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For years scholars and others have been trying to out Shakespeare as an ardent Calvinist, a crypto-Catholic, a Puritan-baiter, a secularist, or a devotee of some hybrid faith. In Religion Around Shakespeare, Peter Kaufman sets aside such speculation in favor of considering the historical and religious context surrounding his work. Employing extensive archival research, he aims to assist literary historians who probe the religious discourses, characters, and events that seem to have found places in Shakespeare’s plays and to aid general readers or playgoers developing an interest in the plays’ and playwright’s religious contexts: Catholic, conformist, and reformist. Kaufman argues that sermons preached around Shakespeare and conflicts that left their marks on literature, law, municipal chronicles, and vestry minutes enlivened the world in which (and with which) he worked and can enrich our understanding of the playwright and his plays.
A Will to Believe is a revised version of Kastan's 2008 Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures, providing a provocative account of the ways in which religion animates Shakespeare's plays.
William Shakespeare stills stands head and shoulders above any other author in the English language, a position that is unlikely ever to change. Yet it is often said that we know very little about him - and that applies as much to what he believed as it does to the rest of his biography. Or does it? In this authoritative new study, Graham Holderness takes us through the context of Shakespeare's life, times of religious and political turmoil, and looks at what we do know of Shakespeare the Anglican. But then he goes beyond that, and mines the plays themselves, not just for the words of the characters, but for the concepts, themes and language which Shakespeare was himself steeped in - the language of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. Considering particularly such plays as Richard ll, Henry V, The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, Hamlet, Othello, The Tempest and The Winter's Tale, Holderness shows how the ideas of Catholicism come up against those of Luther and Calvin; how Christianity was woven deep into Shakespeare's psyche, and how he brought it again and again to his art.
In 16th century England many loyal subjects to the crown were asked to make a terrible choice: to follow their monarch or their God. The era was one of unprecedented authoritarianism: England, it seemed, had become a police state, fearful of threats from abroad and plotters at home. This age of terror was also the era of the greatest creative genius the world has ever known: William Shakespeare. How, then, could such a remarkable man born into such violently volatile times apparently make no comment about the state of England in his work? He did. But it was hidden. Revealing Shakespeare's sophisticated version of a forgotten code developed by 16th-century dissidents, Clare Asquith shows how he was both a genius for all time and utterly a creature of his own era: a writer who was supported by dissident Catholic aristocrats, who agonized about the fate of England's spiritual and political life and who used the stage to attack and expose a regime which he believed had seized illegal control of the country he loved. Shakespeare's plays offer an acute insight into the politics and personalities of his era. And Clare Asquith's decoding of them offers answers to several mysteries surrounding Shakespeare's own life, including most notably why he stopped writing while still at the height of his powers. An utterly compelling combination of literary detection and political revelation, Shadowplay is the definitive expose of how Shakespeare lived through and understood the agonies of his time, and what he had to say about them.
Did Shakespeare write Psalm 46 of the King James Bible? In "Shakespeare and the Psalms Mystery" Jem Bloomfield investigates the literary legend that the famous playwright left his mark on the Authorized Version. He delves into the historical, textual and literary evidence, showing that the story isn't true - but that there are much more engrossing stories to be told about Shakespeare and the Bible. Whilst amassing the evidence against the Psalm 46 legend, Bloomfield asks why people want to believe it. What does this myth tell us about the connections between Shakespeare and the Bible? What does it reveal about people's views of religion and culture? In an intriguing investigation, Bloomfield ranges from the theatres of sixteenth-century England to the churches of the modern United States. On the way the reader is shown exiled Protestants becoming illegal Bible-smugglers, Edwardian schoolboys making jokes about the Book of Daniel, Lady Mary Sidney writing poetry inspired by the Psalms, Rudyard Kipling taking instructions from his own personal daemon, Lancelot Andrewes declaring that Jesus was a gardener, and other remarkable scenes from literary history. "Shakespeare and the Psalms Mystery" argues that the truth is always odder and more fascinating than any conspiracy theory. In debunking the legend of Shakespeare's hand in the King James Bible, it offers the reader a glimpse into the real mysteries which these books and their histories possess. Jem Bloomfield is Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of Nottingham. His previous publications include articles in scholarly journals on literature, theatre and religion, and the book "Words of Power: Reading Shakespeare and the Bible."
A wide-ranging yet accessible investigation into the importance of religion in Shakespeare's works, from a team of eminent international scholars.
Sharon Moughtin-Mumby considers the often unrecognised impact of different approaches to metaphor on readings of the prophtic sexual and marital metaphorical language. She outlines a practical and consciously simplified approach to metaphor, placing strong emphasis on the influence of literary context on metaphorical meaning. Drawing on this approach, she read Hosea 4-14, Jeremiah 2:1-4:4, Isaiah, Ezekiel 16 and 23, and Hosea 1-3 with fresh eyes. Her lucid new readings reveal the way in which scholarship has repeatedly stifled the prophetic metaphorical language by reading it within the 'default contexts' of 'the marriage metaphor' and 'cultic prostitution', which for so many years have been simply assumed. Readers are encouraged instead to read these diverse metaphors and similes within their distinctive literary contexts in which they have the potential to rise vividly to life, provoking the question: how are we to respond to these disquieting, powerful texts in the midst of the Hebrew Bible?
Named One of Esquire's 50 Best Biographies of All Time The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, reissued with a new afterword for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. A young man from a small provincial town moves to London in the late 1580s and, in a remarkably short time, becomes the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time. How is an achievement of this magnitude to be explained? Stephen Greenblatt brings us down to earth to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life, could have become the world’s greatest playwright.
The question of what happens after death was a vital one in Shakespeare's time, as it is today. And, like today, the answers were by no means universally agreed upon. Early moderns held surprisingly diverse beliefs about the afterlife and about how earthly life affected one's fate after death. Was death akin to a sleep where one did not wake until judgment day? Were sick bodies healed in heaven? Did sinners experience torment after death? Would an individual reunite with loved ones in the afterlife? Could the dead communicate with the world of the living? Could the living affect the state of souls after death? How should the dead be commemorated? Could the dead return to life? Was immortality possible? The wide array of possible answers to these questions across Shakespeare's work can be surprising. Exploring how particular texts and characters answer these questions, Shakespeare and the Afterlife showcases the vitality and originality of the author's language and thinking. We encounter characters with very personal visions of what awaits them after death, and these visions reveal new insights into these individuals' motivations and concerns as they navigate the world of the living. Shakespeare and the Afterlife encourages us to engage with the author's work with new insight and new curiosity. The volume connects some of the best-known speeches, characters, and conflicts to cultural debates and traditions circulating during Shakespeare's time.
Shakespeare, Lee Oser argues, is a Christian literary artist who criticizes and challenges Christians, but who does so on Christian grounds. Stressing Shakespeare’s theological sensitivity, Oser places Shakespeare’s work in the “radical middle,” the dialectical opening between the sacred and the secular where great writing can flourish. According to Oser, the radical middle was and remains a site of cultural originality, as expressed through mimetic works of art intended for a catholic (small “c”) audience. It describes the conceptual space where Shakespeare was free to engage theological questions, and where his Christian skepticism could serve his literary purposes. Oser reviews the rival cases for a Protestant Shakespeare and for a Catholic Shakespeare, but leaves the issue open, focusing, instead, on how Shakespeare exploits artistic resources that are specific to Christianity, including the classical-Christian rhetorical tradition. The scope of the book ranges from an introductory survey of the critical field as it now stands, to individual chapters on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, the Henriad, Hamlet, and King Lear. Writing with a deep sense of literary history, Oser holds that mainstream literary criticism has created a false picture of Shakespeare by secularizing him and misconstruing the nature of his art. Through careful study of the plays, Oser recovers a Shakespeare who is less vulnerable to the winds of academic and political fashion, and who is a friend to the enduring project of humanistic education. Christian Humanism in Shakespeare: A Study in Religion and Literature is both eminently readable and a work of consequence.