Roland Frye's Protestant Bias (Part 7: Religious Bias in Shakespeare Scholarship)

When he was a research professor at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Roland M. Frye wrote Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine (1963),* which criticizes Shakespeare scholars like G. Wilson Knight (the subject of last week’s post) and others who, according to Frye, offered too-simplistic or unsupported religious readings of the plays (4-6, 19-42).

[* All quotes here are from my 1963 edition, published by Oxford University Press. Frye's Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine is still published through the Princeton Legacy Library.]

Frye was a Protestant theologian and Presbyterian elder. Protestant writers believed in the utter depravity of humanity due to original sin since the fall of Adam and Eve; this could be overcome by “faith alone,” not by works. Frye stresses Protestant views throughout.

Initially Frye notes that people in Shakespeare’s time who conformed outwardly may have privately held “heterodox, heretical, or… anti-Christian opinions” (4). Later he contradicts this, presenting Shakespeare’s world as religiously deterministic and compartmentalized: If Luther, Calvin, and Hooker claimed suicides are damned, then to him, there is no way Shakespeare or his audiences could have questioned religious doctrine on this point. So to Frye, Shakespeare could never have intended for Othello or Romeo and Juliet to imply any challenge to Christian doctrine on suicide (24-31).

If suicides in Othello and Romeo and Juliet elicit sympathy, audiences must have compartmentalized it as mere secular entertainment, having nothing to do with religion or doctrine. Frye quotes Luther (100) and Calvin (106) in support of the idea that daily life, including the theater, can be well lived without religion at all; strangely, and in this very indirect way, he argues that Shakespeare’s plays were viewed by Shakespeare and his audiences as mostly secular. Yet the second half of the book (113-263) explores almost exclusively religious ideas in the plays.

Catholics believed in the “merit” of good works or actions that cooperate with the grace of God, but Protestant thinkers condemned this idea. Frye claims that because Hooker and others condemned it, Shakespeare and his audiences would not have allowed any belief in the merit of good works (29). This is weak, as if claiming that becoming a Protestant nation was for England like flipping a light switch.

Like Simon A. Blackmore (in my blog two weeks ago), who resisted the idea that Hamlet at Wittenberg alludes to Luther, Frye resists the idea that Horatio’s line at Hamlet’s death, “flights of angels sing thee to thy rest” alludes to the Catholic Requiem mass.

To paraphrase Gertrude in Hamlet: Methinks Blackmore and Frye doth protest too much.

Luther said faith should be defined by “scripture alone” and stressed that there is only one Christ in history who died once and for all. Frye’s “Language for God and Feminist Language: Problems and Principles” opposes inclusive or feminine names for God. Perhaps these and the rejection of merit in part explain why Frye resists allowing “Christ-figures” like Desdemona or Cordelia?

Frye writes, “In the train of Knight’s influence, we have had and continue to have a great wave of supposedly theological analyses of Shakespeare: again and again we are informed of the discovery of some new Christ-figure or Christ-allusion in the plays, or we are advised as to the eternal destiny in a future life of Shakespeare’s stage characters, or we are introduced to some doctrine which serves as a theological structure upon which an entire plays is built.” (5)

Regarding the imagined “eternal destiny” of characters, this is simply part of our suspension of disbelief when we view or read a play. Readers and viewers who are religious and believe in an afterlife (like Frye, in fact) would be inclined by their own religious bias to think of characters in terms of afterlife and redemption. Those who are not so inclined, of course, would not, but such questions can function as analogies for more secular readings.

Frye’s resistance to “Christ figures” is problematic: The baptism rite in the Book of Common Prayer** didn’t say the baptized equal Christ, but that the old and sinful self must be “buried” so the new may be raised in them (274-5) as they “follow the example” of Christ, to be made “like unto him” (276). It was the vocation of every baptized Christian (male or female) in Shakespeare’s time to become Christ-figures, though imperfect.
[** The Book of Common Prayer (1559), ed. John E. Booty, 1976.]

See also Maurice Hunt’s Shakespeare’s Religious Allusiveness: Its Play and Tolerance (2004): Hunt (who makes no attempt to conceal his Protestant sympathies) recognizes Shakespeare’s allusions to both Protestant and Catholic themes, and that these might be at times in tension, or tolerant of, one other in the same play. This succeeds in some ways where Frye fails due to Frye’s overemphasis of Protestant ideas and sources.

See also Leah S. Marcus’s book, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and its Discontents (1988), which recognizes that the plays often suggest a multiplicity of meanings, sometimes in contention with one another (“multivalent”). Marcus recognizes that Shakespeare was writing in a time of censorship and had to be careful and creative in the ways he explored certain themes in his plays, and that multivalence is often a result. This is a richer view than Frye’s deterministic Protestant view.


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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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