Christian Irony in Shakespeare's Histories.

Cox, John D.

Christian Irony in Shakespeare's Histories. 2 vols. By Roy Battenhouse. Edited by Peter Milward. Tokyo: Renaissance Institute. No ISBN. 149 pp. and 106 pp. respectively. [yen] 2000 (approximately $20--not readily available in traditional U.S. markets).

Long before the current "turn to religion" in literary studies, Roy Battenhouse made the turn himself. Born in 1912, he was educated between the world wars, earning his doctorate at Yale in 1938 and going on to train for the Episcopal priesthood, in which he was ordained in 1942. He practiced his priestly vocation by pursuing his avocation, which was the study and teaching of literature. After brief appointments at three other institutions, Battenhouse was hired by Indiana University, where he taught from 1950 to 1982. His first book, published in 1941, was on Marlowe's Tamburlaine, which he analyzed as a "study in Renaissance moral philosophy" (the book's subtitle), and his proudest achievement was Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Christian Premises, published in 1969. In 1994, the year before he died, he published a digest of edited articles and book chapters with the descriptive title, Shakespeare's Christian Dimension: An Anthology of Commentaries.

As a tribute to Roy Battenhouse, his friend and fellow priest, the Jesuit scholar Peter Milward has edited and published ten essays by Battenhouse on Shakespeare's history plays, all but one of them previously published as journal articles or book chapters. Issued in two slender paperback volumes by the Renaissance Institute of Sophia University, the essays include a brief foreword by Battenhouse's widow, Marian, explaining that she asked Milward to edit her husband's essays on the history plays in response to a final request from Battenhouse himself. Milward added a complementary eulogy and a short editorial introduction, but for the real introduction (and the first of the ten essays) the editor chose Battenhouse's own introduction to his digest of essays on the history plays in Shakespeare's Christian Dimension.

The editor chose well, because the introduction accurately reflects the strengths and limitations of Battenhouse's particular turn to religion. Beginning and ending with divine providence, the essay outlines a sense of history that is indebted about equally to St. Augustine (Battenhouse edited a collection of essays on Augustine in 1954), E. M. W. Tillyard, and Lily Bess Campbell. "I had the good fortune in the 1930's;' Battenhouse acknowledges, "that the prevailing horizons of scholarship had begun to be challenged by a historicist named Lily B. Campbell" (I.20). Both Tillyard and Campbell reacted against nineteenth-century character criticism by interpreting Shakespeare's plays about English history against the background of Elizabethan ideas about history, which were strongly providential. Tillyard eventually carried the day with generalizations about "the Tudor myth;' which he argued was the principal shaping influence in the sequence of eight plays that Shakespeare wrote on English history from the reign of Richard II to the advent of Henry VII at the end of Richard III.

The strength of Battenhouse's religiously informed criticism is his continuing commitment to ideas of Christian providence. Though he had the good fortune, as he puts it, to be introduced to the idea by others, he persisted in it on his own and in his own way. To be sure, he did not subscribe to the Tudor myth; in fact, he takes explicit issue with Campbell and Tillyard on particular points (I.68, I.76-106, II.2). Nonetheless, his thinking is strongly influenced by them, rather than by New Historicism, for example, which carried the day in the 1980s, and which Battenhouse mentions briefly for the first and only time on the last page of his second book (II. 103). Battenhouse continued to affirm his original notions of divine providence in Shakespeare's histories and tragedies even after the publication of Henry Asgar Kelly's Divine Providence in the England of Shakespeare's Histories (1970), which was a powerful "old" historicist critique of Tillyard's argument in particular. (Kelly appears neither in Shakespeare's Christian Dimension nor in Christian Irony in Shakespeare's Histories.) By neither acknowledging nor answering some of his most important contrary arguments, Battenhouse inadvertently turned the principal strength of his position into its principal limitation.

Battenhouse reads providence eschatalogically, in both tragedy and in history; that is, he views human life sub specie aeternitatis in both genres and assesses it accordingly. This viewpoint is explicit in frequent comparisons to Dante: "The punishment assigned by Dante to Alexander the Great, that of wading in blood in heirs circle of the violent against neighbor, would seem to apply to Henry [the Fifth]" (I.16). The problem with these comparisons is that the Divine Comedy imagines human life only and always from the perspective of the last things (death, judgment, heaven, and hell), whereas Shakespeare does so very briefly for only a handful of minor characters who appear as ghosts in Richard III and Hamlet (with notorious ambiguity). Macbeth is the most eloquent of all Shakespeare's characters about "the life to come"--and the most haunted by it--but we never see him there: we see him only on "this bank and shoal of time" where he acts and suffers whatever consequences we see him suffering (Macbeth, 1.7.6-7, quoted from David Bevington's fifth edition of Shakespeare's Complete Works). What is true of Macbeth is no less true of Henry V. We see him negotiate with powerful bishops, conquer France, and win the French princess, and we hear the Chorus predict the earthly futility of his achievements in the disastrous reign of his son, which the Chorus reminds us the playwright has already treated in his plays about Henry VI (Henry V, Epilogue, 9-14), but none of this amounts to Henry V's wading in symbolic blood like Dante's Alexander. We can use Shakespeare's play to determine what happened to Henry V after his death only by filling a silence that is no less important than the words Shakespeare actually wrote. One can fill that silence in other ways than the one Battenhouse chooses, or one can take the silence itself as an indicative limiting factor in reading Shakespeare's plays. These alternatives are not necessarily less Christian than Battenhouse's approach, though they are likely to involve a more complicated sense of divine providence.

One of the attendant difficulties with Battenhouse's eschatological hermeneutic is that it compelled him to pass up opportunities for connecting his own criticism meaningfully to the scholarly conversation that continued throughout his lifetime. The editor acknowledges that the essays may appear "excessively dated" (I.11), but he sees this quality as "their distinctive merit;' because they anticipated later developments--even postmodern developments. The point is a good one, as this review acknowledges, but again a potential strength emerges as a limitation. Battenhouse was by no means the only critic to take issue with the Tudor myth in its heyday, though Milward seems to suggest that he was: Battenhouse "wields his sword of criticism with devastating effect on so many modern scholars--Tillyard and Wilson Knight, Frye and Kermode--whose names have become all but iconic in today's Shakespeare establishment" (I.11). Battenhouse's critique of Tillyard's emphasis on order, obedience, and "degree" as supposed assumptions of Elizabethan political thinking in fact shares much common ground with the critique of Tillyard that emerged with New Historicism in the 1980s. Instead of ignoring New Historicism, Battenhouse could have allied himself with it, offering a critique of political idealism (as he does in his comments on Henry V) from a distinctly Augustinian perspective and thereby using it also to critique the materialist perspective that New Historicists explicitly endorsed.

Another missed opportunity in these essays relates to self-deception, which Battenhouse identifies with Henry IV, Henry V, and Cranmer in Henry VIII (I.28, 35, 59, II.20, 97). Battenhouse seems not to recognize that psychological self-deception is the hallmark of postmodern thinking, as Paul Ricoeur has argued, nor that moral self-deception may be historically richer as an explanation for self-deception in Shakespeare than its postmodern counterpart. Battenhouse does not trace the intellectual origins of moral self-deception, nor does he ask whether Shakespeare had access to them, and if so, how. Neglecting postmodern insights about self-deception in Shakespeare (in the criticism, say, of Harry Berger and Stanley Cavell), Battenhouse passed up a chance to qualify them with reference to a distinctly Christian tradition that Battenhouse himself recognizes and helpfully acknowledges. Peter Milward identifies and endorses Battenhouse's consistently adversarial stance (I.4-5), but because of it Battenhouse often comes across sounding more like Tertullian ("What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?") than like the Augustine he loved and admired, who urged Christians to read the pagan philosophers in order to take from them what God had given them and to convert it to the building up of the church.

The key phrase in Peter Milward's title for the collection is "Christian irony;' because it is true to the essays and especially to the most famous of them: Battenhouse's interpretation of Shakespeare's Falstaff, which he originally published in PMLA in 1975. The hermeneutic in this case had been identified by Richard Levin in an article published in PMLA the year before Battenhouse published "Falstaff as Parodist and Holy Fool" Levin used several essays without identifying them by author or title (though one was Battenhouse's 1946 essay on Measure for Measure) to illustrate what Levin called "Fluellenism;' referring to the argument Fluellen makes in Henry V, comparing the English king to Alexander the Great. Fluellen represents a critical method, Levin argues, that selects certain similarities while ignoring differences, so the argument is bound to succeed, even though "no matter how many likenesses are found, the number of differences will always be much larger. It will, in fact, be infinite:' The "great strength" of the method is to find the similarities, Levin argues, but this strength is also "its greatest weakness" because the ignored differences allow the critic to prove whatever the critic wants to prove.

Levin's critique applies not only to Battenhouse on Measure for Measure but also to Battenhouse on Falstaff. Battenhouse interprets Falstaff as a holy fool, like Jesus himself in Harvey Cox's account (which Battenhouse approvingly cites [I.113]): Falstaff prays for his enemy, King Henry, who betrays him (I. 108); Falstaff is wise as a serpent and harmless as a dove (I.109); he eschews worldly honor in his soliloquy in 1 Henry IV (I. 111); he cites the Bible frequently (I.115, 117-18); he reproves his social superiors for their moral laxity (I.115, 119-20), and so forth. None of these similarities is untrue in itself, though some are more persuasive than others, but they ignore irreconcilable differences. We have no record that Jesus exploited widows by running up ruinous debts at their expense, as Falstaff does with Mistress Quickly. Battenhouse blames the victim in this case, referring to Mistress Quickly dismissively as the "gullible Hostess" (I. 129) and ignoring the "stuffy Chief Justice's" (I.114) incisive observation to Falstaff: "You have, as it appears to me, practiced upon the easy-yielding spirit of this woman and made her serve your uses both in purse and in person" (2 Henry IV, 2.1.112-14). We have no record that Jesus defended himself against such a charge with witty and self-serving rationalism, as Falstaff does, to which the Lord Chief Justice trenchantly replies, "You speak as having power to do wrong" (2 Henry IV, 2.1.127).

Battenhouse tries to defend Falstafffor engaging in another kind of exploitation: corrupt recruiting. "We lack evidence, actually, that any of Falstaff's recruits ever took part in the battle" Battenhouse remarks (I. 131), as if Falstaff's admission that "I have misused the King's press damnably" (1 Henry IV, 4.2.12-13) were excusable because no iii effects came of it. Shakespeare emphasizes this misuse in both of the Henry IV plays, mentioning it repeatedly in the first play and showing it in action in the second play, where Falstaff colludes with a corrupt Justice of the Peace to exploit the poorest and sickest conscripts in Gloucestershire. Falstaff himself states in soliloquy that he took his recruits into battle at Shrewsbury, and he admits that the results were disastrous: "I have led my ragamuffins where they are peppered. There's not three of my hundred and fifty left alive, and they are for the town's end, to beg during life" (I Henry IV, 5.3.36-38). If the body count of his own men is accurate, he is acknowledging a horrendous casualty rate of 99.98%. Jesus' repeated insistence--in both his preaching and his actions--on caring for the poor and the oppressed is strongly at odds with Falstaff's habitual practice. Battenhouse's defense of his hermeneutic as "Christian irony" allows him to read against the grain, as postmodern critics do, but his readings sometimes offer less in the way of understanding a text than in showing how a critic can stand over it to make it mean what he wants it to.

Roy Battenhouse deserves enormous gratitude for his principled stand, his forthrightness, and his tenacity. His scholarship is wide-ranging, and his close readings are often incisive. The Conference on Christianity and Literature has appropriately established an endowed travel grant in Battenhouse's name because of his leadership of the organization and his contribution to Christian literary scholarship. If this review emphasizes the limitations of his writing, it also acknowledges the magnitude of his achievement. He unfortunately lacked the time and energy to bring the essays collected by Peter Milward into a coherent whole, so no theory of the history play emerges here, and Shakespeare's earliest history plays (1, 2, and 3 Henry VI) receive almost no attention. Nonetheless, the collection serves as a reminder of an important pioneer in the turn to religion and as an inspiration to others who would make the same turn after him.

John D. Cox

Hope College