonzalo doubly blesses the joining of Ferdinand and Miranda with "Be it so! Amen" (114). Finally, Boitani relates Prospero's epilogue to the Lord's Prayer as Prospero asks to be forgiven as he forgives others. Boitani finds that the play is about wonder, bringing good out of evil, and beauty found in "redemption and salvation" (119).

Many other writers have dealt with Shakespeare's Christianity. John D. Cox, in a review essay in Christianity and Literature, "Was Shakespeare a Christian, and If So, What Kind of Christian Was He?" (55.4, 2006: 539-66), summarizes the debate. For years, the most discussed topic has been whether Shakespeare was a Protestant or a Catholic. Peter Milward, in Shakespeare's Religious Background (1973) and Shakespeare the Papist (2005), argues for his Catholicism. Beatrice Batson edited a collection of essays from both sides of the issue in Shakespeare's Christianity: The Protestant and Catholic Poetics of Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Hamlet (2006), but mainly the collection points out the presence of Christianity

in Shakespeare's thought without arguing for either side. The wealth and diversity of the scholarly treatment of Christianity in Shakespeare's plays is illustrated by the excellent collection of excerpts Roy Battenhouse presents in Shakespeare's Christian Dimension: An Anthology of Commentary (1994), a collection which gives some of the best arguments presented by the scholarly community for the presence of Christianity in Shakespeare's work. Boitani's work is a thing apart from all of these scholarly studies of Shakespeare's Christianity. Instead it gives personal, sometimes idiosyncratic, readings by a consummately close reader of Shakespeare's work. Boitani picks up on phrasing and connections that readers have missed and shows their importance within the context of the work. This is not a narrow study for nitpicking scholars who expound esoteric theories, but a loving reading by an admirer and appreciator of Shakespeare's work who happens to have the expertise and breadth of knowledge of the literary tradition preceding Shakespeare's writing to give it full understanding and measure. This is a book to be treasured and savored by lovers of Shakespeare and also those readers who want to understand better what the bard is up to and the world of the mind he inhabits.

Mimosa Stephenson

University of Texas at Brownsville