Biases in Shakespeare/Hamlet Scholarship (Part 2: Secular/Universal Bias)

Given the fact that Shakespeare wrote during the English Reformation, a time of great conflict over religion, and given the many biblical and religious references scholars find in his plays, what factors may have come together to create the strong secular bias in criticism—especially in the early centuries after Shakespeare's death, but also persisting today?

What factors may have led critics to claim that Shakespeare was more interested in universal truths than in the important political and religious issues of his time, for which some risked execution?

[Murder Most Foul: Hamlet Through the Ages, by David Bevington. Oxford University Press, 2011. Fair use.]

1. Laws prohibited Shakespeare from writing too explicitly about certain religious and political topics. His silence on some of these topics resulted in ambiguities that may have been misread as disinterest, favoring universal and secular truths.

2. If Shakespeare had religious and political opinions at odds with the monarchy and English church, he may have chosen not to voice them for the risks involved, or to bury them carefully in subtexts and veiled allusions. (Such buried or veiled allusions are often the subject of this blog.)

3. In Shakespeare's time and after, in part due to debate and questions raised by the Reformation, European cultures were increasingly secular in many of their interests, regardless of religious debates and censorship in England.

4. From 1642 to 1660, during the English Civil War (1642-1651) and interregnum, English theaters were closed, and there was a gap in Shakespeare performance. After the Restoration, Shakespeare was freely adapted to suit interests of new generations that may have lost interest in old religious/sectarian squabbles that had caused so much violence and unrest.

There were exceptions: A minority of voices sometimes claimed Shakespeare "died a papist," and others occasionally noted some of the many explicit biblical allusions. But the idea that Shakespeare was mostly secular, and mostly uninterested in local and topical issues in favor of universal truths, was at least in part a projection of later critics, reading into ambiguities in his plays.

In his book, Murder Most Foul: Hamlet Through the Ages (2011), David Bevington wrote, "the history of Hamlet can be seen paradigmatically as a history of cultural change." (4) Bevington traces the biases of the Restoration age, the Ages of Reason and Enlightenment, the Romantic and Victorian eras and other times up to our own. Each age projected its own biases in its readings and stagings of Hamlet and other plays. He writes, "Hamlet has thus become a microcosm, a little world, containing within itself the elements that go to make up cultural history."

But the secularity later critics claimed to find in Shakespeare was not merely their own projection.  Some of its origins were in the necessary ambiguities of the playwright working in a context of censorship and self-censorship.

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Series on Religious (and a few other) Biases in Shakespeare Scholarship:
1. Biases & Assumptions Influence What We Notice, Seek, or Neglect - 11 January, 2022
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2022/01/biases-assumptions-influence-what-we.html

2. Secular/Universal Bias in Shakespeare/Hamlet Scholarship - 18 January, 2022
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2022/01/part-2-factors-contributing-to.html

3. Victors Wrote the Histories of Shakespeare and Francis of Assisi - 25 January, 2022
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2022/01/victors-wrote-history-of-shakespeare.html

4. Biblical Seeds of Secular Shakespeare Bias - 1 February, 2022
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2022/02/biblical-seeds-of-secular-shakespeare.html

5. Catholic Bias in Simon Augustus Blackmore - 8 February, 2022
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2022/02/catholic-bias-in-simon-augustus.html

6. Nietzschean & Christian-Mythical Bias in G. Wilson Knight - 15 February, 2022
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2022/02/nietzschean-christian-mythical-bias-in.html

7. Roland Frye's Protestant Bias - 22 February, 2022
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2022/02/roland-fryes-protestant-bias.html

8. Gatekeeping and Religious Turns in Shakespeare Scholarship - 1 March, 2022
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2022/03/gatekeeping-and-religious-turns-in.html

9. Honigmann, Hammerschmidt−Hummel, and Moses' Shoes - 8 March, 2022
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2022/03/taking-off-shoes-in-presence-of.html

10. Protestant Bias in Arthur McGee's 1987 book, "The Elizabethan Hamlet" - 15 March, 2022
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2022/03/protestant-bias-in-arthur-mcgees-1987.html

11. Catholic Bias in Clare Asquith's 2005 book, "Shadowplay" - 22 March, 2022
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2022/03/catholic-bias-in-clare-asquiths-2005.html

12. Protestant and authoritarian bias in Roy W. Battenhouse - 29 March, 2022
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2022/03/battenhouses-authoritarian-protestant.html



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Disclaimer: If and when I quote or paraphrase bible passages or mention religion in many of my blog posts, I do not intend to promote any religion over another, nor am I attempting to promote religious belief in general; only to explore how the Bible and religion influenced Shakespeare, his plays, and his age.
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