Shakespeare, Christ Figures, and the Critics

Two books in roughly the past half-century have done a good job identifying the flaws in sloppy or superficial Christian criticism that tries too hard at times to find Christ-figures everywhere. These have had good and bad effects on the way that people who are less aware of the field of Shakespeare and Religion sometimes perceive it. On the one hand, Christians should not proselytize sloppily through Shakespeare, finding religious allegories anywhere or everywhere, and if they point out religious themes or biblical echoes, they should cite evidence to support their claims. Fair enough. But some of this criticism of the Christian theologizers is fraught with its own flaws and distortions, as well as having unintended negative effects.

Roland Mushat Frye was a scholar-in-residence at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and his book, Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine (1963), is often cited. Chapter 1 (19-42) is called "Theologizing Analyses: The School of Knight," named after one critic in particular who exemplifies for him this sort of sloppy scholarship.

Richard Levin's 1979 book, New Readings v. Old Plays, in an appendix named "The Figure of Fluellen" (209-229), offers similar criticism, much of it deserved, occasionally citing Frye.

One of the problems I see with Frye's book in particular is that, instead of starting with the evidence of the Shakespeare texts and looking for allusions to scripture, catechism, liturgy, and doctrine, he starts with a very narrow selection of three major Protestant writers (Luther, Calvin, and Hooker), spends a great deal of time explaining why these were so important in Shakespeare's time, and then goes looking for evidence of those in the plays. This makes it a too-limiting enterprise from the start. (It seems an example of confirmation bias: start with what you find to be major Protestant thinkers, and then go cherry-picking the text for data to confirm your assumptions about the pervasive influence of those Protestant thinkers on Shakespeare as well as on other writers of the era.) Many of his insights are good, but his methods and some of the radical narrowing of his efforts and results are questionable.

Another problem I see with the effects of such writing is that the too-easy, too-sloppy theologizers are like the boys who cried wolf, and the (perhaps unintended) effect of critics like Levin and Frye is like the townspeople who say, "Let's ignore those boys; it's always a prank." In other words, the combined effect is that it might encourage some to dismiss any claims of Christ figures in the plays.

This would be unfortunate, because in Shakspeare's Christian culture as well as in Christianity today, to be baptized as a Christian means to embrace a life-path that involves "dying to sin" and "rising anew in Christ," and for many Christians, whether they believe in transubstantiation or not, it involves regular commemoration of the Last Supper, when Jesus calls the bread and wine his body and blood and makes the point that he is *inside* the disciples themselves.

One can be a traditional Protestant or Catholic or Orthodox Christian of various sorts, or one can be a more humanistic one who believes in the moral and spiritual values in the gospels, but who doesn't take literally Christianity's claims of virgin birth and resurrection as the supernatural resuscitation and glorification of a corpse. Either way, one goal of Christianity is for all to strive to be Christ figures. Shakespeare, his wife, parents, and children were all baptized Christians, so it might be unusual if there were an absence of Christ figures in Shakespeare's literature.

Perhaps one of the problems is that when we say "Christ-figure," many expect someone to be killed, sacrificed, and some of these expect that the person sacrificed should be morally exemplary from the start of the play or fiction. Some critics might be unwilling to accept a repentant prodigal son figure like Hamlet as having a character arc that moves toward something more Christian in a variety of ways, although he does still kill the unrepentant usurper, Claudius, in the end before he himself dies.

So for these and many other reasons, the ending of the play is challenging, and considering Hamlet as having a character arc that moves him toward being a Christ-figure is too far for some to go, especially since he kills Polonius at the start of his steepest descent, and Claudius at the end of the play, an apparent king. Shakespeare seems to have been very interested in writing plays about killing kings, and some of the killers (like Macbeth) certainly seem hell-bound. How can a king-killer have flights of angels sing him to his rest, as in the story of Lazarus and the rich man, if he's hell-bound? What kind of Christian prince is this? If Hamlet is a Christ-figure, the evidence is hard for some to find and affirm against apparently contrary evidence and assumptions.

This is why Flannery O'Connor named her famous story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find," about a family on a road trip. The grandmother is a somewhat self-centered character at first, and in part through her selfishness (bringing along her favorite cat, hidden in a basket on her lap), she sets in motion the series of accidents that lead to the deaths of the whole family at the hands of The Misfit.

The grandmother faces The Misfit and watches as other members of the family - her son and daughter-in-law and her grandchildren - are taken off into the distance in the woods and shot. She tries all she can to talk The Misfit out of killing her, but through his revealing responses to her, we see that none of it works, and the Misfit even displays his anguish and doubt about whether Jesus rose from the dead or not, and what claims that might make on him if it were true. After she has played all her cards, to no effect, she empathizes with this doubtful and troubled person and ponders whether in fact Jesus did rise. Then she reaches out to him in compassion, finally, and finds some connection between them, saying, you poor boy, you're one of my own - in a very kind and grandmotherly way, having become her best self when other options were stripped away.

She reaches out to touch him, and as if startled, he shoots her three times in the chest.

He later comments that she'd have been a good woman if there'd been someone there with a gun on her every minute of her life.

O'Connor (in the book of her nonfiction writings, Mystery and Manners) says she wants to laugh at the end, because she thinks the woman went straight to heaven, and that in her gesture of reaching out to him, she planted in his heart a seed that would one day grow to a great tree, as it did in the heart of Saul, who became Paul after being knocked from his horse by a blinding light.

But many readers didn't see the story that way and assumed The Misfit was Satan, and the tale simply one of the existential plight of life in a world devoid of meaning, etc. Some wrote to her explaining their views.

So sometimes, a good man is hard to find, whether it's a Christ-figure in Shakespeare, or in a grandmother who's killed on a back road, lost with her family, shot by an escaped convict with a gang and a troubled soul.


#shakespeare #bible #religion #literature #theatre #drama #EarlyModern #literarycriticism #theology #BritishLiterature #britlit #liturgy #Catholic #Protestant #theater #biases