Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England.
Cox, John D.
Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern
England. Edited by Dennis Taylor and David N. Beauregard. New York:
Fordham University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-8232-2283-7 (cloth),
0-8232-2284-5 (paper). Pp. 451. $65.00 (cloth), $28.00 (paper).
Sixteen essays appear in this collection--nearly all of them newly
commissioned--together with a substantial introduction by Dennis Taylor,
one of the two coeditors. The essays do not argue in favor of Christian
belief in Shakespeare (as opposed to doubt or disinterest); they assume
it. As Taylor puts it, "The premise of this collection of essays is
that the Reformation was the defining event of Shakespeare's
background" (1). What he means is that Shakespeare was defined by
the transformation of English culture that followed the Henrician,
Edwardian, and Elizabethan church settlements in the sixteenth century,
and that what principally defined him was his resistance against those
settlements in favor of traditional religion (to borrow Eamon
Duffy's phrase for pre-Reformation faith and practice).
Most of the essays thus argue, in one way or another, for a
"Catholic" Shakespeare, and the coeditors are themselves
strongly inclined to that view, as indicated in Taylor's
introduction and in David Beauregard's essay on Measure for
Measure. Taylor writes that "we are ambitiously tracing a story
projecting a teleological reading of Shakespeare's career"
(21). He admits that Hamlet is an "interruption" in this
narrative, but the two "problem plays" (All's Well That
Ends Well and Measure for Measure) reflect "a false fire of
hope" that ran in Catholic circles with the advent of James I,
because these two plays are a "strained re-entertainment of the
possibilities of English religious reconciliation" (16), while the
tragedies (again excepting Hamlet) respond to "the darkest moment
in early modern English Catholicism" (21)--the Gunpowder Plot of
1605. All this might put some readers in mind of Lytton Strachey's
rejection of Edward Dowden's attempt to read the plays as a
reflection of Shakespeare's supposed states of mind, but Taylor has
an answer: Strachey did not attack Dowden's story per se; "he
attacked Dowden's story in favor of another story that he,
Strachey, preferred" (16).
One of the problems with any teleological reading of the plays and
poems is the difficulty of dating them precisely. Taylor acknowledges
that David Bevington's edition of the Complete Works "suggests
somewhat different date ranges for the plays" but he neglects to
identify the authority for his own dating (or even precisely what that
dating is), despite his acknowledgment that "determining dates
needs close integration with the kind of thematic concerns explored in
this volume" (16). The risk of circular reasoning is openly courted
here: without clear indications for precise dating, dates are determined
by the chosen narrative, yet the order of the plays is crucial to the
narrative in the first place. Presumably this is why Measure for Measure
is treated before All's Well That Ends Well in this volume (which
organizes the essays according to the putative order of the plays'
composition), though virtually everyone else believes that these two
plays were composed in the reverse order of their treatment here.
If teleology is one earmark of this collection, allegory is
another, in that several of the essays read various plays as allegories
of "the Protestant/Catholic split that is the coded subject of much
of Shakespeare's work" (24). Such an allegory is implied by
the narrative Taylor describes in his introduction, and
Beauregard's essay on Measure for Measure reads it as a nostalgic
defense of monasticism (long since suppressed by the English crown).
Claire Asquith argues that Love's Labor's Lost is a topical
allegory written for the occasion of Elizabeth I's visit to Oxford
in 1592. The oath taken by the four young noblemen in the play thus
becomes the Oath of Supremacy that Oxford University required of all
matriculates, thereby causing difficulties for Catholics who could not
endorse the queen's headship of the church. Asquith identifies
particular individuals (Adriano de Armado is the Oxford tutor, Antonio
de Corro; Moth is John Donne; Holofernes is Gabriel Harvey), using a
method that was popular among critics in the early twentieth century and
that endures still among those who deny Shakespeare's authorship of
the plays ascribed to him. This is dubious company, and the method was
examined and found wanting by Bevington in Tudor Drama and Politics: A
Critical Approach to Topical Meaning (1968). Bevington's
observation that the method "implies a debased and contentious view
of Elizabethan dramatic art" seems applicable to many of the essays
in this collection.
My point is not that essays committed to the hypothesis of
Shakespeare's Catholicism have to be of the sort I have just
described. For one thing, not all these essays are. Richard
Dutton's essay on The Comedy of Errors, for example, argues
strongly for a hitherto unrecognized source, and while Dutton's
reading of the source's applicability to the play is compatible
with the claim for Shakespeare's Catholicism, that is not
Dutton's point: "This is not the place," he concludes,
"to speculate about what, if anything, this tells us about
Shakespeare's own faith" (39). Moreover, some of the essays in
this collection employ allegory in support of Protestant readings rather
than Catholic. R. Chris Hassel thus argues that Hamlet is a variation on
the stage Puritan, even though Hassel draws some of his evidence from
the official Elizabethan homilies (297), which are hardly Puritan; and
when he claims that the Gravedigger's comment about Adam's not
being a gentleman is Puritan (301), Hassel seems to forget the tag
ascribed to the northern priest, John Ball, during the peasants'
rebellion of 1381: "When Adam dalf and Eve span, / Who was then a
gentleman?" Besides these problems of detail, it is hard to see how
Hassel's essay fits into the "unfolding story of
Shakespeare" that Taylor describes in his introduction (16), unless
we are somehow to understand Hamlet as an anti-Puritan satire, with the
prince as the butt of the joke. This is not the play that most readers
and playgoers find haunting and endlessly provocative.
One of the difficulties in deriving Shakespeare's religious
attitude from his writing is the breadth of views represented in it.
Beauregard is right to emphasize Measure for Measure's sympathetic
treatment of Catholic clerics, and it will not do to claim that this is
because the play is set in Vienna, because Shakespeare did not have to
choose a Catholic city for his setting. But what are we to make of the
many corrupt and king-threatening cardinals, from Winchester in 1 Henry
VI to Wolsey in Henry VIII? What about the grotesque caricature of Joan
of Arc as a demon-inspired witch in 1 Henry VI, or the monk who poisons
King John (King John 5.6.24)? If Theseus is praising the vow of chastity
in Midsummer Night's Dream (1.1.67-78), as Beauregard asserts
(311), why does the duke describe convent life to Hermia as living
"a barren sister all your life, / Chanting faint hymns to the cold
fruitless moon" (1.1.72-73; my emphasis)? This is not the destiny
Hermia wants for herself, nor is it the one the playwright gives her in
the end, when she marries Demetrius. What are we to make of
Lavatch's comparing "the nail to his hole" with "the
nun's lip to the friar's mouth" (Ali's Well That
Ends Well 2.2.23-26), or his satiric remark on cuckoldry: "[Y]oung
Charbon the puritan and old Poysam the papist, howsome'er their
hearts are severed in religion, their heads are both one--they may jowl horns together like any deer i'th' herd" (1.3.51-55)?
Taylor is right to identify the "ecumenical style" of
Lavatch's satire (19), and the statement I found most persuasive in
Taylor's introduction is this one: "Shakespeare's plays
are full of the culture of Catholicism mixed in with elements of the new
culture of Protestantism" (20). Yes, indeed, and if that is the
case, how we to determine the playwright's own attitude?
John D. Cox
Hope College
