Nietzschean & Christian-Mythical Bias in G. Wilson Knight (Part 6: Religious Bias in Shakespeare Scholarship)
If all one knew of G. Wilson Knight (1897-1985) was that Roland Frye (1921–2005), a Folger Shakespeare Library scholar, once accused him and others of too-easy “theologizing” of too many Shakespeare plays, one might think Knight was a Christian evangelical, and Frye a champion of secular humanism.
Both assumptions would be wrong. Knight was a disaffected English Protestant who admired Nietzsche and noticed archetypal trends in literature, including Christ-figures. But as such, he was painting with a broad brush, not as exacting as Protestant scholars like Frye would have preferred.
In 1948, Knight wrote of Nietzsche’s idea of the “Avenging Mind”:
“Hamlet… is an archetypal play, where Shakespeare watched his hero trying, sometimes successfully, more often [not], to transmute this dark thing through his own dramatic personality” (184).*
[* G. Wilson Knight, Shakespeare and Religion (1967)]
On Protestantism:
“...perhaps our traditional Christianity leaves today a want [...]
the Church’s teaching has allowed itself to be dominated by negatives [..]
Deep in the Christian tradition [...] it has been for ages supposed that a sense of sin is the necessary beginning; that the cross is the one centre; and [...] that the end is [...] that grand-scale symptom of the ‘Avenging Mind,’ Hell.” (185).
Too much Protestant “looking back”:
“What hope would there be for a creative teaching if the teacher told his pupil: ‘There is little good in you. You are helpless. Rely on me.’ Or even worse: ‘There is little good in me. Rely on the founder of your school.’ (186).
- This Protestant “looking back” included its claim that Christianity should be based on “scripture alone,” and that the time of miracles and revelation had ended with scripture. Protestantism criticized Catholicism for its belief that actions can cooperate with divine grace and play a role in salvation. Protestantism stressed the utter depravity of humans after the fall of Adam and Eve, and that faith alone can save us.
- Knight was criticizing this negativity and “looking back” at the heart of Protestantism. (Frye was a Presbyterian, a form of Protestantism).
Knight claimed Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra
“has a positive gospel of the greatest importance. He is trying to fashion [...] a purpose of the future, a christology, [...] yet one which in its main emphasis strongly counters our traditional Christianity [..]
If he says that his super-being, the ‘over-man’, most conquer sympathy, it is not that he is to be unsympathetic but rather because sympathy—’suffering with’—is a lowering of yourself to the sufferer, a surrender to the negative. Rather must the great soul lift the sufferer to his own joy [....]
Nietzsche so often seems to talk dangerously in terms of evil; he only means that you have to make friends with these dark energies, as you do with a child or an animal before you can properly train them” (193).
(Might this have rubbed Frye the wrong way?)
Frye’s resistance to “theologising” and Christ-figures may have been based in part on a misreading of Knight that completely neglected Knight’s interest in Nietzsche, myth and archetypes.
Knight wrote, “Whenever I have seen Christian elements as part of the Shakespearian synthesis many of my readers have apparently assumed that I must be reading Shakespeare as part of Christianity. What I have been doing is *larger* than they supposed (pp. 103, 311-12, 318).”
In his chapter, “Jesus and Shakespeare” (reprinted from 1934, 69-73), Knight claimed that Shakespeare was more concerned with human love as Eros than with the love Jesus represents, but he sets it up as too much of a binary, either-or choice. Knight also demonstrates in this chapter that he assumes Shakespeare was striving not to engage in the issues of his own time (with "local" or "topical" references, as critics and scholars have sometimes claimed with varying degrees of complexity). He did not imagine that Shakespeare may have included complex and covert meanings to outsmart the censors (as many now recognize), but that Shakespeare was merely the “greatest poet” of the modern era striving to embody universal meanings in his plays. This is a serious limitation for both Knight and Frye, but typical of the years in which they wrote.
Knight's best-known books include The Wheel of Fire (1949), which went through many reprintings. His book quoted above, Shakespeare and Religion, was written in response to Roland M. Frye's criticism of his writings on Shakespeare as over-theologizing.
~~~
Here's an excerpt of a helpful review of Knight's book from 1968:
Reviewed Work: Shakespeare and Religion by G. Wilson Knight
Review by: Robert McDonnell
The Journal of Religion
Vol. 48, No. 4 (Oct., 1968), pp. 403-405 (3 pages)
Published By: The University of Chicago Press
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1201453
And here is the abstract of an article on Knight's legacy, by Laurence Raw, Başkent University, Ankara, Turkey:
Abstract
G. Wilson Knight (1897-1985) was one of the most influential Shakespearean critics of the mid-twentieth century. This piece surveys his work from 1930 until the early 1980s. Much affected by the First World War, he developed a style of criticism based on Christian principles of respect for other people and belief in an all-powerful God. Many of his most famous pieces (in THE WHEEL OF FIRE, for instance) argue for human insignificance in an indifferent universe. It is up to all of us as individuals to develop methods of coping with this world. Wilson Knight’s ideas gained particular currency during the Second World War, when Britain’s very future seemed at risk due to the threat of Nazi invasion. Although much derided for his use of transcendent language—especially by his contemporary F. R. Leavis—Wilson Knight’s ideas seem to have acquired new significance in a globalized world, where individuals fight to main their identity in a technology-driven environment.
Raw, L. “The Legacy of G. Wilson Knight”. Linguaculture, vol. 8, no. 1, June 2017, pp. 108-24, doi:10.1515/lincu-2017-0010.
https://journal.linguaculture.ro/index.php/home/article/view/95
And here, another journal article that mentions Knight, this one from 1985:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41801727 'HAMLET' WITHOUT THE PRINCE OF DENMARK: SHAKESPEARE CRITICISM 1930s-1960s
by D.P. EDMUNDS
Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory
No. 64 (May 1985), pp. 43-55 (13 pages)
Published By: Berghahn Books
Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory
~~
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. Religious 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
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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 point out how the Bible and religion may have influenced Shakespeare, his plays, and his age.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Thanks for reading!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
My current project is a book tentatively titled Hamlet’s Bible, about biblical allusions and plot echoes in Hamlet.
Below is a link to a list of some of my top posts (“greatest hits”), including a description of my book project (last item on the list):
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2019/12/top-20-hamlet-bible-posts.html
I post every week, so please visit as often as you like and consider subscribing.
Both assumptions would be wrong. Knight was a disaffected English Protestant who admired Nietzsche and noticed archetypal trends in literature, including Christ-figures. But as such, he was painting with a broad brush, not as exacting as Protestant scholars like Frye would have preferred.
In 1948, Knight wrote of Nietzsche’s idea of the “Avenging Mind”:
“Hamlet… is an archetypal play, where Shakespeare watched his hero trying, sometimes successfully, more often [not], to transmute this dark thing through his own dramatic personality” (184).*
On Protestantism:
“...perhaps our traditional Christianity leaves today a want [...]
the Church’s teaching has allowed itself to be dominated by negatives [..]
Deep in the Christian tradition [...] it has been for ages supposed that a sense of sin is the necessary beginning; that the cross is the one centre; and [...] that the end is [...] that grand-scale symptom of the ‘Avenging Mind,’ Hell.” (185).
Too much Protestant “looking back”:
“What hope would there be for a creative teaching if the teacher told his pupil: ‘There is little good in you. You are helpless. Rely on me.’ Or even worse: ‘There is little good in me. Rely on the founder of your school.’ (186).
- This Protestant “looking back” included its claim that Christianity should be based on “scripture alone,” and that the time of miracles and revelation had ended with scripture. Protestantism criticized Catholicism for its belief that actions can cooperate with divine grace and play a role in salvation. Protestantism stressed the utter depravity of humans after the fall of Adam and Eve, and that faith alone can save us.
- Knight was criticizing this negativity and “looking back” at the heart of Protestantism. (Frye was a Presbyterian, a form of Protestantism).
Knight claimed Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra
“has a positive gospel of the greatest importance. He is trying to fashion [...] a purpose of the future, a christology, [...] yet one which in its main emphasis strongly counters our traditional Christianity [..]
If he says that his super-being, the ‘over-man’, most conquer sympathy, it is not that he is to be unsympathetic but rather because sympathy—’suffering with’—is a lowering of yourself to the sufferer, a surrender to the negative. Rather must the great soul lift the sufferer to his own joy [....]
Nietzsche so often seems to talk dangerously in terms of evil; he only means that you have to make friends with these dark energies, as you do with a child or an animal before you can properly train them” (193).
(Might this have rubbed Frye the wrong way?)
Frye’s resistance to “theologising” and Christ-figures may have been based in part on a misreading of Knight that completely neglected Knight’s interest in Nietzsche, myth and archetypes.
Knight wrote, “Whenever I have seen Christian elements as part of the Shakespearian synthesis many of my readers have apparently assumed that I must be reading Shakespeare as part of Christianity. What I have been doing is *larger* than they supposed (pp. 103, 311-12, 318).”
In his chapter, “Jesus and Shakespeare” (reprinted from 1934, 69-73), Knight claimed that Shakespeare was more concerned with human love as Eros than with the love Jesus represents, but he sets it up as too much of a binary, either-or choice. Knight also demonstrates in this chapter that he assumes Shakespeare was striving not to engage in the issues of his own time (with "local" or "topical" references, as critics and scholars have sometimes claimed with varying degrees of complexity). He did not imagine that Shakespeare may have included complex and covert meanings to outsmart the censors (as many now recognize), but that Shakespeare was merely the “greatest poet” of the modern era striving to embody universal meanings in his plays. This is a serious limitation for both Knight and Frye, but typical of the years in which they wrote.
Knight's best-known books include The Wheel of Fire (1949), which went through many reprintings. His book quoted above, Shakespeare and Religion, was written in response to Roland M. Frye's criticism of his writings on Shakespeare as over-theologizing.
~~~
Here's an excerpt of a helpful review of Knight's book from 1968:
Reviewed Work: Shakespeare and Religion by G. Wilson Knight
Review by: Robert McDonnell
The Journal of Religion
Vol. 48, No. 4 (Oct., 1968), pp. 403-405 (3 pages)
Published By: The University of Chicago Press
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1201453
And here is the abstract of an article on Knight's legacy, by Laurence Raw, Başkent University, Ankara, Turkey:
Abstract
G. Wilson Knight (1897-1985) was one of the most influential Shakespearean critics of the mid-twentieth century. This piece surveys his work from 1930 until the early 1980s. Much affected by the First World War, he developed a style of criticism based on Christian principles of respect for other people and belief in an all-powerful God. Many of his most famous pieces (in THE WHEEL OF FIRE, for instance) argue for human insignificance in an indifferent universe. It is up to all of us as individuals to develop methods of coping with this world. Wilson Knight’s ideas gained particular currency during the Second World War, when Britain’s very future seemed at risk due to the threat of Nazi invasion. Although much derided for his use of transcendent language—especially by his contemporary F. R. Leavis—Wilson Knight’s ideas seem to have acquired new significance in a globalized world, where individuals fight to main their identity in a technology-driven environment.
Raw, L. “The Legacy of G. Wilson Knight”. Linguaculture, vol. 8, no. 1, June 2017, pp. 108-24, doi:10.1515/lincu-2017-0010.
https://journal.linguaculture.ro/index.php/home/article/view/95
And here, another journal article that mentions Knight, this one from 1985:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41801727 'HAMLET' WITHOUT THE PRINCE OF DENMARK: SHAKESPEARE CRITICISM 1930s-1960s
by D.P. EDMUNDS
Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory
No. 64 (May 1985), pp. 43-55 (13 pages)
Published By: Berghahn Books
Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory
~~
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. Religious 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
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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 point out how the Bible and religion may have influenced Shakespeare, his plays, and his age.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Thanks for reading!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
My current project is a book tentatively titled Hamlet’s Bible, about biblical allusions and plot echoes in Hamlet.
Below is a link to a list of some of my top posts (“greatest hits”), including a description of my book project (last item on the list):
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2019/12/top-20-hamlet-bible-posts.html
I post every week, so please visit as often as you like and consider subscribing.
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