Gatekeeping and Religious Turns in Shakespeare Scholarship (Part 8: Religious Bias in Shakespeare Scholarship)

If we are to believe Roland Frye (1963) [1], what was later called “The Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Studies” [2] may actually have been more of a *return* to religion on renewed terms, after a turning away that was aided in part by Frye and a bit of Protestant gatekeeping.

Frye writes, “In the train of [G. Wilson] 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) At least at that time, Frye believed there was too much “supposedly theological analyses of Shakespeare,” marked by sloppy or ill-supported religious claims, and poorly thought out theology, often for not being Protestant enough.

Julia Reinhard Lupton (2017) has noted that Jackson and Marotti (2004) “recovered the vitality of English Catholicism in response to the commonly received narrative of progressive secularization aided by the triumph of Protestantism (Sommerville 1992)” [3].

If the recent turn to religion recovered Catholic aspects, earlier gatekeeping asserted Shakespeare's Protestantism, and Frye's gatekeeping discouraged *religious* criticism not conforming with Protestant ideas. But what sort of religious reflection on Shakespeare was not only allowed but also embraced by Protestant critics in century previous to Frye?

Protestants define themselves in part by their relation to the Bible, the "Word of God." So certainly part of that religious reflection on Shakespeare that was embraced involved the relation of the plays to the Bible, as noted eloquently and at helpful length by Hannibal Hamlin in his 2013 book, The Bible in Shakespeare.

By the time Bishop Charles Wordsworth published his book on Shakespeare’s use of the Bible in 1864 [4], the topic had already been addressed in shorter works; Wordsworth’s book went through numerous reprints. He is (too) certain of Shakespeare’s Protestantism. The book is clumsy for how it interprets biblical allusions as representative of religious ideas and then organizes material by those ideas instead of by play, act, and scene, the method later employed by Thomas Carter (1905) [5] and subsequent reference works on the same topic. Yet the book also pays close attention to phrases and commonplace sayings influenced by Bible translations and shows an influence of empiricism—which make sense, given that it was published shortly after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

Perhaps occasional religious interpretations of Shakespeare (of varying quality) persisted from the mid-1800s through at least 1963 when Frye put his foot down and declared he’d prefer secular criticism over sloppy, unsupported, and non-Protestant analyses.

Did Frye’s 1963 book, Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine, influence any trends in criticism? An interesting project for a class or university would be to research how often, and in what years, books and journal articles of Shakespeare criticism focused on analysis of religious themes, and whether the number increased or decreased after Frye’s book, as well as how often his book was cited. Such a study might use titles and abstracts as a starting point.

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[1] Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine by Roland M. Frye, Oxford University Press (1963), and more recently, Princeton Legacy Library.

[2] “The Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Studies” by Ken Jackson and Arthur F. Marotti, published in Criticism, Vol. 46, No. 1, Special Issue: Materia Media (Winter 2004), pp. 167-190 (24 pages).
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23127344
[3] “Religion and the Religious Turn” by Julia Reinhard Lupton, chapter 5 in A Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies, ed. John Lee (2017).
DOI:10.1002/9781118458747

[4] On Shakespeare's knowledge and use of the Bible, by Charles Wordsworth (1864).
https://archive.org/details/onshakespeareskn00wordrich
[5] Shakespeare and Holy Scripture, with the version he used, by Thomas Carter (1905).
https://archive.org/details/cu31924077732570

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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. 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


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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 point out how the Bible and religion may have influenced Shakespeare, his plays, and his age.
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