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 [...] t...