Religion Around Shakespeare - Peter Iver Kaufman Religion Around

Скачать книгу

      

      PETER IVER KAUFMAN, General Editor

      Books in the Religion Around series examine the religious forces surrounding cultural icons. By bringing religious background into the foreground, these studies give readers a greater understanding of and appreciation for individual figures, their work, and their lasting influence.

      Library of Congress

      Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Kaufman, Peter Iver, author.

      Religion around Shakespeare / Peter Iver Kaufman.

      p. cm—(Religion around)

      Summary: “Examines the historic and religious context surrounding the work of William Shakespeare”—Provided by publisher.

      Includes bibliographical references.

      ISBN 978-0-271-06181-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

      1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Religion.

      2. England—Church history—16th century.

      3. England—Church history—17th century.

      4. Christianity and literature—England—History—16th century.

      5. Christianity and literature—England—History—17th century.

      6. Religion in literature.

      I. Title.

      PR3011.K38 2013

      822.3’3—dc23

      2013023204

      Copyright © 2013 The Pennsylvania State University

      All rights reserved

      Printed in the United States of America

      Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press,

      University Park, PA 16802–1003

      The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

      It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

      This book is printed on paper that contains 30% post-consumer waste.

      CONTENTS

       INTERLUDE

       3 Religious Authority

       4 Religious Personality

       5 Religious Community

       Conclusion

       Notes

       Bibliography

       Index

      Professors Darryl Gless, Norm Jones, and Richard Mallette read earlier drafts of the entire manuscript. Their kindness made me a more careful author; their criticism made this a better book. Parts of it profited from reviews and remarks by Kristin Bezio, Barbara Hanrahan, John Headley, Ritchie Kendall, Peter Lake, and Albert Rabil Jr. At Albion College, Samford University, the United States Military Academy at West Point, the University of Chicago, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Richmond, my student and faculty colleagues have coaxed me to be more intelligent and more intelligible.

      Jerry Brauer and Bernie McGinn, at the start, suggested that I might make a contribution as a historical theologian. Early on—but closer to the start than to the finish—Professors Stephen Greenblatt and Debora Shuger suggested that this historical theologian might usefully poach in a field leagues away from his training ground. I hope they are not terribly displeased by the results.

      To list all the other sources of encouragement and inspiration would tax the patience of two of them at the Pennsylvania State University Press, Patrick Alexander and Kathryn Yahner. Begging the pardon of all those unmentioned, I cannot proceed responsibly without also naming Joanne Ciulla, Don Forsyth, Clark and Nancy Gilpin, Al Goethals, Gill Hickman, Crystal Hoyt, Roger Kaufman, Gary McDowell, Shirley Ort, Stephanie Paulsell, Sandra Peart, Terry Price, Kerstin Soderlund, Thad Williamson, and Tom Wren. Julie Schoelles, at the press, expertly scrubbed the manuscript and gently spared its maker many embarrassments.

      This book is dedicated to Len, Miles, Rob, and Scott with gratitude for a friendship that has lasted for just under fifty years. They will be happy that this eagle has landed with less fuss than the last.

      I am not a literary historian, and what follows is not another interpretation of several of Shakespeare’s plays. For decades I have been studying the religious cultures of late Tudor and early Jacobean England, particularly what Alison Shell now calls the “fierce internal debate” that “beset” the established church, which was having problems as well “see[ing] off challenges from outside.”1 What I do in this book is give everyone interested in reading, watching, interpreting, or performing the plays a good look at the religion around Shakespeare. Circumstance is my subject.

      Historians have long been at work on the religion of Shakespeare, and a few have gotten around to the religion around him. Several relatively recent and much publicized efforts suggest that late Elizabethan and early Stuart theatergoers justifiably saw Shakespeare’s plays as coded endorsements of expatriate Catholic missionaries’ efforts to restore the realm’s old faith, which Shell characterizes as “challenges from [the] outside.” Those presentations of the playwright’s Catholicism claim to have cracked the code that concealed his religiously unreformed opinions from religiously reformed government censors while it cued Catholics in his first audiences to his abiding allegiance to what they remembered as traditional Christianity.2 What twenty-first-century playgoers may see and hear simply as Hamlet’s brooding over the skull of poor Yorick is, after some code cracking, an “encrypted tribute” to the Englishman Edmund Campion, who left the realm rather than subscribe to his queen’s religion, returned to reinforce the faith of the resident Catholics, and died a martyr.

      Some critics trust that other signs of Shakespeare’s pro-Catholic sentiments need no decryption. After all, how could playgoers fail to be impressed by the reverence for Isabella and the respect for Catholic convents radiating from his Measure for Measure? Very easily! Isabella can be off-putting, which is understandable at times, but wholly un-conventual. She tells her brother, who asked her to compromise her virtue to keep him from the scaffold, that she will “pray a thousand prayers for [his] death.” She will utter “no word to save” him (3.1.145–46). Measure is hardly a token of the playwright’s nostalgia for the higher righteousness professed by the realm’s chaste monks and nuns before monastic foundations were dissolved during

Скачать книгу