SHAKESPEARE, SUICIDE, & HOW NARRATIVE ARTS CAN HELP ADVANCE THEOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING

Gustav Klimt, Death of Romeo & Juliet, "Theatre of Shakespeare" (1886) from historic Burgtheater, Vienna, via UK Shakespeare Magazine, Twitter.

Shakespeare has many plays with suicides in them. Most famously, perhaps, is the dual suicide of Romeo and Juliet. Lady Macbeth kills herself, as do Anthony and Cleopatra, Brutus, Cassius, the wife of Brutus, Timon of Athens, and a daughter of King Lear.

In Lear, the blinded Gloucester wants to commit suicide by jumping off a cliff, but his son in disguise sets it up to make his father believe he has been miraculously saved.

Othello kills himself after he realizes he has been tricked into killing his wife by Iago (whose name is a Spanish form of James, which makes sense considering how the English hated the Spanish after the Armada, and the Jesuits, based in Spain; but which creates cognitive dissonance when we think of how the play was written while a king named James occupied the English throne).

In Hamlet, the prince contemplates suicide but wishes "that the Everlasting had not fix'd / His canon 'gainst self-slaughter!" (that God did not include suicide in the commandment not to kill). Before he dies, Hamlet convinces his friend Horatio not to take his own life so that he might live to tell Hamlet's story "aright." (cont. below pic)


'Ophelia', Sir John Everett Millais, Bt, 1851-2

Ophelia dies under suspicious circumstances; if we trust Gertrude's account, after falling in a stream, Ophelia does not seem concerned that she may die, does not struggle to get out, singing and perhaps at peace, accepting of her impending death.

At her grave, Laertes notes the "churlish" (rude, ungracious) priest who will not do full burial rites for his sister because of her suspected suicide; Laertes tells the priest that his sister will be a "ministering angel" (in heaven like the beggar Lazarus, in the gospel parable of "Lazarus and the Rich Man"), while the priest will lie "howling" (in hell like the rich man).

She is daughter to Polonius; we might consider that Polonius was originally named Corambis ("double-hearted"), thought to poke fun at William Cecil (whose motto in Latin was "Cor unum, via una," or "one heart, one way), which probably resulted in the censors requiring a change of the name. Cecil had a daughter Anne, wife of the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere; Anne Cecil also died suspiciously at the age of 31, perhaps a suicide hushed up by a powerful family so that she could be buried in a church cemetery, or as it turns out, with her mother in a church crypt, instead of being buried elsewhere with suicide victims.

Is it possible that Shakespeare not only constructed plays that evoke great sympathy for at least some of his characters who commit suicide, but that he did so out of respect and reverence for the mystery of why certain people come to that end? Perhaps.

As I've said before in a previous blog post (on getting the prodigal son story wrong), both Laertes and Polonius use the word "Prodigal" when speaking to Ophelia about Hamlet (in reference to the threat of her own prodigality or Hamlet's). But that gospel story was more about divine mercy than about putting fear into the hearts of young women about their sexuality.

The gospel tale of the prodigal son was also used to show listeners that sinners were being welcomed into the reign of God (the "kingdom of heaven") before others who believed they were better because they had always followed what they thought was the Hebraic law. In that sense, it may be Shakespeare's way of talking back to the Christianity of his time, to say that perhaps some apparent suicides were entering the reign of heaven before the self-righteous survivors who assume they're heaven-bound.

(One does not have to take the biblical imagery of heaven literally to gain insight from this: For Christians, in part, one enters the reign of heaven by being memebers of Jesus' body, meaning those who live and act in charity as a body, a community on earth, where the living live in communion with the "saints" who have gone before us, whose example fed the spirituality of the community and who therefore live on in the community; this does not have to be a heaven beyond a cloud in outer space. The love, the life, the vulnerability of people who commit suicide can be a gift to the body of the community, a gift that lives on in that body....)

One writer from the Emory University School of Medicine notes that of 13 definite and eight possible suicides in Shakespeare, "at least 7 are depicted as being admirable under the circumstances at the time." (1) This may underestimate the total suicides in all of Shakespeare's plays by other counts.

It's clear that the official position of Catholics and Protestants was that suicide was sinful, and yet about half of the definite suicides in Shakespeare's plays definitely elicit some kind of sympathy. It would seem that this should not have passed the censors; but at least one critic claims that Catholic and Protestant thinkers embraced the idea of education in classical literature, which also included many suicides, so his explanation is that there was a clear demarcation of what was the realm of religion and theology, and what was the secular realm of arts and the theater. (2)

Another possibility is to consider how the narrative arts have perhaps always stretched the limits of accepted religious ideas and morality.

Consider that in the Hebrew scriptures (called "Old Testament" in older Christian bibles), some stories may give the impression that when bad things happen to people, it must be a sign that those to whom they happen are being punished or have fallen somehow from favor. In Genesis 18, when Abraham pleads for Sodom, God says that if there were but 10 good people there, he would not destroy the town. Abraham has talked God down from much larger numbers, so the implication seems to be that God doesn't do bad things to good people.

And yet the book of Job proposes just such a scenario regarding one person, not ten. Job is good, but the devil bets God that he could break him and make him reject his faith. God (inexplicably, not very mercifully) takes the bet and lets the devil do all sorts of bad things to Job, including the killing of his family members, who don't seem to count much more to the narrative than cattle.

In spite of our modern reservations, this is a narrative that seems to require of its listeners a broadening of the older assumption that bad things happen as punishment to bad people. The fact that Job's family members die is never identified as punishment for their sins, just a testing of Job's faith.

In another book of the Hebrew scriptures, the people of Judah had come out of exile in Babylon, but some of the sons of Judah had married foreign women who spoke other languages and perhaps continued to worship their old gods, and this was causing trouble. The women taught their mother-tongue to the children, and the religious conservatives reacted like Trump supporters wanting to kick out all people who had dark hair and darker skin, and who didn't speak English.

So to solve the problem, religious authorities of that time believed they had to take drastic measures, or else things might get even more out of hand. [A-hem.] They exiled the foreign wives and the children they had borne for the sons of Judah, prohibited marriage to foreigners, and prohibited marriage to the children of "mixed marriages" to foreigners. (Ezra 9-10, Neh 13:23-29). Quite a program. Sounds too familiar.

But in such a context, the story of Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz was written. Ruth was a Moabite, so according to Deuteronomy 23:4, she should never have been admitted to the family, but in fact, she had married Naomi's son. Then the husbands of Ruth and Naomi died, and instead of returning to her own people, Ruth pledged herself to remain with her mother-in-law Naomi, claiming Naomi's people and Naomi's God as her own. She acted faithfully, helpfully, generously toward Naomi, and in the end, was married to Boaz, a relative of Naomi, and later became great-grandmother to King David (who was named as an ancestor to Jesus in Christian scriptures).

So both King David and Jesus owe their existence in part to a bending of strict observance to the law for the sake of a foreigner.

Note that this is not one of those "Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" kind of tales. Ruth gets help from Naomi, Boaz, and others. And in this case, things turn out OK.

There are more conservative interpretations of Ruth that try to reconcile her marriages with Hebraic law. I don't buy them. To me and to many others, the examples of Ruth and Job seem to show how narratives can stretch religious laws or doctrines and make room not only for merciful exceptions, but also for broader and more open-hearted thinking.

This is what some would call fruitful dialectics among the various books in the Hebrew scriptures, which suggest that perhaps specific chapter-and-verse passages sometimes don't reveal a transcendent divinity as well as the fruitful dialectics themselves.

And in fact, on the issue of suicide, most of Christianity after Shakespeare eventually came to claim that we should not assume we can judge the eternal fate of those who commit suicide. Maybe the empathy evoked by certain of Shakespeare's characters and plots had a hand in the creative dialectics that resulted in that shift.

In the late 70s, S. Bruce Kauffman wrote an article called "Charting a Sea Change: On the Relationships of Religion and Literature to Theology." (3) In it, he proposed that, instead of theologians and preachers borrowing from literature to preach their own preconceived ideas, perhaps literature sometimes foreshadows new theological insights. This makes sense, as the books of Job and Ruth make sense in fruitful dialectics with sometimes too-rigid religious assumptions or laws. Perhaps the fact that Kauffman would write such an article shows that this very old sense of the dialectical possibilities between theology and literature had, for too many scholars and theologians, been lost.

~~~~~~~~~~
P.S.
On the point of bad things happening to good people:
In spite of the existence of the Book of Job, it seems that the assumption that bad things happening were a sign of God's disfavor (and/or punishment for sin) persisted in the time of Jesus: In the Christian scriptures, Jesus is asked if the victims of a construction accident (Tower of Siloam, Luke 13:4-5) were being punished for sin. Jesus says no, unequivocally. Much more briefly, he confronts the same basic question that the book of Job confronts.

Yet the Protestant work ethic and the idea of predestination renewed the same troubles, with the wealthy and fortunate assuming they enjoyed God's favor, believing that the less fortunate were not among the chosen, and/or being punished for sin.

Sounds like some people today!


(1) "To end itself by death: suicide in Shakespeare's tragedies." Kirkland LR. South Med J. 1999 Jul;92(7):660-6. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10414473
(2) Frye, Roland Mushat. Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine. Princeton University Pres, 1963.
24-30.
(3) Kauffman, S. Bruce. "Charting a Sea Change: On the Relationships of Religion and Literature to Theology." The Journal of Religion 58, no. 4 (1978): 405-27. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1201473.