Why resist pigeonholing Shakespeare and his religious allegiances? (Dr. Gillian Woods)
Instead of asking which team he was on, we might wonder if, at heart, he was perhaps a kind of "free agent," free to admire certain things in a variety of traditions, while passing as an obedient Protestant?
It's true that Shakespeare was much more sympathetic in his portrayal of Catholic elements in his plays than many of his contemporaries, but this alone does not prove he was secretly Catholic.
England had flip-flopped from Catholic to Protestant under Henry VIII and his son, then back to Catholic under Mary I, then to Protestant again under Elizabeth. Maybe Shakespeare embraced certain values in Christianity, but wanted to hedge his bets, since Catholics (and others) in England were being persecuted for being too outspoken on religion. Who could predict what the next monarch of England might bring in terms of religious demands?
I've had a number of readers ponder Shakespeare's religious allegiances in response to my posts. I recently came across an excellent blog article by Dr. Gillian Woods exploring this topic, so I will link to her article and provide a few key quotes below, but while these are among my favorite quotes, I do recommend reading her entire piece (here):
"...to search for a defining religious label is to miss some of what is most interesting about religion in early modern England, and more importantly, what is most interesting about Shakespeare."
"Questions such as ‘was Shakespeare a Protestant or a Catholic?’ use terms that are too neat for the reality of post-Reformation England. The simple labels Catholic, Protestant, and Puritan paper over a complex lived experience. Even in less turbulent times, religion is a framework for belief; actual faith slips in and out of official doctrine. Religion establishes a set of principles about belief and practice, but individuals pick and choose which bits they listen to."
"Shakespeare calls on the ambiguous associations of Catholic figures, images and ideas, as a means of engaging his audience with the problems he frames. He seems to revel in the pleasures of slippery meaning. By flirting with stereotypes and sectarian expectations he makes his audience think more deeply about the difficulties of the plays and their own culture. Whatever Shakespeare’s personal religion was, the religion he put on stage was both playful and probing."
- Dr. Gillian Woods, excerpts from
"What was Shakespeare’s religion?"
OUPBlog (Oxford University Press Blog) January 23rd 2016
https://blog.oup.com/2016/01/what-was-shakespeares-religion/
Dr. Woods is Reader in Renaissance Literature and Theatre, Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing, Birkbeck College, University of London, and is the author of Shakespeare's Unreformed Fictions as well as one of the editors of the Cambridge Elements / Shakespeare and Pedagogy series.
IMAGE of blog author Gillian Woods in top collage was captured from Youtube: https://youtu.be/rllMxDc_6Q4 (fair use).
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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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Thanks for reading!
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One perspective you might find fruitful is that of Philip Melanchthon. An important intellectual through line of Elizabethan drama and particularly Shakespeare come from the theory of Philip Sidney as expressed in his Defence of Poesy. Sidney was closely associated with Hubert Languet who was in turn a disciple of Melanchthon and much of the tolerance and open- mindedness Shakespeare shows toward various religious positions is consistent with the Philipist perspective. Sidney also tried to reconcile Plato's dismissal of poets with his theory, drawing on Phaedrus to claim poets kinship with Plato's philosophers as makers who could invent narratives to exemplify Platonic truths by enabling revelatory dialectic in fictional work.
ReplyDeleteThanks, David. Excellent and helpful observations. And on the topic of influences toward tolerance and open-mindedness, perhaps also Erasmus? (Jeffrey Knapp stresses the importance of Erasmus in his book, "Shakespeare's Tribe"....)
DeleteDavid McInnis mentions Philip Melanchthon in connection with Hamlet in a Folger interview/podcast:
https://www.folger.edu/podcasts/shakespeare-unlimited/lost-plays-mcinnis/
Melanchthon seems to have been more interested in reconciliation than some reformers, but it also interests me that he took a position on Mary as being negligent (but not sinful) for the episode when the boy Jesus was accidentally left behind and later found in the temple among the elders - as you may know, I did a series of posts on that passage and what I believe is an allusion to it after "The Mousetrap" regarding Gertrude's amazement, and Hamlet comments on how remarkable a lad he is to so 'stonish his mother.
I will look into it, and am grateful for your generous comments, David.