Shakespeare and the Theater of Religious Conviction in Early Modern England [1st ed. 2023] 3031400054, 9783031400056

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Shakespeare and the Theater of Religious Conviction in Early Modern England

Walter S H Lim

Shakespeare and the Theater of Religious Conviction in Early Modern England

Walter S H Lim

Shakespeare and the Theater of Religious Conviction in Early Modern England

Walter S H Lim Department of English Linguistics & Theatre Studies Singapore, Singapore

ISBN 978-3-031-40005-6    ISBN 978-3-031-40006-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40006-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

In loving memory of my father Stephen Lim Mah Chye (1930–2020) and my mother Helen Teo Beng Tee (1930–2022)

Acknowledgments

This book took many years to write. The journey was made easier by colleagues and friends who helped me in various ways along the way. First, I want to thank Kenneth Graham for inviting me to present an early version of my Hamlet chapter in 2014 at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Ken also helped to proofread an early draft of this chapter and offered incisive feedback. Other colleagues and friends have also generously taken time from their busy schedules to help read and comment on chapters: Susan Ang Wan-Ling, Jane Wong Yeang Chui, Carmen Nocentelli, and Heather Laura Brink-Roby. Their input has helped me navigate my way through materials with greater clarity and confidence. To my son Brandon: thank you for collating materials and helping to proofread my book; your eye for detail is a source of wonder. A big thank you to Michelle Lazar (former head of the Department of English, Linguistics & Theatre Studies) and Chitra Sankaran (former chair of Literature in the Department) for supporting my one-year sabbatical leave that made it possible for me to complete the writing of this book. I wish to take the opportunity here to thank Eileen Srebernik, editor at Palgrave Macmillan, for showing enthusiasm for this project from the start and for securing me a book contract. I am also grateful to the anonymous readers of the press for offering detailed and perceptive feedback on my manuscript, which helped tremendously with the revision process. Special thanks also go to Steven Fassioms, project coordinator for books, who has been wonderful in helping shepherd this book to publication. In writing this book, I realize I have a debt of gratitude that goes back many years—over three decades, to be precise—to that memorable vii

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

summer in 1991 when I participated in Richard Strier’s NEH Seminar, “Renaissance and Reformation in Tudor-Stuart England,” at the University of Chicago. I learnt many things from Professor Strier, and that included the significance of opinion and knowledge in The Winter’s Tale, themes which—constituting the focus of an article I wrote in 2001—continue to have relevance for the argument of this book. More recently, my former student Dr Kim Su Min drew my attention to the significance of the grief motif in Richard II, something I have also benefited from for my reading of the play in this book. The challenges of the past few years, marked by health issues in the family and the passing of my father Stephen and mother Helen, were made more manageable by the compassion and ministry of the Rev Anthony Lee and Rev Emanuel Goh of Ang Mo Kio Methodist Church in Singapore. Their spiritual support in difficult times has been a godsend, and for that I am truly grateful. To my sister—the Rev Loretta Lim—who selflessly helped to take care of mum and dad in their old age so I could focus on my family’s medical needs: THANK YOU! In this journey, it is not only the academic community to which I owe a great debt. I also owe much to the medical community. Through their kindness and medical expertise, the following physicians have helped my family in more ways than they can ever know: Dr Ling Khoon Lin, Dr Ooi Boon Swee, and Dr Liow Pei Hsiang. Thank you for walking with us. I thank SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 for granting permission to use material from the following articles of mine in this book: “Surety and Spiritual Commercialism in The Merchant of Venice,” SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 50, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 355–82; and “Knowledge and Belief in The Winter’s Tale,” SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 41, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 317–34. Finally, I am grateful to my wife Rebecca, and my sons Brandon and Joshua, for journeying with me through life’s dark moments and light. You have given me much needed support and encouragement throughout the writing of this book. Through the years, I have learnt that many things are possible through the Christ who affirms “My grace is sufficient for thee” (2 Cor. 12:9) and in the love of my family. 2023 National University of Singapore

Contents

1 Shakespeare  and the Theater of Religious Conviction in Early Modern England  1 2 Dying Unshriven and the Afterlife in Hamlet 31 3 Temptation,  Fornication, and the Fall in Measure for Measure 75 4 Biblical Faith and Radical Politics in The Winter’s Tale127 5 Grief, Gardens, and the Staging of Tragedy in Richard II177 6 Surety,  Usury, Hazard, and Spiritual Commercialism in The Merchant of Venice225 Index279

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About the Author

Walter  S.  H.  Lim  is Associate Professor of English Literature in the Department of English, Linguistics, and Theatre Studies at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of The Arts of Empire: The Poetics of Colonialism from Raleigh to Milton (1998); John Milton, Radical Politics, and Biblical Republicanism (2006); and Narratives of Diaspora: Representations of Asia in Chinese American Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). He is also the co-editor of a volume of essays, The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

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CHAPTER 1

Shakespeare and the Theater of Religious Conviction in Early Modern England

Shakespeare’s plays often prompt us to turn to the Bible and refer to the familiar materials of Christian doctrine to assess the significance of their presence in the works in which they are found. In his plays, we encounter doctrinal and theologically loaded topics such as grace, salvation, damnation, purgatory, and confession. Encountering these topics, we ask if they reveal something about Shakespeare’s own religious conviction. Other questions may follow: Is there such a thing as a reforming theater that stands in definitional contrast with the theater of Roman Catholic ritual and practice? Is the evocation of religious subject matter in Shakespeare’s plays primarily to serve a dramatic and theatrical purpose? What happens when the subject matter of the sacred is represented in the dramatic form of the play and on the stage of the public and secular playhouse? What are the ideological implications when the secular stage serves functions that are culturally associated with religion? The “religious turn” in Shakespeare studies has generated a rich body of critical works in response to these questions.1 Theater’s relationship with religion has received much critical attention: ranging from readings of Puritanism’s antitheatrical prejudice to analyses of the grounded secularity of theater and performance, from studies of the impact of the English Reformation on the form and content of the public playhouse to considerations of how theater enables “the religious [to] serve the profane” in support of the dramatist’s “aesthetic © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 W. S. H. Lim, Shakespeare and the Theater of Religious Conviction in Early Modern England, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40006-3_1

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intentions.”2 The motif that theater’s secular ethos flattens out the content of the sacred when religious references in a play enter the space of performance afforded by the public playhouse is a familiar one, foregrounded in readings that identify early modern English theater as a supremely worldly institution. A variation of this theme can be found in Stephen Greenblatt’s New Historicist readings, which argue that early modern English theater was “the beneficiary of a spiritual crisis in England sparked by the Reformation.”3 Offering an alternative means by which to experience medieval Catholicism’s symbolic forms displaced by Luther’s Protestant revolution, the stage of the public playhouse evacuates— through performance and representation—the matter of ritual central to the experience of faith and religious conviction. In Shakespearean Negotiations, Greenblatt elaborates on this theme by considering the cultural implications of Shakespeare’s borrowings of material pertaining to demonic possession and exorcism from Samuel Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603)4 in King Lear, important to which is the identification of rituals of exorcism (as practiced by Jesuit priests in particular) as theatrical and fraudulent.5 The presence of Harsnett in King Lear enables the play to question the experience of faith and religious conviction by associating belief in demonic possession and exorcism with superstition, credulity, and untruth. When demonic possession and exorcism—embraced as fact and truth by the Christian faithful— are identified as inauthentic by Harsnett and dependent on sensationalism and spectacle, desacralization of both church and scriptural authority takes place. In the case of Shakespeare, demonic possession and exorcism are associated with fiction, pointing to the emptiness of religious rituals and beliefs. This example of Shakespeare’s borrowing from Harsnett allows us to consider the cultural and ideological implications of carrying over material from religious texts to literary genres such as tragedy and comedy. When such crossings take place, the significance of the sacred can be displaced, or even undermined. Identifying structural, experiential, and thematic affinities between theater and religion can sometimes result in readings that locate a religious function—like a “sacramental purpose,”6 for example—in Shakespeare’s plays. When affinities and analogies between the structures of theater and those of religious conviction are found, these tend to be interpreted with reference to theater’s displacement and absorption of religious significance. Going to the public playhouse to watch a Shakespeare play might prompt an audience to consider if any relationship exists between art (the

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writing and staging of a play) and the experience of faith. There might be a relationship, especially if theater and performance—much like religious belief—require participatory engagement with the implausible, magical, and prodigious represented on stage. If suspension of disbelief—the willingness to believe as true what is patently impossible or incredible in a play—requires faith, then it is possible to refer to the requirement of “poetic faith”7 in responding to Shakespeare’s art, with its share of miracles and magic. We can agree that Shakespeare’s plays are not in the business of encouraging a religious point of view or denominational persuasion. That said, Christian motifs and biblical allusions appear frequently enough in Shakespeare’s plays, prompting us to ask whether their dramatic presence points to aspects, sometimes controversial, of Catholic and/or Protestant belief. With the persecution of Catholics, who were heavily burdened by state-sanctioned restrictions in Reformation England, which included outlawing the Mass, representing Catholic material in plays can be risky, especially if it raises suspicions about the playwright harboring sympathies for the old faith renounced by King Henry VIII.  And yet, early modern English plays afford ample space for representing elements associated with the Catholic faith in the construction of plot and dramatic action. In Shakespeare’s plays, familiar Catholic features include a ghost that comes from purgatory (Hamlet), the exploits of Joan la Pucelle (Joan of Arc) (1 Henry VI), building chantries to pray for Richard’s soul (Richard II), and a young woman wanting to be a nun (Measure for Measure). What are some effects of the Catholic themes and motifs deployed to lend dramatic and thematic support to plays written and performed in Reformation England? In Shakespeare’s Unreformed Fictions, Gillian Woods analyzes the dramatic, cultural, and ideological effects of Shakespeare’s staging of Catholic—or what she prefers to term “unreformed”—subject matter in his plays, contextualizing this religious content with reference to other dramatic works and theatrical productions of the period.8 For Woods, “unreformed fictions,” used in the title of her book, has the benefit of highlighting the ambiguity of Catholic content in Shakespeare’s work, a general equivocality attributable in part to the playwright’s seeming lack of concern with the requirement of precision and accuracy in alluding to Catholic beliefs and practices. Catholic or “unreformed” motifs, idioms, metaphors, and images found in Shakespeare’s plays do not translate into a propagation or proselytization of the Catholic faith. Instead, the

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potential meanings and implications of a play’s Catholic allusions are informed by literary elements such as plot and expectations of genre as well as staging directions and anticipations of audience response. Catholic material serves a dramatic/artistic function, its representation in a play and on stage (via costumes such as a friar’s robe or nun’s habit, for example) conveying ideas and impressions that can prompt varied responses such as nostalgia, ridicule, apprehension, or just plain simple enjoyment. The “unreformed” material of Shakespeare’s plays is primarily secular in focus and effect because the playwright “makes imaginative rather than confessional use of Catholic aesthetics in his drama.”9 Even as Shakespeare scholars explore the literary, cultural, and ideological implications and reach of early modern English theater’s secularizing influence, does theater’s role as society’s primary source of popular entertainment imply that any religious content represented on stage inevitably loses its edifying and instructional potential? A response to this question can be found in Shakespeare’s Tribe, in which Jeffrey Knapp, noting that “English theology and ecclesiology shaped [early modern English] drama at a fundamental level,” postulates that playwrights in Shakespeare’s England viewed the staging of plays “as a kind of ministry” based less on church affiliations and doctrinal beliefs than on the idea of community and the tribe.10 Playwrights hoped that this focus could contribute to the lessening of sectarian tensions and violence, the theater of Shakespeare and his contemporaries lending support to an inclusive vision of civic Christianity that prioritized fellowship over factionalism. Instead of developing in an increasingly secular direction, theater in Shakespeare’s England was —in the larger scheme of things—capable of performing some of the functions associated with institutionalized religion. In fact, playwrights managed to find in theater a cultural institution that not only entertained but taught, perhaps even “preached,” a more tolerant and charitable form of Christianity associated with Erasmus. Even if we do not wholly share Knapp’s enthusiasm in recuperating a vision of early modern English theater’s religious motivations and intentionality, even if we accept that this theater possessed some quite potent secularizing energies, it needs to be said that there are limits to the expansive capabilities of these energies. The fact is that meaning making in the realm of spiritual and devotional experience transpires in contexts that extend beyond the aegis of the public playhouse. Even if we are agnostic in accepting the premise that theater in Shakespeare’s England is first and foremost a secular institution, this does not mean that it necessarily

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subsumes, flattens, or empties out the matter of the sacred every time such matter is performed on stage. In this book, I propose that Shakespeare’s invocation of materials pertaining to the experience of faith in both Catholicism and the Reformation for plot development, dramatic construction, and thematic emphasis in his plays can have theological and doctrinal resonance for members of an audience. Shakespeare’s plays are open to bringing into the dramatic action doctrinal concepts, articles of faith, and devotional habits that may prompt reflection because of the way in which they are represented to generate certain effects in a performance. Take, for example, the scene of Claudius trying to make a good confession for the sin of murdering his brother King Hamlet, or another of Henry V pleading with God on the eve of Agincourt not to hold his father’s sin of deposing Richard II against him and the English army. Staging a king at prayer might prompt an audience to recall a verse from scripture or sermon recently heard in church. What are Claudius’s and Henry V’s states of mind—their conscience— when they find themselves approaching God in prayer? Both monarchs pray to God under different circumstances: Claudius suddenly assailed by guilt and a troubled conscience while Henry V finding himself burdened by deep anxieties. Being at the theater does not discourage or prevent an audience from considering the significance of an awakened conscience or effective repentance of sin for the conduct of one’s devotional life. Watching characters at prayer on stage might just be the experience that triggers one’s memory of last Sunday’s sermon on sin, guilt, and conscience. Likewise, when words like grace, sin, and perdition appear in dramatic and theatrical contexts that are non-religious in focus and emphasis, they do not necessarily lose their theological and doctrinal meanings and connotations. While one could of course argue that a religiously loaded word uttered in a play scene is minor or peripheral and does not contribute in any significant way to the play’s controlling thematic concerns, nothing is lost in putting the signifying potential of this word to the test. This book undertakes close readings of the scenes and dramatic contexts in which words associated with a society’s religious culture find themselves embedded. It is especially interested in the dramatic, thematic, and cultural effects of the presence of theologically and doctrinally resonant terms in a play whose focus appears to be secular and worldly. Shakespeare’s The Tempest offers us an opportunity to unpack some of the effects and implications of the deployment of words like sin, perdition, and indulgence in

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a play that sets up a metaphorical relationship between magic, artistic creativity, and political authority. In this play, the idea of theater cannot be extricated from the discourses of power. The Tempest is the story about an exiled duke Prospero, who lost his dukedom because supplanted by his treacherous brother with the help of the king of Naples. Living on an island with his young daughter, the native savage Caliban, and a spirit Ariel whose role is to do his master’s bidding such as conjuring up storms and generating hallucinations, Prospero is a powerful sorcerer who possesses potent knowledge of the magic arts. A metaphor for the creative powers of the dramatist, magic brings Shakespeare’s audience into the world of a play in which the self-reflexive presence of the dramatist as an all-controlling master of the production of wonder is palpable. The controlling source of the play’s supernatural manifestations, Prospero celebrates his daughter Miranda’s relationship with Ferdinand with a betrothal masque graced by Iris, Ceres, and Juno—classical goddesses—in a play that also makes space for words and ideas traceable to the Judeo-Christian tradition. So, what are some theologically and doctrinally resonant terms and concepts found in this play? First is the idea of sin. In Act 3 scene 3, Ariel identifies Alonso, Sebastian, and Antonio as “three men of sin” (3.3.53; emphasis mine) because of their involvement in political treachery: overthrowing Prospero as the duke of Milan and plotting the murder of the king of Naples. Heightening anxiety and the experience of grief, Ariel tells Alonso that the forces of nature are arrayed against him because of his “sin” in facilitating Prospero’s dispossession, resulting in the (supposed) death of his son Ferdinand by drowning and present state of mental distress. Punishment for Alonso’s political transgression will be slow and ongoing, as affirmed by Ariel’s “Ling’ring perdition—worse than any death” (3.3.77), the word perdition signifying the state of eternal damnation in Christian belief. The only way out of this punishment of interminable mental torment is “heart’s sorrow / And a clear life ensuing” (3.3.81–82), a reference to sincere repentance of sin and the transformed life that results. Shakespeare’s choice of the word “perdition” and reference to “sorrow” for sin here brings political discourse into conjunction with theological, where a political wrong can be put right by recognition of sin. If humanism recognizes the importance of education for self-­ understanding and bettering the lives of citizens, and of knowledge leading to virtuous action, the significance of its thematic presence in The

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Tempest is modulated by the evocative presence of allusions that point us in the direction of the Judeo-Christian tradition. In the epilogue to The Tempest, Prospero, the retiring magus, affirms that his “charms are all o’erthrown” (Epilogue 1) and makes an enigmatic plea to “be relieved by prayer” (Epilogue 16). He wants assurance that he has the attention of the almighty and forgiveness of his sins, even going so far as to call on the audience to participate in the “remission of the punishment for sin” through their “indulgence,”11 a word that denotes catering to a person’s whim and points to the medieval church’s penitential system that granted full or partial absolution for sin (via a writ) in return for monetary donation or payment. When granted, the church’s indulgence guarantees the absolution sought by the petitioner. Predictably, this penitential system became a corrupt means of amassing money, making it central to Luther’s critique of the medieval church in his ninety-five theses nailed to the Castle Church at Wittenberg.12 Like readers’ response to Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Retraction” of his major works and supplication for forgiveness at the end of The Canterbury Tales owing to their scandalous content and participation in worldly vanity, Shakespeare’s audience might ask if staging Prospero’s magic powers caused the playwright unease because of God’s injunction against dabbling in the occultic arts, white magic (as opposed to black) notwithstanding. This book identifies words and terms that have familiar (secular) meanings, but that are also defined in specific ways in Church history and Christian doctrine. One word that comes to mind here is “grace.” In English Renaissance literature in general, and in Shakespeare’s works in particular, grace can refer to different things and signify in different contexts. As a verb, grace can denote the granting of patronage. You can say grace—a short prayer of thanksgiving to God—before a meal. When the narrator in Donne’s “The Canonization” reproves some unnamed person who has taken an unwelcome interest in his private life by asking him (or her?) to observe instead “his Honour, or his Grace,”13 he is speaking about a judge (“his Honour”) and a person of royal or noble rank (“his Grace”). “Your grace” is, as we well know, a familiar style of address.14 In art and mythology, graces tend to come in numbers of three. We have the classical Euphrosyne (mirth), Aglaia (elegance and beauty), and Thalia (abundance), characters that Paul Peter Reubens immortalized in his oil painting “The Three Graces.” In Christianity, the three graces are faith, hope, and charity (1 Cor. 13:13), allegorized by Edmund Spenser in Book 1 of The Faerie Queene as Fidelia (“faith”), Speranza (“hope” in

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Italian), and Charissa (“charity”), the three daughters of Caelia or “heaven.” Caelia’s dwelling is the House of Holiness, a place of spiritual recuperation and healing to which Una brings the Redcrosse Knight after his near-suicidal encounter with Despair. In the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), two definitions of “grace” (among others) pertinent to the Christian faith are: (a) “a quality of God: benevolence towards humanity, bestowed freely and without regard to merit, and which manifests in the giving of blessings and granting of salvation”; and (b) “As something received from God by the individual: benevolent divine influence acting upon humanity to impart spiritual enrichment or purity, to inspire virtue, or to give strength to endure trial and resist temptation.”15 Grace is a controlling doctrinal concept in Reformation thought, anchored on Ephesians 2:8–9, which reads: “For by grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God, / Not of works, lest any man should boast himself.” Ephesians 2:8–9 lend support to the Protestant emphasis on the importance of sola gratia (grace alone) and sola fide (faith alone) to the salvation of the soul. The Lutheran Reformation clarified that the sinner is justified by grace alone through faith alone in the redemptive work of Christ on the cross. This means that salvation is independent of any good work or merit that a person may think he or she can present before the judgment throne of God. Because all human beings come into the world tainted by original sin and inheriting the spiritual depravity of Adam and Eve, they can never, on their own, initiate reconciliation and reestablish communion with God. “For by grace are ye saved through faith,” declares Ephesians 2:8, as noted above. Now, what is faith? In Hebrews 11:1, we read: “Now faith is the grounds of things which are hoped for, and the evidence of things which are not seen.” Looking at the relationship between grace, faith, and skepticism in Renaissance England, Paul Stevens finds that the “melancholy of skepticism” is not positioned against “the clarity of faith”16 as its diametrical opposite, but it can be recuperated in a positive direction through the transformation of the supremely theological concept of grace over time. Mediated by the secularizing instincts of the Enlightenment, the concept of grace does not lose its vitality as it transitions from Shakespeare’s day to Restoration England and beyond. Stevens refers to the transmutation of theological grace—as understood in Protestantism— into an idea that still carries meaning and resonance in the modern world as “the secular displacement of grace.”17 He qualifies and elaborates: “By

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grace I mean not only the completely unmerited gift of God that enables individual regeneration but the divine caritas or surplus of love that first created the world and continues to animate it. By secular displacement or secularization I mean the way sola gratia, the religious doctrine of grace alone so emphasized in Early Modern Protestantism and so ingrained in both the intellectual and everyday life of sixteenth-century English people, does not pass into oblivion but is metamorphosed into all kinds of pointedly non-religious forms of cultural surplus.”18 For his argument, Stevens invokes Jane Austen who—writing under the influence of Milton’s great epic poem Paradise Lost—facilitates the signifying power of grace in a (secular) context and register defined by the cultural politics of class. In this book, the word secular refers to a set of circumstances, the unfolding of which suggests an increasing distancing from the interpretive lenses and informing structures of religious discourse. The familiar definition of this word ties it to the processes of modernization in which a society starts, maybe slowly but surely, questioning the logic and value of religious institutions and culture’s belief in a supreme divine being. Secularity focuses on the worldly and temporal; it valorizes practicality and the faculty of reason. For the purposes of this study, secularity is not necessarily, or immediately, taken to signify skepticism or doubt about the existence of God. It can refer to social, cultural, and political developments that—without necessarily jettisoning the Christian worldview—nevertheless operate in an experiential space in which pressures exerted by the emergence of the modern cannot be blithely ignored. Economic and mercantile activities, ocean travel to distant lands, and global expansionist ambitions all offer examples of pursuits associated with participation in the conditions of modernity. Even though such activities are generally understood to be shaped by the instincts of the secular, they nevertheless rely on Christian principles and understanding for their realization. This is dramatized in The Merchant of Venice, where economic transactions and legal practices—secular activities by definition—find themselves entangled with the discourse of the Bible, specifically the typological reading that the Jew belongs to an Old Testament dispensation that has been superseded by the dispensation of grace. Shakespeare’s literary and creative imagination was very much influenced by his familiarity with the Bible and aspects of Christian doctrine. As Daniel Swift has pointed out in Shakespeare’s Common Prayers, the playwright was also deeply familiar with the Book of Common Prayer, invoking its liturgical language, expressions, and rhythm to structure action,

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dialogue, and dramatic context in his plays.19 The Book of Common Prayer is an important repository of doctrinal concepts for Shakespeare, affording him liturgical material for portraying events such as marriage and the burial of the dead, representation that inflects dramatic construction with the ritual articulations of faith. This interplay between art—the writing and staging of a play—and liturgy can imbue a play scene with the suggestiveness of liturgical drama, accentuating at the same time the literariness of the Book of Common Prayer. If, as Swift has argued, Shakespeare made significant use of this principal liturgical book of the Anglican communion for dramatic and literary purposes, he also deploys words, phrases, and concepts associated with Christian belief to dramatize interactions between characters, structure dialogue, and associate events in a play with familiar (or not so familiar) biblical stories. Identifying religious allusions in a play allows us to analyze the dramatic effects, thematic significance, and cultural meanings or ideological implications of their presence in the work in which they are found. In Shakespeare’s plays, words such as conscience, repentance, and reformation can have secular significance or religious meanings. Let’s consider for a moment the idea of conscience. Hamlet’s staging of a play to catch the “conscience” of the king suggests that (secular) theater can penetrate the soul with the same effectiveness as the Word of God. Hamlet’s playlet, which discomposes Claudius, lends support to the humanist belief in art’s astonishing power, juxtaposing this with Christianity’s understanding that it is the Holy Spirit that moves the conscience, “reprov[ing] the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment” (John 16:8). When the word “repent” appears in Othello, it can mean feeling sorry or experiencing remorse for wrongdoing, or also being contrite for the commission of a sin, such as when Othello instructs Desdemona to make a good confession before he takes her life. Likewise, when the Archbishop of Canterbury invokes the word “reformation” (1.1.34) to describe Henry V’s spectacular transformation from wayward youth to exemplary monarch in Henry V, this usage might prompt an audience to consider the possibility that Shakespeare was here presenting the heroic virtues of a Protestant king on stage. Reformation is a heavily loaded word in Elizabethan England. At about the time that Shakespeare composed and staged Henry V—sometime between January and June 159920—there was a political project that occupied the attention of Elizabeth I in which the idea of reformation was broached and debated: the effective colonization of Ireland. In A View of

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the Present State of Ireland (1596; printed in 1633)21—a controversial blueprint for the conquest of Ireland structured as a dialogue—Edmund Spenser has one of his two interlocutors proposing strategies for reforming the savage Irish who are said to be incapable of benefitting from sound law and good government. Arguing for the radical re-creation of Ireland ex nihilo—with no space afforded for a moderate course—the character Irenius deploys the word reformation in a secular and political (rather than religious) context. A View conceptualizes reformation as the unleashing of colonial violence on a hapless people and society. In March 1599, Queen Elizabeth sent Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, to Ireland to crush a rebellion led by the Earl of Tyrone. Essex left London in March feted with the trappings of a triumphal celebration, with crowds of people lining up and jostling to catch a glimpse of him.22 Shakespeare alludes to Essex’s Irish campaign in the patriotic Chorus to Act 5 of Henry V, which celebrates the king’s return from his victorious war against the French. An audience watching Shakespeare’s history play dramatizing the exploits of Henry V, “the mirror of all Christian kings” (2 Chorus 6), might recall the festive and optimistic spirit on display as “citizens” (5 Chorus 24) wished Essex success in his Irish campaign. Describing the celebratory mood of Londoners pouring out in force to welcome “their conqu’ring Caesar” (5 Chorus 28) home, the Chorus in Henry V transports its audience back to the world of “antique Rome” (5 Chorus 26), where Roman generals—having scored resounding victory in their military campaigns—return home to enjoy the honors of a triumphal march that includes displaying the spoils of war. Even as Shakespeare turns to Roman times for a model of how military successes were celebrated, he also anticipates the return of Essex—“the General of our gracious Empress” (5 Chorus 30)—who was expected to do well in bringing rebellion to heel in Ireland. Unfortunately, Essex’s Irish campaign turned out to be a disaster and he returned to England in disgrace in September 1599.23 When Shakespeare alludes to Essex’s Irish campaign in Henry V, the play assumes topical significance in pointing to the historical and political context of early modern English ambitions to achieve the conquest of Ireland. When juxtaposing Henry V with A View based on its shared Irish interest and use of the word reformation, we get a sense of how a history play about a militant (Protestant) monarch who waged war against France encourages associations to be made with Tudor England’s colonial designs in Ireland. A term which derives its significance from Luther’s historic break with the medieval church, reformation resonates in Henry V by

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bringing religious and theological considerations into entanglement with English colonial desire. If words can carry religious and theological significance, so can a distinctive phrase or idea familiarly associated with a specific book of the Bible. Early on in Antony and Cleopatra, we encounter an anachronistic allusion made to the Book of Revelation by Marc Antony, who, responding to Cleopatra’s demand to hear how much he loves her, exclaims: “Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth” (1.1.17; emphasis mine). Antony declares to Cleopatra that his love for her exceeds the boundaries of earthly existence and must be found in worlds that have not yet been discovered. An audience familiar with the last book of the Bible might recall Revelation 21:1, which reads: “And I saw a new heaven, and a new earth: for the first heaven, and the first earth were passed away, and there was no more sea” (emphasis mine). Made available by God to John of Patmos, this vision unveils God’s re-creation of the entire universe that will take place at the end of time and consummation of human history. When Shakespeare wrote Antony and Cleopatra based on material gleaned from Plutarch’s narrative of “Antony” in Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, translated into English by Thomas North in 1579, he found the Book of Revelation helpful for facilitating the creation of certain dramatic effects in the play. The apocalyptic resonance of Antony’s “new heaven, new earth” is not the only allusion to the last book of the Bible in the play. A Roman guard’s lament that “The star is fall’n” (4.15.106) to describe the dying Antony who had just dealt himself a mortal wound with his sword points us to Revelation 9:1: “And the fifth Angel blew the trumpet, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth, and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit.” Shortly before Cleopatra’s death, her attendant Charmian exclaims “O eastern star!” (5.2.299). In the Bible, falling stars are often invoked to signify upheavals so great that they affect not only the natural world as we know it but also the entire created order itself. Matthew 24:29 and Mark 13:24–25 both identify a darkening sun, lightless moon, and falling stars as signs, among others, of the end times. Falling stars also describe the fallen angels who, led by Satan, rebelled against God in heaven and were banished into hell. In Revelation 12:4, we read about a great red dragon, referring to Satan, whose “tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and cast them to the earth.” In Luke 10:18, Jesus recounts how he “saw Satan, like lightning, fall down from heaven,” a passage on which Milton based his epic

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narration of the expulsion of Satan from heaven into hell. The following verses from Isaiah 14 have also often been read as a gloss on the fall of Satan: 12 How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning? and cut down to the ground, which didst cast lots upon the nations? 13 Yet thou saidest in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, and exalt my throne above beside the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation in the sides of the North. 14 I will ascend above the height of the clouds, and I will be like the most high. 15 But thou shalt be brought down to the grave, to the side of the pit.

I am not suggesting here that Shakespeare was setting out to portray Antony in a demonic light through the Second Guard’s reference to the defeated Roman general and triumvir as a fallen star. What I am instead suggesting is that the imagery and symbolism of astronomical bodies in Revelation afforded Shakespeare literary material for accentuating the larger-than-life—even mythic—stature of Antony and Cleopatra as tragic protagonists. Unveiling the eschatological events that will transpire when the tragedy of postlapsarian history is finally subsumed into God’s divine comedy when all things are made new (Rev. 21:5), Revelation shows us in vision the final cosmic confrontation between good and evil at Armageddon (Rev. 16:16), the setting in which the kings of the earth under Satan’s leadership wage war against God and the forces of good. Because all three domains—terrestrial, infernal, and celestial—are involved in this final confrontation between God and the devil, good and evil, Revelation’s eschatological vision is cosmic in scope, its narrative making extensive use of the trope of amplification. The Book of Revelation’s vision of battling armies—both terrestrial and spiritual—conveys a sense of expansiveness that is also present in the play’s varied geographical settings as well as military reach of Octavius Caesar’s political ambition. In addition to the controlling settings of Rome and Egypt, Antony and Cleopatra also brings us to other locales such as Misenum (ancient port of Campania in Italy), Messina (in Sicily), Athens, Actium, Alexandria, and Syria. Not only do we find ourselves moving between the play’s different settings at a dizzying pace, but we also encounter numerous characters both major and minor. Fracturing the

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classical unities of time, place, and action, Anthony and Cleopatra is—as Michael Neill notes—imperious in its “survey of a twelve-year history that determined the fate of two empires and innumerable petty kingdoms—a history that sealed the demise of Roman republicanism, and decisively shifted the balance of Mediterranean power from East to West, so preparing the way (as Renaissance providential historiography saw it) for the Universal Empire of Christendom, ‘the time of universal peace’ foreshadowed by Octavius Caesar [4.6.4].”24 One observation that has been made about Shakespeare’s biblical allusions is their contribution to the building or reinforcement of dramatic effect, an assessment that attributes the use of such allusions to poetic/ artistic motivations. While such may be the case, the effects generated by scriptural allusions can be quite unexpected, going beyond the playwright’s dramatic intention or design. If the presence of the Book of Revelation in Antony and Cleopatra reinforces the sense of the vast historical—even cosmic—scope that constitutes the backdrop framing Antony and Cleopatra’s tragic love relationship, we might be reminded of the Aeneid, Virgil’s great epic that sets out to represent the inexhaustible and boundless expanse of the Roman empire through tropes of amplification. Virgil’s Aeneid analogizes the workings of the Roman empire with the operations of the natural world and realm of the gods, rhetorically bringing into conjunction the orders of cosmos and imperium.25 For Antony and Cleopatra’s Jacobean audience, the character of Octavius, Antony’s nemesis, might have reminded them of their own monarch James I, who saw himself as Britain’s Caesar Augustus and symbolized his rule as an Augustan one. If triumphal architecture and lavish pageantry glorified the monarch and celebrated royalty by linking them to the classical past, they also pointed to London’s significance as an emerging world city with the potential to become a powerful maritime center. Allusions to the Bible in Shakespeare’s plays can sometimes be inconspicuous, or even unfamiliar to many people in an audience. Most people would be familiar with the story of Adam and Eve; in comparison, Jephthah in the Old Testament Book of Judges is much less familiar. When Hamlet addresses Polonius as Jephthah (2.2.385, 393), he invokes the name of a judge in pre-monarchical Israel whose daughter was sacrificed to God because of a rash and foolish vow he made. In this story, Jephthah supplicated Yahweh for victory against his enemies the Ammonites, in exchange for which he would sacrifice to God the first living thing he encountered after his return from battle. To Jephthah’s horror, his

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daughter—an only child—greeted him at his return and became the offering promised to God. Gendered readings have noted the patriarchal strain in this narrative, reinforced by the daughter’s namelessness and paternal authority’s prerogative to take her life when he should instead be protecting her. A young woman lost her life because of her father’s poor judgment, brought on by his reckless determination to get what he wanted—to be the leader of Gilead—never mind the cost. In contrast to Jephthah’s nameless daughter is Isaac, Abraham’s son, whom Yahweh spared from being sacrificed to him. Isaac was instead blessed as one of the great patriarchs of Israel. Polonius does not seem to be familiar with the ballad of Jephthah invoked by Hamlet to disparage his character as a father who is not doing right by his daughter. However, if we propose that Polonius knows the story of Jephthah from Judges 11, he certainly hides it well from Hamlet, perhaps to deflect the insults aimed at him by the prince. For Hamlet, Polonius is no different from a pimp (signified by the word “fishmonger” [2.2.175]) in the way he uses Ophelia for his own political advantage: to enhance his position as the palace’s loyal counsellor who can always be trusted and relied on by Claudius. With information on the prince secured through Ophelia as “bait,” Polonius hopes to ingratiate himself with the king. Hamlet’s allusion to Judges 11 underscores the point that, like Jephthah, Polonius is an irresponsible father who lacks wisdom in his treatment of his daughter. In Measure for Measure, lines uttered by a character in a conversation have a familiar ring because their subject matter seems to allude to material encountered somewhere in the Bible. I am thinking here of Duke Vincentio’s conversation with the provost of the prison in which both Juliet and Claudio are incarcerated. In this scene, the duke introduces himself to the provost by informing him that he has “come to visit the afflicted spirits / Here in the prison” (2.3.4–5), pointing an alert audience to the cryptic reference in 1 Peter 3:18–19: For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, and was put to death concerning the flesh, but was quickened by the spirit. / By the which he also went, and preached unto the spirits that are in prison.

This allusion points us to a book in the New Testament that Shakespeare was reading and familiar with. In terms of dramatic and thematic interest,

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the duke’s evocation of Peter’s claim that Jesus (in the words of the Apostles’ Creed) “descended into hell” (descendit ad inferos) prompts us to ask why this penitentiary in Vienna comes to be associated with the underworld or Hades that the crucified Christ is believed to have visited between his death on Good Friday and the resurrection on Easter Sunday.26 Does this appropriation of 1 Peter 3:18–19 imply hubris on the part of the duke in imagining himself to be Christ-like, ministering to the souls of the condemned? If the duke’s brief conversation with the provost is meant, at some level, to impress the thematic point that his role in the play entails bringing secular categories (ducal authority) into conjunction with sacred ones (pastoral vocation), it also makes space for considering the implications of the strategies deployed by the disguised duke in his prison ministry. Settings and placenames in Shakespeare’s plays can also resonate with scriptural significance. The Comedy of Errors offers a good example of this in the play’s use of the setting of Ephesus, which directs an audience toward the beginnings of the early church and of Paul’s missionary journeys narrated in the New Testament. A lucrative commercial center situated at one of the busiest trade routes in the Roman world, Ephesus is an apt setting for a farcical comedy in which characters cross paths through implausible coincidences complicated by mistaken identities. But this ancient port city is also central to the Apostle Paul’s missionary activities. Paul’s epistle addressed to the Christians in Ephesus is distinctive for its references to warfare fought between the faithful and powers of darkness in the spiritual world. When characters encounter the strange and inexplicable in Ephesus, an experience engendered by two sets of identical twins creating much confusion in social interactions, they respond by thinking in terms of magic and witchcraft. Shakespeare’s characters often evoke magic and witchcraft to describe experiences of bewilderment and disorientation. Because there are good reasons (such as mistaken identities) for this bewilderment, clarified by the end of the play, evocations of spiritual experience are not meant to affirm Shakespeare’s personal belief in evil supernaturalism. When exorcists appear in Shakespeare’s comedies, they can generate humor (such as Dr Pinch in Comedy of Errors who treats people demonically possessed by tying them up in dark rooms) or nervous laughter, such as when Feste, disguised as Sir Topas the curate, pretends to cast out demons from Malvolio held in a dark room in Twelfth Night. In King Lear, Edgar disguises himself as a mad and demon-possessed vagrant, a dramatization that retains the association between exorcism, theater, and fraud made by

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Harsnett in A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures,27 an important source text for this tragedy. This association is also suggested in the so-­ called “suicide scene” in which the disguised Edgar, like an exorcizing priest, helps his blind father surmount his suicidal despair by manipulating his sense of reality and illusion. In this book, I analyze Shakespeare’s religious allusions with reference to the (con)text of the play or scene in which they appear, assessing the effects of their presence on Shakespeare’s specific dramatic construction and development of themes. In these readings, I find opportunity to compare Shakespeare with English Renaissance poets committed to the writing of devotional literature: John Donne and George Herbert, among others, come to mind. When we engage with Shakespeare’s dramatization of theological and doctrinal subject matter by relating it to material found in the rich corpus of devotional literature available in Renaissance England, we stress that the significance of religious allusions in Shakespeare’s plays is defined not so much by interpretive boundaries placed on these allusions by literary form and the staging of a play as by their relationship to larger early modern English society where faith and religious conviction permeate all aspects of life. I have given some examples above of how paying attention to theologically significant words and stories from the Bible can help us analyze a play’s representation of devotional and spiritual themes. The presence of words and concepts deeply associated with the Christian faith (such as grace, sin, and perdition, for example) as well as scriptural narratives and biblical characters (such as Adam and Eve, or Jephthah, for example) serves a literary purpose and invites reflection on the place of religion in contemporary culture and society. I said that Shakespeare’s use of religious content in his plays can benefit from comparison with other poets based on shared devotional and spiritual interests. Comparing Shakespeare’s work with the period’s devotional lyric shows us how dramatic representation and literary production can reveal much about an individual dramatist’s or poet’s creative endeavor as well as the sociocultural backdrop enabling such creativity. While this book highlights some of Shakespeare’s allusions to the Bible, Christian doctrine, and theological concepts for dramatic effect and thematic development in his plays, it also moves beyond theater’s signifying possibilities by considering the representation of religious experience in the work of not only other poets but also political thinkers, clergymen, exegetes, and advocates of English overseas travel. In addition to

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devotional and religious literature, there are important extraliterary genres—such as the sermon, political treatise, travel narrative, and royal proclamation—that should also be accounted for in our critical analysis, given that, often enough, they invoke biblical material and Christian doctrine for their expression, argument, and elucidation. The sermon is a serious genre that, delivered or thundered from the pulpit, may offer guides on biblical interpretation, encourage exhortations to holy living, and dispense pastoral counsel. In the nimble mind of a preacher like John Donne, ocean-going vessels can function as a metaphor for some of the ways by which God accomplishes his purposes in our world. When Donne invokes the motif and metaphor of ships to describe God’s facilitation of the evangelical mandate, his representational emphasis also calls to mind depictions of ocean travel we encounter in English Renaissance literature, such as The Merchant of Venice. In The Merchant, Shakespeare’s anxieties about the dangers of ocean travel are balanced by the advantages that can accrue to investment ventures, the motif of ships/ argosies bringing the functioning of economic activities into conjunction with spiritual pursuits. In Shakespeare’s play, the significance of overseas (ad)venturing goes beyond dramatic narrative and plot to Renaissance England’s transoceanic projects and nascent global ambitions. If Christian culture and biblical principles lend important support to the enablement of such projects and ambitions—informing conceptions of practices such as usury and surety—their material success affirms in turn the leadings of divine providence. Biblical understanding and the workings of society mutually reinforce one another. When we identify areas of complementarity and divergence in different writers’ and thinkers’ handling of the matter of the sacred, we get a better picture of the playwright’s attitude toward the Bible as God’s holy Word, especially as it serves as a repository of literary materials for his plays. When religious motifs in Shakespeare’s plays are found elsewhere in Renaissance England’s cultural production and political writings, the emphases in these other works invite comparative analysis that helps bring focus to the meanings and implications of Shakespearean representations. Shakespeare’s dramatization of religious content puts him in dialogue with other representations of religious experience in Tudor and Stuart England. This book analyzes the significance of religious motifs and biblical allusions in five plays of Shakespeare: Hamlet, Measure for Measure, The Winter’s Tale, Richard II, and The Merchant of Venice. These plays represent different genres in Shakespeare’s corpus: tragedy, problem play,

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romance, English history, and comedy. Each chapter of the book focuses on a specific play, analyzing through close reading the significance of Shakespeare’s invocation of theological and doctrinal material to construct the play’s dramatic narrative and ground its thematic concerns. Christian motifs in Shakespeare’s plays may suggest, if not tell us, something about Shakespeare’s personal views on the nature and experience of religious faith. Even though Shakespeare is a playwright who is generally opaque about his own relationship to Christianity as a faith system, it is not the case that we are completely unable to discern elements in plays that suggest a personal interest in aspects of spiritual belief such as salvation and damnation. Hamlet gives us a tragedy in which sustained focus on the importance of proper confession of sin and shriving in preparation for a good death strikes the audience as thematic subject matter that suggests Shakespeare’s own anxieties about the doctrine of eternal damnation. Shakespeare’s thematization of death and the afterlife in Hamlet differs from his dramatization of the protagonists’ death in the other great tragedies. Macduff kills Macbeth for Scotland’s restoration to political health, a conclusion ironically enabled by the equivocations of three witches at the center of the play’s evil supernaturalism. King Lear’s pre-­ Christian society belongs to a nihilistic universe in which man’s desire to find solace and meaning in earthly and otherworldly justice only encounters a void. Othello commits suicide for murdering his wife who is innocent of adultery in the context of a Christian society where race prejudice lurks as a destructive force. In the plays discussed in this book, the presence of religious motifs and doctrinal concepts does not necessarily lead to the building of a coherent or consistent vision of faith. If the dramatic and thematic content of a play happens to draw the audience’s attention to familiar Catholic-Protestant tensions in theological and doctrinal matters, the same material in another play can lead to an interrogation of the experience of religious conviction and even encourage skepticism toward things spiritual. Biblical materials can also be deployed in a play to question the truth claims of the Christian faith while at the same time broaching the subject of prophetic authority and the political implications of speaking truth to power. Biblical subject matter can serve different thematic purposes and generate a variety of dramatic effects. Biblical material and theological content generate meanings in different registers, including the personal space of one’s belief in God, the realm of political authority and power, and the sphere of a nation’s political aspirations and imperial ambitions. Often

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enough, the significance of doctrinal subject matter—such as Jesus’s atoning sacrifice on the cross—is not only found in one’s personal experience of faith and religious conviction but extends to shape political expressions and polemical endeavors as well. When Shakespeare portrays Richard II deploying elements of the Passion narrative to support his effort to construct a coherent identity under the conditions of political defeat, his depiction of the king’s harnessing of biblical material to obtain a specific emotional response from the audience has significance not only for shaping the play’s dramatic narrative but also for providing material for composing polemical works at a time of political upheaval. When reading Eikon Basilike, or the King’s Book, Charles I’s invocation of the suffering Christ to represent his experience of political violence perpetrated by Puritans and Parliamentarians in Revolutionary England might remind us of Richard II’s imitation of Christ in Shakespeare’s history play. Biblical narratives can have both theological and political import at the same time. Doctrinal and theological understanding can influence political conceptions even as political understanding can inform the reading and interpretation of biblical texts. The first play discussed in this study, Hamlet, the first play discussed in this study, is a revenge tragedy thematically engaged with the doctrinal topics of sin, salvation, and the afterlife in the Christian faith. This tragedy focuses on the experience of death and dying not in general but specific terms, meditating on what must transpire in the moments preceding death so that the soul can be assured of immortal bliss instead of perdition. This focus is set up early in the play through the spectral return of the dead king unfolding to Hamlet the conditions of an afterlife resembling the Catholic conception of purgatory. Central to the Ghost’s narrative is the theological point that he was deprived of the opportunity to make a good confession before he died, a deprivation that carried consequences for the afterlife. Pondering the implications of what it means to die unshriven, Shakespeare evokes the related topics of grace, confession, and life after death. In so doing, he shows alertness to shared and divergent understandings of spectral visitations, prayer, and confession found in both Reformation thought and Catholicism. Where Hamlet registers interest in the theological implications of dying without making a good confession and receiving proper shriving, Measure for Measure dramatizes the experience of a character awaiting execution in death row for fornication, a crime that refers not only to adultery and extramarital affairs but also to premarital sex. Measure for Measure

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represents the workings of political authority, considering the significance of the themes of chastity, judgment, and forgiveness in not only a religious but also secular and political context. When Viennese law metes out the death penalty for premarital sex, Shakespeare’s audience is asked to consider habits of thought associated with fundamentalist Puritanism. Where Hamlet shows us Shakespeare’s engagement with the Christian tradition’s views on death and the afterlife, Measure for Measure finds opportunity to interrogate some of the church’s teachings on how to live the moral life in a postlapsarian world. Chapter 3 focuses on Measure for Measure as a play that represents sin not as an abstract doctrinal concept but as a central aspect of what it means to be human. To be human is not only to embrace temptation with gusto but also to exist in the margins of civilized society giving sex for money, contracting venereal disease, and struggling to make a living. In the suburbs of Vienna, sin is perceived as a fact of human nature and as a condition of social life in the shadowland inhabited by the lower class. Sin is not so much about fallen humanity’s need for spiritual recuperation and renovation as it is about the struggle to make ends meet. When lower-class characters embrace sin as a fact of life divorced from the rarefied discourses of theology, they question not only official culture’s understanding of crime and punishment but also familiar theological ideas of transgression and redemption. Measure for Measure deals with religiously resonant topics—law and mercy, the virtue of chastity, Puritan spirituality—that point an audience in the direction of scriptural and church teachings that also shape the formulation of laws in early modern England. When we encounter topics of theological and doctrinal significance in Shakespeare, we recall their presence in other familiar literary works of the period, genres of spiritual edification, and even judicial proscriptions. Shakespeare’s representation of religious themes and Christian doctrine often carries unexpected social, cultural, and political meanings and implications for the playwright’s Elizabethan and Jacobean audience. Sometimes a plot or storyline with a patently secular focus may find itself accreting political meanings through the incorporation of topical and biblical allusions. In The Winter’s Tale, which I discuss in Chap. 4, a story of suspicion and distrust on the part of a monarch concerning his wife’s fidelity in marriage becomes a drama that also offers a portrait of political tyranny and depicts a subject’s response to unjust rule and the arbitrary exercise of power. Here tyrannical King Leontes’s use of the word

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“prerogative” to describe his authority as both monarch and judge alludes to King James I’s belief in the supremacy of the king’s royal prerogative when engaging in debate with Parliament, giving the play a topical resonance. If Shakespeare’s familiarity with James I’s exercise of absolutist authority affords him dramatic language to represent Leontes’s fallacious belief that his wife is an adulteress, Old Testament narratives of prophetic authority enable him to frame the play’s dramatization of subjects who find it morally necessary to speak out against injustice even if at the risk of losing one’s life. Even if inadvertent, allusions to biblical accounts of God’s command to the prophets of Israel to stand up to and pronounce judgment on wayward and evil rulers can gesture in the direction of radical political thought that argues for the right of a subject to resist the rule of a tyrant. The Winter’s Tale also invites its audience to question what the experience of faith and religious conviction is all about. It alludes to stories of the Bible not necessarily to reinforce the experience of faith but to destabilize popular representations of the nature of religious conviction. The coming to life of Hermione’s statue toward the end of the play suggests a miracle, evoking the discourse of wonder. The dramatic representation of a miracle can affirm a person’s conviction that events which violate the laws of the natural world are indeed possible, endorsed by the Bible; or it can create a self-reflexive distance from which one finds oneself questioning not only the status of miracles but also the experience of faith, belief, and religious conviction. The Winter’s Tale nudges its audience to consider the relationship between fictional representation and miraculous event, and how watching theatrical performance brings us surprisingly close to the discourse of faith and the importance it places on the existence of the supernatural. Interrogating the logic of religious experience goes hand in hand with a consideration of the Bible’s influence on the development of radical political thought in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Biblical narratives can lend support to controversial political and ideological positions in Shakespeare’s plays. Chapter 5 considers Shakespeare’s evocation of the familiar biblical narrative of Christ’s Passion to frame and contextualize a king’s traumatic experience of political defeat in Richard II, inviting his audience to consider whether this monarch’s fashioning of identity as a Christ figure is convincing, and, if not, why and to what dramatic effect. When we encounter Richard II likening himself to the suffering Christ, we recall different devotional poets’ representation of the momentous significance of Good Friday for their own experience of faith.

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Donne, Herbert, and the proto-feminist Aemilia Lanyer are some poets who have dealt with the heavy matter of Christ’s crucifixion in their writings, making available a cultural context and frame of reference for analyzing the dramatic and thematic significance of King Richard’s “Christian self-fashioning.”28 An audience familiar with Richard II’s attempts to liken the pain of his political downfall to Christ’s suffering might be surprised to find a similar thematic emphasis controlling Charles I’s representation in Eikon Basilike of his experience of the English Civil War that brought him to the scaffold. In Richard II, the tragic protagonist’s performance of identity in the deposition scene offers a model of political theater that can be deployed for polemical ends in the pamphleteering wars of Revolutionary England. While the Last Supper, Gethsemane, Pilate’s judgment hall, and Jesus’s crucifixion—the controlling narrative elements of the Passion—are usually associated with genres such as devotional literature and Renaissance art, they are also present in political works written to support diametrically opposing ideological positions such as royalism and republicanism in the period of the Puritan Revolution and English Civil War. This book is also interested in the ways in which words and concepts can signify concurrently in both sacred and secular registers. One thinks here of the controlling motif of surety in The Merchant of Venice, which I analyze in Chap. 6 as a concept that points to Christ as fallen humankind’s divine surety even as it refers to the legal practice wherein a person assumes direct liability for another party’s obligation. When we consider the cultural, legal, and theological meanings and significance of surety in The Merchant, we encounter a dramatic environment in which biblical ideas are invoked to support the development of Renaissance England’s economic practices. In this play, surety’s significance is augmented by the idea of overseas (ad)venturing and ocean travel, an idea that again brings sacred subject matter into entanglement with secular by pointing to the importance of ocean-going vessels in spreading the good news of the gospel and invigorating England’s mercantile activities. In this study, I consider the significance and interpretive implications of Shakespeare’s use of religious allusions in his plays not only by turning to general conceptions and popular understanding of these allusions but also by looking at how poets, clergymen, and political theorists in Elizabethan and Jacobean England defined them. Meaning making in religious faith is enabled not only by the church—both Protestant and Catholic—but also by devotional literature that represents an individual’s spiritual life through

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aesthetic forms that support creative expression. The work of religious poets—John Donne, George Herbert, Thomas Traherne, and Henry Vaughan among them—affords the audience a literary backdrop against which to position and decipher the playwright’s representation of devotional subject matter in his works. By considering the ways in which religious poets represent aspects of Christian doctrine, biblical stories, and spiritual motifs also found in Shakespeare’s plays, one finds opportunity to analyze the genres and literary techniques deployed in the devotional lyric to capture the individual’s as well as a society’s experience of faith and religious conviction. The effects of Shakespeare’s representation of religious subject matter in his plays are shaped by the evocation of doctrinal motifs and theological material at strategic moments in the plot and dramatic narrative. Even as religious allusions in Shakespeare’s plays help to construct dramatic diction for generating specific literary and staging effects, they also make space for an audience to consider the importance of religion in the life of society. Shakespeare’s plays tell us that the matter of the sacred and activities of the secular are not mutually exclusive, often supporting each other inadvertently as well as strategically. Biblical allusions and religious themes/motifs bring sacred contexts into conjunction with secular ones to generate a range of dramatic effects, sometimes rather unexpected ones. In discussing the relationship between the matter of the sacred and material associated with the energies of secularization in early modern England, we look at how cultural understanding and political institutions supported by biblical conceptions undergo adjustments and change over the course of the seventeenth century even as social practices increasingly loosen their reliance on religious moorings. Take, for instance, the phenomenon of ocean travel, an activity necessary for the faithful to spread the good news of the gospel to lands, peoples, and cultures still untouched by Christianity. If ocean travel is indispensable for the task of fulfilling Christ’s proselytizing mandate, it also supports the vitalization of mercantile and merchandizing activities that bring England into contact with foreign lands and the experience of cross-cultural interactions. Another example is the practice of surety, where a person agrees to assume responsibility for another party’s default on financial obligations. While surety carries a theological meaning, centered on Christ as the lamb of God sacrificed for the salvation of fallen humanity, it also serves an important function in the economic sphere where legally binding agreements are regularly made. It is not difficult to see that when a concept, practice, or activity

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defines its significance by referring to both a religious and an economic/ legal context, the expansion of a nation’s economic activities has the effect of reducing—albeit gradually—the influence of religion exerted over English social, cultural, and political life. The religious content in Shakespeare’s plays derives its significance from a social, cultural, and political environment fraught with tensions tied to Henry VIII’s break with the Catholic Church and the establishment of the English Reformation, disagreements about the forms and content of church worship, disagreements about Christian doctrine, and questions about the (inviolable) concept of divine-right kingship. It seeks to identify interest in aspects of religious belief shared between Shakespeare and other writers of the period who may be poets, pamphleteers, political exiles, ministers of the gospel, or even the monarch herself/himself. In Shakespeare’s plays, the matter of religion may be pertinent to an individual’s experience of faith, which includes the workings of the conscience, not dying unshriven, and trusting in divine providence. Or it may underscore the inextricable relationship between religious conviction, the exercise of monarchical authority, and debates on political models (monarchism versus republicanism, for example) for governing the realm. While the content of faith in Shakespeare’s plays may gesture in the direction of doctrinal (dis)agreements or evoke the politics of church/denominational affiliations, it can also affect constructions of meaning in a play’s dramatization of the workings of political power. Shakespeare’s plays tell us that biblical understanding played an important role in shaping individual belief, political philosophy, operations of law, and the arts of government in Tudor and Stuart England. Finally, this book considers the implications of the incorporation of biblical and religious themes in significant plays of Shakespeare that engage not only with the experience of faith and religious conviction but also with social, cultural, and political developments. The religious topics identified for analysis foreground the complex changes wrought on society by the English Reformation, developments alluded to and dramatized—sometimes provocatively—in Shakespeare’s plays. Religious concepts in these plays are marked by their variety and ambiguity, informed by some of early modern England’s most important questions: Are the truth claims of religious faith and experience verifiable? Is divine-right kingship inviolable? Does Christianity promise riches for the godly life? In addition to close textual analysis of the playwright’s attitudes toward the Bible and religion, I refer to a range of literary, historical, and religious material to frame my

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consideration of larger issues taken up by Shakespeare in his dramatic handling of religious themes. The plays studied in this book afford fruitful ground for looking at the ways in which the interplay of sacred and secular perspectives shaped early modern English society, culture, and politics.

Notes 1. Recent critical works considering the “religious turn” in Shakespeare studies and related representations of religion in early modern English literature and culture include Valentin Gerlier, Shakespeare and the Grace of Words: Language, Theology, Metaphysics (New York: Routledge, 2022); Anthony D. Baker, Shakespeare, Theology, and the Unstaged God (Abingdon, UK & New York: Routledge, 2020); Hannibal Hamlin, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Katherine Steele Brokaw and Jason Zysk, eds., Sacred and Secular Transactions in the Age of Shakespeare: Rethinking the Early Modern (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2019); Thomas Fulton and Kristen Poole, eds., The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage: Cultures of Interpretation in Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Matthew J.  Smith, Performance and Religion in Early Modern England: Stage, Cathedral, Wagon, Street (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018); Andrew Hiscock and Helen Wilcox, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern English Literature and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Will Stockton, Members of His Body: Shakespeare, Paul, and a Theology of Nonmonogamy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017); David K. Anderson, Martyrs and Players in Early Modern England: Tragedy, Religion and Violence on Stage (New York: Routledge, 2016); Jane Hwang Degenhardt and Elizabeth Williamson, eds., Religion and Drama in Early Modern England: The Performance of Religion on the Renaissance Stage (New York: Routledge, 2016); David Loewenstein and Michael Witmore, eds., Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Richard C. McCoy, Faith in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Gillian Woods, Shakespeare’s Unreformed Fictions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Hannibal Hamlin, The Bible in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Brian Cummings, Mortal Thoughts: Religion, Secularity, and Identity in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Peter Iver Kaufman, Religion Around Shakespeare (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2013); Daniel Swift, Shakespeare’s Common Prayers: The Book of Common Prayer and the Elizabethan Age (Oxford: Oxford

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University Press, 2013); Adrian Streete, ed., Early Modern Drama and the Bible: Contexts and Readings, 1570–1625 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Ken Jackson and Arthur F. Marotti, eds., Shakespeare and Religion: Early Modern and Postmodern Perspectives (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2011); Kenneth J.  E. Graham and Philip D.  Collington, eds., Shakespeare and Religious Change (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Paul Yachnin and Patricia Badir, eds., Shakespeare and the Cultures of Performance (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2008); John D. Cox, Seeming Knowledge: Shakespeare and Skeptical Faith (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007); Kristen Poole, Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Nonconformity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Beatrice Groves, Texts and Traditions: Religion in Shakespeare 1592–1604 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); JeanChristophe Mayer, Shakespeare’s Hybrid Faith: History, Religion and the Stage (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Beatrice Batson, ed., Shakespeare’s Christianity: The Protestant and Catholic Poetics of “Julius Caesar,” “Macbeth,” and “Hamlet” (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006); Ewan Fernie, ed., Spiritual Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 2005); Dennis Taylor and David N. Beauregard, eds., Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003); Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Steven Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). 2. Anthony B.  Dawson, “Shakespeare and Secular Performance,” in Shakespeare and the Cultures of Performance, ed. Paul Yachnin and Patricia Badir (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 83–97, here 91. 3. Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe, 7. 4. Samuel Harsnett, A declaration of egregious popish impostures to with-draw the harts of her Majesties subjects from their allegeance, and from the truth of Christian religion professed in England, under the pretence of casting out devils (London: James Roberts, 1603). 5. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), 94–128. 6. Cited in Richard McCoy, “Awakening Faith in The Winter’s Tale,” in Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion, ed. David Loewenstein and Michael Witmore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 225. 7. See McCoy, Faith in Shakespeare.

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8. Woods, Shakespeare’s Unreformed Fictions. 9. Ibid., 17. 10. Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe, 9. 11. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 205. Orgel glosses Shakespeare’s “mercy” as “a synecdoche for God” and “indulgence” as “playing on the technical sense of remission of the punishment for sin” in notes 336 and 338. 12. For examples of Protestant responses to Catholic abuse of the system of indulgences, see Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), esp. 10–46. 13. John Donne, The Major Works, Including “Songs and Sonnets” and Sermons, ed. John Carey (1990; reis., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 95–96. 14. R.  Chris Hassell and R.  Chris Hassell Jr. note five basic meanings and senses of Shakespeare’s use of the word “grace” in Shakespeare’s Religious Language: A Dictionary (New York & London: Continuum, 2007), 146–50. 15. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “grace, n.,” accessed September 7, 2021, https://www-­oed-­com.libproxy1.nus.edu.sg/view/Entry/80373?rskey= qEfBq2&result=1#eid. 16. Paul Stevens, “Raphael’s Condescension: Paradise Lost, Jane Austen, and the Secular Displacement of Grace,” in Milton in the Long Restoration, ed. Blair Hoxby and Ann Baynes Coiro (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 531–54, here 533. 17. Ibid., 532. 18. Ibid. 19. See Swift, Shakespeare’s Common Prayers, and also “The Drama of the Liturgy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Religion, ed. Hannibal Hamlin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 52–66. 20. William Shakespeare, Henry V, ed. Gary Taylor (1982; reis., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 5. 21. Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. W. L. Renwick (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). 22. Shakespeare, Henry V, 5. 23. Ibid. 24. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Anthony and Cleopatra, ed. Michael Neill (1994; reis., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 1. 25. For an excellent study of Virgil’s epic rendition of the immense expanse of the Roman empire through the rhetorical use of hyperbole, see Philip R.  Hardie, Virgil’s “Aeneid”: Cosmos and Imperium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), esp. 241–92. 26. For a volume of multidisciplinary perspectives on the theological significance of the line, “He descended into hell,” affirmed in the Apostles’

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Creed, see Marcel Sarot and Archibald L. H. M. van Wieringen, eds., The Apostles Creed: “He Descended into Hell” (Leiden, NL: Brill, 2018). 27. Harsnett, A declaration of egregious popish impostures to with-­draw the harts of her Majesties subjects from their allegeance, and from the truth of Christian religion professed in England, under the pretence of casting out devils (London: James Roberts, 1603). 28. Debora Shuger, “‘In a Christian Climate’: Religion and Honor in Richard II,” in Shakespeare and Religious Change, ed. Kenneth J. E. Graham and Philip D.  Collington (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 37–59, here 46.

CHAPTER 2

Dying Unshriven and the Afterlife in Hamlet

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in our philosophy. (Hamlet) There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will. (Hamlet)

Hamlet stands out among Shakespeare’s great tragedies for its interest in the topic of salvation that has powerful relevance for the Christian soul. In Hamlet, the dramatic representation of death facilitates Shakespeare’s meditation on theological and philosophical conceptions of the relationship between mortality and immortality. The deaths of King Hamlet and Ophelia, together with Hamlet’s decision not to take revenge when Claudius is found at prayer, are all dramatized with reference to the thematic concern of the sinning soul in relation to the doctrine of grace and theology of salvation. Hamlet brings into play Catholic-Protestant conceptions of the relationship between salvation and damnation. The Christian soul desires eternal bliss in heaven and will do its utmost best to escape damnation in the eternal fires of hell. While Hamlet is not a homiletic play about how not to be damned to hell, it affords opportunities for an audience to think about the netherworld, the infernal regions from which King Hamlet fortunately escaped after he died and where the avenging Hamlet seeks to © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 W. S. H. Lim, Shakespeare and the Theater of Religious Conviction in Early Modern England, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40006-3_2

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send his uncle Claudius for killing his father. Hamlet’s preoccupation with graveyards and death points not only to Hamlet’s macabre temper and susceptibility to dark imaginings but also to the theological relationship between the inescapable conditions of mortality and religion’s intimations of immortality. If Shakespeare evokes Catholic-Protestant doctrinal views of the afterlife, he also addresses philosophical conceptions of life and death in relation to meaning making associated with the classical tradition.1 Hamlet is distinctive in evoking doctrinal ideas from the Judeo-Christian tradition for mapping onto classical values and philosophy, raising questions about the effect of this dramatic and narrative feature. In Hamlet, themes and motifs grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition share dramatic space with the classical tradition, destabilizing some of the comforts and meanings conventionally afforded by the institutions of faith and religious conviction. Grounding the thematic center of the tragedy, a ghost’s command to take revenge for his murder pulls value systems from these two traditions into provocative conjunction, allowing Shakespeare to meditate on living a meaningful life obtained from fulfilling one’s filial responsibilities to one’s late father and from thinking about life after death.

Confession and Dying Right Death and dying are more than something that happens as part of the natural order of things; they are events that find meaning in a society’s belief in God and the afterlife. Death may come unexpectedly when the sinning soul least expects it, so it is important always to be prepared to meet one’s God. You may think you know the state of another person’s relationship with God, but you are more likely than not to be mistaken. With an unexpected death, one can only surmise whether the departed has obtained salvation or not. Focusing on the preparedness of the soul for the afterlife raises questions of doctrinal interest. What happens when one dies, in the words of the ghost of King Hamlet, “in the blossoms of [one’s] sin” (1.5.76)?2 Is there space for purgation and refinement as facilitated by the Catholic idea of purgatory, or are there only heaven and hell to be reckoned with as emphasized in Protestant understanding? How can a gravedigger, the church, or the king determine whether someone who died in an ambiguous state—maybe suicide was involved—has attained salvation? In addition to the Bible that reveals God’s truth not always necessarily with the

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clarity one seeks, is there something else such as an otherworldly visitation that can shed light on immortality and eternity? The Ghost’s entrance in Hamlet raises for audience consideration the subject of salvation and damnation central to Shakespeare’s portrayal of Hamlet’s encounter with the spectral appearance of his late father. Even though Marcellus, Barnardo, and Horatio have seen the Ghost note that it is “like” (1.1.57) the form of old King Hamlet, they cannot be sure of its provenance. Declaring himself to Hamlet as “thy father’s spirit” (1.5.9), the Ghost describes the conditions of his afterlife as involving “fast[ing] in fires / Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purged away” (1.5.11–13). Murdered by his brother when he was sleeping one afternoon in his orchard, King Hamlet had died “Unhouseled, dis-appointed, unanel’d” (1.5.77). Death came suddenly, depriving the king of an opportunity to make a good confession and seek forgiveness of sin from God. This is one anxiety and even terror for many people in Shakespeare’s England: that death should come without warning, severing soul from body. In Luke 16:19–31, Christ tells the parable of a rich man who feasted sumptuously every day, oblivious to the presence of a sore-infested beggar who desired nothing more than gathering the leftovers that fell from the rich man’s table. In this story, both the rich man and the poor man died, with the first consigned to Hades and the other—whose name is Lazarus— to Abraham’s bosom. In agony in the flames of hell, the unnamed rich man, familiarly known as Dives (Latin for “rich”), sought to warn his living relatives about this place of torment but could not do so because the spirits of the dead are separated from the living by an unbridgeable chasm. This parable appears prima facie to be about the reversal of one’s social position in the afterlife, where the rich (on earth) now suffer deprivation and the poor are blessed with bliss and plenitude. In Miscellanea. Meditations. Memoratives (published posthumously in 1604), the English poet Elizabeth Grymeston gave voice to Dives seen tormented in the flames of hell. In Chap. 3—“A pathetical speech of Dives in the flames of hell”—Dives begins by stressing the suddenness with which death came upon him in the midst of good health and wealth. Death ushers the soul into the court of divine judgment, where Dives immediately sees how his sins on earth are now arrayed against him. Rejecting Christ and embracing the devil in his earthly life, Dives now finds himself subjected to ceaseless torment in hell, consigned not only to the lake of fire’s unquenchable flames but also to vomiting all the riches

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that he had gluttonously ingested in his earthly life.3 Dives tells the reader that one must strive to do good in one’s earthly life to escape eternal damnation. In Christ’s parable in Luke 16:19–31, the point is underscored that souls in the afterlife can never gain access to the world of the living. What sense is one to make then of the appearance of the ghost of the late King Hamlet to his son? Is the Ghost encountered by Hamlet “a spirit of health or goblin damned” (1.4.21)? Hamlet’s question is doctrinally loaded. From a Protestant perspective, a spirit who claims to come from purgatory must be a “goblin damned” because there are only heaven and hell after this life. Article 22 (“Of Purgatory”) of the “Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion” in the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer states that “THE Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping and Adoration as well as of Images, as of Reliques, and also Invocation of Saints, is a fond thing, vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the word of God” (emphasis mine).4 As the author of the Book of Hebrews affirms, “it is appointed unto men that they shall once die, and after that cometh the judgment” (Heb. 9:27), with the soul either enjoying the bliss of heaven or suffering the torments of hell. There is no intermediate state known as purgatory, in which souls, which are in a state of grace but have not yet expiated for their sins, undergo suffering to be purified for heaven. The Ghost refers to the state of the afterlife he finds himself in as “the secrets of my prison-house” that would entail “a tale” that “Would harrow up thy soul” (1.5.14–16). According to David Scott Kastan, these “secrets” refer to “the harrowing detail of the pain [of purgatorial existence], which would be incommunicable and incomprehensible in any case.”5 “Secrets” capture the general resistance of the theological discourses of heaven, hell, and purgatory to ready understanding and interpretation. If King Hamlet’s spectral visitation suggestively points in the direction of the doctrine of purgatory, it also foregrounds anxieties about what may happen to the soul that dies unprepared.6 When we look at the relationship between making a good confession and dying in Hamlet, we find this motif sustained by its persistent evocation in different dramatic moments and contexts, all of which leading to a focus on individual and social renditions of what it means to die in a state of grace or outside of it. For a Catholic, not going to hell or heaven after one dies means subjection to the pains of purgatory, which, even though as intense as the sufferings of hell, is importantly (and thankfully) not everlasting.

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Both Catholics and Protestants are very much in agreement on hell’s indescribable agonies for the damned, the permanent consequence of unrepented and unforgiven sin. Hamlet reveals he understands the implications of the doctrine of hell fire when wanting Claudius to go to hell for the murder of his father. Nothing short of eternal torment in hell can satisfy the demands of justice required by the revenge ethic. If the (finite) fires of purgatory can only be gestured toward owing to language’s inability to capture “the secrets of [the] prison house” that Hamlet’s father inhabits after death, what then of hell where the fiery furnace rages without end? In a comparative study of Protestant and Catholic conceptions of hell, including its location and the nature of hell fire, Peter Marshall tells us that the medieval church understood the afterlife to consist of more than the three familiar states of hell, purgatory, and heaven.7 There are also “a limbo for unbaptised infants, and a second limbo for the righteous patriarchs and prophets who had died.”8 In a play preoccupied with the state of the soul in relation to conscience, divine judgment, and the afterlife, the usurping King Claudius stands out as possessing a secular temper. The consummate politician, Claudius is not susceptible to incapacitating attacks of guilt. Even though he is not spiritually inclined, there are two scenes in the play that portray him grappling with the guilty conscience: the first in Act 3 scene 1, and the second in Act 3 scene 3. In Act 3 scene 1, Claudius reacts to Polonius’s offhand remark that human beings often conceal misdeeds behind the façade of devotion and piety with an unexpected aside: “How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience. / The harlot’s cheek, beautied with plast’ring art, / Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it / Than is my deed to my most painted word. / O heavy burden!” (3.1.52–56). In Act 3 scene 3, Shakespeare portrays Claudius turning to prayer in response to Hamlet’s staging of “The Murder of Gonzago.” Hamlet’s playlet has shaken Claudius’s equanimity, and for good reason—the king has just witnessed a mimed reenactment of his crime of fratricide and regicide. Consistent with a pattern in this tragedy that dramatizes the consequential messiness that follows the prince’s premeditated or spontaneous acts, Claudius’s response registers a knee-jerk reaction to the play’s effectiveness in holding up a mirror to nature—his crime must have been known—but it also indicates an awakening of the conscience. “The Mousetrap” carries implications for reading some of the effects of theater and performance on the hearts and minds of its audience. In addition to the humanist idea that theater has power to penetrate the soul is

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the idea that theater participates in the spiritual awakening of the conscience.9 Secular theater’s ability to touch the human heart converges on Reformation art’s and theater’s efficacious capacity to disrupt moral complacency and stimulate self-examination.10 By dramatizing the ability of plays to jolt the conscience, Hamlet supports the understanding that theater can constitute “an ethical act that drives the spectator inward”11 and participate in the transformation of souls, an idea supported by the Reformation culture of early modern England.12 The idea of conscience is central to the theology of spiritual awakening and reformation of the soul. Associated with the workings of the Holy Spirit, conscience makes space for considering the relationship between freewill and predestination, the theological question hinging on whether the ability to respond to divine grace is only made possible through God’s proactive reaching out to the sinning soul. If the soul is dead in sin because of Adam and Eve’s transgression in the Garden of Eden, then he/she is incapable of seeking reconciliation with God on his/her own. English Renaissance drama portrays the workings of conscience differently. In Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, both good and bad angels fight for the soul of the protagonist, a dramatic feature traceable to the medieval morality play. Where Marlowe turns to allegory to represent the inner and spiritual struggle of the psychomachia, Shakespeare relies on the staging of the play and power of the spoken word to move the sinner to awareness of sin. In the discourse of repentance and contrition with which Shakespeare was familiar, prayer is all important. In Act 3 scene 3, Shakespeare dramatizes Claudius’s tormented conscience in his struggle to make a good confession. In this scene, the praying Claudius shows recognition of sin when he cries, “O, my offence is rank! It smells to heaven. / It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t, / A brother’s murder” (3.3.36–38), recalling the story in Genesis of Cain’s murder of Abel. Claudius is familiar not only with the Book of Genesis but also Isaiah when he asks: “What if this cursèd hand / Were thicker than itself with brother’s blood, / Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens / To wash it white as snow?” (3.3.43–46). Isaiah 1:15–18 is relevant here: And when you shall stretch out your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: and though ye make many prayers, I will not hear: for your hands are full of blood. / Wash you, make you clean, take away the evil of your works from before mine eyes: cease to do evil. / Learn to do well: seek judgment, relieve the oppressed: judge the fatherless, and defend the widow. / Come now,

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and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins were as crimson, they shall be made white as snow: though they were red like scarlet, they shall be as wool.13

In Isaiah, God’s forgiveness comes with true repentance that entails “tak[ing] away the evil of your works,” affording no space for the antinomian heresy that grace absolves the sinner of sin despite continuing transgression of God’s law. Claudius’s prayer is passionate and intense, involving not only talking with God but also wrestling with his own soul pulled between a desire for true repentance and his inability to surrender the fruits of sin. At one point in his soliloquy, Claudius cries: What then? What rests? Try what repentance can. What can it not? Yet what can it when one cannot repent? O wretched state, O bosom black as death, O limèd soul that, struggling to be free, Art more engaged! Help, angels! Make assay. Bow, stubborn knees; and heart with strings of steel, Be soft as sinews of the new-born babe. All may be well. (3.3.64–72)

The anaphoric question “what” and exclamation “O” in Claudius’s prayer capture the emotional and mental upheaval experienced by the king. Claudius says that his soul is “limed,” trapped in the sticky substance set up by bird-catchers to snare birds; even as the ensnared soul struggles to free itself from its condition of bondage, it finds itself getting more hopelessly entangled. When Claudius cries out for angels to come to his aid as he struggles to make a good confession, the tone of anguish is palpable. In dramatizing Claudius’s effort to repent, Shakespeare raises the controversial subject of the relationship between predestination and free will in the salvation of the soul. If, at one level, the guilty conscience is understood as the Holy Spirit operating to convict the sinner of sin and need for repentance, facilitating a response to the promptings of grace, the portrait of an intransigent soul can also signify a predestinarian context in which Claudius is a reprobate soul foreordained to damnation. The soul that has been chosen by God for damnation lacks any capacity for agency (freewill)

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in reaching out to God and tapping divine mercy. Is Claudius’s obdurate heart owing to God’s predestinarian decision not to break or soften it, a decision that traces its rationale to the fact of divinity’s supreme prerogative? Praying to God is a heavily loaded act, as it can mean a sincere and concerted effort on the part of a human being to come before God in deep contrition and supplicate for forgiveness of sin. Having experienced an awakening of the conscience, Claudius approaches God in prayer, enacting what appears to be a Protestant rather than Catholic moment given the absence of an institutional intermediary. In the Reformation emphasis, the conscience is private and what transpires between the sinning soul and God in the exercise and discipline of prayer is inaccessible to the outside observer. Shakespeare’s audience witnesses Claudius’s inability to make a good confession but not Hamlet. Hamlet only observes the king in the posture of prayer and misreads its significance, highlighting the inability of an observer to gain access to the private and spiritual space of the conscience that defines a sinner’s relationship with God. If lack of access to the psychological recesses of another person foregrounds the deep distrust permeating Danish social and political life, it also captures the radical privacy defining the soul’s communion with God, one manifested in devotional discourse as the trope of interiority. Prayer scenes such as the one involving Claudius conjure up Catholic-­ Protestant debates on the significance of the sacrament of penance, the theological emphasis on God’s imputation of righteousness to the sinner, and the relationship between freewill and predestination in the salvation of the soul. On salvation and damnation, Protestantism focuses on the Pauline emphasis that one can only be saved by grace through faith. Inheriting original sin, the sinner can bring no merit to God’s judgment seat for divine consideration; instead, he can only rely on Christ’s imputation of righteousness to be made whole and acceptable to God. In Luther’s understanding of this doctrine of imputation emphasized in the Book of Romans, salvation by grace through faith supports a theology of comfort. The sinner who fully embraces Christ’s substitutionary sacrifice on the cross for his or her salvation must not be beset by anxiety as salvation is a free gift of God independent of human effort and merit. While the awakening of the king’s conscience stems from the playlet mounted by Hamlet, it also enables a consideration of doctrinal perspectives. Wondering how man comes to have “notions and conceits of virtue and vice, justice and wrong, good and evil” in The Advancement of

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Learning, Francis Bacon finds an answer in the “light of nature” that springs not only from “reason, sense, induction, argument,” but also from “the law of conscience” that is “imprinted upon the spirit of man by an inward instinct.”14 This “instinct” has a supernatural provenance traceable to “the purity of [man’s and woman’s] first estate” that is prelapsarian Eden. In the fallen world, contact with the moral law is enabled “by inspiration and revelation from God.”15 However, the awakening conscience does not necessarily mean a sinner will turn from evil and embrace good. If conscience, according to the Puritan divine William Ames, “stands in the place of God himself,” then “despising of conscience” entails sinning against “the will of God.”16 In Hamlet, Claudius “despises” any pang of conscience he might have experienced because he is unable to surrender the worldly advantages he had gained through his brother’s murder. He struggles to make an efficacious prayer but fails, informing us it is difficult for him to pray, attributing this inability to the “stronger guilt” that “defeats [his] strong intent” (3.3.40). In the discourse of confession and contrition, believing that one’s sins are of such magnitude as to make impossible the functioning of God’s grace and forgiveness is to commit the sin of despair.17 Martin Luther had exhorted, “Let no man therefore despair,” because Christ’s sacrifice on the cross has given fallen humanity “our ground and anchor-hold … our only perfect righteousness.”18 For Luther, Christ’s imputation of righteousness grounds the Reformation theology of comfort. In relation to this theological emphasis, Claudius’s inability to give up his crown, ambition, and queen (3.3.55) indicates a lack of the faith required for making possible true contrition and divine comfort: “faith, divining the unchangeableness of the truth of God, disturbs and reproves the conscience, and so renders it contrite; but, at the same time, it exalts and comforts that conscience, and so keeps it contrite. Wherever faith is found, the certainty of punishment causes contrition, and the trustworthiness of the promises is the means of consolation; and through this faith a man merits forgiveness of sin.”19 Shakespeare’s interest in the subject matter of confession and the confessional finds dramatic expression in plays as different as Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Measure for Measure. In the confessional context of Measure for Measure, Duke Vincentio, disguised as a friar, generates much anxiety in the parishioners and prisoners to whom he is supposed to minister and bring comfort. In Romeo and Juliet, Friar Laurence, a Franciscan monk and Romeo’s father confessor, assumes the role of a surrogate

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parent and confidante to two young lovers who come from feuding families. Providing guidance, Friar Laurence represents priestly counsel that cannot overcome the fatalism of a “star-crossed” (Prologue 6) universe. Hamlet starts out with the story of the old king who could not make a good confession before he was murdered and moves on to Claudius unable to make a good confession because of his inability to surrender his ill-gotten gains. Claudius is not the only Shakespearean monarch associated with prayer and repentance. In The Winter’s Tale, King Leontes spends sixteen years in remorse and repentance for wrong done to his family and friend Polixenes. Leontes performs his penitential journey in not only rigorous but suggestively Catholic terms through the image of the cloister. In Henry V, the king petitions the “God of battles” (4.1.271) to steel his soldiers’ hearts on the night before Agincourt, pleading with almighty God not to remember the transgression of his father Bolingbroke/Henry IV in deposing Richard II. Henry V reminds God that not only had he buried anew the body of Richard II, but he has bestowed much “contrite tears” (4.1.278), paid for prayers to be offered for pardon of sin, and built “Two chantries, where the sad and solemn priests / Sing still for Richard’s soul” (4.1.283–84). If Shakespeare’s audience thinks it is witnessing the achievements of a Protestant monarch in Henry V—encouraged perhaps by Canterbury’s “Never came reformation in a flood” (1.1.34, emphasis mine) to describe Hal’s astonishing transformation—the king’s disclosure of hiring priests to pray for the soul of Richard II attests to a Catholic practice in which endowment is bestowed for the purpose of saying masses for a person’s soul. Staging the monarch at prayer allows a dramatist to bring to light the inner thoughts and emotions of the king, adjusting the absolutist motif that nothing can be hidden from the all-seeing eye of royal authority. It reveals the monarch’s secret fears and longings that are generally hidden from view in the mystification of absolutism. In the scene of the praying Claudius, the audience, instead of Hamlet, eavesdrops on the king’s prayer. Hamlet’s lack of access to the content of Claudius’s prayer means that he is left to interpret the outward sign of the king at prayer, adducing from what he sees that Claudius is repenting and seeking God’s forgiveness of his sins. This scene of Hamlet chancing on the praying Claudius captures the difficulty, if not impossibility, of deciphering and interpreting what goes on in a person’s heart and mind based on external signs. Is there any way in which an outsider or observer can gauge the sincerity and

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efficacy of another person’s repentance?20 Hamlet does not attempt to answer this question, only reaching the conclusion that the king is setting his soul right with God because he is praying. Observing Claudius on his knees, Hamlet concludes that this is not the right moment to avenge his father’s death since sending Claudius’s soul to heaven would subvert the logic of the revenge ethic. The implications of not making a good confession and having one’s sins forgiven before death are very much on Hamlet’s mind. For Hamlet, anything short of eternal damnation is inadequate punishment for Claudius’s villainy. If Hamlet wants Claudius to be in hell, he desires the same for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as well when he demands that the English king “should [Rosencrantz and Guildenstern] put to sudden death, / Not shriving-time allowed” (5.2.47–48; emphasis mine) when they arrive in England.21 Hamlet’s desire that his enemies should have no opportunity to confess sin and obtain absolution before death stands in stark contrast with Duke Vincentio who, in Measure for Measure, responds to a drunken prisoner who refuses to be delivered for early execution because spiritually unprepared: “A creature unprepared, unmeet for death; / … to transport him in the mind he is / Were damnable” (4.3.59–61). Unlike Hamlet, who wants his uncle’s soul to be sent directly to hell, Vincentio cannot disregard the importance of the shriven soul. Even Shakespeare’s Othello finds himself instructing Desdemona to reconcile herself “to heaven and grace” (5.2.29) because he “would not kill [her] unpreparèd spirit” (5.2.33). He enjoins Desdemona to “confess thee freely of thy sin” (5.2.58). Of course, Desdemona does not know what Othello is referring to. When finally, however, the terrified Desdemona pleads for the opportunity to utter “one prayer” (5.2.91), he refuses her request with the horrifying “It is too late” (5.2.92) and consigns her to perdition. Hamlet’s concern with confession and repentance just moments before (unexpected and sudden) death prompts an audience to ask whether such acts in fact hold any efficacy before the God of judgment. Hamlet’s refusal to kill Claudius at prayer tells us he understands the capacity of prayer to make one’s soul right with God and receive forgiveness of sin. The efficacy of last-moment repentances is a contested idea. In The Anatomie of Abuses (1583), the pamphleteer Philip Stubbes presents two interlocutors Spudeus and Philoponus discussing many topics, including whether there can “be a true repentance, which is deferred to the last gaspe.”22 When Spudeus expresses the view that God will forgive a sinner’s transgressions whenever (early or late) he or she repents, Philoponus responds:

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No, truely; For true repentance must spring out of a lyvelie faith, with an inward lothing, hating, and detesting of sinne. But this deferred repentance springeth not of faith, but rather of the feare of death, which he seeth imminent before his eyes, of the grief and tediousnes of paine, of the Horror of Hell, and feare of God his inevitable judgement, which he knoweth now he must needs abyde. And therfore this can be no true repentance; For there is two maner of repentances, the one a true repentance to life, the other a false repentance to death.23

How one dies—in the thick of sin or in God’s mercy—is broached not only in King Hamlet’s murder and in Hamlet’s encounter with the praying Claudius but also in Ophelia’s death, raising questions about the destiny of a soul whose “death was doubtful” (5.1.209). No one knows for certain the state of Ophelia’s soul when she drowned. However, there are people that are (quite) sure that her death is a suicide. The gravedigger asks the question: “Is [Ophelia] to be buried in Christian burial that wilfully seeks her own salvation?” (5.1.1–2). Later the priest, viewing Ophelia’s death as a suicide, refuses to “sing sage requiem and such rest to her / As to peace-­ parted souls” (5.1.220–21) in line with canon law.24 Someone who had died as the result of suicide is not understood to be peacefully deceased. While Elizabethan and early Stuart England generally viewed suicide as abhorrent in both the theological domain and legal realm, interestingly no reference to self-murder was made in the 1549, 1552, 1559, and 1604 substantive versions of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. It was in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer that we find the following rubric added to “The Order for the Burial of the Dead”: “Here is to be noted, that the Office ensuing is not to be used for any that die unbaptized, or excommunicate, or have laid violent hands upon themselves.”25 The refusal of Shakespeare’s priest to sing a requiem for Ophelia aligns with the post-Restoration injunction not to perform certain rituals at the burial of those who died by suicide. Where suicide was a felony in early modern English law, it was a mortal sin in ecclesiastical law. In popular understanding, the soul of someone who commits self-murder goes to hell. Suicide entails damnation because it brings to culmination the sin of despair and entails dying outside the reach of God’s grace and mercy. If Ophelia committed suicide, she could not—technically speaking—be buried in consecrated ground. The unnatural sin of suicide found reinforcement in civil law, given visceral and symbolic expression in the early modern English practice of burying suicides naked at crossroads,

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dramatically replete with stakes impaling their bodies to the ground.26 This profane ritual continues to make its literary presence felt as late as Bram Stoker’s Victorian novel Dracula, in which we read about driving stakes into the hearts of vampires to dispatch them. Synonymous with self-­ destruction and self-murder, suicide was both “a desperate sin” and “a terrible crime” in Tudor and early Stuart England.27 How and where that one is buried can reveal something about the state of one’s soul and whether society believes one is going to be saved from the fires of hell on the Last Day. Not being interred in consecrated ground has implications for the salvation of the soul.28 In the case of Ophelia, Claudius intervened to ensure her a place on hallowed ground, raising questions not only about salvation but also about privilege. Had it not been for royal command, Ophelia “should in ground unsanctified have lodged / Till the last trumpet” (5.1.211–12). The relationship of burial to earth and land brings the exercise of royal and state authority into conjunction with church ownership over land parceled out for the interment of the dead, with the first possessing the prerogative to exert political pressure on the latter where necessary, bending ecclesiastical decisions to secular political will.29 The gravedigger scene highlights the way in which a person’s death can become a contested site for meaning making. If the king possesses power to demand a specific form of burial for a certain person, such absolutist fiat only offers the authority of form—interment in sacred ground—without the comfort of content, the sure knowledge that Ophelia did not in fact commit suicide. The precise circumstance of Ophelia’s death will always remain ambiguous because it is not portrayed onstage but narrated by Gertrude, a representational distance that obstructs interpretive access to the tragic event. No one knows for sure the state of Ophelia’s soul when she drowned. Whether she died a good death and made it to heaven remains undetermined. Shakespeare’s “Till the last trumpet” calls our attention to the Apostle Paul’s account of the resurrection of the dead at Christ’s Second Coming in the following two passages from scripture: 1 For this say we unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which live, and are remaining in the coming of the Lord, shall not prevent them which sleep. / For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, and with the voice of the Archangel, and with the trumpet of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: / Then shall we which live and remain, be caught up

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with them also in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord. (1 Thess. 4:15–17) 2 Behold, I show you a secret thing, We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, / In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye at the last trumpet: for the trumpet shall blow, and the dead shall be raised up incorruptible, and we shall be changed. / For this corruptible must put on incorruption: and this mortal must put on immortality. (1 Cor. 15:51–53)

Also pointing in the direction of the Book of Revelation, the trumpet is a resonating motif in eschatology, the doctrine of the last things that deal with the end of history, the resurrection of the dead, and the last judgment. In Hamlet, Shakespeare ponders what happens to the soul after death and how the dead will be resurrected. If Donne, Shakespeare’s contemporary, found himself preoccupied with the dissolution of the body after death and with how the scattered atoms of the dead long gone are reassembled anew as promised in the New Testament, struggling to understand the mechanisms by which God would reconstitute the resurrected body on the Last Day, Shakespeare’s imagination stretched to yawning graveyards and the stench of putrefaction.30 The playwright is preoccupied with ideas of the dissolution of both body and soul (see the “O that this too too solid31 flesh would melt” [1.2.129] soliloquy) and reveals apprehension about life, if any, beyond this one (see the “To be or not to be” soliloquy). In the postlapsarian world, there is only one secure point of reference— the figure of the grave-maker who, from Adam to the end of time, builds the sturdiest homes, indestructible edifices because the dead can always be relied upon to inhabit them. The profession of the gravedigger is immune to historical contingencies, political upheavals, and economic downturns; it enables the building of an ironic temper particularly suited to black comedy, where the subject matter of death can be managed through casual banter, wit, and (gallows) humor. Callous jokes about death and corpses register the awkwardness with which an individual confronts one of the most familiar manifestations of mortality—the decaying body that has become food for worms. We recall Hamlet’s description of the slain Polonius consumed by worms, reducing humanity to a morsel in the food chain of the animal kingdom (4.3.20–22). Hamlet is preoccupied not only with what happens to the soul after death, but also with what happens to the body at death. Focusing on the body in decay in the graveyard scene, the play reinforces the gulf that

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separates man and woman, subject to mutability, from spirit whose supreme manifestation is the Ghost and whose otherworldly abode is the subject of religious speculation and debate. In the play’s dichotomy between flesh and spirit, the experience of death and mourning not only generates elegiac remembering but facilitates macabre imaginings of mortality fixed on rotting corpses and grinning skulls. Yorick’s skull, the play’s controlling memento mori (“remember you must die”) device, obtains its significance in a tragedy in which persistent reminder of the fact of mortality functions as a central theme, starting from a son’s distraught reaction to the death of his father to the scene of gravediggers preparing the ground for—in the words of John Donne— “Some second guest to entertain.”32 Underscoring the evanescence of human existence, corpses and rotting bodies point not only to the temporal materiality and material temporality of life but also to the conditions of otherworldliness that belong to the realm of theological discourse. If the return of King Hamlet’s ghost implies that judgment of the soul takes place when it leaves the body at death, the judgment of the living and the dead on the Last Day accommodates the possibility of mortalism—the doctrine that the soul dies or “sleeps” with the body until Christ’s Second Coming, a doctrine subscribed to by the reforming Luther and Puritan John Milton.33 Donne himself was also fascinated by the theory of mortalism.34 While both Protestants and Catholics might speak with passion about their understanding of what happens to the soul after death, that passion was not always accompanied by confidence and certitude. The question of how the resurrection of the dead was going to be brought about by God could not be satisfactorily answered by either Protestant or Catholic. Despite the teachings of the church on the eternal existence of the soul, imagining life after this one is not easy. In Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin—commenting on the relationship between man’s corruptible body and his future incorruptible one, the nature of the body and the soul, and the doctrine of mortalism—found he had to accept limits in human attempts to understand “the last resurrection.”35 There are aspects pertaining to the condition of the soul between death and the resurrection that remain a mystery because concealed by God.36 When Donne represented his ailing body preparing for immortality in “Hymn to God, my God, in my Sickness,” he could only do so through metaphor—a musical instrument being tuned for transformation into God’s music in the heavenly choir—likewise suggesting distance between human comprehension and heavenly realities as revealed in scripture and taught by the

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church. In Institutes, Calvin comments on the limits of human conceptions of heavenly bliss: “For though we are truly told that the kingdom of God will be full of light, and gladness, and felicity, and glory, yet the things meant by these words remain most remote from sense, and as it were involved in enigma, until the day arrive on which he will manifest his glory to us face to face (1 Cor. xv.54).”37 In Hamlet, heaven, hell, and purgatory constitute possibilities of the afterlife but so is uncertainty pertaining to knowledge of otherworldliness such as given expression in Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” soliloquy. This soliloquy registers a contradiction in Hamlet’s assertion that “death” is “The undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveller returns” (3.1.80–82), a contradiction because this revenge tragedy is made possible through the return of a (Catholic?) ghost describing the afterlife in purgatorial terms and demanding revenge. In a play in which a ghost raises questions about the reliability of Protestant and Catholic accounts of the afterlife, situating Shakespeare’s tragedy in the context of early modern English doctrinal debates, Hamlet’s statement that it is not possible to know what exists beyond this life because no one has ever returned from the dead prompts surmise about a moment referred to by Greenblatt as “a spectacular and mysterious act of forgetting.”38 This “forgetting” relates not only to King Hamlet’s spectral appearance but also to the play’s interest in Christian conceptions of the afterlife. Thinking about the afterlife in terms of its resistance to both human capacity for imagination and conventional theological prescriptions, Hamlet’s soliloquy focuses on the experience of fear encapsulated in the idea of the “conscience” that “does make cowards of us all” (3.1.85). If conscience involves both experience of guilt and recognition of sin, its evocation in this soliloquy can be said to function in part as an implied questioning of the fear that can be instilled by doctrinal and theological commonplaces. In Biathanatos, a heterodox defense of suicide, Donne reveals he often has “a sickly inclination” toward “self-homicide,” a doctrine that contains both “perplexity and flexibility.”39 If Donne had been a sexton preparing for Ophelia’s burial, he would have been sympathetic to her as a (possible) suicide. In a soliloquy that ponders the implications of suicide (“not to be”) as an answer to “The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” (3.1.60) and “The heartache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to” (3.1.64–65), conscience, synonymized with fear, constitutes a prohibitive theological principle that one does not quite know how to deal with.

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Upheld by homilies and undergirded by church teaching, conscience reminds us that it is an unpardonable sin to take one’s own life. If this is gestured toward in Hamlet’s equation of conscience with cowardice, any (implied) anxiety about eternal damnation is not exactly reinforced in the soliloquy’s theologically neutral imagination of an afterlife that includes unknowable “dreams” (3.1.68) and that mysterious “something after death” (3.1.80) that “puzzles the will” (3.1.82). Absence of philosophical/theological guidance and knowledge generates “dread,” inspiring fear. Distinguished by its thematic preoccupation with sin and confession, Hamlet makes the point that such preoccupation can deleteriously affect an individual, instantiated in the closet scene where Hamlet castigates his mother for her marriage to Claudius. If sin in Hamlet is defined by God’s moral law (such as the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” [Exod. 20:13]), it is also defined by Hamlet’s subjective emotions evinced in his violent criticism of Gertrude’s second marriage. When Hamlet berates Gertrude in Act 3 scene 4, the closet scene immediately following Claudius’s attempt at prayer, he focuses on his mother’s blindness. “Have you eyes?” (3.4.64, 66), he asks her twice, accusing her of impoverished judgment and sense in her choice of Claudius against whom King Hamlet compares as a classical god. Even if Hamlet indicates susceptibility toward idolizing his father, that does not adequately explain his harsh view of his mother living with Claudius “In the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed, / Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty” (3.4.82–84). Hamlet identifies sexual desire with the rebellion of man’s and woman’s lower nature, a rebellion that finds epic expression in Milton’s metaphorization of the Fall as a descent into libidinal excess and “the Harlot-lap / Of Philistean Dalilah”40 in Paradise Lost. Berating his mother for her inability to differentiate between her late husband and the “mildewed ear” (3.4.63) and “moor” (3.4.66) that is Claudius, Hamlet wants Gertrude to experience shame and guilt leading to conviction of sin. Only when there is conviction of sin can there be transformation of life. Not recognizing sin permits the spiritual infection of “rank corruption” (3.4.139) to spread and deepen. “Confess yourself to heaven,” Hamlet tells Gertrude, “Repent what’s past, avoid what is to come, / And do not spread the compost o’er the weeds / To make them ranker” (3.4.140–43). The words achieve their desired effect leading to Gertrude’s anguished cry: “O Hamlet, speak no more! / Thou turn’st mine eyes into my very soul, / And there I see such black and grainѐd spots / As will not leave their tinct” (3.4.78–81).

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The importance of not postponing the sinner’s moment of repentance cannot be overemphasized. At a “Sermon Preached at Saint Dunstan’s Upon New-Year’s Day, 1624,” Donne declares: If any man put off his Repentance till death, Fateor non negamus quod petit, saies Saint Augustine, I dare not deny that man, whatsoever God may be pleased to grant him; Sed non prœsumimus, quod bene erit; I dare not presume to say, that that man died well, Non prœsumo non vos fallo, non prœsumo, saies that Father, with some vehemency, I dare not warrant him, let me not deceive you with saying that I dare, for I dare not.41

In his sermon, Donne reiterates the emphatic “I dare not” to achieve the rhetorical effect of destabilizing any secure sense a person might have about the efficacy of a deathbed repentance. There can be serious spiritual consequences for postponing repentance of sin to the last moment, for it might just be possible that one is not in the right frame of mind to make a good confession when one is very ill, or that one’s prayer is desperate or opportunistically made. Donne continues: [T]hat is but a suspicious state in any man, in which another Christian hath just reason to doubt of his salvation, as Saint Augustine doth shrewdly doubt of these late Repenters, Sicut ejus damnatio incerta, ita remissio dubia; As I am not sure he is damned, so I am not sure he is saved, no more sure of one then [sic] of the other.42

For the preacher, it is not possible to arrive at a clear picture of a dying sinner’s state of mind or soul and therefore be able to say with confidence that he or she is in a state of grace. Hamlet’s impassioned demand that his mother repent of her sins is marked by not only its angry tone but also a sense of urgency, a call to repentance that is loud and uncompromising. Gertrude’s distraught reaction suggests complex emotions traceable to both physiological triggers and spiritual activity.43 While Gertrude’s response appears to signify experience of guilt and conviction of sin, the question can be asked: What is the queen supposed to be guilty of? If Hamlet wants his mother to experience intense loathing for her marriage to Claudius, what is it about this matrimonial union that should make Gertrude feel she has committed sin? Does Gertrude ever arrive at a point where she views her marriage to Claudius as incest, defined by “the doctrine of carnal contagion, according

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to which one should not marry one’s deceased brother’s widow because she is one’s own sister.”44 From early in the play, Hamlet has been deeply disturbed by his mother’s and uncle’s marital union, railing against the “most wicked speed” (1.2.156) with which Gertrude had moved “With such dexterity to incestuous sheets” (1.2.157; emphasis mine). Because the queen’s sexuality is the source of the problem, she should not “Lay … a flattering unction to [her] soul” (3.4.136; emphasis mine) because any application of healing ointment can only serve as surface dressing that conceals soul-destroying corruption festering within. If Gertrude does not repent, she faces damnation. It is not the queen’s prerogative to apply healing unction because she cannot. Only Hamlet, the minister attending to Gertrude’s soul, can facilitate spiritual healing. Evoking the idea of unction to metaphorize Gertrude’s need to heal her diseased soul, Hamlet deploys a word that draws attention to debates on the sacraments. In the Catholic tradition, the extreme unction, the last of the seven sacraments instituted by Christ, refers to the application of healing oil or ointment on a person who is about to die. This practice is believed to stem from the following injunction from James 5:14: “Is any sick among you? Let him call for the Elders of the Church, and let them pray for him, and anoint him with oil in the Name of the Lord.” The Reformation response to the Catholic sacrament of the extreme unction is found in The Pagan Servitude of the Church (familiarly known as The Babylonian Captivity of the Church), where Luther argues that Christ did not institute this particular sacrament and “[i]t was not the apostle’s [referring to James] intention that it should be extreme, or that it should be given only to those at the point of death.”45 For Luther, “the unction [is] meant to be administered at any time”46 for the ministry of the sick and dying and for the healing of souls. In censuring his mother, Hamlet affects the posture of a minister who seeks to bring about conviction of sin through the spiritual power of the sermon and the homily.47 Here the discourse of guilt and conscience recalls Luther’s emphasis on the centrality of the spoken word to the life and work of the church. Luther understood that a preacher’s words possess power to produce epiphany and recognition of sin through the illumination of the Holy Spirit. For Luther, [t]he Word is the channel through which the Holy Spirit is given. This is a passage against those who hold the spoken Word in contempt. The lips are

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the public reservoirs of the church. In them alone is kept the Word of God. You see, unless the Word is preached publicly, it slips away. The more it is preached, the more firmly it is retained. Reading it is not as profitable as hearing it, for the live voice teaches, exhorts, defends, and resists the spirit of error. Satan does not care a hoot for the written Word of God, but He flees at the speaking of the Word. You see, this penetrates hearts and leads back those who stray.48

If Shakespeare’s evocation of the theological concepts of sin, grace, and repentance draws attention to doctrinal topics and the tensions engendered by these, these terms are also significant within the context of the pastoral ministry, which involves the practical aspects of religious conviction such as discipline, human interactions, reconciliation, and forgiveness. Unlike doctrine, which derives significance from theological principles and positions, discipline entails the regulation of the godly community. The discipline of an individual, community, or congregation ranges from admonition and exhortation to rebuke or reprimand and even excommunication while the instruments entailed in administering discipline centers on the professional clergy, ordained lay elders, or an entire congregation itself.49 The New Testament contains practical advice on admonishing sin and transgression. In Matthew 18:15–17, Christ instructs: [I]f thy brother trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he hear thee, thou hast won thy brother. But if he hear thee not, take yet with thee one or two, that by the mouth of two or three witnesses, every word may be confirmed. And if he refuse to hear them, tell it unto the Church: and if he refuse to hear the Church also, let him be unto thee as an heathen man, and a Publican.

In 1 Timothy 5:20, the Apostle Paul affirms the deterrent effects of public admonition: Them that sin, rebuke openly, that the rest also may fear.

The idea of church discipline was very much in Paul’s mind when he wrote to the community of the faithful, evinced, for example, in Galatians 6:1:

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Brethren, If a man be suddenly taken in any offense, ye which are spiritual, restore such one with the spirit of meekness, considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted.

Pauline admonition can assume two forms: one involving steadily increasing pressure on the sinner and even instilling fear into the congregation; the other, extolling gentleness in ministering to the errant soul. When Hamlet assumes the pastoral function of ministering spiritually to Gertrude, his ministration cannot be separated from the enactment of discipline and spiritual recuperation of the sinning soul. Hamlet’s assumption of this role is a familiar motif in a play that demonstrates sustained interest in the idea of confession, identified by James Nohrnberg in Shakespeare’s dramatization of the following: “Claudius’ indictment of his own penance; Polonius’ playing father-confessor to Ophelia; Claudius’ spiritually advising Hamlet and promising to labor with Laertes’ soul; the Ghost’s acknowledgement of his sinfulness; Hamlet’s refusal to hear Horatio embrace truancy; Claudius’ promise of—and Hamlet’s request for—Laertes’ absolution: any speech piercing ears by revealing appalling sins.”50 If the pastoral ministry is associated with the tender caretaking of parishioners, Hamlet’s admonition of his mother does quite the opposite, caught up with emotions of deep anger. It appears that balancing admonition with love, rebuke with comfort, is never easy and the preacher may find himself participating in the wretched condition of the sinning soul to which he is ministering.51 If, as Glenn Clark notes, “Hamlet is made to seem like a character who may indeed have a pastoral vocation,”52 this is a vocation in which the office of the admonishing minister is complicated by the emotions of a protagonist for whom the transgressing maternal body constitutes a source of major anxiety.53 Hamlet harangues his mother reducing her to a position of total abjection, the requisite condition for the awakening of shame, transformation of the heart, and conversion of the soul. This harangue brings a son’s browbeating of his mother into provocative conjunction with a minister’s function to counsel and instruct. What are we to make of the protagonist’s assumption of the pastoral role that lacks the milk of human kindness, which, if not totally attributable to Hamlet’s frayed state of mind, at least suggests possible authorial commentary on the pastoral function and practice of church discipline? The harshness of Hamlet’s treatment of Gertrude suggests that there can be an oppressive dimension to regimes of church and pastoral discipline.

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If, as Kenneth Graham explains, discipline entails “a series of speech acts that includes admonition, invitation, comfort, promise, forgiveness, and proclamation,”54 then Hamlet deploys the blunt instrument of “admonition,” accentuated by the graphic representation of sin and transgression. Shakespeare’s emphasis on Hamlet’s admonitory excess highlights a disjunction between the gentler means of discipline (as espoused in Galatians 6:1) and the harsh, making us wonder whether Shakespeare sought to interrogate at some level the practice of pastoral exhortation to repentance. Framed by the discourse of the pastoral ministry, Hamlet’s castigation of Gertrude has the effect of reinforcing the play’s preoccupation with sin, repentance, and forgiveness as well as ironizing the figure of the lay preacher who stands at the center of the ministering process. While the fact that the preacher’s role can be played out with such vehement gusto reveals something about the deleterious effects of a minister’s melancholic disposition, it may also suggest some of the ways in which the pastoral ministry can turn into an instrument of abuse, indicating that the work of the church cannot be dissociated from the fallen temper(aments) of the leaders tasked with its management. In Hamlet, sin and repentance are more than abstract theoretical concepts; they find expression in tangible effects such as witnessed in Hamlet’s visceral reaction to his mother’s (sexual) transgression. The conception of sin in Hamlet is strikingly theological, unlike its invocation in Shakespeare’s other great tragedy King Lear. In the Folio King Lear, the aged king, dispossessed and roaming the heath on a stormy night, roars in despair: “I am a man / More sinned against than sinning” (3.2.58–59). Confronted by evolutionary biology’s painful principle that the old of the human species is meant to wait for death and forgetting after the young has come into his or her own, Lear traces the agony of his present condition to his mistake of repudiating Cordelia and embracing Goneril and Regan.55 In the pre-Christian world of this tragedy, Lear anachronistically invokes the Christian idea of sin to define the enormity of his error, declaring, however, that no transgression of his merits the kind of punishment that nature now unleashes on him. Lear accuses the “dreadful summoners” (3.2.58), the gods who enact judgment and retribution, of committing a weightier sin than any he is guilty of. When we consider the way in which King Lear uses the word sin in the play, we find its meaning to be more general and less theologically specific than Hamlet’s understanding of sin. In King Lear, sin is synonymous not only with a major mistake or error but also with the unjust and horrific mistreatment

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of another person. In Hamlet, on the other hand, sin signifies spiritual transgression and the danger of eternal damnation.

Hebraism, the Classical Tradition, and Tragedy How does a tragedy that shows sustained interest in dying right with God and in the afterlife grapple with the pressures of the revenge ethic exerted on the tragic protagonist? What is the relationship between Hamlet’s cogitations on death and the burden of assuming the role of avenger foisted on him by his late father? Does Hamlet think about the spiritual consequences of his actions as an avenger? When we consider these questions, we find that while the tragedy shows a distinctive Christian focus on the phenomenon of death and dying, it complicates this focus through its representation of classical value systems coexisting with scriptural ones. While the presence of both biblical and classical allusions is a commonplace feature in English Renaissance literature, it functions in this play as a commentary on Hamlet’s struggles to navigate his way from introspection to action, an experience complicated by the demands of Judeo-Christian morality that are not always in alignment with values associated with the classical worldview. Hamlet moves toward death, the logical conclusion of the tragic experience, by grappling with the demands of both the Christian faith and affirmations of classical ethics. The challenges facing Hamlet in his effort to fashion his role as an avenger pressure him to think about theological themes such as predeterminism and free will as well as the role of divine providence in his life. Traditional readings of tragedy have focused on the effects and implications of the genre’s dramatization of the relationship between agency (free will) and fatalism. In a deterministic universe, the human being is a plaything of arbitrary gods. When Hamlet rails against the present state of Denmark as a “time” that “is out of joint,” and bemoans the fact that he was born into the world to set it right (1.5.189–90), his language carries a deterministic undercurrent. His very existence has a purpose—to set Denmark right—and it is an unenviable one. Hamlet is a man with a mission who wishes it were otherwise. As he struggles to find his way and determine a course of action to fulfill his responsibilities as an avenger, he finds himself thinking in relation to not only the values of the Christian worldview in which actions have eternal consequences but also those of classical ethics.

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Part of Hamlet’s struggles with the Ghost’s revenge injunction can be traced to differing conceptions of the good, proper, and heroic act in the classical and Judeo-Christian traditions. A humanist character with a passion for the arts, Hamlet is familiar with the tradition of tragedy represented by dramatists such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca. While tragic theater associated with these dramatists draws attention to specific definitions of heroic value and moral action, it can also bring into play a structure of morality that is associated with the Judeo-Christian tradition. Saddled with the responsibility of the revenge mandate, Hamlet finds himself burdened by the implications of agentic self-affirmation related to the ethics of meeting one’s obligation to the spirit of one’s dead father. Consumed by anxiety about the proper conduct of filial duty in a world that seems to afford little if any space for the exercise of free will, he berates himself for not having access to passion (as a classical heroic virtue) in his “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” (2.2.527) soliloquy as he struggles to be an effective avenger, seeking to annihilate the space separating feeling from the manifestation of feeling. If Hamlet were to turn to scripture for guidance on the ethic of revenge, he would discover this New Testament emphasis: “Dearly beloved,” writes the Apostle Paul, “avenge not yourselves, … for it is written, Vengeance is mine: I will repay, saith the Lord” (Rom. 12:19). In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus responded to Simon Peter’s (named in Jn. 18:10–11) wounding of the servant of a high priest with the following dictum against violence: “Put up thy sword into his place: for all that take the sword, shall perish with the sword” (Matt. 26:52). God is explicit in his command that a person who has been wronged should not resort to violence, the controlling spirit of the revenge ethic. However, when dealing with revenge, Hamlet does not only have the Bible to turn to for guidance. He also has the perspective of the classics. In classical literature, the unhesitating man of action is celebrated for his courage, recognized as a form of heroism. Pusillanimity, which denotes “smallness” of spirit and timidity, is a negative attribute. If the ancients eschewed pusillanimity and celebrated courage, endurance, and exploits on the battlefield, is there something in their value system that can help Hamlet get closer to fulfilling his responsibility as the avenging son of a murdered father? For matters of revenge, Hamlet finds himself seeking direction from the tradition of epic and Greek tragedy. Almost immediately after the arrival of the troupe of players at Elsinore, he evokes epic when he

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encourages an actor to continue a speech capturing Trojan Queen Hecuba’s heart-wrenching grief at the death of her husband Priam, a dramatic reenactment of Aeneas’s narration of the sack of Troy in Book 2 of Virgil’s Aeneid. The fact that the actor playing Priam can be so overwrought with the role he is asked to play makes Hamlet ponder on his own seeming lack of energy in sweeping to his revenge. Is it that he lacks the necessary emotions over his father’s death, and, if so, how ironic is it that a player who is here doing nothing more than acting out a piece of fiction can be overwhelmed by such powerful emotions? The effect of Virgil’s epic poem on the reader is something that Saint Augustine had considered in Book 1 of Confessions, when he thinks about how he is able to weep for Dido’s tragic death in the Aeneid, a work of fiction, while experiencing no emotions over his separation from God and spiritual death. Hamlet finds classical literature and myth inspiring both for their expressive power and for the lessons they offer on how to respond to the demands of revenge that is one of Greek tragedy’s controlling themes. Where Polonius finds the First Player’s dramatization to be tediously long, Hamlet is swept up by the tempo of the narrative violence and of the actor’s ability to empathize viscerally with the emotions of this Virgilian adaptation. Hamlet’s response is more than simply that of someone who has a real love for the affective power of classical texts. Setting up associational links between Hamlet and Pyrrhus, Shakespeare suggests that the story of Priam’s murder is relevant to Hamlet’s circumstance. Pyrrhus’s dark purpose (2.2.433), symbolically reinforced by his “dread and black complexion” (2.2.435), recalls Hamlet’s own “nightly colour” (1.2.68) and “inky cloak” (1.2.77). If Pyrrhus’s murder of Priam captures Troy’s violent destruction and represents the tumultuous conditions framing Aeneas’s initiation into his role as the prince of destiny, it is also a narrative of revenge. Pyrrhus had come to Troy to avenge his father Achilles’s death at the hands of Paris, Priam’s son. After unexpectedly finding himself frozen like “a painted tyrant” (2.2.460), his sword suspended in the air, Pyrrhus proceeds to complete his work of “rousèd vengeance” (2.2.468) by making “malicious sport” (2.2.493) and “mincing with his sword [Priam’s] limbs” (2.2.494). If Pyrrhus is a model of the avenging man of action, his violence also shows the hell that can be unleashed by the spirit of vengeance. The challenges faced by Hamlet in seeking models of conduct to apply to his situation contribute to the difficulty he has in translating thoughts and feelings into the affirmation of an act. When Hamlet transforms

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(rather suddenly) from a passive to an active character in his stabbing of Polonius in the tragedy’s peripeteia, he shows that the concept of agency is not straightforward because it is entwined with the idea of rashness. Together with impulse and spontaneity, rashness is closely associated with passion in the play. The precise ethical valence of an act is not readily decipherable because the relationship of rashness to passion signifies differently in both the classical and Judeo-Christian traditions. Here Aristotle’s meditation on the relationship between passion or emotion and courage in both man and beast in his discourse on courage in Book 3 of Nicomachean Ethics is relevant. “Emotion,” Aristotle writes, “is also counted as bravery” because “those who act on emotion also seem to be brave—as beasts seem to be when they attack those who have wounded them—because brave people are also full of emotion.”56 Elaborating that “emotion is most eager to run and face dangers,” a heroic virtue in Homer, Aristotle distinguishes between “brave people [who] act because” aided by passion/emotion and wild beasts that cannot be deemed courageous because they impulsively attack (based on primal instincts) in response to pain and fear.57 Hamlet’s murderous reaction to Polonius’s cries behind the arras is instinctual and unpremeditated, taking even the protagonist himself by surprise and prompting him to identify himself as heaven’s “scourge and minister” (3.4.159) assigned to punish wrongdoing. After the stabbing of Polonius and his harsh castigation of Gertrude, Hamlet starts responding to pressures with an indifference not found in the first three acts of the play. From struggling to fulfill his role as an avenger, he now surrenders himself to events without the habit of overthinking that literary history has identified as a major source of his procrastination. Hamlet finds himself inhabiting a world in which “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will” (5.2.10–11). This deterministic conception of human experience finds expression in Greek tragedy as fate or the will of the gods, a conception that cannot be separated from the thorny issue of human agency and free will.58 When one becomes a plaything of the gods, stoicism might very well be the only reasonable response—one needs to be calm whatever the circumstance and responds to whatever life throws one’s way with equanimity. “Give me that man / That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him / In my heart’s core” (3.2.64–66), Hamlet says to Horatio, expressing a desire to embrace the stoic ideal of the apatheia of reason and self-control. Stoic philosophy associated emotions such as fear and envy or passionate attachment to

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things with false judgment. A philosophy of equanimity, stoicism can help make one mentally and emotionally resistant to the buffetings of fortune. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, embracing the stoic position as a response to one’s inability to make sense of life’s challenges and calamities must not be dissociated from the recognition that God is in control of all things and that life ultimately has meaning. However, things are never this straightforward, as King Lear, seeking to embrace patience as a version of the stoic ideal, discovers: the gods are indifferent, and any sense that they dispense justice is an illusion. In the Lear universe, human beings are to the gods as insects are to sadistic boys: played with, tortured, and then disposed of. Disproportionate suffering interrogates expectations of otherworldly justice and reliability of divine providence. The patience that Lear seeks to possess is entangled with his descent into madness. An old king wants to slow down in his twilight years, to induct his daughters into the responsibilities of rule, only to encounter the void. Unlike its experience of King Lear, the audience in Hamlet observes a certain calm descend on the prince, which can be attributed to surrendering the self to God’s “special providence” (5.2.157–58), an affirmation bracketed by the challenge—“We defy augury” (5.2.157)—and resignation: If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes? (5.2.158–61)

Shakespeare’s tragic protagonist rejects man’s ability to interpret, divine, or prognosticate the future, the reason being that the will of the gods and workings of fate cannot be contested or subverted. Hamlet’s lines imply that he had, in the past, responded to his circumstance by overthinking issues in the belief that doing so would give him control over his life. Recognizing, however, that there is nothing one can do to change what has been ordained by the gods in one’s life, Hamlet espouses acceptance and surrender that can accommodate the value of endurance prescribed by stoicism. Between “We defy augury” and “If it be now, ’tis not to come” is Hamlet’s “There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow” (5.2.157–58), an allusion to Matthew 10:29: “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing, and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father?” In Matthew 10:29, Christ gives the example of sparrows to

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emphasize that men and women “are of more value than many sparrows” (Matt. 10:31). Because “all the hairs of your head are numbered” (Matt. 10:30), there is no need for fear because one can be confident of God’s providential care.59 Alison Shell notes that “providence was a more uniformly optimistic idea than either predestination or fate, because of the notion that divine justice existed and would be implemented in the fullness of time.”60 Even as Hamlet expresses the need to embrace whatever the future may throw his way, he appears to take comfort in the idea of divine providence, which bestows a certain degree of calm. Providence is important in the religious literature of the English Renaissance, evocatively underscored by Milton at the conclusion of Paradise Lost, where Adam and Eve, expelled from Eden, begin their life in the postlapsarian world with much anxiety and trepidation, understandably so. They have been banished from their first home—the paradise of innocence—to a world they were not created by God to inhabit. If the archangel Michael counselled Adam and Eve that living a life of virtue, faith, patience, temperance, and love will enable them to “possess / A Paradise within … happier far” (PL 12.586–87) in the condition of exile, the epic narrator also affirms that God’s “Providence” (PL 12.647) will guide and take care of them in their sojourn on earth. Trusting in divine providence means putting one’s faith in a sovereign God who is in control of all things. Trust in divine providence helps to alleviate fears and anxieties. In Paradise Lost, God’s providential control over history and the lives of individuals is revealed in his plan to save fallen humanity from eternal death. Because God is in control, Adam and Eve’s Fall can be said to be “happy,” hence the concept of felix culpa: the “happy fault” or “happy Fall.” The tragedy of the Fall can be said to be happy or fortunate because of the good that will come from it, specifically the blessed experience of God’s supreme love and redemptive design manifested in Calvary’s cross. The idea of God’s providence is a familiar one. In Institutes, Calvin explicates God’s sovereign control over all things by invoking Matthew 10:29, which affirms that nothing happens in creation and in the lives of men outside of the Father’s will.61 All “occurrences, prosperous as well as adverse,” must not be attributed to fortune but recognized as “governed by the secret counsel of God.”62 God’s authority is absolute, and tied up with his “election and decree.”63 Calvin’s emphasis on God’s omniscient and omnipotent providence aims to generate comfort and confidence that nothing in life lies outside the domain of divine control.

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By Act 5 scene 2, Hamlet seems to have moved from anxiety fueled by the appearance of the Ghost to comfort in the existence of a “special providence.” The idea of the theology of comfort is important in the history of the Protestant Reformation, predicated on Luther’s understanding that salvation comes through God’s imputation of righteousness to the sinner without any requirement of contributory merit (works) on the part of fallen man. Because God has changed his attitude toward us and counted his perfect righteousness as our own, there can be peace in the conscience and a sense of liberty that brings both assurance and joy. While Hamlet’s invocation of providence does not directly engage with the radical implications of the Lutheran emphasis that salvation is only made available by grace through faith, it calls to mind the Reformation discourse of predestination and theological comfort. In this discourse, theological comfort stems from the knowledge that a predestinating deity is running the universe.64 The problem here is that the identity of this predestinating deity overlaps quite readily with the identity of the classical fates whose predetermined weaving of the fabric of man’s life can be arbitrarily cruel, explaining the helplessness of being caught in a circumstance that permits no escape. If the fates of the classical tradition can prove disturbingly disconcerting in their capacity to play havoc with the lives of human beings, so can—at least as suggested by the play’s entanglement of Judeo-Christian and classical motifs—the predestinating deity associated in early modern England with the Calvinist tradition. Surrendering to divinity may bring calm and comfort, but stoicism—whether Christian or classical—does not, by definition, obviate the experience of pain and suffering intrinsic to the human and postlapsarian condition. If, for Luther, predestination—the doctrine that all events in one’s life, including the eternal destiny of our souls, have been preordained and willed by God—should bring comfort to the elect, then what about the reprobate? At around the time when Hamlet was first performed at the Globe in the early 1600s, the topic of predestination was discussed by fervent Protestants who wanted Calvin’s accentuation on double predestination to be foregrounded in Article XVII of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England (1563). As it then stood, Article XVII—titled “Of Predestination and Election”—reads: PREDESTINATION to life, is the everlasting purpose of God, whereby (before the foundations of the world were laid) he hath constantly Decreed

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by his Counsel, secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation, those whom he hath chosen in Christ out of mankind, and to bring them by Christ to everlasting salvation, as vessels made to honour. Wherefore they which be endued with so excellent a benefit of God, be called according to Gods purpose by his Spirit working in due season: they through grace obey the calling: they be justified freely: they be made sons of God by adoption: they be made like the image of his only begotten Son Jesus Christ: they walk religiously in good works: and at length by God’s mercy they attain to everlasting felicity…. Furthermore, we must receive Gods promises in such wise as they be generally set forth to us in holy Scripture: and in our doings, that will of God is to be followed, which we have expressly declared unto us in the word of God.65

In response to the clamor for double predestination to be highlighted as a creed of the Church of England, Dr John Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury, formally approved what came to be known as the Lambeth Articles (of 1595), effectively a Calvinistic appendix to the Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles: 1. GOD has from all Eternity predestinated some to Life, and reprobated some to Death. 2. The efficient cause of Predestination is not a foresight of Faith, or Perseverance, or good Works, or of any other thing that is in the Person predestinated, but it is the sole, absolute, and simple Will of God. 3. Of those that are Predestinated, there is a determinate and certain Number, which can neither be increased nor diminished. 4. Those who are not predestinated to Salvation, shall of necessity be condemned for their Sins. 5. A true, lively, and justifying Faith, and the sanctifying Spirit of God is neither extinguished nor lost, nor does it depart from those that have been once partakers of it, either totally or finally. 6. The truly faithful Man; that is, one that is indued with justifying Faith; is certain with a certainty of Faith, of the forgiveness of his Sins, and of his eternal Salvation by Christ. 7. Grace sufficient to Salvation is not afforded, communicated, or granted to all Men, whereby they may be saved if they will.

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8. No Man can come to Christ, unless it be given him, and unless the Father draw him; and all Men are not so drawn by the Father, that they may come to the Son. 9. It is not put in the Will or Power of every Man to be saved.66 When Puritan complaint against Article XVII’s language as restrained, or that skirted the express definition and theological implications of double predestination, came before King James I’s adjudication at the three-­day Hampton Court Conference of January 1604, the Stuart monarch rejected the petition to have Calvin’s predestinarian idea forcefully inscribed as a creed of the Church of England. However, the king’s rejection did not prevent debates on the grammar of predestination from taking place, and, in April 1604, a committee in the House of Commons sought a conference with the House of Lords, partly to seek support for adding the Lambeth Articles to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England.67 Once again, the king overruled the request. The push to confer credal standing on the dogma of double predestination was in part a reaction to the rise of Arminianism, a theological movement that saw no incompatibility between God’s sovereignty and man’s free will. William Laud, the cleric who was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury by King Charles I in 1633, held Arminian beliefs. And so did Milton, who was not only an epic poet but also a Puritan apologist for tyrannicide. When we read Hamlet with the Hampton Court Conference in mind, Hamlet’s view that he inhabits a foreordained universe—a motif that goes all the way back to classical Greek tragedy—resonates with early seventeenth-century England’s doctrinal disputes about the relationship between predestination and free will or human agency. Hamlet is a protagonist who grapples with the experience of being unwillingly thrust into a set of circumstances from which he cannot escape and over which he has little to no control. If Hamlet cannot foretell what the future may bring and is therefore unable to shape events according to plan, he nevertheless tries to meet the challenges posed by each moment in the best way he knows how. But Hamlet’s best is far from reassuring, especially given his ineffectuality as an avenger.

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Act 5 Scene 2 In Mortal Thoughts, Brian Cummings analyzes the unfolding of events in Hamlet in terms of “the philosophy of chance,” displacing the play’s theological emphasis on predeterminism and human agency onto a more secular register.68 The operative concepts in this secular register are “fortune” and “chance,” words associated semantically with “luck,” a term that is absent in Hamlet but found in Shakespeare’s other plays.69 To show the importance of chance as a philosophical and thematic concept in the play, Cummings summarizes the distinctive misalignment between plan and execution, between action and result, in contributing to the tragedy of Denmark’s royal family: [J]ustice has been achieved only by “accidentall” process; intention has been mismatched with result; cunning plots have had the opposite effect; malicious motives have succeeded only in redounding upon themselves. The key word is that interesting case “casual”, a word that has over time been reduced to meaning a kind of attire to wear at parties but here is used in its root sense: subject to chance, something that just happens.70

Cummings notes that Hamlet is a play in which references to “chance” and “fortune” can be read with reference to the idea of “luck,” where the good and bad things that happen to us are brought about by chance rather than the result of our own actions. Luck is something people often try to manage in the hope of making it work in their favor, such as buying multiple lottery tickets in the hope of increasing one’s odds at winning. In Hamlet, the operative word associated with “chance” is “wager.” The different meanings available for “wager” in the OED include (a) “Something (esp. a sum of money) laid down and hazarded on the issue of an uncertain event; a stake”; (b) “An agreement or contract under which each of the parties promises to give money or its equivalent to the other according to the issue of an uncertain event; a betting transaction”; and (c) “Something on the issue of which bets are or may be laid; the subject of a bet or bets.”71 Even though the OED cites Hamlet’s “iv. vii. 128 Wee’le make a solemne wager [place bets] on your cunnings [fencing skills]” as an example of definition (b) above, events in Hamlet also point to definition (c). In Act 5 scene 2, the word “wager” recurs like a refrain: (a) Osric tells Hamlet that “his majesty bade me signify to you that a has laid a great wager on your head” (5.2.99–100; emphasis mine).

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(b) Osric continues to inform Hamlet that “The King…hath wagered with him six Barbary horses, against the which he imponed [staked]…six French rapiers and poniards, with their assigns [accessories] as girdle, hanger, or so” (5.2.108–110; emphasis mine). (c) Horatio tells Hamlet, “You will lose this wager, my lord” (5.2.147; emphasis mine). (d) Hamlet responds to the king’s arrangement of this duel with sportsmanship: “I do embrace it freely, / And will this brothers’ wager frankly play.— / [To attendants] Give us the foils. Come on” (5.2.189–91; emphasis mine). (e) We hear Claudius instructing Osric, “Give them the foils, young Osric. Cousin Hamlet, / You know the wager?” (5.2.197–98; emphasis mine). In this last scene of the play, Hamlet appears to be quite relaxed about his odds of winning the upcoming duel with Laertes. The grimness of a predetermined universe palpable in earlier acts of the play now appears to be mitigated by (the perceived presence of) God’s providential care and sovereign control, as we have discussed above. As the play moves—very quickly, we might add—to its denouement, Hamlet finds himself operating in instinctive and reactive mode to the rapidity with which things are coming at him. He has refrained from accepting Claudius’s toast by not drinking from the (poisoned) chalice offered him only to find his mother drinking from the same cup to wish him well. Almost immediately after this, the stage direction indicates “Laertes wounds Hamlet,” after which—with almost no break in between—the two duelists scuffle and switch rapiers, with Hamlet now wounding Laertes. At this moment, Gertrude collapses and proclaims that she has been poisoned. At about the same time, Laertes confesses to Hamlet that both he and the prince have received their mortal wound from the poisoned rapier designed by the treacherous king. In all this, there is little or no time for thinking or deliberation on Hamlet’s part. Suddenly and without warning, Hamlet plunges a rapier into Claudius at the same time forcing him to ingest the poisoned wine partially drunk by Gertrude. He calls the king “incestuous, murd’rous, damnèd Dane” (5.2.267), reminding the audience of his violent disapproval of his mother’s second marriage. Cummings notes that “[t]he last scene of Hamlet is famously confused. Nothing quite goes to plan. Gertrude takes the wrong cup; Hamlet and

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Laertes swap swords; both receive a killing blow. It is at this point, apprehending the full enormity of what has happened, that Hamlet finally is spurred into doing what he has been promising to do throughout the play, and kills his uncle.”72 The question here is whether the revenge imperative foisted on Hamlet by the Ghost was on Hamlet’s mind when he thrust his rapier into Claudius. Or was the killing of Claudius an instinctive and unpremeditated reaction to the king’s plot of the poisoned rapier and chalice? When onlookers at the Danish court cry “Treason, treason!” (5.2.265) in response to Hamlet’s stabbing of Claudius, they are reacting to what they have just prima facie witnessed: violence enacted against the king of Denmark by his nephew. For an audience, Hamlet’s killing of Claudius can only be interpreted as an act of treason. You are forbidden from taking the life of a king who is God’s deputy placed on the throne by divine appointment. The audience does not know that Claudius had murdered the old king. Fatigue and resignation are key notes in Hamlet’s experience of dying. As he lay dying, Hamlet makes peace with Laertes and stops his friend Horatio from consuming the remaining poison and committing suicide like “an antique Roman than a Dane” (5.2.283), asking him to tell his story in “this harsh world” where human beings “draw [their] breath in pain” (5.2.290). As he prepares to die, Hamlet tells the audience that “The rest is silence” (5.2.300), the play’s tragic equivalence of The Tempest’s “our little life / Is rounded with a sleep” (4.1.157–58).73 In his experience of the play, Robert Watson finds that Hamlet “deeply condemns the illusions of afterlife it superficially encourages.”74 My reading of the play does not find Shakespeare treating Christian conceptions of the afterlife critically or with deep skepticism. Hamlet does not seek to fine-tune doctrinal perspectives on the afterlife through explication and debate or to convey Shakespeare’s personal religious conviction. This tragedy does, however, register interest in the experience of death and dying as well as in the conditions of salvation and damnation, a thematic feature which suggests that Shakespeare is personally concerned—for one reason or another—with what happens to us when we die. If Shakespeare considers the possibility that death is oblivion (“The rest is silence”), he also grapples with the implications of the Christian understanding of repentance and forgiveness of sin, of salvation and damnation. Compared with Macbeth, King Lear, and Othello, Hamlet stands out for its sustained interest in the Christian themes of the awakening conscience, repentance of sin, predestination, and the conditions of eternity, topics

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that pertain to the destiny of the Christian soul after this life. Even though Hamlet does not shy away from suggesting that death entails cessation of consciousness, annihilation of being, and the condition of nothingness, it does not abandon the material of faith when conditions appear, in the words of Kent in King Lear, “All’s cheerless, dark and deadly” (Folio 5.3.265). Upon Hamlet’s death, Horatio bids his friend farewell: “Good night, sweet prince, / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest” (5.2.302–303). The nihilistic tenor of Kent’s appraisal of the environment in which the tragedy of King Lear unfolded presents a contrast to Horatio’s appeal to the consolations of faith made available by the church to those who mourn.

Conclusion Hamlet stands out among Shakespeare’s great tragedies in its (self-­ conscious) evocation of doctrinal topics and religious subject matter that are, one could say, cultural commonplaces as they are made familiar through people’s participation in liturgical worship, reading of scripture, listening to sermons, and suchlike. When the play deploys the stage presence of a Ghost calling for revenge—a familiar feature in revenge tragedies—it finds opportunity to describe the conditions of the afterlife in purgatorial terms, alluding to differences in Catholic and Protestant understanding of the destination of one’s soul after death. When the play emphasizes that King Hamlet was murdered before he could repent of his sins and was therefore consigned to purgatory, it registers an anxiety shared by many people in Elizabethan England about encountering the God of judgment without having made a good confession when death arrived without warning. In its portrayal of the burial of the dead—as in Ophelia’s case—Hamlet also considers society’s as well as the church’s views on suicide, especially as it pertains to those who take their own lives and, as a result, die outside the state of grace. Framed by audience expectations of the genre of the revenge tragedy, Hamlet evokes familiar motifs and terms of reference found in both the classical tradition and the Bible. When Hamlet seeks to fulfil his role and identity as the avenger of his father’s murder and turns to the classical tradition for counsel, he finds that the cultural documents of the classical world offer definitions of heroic and noble action that do not always square with biblical conceptions of right conduct. When he turns to the Judeo-Christian tradition for its perspective, he finds that it is not

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straightforward because of differences in doctrinal emphasis that Shakespeare’s audience can trace to familiar Catholic-Protestant tensions. In Hamlet, Shakespeare draws on both Protestant and Catholic perspectives to inflect his dramatization of Hamlet’s struggle to find appropriate philosophical and theological insights for meaning making. When he alludes to Reformation ideas together with Catholic ones, he does not privilege one tradition over the other. Hamlet dramatizes the ways in which the belief structures of institutionalized religion can extend comfort to a person in pain and distress even while susceptible to disagreement and conflict. Part of that comfort derives from the implied premise of an afterlife in the play’s dramatic portrayal of the Ghost. The question here is which version of the afterlife is authoritative. Even if Shakespeare’s audience cannot finally determine with confidence the Ghost’s identity as “a spirit of health or goblin damned” (1.4.21), they are at least pressured to give some thought as to whether there is hell, purgatory, heaven, or nothingness after we have shuffled off this mortal coil.

Notes 1. When undertaking a critical reading of differences in doctrinal emphases (sometimes popularly) perceived to separate Protestantism from Catholicism, we need to remember Alison Shell’s caveat that devout individuals can come from different backgrounds and inhabit complex, sometimes contradictory, environments. In Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), Shell notes that, despite the fact that “early modern Catholicism was a catacomb culture, defined by secret or discreet worship[,] … Catholics did not spend all their lives underground, and their visibility had complex effects. … [T]here was considerable personal and literary interaction between individuals of opposing religious views. Catholics and Protestants often lived side by side, sometimes spoke to each other without quarrelling, and read each other’s books” (16). 2. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 1.5.76. All references to Hamlet and other plays of Shakespeare are to this edition unless otherwise indicated. 3. Elizabeth Grymeston, Miscellanea. Meditations. Memoratives (London: George Elde, 1604), Chap. 3. 4. Brian Cummings, ed., The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 679.

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5. David Scott Kastan, A Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 131. 6. For an account of late medieval concerns and anxiety about not dying with proper confession and penance, anointing, and receiving the Eucharist, see Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400-c.1580, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 301–27. 7. Peter Marshall, “The Reformation of Hell? Protestant and Catholic Infernalisms in England, c. 1560–1640,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 61, no. 2 (April 2010): 279–98. 8. Ibid., 280. 9. Studies of conscience in Renaissance literature and thought include Harald E.  Braun and Edward Vallance, eds., The Renaissance Conscience (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) and John S. Wilks, The Idea of Conscience in Renaissance Drama (New York: Routledge, 1990). 10. In Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 89–90, Huston Diehl invokes Claudius’s response to “The Mousetrap” as exemplifying the power of Reformation art and theater. 11. Ibid., 86. 12. Ibid., 5. Diehl argues that the English Reformation did not invariably support the anti-theatrical prejudice: “By inspiring new kinds of rituals, spectacles, and dramas, the reformed religion … contributes to the formation of a uniquely Protestant theater in early modern England.” 13. The 1599 Geneva Bible (White Hall, WV: Tolle Lege & White Hall Press, 2010). All citations of the Bible are to this edition unless otherwise indicated. 14. Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon: The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 290. All references to Bacon’s works are to this edition unless otherwise indicated. 15. Ibid. 16. William Ames, Conscience with the power and cases thereof (London: E. G., 1643), 6–9. 17. For a study of how Calvinist theology in sixteenth- and seventeenth-­ century England generated a culture of despair built on searing anxiety pertaining to reprobation and damnation, see John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 18. Martin Luther, A Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, in Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (New York: Anchor Books, 1962), 147. 19. Ibid., 317.

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20. For a discussion of how Protestant confession in Shakespeare’s England cannot be convincingly dissociated from the doctrinal underpinnings of the Catholic sacrament of penance, see Paul D.  Stegner, Confession and Memory in Early Modern English Literature: Penitential Remains (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 106–28. Stegner draws our attention to the ways in which Judas Iscariot’s suicide has encouraged interpretations of failed repentance as well as to the uncertainties experienced by confessors striving to verify inward and efficacious change of heart. For an analysis of Shakespeare’s dramatization of Claudius’s confession scene in relation to the context of confession genres and scaffold confessions (exemplified, e.g., by the Earl of Essex, who was found guilty of treason against Elizabeth I), see Joseph Sterrett, The Unheard Prayer: Religious Toleration in Shakespeare’s Drama (Leiden, NL: Brill, 2012), 85–105. Often “prescripted” in the sense that there are social and cultural expectations of how they should transpire under specific circumstances, confessions have both a performative and deeply personal/private dimension. 21. In “Hamlet” without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), Margreta de Grazia makes the point that the “desire … to damn a soul to eternal pain is the most extreme form of evil imaginable in a society that gave even its most heinous felons the opportunity to repent before execution” (188). 22. Phillip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall (London: N.  Trubner & Co., 1877–79), 189. All citations of the text are to this edition. 23. Ibid. 24. For a discussion of how the priest’s degradation of Ophelia’s funeral through “maimèd rites” constitutes a ritual anomaly in the burial of the dead given Ophelia’s supposed derangement, see Roland Mushat Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 297–309. According to Frye, Ophelia should have been conferred all the rites of a proper Christian burial because her death was not willful and therefore not amounting to “self-slaughter.” Responding to Frye’s “claim that mercy was invariably extended to the insane in Shakespeare’s lifetime” (310), Michael MacDonald argues that the law against suicide was in fact rigorously enforced in early modern England in “Ophelia’s Maimèd Rites,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37, no. 3 (Autumn 1986): 309–317. For a reading of the relationship between the breakdown of funeral rites and the breakdown of ceremonies representative of Claudius’s corrupt rule, see James V. Holleran, “Maimed Funeral Rites in Hamlet,” English Literary Renaissance 19, no. 1 (December 1989): 65–93. Holleran considers the roles of the coroner and priest in determining whether the dead person was a suicide, a verdict that would

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have an impact on the funeral rites accorded to him or her. For a reading of Shakespeare’s allusion to rites and rituals found in the Book of Common Prayer to contextualize his dramatization of debates on proper forms of the funeral liturgy in the burial of Ophelia, see Swift, Shakespeare’s Common Prayers, 127–60, esp. 153–57. 25. Cummings, ed., Book of Common Prayer, 451. 26. Gary B.  Ferngren, “The Ethics of Suicide in the Renaissance and Reformation,” in Suicide and Euthanasia: Historical and Contemporary Themes, ed. Baruch A. Brody, Philosophy and Medicine 35 (Dordrecht, NL: Springer, 1989), 155–81. For a historical and sociological reading of death and suicide in early modern England, see Michael MacDonald and Terence R.  Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). 27. MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, 15. 28. de Grazia, “Hamlet” without Hamlet, 142. 29. In English history, the Crown’s ascendancy over ecclesiastical authority occasioned by Henry VIII’s self-declared headship of the Church of England led to enactment of laws aimed at reducing the power of the church. In addition to the dissolution of the monasteries, legislations such as the Act in Restraint of Appeals (1533) and the Act of Supremacy (1534) set out to dismantle papal jurisdictional authority by subjecting spiritual cases to the Crown. 30. Ramie Targoff, John Donne, Body and Soul (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 181. For a related reading of the social and cultural meanings conveyed by monuments in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, see Peter Sherlock, Monuments and Memory in Early Modern England (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008). 31. In the 1604 Quarto, “solid,” found in the 1623 Folio text, was rendered as “sallied,” sometimes read as a possible spelling for “sullied.” 32. John Donne, “The Relic,” in John Donne: The Major Works, ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 130. All citations of John Donne’s poetry are to this edition. 33. Warren Chernaik comments on Milton’s subscription to the doctrine of mortalism in Milton and the Burden of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 30. 34. Targoff, John Donne, 8–10. 35. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1981), 259–76. 36. Ibid., 2:267. 37. Ibid., 2:273. 38. Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 252. For a reading of the significance of memory in the genre of the revenge tragedy and in Protestantism’s dis-

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placement of the dead by ending the doctrine of purgatory, see Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Death in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 243–62. For a reading of memory, iconography, and the narrativization of status and achievement in funereal monuments in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, see Sherlock, Monuments and Memory. 39. John Donne, Biathanatos, ed. Michael Rudick and M. Pabst Battin (New York: Garland, 1982), 39, 81. 40. John Milton, Paradise Lost, in The Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Macmillan, 1957), Book 9, lines 1060–61. All citations of Milton’s poetry are to this edition, with Paradise Lost abbreviated as PL and Paradise Regained abbreviated as PR in the text. 41. John Donne, “Sermon Preached at Saint Dunstan’s Upon New-Year’s Day, 1624,” John Donne Sermons (BYU Harold B.  Lee Library Digital Collections, 2004–5), 18, http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/JohnDonne/id/3211/rec/1. 42. Ibid. 43. In Ill Composed: Sickness, Gender, and Belief in Early Modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), Olivia Weisser writes that, in early modern England, spirituality can be “experienced in the body, in shaking limbs and stuffed-up stomachs” (68). Weisser elaborates: “pious individuals were assured of … receiving God’s grace upon sensing a physical alteration, such as a stir, prick, or burn. Protestant doctrine referred to the reception of divine grace as a ‘quickening’ of the soul, a phrase that connoted a particular bodily sensation for some women. Quickening also referred to the moment when a pregnant woman first felt her fetus move within the womb, marking the beginning of life. As both a medical and a religious term, quickening represented an acute moment of renewal and generation” (68). 44. Marc Shell, Children of the Earth: Literature, Politics, and Nationhood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 98. Evoking the word “incest” to describe the marriage of one’s mother to one’s uncle invites contextualization from the Old Testament. Genesis 38 offers an early account of the divinely sanctioned cultural practice that came to be known as the levirate marriage in which the brother of a deceased man is obliged to marry his brother’s widow to produce offspring who could fulfill the demands of patrilineal perpetuation. 45. Luther, Selections, 351. 46. Ibid., 355. 47. For a reading of the implications for church ritual, individual worship, and doctrinal understanding of the Reformation dismantling of the Catholic sacrament of penance entailing contrition, confession, and absolution, see

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Sarah Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), esp. 1–56. In a reading of the closet scene, or what she refers to as “Hamlet’s Confession” (55), Beckwith makes the point that “Hamlet has not been formally invested with the role of confessor; there has been no ordination” (55). Because of Hamlet’s lack of priestly credentials as a “ghostly father,” whether or not Gertrude accepts her son’s assumption of the role of confessor is something to be considered in critical analysis (56). In my reading of the scene, while Gertrude showed she was incensed at Hamlet for the way he was behaving toward Claudius, she did not take umbrage with his identification of her transgressions as sins that needed genuine repentance. 48. Martin Luther, Lectures on the Minor Prophets I, in Luther’s Works: American Edition, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut Lehmann, vol. 18 (St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 1955–75), 401. 49. Offering a reading of the discipline of the faithful in the early New England church, David A.  Weir offers basic comparisons with discipline in the English church in Early New England: A Covenanted Society (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), esp. 160–63. 50. James Nohrnberg, “Forward,” in John E.  Curran Jr., “Hamlet,” Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency: Not to Be (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), xvii. 51. Glenn Clark, “Speaking Daggers: Shakespeare’s Troubled Ministers,” in Shakespeare and Religious Change, ed. Kenneth J. E. Graham and Philip D. Collington (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 176–95. 52. Ibid., 187. 53. For a psychoanalytical reading of Hamlet’s encounter with the maternal body, see Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, “Hamlet” to “The Tempest” (New York: Routledge, 1992), 11–37. 54. Kenneth J. E. Graham, Disciplinary Measures from the Metrical Psalms to Milton (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 3–4. 55. For the idea that King Lear’s old age (80 years old) would be considered unusual and even unnatural in the early modern period, I am indebted to Stephen Greenblatt’s lecture, “‘Age is Unnecessary’: Shakespeare and the War Between Old and Young,” delivered at Yale-NUS (Singapore) on August 10, 2017. Greenblatt invokes John Florio’s 1603 translation of Montaigne’s essay, “Of Age,” to contextualize early modern views of longevity in his reading of King Lear. 56. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis, IN.: Hackett, 1985), 76. 57. Ibid., 76–77.

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58. In Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), Terry Eagleton writes that the ancient Greeks did not quite share our modern sense of the individual as a morally responsible and autonomous agent pitted against an external fate. The ancient Greeks “perceived an irreducible ambiguity in human existence which made it hard to categorize actions simply as ‘willed’ or ‘fated’, ‘free’ or ‘necessary’” (106). 59. For a study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English belief in God’s active intervention in human affairs, see Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 60. Alison Shell, Shakespeare and Religion (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010), 178. 61. Calvin, Institutes, 1:173. 62. Ibid., 1:177. 63. Ibid. 64. For a reading that the heavy religious tenor of Hamlet’s resignation to divine providence does not ultimately constitute “a counter-example to the secularizing process” (90) characteristic of both Shakespeare’s plays and the early modern stage, see Dawson, “Shakespeare and Secular Performance,” 90–92. 65. Cummings, ed., The Book of Common Prayer, 678. 66. John Ellis, A defence of the Thirty nine articles of the Church of England written in Latin by J. Ellis … now done into English; to which are added the Lambeth Articles; together with the judgment of Bishop Andrews, Dr. Overall, and other eminent and learned men upon them (London: Printed for H. Bonwicke, T. Goodwin, M. Wooten, S. Manship, and B. Tooke, 1700), 102–103. 67. Maurice Hunt, “Predestination and the Heresy of Merit in Othello,” Comparative Drama 30, no. 3 (Fall 1996): 346–76, esp. 351–53. 68. Cummings, Mortal Thoughts, 208. 69. In Mortal Thoughts, 207–35, Cummings offers a fascinating reading of the history and cultural significance of the word “luck” in the English language and its conceptual ties to “chance” and “fortune,” words and definitions that are not always viewed positively in the Christian faith. Cummings also analyzes the use and avoidance of the word “luck” in the history of English translations of the Bible, one which registers the Judeo-Christian tradition’s theological unease with the “metaphysics of fate or the goddess Fortuna” (215) that it associates with heathenism. 70. Ibid. 71. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “concupiscence, n.,” accessed September 7, 2021, concupiscence, n. : Oxford English Dictionary (nus.edu.sg). 72. Cummings, Mortal Thoughts, 208.

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73. Noting that death is both dreaded and longed for in Hamlet, Michael Neill argues in Issues of Death that “[b]oth of these contradictory attitudes towards death can be accommodated in the hero’s enigmatic final sentence, ‘the rest is silence’ (V. ii. 352); for the meaning of these words, whose terminating period enacts the abruption of which they speak, shifts with the degree of emphasis one gives to ‘rest’ or ‘silence’. Spoken with one inflexion, they can signal the grateful release of a mind tired with the endless iteration of ‘words, words, words’; spoken with another, they can express the frustration of a narrative voice cut short, like Hotspur’s, by the ‘stop’ of death” (218). 74. Robert N. Watson, The Rest is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 74.

CHAPTER 3

Temptation, Fornication, and the Fall in Measure for Measure

when lust. By unchaste looks, loose gestures, and foul talk. But most by lewd and lavish act of sin, Lets in defilement to the inward parts, The soul grows clotted by contagion. (John Milton, Comus). … whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her, hath committed adultery with her already in his heart. (Matt. 5:28).

Measure for Measure is a dark comedy that sets out to dramatize an event of sexual harassment, in which a man in a position of high authority exercises his power to pressure a young woman—who wishes to become a nun—to sleep with him. This scenario is not new. Heads of state, governors, and even members of royal families have been called out at various times for suspected or actual trysts with women they should not have been involved with. When Angelo—the authority figure deputized by Duke Vincentio to look after Vienna when he takes a leave of absence—is approached by a novitiate Isabella to overturn the death sentence pronounced on her brother Claudio for making his fiancée pregnant before marriage, something startling happens. Angelo—the “angelic” deputy— proposes a quid pro quo: that this young woman yield him her virginity in exchange for her brother’s life. Judge Angelo’s indecent proposal raises © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 W. S. H. Lim, Shakespeare and the Theater of Religious Conviction in Early Modern England, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40006-3_3

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some challenging questions: What can a person—for that matter, a young woman—do when male power bullies and coerces with impunity? What makes a person think that he is so well fortified spiritually as to be immune to the temptation of sexual desire and lust? Importantly, do the natural needs and instincts of the human body critique Christianity’s distrust of sex and pleasure? If so, does Measure for Measure interrogate the Christian tradition’s familiar representation of the relationship between sexual activity—especially when it takes place outside of marriage—and sin and moral transgression against God? This chapter considers Shakespeare’s thematization of human sexual activity—making love within and outside the marital economy; sleeping with the wrong woman thinking she is somebody else; pimping and prostitution—in relation to the context of familiar church teachings on sex and marriage, doctrinal conceptions of sexual purity, cultural ideas of chastity, and definitions of fornication. In Measure for Measure, acceptable and correct forms of sexual activity are defined with reference to Christian doctrine and to the state’s regulation of the human body by determining what it can and cannot do.1

Saint Augustine and Sexual Desire Measure for Measure is the story of one Duke Vincentio, a ruler who is known for his reticence in applying the law to punish wrongdoing in the realm he is responsible for governing. His lenient disposition and laxity in enacting discipline and punishment when required has given rise to a social situation in which citizens no longer fear the law, which—although still in the books—only has the effects of a scarecrow known to frighten but without bite. Duke Vincentio believes that putting Angelo in charge when he is (pretending to be) away will restore respect for the law because this deputy is someone who will not hesitate to dispense appropriate justice when needed. Angelo is known for his upright and disciplined life, which means that the citizenry will not be taken aback when he punishes wrongdoing in society. Much to everyone’s surprise, the first newsworthy case featuring Angelo’s habits as a magistrate is his imposition of the death sentence on Claudio for not following the law’s requirements on how a man and woman ought to behave before marriage. Claudio’s crime is that he has made his fiancée Juliet pregnant, indisputable evidence for the state that he has engaged in premarital sex. Gossip and the rumor mill swing into

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action and characters begin to talk about poor Claudio and the planned demolition of all the houses of ill repute in the suburbs. (In 1604—the year in which Measure for Measure was performed as part of James I’s Christmas celebrations—the Stuart monarch ordered the destruction of tenements in the suburbs of London’s overcharged environment in a bid to prevent the spread of the plague, a violent reconstruction of the cityscape that recalls Angelo’s plans to bulldoze and rehabilitate the Vienna suburbs in Shakespeare’s play.2) The reformation of Vienna entails not only ensuring that judicial punishment is systematically imposed for breaking the law, but also dismantling the support structures enabling criminal activity and immorality to flourish in the first place. In Measure for Measure, wrongdoing takes place not only with reference to the statutes of the criminal law but also in relation to biblical conceptions of sin and right living pleasing to God. Regulating the body appears to be central to the functioning of Vienna’s legal regime. When one lacks the moral fortitude to withstand temptations of the flesh, resulting in fornication—having sex outside of marriage—the law steps in to discipline and punish the transgressing subject. It is specifically for committing the crime of fornication that Claudio has been “Condemned … / To lose his head” (5.1.70–71). Regulation of sexual instincts is not only the responsibility of the state but also of the individual. Associated with decay, corruption, and death, sex is the human activity that brings spiritual transgression/sin into conjunction with secular law. How and why does having sex outside of marriage constitute a transgression of such egregious proportions that it is necessary for the state to impose the death penalty for its occurrence? Shakespeare’s play locates the reason for this extreme law in the deleterious effects that illicit sexual activity has on Viennese society, including the spread of venereal diseases and birth of illegitimate children. (On the subject of illegitimate children, one thinks here not only of Lucio who made the prostitute Kate Keepdown pregnant and then abandoned her, but also the Earl of Gloucester in King Lear who has a bastard son Edmund that he introduces to us in not very sensitive terms.) Measure for Measure offers its audience different views of human sexuality in the conduct of Isabella and Angelo. Early in the play, we encounter Shakespeare’s young protagonist Isabella preparing to take vows to live a celibate life as a nun in a strict convent. The portrayal of a novitiate seeking to commit her life to God by joining the religious Order of Saint Clare brings us not only into the world of European Catholicism but also the

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psychology of a young woman who appears to be idealistic if not naïve in many ways.3 When urged by Lucio to plead for her brother’s life before the magistrate Lord Angelo, Isabella responds awkwardly with words that appear to be bereft of real or deep concern. Given the seriousness of her brother’s plight, Isabella’s reaction is strangely muted, something that strikes Lucio when he witnesses her appeal to Angelo. Remarkably, Isabella frames her first meeting with Angelo by making clear her view that the crime of her brother’s sexual relationship with Juliet—causing her to become pregnant—is “a vice that most I do abhor, / And most desire should meet the blow of justice, / For which I would not plead, but that I must” (2.2.29–31). Suggesting a readiness toward accepting Angelo’s resistance to her brother’s pardon, Isabella has to be prompted by Lucio to be more fervent and articulate in her entreaty. Is Isabella’s reticence and lack of enthusiasm in pleading for her brother’s life symptomatic of a timidity and awkwardness traceable to her inexperience with the world of men and power? Even as we respond to Isabella’s lack of natural eloquence, Shakespeare makes a point of associating Isabella with coldness and rigidity, attributes that are distinctively applied to Angelo in the play. In Act 2 scene 2, Isabella picks up momentum as her entreaty for mercy stretches on. Isabella appeals to the virtue of mercy, saying that her brother—if he were in Angelo’s stead—would most certainly exercise it. She points out that when a person in authority exercises the totality of power granted him by his office, he becomes a tyrant. She then invokes the theme of human beings’ innate fragility and the impermanence of whatever “little brief authority” (2.2.121) a person happens to have the privilege of enjoying at a moment in time. When this person thinks of himself as God with the power of life and death over another human being, he is no different from apes that imitate men, ludicrous animals that think they are human. Isabella next appeals to the common experience of human transgression and failing, which, if Angelo is aware of any wrong that he has ever committed “That’s like my brother’s fault. If it confess / A natural guiltiness, such as is his” (2.2.141–42), he should pardon Claudio. As co-inhabitants of a postlapsarian world, no human being is exempt from wrongdoing and sin. As the Apostle Paul makes clear: “There is none righteous no not one” (Rom. 3:10). What Isabella espouses in her exchange with Angelo is the dictum underscored by Christ in the New Testament: “Let him that is among you without sin, cast the first stone at her” (John 8:7).

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The scene of the second meeting between Angelo and Isabella, Act 2 scene 4 begins with a soliloquy that offers a glimpse into Angelo’s mental state after his first meeting with Isabella in Act 2 scene 2. Although Angelo is trying to pray, he is unable to do so effectively as he cannot quench his lustful thoughts about Isabella. Angelo has made a point of embracing sexual abstinence as a higher good, a moral position that finds support in the Bible, particularly the Pauline epistles. Shakespeare portrays Angelo as a man who not only possesses admirable moral discipline but also takes pride in his exercise of this discipline. For a man like Angelo to be able to say, without any sense of irony, that “’Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus, / Another thing to fall” (2.1.17–18), he must possess an inflated sense of his own spirituality. Setting eyes on Isabella has disrupted any sense he previously had about his unassailable moral fortitude, leading to tumultuous emotions generated by the clash between adherence to moral principles and eruption of libidinal desire. Angelo’s soliloquy has a somber tone. Aware that his lustful imaginings constitute sin in the sight of God, he is nevertheless unwilling or unable to surrender the desires of the flesh and participate in heartfelt repentance. “Heaven hath my empty words” (2.4.2), admits Angelo, recalling Claudius’s attempt to make a good confession of his sins before God, but finds he cannot relinquish his throne acquired through the murder of his brother King Hamlet. Angelo reinforces his “empty words” with a gustatory image of God being masticated: “God in my mouth, / As if I did but only chew his name, / And in my heart the strong and swelling evil / Of my conception” (2.4.4–7). Chewing God’s name is a perfunctory gesture that signifies Angelo’s inability to perform the requirements of substantive contrition. A eucharistic allusion as well, these lines bring consuming God’s body (“Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you” [1 Cor. 11:24]) into conjunction with a “strong and swelling evil,” pointing to the Catholic Church’s emphasis that a person who is in the state of mortal sin must not receive Holy Communion until a good confession has been made. The Apostle Paul’s instruction to the church in 1 Corinthians 11:26–29 has been invoked to lend support to this liturgical proscription: 26 For as often as ye shall eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye show the Lord’s death till he come.

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27 Wherefore, whosoever shall eat this bread, and drink the cup of the Lord unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. 28 Let every man therefore examine himself, and so let them eat of this bread, and drink of this cup. 29 For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh his own damnation, because he discerneth not the Lord’s body.

The concept of sin is central to the dialogue between Isabella and Angelo in Act 2 scene 4. In this meeting, Angelo asks how far Isabella is willing to go to save her brother, as this will come into play when he later proposes that she sleep with him in exchange for Claudio’s life. Knowing that his desire to have sex with Isabella is both a crime and a sin, Angelo seeks to pressure the female supplicant into accepting the rationale that committing sin for the realization of a greater good is permissible. Even though it is possible to mount a convincing reading of Isabella as idealistic, naïve, and inexperienced when it comes to affairs of the world involving men and especially those in power, there is one moment in the young novitiate’s dialogue with Angelo that surprises us because it appears to be inconsistent with our sense of her not very eloquent persona. In Act 2 scene 4, Angelo asks Isabella what she would do if she had to “lay down the treasures of [her] body” (2.4.96) in exchange for her brother’s life. Isabella responds in sexually suggestive language: [W]ere I under the terms of death, Th’impression of keen whips I’d wear as rubies, And strip myself to death as to a bed That longing have been sick for, ere I’d yield My body up to shame. (2.4.100–104)

Even if she were under the sentence of death, she would not compromise the integrity of her honor/virginity. Instead, she would endure the sharp pains of the whip, and embrace lacerations and gashes as if they were precious stones. Isabella’s “rubies” revises the significance of Angelo’s earlier use of the word “treasures” as a metaphor for her maidenhead.4 Isabella would also welcome a painful death over having sex with Angelo. Isabella’s account of what she is willing to undergo to protect her chastity/spiritual purity hinges on words with double meanings, some of them erotically fraught. Derived from the Latin imprimere—or imprint—the word “impression” that she uses defines the action of pressing or stamping

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something with pressure to produce a distinct mark on a surface; it also refers to the general sense that other people may have of you, especially if they do not know you well. Likewise, the transitive verb “strip” refers, at an obvious level, to the removal, dismantling, and diminishing of an object, idea, or concept. You can “strip” someone of his or her honors and privileges; and you can also dismantle a person’s sense of selfhood and identity. In the context of Angelo’s predatorial sexual fantasies, the word “strip” conjures up images of a woman getting naked for the male gaze and his physical enjoyment. (John Donne’s “To His Mistress Going to Bed” comes to mind here.) Isabella’s language here suggests an openness to the practice of corporal mortification in which a person—recognizing the comforts needed or desired by our bodies—submits herself to a regime of deprivation and pain. By enabling the experience of discomfort and even agony, corporal mortification can range from fasting to donning hairshirts to whipping, all aimed at overcoming the demands of the flesh. It comes as no surprise that Isabella, whose ambition is to join the reputationally austere Order of Saint Clare as a nun, should evoke the language of martyrdom to reject Angelo’s ultimatum. Isabella’s invocation of the afflictions she would gladly endure for the sake of spiritual purity calls to mind the erotic and masochistic strain associated with medieval Catholicism’s mystical tradition. A familiar expression of this strain is found in Saint Teresa of Avila, whose subjection to sustained somatic scourging precipitates the experience of mystical ecstasy, which in turn validates the spirituality of ecstatic mysticism. Medieval female mystics characteristically underscore the entanglement of eroticism and suffering/pain in religious experience. The erotization of spiritual experience and spiritualization of erotic experience testify to the mystic’s passionate relationship—not unlike that of sexual love—with the divine. If Isabella gestures toward a dimension of spiritual experience in which violence enacted on the body triggers sexual ecstasy, her erotically charged language might just be apprehended as seductive by Angelo. Isabella’s moral position that she would willingly embrace torture and even death before compromising the purity of her soul and security of eternal life aligns with Christ’s injunction: “fear ye not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him, which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt. 10:28). Central to Isabella’s conception of the purity of one’s soul is the idea of chastity, a word that signifies in both secular and sacred domains. If Isabella shows

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awkwardness as a young woman forced to navigate the unfamiliar contours of a treacherous world in which men can bully and force their sexual designs on hapless women, what are the implications of her response to Claudio’s plea for her to surrender her virginity to Angelo so that he can live? Petrified about his imminent execution, Claudio desperately grasps at anything—including the forfeit of his sister’s virginity—that would save him from death. Informed that Angelo wants Isabella to sleep with him as the condition for his release from death row, Claudio hopes that she will accede to Angelo’s demand. Isabella’s response to Claudio’s anguished cry is uncompromising: she will not live a “shamèd life” (3.1.117). Isabella reacts to her brother’s desperation by angrily telling him that she will “pray a thousand prayers for [his] death, / No word to save [him]” (3.1.147–48), not the kind of language one might expect from someone with aspirations to become a nun. Isabella’s response takes us aback not only because it lacks empathy and sympathy, but also because it suggests a basic inability to appreciate the ethical complexity of the choice forced upon her by Angelo. Isabella’s wish to become a nun and her view of the importance of her virginity brings secular definitions of chastity into conjunction with this virtue’s religious and spiritual significations. Measure for Measure addresses cultural and theological conceptions of chastity, a word we tend to think of today in terms of abstinence from sexual intercourse and unwavering marital fidelity. When fine-tuning the denotative meaning and connotative resonance of the words virginity and chastity in Measure for Measure, we may find Bonnie Lander Johnson’s definition here to be helpful: “For early moderns, chastity was not only one of the most important Christian virtues, both doctrinally and culturally, but one of the key conceptual frameworks through which individual men and women understood their relationship to their own bodies, to their community, to the wider Christian world, and to God. Importantly, chastity was not the same as virginity. Virginity was an anatomical state that preceded sexual activity; chastity was a state, both spiritual and physiological, of sexual integrity that could be observed through all stages of a person’s adult life.”5 The theological significance of chastity in the Christian tradition’s discourse on human sexuality has a long history, provocatively engaged with by Saint Augustine in his Confessions and The City of God. In Confessions, Augustine famously writes about a person’s human urges and passions that struggle with virtue for control of the soul. In his life, Augustine had found it difficult to overcome sexual temptation, making lust/fornication

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(luxuria/fornicatio) the controlling sin that held him captive. His relationship with the one woman he had lived with but did not marry, and who bore him his only son Adeodatus, was defined by passion and lust rather than the love taught by the Church to inhere in the sacrament of marriage. When Augustine finally broke free from the life of debauchery that God impressed on him that he had been living, he was overcome by guilt and shame. Where once he reveled in sexual immorality, now he recognizes and embraces the virtue of chastity. Chastity is important in Augustinian thought, not least because it deals with fallen human nature’s instinctive gravitation toward sin. Despite looking askance at the Catholic Church’s valorization of celibacy, Protestantism’s support for the institution of marriage does not necessarily negate its anxieties about the spiritual dangers of sexual pleasure that distract from the procreative mandate that should be the controlling rationale for all matrimonial unions. If Augustine bequeathed to the Western world the concept of original sin that makes of the entire human species “a massa peccati, a lump of sin,”6 that doctrinal idea was reinforced and developed even further by the Protestant Reformer John Calvin, who postulated that human beings came into the world dead in sin such that only God’s grace can bring to life. Whether God bestows grace on you—a spiritual corpse—depends on whether you belong to the elect. If you are, then the spiritual battle to contain the wayward bent of the soul continues, especially in the realm of sexual desire central to Augustine’s understanding of the theological Fall. This brings us to Calvin’s reading of the seventh commandment of the Decalogue: “Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery.” In his exposition, Calvin emphasizes that “as God loves chastity and purity, we ought to guard against all uncleanness. The substance of the commandment therefore is, that we must not defile ourselves with any impurity or libidinous excess.”7 According to Calvin, celibacy, “a special gift from God,” is only bestowed on a select body of individuals—“eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake”—in Christ’s holy church.8 For the others who are liable to incontinence and susceptible to sexual passion, they are—without exception—to marry because the institution of marriage is “the only remedy by which unchastity may be obviated.”9 That is not to say that husband and wife have the right to lose themselves in “intemperate and unrestrained indulgence”10 even though they are married. Calvin elaborates:

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For though honourable wedlock veils the turpitude of incontinence, it does not follow that it ought forthwith to become a stimulus to it. Wherefore, let spouses consider that all things are not lawful for them. Let there be sobriety in the behaviour of the husband toward the wife, and of the wife in her turn toward the husband; each so acting as not to do anything unbecoming the dignity and temperance of married life. Marriage contracted in the Lord ought to exhibit measure and modesty—not run to the extreme of wantonness. This excess Ambrose censured gravely, but not undeservedly, when he described the man who shows no modesty or comeliness in conjugal intercourse, as committing adultery with his wife.11

The Cambridge and Calvinist theologian William Perkins affirms that “he committeth adultery with his wife, who in the use of wedlocke hath neither regard of seemelines, nor honestie. A wise man ought to rule his wife in judgment, not in affection. He will not give the bridle unto headstrong pleasure, nor headily company with his wife. Nothing…is more shameless, then to make a strumpet of his wife.”12 To Calvin, for whom adultery is a sin that violates the covenantal bonds between husband and wife as well as between the adulterer and God, unchastity refers not only to “the outward act” of sexual intercourse with someone who is not one’s spouse but also, importantly, to “purity of mind.”13 Shakespeare’s Isabella would agree with Calvin that spiritual purity must be affirmed at both the physical and mental levels. I am not suggesting here that Shakespeare was immersing himself in the doctrinal and theological niceties of the Fall and of original sin in the human experience, but that cultural and religious conceptions of purity and chastity—whether basic or developed—became suddenly and urgently foregrounded for Isabella proceeding from her encounter with Angelo. The inviolability of the idea of chastity at both the physical and spiritual levels is at the heart of Isabella’s response to Angelo’s scandalous proposition and Claudio’s anguished plea against execution.

Augustine, Spenser, Milton, and the Discourse of Rape Rape is a word that has been invoked in critical analysis of dramatic episodes and moments in Measure for Measure, ranging from Angelo’s abuse of power in demanding sexual favors from a female appellant to Duke Vincentio’s proposal of marriage to Isabella, which has sometimes been

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viewed as coercive because appearing like “a sanitized equivalent to Angelo’s proposed rape of her.”14 The idea of rape has even been invoked in readings of the bed trick in which Angelo was duped into believing he was sleeping with Isabella when in fact it was with his spurned fiancée Mariana. According to Pascale Aebischer, “having sex with the one woman in the world [Angelo] least wants to sleep with is a kind of rape by Isabella through her substitute Mariana.”15 The present-day English common-law offense of “rape by deception” is contextually relevant here, even if its application back in time to Jacobean England when Measure for Measure was first performed risks anachronism.16 This criminal offense refers to a situation in which a person—the victim—willingly engages in sex with a perpetrator/offender as the result of a deception, without which there would have been no consent.17 Deception can assume many forms, including a false statement, an action, or an impersonation. Impersonation is at the heart of the bed trick perpetrated by Duke Vincentio, where Mariana stands in for Isabella to get into bed with Angelo. Augustine’s work not only registers a deep distrust of human sexuality, emphasizing that sexual intercourse outside of marriage is a serious infraction of God’s moral law, but it also considers cultural and spiritual conceptions of chastity in relation to rape. In The City of God, Augustine looks closely at how the concept of chastity applies to women who were raped against their will. The historical context for Augustine’s meditation on the spiritual and cultural implications of forced violation of the female body was the sacking of Rome in 410  CE by the Visigoths led by Alaric, an event that Augustine invokes to reflect on the conditions of life in the postlapsarian world and theological significance of suffering in the city of man. What happens to a woman when she is physically violated by the enemy under conditions of war? Has she lost her chastity and purity as a result? Augustine evokes the legal concept of consent on the part of the victim to determine the condition of her spiritual state when she is raped by a man. When a woman who is a virgin is raped—is sexually assaulted against her will—the sanctity of her soul remains intact.18 According to Augustine, purity “is a virtue of the soul, and has for its companion virtue the fortitude which will rather endure all ills than consent to evil.”19 The purity or defilement of one’s soul depends on the will, and on whether a woman desired to have sex with the man. Absence of consent—and this applies also to a situation in which the woman experiences some degree of

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physical pleasure when raped—means there is no moral or spiritual transgression against God.20 Augustine also considers the psychological effects of rape on a woman, and rightly identifies shame as a potentially overwhelming and destructive emotion.21 Shame comes about because of social norms or lack of understanding. When the pressure becomes overwhelming, the woman who experiences shame might take her own life, as the classic example of Lucretia—a noblewoman from ancient Rome—demonstrates much to Augustine’s perplexity and disapproval.22 What befuddled Augustine was why Lucretia committed suicide. Augustine’s analysis of Lucretia’s spiritual purity in relation to her rape by Sextus Tarquinius was complicated by his need to take account of her suicide, understood as an egregious sin against God. Might she be experiencing remorse because she had experienced some sexual pleasure and inadvertently given (some) consent to her rapist?23 Shakespeare’s own interest in the story of Lucretia found expression in The Rape of Lucrece, a narrative poem which deals with the themes of lust, chastity, and rape also pertinent to Measure for Measure. In Lucrece, a Roman soldier by the name of Collatine praises and boasts about his wife Lucrece’s beauty and chastity, piquing another soldier Tarquin’s interest and curiosity. Visiting Collatine’s home, Tarquin finds Lucrece to be indeed the paragon of beauty and virtue vaunted by her husband and is overcome by lust and desire. Intruding into her bedroom, Tarquin views Lucrece’s body as a fortress waiting to be breached and conquered through rape. Lucrece is distinctive for the narrative detail it offers on the tragic protagonist’s mental and emotional turmoil catalyzed by Tarquin’s sexual crime committed in the privacy of the bedroom shared by Lucrece with her husband. Shakespeare evokes the motifs of reputation, honor, and revenge in Lucrece’s overwhelming sense of shame generated by the experience of physical defilement signified by the symbol of blackened blood. Living in the world of the Roman soldier, Lucrece figures her rape as the sacking of a “house” (l. 1170), “mansion” (l. 1171), “sacred temple” (l. 1172), and “fort” (l. 1175), emphasizing that the transgression of the body has inevitable implications for the integrity of the soul. Experiencing psychological trauma, Shakespeare’s Lucrece finds opportunity to evoke the Augustinian idea that rape without the will’s participation leaves intact the purity of the soul (ll. 1053–1659). However, even as Lucrece verbalizes the Augustinian dictum that absence of consent betokens innocence, she refers to this conception as an “excuse” (l. 1053) and

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“refuge” (l. 1054) because she feels herself ineradicably tainted. When the lords respond to Lucrece’s desire to kill herself by affirming her purity (ll. 1709–1710), she rejects their Augustinian perspective. Accepting these elders’ judgment proclaiming her purity is to experience another violation, this time committed by men of her own tribe who had just reduced rape to a theoretical abstraction. Shakespeare’s Lucrece refuses to ignore or forget the physical violation of her body as well as sense of contamination overwhelming her entire being. Mind cannot be separated from body in a woman’s experience of rape; and, at least for Shakespeare’s Lucrece, absence of consent does not translate into purity or chastity. Where Augustine views suicide through Judeo-Christian lenses, Shakespeare adopts the Roman perspective in which taking one’s life can be an honorable act. Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus shares thematic affinities with Lucrece in its dramatization of the violent rape of a young woman Lavinia, the daughter of the eponymous general and war hero distinguished for leading Rome’s successful war against the Goths. Three characters in Shakespeare’s Roman play—Aaron, Titus Andronicus, and Marcus Andronicus—allude to Lucrece, a feature that invites consideration of similarities as well as differences between the two works. In Titus Andronicus, the sons of Tamora, the conquered queen of the Goths, satisfy their lust and revenge for Titus’s ritual sacrifice of their eldest brother Alarbus by raping Lavinia and amputating both her tongue and hands. Titus responds to Demetrius’s and Chiron’s rape of Lavinia by vocalizing his own mental and emotional agony instead of showing concern for the well-being of his maimed daughter. His response is shaped in part by the legal conception of rape as a crime committed against the property and honor of the rape victim’s father. Raping a woman is tantamount to thieving because of the loss of the female victim’s value in the marriage market. An important effect of Chiron’s and Demetrius’s rape of Lavinia is the experience of shame, dramatized in Lavinia’s turning away from her horrified uncle Marcus “for shame” (2.4.28) because of what has happened, and finally in Titus’s decision to kill her so that she can be freed from her “shame” (5.3.40, 45, 46) and he himself can obtain relief from his devastating sorrow. The rape of Shakespeare’s Lavinia signifies at both the literal and symbolic levels. Chiron’s and Demetrius’s perpetration of masculinist violence on the hapless body of Lavinia not only deprives her of voice, but also affirms her secondary and marginalized gender(ed) status in Roman

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society. The silent and vulnerable female body becomes the object on which the dark energies of revenge can be cruelly unleashed. This body— reduced by physical violence to dehumanized form—also serves as the focus of a retribution that shockingly entails baking the remains of two murdered human beings into a pie for consumption. Where Shakespeare’s Lucrece finally decides that suicide—or what Melissa Sanchez describes as “self-sacrifice”24—is necessary for exposing Tarquin’s villainy and inspiring a popular revolt against his family’s tyrannical rule, Lavinia is deprived of even the agency to take her own life. Where, in Lucrece, consent is defined by limits placed on the choices available to the female subject threatened with rape, leading to “helpless acquiescence”25 that can become a weapon of political resistance, in Titus Andronicus the legal and moral implications of consent are overshadowed by Lavinia’s status as both object and property: desired by men, raped and mutilated, and dispatched by paternal authority unable to bear the mental and emotional burden of living with his daughter’s compromised “sexual purity.” In Measure for Measure, Angelo’s power play over Isabella complicates Augustine’s scenario of the relationship between rape and chastity by introducing a variable to the legal element of consent. Would consent lose its legal and moral meaning of complicity and guilt if a woman were to make the conscious choice of surrendering her virginity to the demands of a coercive and unjust ruler in exchange for another person’s life? Making this choice means that the woman has decided that saving this person’s life is more important than preserving her maidenhead.26 If—theoretically speaking—Isabella accepts Angelo’s ultimatum, is she spiritually contaminated in the way that she believes she would be? Isabella is repulsed by the idea of living a life of shame if she accedes to Angelo’s carnal desire. For her, the paradoxical concept of the “chaste non-virgin” does not exist, whereas it does for Augustine in The City of God. Is Isabella right in this? Or does Shakespeare complicate the moral and ethical dimensions of consent in this scenario and context? When Angelo—garbed in the robes of judicial authority and girded with an excellent moral reputation—first sets eyes on Isabella, he reacts to her presence in a way he did not think possible. He finds her sexually desirable, an experience that departs from his confident sense of his own morally disciplined and upright life. As Isabella pleads for her brother’s life, Angelo finds that her awkward effort to sway him to mercy is—unexpectedly enough—sexually alluring.

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Angelo’s sexual arousal in his meeting with Isabella can be seen as an example of lust, made more menacing because supported by political power. The word lust—which has, among its definitions, “[s]ensuous appetite or desire, considered as sinful or leading to sin” (in biblical and theological usage) and “[s]exual appetite or desire. Chiefly and now exclusively implying intense moral reprobation: Libidinous desire”—has not always carried a negative or pejorative sense in the history of its semantic development. As the OED informs us, obsolete definitions of the word include “[p]leasure, delight”; “[l]iking, friendly inclination to a person”; “[d]esire, appetite, relish or inclination for something”; and “desire or wish.”27 In Act 5 scene 1, Isabella—in a bid for justice—publicly accuses Angelo of abuse of power, where “He would not, but by gift of my chaste body / To his concupiscible intemperate lust, / Release my brother” (5.1.97–99; emphasis mine). Lust is a familiar motif in the literature of early modern England and finds elaborate treatment in diverse genres such as allegory, the devotional lyric, and epic. Lust is also a familiar theme in literature, sermons, and treatises on holy living. One of the Seven Deadly Sins and a powerful symptom of the postlapsarian condition, lust affirms for Augustine the incontrovertible point that sex has been a disruptive force for humankind since Adam and Eve fell in the Garden of Eden. To Augustine for whom sexual abstinence is a spiritual ideal, it is even sinful to experience passion when one has sex with one’s spouse. Sexual intercourse between a married man and woman should not be for the purpose of pleasure but procreation.28 Writing on the importance of sin’s mortification in one’s life, the Puritan preacher John Owen defines lust as “a depraved habit or disposition, continually inclining the heart to evil.”29 Fallen human nature ensures there is not only one lust that occupies the attention of the sinner but many. Lusts, Owen elaborates, “are said to fight or wage ‘war against the soul’ (1 Pet. 2:11).”30 One major lust or “habitual inclination and bent of will and affections unto some actual sin”31 is fornication, a sin different from others because it “sins against his own body.”32 Fornication, also described as “uncleanness,” is destructive, generating a “great … combustion in the whole man.”33 Because human beings live in a fallen world and are born with original sin, they are not going to find it easy vanquishing the temptation of lust. Recognizing one’s natural propensity to sin and evil is an important part of the effective exercise of mortification. Angelo does not lose himself

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in considerations of mortification, as Shakespeare directs his focus at the implications of a habit of thought comfortable with the idea that a morally upright man will not succumb to temptations that come his way. Even though Shakespeare shows us Angelo struggling—at least briefly—with the legal and spiritual implications of his sexual desire for Isabella, he does not offer any protracted account of the workings of conscience on the part of the deputy. The much-respected Angelo quickly foregoes any moral compunction he might have had and proceeds to pressure Isabella into having sex with him. To get a better sense of how lust is portrayed in important literary work of the English Renaissance, I would like to invoke its treatment in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and John Milton’s A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634, also familiar to us as Comus. The Faerie Queene is an allegorical epic-romance that offers a helpful literary and cultural context for analyzing depictions of defenseless women threatened by predatory males. Spenser depicts lust in various forms in his epic poem. There is first the familiar allegorical association of lust with the wildness of nature found in woods and forests untouched by human culture and civilization. In Book 4 of the poem, we encounter “a wilde and salvage man” (4.7.5.1)34 who, capturing Amoret—the twin sister of Belphœbe—almost rapes her and eats her alive. Allegorizing the violent side of lust, Spenser’s “salvage man” physically bears away Amoret in a grotesque analogy of Scudamore’s seizing of an unwilling Amoret from the Temple of Venus in Book 4 canto 10. Susceptible to abduction, Amoret’s imprisonment by the savage reenacts in a different allegorical context her earlier imprisonment and torture by Busirane, an evil sorcerer whose spearing of Amoret’s chest and removal of her heart symbolize the different means—all disturbingly violent—by which pathological masculinity seeks to establish dominance over the female body. Spenser’s savage is shaggy and has a wide mouth complete with enormous teeth with which to tear apart and chew his prey. In portraying the savage, Spenser evokes the cannibalistic motif made familiar in accounts of uncivilized Amerindians to underscore bestiality’s relationship with unbridled lust. This motif resurfaces in Book 6 when Serena—in an analogy of Amoret—is captured by a “salvage nation” (6.8.35.2), a colony of cannibals, to satisfy their lust and appetite. Lust—which exists on the other end of the moral spectrum from chaste love—is a vice found not only in men but also women, whose extreme allegorical representation is the giant titaness Argante, whose insatiable sexual appetite encompasses incest and

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bestiality, including ranging “over all the countrie” (3.7.50.1) in search of young men to ravish and “quench her flaming thrust” (3.7.50.2). Allegorical episodes can embed imagery with visual and tactile appeal to excite readers even while warning against the spiritually destructive temptations of lust. When the pornographic explicitness of nude female bodies is entwined with moral instruction facilitated by allegory, readers find themselves negotiating the often-fuzzy line that separates the pull of the erotic from the imperatives of holy living. In The Faerie Queene, both scantily clad and naked female figures can titillate, and Spenser’s use of poetic techniques like the blazon helps the reader navigate the anatomical contours of the unclothed female body exhibited for the male gaze. Like Orlando Furioso, Ariosto’s chivalric romance which exerted a major influence on Spenser, The Faerie Queene finds ample opportunity to depict men chasing vulnerable and hapless maidens, sometimes with the goal of sexual violence in mind. In Orlando Furioso, the motif of pursuing a young maiden with fantasies of ravishing her is brought into focus with Angelica, the exotic princess of Cathay. Ariosto’s Angelica is a young woman that many men—including the eponymous Orlando himself—sexually desire. She is beautiful and vulnerable, an alluring combination as the Saracen knight Ruggiero discovers when he chances upon her chained naked to a rock as an intended sacrifice to the sea monster Orc. Female vulnerability can arouse a man’s protective instincts, such as when Ruggiero rescues Angelica and transports her on a hippogriff to Brittany. Seeing and having physical contact with a naked princess who is totally defenseless, Ruggiero suddenly finds himself overcome by desire and attempts to rape the woman he has just rescued. Near rape is a recurrent motif in The Faerie Queene. There is Una—the Redcrosse Knight’s future bride—who came close to being raped by Sansloy (“without law”) only to be rescued in time by satyrs. There is the incredibly beautiful Florimell—described by Patricia Palmer as “an icon of sexual vulnerability”35—who seems to live a life fleeing from men, regardless of whether they have noble intentions of wanting to help her or ignoble ones of seeking to ravish her. Exemplifying the imperative of protecting her chastity at all costs by running, Florimell only desires Marinell, a man who, initially at least, does not reciprocate her feelings for him because of his mother’s misinterpretation of a prophecy that he will suffer harm because of a woman. Where Florimell flees from men—indiscriminately and “to quite parodic effect”36—because she views them all as (potential)

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predators, Marinell seeks to get as far away as possible from all female virgins. For a woman whose allegorical identity is defined by the trope of the damsel-in-distress, Florimell—who had come close to being physically violated by characters such as the Fisher and unnamed Foster (or Forester)37—is likened to a “light-foot hare” (3.4.46.4) pursued by a hunter and his hounds. The experience of guilt central to Saint Augustine’s views of libidinal desire and sexual intercourse is an important motif in The Faerie Queene. Book 3 of the epic poem gives us two prominent episodes that deal with the experience of guilt and shame stemming from carnal desire and lust: canto 2 and canto 5. In Book 3 canto 2, Britomart sees the image of her future husband, Arthegall, the knight of justice, in a magic mirror crafted by Merlin and owned by her father King Ryence. As a result of catching sight of Arthegall, Britomart finds herself experiencing lovesickness, uncontrollable feelings that cause much confusion for her. Her concerned nurse Glauce tries to calm her tormented emotions by affirming that there exists “No guilt in you, but in the tyranny of love” (3.2.40.9). If Britomart experiences guilt, what is the source of this guilt? Might it involve, at some level, lustful thoughts that get entwined with emotions of “affection” (3.2.40.5) and “Swete love” (3.2.41.9)? Because of the intensity of Britomart’s (love)sickness, both she and Glauce decide to search for a remedy by consulting the powerful wizard, Merlin. What Merlin reveals for Britomart’s edification is her providential destiny as the ancestor of the English monarchy and mother of the British nation, in effect telling her that it is reasonable to entertain sexual thoughts about Arthegall because he will be her husband. In Book 3 canto 5, Spenser once again thematizes the relationship between lust and guilt in Timias’s encounter with Belphœbe. When Timias, Arthur’s squire, is wounded in his thigh when fighting the foresters, he is found and attended to by Belphœbe who happens to be knowledgeable about medicinal herbs. Upon seeing his rescuer for the first time, Timias finds himself dazzled by her beauty and overcome by lovesickness, such that he sustains another wound, this time in the heart. An avatar of Elizabeth I, Belphœbe signifies in a narrative space that evokes both the rituals of courtly love and Petrarchan convention of the idealized and unattainable lady that can only be gazed at and desired from afar. Timias’s struggles with his desire for Belphœbe—in which he affirms the importance of serving her with honor and loyalty—recall Elizabeth I’s courtiers

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whose love the queen encouraged but longing for sexual satisfaction denied.38 Even if the depiction of Timias and Belphœbe resonates with the Virgin Queen’s relationship with her courtiers, Spenser’s depiction of the squire’s relationship with Belphœbe enables a reader to consider the possibility that he harbors lustful thoughts about his “savior,” thoughts which are nonetheless wrestled with and suppressed. The first line of Book 3 canto 5 stanza 48 tells us that Timias has waged war for a “long time” against lust, signified by the word “will,” for Belphœbe. He struggles to be rid of his lustful thoughts through a heightening of guilt. Unlike the Forester and other men pursuing Florimell, Timias possesses an awareness that can be glossed as guilt or the conscience facilitating self-regulation. In The Faerie Queene, unclothed female bodies are complex allegorical constructs, not restricted to the concept of helpless damsels-in-distress. In Book 1 canto 8, we encounter Duessa forcibly denuded to expose the grotesqueness of her physical and allegorical body.39 In Book 2, Guyon finds himself distracted with potentially serious consequences in the sensuous Bower of Bliss when he chances upon two naked women cavorting in a fountain. The Palmer’s timely intervention helps stop Guyon from falling into the temptation of sensuality and lust, making way for the knight of temperance to destroy the Bower with unfettered violence.40 Spenser’s knights are not immune to temptations of the flesh. In Book 1, the Redcrosse Knight—whose allegorical significance is tied to his future mythological apotheosis as Saint George of England—is not immune to sexual allure, establishing him as an erring Christian soldier who doubles as wavering lover. When representing the theological virtue of chastity via the physical fact and metaphorical sign of preserved virginity, Spenser’s female characters are multifaceted. One encounters Una who embodies truth in its singularity and indivisibility. Emblematizing the one true Protestant church and spiritual purity, Una is defined by her virginity/chastity, a virtue which carries important theological significance in an epic-romance narrative allegorizing the pursuit of holiness. In Book 1, Spenser underscores chastity’s inextricable relationship with fidelity by giving his reader the allegorical figure of Fidelia (faith), one of the daughters of Caelia (heavenly) who inhabits the House of Holiness. Like her sister Speranza (hope), Fidelia is a virgin. Caelia’s third daughter Charissa (charity) is associated with life-giving maternity, her most recent childbirth pointing the reader

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to Redcrosse’s recuperation and spiritual rebirth in the House of Holiness after almost losing his life to Despair. Book 3 of The Faerie Queene is especially interesting for its handling of the virtue of chastity that is significant for our reading of Shakespeare’s portrayal of Isabella’s response to her brother’s plea that she consider sleeping with Angelo. Spenser’s knight of chastity is a dazzling lady named Britomart who possesses a romantic temper. Britomart is wandering the world in search of Arthegall, a man whom she had caught sight of in a magic mirror belonging to the wizard Merlin and loves. Britomart is not a helpless damsel in need of chivalrous men to rescue her from danger. Amazonian and androgynous, she dons body armor, even leading people to mistake her for a man. The figure of Britomart portrays chastity as a martial and even aggressive virtue. Another figure who also stands for the militant attributes of female chastity is Belphœbe, the twin sister of Amoret.41 Spenser’s allegorical depiction of chastity is not static, ranging from the vulnerability of this virtue to male sexual violence to a martial and aggressive attribute in which the female is fully capable of enabling her own protection and security.42 Elizabeth I shrewdly portrayed herself as the female monarch who remained single because espoused to the kingdom of England figured as her husband. If “chastity was a state, both spiritual and physiological,”43 it was—in the case of Elizabeth I—also political. Attempts to match her with foreign princes repeatedly failed, generating much anxiety about the succession of power after her passing. Spenser’s Britomart is problematic in this context because Merlin prophesies in Book 3 that her providential marriage to Arthegall will generate a royalist line that extends to the Tudors. While Merlin’s genealogical narrative serves Spenser’s ideological aim of extolling the Tudor regime, the fact remains that when Spenser wrote The Faerie Queene, it was obvious to many that England’s Virgin Queen would be the last monarch of the Tudor Dynasty. Unlike Elizabeth I, for whom remaining single has profound repercussions for the politics of royal succession, Isabella’s embrace of chastity in Measure for Measure is, at a fundamental level, tied to her conviction that she wants to be celibate and surrender her life to God. Sometimes referred to as a bride of Christ, the woman who chooses to become a nun in the Catholic tradition leaves behind the secular world to join a religious community of like-minded women who seek to serve God through a life of obedience, chastity, and poverty. Virginity and chastity are important spiritual concepts in this religious vocation.

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If Isabella’s reproach of her brother for asking her to accept Angelo’s indecent proposal has a spiritual basis because grounded in her religious convictions, her reference to the dishonorable experience of shame also seems to gesture in the direction of at least one social and cultural view of female chastity: the idea that a woman’s virginity is an priceless asset that has implications for both marriage life and primogeniture.44 The world is not always hospitable to young women who dream of joining a convent or to a fifteen-year-old girl, who is of marriageable age in early modern England. One such fifteen-year-old girl is Alice, the daughter of John Egerton, 1st Earl of Bridgewater, who had an important role to play in Milton’s masque Comus. Comus extols the virtue of chastity represented by Alice, simply referred to as the Lady in the masque. This Lady has two brothers, lead roles played by Alice’s brothers John and Michael. The setting of Milton’s masque is a journey through the dark woods, a dangerous environment in which one can get lost and encounter unsavory characters like Comus, a sorcerer and the offspring of Bacchus and Circe masquerading as a villager. Separated from her Elder and Second brothers who have wandered off in search of sustenance, the Lady is taken in by Comus’s friendliness and follows him only to be abducted to his pleasure palace. Comus wants his victim to drink a magic potion that will transform her into his follower embracing sensuality, decadence, and carnal pleasures. Milton’s masque asks how a young woman threatened by sexual assault is to defend herself. This woman is unlikely to have the physical strength to fend off such an assault, a point registered in the Lady’s physical imprisonment by Comus. However, imprisoning the physical body is one thing; making the mind succumb to temptation is another. To make pliable the mind of his young victim, Comus waxes lyrical about the joys of sex and drawbacks of hoarding a woman’s virginity in the face of time’s implacable onslaught: List Lady, be not coy, and be not cozen’d With that same vaunted name Virginity; Beauty is nature’s coin, must not be hoarded, But must be current, and the good thereof Consists in mutual and partak’n bliss, Unsavory in th’enjoyment of itself. (ll. 737–42)45

The maxim that a woman who is blessed with beauty must not stash away nature’s gift but generously share it with others recalls Ben Jonson’s carpe

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diem, “Come, my Celia, let us prove,” in Volpone. Where this carpe diem endorses the uninhibited pursuit of sexual pleasure as a logical response to life’s transience, the sonneteer of Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence implores a fair youth to bequeath his beauty to posterity—a responsibility he owes to nature—by making love to a woman and begetting offspring. Milton’s masque offers a moral and spiritual explication of the Christian concept of chastity, conferring on this virtue supernatural attributes. As “a hidden strength” (l. 418) gifted by heaven, chastity garbs its possessor with the invincible spiritual armor of “complete steel” (l. 421). According to the Elder Brother, “So dear to Heav’n is Saintly chastity” (l. 453) that angels will not only minister to the pure woman but also reveal things through dreams and visions. Chastity finds its source in “The unpolluted temple of the mind” (l. 461), having salutary effects on the soul “Till all be made immortal” (l. 463). The Lady responds by telling Comus that all his charms are powerless to “touch the freedom of [her] mind” (l. 663), affirming the importance of self-control as a weapon against evil.46 Virtue is protected by its own invincible armor. As the Elder Brother puts it: “Vertue may be assail’d, but never hurt, / Surpris’d by unjust force but not enthrall’d” (ll. 589–90). Affirming that nature does not condone intemperate and riotous use of her largess, the Lady lends rhetorical support to the Elder Brother’s discourse on virtue’s unassailability by instructing him about “the Sun-clad power of Chastity” (l. 782). Comus’s depravity, adds the Lady, prevents him from apprehending “The sublime notion and high mystery / That must be utter’d to unfold the sage / And serious doctrine of Virginity” (ll. 785–87). The didactic tenor of this discourse on virtue and chastity notwithstanding, the Lady finds she is unable to free herself from the “stony fetters fixt and motionless” (l. 819) enabled by Comus’s dark magic. The Lady’s immobility highlights elements of vulnerability in her encounter with Comus, pointing to the real danger of physical harm that could befall a young girl in the clutches of a predatory male. To facilitate the Lady’s release from Comus’s preternatural enchantment, Milton introduces the deus ex machina intervention of Sabrina, who represents the power of divine providence and grace. Bringing Celtic mythology into conjunction with Christian allegory, Sabrina—the mythological incarnation of the River Severn—signifies supernatural protection needed for the welfare and safety of children who have to navigate the winding and unpredictable

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passage that leads from the condition of innocence into the world of experience. If Milton’s masque incorporates the moralizing thrust of allegory into the celebration of an auspicious occasion—specifically the Earl of Bridgewater’s installation as the Lord President of Wales—and encomiastic celebration of the Bridgewater family’s aristocratic virtues, Shakespeare’s play deals with the similar motif of chastity but considers its significance largely in relation to the context of social expectations and of male/female, magistrate/supplicant power relations. More than that, Measure for Measure sets out to complicate definitions of chastity by highlighting the cultural and ideological tensions that come into play when doctrinal/theological conceptions jostle against those held by secular society. Even when Isabella as a would-be nun subscribes to a religious conception of chastity, she finds herself forced to deal with a circumstance in which one’s privileging of spiritual purity might lead to a brother’s death by execution. As Duncan Salkeld puts it bluntly: “Filled with desire for Isabella, sister to the condemned fornicator Claudio, Angelo demands that she sleep with him. The choice for Isabella is effectively her rape or her brother’s murder.”47 Contributing to the complex discourse of chastity encountered in literary works such as The Faerie Queene and Comus is not only Isabella’s resolute defense of the sacrosanctity of this virtue but also the perspective of a group of people in Vienna for whom having sex is a fact of life divorced from the rarefied discourses of Christian doctrine. If characters from the suburbs of Vienna—associated with society’s lower class and the unsavory world of brothels, pimping, and sexually transmitted disease—routinely engage in sex and are guilty of the crime of fornication for which Claudio was given the death sentence, their attitude toward the state’s regulation of morality and sexual conduct is amazement if not incredulity. Characters like Mistress Overdone, Kate Keepdown, and Lucio belong to a world where something like prostitution is accepted as enabling one to make a living and put food on the table. Sex between people—within marriage or outside of it—is something natural and eminently human. Shakespeare’s denizens of the suburbs question not only official culture’s understanding of crime and punishment but also the church’s familiar theological ideas of moral and spiritual transgression. In the prosaic discourse of the Vienna suburbs, upper-class enunciations of the theology of sin and redemption, crime and punishment, are critiqued by a discourse of

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ironic irreverence predicated on the understanding that sex is a central biological instinct indispensable for the perpetuation of the human species. In Measure for Measure, class and privilege generate a distinctive discourse of temptation and fall divorced from quotidian reality, provocatively expressed in the messy and sordid lives of Vienna’s ordinary citizens. In the suburbs, sin is a fact of human nature and an inescapable condition of social life. Sin is not so much about fallen humanity’s need for spiritual recuperation and renovation as it is about the struggle to make ends meet, to survive in a world removed from that inhabited by the novitiate, friar, magistrate, and duke. Where the social space of Vienna’s lower-class citizens is associated with both lack of hygiene and questionable values, upper society is sterile, prohibitive, and claustrophobic, symbolically designated by the court, the convent, and the moated grange.

Shakespeare’s Vienna and Early Modern London Early modern Vienna, the setting of Measure for Measure, was the capital of the Habsburg Austrian Empire, ruled by a dynasty historically known for its fervent and militant Catholicism. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the city of Vienna was attacked by the Ottoman Empire, embraced Protestantism for a brief period, and consolidated itself as a stronghold of the Counter-Reformation. In 1529, the Ottoman Turks launched an attack on Vienna to bring it under Muslim control, but that military venture was repulsed. Unhappy with the outcome of this campaign, the Turks, led by Suleiman the Magnificent, attempted once again—unsuccessfully—to overrun the capital in 1532. In the early modern period, Vienna shared with Lepanto, Constantinople, Crimea, and Hungary deep anxieties about the military threat posed by the Ottoman Empire to the security and stability of Christian Europe.48 In Orlando Furioso, Ariosto celebrates Charles V of Spain as the historical and spiritual successor of Charlemagne and unifying head of the Christian world, creating a formidable bulwark against Muslim hostility as well as enabling the conditions hospitable to the building of empire. Ariosto’s poem focuses on the greatness of the Spanish Empire underwritten by the achievements of Charles V as Holy Roman emperor, the great conqueror of lands as far away as the East and West Indies. Figuring Spanish galleys as the “new Argonauts”49 traveling the seas in search of another golden fleece, Ariosto ties Charles’s historical greatness to God’s providential design to bless Spain with the mantle of empire that was

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Rome’s, in order that it can protect the Catholic Church and “the Holy Cross.”50 God “the Supreme Good has awarded [Charles V] the crown of the great empire once ruled over by Augustus, Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, and Septimus Severus; not only this, but also that he should rule over every land East and West, however far flung, that sees the sun and the passage of the year.”51 Measure for Measure sets up the Catholic context of early modern Vienna early in the play with the introduction of Isabella planning to join the convent and Vincentio leaving behind his administrative duties as duke so he can don the guise of a friar to spy on goings-on in the realm. Because of Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries and nunneries in England in the later 1530s, it was unlikely that Shakespeare’s audience would have met a friar or nun in their lives. Even though monks, nuns, and friars were generally invisible in the social world of early modern England, they nevertheless had a visible presence on stage. Gillian Woods tells us that post-­ Reformation theater made visible the habits, forms, and contents of Roman Catholicism when these were absent in “real life.”52 Woods elaborates: “Hermits’, nuns’, and especially friars’ habits were a staple part of early modern costume collections. At least 32 plays from the period 1500-1660 feature one or more hermits; 21 cast nuns and 64 starred friars. Rosary beads and crucifixes also appeared as props signalling a Catholic aesthetic. But what was visible on stage was practically invisible in reality.”53 Duke Vincentio’s disguise as a friar contributes to the corpus of plays found in Renaissance England that depicted friars as characters or types. If the drama of Reformation England seemed to take delight in pillorying historical Catholic practices such as the cloistered life and celibate clergy, Shakespeare appeared to hold a generally sympathetic view of friars.54 Shakespeare’s generally benign treatment of friars in his plays has sometimes been attributed to an instinct to bridge differences between Protestants and Catholics at a time of violent sectarian strife.55 Shakespeare’s familiar Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet is, for example, a well-intentioned character who desires a happy life for the eponymous young lovers and reconciliation between the feuding families. However, even though he represented a benevolent substitute father-­ figure for Romeo and Juliet, this Franciscan friar might have meddled in matters he should have been more careful about. Jeffrey Knapp has noted that Shakespearean friars are in the habit of dealing with secrets and subterfuge.56 This is true of Friar Laurence who gives Juliet a potion to drink that will enable her to mimic death. In addition, he also performs the rites

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for Romeo and Juliet’s secret marriage, infringing parental and familial objections to their relationship. However, the meddling of Friar Laurence in secular matters outside of the spiritual realm does not negate the audience’s sense that the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet was more fatalistic than owing to the characters’ free will and human agency. Disguise as a friar allows Duke Vincentio to keep an eye on the realm when he is away. Even though he is confident enough in Angelo’s ability to look after things in his absence, he wants to be sure that nothing untoward should happen under his deputy’s watch. Connecting him to things happening on the ground, Vincentio’s disguise also allows him to have access to characters’ personal fears and anxieties not revealed to others. As a confessor, he is someone whose role entails listening to the concerns of people like Claudio on death row awaiting execution and proffering them spiritual counsel. Debora Shuger comments on the significance of Duke Vincentio’s disguise as Friar Lodowick: “Shakespeare’s Duke … does not simply disguise himself in a friar’s habit, but acts as a priest—hearing confessions, preparing the souls of the dying for eternity, counselling sinners.”57 Shuger also notes that the duke “both exercises spiritual jurisdiction and overrides the law. Since English kings were not clergymen, his disguise is literally sacrilegious imposture, yet … the play nowhere suggests that the Duke’s actions are improper; the point of his taking on a friar’s role and garb, over and above its utility as a plot device, seems to be rather to indicate, to gesture toward, the sacerdotal nature of royal authority, and thus what it means to bear ‘the sword of heaven.’”58 If Shakespeare’s ideological point is to underscore the sacred nature of royal authority in the figure of the disguised duke, his actions, aimed at bringing resolution to the problems precipitated by Angelo’s governance, are not only uneven but also ethically ambiguous if not problematic. I would like at this point to take a closer look at two dramatic moments in the duke’s masquerade as a prison chaplain: the first is the kind of “comfort” he brings to the terrified Claudio on death row; the second is when his careful plan to secure Claudio’s freedom is almost derailed when Angelo gives instructions for Claudio’s scheduled execution to be expedited. Act 3 scene 1 shows the duke disguised as Friar Lodowick having a conversation with Claudio in prison. When Claudio tells the duke that he is ready to die even though he hopes to live, the duke responds peremptorily with “Be absolute for death” (3.1.5), a terse imperative that can be read in two possible ways: be completely and unreservedly prepared for death; and know for certain that your execution is imminent and there is

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no hope of a reprieve. What follows is an itemization of life’s numerous problems, such as the fact of human baseness and lack of nobility, falling victim to unpredictable influences over which we have no control, and fear over countless things, especially the inescapable specter of death. Created out of dust, the human being is burdened with sorrow, problems, and unfulfilled desires. And when you are finally old and decrepit, your offspring will “curse the gout, serpigo, and the rheum, / For ending thee no sooner” (3.1.31–32). Given what life is really like, desperately wanting to cling on to it when death beckons makes one a fool. Missing from the duke’s catalogue of human misery is a Christian vision of the afterlife and bliss of salvation that makes it imperative for one to die in a state of grace. The duke does not help Claudio undertake repentance of sin and prepare his soul to meet God, something we would expect a prison chaplain—at the very least—to do. When the disguised duke visits Juliet, Claudio’s fiancée, earlier in prison (Act 2 scene 3), he makes a point of focusing on the sinfulness of having a baby out of wedlock and stressing her need for repentance. In contrast, the duke does not invoke the discourse of sin, confession, and repentance when conversing with Claudio in prison. In ministering to Claudio, the duke also does not offer religious comfort to help the prisoner come to terms with his impending death, emphasizing instead the much-needed rest death mercifully affords after the afflictions of human existence. Not invoking the spiritual comfort of the Christian faith in his prison ministry to alleviate Claudio’s dread of dying, Duke Vincentio shows he revels in arousing psychic anxiety on the part of the subjects to whom he is ministering. Instead of assuaging the pain of Isabella’s grief after Claudio’s supposed death by telling her that her brother is still alive, the duke decides to prolong her mental pain by affirming the narrative that Claudio has indeed been executed. In New Historicist criticism, manipulation of anxiety constitutes a strategic means by which rulers impress on society’s collective consciousness the fact of their absolute power, supported by formidable tools of discipline and punishment awaiting ready deployment. Important instruments for engendering psychic anxiety, sadistically creative forms of torture and lurid spectacles of execution encourage self-regulation and censorship of thought and action. In Shakespearean Negotiations, Greenblatt points out that Renaissance England’s “subtle conception of the relation between anxiety and the fashioning of the individual subject” seeps into and influences “the fashioning of texts” as well as those “cultural practices that are essential to the

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making and staging of plays.”59 When playwrights adapt structures and techniques associated with the political arousal of anxiety to the needs of the stage and public playhouse, “salutary anxiety is emptied out in the service of theatrical pleasure.”60 If the strategic generation of anxiety serves the ideological project of transforming the mind and heart of the individual subject “through pardon into gratitude, obedience, and love,”61 it does not, however, always succeed in achieving this effect, as demonstrated in the disguised duke’s attempt to minister to the pregnant Juliet in prison by bringing her to a consciousness of sin and repentance. In the confession and penitential scene of Act 2 scene 3, the duke in disguise as a friar gets straight to the point when he meets Juliet in prison— “Repent you, fair one, of the sin you carry?” (2.3.20)—metonymically substituting the biological fact of a woman’s unborn child with the doctrinal concept of sin, the transgression of God’s law. Where Angelo punishes citizens who break the law, the duke—ministering to the health of a person’s spiritual life—points out sin and facilitates repentance. Juliet’s language registers recognition of her need for God’s forgiveness. That said, her dialogue with the duke is not as straightforward as it might appear, finding opportunity for ambiguity that interrogates the logic of the friar’s spiritual system and workings of Vienna’s legal regime. We encounter Juliet, for example, saying to her confessor, the disguised duke: “I do repent me as [premarital sex and becoming pregnant] is an evil, / And take the shame with joy” (2.3.37–38, emphasis mine). Juliet points to her joy in the baby she is carrying, a pregnancy which Vienna’s culture of moral surveillance wants her to experience as shame.62 Juliet occupies what Patricia Phillippy has referred to as a “doubled position”: responding to Friar Lodowick in a repentant acknowledgment of wrongdoing and sin as well as revealing an equivocal attitude toward the fact of her pregnancy.63 Where the duke views Juliet’s baby as a transgression of God’s moral law, and Angelo responds to premarital sex as a capital crime, Juliet revises the meaning of shame to that of joy. Even as we consider the social and cultural implications of criminalizing premarital sex and getting pregnant before one’s nuptials in Measure for Measure, it is interesting to note that in England—at least before the Marriage Act of 1753—it was common enough for a couple to cohabitate and have sex after their betrothal.64 (When eighteen-year-old Shakespeare married the twenty-six-year-old Anne Hathaway in November 1582, the latter was pregnant with their first child.) Martin Ingram tells us that in the period c. 1570–1640, the church courts began to pursue more

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vigorously disciplinary prosecutions for prenuptial fornication and bridal pregnancy, even though this policy went against social attitudes that generally tolerated intimate sexual activity between couples who were seriously courting or betrothed.65 Ingram also informs us that “[i]n early modern England generally, at least a fifth of all brides were with child by the time they got married in church.”66 However, the rates of women who were with child by the time they married in church varied between communities.67 Juliet’s (implied) criticism of Vienna’s laws and assertion that she loves the shame/baby she is carrying suggest that she and Claudio embraced values viewed askance by official society. If Juliet’s and Claudio’s engagement in premarital sex is transgressive in infringing Viennese society’s legal codes and rules of proper conduct, the entire way of life in the suburbs is even more disconcerting because revolving around brothels, drinking, and the transmission of venereal disease. Despite problems in the upper stratum of Viennese society such as Angelo’s hypocrisy and facade of moral uprightness, Shakespeare does not portray the city’s “lower world”—the suburbs occupied by characters such as Pompey and Mistress Overdone— as an alternative setting to be preferred. A character who makes his living by opportunistically tapping the resources of Vienna’s sordid suburbs, Pompey is a tapster or barman who works in Mistress Overdone’s brothel. Herself a denizen of the city’s “lower world” involved in the criminal activity of running a brothel, Mistress Overdone, who has had nine husbands, is now facing a serious threat to her livelihood with Angelo promising to demolish all the houses of ill repute in the realm. How is someone like Mistress Overdone going to survive in the face of Vienna’s resurgent application of discipline and punishment? The world inhabited by Pompey, Mistress Overdone, and Lucio, a frequent customer of the brothel, revolves around taking advantage of men’s lust to make a living. To this world, the importance placed by Isabella on the spiritual value of chastity must appear patently ludicrous. For Shakespeare’s audience, Vienna’s seedy district might appear strangely familiar because early modern London was not always known for its physical and moral hygiene. In Christ’s Tears Over Jerusalem, the Elizabethan playwright, poet, and pamphleteer Thomas Nashe laments: London, what are thy suburbs but licensed stews? Can it be so many brothel-­ houses of salary sensuality & sixpenny whoredom (the next door to the magistrate’s) should be set up and maintained, if bribes did not bestir them?

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I accuse none, but certainly justice somewhere is corrupted. Whole hospitals of ten-times-a-day-dishonested strumpets have we cloistered together. Night and day the entrance unto them is as free as to a tavern.68

A writer of satirical tracts and epigrams, Samuel Rowlands describes London’s cityscape and social life in Greene’s Ghost Haunting Conie-Catchers: I know not I what should be the cause why so innumerable harlots and Curtizans abide about London, but because that good lawes are not looked unto: is there not one appointed for the apprehending of such hell-moths, that eat a man out of bodie & soule? And yet there be more notorious strumpets & their mates about the Citie and the suburbs, then ever were before the Marshall was appointed: idle mates I meane, that under the habit of a Gentleman or serving man, think themselves free from the whip, although they can give no honest account of their life.69

Joad Raymond elaborates on the infrastructural, social, and cultural conditions of early modern London: the city “was an unparalleled babel of commotion and confusion, internally variegated, its streets teeming with people and animals, carts and wagons, tradesmen’s stalls and chapmen’s cries, buzzing with business and pleasure, an array of dialects, the echoes of devotion, the glow of propriety and glister of notorious conduct, the luminescence of a society governed by spectacle, display, consumption and expenditure, and the muttering of an other world in its penumbra.”70 Early modern England had both ecclesiastical and common law courts that facilitated the policing of sexual conduct in society. In this social milieu, fornication referred not only to adultery and extramarital affairs but also premarital sex, the crime for which Claudio was condemned to death. Ingram tells us that even though “[i]n theory the church courts could bring prosecutions for immodest behaviour … prevailing social conditions and judicial caution ensured that these powers were very sparingly used.”71 He also highlights “the licence to enjoy advanced physical intimacy which popular custom tacitly accorded seriously courting or affianced couples.”72 Even though England’s church courts were generally restrained in bringing the severity of the law to bear on “seriously courting or affianced couples” engaged in sexual intimacy, severe responses to sexual indiscretion were supported by members of the Puritan community such as the pamphleteer Philip Stubbes and theologian William Perkins.

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Criticism of people’s sexual habits in early modern England finds expression not only in literary works but also, as expected, in pamphlets and sermons. In Philip Stubbes’s An Anatomy of Abuses, a character by the name of Philoponus emphasizes his conviction that godly matrimony is “a figure or type of our spirituall wedlocke, betwixt Christe and his Churche, bothe militante and triumphant. This congression, and mutuall copulation of those, that be thus joyned together in the godlie state of blessed matrimonie, is pure Virginitie, and allowable before God and man.”73 When Spudeus—the second character with whom he is dialoguing—evokes the people who suggest that “mutuall coition betwixt man and woman, is not so offensive before God”74 because it enables the procreative mandate and generative principle pronounced by God in Genesis, Philoponus curses these people for embracing a blasphemous view, accusing them of being worse than libertines, atheists, and even the devils themselves. Speaking for Stubbes, Philoponus takes the position that all sexual activity outside of marriage is “da[m]nable, pestiferous, and execrable.”75 When he considers the severe punishments meted out by pagan cultures against those who practice “this stynking sinne of whoredome,”76 he makes clear his view that the law ought to punish people who commit sins of sexual immorality—whoredom, fornication, adultery, and incest—with the death penalty, the severest punishment available. Alternatively—if capital punishment is considered overly extreme—the body of the sinner could be branded with hot iron so that he or she can be readily identified as belonging to “the Adulterous children of Sathan.”77 On England’s profane sexual environment, one sermon which comes to mind is the Anglican bishop and chaplain Hugh Latimer’s last homily preached before King Edward VI in 1550, an extract from which I transcribe here: For the love of God, take an order for marriages here in England. For here is marriage for pleasure and voluptuousness, and for goods; and so that they may join land to land, and possessions to possessions: they care for no more here in England. And that is the cause of so much adultery, and of so much breach of wedlock in the noblemen and gentlemen, and so much divorcing. And it is not now in the noblemen only, but it is come now to the inferior sort. Every man, if he have but a small cause, will cast off his old wife, and take a new, and will marry again at his pleasure; and there be many that have so done. I would therefore wish that there were a law provided in this behalf

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for adulterers, and that adultery should be punished with death; and that might be a remedy for all this matter. There would not be then so much adultery, whoredom, and lechery in England as there is. For the love of God take heed to it, and see a remedy provided for it. I would wish that adultery should be punished with death; and that the woman being an offender, if her husband would be a suitor for her, she should be pardoned for the first time, but not for the second time: and the man, being an offender, should be pardoned if his wife be a suitor for him the first time, but not for the second time, if he offend twice. If this law were made, there would not be so much adultery nor lechery used in the realm as there is. Well, I trust once yet, as old as I am, to see the day that lechery shall be punished: it was never more need, for there was never more lechery used in England than is at this day, and maintained. It is made but a laughing matter, and a trifle; but it is a sad matter, and an earnest matter; for lechery is a great sin: Sodome and Gomorre was destroyed for it. And it was one of the sins reigning in Ninive, for which it should have been destroyed.78

Remarkably, Latimer’s sermon delivered for the benefit of the first surviving and only legitimate son of King Henry VIII dealt with a theme that cemented Henry VIII’s notoriety as a cruel and immoral monarch who philandered even as he pronounced his wives’ extramarital affairs to be treason punishable by death. Henry VIII in fact had two queens, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, beheaded for adultery among other things. It is said that the young Catherine Howard angered the king because she had engaged in sexual intercourse before marriage. In alluding to how marrying “for pleasure and voluptuousness” had contributed to much immorality, such as adultery and divorce among the nobility, Latimer was distressed to discover that the ungodly lifestyles of the aristocratic class had begun to affect the morals of society’s lower-class members. Latimer dreaded to see the moral climate and spiritual state of England defined and overwhelmed by “so much adultery, whoredom, and lechery.” Strict laws—including that of capital punishment—would almost certainly curb England’s culture of sexual licentiousness, likened by Latimer to the abominations of Sodom and Gomorrah. In The Order of the Causes of Salvation and Damnation, William Perkins undertook an exposition of God’s seventh commandment against adultery. In Perkins’s discourse, God’s commandment against adultery “sheweth how we may preserve the chastitie of ourselves, and of our neighbour.”79 The virtue of chastity not only pertains to one’s relationship

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with God, but also touches on our responsibility for the spiritual health of our neighbor. If the seventh commandment of the Decalogue prohibits adultery, Perkins expands the definition of this transgression against God to include not only premarital sex but also sex with a person of the same gender, sex with a virgin, sex with someone who is betrothed or married, bestiality, incest, and others. To underscore the seriousness of the sins of adultery and fornication resulting from lust of the flesh, Perkins refers to the laws of ancient Israel that delivered the death penalty for certain kinds of sexual transgression such as sleeping with a man or woman who is betrothed or married. There are acts engaged in by human beings that are an affront to God. Standing in opposition to the lust of fallen men and women that makes them susceptible to carnal acts that are abhorrent to God is the virtue of chastity, which Perkins describes as “the puritie of soule and bodie, as much as belongeth to generation.”80 For Perkins, “[t]he mind is chast, when it is free, or at the least, freed from fleshly concupiscence. The bodie is chast when it putteth not in execution, the concupiscences of the flesh.”81 The word concupiscence—which derives from the Latin concupiscere (to desire or to covet)—is defined by the OED as “[e]ager or vehement desire; in theological use (transl. ἐπιθυμία in the New Testament) the coveting of ‘carnal things’, desire for the ‘things of the world’”; and also as “[l]ibidinous desire, sexual appetite, lust.”82 In theological ethics, concupiscence covers a range of appetites and desires. Denoting a strong and irrepressible desire for the pleasures of the flesh, concupiscence—conceptually intertwined with the idea of lust in Christian ethics—also signifies humanity’s wayward inclination to(ward) sin. In Paradise Lost, Milton represents the Fall as the subversion of reason by appetite and desire. Associated with the impulse to aspire to godhead and privileging an object of desire over God in one’s life, the Fall also finds expression through the metaphor of fornication. After eating the fruit of the forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve find themselves burning with lust for one another (PL 9.1015). In describing the moment of awakening after the love-making scene that follows the Fall, Milton alludes to Samson, a controversial judge of ancient Israel, awakening in confusion and shorn of his strength in a postlapsarian bower metaphorized as Dalilah’s “Harlot-lap” (PL 9.1060). Adam and Eve’s fracturing of the Genesis prohibition has transformed God’s good earth into an order of nature governed by lust, sin, and death.

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In Measure for Measure, premarital sex between a man and a woman— even if they are on the verge of tying the knot—constitutes the crime of fornication. The imposition of the death penalty for premarital sex in Vienna’s legal regime has no equivalent in Shakespeare’s England, despite Christian moralists’ disapproval of sexual incontinence and licentiousness. However, with the Puritan ascendancy following the English Civil War, fornication came to be briefly classified as a capital offense. In 1650, the Rump Parliament of the Commonwealth of England—the remnant of the Long Parliament (following Colonel Thomas Pride’s purge of 1648) responsible for ordering Charles I’s execution—passed the “Act for suppressing the Detestable Sins of Incest, Adultery, and Fornication.”83 Before the passing of this legislation, fornication—the act of sexual intercourse outside of marriage—was subject to the legal mechanisms of the church courts, also known as ecclesiastical courts. This piece of legislation shows the English Parliament arrogating to itself the role of regulating morality, traditionally a responsibility that belongs to the church. The Act declares incest and adultery to be felonies, punishable—upon conviction—by death without the benefit of clergy. It also makes provisions for a man who has “the carnal knowledge of the body of any Virgin, unmarried woman or widow”84 to be thrown into jail with the woman involved. Men and women who run a brothel will be publicly whipped, put in a pillory, branded with the letter B (for bawd), and committed to a prison or house of correction to work for three years. If these bawds, which can refer to both men and women, are convicted a second time for the same offenses, they will be put to death without the benefit of clergy.85 Interestingly, this 1650 legislation was recalled all the way across the Atlantic in Archives of Maryland to frame the following account cautioning against “legislating too much or too minutely on [one’s] subjects”: A too close inspection into the private lives of subjects or citizens of a state, necessary to carry laws against such immoralities into full effect, opens too wide a door to let in the tyranny and oppression of magistrates and administrators of justice. It would be impossible to depict a despot of a religious, civil or political nature, in more glaring colours than in the character of a ruling elder of New England, at this period of time. He acted as a spy in every man’s family. Adultery with a married woman had before this, in Massachusetts, been made punishable with death, both to the man and the woman committing it.86

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The language in this excerpt from Archives of Maryland reminds us of John Webster’s Jacobean tragedy The Duchess of Malfi, in which a nameless widow’s brothers warn her against remarrying, even going as far as to plant a spy—Bosola—to report on whether she has sexual relations with men. One brother Ferdinand’s disturbing fixation with and perverse need to regulate his sister’s sex life not only connotes undercurrents of incestuous desire, but also suggests a pathological version of fundamentalist Puritanism’s preoccupation with the virtue of chastity. In Measure for Measure, Angelo is directly associated with the Puritan temper, suggested by his remarkable response to an old lord (known for his tempering of justice with mercy) who wonders whether Angelo had ever engaged in sexual activities for which he is now punishing Claudio: “’Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus, / Another thing to fall” (2.1.17–18). If Angelo’s discourse here does not constitute a straightforward answer to Escalus’s query, it could also be read as pride in one’s own righteousness, a self-congratulatory spirit possessed by the pharisee in contrast to the contrite and remorseful sinner that is the publican in Jesus’s parable recorded in the Gospel of Luke: “The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, O God, I thank thee that I am not as other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this Publican” (Luke 18:11). Known for his upright ways, the outside observer does not question Angelo’s integrity and moral rectitude. Characters find Angelo cold, austere, and severe. However, despite his seeming lack of human feelings, Angelo’s public life appears unimpeachable, that is until he sets eyes on Isabella. The emergence of predatorial desire in Angelo suggests that he is a hypocrite whose inner life is divorced from an outer one put on for people’s admiration. In Paradise Lost, Milton makes the point that “neither Man nor Angel can discern / Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks / Invisible, except to God alone” (PL 3.683–85). Temptations are part and parcel of the postlapsarian world. When experiencing temptation, how is the Christian soul expected to respond? In the face of temptation, the Christian is called upon to resist and overcome. However, there is not one human being in all of history who has not fallen into temptation. Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Son of God, is the only exception when he lived on earth. The discourse of temptation frames Angelo’s rationalization of his sexual feelings toward Isabella. After Isabella leaves the scene after her first meeting with Angelo, the latter considers the attribution of responsibility for transgression: “The tempter or the tempted, who sins most?” (2.2.168). Women have often been assigned blame for

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bringing about men’s downfall or even destruction through the seductive powers of their beauty and sensuousness. One thinks here of Dido of Carthage who, inflamed with erotic passion for Aeneas, threatens to prevent Virgil’s Trojan hero from fulfilling his epic identity as the prince of destiny. In Inferno, Dante places the shade of Dido in the second circle of hell reserved for those guilty of the deadly sin of carnal lust, which entails the destructive overwhelming of reason by passion. Shakespeare’s Antony—Rome’s great triumvir and the third pillar of the world—is held captive in Egyptian Cleopatra’s embrace in an affair that resonates with hedonistic lust even while it purports to represent true love. Like Dido, Cleopatra also finds herself punished in Dante’s tempestuous second circle of hell. In Paradise Regained, the “sensuallest” (PR 2.151) and “fleshliest” (PR 2.153) demon Belial makes a point of proposing to Satan that he “set women in [Jesus’s] eye and in his walk” (PR 2.153) considering that men have been especially susceptible to the temptations of the flesh and sexual desire. If Angelo identifies Isabella as a temptress, he is not consistent in leveling that charge, identifying himself also as a contaminating agent in their encounter. Angelo persists in meditating on the nature of temptation in his soliloquy, further clarifying that what prompted him to sin is Isabella’s virtue. A pure woman sexually excites Angelo in a way that a promiscuous woman does not. If Angelo succumbs to temptation in a way that is out of character, we need to make some sense of why Angelo persists in his transgressive ways after this initial moment of moral lapse. Angelo not only goes back on his word to grant Claudio a reprieve after sleeping with his ex-fiancée Mariana, thinking she is Isabella, but he also brings forward the time of Claudio’s execution. Noting that Measure for Measure accords importance to considerations of the moral status of sex in society, and of the responsibilities of state and church in regulating sexual morality, Debora Shuger calls attention to the play’s “domino theory of vice … where the initial sexual infraction rips the self from its ethical moorings, so that it plunges downward from one sin to the next on the fierce currents of appetite and impulse.”87 Specifically, “sexual immorality remains the hallmark of the tyrant.”88 Angelo revels in power’s resistance to accountability, confident that any accusation of wrongdoing brought by a citizen against him will be disbelieved because of the authority of his office and unassailability of his reputation. Shakespeare’s portrayal of Angelo’s confidence that no one would believe Isabella should she reveal his unwanted advances reminds us of the

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apocryphal story of Susanna added to the familiar twelve-chapter (Hebrew and Aramaic) Book of Daniel as Chapter 13 in the Latin Vulgate. In this story, a beautiful young woman named Susanna, who is married to a rich and highly respected man, Joachim, catches the eye of two elders of the people who have been appointed judges. One day these two old men who lust after Susanna approach her when she is bathing and want her to have sex with them. Susanna screams for help and is accused by her would-be rapists of committing adultery with a young man, an event they claim that they have witnessed in the garden. These elders are believed because of their age, seniority, and social position, a principle that Angelo well understood when harassing Isabella. The story of Susanna does not show her doing anything in her own defense, a narrative feature that lends support to readers who find her character passive and ineffectual. As it turns out, she is sentenced to death but is fortunately saved by Daniel who demonstrates that Susanna’s accusers could only deliver conflicting accounts about what in fact took place in the garden at the time Susanna was bathing. In The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare evokes this same Daniel to valorize Portia’s wisdom and abilities as a judge arbitrating Shylock’s legal claim for the merchant’s pound of flesh.

The Sense of an Ending In Act 5 scene 1 of Measure for Measure, the final scene of this dark play, an audience would have noticed the presence of Shakespeare’s characteristic representation of marriage as the symbolic marker of resolution and affirmation in his romantic comedies. The exuberant Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream tells us that “Jack shall have Jill, / Naught shall go ill, / the man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well” (3.3.45–47). These lines affirm the heteronormative vision as the natural order of things: facilitating generation, ensuring the endurance of community, and enabling the preservation of the human species. In Shakespeare’s representative romantic comedies such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, and As You Like It, the marriages that bring the plays to their conclusion symbolize the resolution of issues and problems, assuring the audience that all’s well that ends well and there is no threat intended against or posed to society’s controlling and prevailing values, central to which is the primacy of heteronormativity. If Twelfth Night, for example, facilitates provocative suggestions of same-sex attraction—such as in Duke Orsino’s comments about Cesario’s feminine features or the sea captain Antonio’s

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close friendship with and obvious affection for another male character Sebastian—any perceived endorsement of queer masculinities is overridden by the heteronormative unions that bring the comedy to its close. The events of Act 5 scene 1 take place at the gates of the city, a public space where people can assemble and witness the return of the duke. This setting allows Isabella to present her complaints to the duke not behind closed doors but in public for all to witness. The public setting not only enables Isabella to undertake her quest for justice, but it also allows the duke to display for the benefit of his audience the principles and functioning of justice. Isabella cries out for justice against Angelo whom she accuses of not only being “a murderer” but also “an adulterous thief, / An hypocrite, a virgin-violator” (5.1.39–41). The duke responds by labeling Isabella insane for her indecorous public outcry, deciding that the incomprehensible disjunction between Angelo’s impeccable reputation and this boisterous woman’s accusations can only signify slander. The duke’s display of skepticism about the verity of Isabella’s accusation is merely a prop in the public theater of justice he is unfolding, one that elucidates the meaning of “measure for measure” in a biblical context as well as legal register.89 The performance of justice in the city gates makes us think of one aspect of the functioning of early modern England’s church or ecclesiastical courts identified by Martin Ingram: not so much the goal of “exact[ing] retribution for offences” as of seeking “to reform the culprit … ‘for the soul’s health’ (pro salute animae), to restore offenders to a healthy relationship with God and their neighbours.”90 Instead of conducting judicial proceedings in secret, ecclesiastical courts conducted “the rehabilitation of the sinner … in a blaze of publicity as a system of communal discipline. The characteristic penalty imposed by the courts was public penance, a ritual of repentance and reconciliation, but equally a deeply humiliating experience designed to deter others and give satisfaction to the congregation for the affront of public sin.”91 After Angelo’s flagrant abuse of power is brought to light by Duke Vincentio who can see through his subjects’ darkest secrets “like power divine” (5.1.361)—an absolutist conception—he declares: The very mercy of the law cries out Most audible, even from his proper tongue, ‘An Angelo for Claudio, death for death’. Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure;

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Like doth quit like, and measure still for measure. (5.1.399–403)

In speaking the voice of law, the duke assumes the function of administering justice identified by James I as central to the definition of monarchical authority. In The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, King James writes that kings “sit upon GOD his Throne in the earth, … To minister Justice and Judgement to the people, … To advance the good, and punish the evil, … To establish good Lawes to his people, and procure obedience to the same[,] … To procure the peace of the people, … To decide all controversies that can arise among them, … To be the Minister of God for the weak of them that doe well, and as the minister of God, to take vengeance upon them that doe evill.”92 “Measure for measure” directs Shakespeare’s audience to Matthew 7:1–2, which reads: “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” Angelo is a magistrate who judges a citizen harshly for the crime of fornication which he himself then seeks to commit under the protective cover of his political office. Because Angelo had signed Claudio’s death warrant, the duke now condemns him to the block “for Claudio’s death” (5.1.434). “Measure for measure” also alludes to the lex talionis associated with the Old Testament dispensation of law. In Exodus 21:23–25, we read: 23 …if death follow, then thou shalt pay life for life. 24 Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, 25 Burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.

Also referred to as the law of retaliation or revenge, lex talionis is the opposite of mercy that grounds the dispensation of grace, pleaded for by Isabella after the duke’s imposition of the death sentence on Angelo. Fortunately for Angelo, not only was Duke Vincentio moved by Isabella’s entreaty for Angelo’s pardon, but the fact remains that Claudio had not in fact been killed. That Claudio is alive logically means there are no grounds for Angelo to forfeit his life. It does not, however, obviate the requirement of punishment, which in this play entails tying the knot with someone you have no desire to marry. Analyzing the distinctive features of Shakespeare’s dramatization of marriage at the end of Measure for Measure, Sarah Beckwith points out that the idea of consent—the willingness of two people to be married—is problematized in the play.93 If this play is, at some level, about

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circumstantial disruptions that affect couples’ plans for matrimonial union, such disruptions can lead to a cooling of affections on the part of one person for another. Take, for example, Angelo’s relationship with Mariana, a woman who was rejected because the dowry that was a condition of her marriageability was lost at sea. The spurned Mariana’s life can only move in a different and more positive direction by outside intervention such as the bed trick orchestrated by Duke Vincentio. If our sense of the ending of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies is conditioned by these plays’ matchmaking impetus and the related assumption that marriage is a positive cultural institution that brings men and women happiness and the promise of generation, we also find the marriages arranged by the returning duke questionable because not necessarily informed by willingness or consent. When Duke Vincentio commands Angelo to marry Mariana, he implies that sex between a betrothed man and woman is a (logical?) precursor to the formalization of nuptial ties. The crime of fornication/premarital sex for which Claudio was sentenced to death by Angelo did not appear to be an issue for Duke Vincentio when he proposed the bed trick to Isabella. Furthermore, the question whether Angelo loves Mariana is moot in the context of the duke’s imperious order for Angelo to tie the knot with his one-time fiancée. In Act 5 scene 1, enforced marriages appear to be less for the purpose of starting a new family unit and more for the application of discipline and punishment. Poor Lucio loudly complains that the duke’s judicial injunction that he marry the prostitute Kate Keepdown whom he had abandoned when she became pregnant with his child is worse than “pressing to death, whipping, and hanging” (5.1.515–16). Because the forced unions imposed by the duke are not predicated on the premise of matrimonial bliss, they can be said to facilitate the manipulation of psychic anxiety central to Vincentio’s handling of discipline and punishment. Isolated from society in a moated grange, Mariana continues to love Angelo even though he had jilted her five years earlier. When the duke ordered Angelo’s immediate execution after completing the formal protocols of his marriage to Mariana, Mariana pleaded for her husband’s life and asked Isabella to help her supplicate for mercy, which Isabella did even though she herself was under intense stress. Considering that she is still under the impression that her brother is dead, Isabella’s willingness to plead for Angelo’s life is remarkable. The final scene of the play depicts the sealing of matrimonial union between Angelo and Mariana, and between Lucio and Kate Keepdown, as

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a function of state authority’s enactment of discipline and punishment, presenting a situational context in which the question of consent between the marrying couple does not bring forth a clear response. When the duke orders Lucio to marry the prostitute whom he abandoned after she gave birth to his child, the latter vociferously declares this to be cruel and unusual punishment. And we also wonder about Angelo’s feelings toward the woman he had abandoned for lack of a dowry. Arguably the most problematic marriage in the play—if in fact it does take place—is the anticipated one between the duke and Isabella. While the duke’s proposal of marriage to Isabella—“Give me your hand, and say you will be mine” (5.1.486)—may help to round off comedy’s demand for the symbolic closure conferred by this fundamental social and cultural institution, it does not secure a response from Isabella. Even though the duke might have afforded some flexibility for Isabella’s potential refusal of his marriage proposal in the line “if you’ll a willing ear incline” (5.1.529), one notes that this proposal takes place within the context of a major power differential between the ruler of Vienna and a young woman who—at least at the beginning of the play—had plans to join the convent. Measure for Measure does not give Isabella voice by way of a reply, a silence that leaves open an audience’s sense of how she would in fact respond to the duke. To audiences for whom the symbol of marriage still affords appropriate closure for the play despite its stresses and ethical ambiguities, Isabella’s assent to the duke would make for a happy ending. However, if one takes the view that Shakespearean comedy is informed by the spirit that all’s well that ends well, does not the ending of this play make room for unease, especially when it comes to the issue of willing consent in entering a marriage arrangement? I say willing consent because consent can be given in response to pressure tactics and even coercion. A familiar reading of Measure for Measure focuses on the play’s dramatization of the exercise of political power, one which, in the case of Angelo, manifests as sexual harassment. Isabella learned the unpleasant lesson that ordinary citizens are powerless against rulers, magistrates, and people in high political office. Thank goodness that Duke Vincentio turns out to be a benevolent ruler. Even though this might be the case, the duke represents the apex of power in society, the political position occupied by Angelo when he forced his will on Isabella. To a young woman for whom the experience of political and judicial authority turned out to be harrowing—to put it mildly—the achievement of resolution that could only bring

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a sigh of relief is followed almost immediately after by the duke’s proposal of marriage. How is an audience to respond to the duke’s closing lines? In the course of the play, we have been given almost no hint about the duke’s romantic interest in Isabella, his encounters with her defined by his role as prison chaplain to Vienna’s prisoners on death row and also as the author of the bed trick. There is also little, if anything, to suggest that Isabella finds herself attracted to the duke, Vienna’s absent ruler she had only known as the disguised Friar Lodowick. That the play text does not readily lend itself to supporting a reading of the duke and Isabella in love does not prevent a stage production from doing so. Pascale Aebischer calls our attention to Adrian Noble’s 1983 Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Measure for Measure in which Isabella, overwhelmed by excitement with Friar Lodowick’s scheme of the bed trick, impulsively kisses Duke Vincentio on his cheek. In Act 4 scene 3 of this same production, the duke also plants a kiss on Isabella’s forehead in a bid to lighten the stress she is under even as the plot of the bed trick is underway.94 These two kisses, small physical touches though they may be, can be effectively deployed by a director to foreground the start and development of a romantic interest. If readings of Measure for Measure have engaged with the ideological implications of the play’s dramatic representation of the workings of political power, even suggesting the presence of elements in praise of absolutist authority, these readings are complicated by elements of plot that have the potential to unsettle the structures of encomium. We see Duke Vincentio almost losing control over his plan to set things right in the realm when Angelo makes the unexpected decision to execute Claudio expeditiously, reneging on his agreement with Isabella. The scheme of the bed trick orchestrated by the duke also complicates the premise that, in the Vienna of the play, premarital sex constitutes a capital offense. Where Angelo sentences Claudio to death for sleeping with Juliet with whom he is not officially married because lacking a piece of legal formality, the duke arranges for Angelo to sleep with Mariana—his ex-fiancée masquerading as Isabella—so that he no longer has the option of spurning her when the facts of the bed trick are brought to light. That Act 5 scene 1 can accommodate either a happy ending or the more problematic one in which Isabella’s silence in the face of the duke’s offer of marriage registers surprise, shock, or even horror reinforces one’s sense that Measure for Measure is distinctive in complicating the ethical implications of certain human actions and conduct. If Duke Vincentio is a

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“sacred monarch”95 who turns to the principles of Christian morality and spirituality to support a penitential conception of justice grounded in equity instead of retribution and deterrence, the events of the bed trick and proposal of marriage to Isabella—even when viewed as simply elements of plot—raise questions about probity for an audience. While the allusive presence of scriptural passages (such as Matthew 7:1–2, with its warning against judging others) might suggest that Measure for Measure seeks to thematize serious religious topics, it does not make the play resonate as a preacherly text. While the motifs of law, grace, and mercy—familiar theological commonplaces—contribute to shaping the dramatic arc of the play in distinctive ways, they derive their significance both from the discourse of typology and operations of political power. As the controlling principle of retributive justice, “measure for measure” points us not only toward the Old Testament legal culture of lex talionis but also Renaissance England’s handling of discipline and punishment. The Bible affords Shakespeare material for representing the workings of a Christian conception of justice. It also gives the audience an opportunity to consider the identification of carnal desire as a serious sin in Christianity as well as the place of a confessor in helping a death-row inmate die a good death. Where in Hamlet—as discussed in Chap. 2—Shakespeare showed (an almost personal) concern with what religion and culture have to say about death and the afterlife, in Measure for Measure he portrays the world of the Fall as one in which conceptions of death, chastity, and law versus grace/mercy signify not only theologically but also socially and politically.

Notes 1. For a reading of Plato’s Laws as “the first western text to argue for the comprehensive public regulation of sexual behavior” (24) as an important element in the political creation of the good and virtuous city, see Debora Kuller Shuger, Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England: The Sacred and the State in “Measure for Measure” (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 9–38. From Plato down to the Protestant reformer Martin Bucer and early modern Puritan Left (the ultra-­fundamentalists), regulation of sexuality powerfully symptomatizes the workings of a theocracy in which the state is constituted from the interweaving of politics, religion, and morality. 2. Anna Beer, The Life of the Author William Shakespeare (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2021), 94.

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3. In Reading and Writing During the Dissolution: Monks, Friars, and Nuns, 1530–1558 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), Mary C.  Erler offers a reading of responses from representative figures—friar, anchorite, monk, and nun—associated with the Catholic tradition to King Henry VIII’s closure of Catholic institutions in the latter half of the 1530s. The responses of Catholic men and women in monastic and ascetic life to Henry VIII’s establishment of the English Reformation encompass critique of and negotiation with the king’s violent dissolution of the monasteries at both the spiritual and practical levels. 4. In Shakespeare’s Unreformed Fictions, 90–119, Gillian Woods notes that Isabella’s ability to alter the meanings of Angelo’s sexual allusions shows she possesses dexterous rhetorical skills that can be harnessed in support of the spiritual life. However, the thematic significance of Isabella’s character is defined by her position in a cultural world in which “nun” is a slang for “prostitute” and actors playing nuns and friars on stage invite audience responses that are often informed by Protestant bias and animosity. To watch an actor playing the role of a would-be nun or a duke disguised as a friar is to encounter on stage—via representation—Catholic figures who were “practically invisible in reality. Since the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s, friars and nuns were not seen in public. Rare exceptions were found at times of execution or imprisonment” (90). 5. Bonnie Lander Johnson, Chastity in Early Stuart Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 2. 6. Stephen Greenblatt, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017), 109. 7. Calvin, Institutes, 1: 348. 8. Ibid., 1:348–49. 9. Ibid., 1:349. 10. Ibid., 1:350. 11. Ibid. 12. William Perkins, A golden chaine, or The description of theologie containing the order of the causes of salvation and damnation, according to Gods word (London: John Legate, 1595), 135. 13. Calvin, Institutes, 1:349. 14. Pascale Aebischer, “Silence, Rape and Politics in Measure for Measure: Close Readings in Theatre History,” Shakespeare Bulletin 26, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 1–23, here 8. 15. Ibid., 7. 16. Donatella Pallotti, “‘A most detestable crime’: Representations of Rape in the Popular Press of Early Modern England,” LEA - Lingue e letterature d’Oriente e d’Occidente 1, no. 1 (2012): 287–30. Pallotti points out that medieval law viewed rape as a property crime, and it was only in the late

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sixteenth century that it “came to be seen as a crime against the person” (289). This shift in the law’s view of rape as a property crime to one that is a sexual crime brings up for more in-depth consideration the element of consent on the part of the victim (289). In early modern England, “conviction for rape was rare and predominantly involved the rape of a child or a very young girl, whose virginity was thought to be forfeited” (295–96). A young woman who claims to be a victim of rape must offer “several exact repetitions of the account, each time addressed to a different audience. The inner act of violence is thus turned into a public spectacle, its victim into an actor—playing both herself and the self she is expected to be— whose ability to perform according to a script determines the successfulness of the legal appeal” (290). Rape victims, Pallotti elaborates, tended to be poor, or at least poorer than the men accused of the heinous physical violation of the woman; likewise, discrepancy between the social status of the rape victim and that of the alleged male perpetrator typically raises questions about the girl’s or woman’s credibility, prejudicially affecting her case (294). 17. For an analysis of the historical development of statute laws pertaining to rape in medieval and early modern England, and inconsistency in interpretations of these laws, see Chap. 3, “Statute Law,” in Helen Barker, Rape in Early Modern England: Law, History and Criticism (Cham, CH: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer Nature, 2021), esp. 74–76. Related studies on the discourse of rape in early modern England include Jocelyn Catty, Writing Rape, Writing Women in Early Modern England: Unbridled Speech (Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999); Amy Greenstadt, Rape and the Rise of the Author: Gendering Intention in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2016); and Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose, eds., Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2001); and Garthine Walker, “Rereading Rape and Sexual Violence in Early Modern England,” Gender & History 10, no. 1 (April 1998): 1–25. 18. Published in The Graphic in Great Britain in weekly installments between July and November 1891, Thomas Hardy’s Victorian novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles resurrects some of the thematic issues raised by Shakespeare in the early seventeenth century in Measure for Measure. A work that asks some hard-hitting questions about the impact—not always positive—of Christian belief on society and cultural consciousness, the tragedy of the eponymous Tess centers on her rape by a sham relative Alec d’Urberville. Hardy describes Tess as “a pure woman faithfully presented” in the subtitle of his novel, generating controversy because nineteenth-century England had difficulties viewing a young woman who had sex—even if without her consent—with a man outside of marriage as pure or chaste. Even though

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Hardy portrays Tess as a victim of rape as well as of the persecutory potential of a Christian s­ ociety’s proscriptive moral codes, the novel allows space for considering the possibility that Tess was seduced by Alec, raising the thorny question of consent on the part of the woman for what transpired that fateful night at the Chase. 19. Saint Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 22. 20. Ibid., 21–22. 21. Tianyue Wu, “Shame in the Context of Sin: Augustine on the Feeling of Shame in De Civitate Dei,” Recherches de théologie et philosophie médiévales 74, no. 1 (2007): 1–31. 22. Augustine, City of God, 25. 23. In Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 87–116, Melissa E. Sanchez discusses the political implications of Lucretia’s rape as interpreted by Saint Augustine in The City of God and narrated by Shakespeare in The Rape of Lucrece, analyzing the vexed relationship between submission, consent, and resistance in a woman’s experience of sexual assault. For Sanchez, “[t]he gendered language of sexual assault provides Shakespeare a powerful idiom for analyzing political consent precisely because it depicts agency in such confused and paradoxical terms” (89). Sanchez’s reading of Shakespeare’s Lucrece not only foregrounds the complex manifestations of consent in a woman’s response to male tyrannical authority, but also highlights the ambiguities intrinsic to both the theory and praxis of political agency. 24. Ibid., 103. 25. Ibid., 115. 26. See the collection of essays in Franklin Miller and Alan Wertheimer, eds., The Ethics of Consent: Theory and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 27. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “lust, n.,” accessed July 24, 2022, https:// www-­oed-­com.libproxy1.nus.edu.sg/view/Entry/111374?rskey=KnIqO 1&result=1#eid. 28. For a reading of Augustine’s impact on the development of Christianity’s deep distrust of human sexuality, especially as it relates to the desire for and experience of pleasure, see Greenblatt, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, 81–119. For a perceptive reading of the contradictions inherent in Augustine’s efforts to imagine sex in prelapsarian Eden and his anxious revulsion at the experience of postlapsarian concupiscence and lust, see James Grantham Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (1993; rprt, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), Chap. 2 (38–95). In this chapter, Turner discusses the sig-

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nificance of the will in both Edenic and fallen human sexuality; the theology of shame in the experience of naked human bodies; the relationship between reason and passion in sexual activity; and the voluntary (paradisal) and involuntary/uncontrolled (fallen) use of man’s and woman’s sexual organs for pleasure and for procreation. 29. John Owen, Overcoming Sin and Temptation, ed. Kelly M.  Kapic and Justin Taylor (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2006), 73. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., cited in 74. 33. Ibid., 74. 34. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A.  C. Hamilton, Hiroshi Yamashita, and Toshiyuki Suzuki (Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2007). All citations of The Faerie Queene are to this edition. 35. Patricia Palmer, The Severed Head and the Grafted Tongue: Literature, Translation and Violence in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 91. Studies on sexual violence in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England include Jocelyn Catty, Writing Rape, Writing Women in Early Modern England: Unbridled Speech (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999) and Anne Leah Greenfield, ed., Interpreting Sexual Violence, 1660–1800 (New York: Routledge, 2016). For a reading of some of the cultural and ideological implications of Spenser’s representation of sexual violence in his epic poem, see Katherine Eggert, “Spenser’s Ravishment: Rape and Rapture in The Faerie Queene,” Representations 70 (Spring 2000): 1–26. 36. Catherine Bates, Masculinity and the Hunt: Wyatt to Spenser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 256. 37. Pamela Joseph Benson, “Fisher,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London: Routledge, 1991), 804–806. 38. See Spenser, The Faerie Queene, n. 3.5.45–47 (339). 39. See the discussion in Stephanie Bahr, “‘Ne spared they to strip her naked all’: Reading, Rape, and Reformation in Spenser’s Faerie Queene,” Studies in Philology, 117, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 285–312. 40. In Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1980), 169–92, Stephen Greenblatt highlights Guyon’s destruction of the Bower of Bliss as a narrative feature that is informed by Western culture’s contradictory instincts of embracing sexual pleasure and repudiating it, a repudiation that finds expression in Freud’s theoretical premise that civilization is built on the repression of desire. Greenblatt finds that in Book 2 of The Faerie Queene, Spenser shows that while it is easy enough for the temperate man to resist the temptations of Mammon, this is certainly not the case when it comes to temptations of the

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flesh and of sexual desire. The violent destruction of the Bower of Bliss can be seen as deriving its impetus from various social and cultural conceptions, which include the definition of sexual pleasure as sin and a feature of fallen human nature; the identification and destruction of the demonic Other in the service of monarch and nation; and even the need of an individual or social and cultural institution to participate in the politics of control and exercise of power. 41. In Polliticke Courtier: Spenser’s The Faerie Queene as a Rhetoric of Justice (Montreal and Kingston, CA: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), Michael F. N. Dixon makes the point that Belphoebe is “to heroic virginity what Britomart is to heroic chastity” (59). For a reading of the contribution of early modern English ideas of chastity to the development of political, theological, and philosophical thought, see Johnson, Chastity in Early Stuart Literature. 42. Anna Whitelock, “‘Woman, Warrior, Queen?’: Rethinking Mary and Elizabeth,” in Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth, ed. Alice Hunt and Anna Whitelock (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 173–89. 43. Johnson, Chastity in Early Stuart Literature, 2. 44. In Pure Resistance: Queer Virginity in Early Modern English Drama (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), Theodora A. Jankowski offers a survey of Christian history’s interpretation of virginity from ancient times through the Renaissance. Even as the Catholic tradition’s subscription to the Pauline privileging of the condition of virginity for both men and women jostles against Protestantism’s valorization of the institution of marriage, early modern English plays register cultural, doctrinal, and ideological tensions in their representation of female virgins on stage. Related studies on representations of virginity and chastity in early modern England include Marie H.  Loughlin, Hymeneutics: Interpreting Virginity on the Early Modern Stage (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1997); Kathleen C.  Kelly and Marina Leslie, eds., Menacing Virgins: Representing Virginity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1999); and Kathryn Schwartz, “Chastity, Militant and Married: Cavendish’s Romance, Milton’s Masque,” PMLA 118, no. 2 (March 2003): 270–85. 45. Milton, Comus, in Complete Poems and Major Prose, 86–114. 46. In “John Milton’s Comus,” in A New Companion to Milton, ed. Thomas Corns (West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 241–54, Leah S. Marcus draws attention to a major sex scandal involving the Countess of Bridgewater’s brother-in-law, Mervin Touchet, second Earl of Castlehaven, who was beheaded for the crimes of rape and sodomy involving family members, relatives, and even servants in the household. Marcus argues that

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this notorious “Castlehaven scandal” was familiar news and served as an inescapable backdrop for interpreting Milton’s thematization of chastity in the masque. See also Marcus’s “The Milieu of Milton’s Comus: Judicial Reform at Ludlow and the Problem of Sexual Assault,” Criticism 25, no. 4 (Fall 1983): 293–327, for ways in which the rape of one Margery Evans near the Welsh border—a case investigated by the First Earl of Bridgewater himself—affords a suggestive context for reading the cultural politics of Milton’s masque. 47. Duncan Salkeld, Shakespeare and London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 98. 48. See Introduction in Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, trans. Barbara Reynolds (1973; reis., London: Penguin Books, 1975), esp. 11–14. 49. Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, trans. Guido Waldman (1974; reis., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 155. 50. Ibid., 156. 51. Ibid. 52. Woods, Shakespeare’s Reformed Fictions, 90. 53. Ibid. 54. David N.  Beauregard, Catholic Theology in Shakespeare’s Plays (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 150. See also Christopher Matusiak, “Lost Stage Friars and their Narratives,” in Lost Plays in Shakespeare, ed. David McInnis and Matthew Steggle (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 208–228. 55. Matusiak, “Lost Stage Friars,” 211. 56. Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe, 53. 57. Shuger, Political Theologies, 60. 58. Ibid. 59. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 138. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid., 138. 62. Ibid., 139–41. I am indebted to Greenblatt’s close reading of Juliet’s encounter with the disguised duke in prison, in which he notes Juliet’s implied criticism of Vienna’s legal regime and culture of moral regulation in her use of ambiguous language. 63. Patricia Phillippy, Painting Women: Cosmetics, Canvases, and Early Modern Culture (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 93. 64. In Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Martin Ingram considers the ways in which—even before the Reformation had sunk roots in England through Henry VIII’s assumption of supreme headship over the Church of

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England—both English secular and ecclesiastical courts were already actively involved in the regulation of sexual life for both clergy and laypersons, the former committed to celibacy. In early modern England, religious and institutional changes contributed to the stricter regulation of sexual conduct in the lives of both individuals and the larger society. Ingram tells us that even though “[i]n theory the church courts could bring prosecutions for immodest behaviour … prevailing social conditions and judicial caution ensured that these powers were very sparingly used” (240). Ingram also points us to “the licence to enjoy advanced physical intimacy which popular custom tacitly accorded seriously courting or affianced couples” (240). 65. Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage, 219. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68. Thomas Nashe, Christ’s Tears Over Jerusalem. Whereunto is annexed A comparative admonition to London (London: James Roberts, 1593), 80. 69. See “The Epistle Dedicatorie” in Samuel Rowlands, Greenes Ghost Haunting Conie-Catchers (1602; rpt., n.p.: Printed for the Hunterian Club, 1872), 4–5. 70. Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 54–55. 71. Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage, 240. 72. Ibid. 73. Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (London: John Kingston, 1583), 50. 74. Ibid., 49. 75. Ibid., 51. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid., 57. 78. Hugh Latimer, “Last Sermon preached before King Edward VI,” in Project Canterbury: Sermons by Hugh Latimer (New York: E.P.  Dutton, 1906), accessed August 6, 2022, http://anglicanhistory.org/reformation/latimer/sermons/edward8.html, para. 4. 79. Perkins, A golden chaine, 132. 80. Ibid., 138. 81. Ibid. 82. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “concupiscence, n.,” accessed September 7, 2021, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/concupiscence_n?tab= meaning_and_use#8674460. 83. An Act for suppressing the detestable sins of incest, adultery and fornication (London: John Field, 1650). 84. Ibid., 829.

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85. Ibid., 829–30. 86. John Leeds Bozman, The History of Maryland, from its First Settlement, in 1633, to the Restoration, in 1660, with a Copious Introduction, and Notes and Illustrations, vol. 2 (Baltimore, MD: James Lucas & E.  K. Deaver, 1837), 427. 87. Shuger, Political Theologies, 37. 88. Ibid., 38. 89. See the related discussion in Stacy Magadenz, “Public Justice and Private Mercy in Measure for Measure,” SEL: Studies in English Literature 44, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 317–32. 90. Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage, 3. 91. Ibid. 92. James I, The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, in King James VI and I: Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 62–84, here 64. 93. See Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness, 59–81, esp. 69–73. 94. Aebischer, “Silence, Rape and Politics,” 1–23. 95. Shuger, Political Theologies, 45.

CHAPTER 4

Biblical Faith and Radical Politics in The Winter’s Tale

What is truth? (John 18:38) Jesus said unto him, I am that Way, and that Truth, and that Life. No man cometh unto the Father, but by me (John 14:6)

Shakespeare employs scriptural stories to help shape the plot of The Winter’s Tale, stories that, intertwined with classical allusions, facilitate consideration of the relationship between the Bible as God’s inspired Word and classical mythology to which Ovid’s Pygmalion, an important literary source in the play, belongs. For Shakespeare, the Bible affords a rich source of literary material that can be mined for subject matter to supplement and complement the stories of the classical tradition. By making scriptural and classical materials share a common dramatic space, Shakespeare encourages his audience to question the status of the Bible as sacred text and to consider the place of truth in the experience of religious conviction. If The Winter’s Tale considers the literary and cultural significance of biblical stories, it also considers the Bible’s contribution to early seventeenth-century English political culture. If its status as sacred text is interrogated by the playwright’s interest in the relationship between different literary forms and genres, the Bible also yields material for Shakespeare’s representation of the world of the court, monarchical © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 W. S. H. Lim, Shakespeare and the Theater of Religious Conviction in Early Modern England, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40006-3_4

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authority, and law. Topics such as faith and one’s conviction of truth may carry weight in the discourse of religious experience, but they are also applicable to the workings of political life. One distinctive feature of The Winter’s Tale is the way in which Shakespeare evokes the experience of faith and religious conviction to enable the dramatic representation of political life in the world of the court, one that alludes to James I’s understanding of the institution of law and of the monarch’s relationship with Parliament. Christian religion is deeply implicated in the development of political thought in early modern England.

Classical Mythology, Biblical Allusion, and Christian Doctrine The Winter’s Tale possesses dramatic and thematic elements that scholars have associated with the genre of romance: the discovery of long-lost children, focus on fantastic events and magic, reconciliation between hostile rulers, and guarantee of dynastic continuity. Like his other late romance, The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale does not strive to give its audience a dramatic world that is realistic or experientially familiar. The story begins in the Sicilian court where King Leontes suddenly and inexplicably finds himself consumed by jealousy and convinced that his wife Hermione has committed adultery with King Polixenes of Bohemia, an old friend of his who is presently visiting him as a royal guest in Sicilia. As a result of this, Leontes loses the trust of Polixenes who secretly flees Sicilia when he discovers that his life is in danger. Furthermore, Leontes experiences the deaths of both his son and wife, which the play presents as a form of retribution for the king’s tyrannical rule. In the play, the truth of Hermione’s innocence is made known by Apollo’s oracle in a sealed message conveyed by two lords, Cleomenes and Dion, to Leontes. That Leontes sent Cleomenes and Dion to Delphos is significant because it calls attention to the play’s interest in the matter of classical literature and mythology. A well-known religious sanctuary of the ancient world dedicated to Apollo, Delphi—located on the slopes of Mount Parnassus—was where one could consult the god’s female oracle for prophetic insight into the future or for answers to questions of private and political import. Sophocles’s tragic protagonist Oedipus famously consults the oracle at Delphi for information about his parentage only to learn that he is destined to kill his father and sleep with his mother.

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The classical world foregrounds its presence in a self-conscious way in The Winter’s Tale. In Act 4 scene 4—the scene of the great sheep-shearing festival in which Perdita and Florizel declare their love for each other before the disguised Polixenes and Camillo—a dialogue ensues between Perdita and the king about the relationship between art and nature. In this urbane exchange, Polixenes expresses support for “marry[ing] / A gentler scion to the wildest stock” (4.4.92–93) in horticulture while Perdita speaks in favor of nature developing freely without the art(ificial) intervention of human management and cultivation. Perdita—Shakespeare’s young, happy, and attractive shepherdess—desires a natural world without winter, the season that came into existence when Demeter (Ceres), goddess of the harvest and mother of Persephone, is deprived of the presence of her daughter who returns to the underworld for a specified number of months each year to join Pluto, the ruler of the netherworld who is also her abductor and husband. This etiological myth explaining the cycle of the seasons that Shakespeare obtained from Ovid is present even in the symbolic dimensions of the play where Sicilia, the island on which Leontes’s court is located, is associated with winter while Bohemia’s balmy pastoral is associated with spring and juvenescence focused on the figure of the young and vibrant Perdita. So long as Perdita remains lost, Sicilia is locked into the condition of winter or sorrow, such that only her return to the land of her birth and restoration to her mother can bring about the return of spring to the kingdom. In the middle of handing out flowers in different shapes and hues to the people around her at the sheep-shearing festival, Perdita makes an unexpected allusion to classical mythology when she says: “O Proserpina, / For the flowers now that, frighted, thou letst fall / From Dis’s wagon!” (4.4.116–18). Here Perdita (unknowingly) establishes her structural positioning and thematic significance as a kind of Persephone figure in the play, prompting the audience to view Hermione in turn as a Demeter figure. We only witness Sicilia’s transformation from winter to spring after the long-lost daughter of Leontes and Hermione has been found, pointing us in the direction of Ovid’s mythological account of Pluto’s abduction of Persephone from the Vale of Anna—a meadow in Sicily—and of Demeter’s distress at the loss of her daughter from the world of the living. A reader alert to Shakespeare’s use of classical allusions in The Winter’s Tale would also notice the presence of biblical material and doctrinal concepts associated with the Judeo-Christian tradition in the play. We can

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identify biblical passages that were on Shakespeare’s mind when he wrote the play. One example is the following account from 2 Kings 2:23–24: And [Elisha] went up from thence unto Bethel. And as he was going up the way, little children came out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Come up, thou bald head, come up, thou bald head. / And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the Lord. And two bears came out of the forest, and tore in pieces two and forty children of them.

Shakespeare received his idea of the bear’s devouring of Antigonus from this Old Testament story, showing that biblical narratives can well serve the purposes of dramatic representation. If Shakespeare’s borrowing from the Book of 2 Kings suggests he views the Bible as a useful source of literary material, his evocation of familiar and even commonplace doctrinal concepts such as original sin in a play allows him casually to question its secure grounding in a people’s cultural understanding. In Act 1 scene 2, Shakespeare evokes the doctrine of original sin in Polixenes’s nostalgic and wistful recollection of his childhood friendship with Leontes: We were as twinned lambs that did frisk i’th’ sun, And bleat the one at th’other. What we changed Was innocence for innocence. We knew not The doctrine of ill-doing, nor dreamed That any did. Had we pursued that life, And our weak spirits ne’er been higher reared With stronger blood, we should have answered heaven Boldly, “Not guilty”, the imposition cleared Hereditary ours. (1.2.69–77; emphasis mine)

The imagery in this passage has affinities with conventional representations of pastoral innocence. The word “innocence” appears twice in one line, suggesting that Polixenes and Leontes harbor fantasies of remaining in a state of perpetual pre-sexual and pre-adolescent existence. This male-­ centered pastoral, uncontaminated by female presence, corresponds culturally with the “androgynous” phase in the raising of children in early modern England.1 In the first few years of a child’s life, both boys and girls were dressed in frocks. Roughly between four and seven years old, boys would be formally breeched (wear trousers) to symbolize their transition from the “genderless” phase of childhood, when mothers served as

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primary caretakers, to the world of men, preparation for which now falls under the purview of fathers and other prominent male members of the family.2 Shakespeare’s representation of childhood as a period in life when heavy doctrinal concepts such as original sin do not come into play allows for nostalgic reminiscence of the past as well as idealization of friendship bonds forged at the time. Polixenes identifies the onset of sin or “ill-­ doing” at that moment when his wife ceases to be “a girl” and after Hermione had “crossed [Leontes’s] eyes” (1.2.80–81), registering anxiety about the female sex and maternal body. Masculine anxiety manifests itself as general distrust of genital sexuality, which is linked to sin(ning). In addition to the psychoanalytic implications of the threat posed by the female body to Leontes’s and Polixenes’s inseparable relationship in childhood are the theological implications of the relationship set up in the play between women, sexual knowledge, and sin. Women disrupt the joys of male homosociality, inaugurating the economy of gender(ed) differentiation and enabling the perpetration of sin. The emphasis that women bear responsibility for bringing boys/men from the condition of innocence into the world of experience resonates with the Bible’s identification of Eve as the first human both to be tempted by the serpent and to consume the forbidden fruit, rendering her more blameworthy than man in the story of humankind’s first disobedience. The idea of innocence and experience informs the pastoral and idyllic world whose loss is deeply lamented by Polixenes in gender(ed) terms. Polixenes nourishes the masculine fantasy of a world without women, a world which also has no knowledge of sin. Polixenes’s account of his early childhood years with Leontes allows Shakespeare to point the audience to one of the church’s central doctrines: inherited spiritual corruption or original sin. As the Apostle Paul puts it: “for all have sinned, and are deprived of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). In this doctrine, all human beings are born, without exception, in the condition of sin. We are all innately depraved, inheriting a sinful nature from Adam and Eve who disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden. When Saint Augustine sought visible and powerful examples of inherited fallen human nature in the world in which we live, he found it in the phenomenon of the newborn child. The newborn infant is an important point of focus in the doctrinal battle waged by Augustine against Pelagius. If there is one visible sign of sin’s terrifying transmission, like some dreadful disease, from Adam and Eve to their descendants—that is, the entire human race—it is the

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phenomenon of the infant itself. In Book 1 section 7 of Confessions, Augustine considers the spiritual condition of the baby by making inferences from his own experience as a neonate as well as from other infants he has observed. For Augustine, no human being is free from sin in God’s sight, not even a one-day-old baby. He compares his own natural instincts as a baby with others that he has seen, concluding that babies’ behavior all testifies to the fact of original sin: crying for things, even those that are harmful; throwing tantrums to get one’s way; striking and hurting others who refuse to accede to their demands. Augustine’s infant is violent, avaricious, jealous, and bitter.3 Picking up from Augustine, Calvin will later refer to the nature of babies as the “seed-bed of sin.”4 Historically, the concept of original sin became doctrinally entrenched as the result of Augustine’s theological quarrel with Pelagius. Because he denied that human beings were born in sin, Pelagius found himself declared a heretic. Augustine found problematic Pelagius’s view that human beings came into the world untainted by sin and that they also have free will and the capacity to choose between right and wrong. For Pelagius, who denies the innate presence of evil in the newborn child, the idea of morality cannot be extricated from the premise that personal assent always operates in the commission of sin. He writes: All the good and all the evil in us, by which we deserve praise or blame, comes from us and is not born with us; we are born with a capacity for either, and as we are created without virtue so we are created without vice. Previous to any action of our own will there is nothing in us except that which the creator has placed in us.5

Pelagius, notes Richard Strier, “saw innocence as potentially continuing through adulthood and only ruined by actual moral failure.”6 Free choice is a concept central to Pelagius’s ethical understanding because a person’s ability to choose between right and wrong is what makes possible the moral dimension in human life. It is this moral dimension that makes men and women responsible for their own actions and consequently deserving of either heaven or hell.7 When we consider the implications of Polixenes’s account to Hermione that, as children, he and Leontes were oblivious to “The doctrine of ill-­ doing,” we note that he is not alone in depicting childhood as a time of innocence, untainted by the shadow of inherited spiritual contamination. In linking the condition of innocence to the carefree and happy existence

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of the child, Shakespeare brings a perspective that makes us think of representations of the child’s closeness to Eden found in devotional literature of the period. In the poem “Eden,” the Anglican clergyman and poet Thomas Traherne wrote: A learned and a Happy Ignorance Divided me, From all the Vanitie, From all the Sloth Care Pain and Sorrow that advance The madness and the Miserie Of Men. No Error, no Distraction I Saw soil the Earth, or overcloud the Skie.8

Celebrating the child’s instinctive goodness that enables him to behold what Adam experienced “in his first estate,” Traherne valorizes “Simplicitie” (ll. 40, 44), a word which appears twice in the poem, to capture the “Treasures” (l. 46) of Eden and the perspective of the child/innocence. Where Shakespeare’s Polixenes “knew not / The doctrine of ill-doing nor dreamed / That any did,” Traherne’s child knew not that there was a Serpents Sting, Whose Poyson shed On Men, did overspread The World: nor did I Dream of such a Thing As Sin; in which Mankind lay Dead. They all were Brisk and Living Weights to me, Yea Pure, and full of Immortalitie. (ll. 10–16; emphasis mine)

In another poem “Innocence,” Traherne likewise celebrates the “wonder” with which everything appeared to him when a child because of its freshness and newness. For him, the experience of the child is the experience of Eden. “Innocence” recalls the “Joyfull Sence and Puritie” (l. 10) as well as the “Contentment only and Delight” (l. 35) of the child’s relation to God’s created world, an experience akin to that of Adam’s in the prelapsarian world. Because “all within was Pure and Bright” (l. 7) and because he “felt no Stain, nor Spot of Sin” (l. 5), the poet desires to “becom a Child again” (l. 65) to re-experience the joy of Edenic innocence.9 In Centuries of Meditations, Traherne writes that humankind’s “Misery proceedeth ten thousand times more from the outward Bondage of Opinion and Custom, then from any inward corruption or Depravation of

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Nature: And that it is not our Parents Loyns, so much as our Parents Lives, that Enthrals and Blinds us.”10 Traherne rejected the doctrine of original sin, affirming, at the start of “The Third Century,” “Those Pure and Virgin Apprehensions [he] had from the Womb, and that Divine Light wherwith [he] was born.”11 He elaborates on his birth: “My Knowledg was Divine: I knew by Intuition those things which since my Apostasie, I Collected again by the Highest Reason. My very Ignorance was Advantageous. I seemed as one Brought into the Estate of Innocence. All Things were Spotles and Pure and Glorious: yea, and infinitly mine, and Joyfull and Precious. I knew not that there were any Sins, or Complaints, or Laws. I Dreamed not of Poverties Contentions or Vices.”12 Reminiscent of Traherne’s “Eden,” “Innocence,” and Centuries of Meditations, the Welsh metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan’s “The Retreate”13 also portrays childhood, “those early dayes” (l. 1), as “Happy” (l. 1) because he “Shin’d in [his] Angell-infancy” (l. 2). Childhood is the condition of nearness to God, that period in one’s existence when one could behold one’s “first love” (l. 8) who is Christ. Focusing on the child’s closeness to the condition of paradisal innocence and bliss, poems like “Eden,” “Innocence,” and “The Retreate” temper Augustine’s representation of babies as express exemplifications of humankind’s inherited spiritual corruption and Calvin’s doctrine of total depravity. Here Traherne’s and Vaughan’s religious poetry may strike us as precursors of Romantic poems such as Wordsworth’s Ode: Intimations of Immortality, which assesses the implications for both the poet and society of the innocent vision of the child (reflecting its heavenly origin) that darkens and diminishes over time. Where Traherne and Vaughan find paradise in the condition and experience of the child, Wordsworth’s Romantic temper identifies the child’s closeness to the celestial prenatal glory that he left behind to enter the world of generation. In his reading of the king of Bohemia’s recollection of his childhood days with Leontes, Richard Strier notes that “Polixenes’s speech asserts absolute childhood innocence in a way that would have been deemed heretical on both sides of the Great Divide [referring to Catholics and Protestants].”14 Even though Shakespeare raised the possible heretical specter of denying the doctrine of original sin in Polixenes’s dialogue with Hermione, Polixenes’s fantasy of a perfect world of male homosociality without women strikes me as innocuous enough for an audience because casually inscribed. The Winter’s Tale does not give its audience a dramatic

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narrative that lends identifiable support to a specific church tradition or aspects of Christian doctrine. Any suggestion of unorthodox doctrine or theology noticed by an audience in The Winter’s Tale takes place in a play that raises questions about the confidence professed by some Christians about the unassailable truth of their faith and religious conviction. This confidence derives from the Judeo-Christian tradition’s view of itself as superior to all other religious traditions of the world, an understanding that is implied—if not made explicit—in the literature of a Christian culture (such as that of early modern England) vis-à-vis the classics, viewed as pagan. In Book 1 of Paradise Lost, Milton identifies the pagan deities who are worshipped by non-Christian peoples as fallen angels who had been thrust into hell with Satan. In Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” the birth of the Christ child led to a silencing of the oracles, Apollo’s inability to divine, an upending of the malignant spirits of the dead, and a fleeing of the pagan deities. In The Winter’s Tale, Apollo’s oracle is far from silent. Classical and Christian allusions coexist easily enough in Shakespeare’s plays. While a play like Hamlet—as discussed in Chap. 2—may foreground doctrinal subject matter pertinent to the Christian faith, it also evokes philosophical conceptions traceable to the classical world. In Hamlet, the intertwining of classical and Christian allusions suggests Shakespeare was interested in the implications of the cultural values of the ancients vis-à-vis those of the Christian world for grappling with the inevitability of death and the relationship between human agency and fatalism or predestination. In The Winter’s Tale, biblical allusions coexist with classical references in a way that prompts an audience to consider the cultural and ideological implications of viewing biblical narratives in terms of genre instead of as inscriptions of God’s infallible Word. The play makes distinctive allusions to the Bible, even pointing us to specific passages, even as it foregrounds familiar materials from the classical tradition such as Apollo’s oracle at Delphi, the myth of Pluto and Persephone, and Ovid’s story of Pygmalion. If the coexistence of biblical and classical allusions in this play generates a certain flattening of God’s divinely inspired Word so that it stands level with the classics in terms of significance, the play could be read as interrogating—at some level—the premise of Christianity’s transcendent exceptionalism. Centering on the coming to life of Hermione’s statue, the denouement of the play offers a dramatic moment that invites us to consider the significance for Christian belief when theatrical representation

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brings two (theoretically) incompatible traditions—one classical/pagan, the other biblical—into conjunction and entanglement.

Stones, Idols, and the Raising of the Dead The restoration to life of Hermione’s statue in the final scene of The Winter’s Tale is borrowed from Ovid’s myth of Pygmalion, the story of a sculptor who fashions an ivory statue of the ideal woman and then falls in love with it. Answering his prayer for a wife who is (like) the statue he sculpted, Venus brings Pygmalion’s sculpture to life and blesses the couple’s marriage. Like the statue of Pygmalion, Hermione—who has been dead for sixteen years—is reintroduced toward the end of the play as a work of art, a piece of sculpture. The unveiling of Hermione’s statue is arranged by Paulina, who calls attention to the artistic premises as well as theological implications of representation predicated on the relationship between art and nature, between naturalism and supernaturalism. As a work of art, Hermione’s statue astounds the beholder because it imitates nature to such a degree of precision as to render imperceptible the line separating art from nature. Polixenes’s earlier line at the sheep-shearing festival—“The art itself is nature” (4.4.97)—appears to be especially pertinent to this scene’s controlling dramatic and thematic focus. Paulina is an artist whose works are displayed in a gallery, none of which interests Leontes as much as the statue of Hermione that he longs to see. Her unveiling of Hermione’s statue by drawing aside a curtain is framed by a sense of formality, solemnity, and ritual. Looking at Hermione’s statue, Leontes marvels at the artist’s handiwork and notes the wrinkles on her features, which Paulina explains is the sculptor’s desire to capture the passage of time in his masterpiece. This artistic representation of his late wife triggers remorse on the part of Leontes who finds himself rebuked by it: I am ashamed. Does not the stone rebuke me For being more stone than it? O royal piece! There’s magic in thy majesty, which has My evils conjured to remembrance, and From thy admiring daughter took the spirits, Standing like stone with thee. (5.3.37–42)

In this passage alone, Shakespeare uses the word “stone” three times: to refer to the statue, to reveal Leontes’s recognition of his past

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transgressions, and to indicate the repentant king’s present emotional state standing next to the statue and all the memories it evokes. Shakespeare was very much aware of the stone motif found in various places in the Bible. J. H. P. Pafford points us to the Book of Habakkuk as an important Old Testament source for Shakespeare’s deployment of the stone image and metaphor to capture the dramatic moment when seeing Hermione’s statue quickens Leontes’s conscience: Thou hast consulted shame to thine own house, by destroying many people, and hast sinned against thine own soul. For the stone shall cry out of the wall, and the beam out of the timber shall answer it. (Hab. 2:10–11)15

Shakespeare’s allusion to Habakkuk reveals his familiarity with and interest in Old Testament narratives. We have earlier noted how he had found inspiration for his account of the bear’s attack on Antigonus from the Book of 2 Kings. From Habakkuk, Shakespeare not only finds a verse that contextualizes Leontes’s guilty conscience, but also notes the prophet’s identification of stone with idols, a motif relevant to the scene of Hermione’s awakening statue in Act 5 scene 3: What profiteth the image? for the maker therefore hath made it an image, and a teacher of lies, though he that made it, trust therein, when he maketh dumb idols. Woe unto him that saith to the wood, Awake, and to the dumb stone, Rise up, it shall teach thee: behold, it is laid over with gold and silver, and there is no breath in it. (Hab. 2:18–19)

In The Winter’s Tale, Julio Romano—Raphael’s chief assistant known for his dramatic illusionism and realism as well as associations with the contaminating context of papal politics—is identified as the sculptor of Hermione’s statue. Obviously, this Italian architect and painter is not in danger of commanding the stone to metamorphose into a human being. When Leontes is shown the sculpture of Hermione, he notes the presence of a magical quality in this work of art, “magic” (5.3.39) referring to its ability to reawaken the conscience and bring the “evils” (5.3.40) that he had committed against his (late) wife to mind. However, the idea of magic can also carry negative connotations because it calls to mind the necromantic arts. When Paulina oversees Hermione’s restoration to life, she

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recognizes that her ability to do so might expose her to charges of involvement in the occult. In order that Leontes can experience the play’s moment of supreme wonder that is the resurrection of Hermione from the dead, Paulina exhorts the remorseful and repentant king: “It is required / You do awake your faith” (5.3.94–95). In the New Testament, we are told that faith possesses power to move mountains and even to restore the dead to life. A familiar definition that frames the great rollcall of faith in the Epistle to the Hebrews reads: “Now faith is the grounds of things which are hoped for, and the evidence of things which are not seen” (Heb. 11:1). The Lutheran Reformation emphasized the indispensability of faith as opposed to the contribution of works to salvation. The crucial text in the formulation of this doctrinal emphasis is the Book of Romans, in which the Apostle Paul underscores that the sinner can only be saved by grace through faith. What then is the nature of the faith that Paulina asks Leontes to awaken?16 For Leontes, the faith called for is one that necessarily eschews logic and commonsense, for how can a person who has been dead for sixteen years and is now represented in stone come back to life? For Shakespeare’s audience, the injunction to exercise one’s faith can refer to the willing suspension of disbelief, a readiness to accept that theater can represent just about anything. This audience would understand that they have been invited to exercise faith in the infinite capacity of theater to make possible the impossible as well as to represent wondrous phenomena and miraculous events that violate the laws of the natural world. The theatergoer’s imagination is capacious enough to embrace the experience of the magical, fantastic, and supernatural enabled by representation. If an encounter with incredible stories brings us into the world of theatrical experience in which anything is possible, it also implicates and involves the experience of faith. Faith in the theatrical and dramatic imagination cannot be completely dissociated from the experience of religious faith. If we accept that Hermione’s statue is indeed an inanimate object and work of art, witnessing its enlivening can be provocative especially for an audience with Protestant sensitivities. Objects tend to be problematic for Protestants both because they are associated with idolatry and because they distract the faithful from the true and proper worship of God which entails recognizing that the sinning soul has direct access to the Father enabled by the intercession of the Son. From the Protestant point of view, the Catholic Church’s encouragement of reverence for objects, icons, and relics reveals its idolatrous

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temper, going against Yahweh’s second commandment delivered to Moses on Mount Sinai: Thou shalt make thee no graven image, neither any similitude of things that are in heaven above, neither that are in the earth beneath, nor that are in the waters under the earth. / Thou shalt not bow down to them, neither serve them: for I am the Lord thy God, a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, upon the third generation and upon the fourth of them that hate me: / And shewing mercy unto thousands to them that love me, and keep my commandments. (Exod. 20:4–6)

Staged in a chapel, the statue scene in The Winter’s Tale makes us think of some of the visual conditions associated with worship in the Catholic Church.17 If Paulina’s gallery facilitates the exhibition of Italian secular art, her curation of the unveiling of Hermione’s statue foregrounds imagery and motifs suggestive of Marian iconography.18 Act 5 scene 3 resonates with familiar Catholic motifs and associations in its staging of architectural forms and representation of spiritual discipline and image-making.19 On Paulina’s act of drawing aside the curtain concealing the late queen’s statue, Lupton argues that “the rhythmic motion of closure and disclosure” involved in handling the curtain as stage prop and as symbolic signifier suggestively “measure[s] the liturgical display of tapestry in … Catholicism.”20 Emerging from the closet where she is hidden, Hermione “does not abandon representation for reality so much as incarnate another form of representation, suspended (but in movement) between idol and icon, or between statue and tapestry.”21 Shakespeare’s audience encounters Perdita kneeling before (the statue of) her mother in the chapel. In this scene, a neutral gesture, that of a child kneeling before her mother, can slide imperceptibly into the domain of theological controversy involving the idolatrous content of (material) forms. Gestures and postures can generate suggestive meanings, particularly when positioned within a setting in such a way as to conjure up the idea of a shrine. In Act 5 scene 3, Perdita shows awareness that kneeling can be perceived as an act of adulation and even apprehended as superstition: And give me leave, And do not say ’tis superstition, that I kneel and then implore her blessing. Lady, Dear Queen. (5.3.42–45, emphasis mine)

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Richard Strier postulates that Perdita’s expression of her wish to kneel before her mother’s statue to supplicate her blessing would have made “[a]ny serious Protestant in Shakespeare’s audience…very nervous” because it conjured up “the fundamental image of Catholic idolatry— which many English Protestants experienced exactly the way the Hebrew prophets did idolatry.”22 Immediately following Hermione’s embrace of Leontes in the climactic scene of spousal reconciliation, the sacerdotal Paulina exhorts Perdita in suggestively liturgical language: “Please you to interpose, fair madam. Kneel, / And pray your mother’s blessing” (5.3.120–21). And then she supplicates: “Turn, good lady, / Our Perdita is found” (5.3.121–22). If, as Gillian Woods notes, “[k]neeling for parental blessing was an ideologically sound demonstration of filial respect in the post-Reformation period, yet … when performed before images it was the defining marker of idolatry.”23 In Act 5 scene 3, the terms of address—“mother,” “lady,” and even “Queen”—resonate with the Catholic Church’s veneration of the Virgin Mary as “sancta maria mater dei” (“Holy Mary mother of God”). In a reading that departs from analyses that identify Catholic elements and resonances in the unveiling of Hermione’s statue, Rhema Hokama argues that Leontes’s and Hermione’s reunion scene affirms Calvin’s Reformation conception that the senses in “experiential devotion” testify to the verity of faith.24 A Reformation model of religious experience, this “experiential devotion”—entailing “the confluence of the sacramental and the sexual,” the intersection of “scriptural interpretation and bodily experience”—is instantiated in the penitent Leontes’s interactions with Hermione’s (awakening) statue.25 For Hokama, the “public performances of desire and devotion” in the reunion scene “effectively overcome the ruptures between husband and wife, parent and child, and the living and the dead”: Leontes’s “desire” for Hermione is reciprocated by Hermione’s obvious “desire” for her long-absent husband.26 While the scene of Leontes’s and Hermione’s reunion concludes in a joyful note with anticipations of dynastic continuity insured by Perdita’s marriage to Florizel, there is present—one could argue—a certain reserve on the part of Hermione toward her husband. For if Camillo tells us that Hermione joyfully embraces Leontes after her miraculous return to life, that enthusiastic gesture does not appear to be supported by the affirmation of words. The only person Hermione addresses and talks to after her awakening is Perdita, the long-lost daughter whose history she desires to learn more about.

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Hermione’s statue brings contesting ideas of the relationship between representation, spiritual truth, and proper worship in Reformation and Catholic thought into conjunction. Where the Reformation temper is historically associated with a deep distrust of representation as implicated in idolatry, a temper that responds with anxiety to gestures (such as kneeling) and ethos (such as the setting of a chapel), the Catholic frame of mind accommodates much more readily the ability of signs to bring one closer to spiritual experience and to God. From the Reformation perspective, this penchant for representation evinced in the reverent embrace of the image accounts for Catholicism’s susceptibility to superstition. More specifically, Catholicism is in the habit of finding in objects and material forms (the simulation of) spiritual life, a metonymic confusion that gives rise to the sin of idolatry. Accepting that a statue possesses power to bring itself to life can mean succumbing to the belief structures of an idolatrous Catholicism. Catholicism’s spiritual apostasy can be found in the expressions of its devotional practice and errors of its doctrinal conceptions. As Francis Bacon writes with reference to the errors of the Catholic Church, venerating the Virgin Mary and the saints involves adhering to “pleasing and sensual rites and ceremonies” and engaging in “over-great reverence of traditions.”27 Such superstition is, in Bacon’s words, “the reproach of the Deity.”28 In his Advancement of Learning, Bacon’s anti-Catholic discourse centers on the “facility of credit, and accepting or admitting things weakly authorized or warranted.”29 Bacon clarifies that ecclesiastical history “hath too easily received and registered reports and narrations of miracles wrought by martyrs, hermits, or monks of the desert, and other holy men, and their relics, shrines, chapels, and images.”30 The ignorance of the people and the superstitious simplicity of some have led to a belief in these reports of miracles as “divine poesies,” unveiled by the Reformation to be “old wives’ fables, impostures of the clergy, illusions of spirits, and badges of antichrist, to the great scandal and detriment of religion.”31 Hermione’s return to the world of the living not only affirms the ability of the stage to generate the experience of wonder but also highlights the theological implications of portraying the return to life of a statue or a character that everyone has known to be dead. But it is not only in the representational space of theater that the dead find themselves coming back to life. The Bible offers accounts of people who have come back from the dead: the son of the Shunamite woman in the Old Testament Book of 2 Kings, Jarius’s daughter, Lazarus, and, of course, Christ himself,

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described typologically as “the firstfruits of them that slept” (1 Cor. 15:20). Hermione’s metamorphosis from dead object to living human being also brings us into the New Testament world of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. Identifiable Catholic motifs share representational space with Protestant perspectives in The Winter’s Tale. Where the coming back to life of the dead is affirmed by both Catholics and Protestants for whom Christ’s resurrection promises how—at the end of time—the Christian faithful will likewise be raised from the grave, the enlivening of inanimate objects also has a place in Reformation thought. If one thinks of the image and icon in terms of Protestantism’s antipathy toward what it perceives to be Catholicism’s susceptibility to the mystification of material forms, it needs to be said that the idea of the icon is also significant in Reformation thought. In John Calvin’s sacramental theology—supported by the trope of metonymy—iconicity can refer to the redeemed who are the true spiritual figurae of God’s holy church.32 True iconicity is to be distinguished from the iconicity that is related—at least from the Reformation perspective— to the practice of idolatry redolent of Catholic worship. Inscribing a tension between words and things, and between figure and referent, metonymic logic allows false idols to simulate life even as it enables living persons to become “dynamic material shapes [that] ‘exhibit’ and ‘mark’ … spiritual presence.”33 In Calvinism, the elect—those that God, in his sovereign pleasure, had chosen for himself from all eternity—are given the means of grace outside of the capabilities of human agency and free will. Grace is God given and totally independent of the sinner who is dead in sin. According to this Calvinistic emphasis, the outpouring of grace stems from God’s divine prerogative. The reprobate cannot repent and be saved because he or she is spiritually deceased, not given the means of regeneration that is only possible through God’s gift of grace. When the sinning soul is dead— metaphorized by the heart of stone—it is impervious to spiritual regeneration, unless acted upon by God through the operations of grace. The outpouring of grace from the divine prerogative, which enables regeneration itself, is a familiar motif in the devotional lyric of the English Renaissance. One poem that thematizes the operations of grace on a heart that is dead in sin is George Herbert’s “The Altar.” In “The Altar,” Herbert writes: “A HEART alone / Is such a stone, / As nothing but / Thy pow’r doth cut.”34 After giving the Decalogue on Mount Sinai,

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Yahweh instructs Moses to command Israel to build “[a]n altar of earth” (Exod. 20:24) for burnt offerings, also making clear his requirements for its construction: But if thou wilt make me an altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewn stones: for if thou lift up thy tool upon them, thou hast polluted them. / Neither shalt thou go up by steps unto mine altar, that thy filthiness be not discovered thereon. (Exod. 20:25–26)

In Ezekiel 11:19, God affirms that he is the source of Israel’s renewal of heart: And I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within their bowels: and I will take the stony heart out of their bodies, and will give them an heart of flesh.

Old Testament motifs of stone, altars, and the human heart come into play in Herbert’s quest for proper materials to construct an altar of true repentance acceptable to God. Herbert’s description of the heart as an inanimate object that only God’s grace and power can “cut” suggests the Calvinistic emphasis that any softening of the sinner’s heart is totally dependent on the grace of a predestinating deity made available to the elect. When John Donne peremptorily calls on—even commands—the triune God to “batter” his heart with a siege engine at the start of Holy Sonnet 14, he figures the sinful heart as both a cadaveric organ and stone that must be forcefully acted upon by divine grace for any possible enlivening or awakening to take place. Donne’s urgent plea that God “break, blow, burn”35 his heart or soul that is dead in sin suggests anxiety traceable to the Calvinistic perspective that if God, exercising his prerogative, has predestined a reprobate soul to damnation, there is nothing that the spiritually dead soul can do about it. Donne gets syntactically and figuratively violent when he is overwhelmed by the soul-wrenching need to receive some palpable sign of the certitude of his salvation. When grace works on the soul facilitating regeneration, it enables the sinner who is dead in sin to recognize that he/she needs God’s forgiveness. Extending from the theological understanding that God’s grace facilitates regeneration is the related idea that God is the archetypal artist/ creator, who breathes spiritual life into the otherwise dead text of a

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devotional poet’s creative endeavor. In Protestant poetics, human art, like the sinning soul, is circumscribed by limits and depends, therefore, on divine inspiration for life. If the mimetic delineations of the long-deceased Hermione blur the line between nature/life and art/representation, it also recalls the heart of stone familiarly evoked in the Judeo-Christian tradition to describe the soul that is dead in sin. With reference to a Protestant framework, Hermione’s statue occupies the position of a dead text that is subsequently infused with God’s quickening power through the operations of grace. The animation of Hermione’s statue affords Shakespeare’s audience not-always-compatible conceptions of the icon in Reformation and Catholic understanding. In The Winter’s Tale, Paulina brings into focus the workings of grace and redemptive affirmations of faith. Not only does she serve as the agent enabling Leontes’s penitence, but she also curates the coming back to life of the dead, the play’s supreme moment of dramatic and theological wonder. When Paulina instructs Leontes to awaken his faith to witness the miracle of Hermione’s resurrection, the language of faith brings us into the New Testament world of the gospels and the Pauline Epistles. As her name prompts us, Paulina can be viewed as a spiritual descendant of the Apostle Paul, drawing attention to the play’s interest in the doctrinal topics of grace and faith that constitute a leitmotif in the Pauline Epistles. Central to Pauline theology is sola fide, the doctrine of the sinner’s justification by faith, and faith alone. If contrition and repentance cannot make the sinning soul right with God, Christ’s sacrifice on the cross—received by faith—enables that by imputing righteousness to the sinner. Salvation by grace through faith is the controlling emphasis of Luther’s Reformation theology of comfort. As the character who speaks out against tyranny, Paulina is also responsible for enabling Leontes’s penitence. Leontes’s restoration is only possible after sixteen years of penance and recognition of sin. When Leontes meets Florizel and Perdita in Act 5, he tells Polixenes’s son: “You have a holy father, / A graceful gentleman, against whose person, / So sacred as it is, I have done sin” (5.1.169–71). Leontes’s choice of words such as “holy,” “graceful,” “sacred,” and “sin” in these lines is peculiar, considering there is no obvious reason why he needs to deploy religious diction in such a conspicuous way here when referring to Polixenes. How exactly is Polixenes “holy” or “sacred”? Are we meant to respond to the word “sacred” by thinking of the idea of divine-right kingship? Leontes’s acknowledgement of “sin” has, on the other hand, a clearer context, as we

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know he has submitted himself to a rigorous penitential ritual for many years. Restoration, reconciliation, and dynastic continuity can only take place after Leontes has truly repented of the sins he had committed against Hermione and Polixenes. Spousal reunion and reconciliation between estranged friends, necessary for the healthy restoration of the political realm, are framed by the experience of true repentance.

Referential Instabilities In a play like The Winter’s Tale, where biblical subject matter and familiar doctrinal topics are evoked and deployed for the purposes of dramatic effect and for considering the relationship between the sacred and the profane in theatrical representation, one wonders what Shakespeare is saying about Christian belief and about Christianity’s claim that it is the only true religion that can bring people to God and heaven. To attempt a reading of the play’s attitude toward the matter of faith and experience of religious conviction, I propose we consider The Winter’s Tale’s self-­ reflexive handling of genres and of an audience’s expectations of their literary value and cultural or ideological effects. I analyze the implications of the coexistence of classical and biblical subject matter in the play, one which affords ample space for an audience’s experience of the fantastic and the marvelous portrayed on stage. English Renaissance literature evokes material from both the classical and Judeo-Christian traditions instinctively and strategically for artistic ends and specific effects. In this literature, it is possible to encounter work that identifies subject matter from the Judeo-Christian tradition as superior to that of the classical (or pagan) tradition because it is grounded in the worship of the one true God. The Puritan poet John Milton will later affirm the Judeo-Christian tradition’s transcendent exceptionalism by having the Incarnate Son reject the kingdom of classical learning and knowledge offered by Satan in Paradise Regained. Tensions of the kind encountered in Milton’s brief epic are avoided in The Winter’s Tale, where the relationship between the classical and scriptural traditions is defined not in terms of their ontological incompatibility as through the implied premise that classical (pagan) myth and scripture (God’s Word) enjoy equal status and validity. In this late romance, classical mythology finds its place in a play that easily accommodates the coexistence of different generic forms—the ballad, the ghost story, myth, and the Bible—without

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acceding to pressure from tensions generated by claims to literary or spiritual superiority. In The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare’s self-conscious use of the word “tale” invites an audience to consider the significance of generic forms when responding to the mounting of a performance. For the critic to whom this play has historically been identified as a comedy—categorized as such in the 1623 First Folio publication—and only later redesignated as a romance, the invocation of “old tale” (5.2.55) playfully destabilizes any secure sense an audience might have about the genre/form and content of the play. The OED tells us that tale can refer to “[a] story or narrative, true or fictitious, drawn up so as to interest or amuse, or to preserve the history of a fact or incident; a literary composition cast in narrative form” or “[t]hat which one tells; the relation of a series of events; a narrative, statement, information.”36 It also proffers another definition—“[a] mere story, as opposed to a narrative of fact; a fiction, an idle tale; a falsehood”37—which captures well the spirit of a play distinguished by a series of hard-to-believe events or improbabilities. In The Winter’s Tale, we encounter destructive passions, man-eating bears, oracles, chance rescues, and revivifying statues, literary subject matter that has a place in theater’s capacity to represent not only the improbable but also the impossible. One can respond to the improbable with unbelief and incredulity, skepticism, or even amazement and wonder.38 Shakespearean theater can play self-reflexively with genres and forms for an audience’s entertainment experience, an impulse not shared by Shakespeare’s contemporary Francis Bacon, whose privileging of inductive reasoning and the empirical method disparages genres such as the fable. In The Winter’s Tale’s engagement with the status of different literary genres, Shakespeare shows himself equally at home in the classical and biblical worlds, facilitating both with ease within the representational space of the play. If Shakespeare presents the relationship between the classical and Judeo-Christian traditions as equal and non-hierarchical, he also allows scenes—such as the dramatization of Hermione’s return to life from the dead—to strike audiences of different denominational affiliations differently. Whatever this audience’s sense of the rightness of the views they have on matters of religion, they will not find ready support in a play that has been known for its deconstructive potential. Both Howard Felperin and Lynn Enterline have argued that the deconstructive enterprise constitutes the enabling condition as well as inescapable effect of The Winter’s Tale. Where Felperin finds the play susceptible to interminable

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deferrals of reference, Enterline finds it underscores truth’s inability to be present in the medium of language as its content.39 Dealing with representation, theater self-reflexively enacts language’s resistance to interpretive efforts to gain uncomplicated access to signification, sometimes compelling necessary engagement with the dramatic and thematic implications of meta-theatricality. More recently, Holger Schott Syme also foregrounds his affinity with poststructuralist assumptions when considering the binary opposition between narration (such as the gentlemen’s testimony in Act 5 scene 2) and the immediacy of presence (when Hermione’s statue comes to life). Destabilizing the premise that “visual presentation” and “immediate experience” are (to be) accorded privileged status over verbal “testimony,” Syme argues that “[w]hat is at stake in The Winter’s Tale specifically is the relative authority of the visual and the verbal, presence and representation, and the body and the word.”40 Despite their respective interpretive inflections, Felperine, Enterline, and Syme all agree that The Winter’s Tale thematically focuses on challenges posed to meaning seeking and meaning making by the existence of gaps between presence and absence, between knowing and unknowing, the bridging of which is necessary in any quest for intelligibility. Implicit in their readings is the assumption that the play is preoccupied with the subject matter of truth and knowledge, and with the difficulties or impossibility of gaining access to both. My reading in this chapter shares this assumption, but I focus on The Winter’s Tale’s theological and philosophical implications, in which Reformation and Catholic structures as well as classical materials in the play register anxieties concerning a playwright’s and culture’s encounter with the boundaries of the (un)knowable. The Winter’s Tale complicates the theological discourse of faith by dramatizing the experiences of belief and opinion,41 two crucial terms that must be considered for us to appreciate how witnessing an inanimate statue come alive involves the audience in the epistemological (un)certainty attending the play’s dramatic events. The word opinion is first employed by Camillo when describing Leontes’s conviction that Hermione is having an affair with Polixenes, the king of Bohemia: Good my lord, be cured Of this diseased opinion, and betimes, For ’tis most dangerous. (1.2.298–300, emphasis mine)

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In Act 2 scene 1, Leontes himself equates verity with opinion, when he says: How blest am I In my just censure, in my true opinion! Alack, for lesser knowledge! (2.1.38–40; emphasis mine)

And, in Act 2 scene 3, Paulina tells Antigonus that “[t]he root of [Leontes’s] opinion … is rotten / As ever oak or stone was sound” (2.3.90–91; emphasis mine). Opinion is a view or judgment made without the necessary backing of facts or evidence. A professional could offer expert opinion on something, which is received as having authority because a lay community happens to lack the necessary background or knowledge for proper assessment. Opinion is, moreover, philosophically significant. Not only does it not enjoy a categorically enviable position in this play, linked to Leontes’s unfounded suspicion and destructive tyranny, but it also recalls a question central to the development of epistemology: How does one navigate the progression from opinion (doxa) to knowledge (episte ̄me ̄)? What is opinion? And what is knowledge? To Plato, for whom these are important questions, opinion is tied to the shifting world of sensation whereas knowledge is tethered to truth, available only in the world of timeless Forms and essences. In Plato’s dialogues, the theory of ideas is understood as acts of knowing; knowledge cannot be separated from the permanent entities which are distinct from those we apprehend through our senses. The direct opposite of ignorance, knowledge is a mental faculty/power that allows us to apprehend “being” (i.e., reality). While opinion is subject to error, knowledge is not. In Plato’s Meno,42 a dialogue ensues between Socrates and Meno about the meaning of virtue—a controlling theme in ethics—and about whether it can be taught, leading to the vexed question about the relationship between true/right opinion and knowledge. Even though true/right opinion can lead one to a destination and therefore turns out to be correct, it does so without understanding and is—as such—like the famed statues of Daedalus, beautiful but untethered and capable of running away. Because of its potential for recalcitrance, true/right opinion is precarious and vulnerable, in contrast to knowledge which is permanent because anchored and tied down. Unlike everything in the visible world, which is defined by transience, mutability, and the mistaking of shadows for substance, knowledge is permanent because it belongs to the invisible

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and immutable world of Ideas that exists outside the cave of human existence. In addition to its importance for the philosophical development of Plato’s epistemology, opinion is also an important concept in the development of political philosophy. I think here of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan— published in 1651 against the backdrop of the English Civil War, regicide, and establishment of the Cromwellian Protectorate—which critiques opinion for mistaking or passing off itself as truth. When Hobbes wrote that “[n]o Discourse whatsoever, can End in absolute knowledge of Fact, past, or to come,”43 he contextualizes this by evoking the different ways in which society confers on opinion an authority that, by definition, it lacks. With the political violence unleashed by the English Revolution fresh in his mind, Hobbes—thinking of how Puritans like John Milton embraced a conception of Christian liberty predicated on obeying the conscience as guided by the Holy Spirit—decried those men who “vehemently in love with their own new opinions, (though never so absurd,) and obstinately bent to maintain them, gave those their opinions also that reverenced name of Conscience, as if they would have it seem unlawfull, to change or speak against them.”44 When Christians like the Puritans valorized subjective opinions by invoking the authority of the spirit-led conscience, they contributed to the condition of political and social chaos understood by Hobbes as the state of nature, a condition that Mary Nyquist notes is related to John Locke’s state of war.45 In The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare identifies the king who mistakes opinion for truth as a tyrant. Conflating opinion with knowing/knowledge and refusing to wed sovereignty to counsel makes for a highly volatile situation. Leontes commits sin because he erroneously believes that Hermione has defiled the marriage bed. Sicilia’s tyrannical monarch refers to those people who believe in Hermione’s innocence as possessing an “ignorant credulity” that “will not / Come up to th’ truth” (2.1.194–95). Credulity refers to a person’s willingness to believe that something is true or real without need for basic proof, or without enacting the necessary scrutiny based on reasonable assumptions. If Leontes castigates those members of the court—pretty much everyone, that is—who believe that Hermione has not done wrong as naïve and susceptible to false belief, Shakespeare identifies another group of people—the shepherds of Bohemia’s pastoral—as susceptible to “ignorant credulity.” Shakespeare portrays the shepherds as credulous in their simplicity, trusting and putting their faith in the rascally Autolycus, the play’s singer

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of songs, teller of tales, and elusive man of masks. The shepherdess Mopsa offers one expression of rustic gullibility when she tells us enthusiastically: “I love a ballad in print, alife, for then we are sure they are true” (4.4.251–52). A vagrant, petty thief, and conman, Autolycus lies to, tricks, and cheats people for a living. Recognizing characters’ susceptibility to believing everything he says, this “coney-catcher” also finds it humorous to arouse fear in others, such as when he tells the Shepherd and his son the Clown that the first will certainly be put to death by King Polixenes, and the latter whipped and smeared with honey for exposure to wasps. The presence of Autolycus affords a measure of the rustic folks’ vulnerability to scamming. “Ha, ha!” laughs Autolycus marveling at the gullibility of human beings: “What a fool honesty is, and trust—his sworn brother—a very simple gentleman!” (4.4.584–85; emphases mine). Invoking “honesty” as a euphemism for naivete and “simple” as a substitute for gullible, both of which are attributes that can be turned into profit by the trickster and conman, Autolycus relishes taking advantage of people identified as yokels by him. These country bumpkins push and jostle to be the first in line to purchase Autolycus’s wares, not very different from the Catholics who are known—at least from the Protestant perspective—for superstitiously seeking possession of “trinkets” that have been “hallowed” (4.4.589) or blessed. Where Leontes’s active belief in bad things leads to paranoia and distrust, establishing a relationship between paranoia and faith in the play, Shakespeare’s shepherds believe good things credulously. If some people are credulous in their ignorance, others are susceptible to the assumption that all benevolent things must be good, even if patently irrational or illogical: the susceptibility of positive credulity. What the language of theological conviction refers to as faith Autolycus defines as “honesty” and “trust” (4.4.584). In The Winter’s Tale’s interest in audience responses to genres that lay claim to different types of authority, the issue of ignorant and positive credulity touches on the topic of scriptural revelation. Unlike Bacon, who finds in his Advancement of Learning that “a credulous man is a deceiver” because “he that will easily believe rumours, will as easily augment rumours,”46 Shakespeare adopts a non-judgmental attitude toward the credulous man or woman. Shakespeare’s stress on credulity is not limited to the pastoral world of Bohemia but touches on the experience of religious conviction among the faithful. Belief, opinion, and knowledge are present in all their complexities in the normal world of human interactions as well as in the world of religious belief and doctrinal affiliations.

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Speaking Truth to Power and Prophetic Authority Biblical stories of miracles can offer dramatic materials for inspiring a sense of wonder in a reader or audience. Events such as the opening of the Red Sea recounted in the Pentateuch and the coming back to life from the dead such as experienced by Lazarus demonstrate the awesome power of the Judeo-Christian God. While enabling the experience of wonder, stories that bring into play the supernatural and marvelous can also raise questions about the nature of religious experience when elements of biblical stories are incorporated into the plotline of a play and coexist with allusions to classical literature and mythology. While biblical allusions to the raising of the dead in The Winter’s Tale might encourage or reinforce the Christian faith, they also allow considerations of the tensions that can exist in Catholic and Protestant responses to the phenomenon of miracles. The conflation of Christian and classical elements in Shakespeare’s romance dramatization of Ovid’s Pygmalion story also allows for referential instabilities if not deconstructive possibilities that have the effect of questioning the reliability of one’s understanding of faith and religious conviction. In The Winter’s Tale, the idea of miracles, which enables theatrical representation to underwrite the experience of faith while at the same time disrupting its stability, is not the only biblical theme that comes to mind for an audience. In dramatizing Paulina’s castigation of Leontes, Shakespeare’s interest in the theme of speaking truth to power finds support in narratives of the prophetic role central to the unfolding of Old Testament history. Paulina is a close friend of Hermione and fiercely loyal to her. When Hermione is accused by Leontes of committing adultery with Polixenes, Paulina mounts a strong defense of her integrity. Her first appearance on stage entails demanding an audience with Hermione who has been imprisoned. She was refused access but managed to get hold of the queen’s newborn daughter Perdita that she resolves she will bring before the king. When prohibited from seeing Leontes, Paulina forces her way in as a “physician” (2.3.54) who seeks to heal the king by “purg[ing] him of that humour / That presses him from sleep” (2.3.38–39). Paulina’s audience with Leontes is interactionally and dialogically violent. When the king commands his men to forcibly remove Paulina from his presence, she threatens to hurt whoever dares lay hands on her. Leontes’s language is patriarchal, where demeaning epithets such as “A mankind witch” (2.3.68), “bawd” (2.3.69), “Partlet” (hen) (2.3.76), “crone” (2.3.77), “callat” (a lewd woman, scold, prostitute) (2.3.91), and

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“hag” (2.3.108) are hurled at her. On her part, Paulina tells the king that the queen is innocent of the charge of adultery and that Perdita is his daughter, not another man’s. In standing up for the defenseless and unjustly treated, Paulina performs a function that recalls God’s Old Testament prophets who have compassion for the downtrodden, championing them when justice fails. In Deuteronomy 27:19, Moses pronounces a curse on whoever hinders “the right of the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow.” In Isaiah 3:15, God demands: “What have ye to do that ye beat my people to pieces, and grind the faces of the poor?” And in Isaiah 10:2, the prophet rails against those who institute unjust laws, issue oppressive decrees, and deprive the oppressed of justice. In speaking out on behalf of Hermione and Perdita, Paulina seeks justice for society’s vulnerable subjects, a theme associated with the prophetic strain of the Old Testament. In confronting the king with the message that he has done wrong and is blind to the truth, which is evident to everyone else, Paulina reminds the audience of Old Testament encounters—not always pleasant ones— between prophets and kings. The Books of 1 and 2 Kings contain stories of confrontation between men of God and kings.47 The prophet Elijah’s condemnation of King Ahab’s and Jezebel’s evil practices and his slaughter of the priests of Baal come to mind. Likewise, the prophet Nathan told King David that he had sinned against God by sending Uriah the Hittite to the frontline of the battlefield so Uriah could be killed, freeing the king to marry his wife Bathsheba without hindrance. For his transgression, God punished David by taking the life of his first child with Bathsheba. The death of Leontes’s son Mamillius as punishment for Leontes’s “sin” recalls this story of David and Bathsheba’s loss of their child. In the biblical tradition, prophets were often noted for their reluctance to shoulder the burden of the prophetic calling. When God’s Old Testament prophets were instructed to confront kings, communities, and peoples, they did not always do so with enthusiasm. Prophets were generally reluctant to communicate warnings about God’s wrath to sinful men and women. Moses, Jeremiah, and Jonah all instinctively desired to avoid confronting political authority and sinful society because they opened themselves up to abuse, harm, and even death. The idea of a female prophet—suggestively dramatized in Paulina’s confrontation with Leontes—revisions the line of male prophets whose lives were inextricably intertwined with the history of ancient Israel. Shakespeare adjusts women’s significance in his portrayal of Paulina as a kind of female prophet, a

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role and identity which while not readily found in Jacobean England, did not mean it was unheard of, as the following story of Elizabeth Barton attests to. During the reign of King Henry VIII—the second monarch of the Tudor dynasty—a young Benedictine nun named Elizabeth Barton spoke out against the king’s desire to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. A female ecstatic given to trances, Barton claimed that God spoke with her, and it was as God’s prophetic instrument that she warned the king about divine punishment that would befall him should he persist in his carnal indiscretions. When her prognostication of his untimely and unpleasant demise as well as loss of the kingdom led to the conviction of treason, King Henry had the Holy Maid (or sometimes Mad Maid) of Kent hung and decapitated, followed by the grisly display of her boiled head on a spike on London Bridge as a grim warning to anyone who felt so inclined to speak out against the king.48 Associated with radical ambiguity, ecstatic and visionary prophetesses attracted fascination as well as skepticism and opprobrium. The dangerous entanglement of mystical and political experience in religious ecstasy can lead to violent death, a historical destiny that connects Elizabeth Barton to the visionary Joan of Arc, France’s female military commander and national heroine that Shakespeare portrayed as an equivocal and cryptic prophetic figure in 1 Henry VI. Speaking truth to power is an important function of the prophetic office, a role that often leads to strained and even violent encounters between prophets and kings. Paulina’s confrontation with Leontes is especially tense, and, one might add, dangerous, not least because the king could summarily demand her execution. Jewish tradition tells us, for example, that the prophet Isaiah was sawn in two by King Manasseh.49 In the New Testament, John the Baptist, herald of God’s long-promised messiah, was jailed and later executed for having “said unto Herod, It is not lawful for thee to have thy brother’s wife” (Mark 6:18). In seventeenth-century England, visionary and prophetic women came into prominence in the period of the English Civil War, the execution of Charles I, and the republican experiment. Between 1640 and 1660, many women emerged claiming prophetic authority. One example was the Baptist and Fifth Monarchist Anna Trapnel who claimed prophetic enthusiasm in spectacular fashion, going into trances and experiencing visions of a spiritual nature. Constructed from Trapnel’s spoken words—based on her singing, praying, prophesying, trances, and a relator’s (direct witness) transcriptions—The Cry of a Stone (1654) foregrounds the inseparable

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relationship between prophetic activity and political commentary in women’s visionary and ecstatic experience in seventeenth-century England.50 As a prophetess who received her mantle of authority from God, Trapnel thundered against Oliver Cromwell’s ambition to power and rebuked the grim state of affairs defining contemporary English politics.51 Another prophetess whose activities can help to contextualize Shakespeare’s potentially radical representation of Paulina as a truth-­ speaking prophetess is Elizabeth Stirredge, who belonged to England’s mid-seventeenth-century Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers. The Quakers generally saw men and women as spiritual equals, a conviction that supported preaching, prophesying, and evangelizing by women. Prophetic Quaker women had a reputation for warning individuals and cities about God’s wrath and the need for heart-felt repentance and sorrow for sin. When the Quaker prophetess Elizabeth Stirredge discovered she could not resist the prompting of the Holy Spirit she experienced to deliver a message from God to the Restoration monarch Charles II, she set out to meet the king in person in 1670.52 Stirredge records her meeting with the king: This was my testimony to King Charles II in the eleventh month of the year 1670. “This is unto thee, O king. Hear what the Lord hath committed unto my charge concerning thee. As thou hast been the cause of making many desolate, so will the Lord lay thee desolate. And as many as have been the cause of persecuting and shedding the blood of my dear children, in the day when I call all to an account, I will plead with them, saith the Lord. Therefore hear and fear the Lord God of heaven and earth, for of his righteous judgments all shall be made partakers, from the king that sitteth upon the throne to the beggar upon the dunghill.” This testimony I delivered into his hands with these words, “Hear, oh king, and fear the Lord God of heaven and earth.” I can truly say that the dread of the most high God was upon me which made me tremble and great agony was over my spirit, insomuch that paleness came in his face and with a mournful voice he said, “I thank you, good woman.”53

Stirredge’s imperative command to Charles II to “hear … and fear the Lord God of heaven and earth” recalls the various times in the Old Testament when individuals and Israel were enjoined to turn from their sinful ways to avert God’s wrath. Originally reluctant to meet the king, Stirredge found new confidence in the recognition that God had

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specifically chosen her to be his prophet for a reason. Stirredge did not lose her life for speaking to the king, but we cannot help recalling Elizabeth Barton’s prophetic reproof of Henry VIII that resulted in her horrific execution. When visionary women and prophetesses like Anna Trapnel and Elizabeth Stirredge spoke truth to power impelled by the Holy Spirit, they provoked controversy partly because of their gender, opening them to public scrutiny of their personal lives and spiritual credentials, that is, their (assumption or arrogation of) prophetic authority. With prophesying women, the issue of prophetic authority could not be disentangled from the gendered status of God’s instrument or vessel. Because early modern England associated prophetic utterance with men, it generally reacted to the phenomenon of prophesying women with skepticism if not ridicule. We see this in Shakespeare’s portrayal of Paulina’s prophetic identity, which while defined by the power of plain speaking and truth telling also nevertheless evokes cultural conceptions of the “scold,” a label denoting a public nuisance who habitually argues and quarrels with people in the community. While a scold can—technically speaking—refer to either a man or a woman, it so turns out that most of those punished by the English common law for “scolding” were women, hence the gender(ed) implications of the term. This complicates the significance of a character like Paulina, whose role as prophetic truth teller overlaps with the identity of an unruly woman who is a troublemaker. Tellingly, Leontes responds to Paulina’s denunciation with patriarchal displeasure, chastising her for her inability to exercise restraint in speech. Leontes’s language reminds an audience of patriarchal culture’s demand for female submissiveness emphasized in conduct manuals, domestic handbooks, marriage sermons, and homilies of the period. However, because Paulina refuses to be submissive, Leontes identifies her as a shrew and a scold. When he commands the counsellor Antigonus to exercise greater control over his wife Paulina, he stresses the importance of managing women at the level of family life. The king commands Antigonus to fulfill his role and duty as the husband and head of the household, which is to keep his wife in her proper place.54 Husband-wife relations have ideological implications for both the domestic household and public political sphere. Hermione brings into focus the ideological significance derived from the mapping of spousal and familial relations onto the symbolic delineations of the political order. She relates to Leontes not only as her husband but also as the monarch who

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functions as society’s fountainhead of law. Effective management of the unruly woman at the microcosmic level of family life is needed for law and order to prevail at the level of the commonwealth. Proper positioning of the husband and wife in a hierarchical society, where the first assumes natural authority over the other, is imperative for order to prevail in the household. The New Testament is relevant here. The apostle Paul had enjoined wives to submit themselves to their husbands, affirming it is God’s will that they do so: Wives, submit yourselves unto your husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the wife’s head, even as Christ is the head of the Church, and the same is the Savior of his body. Therefore as the Church is in subjection to Christ, even so let the wives be to their husbands in everything. (Eph. 5:22–24)

And in 1 Corinthians 14:34–35, Paul also declares: Let your women keep silence in the Churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak: but they ought to be subject, as also the Law saith. And if they will learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the Church.

Any threat posed to the (natural) order of the family—such as when a woman behaves in a way that betrays a rebellious spirit or disruptive temper—needs to be addressed and rectified, either by correction and “taming” by the husband or by regulatory processes enacted by the community.55 Challenging cultural expectations of female subordinationism, Paulina interrogates assumptions of both absolutist ideology and cultural patriarchalism. Shakespeare’s portrayal of Paulina highlights some of the contradictions found by Susanne Woods to be present in society’s support of female subordinationism: “During the sixteenth century Englishwomen found voices through the contradictory injunctions of Protestantism, which on the one hand reasserted the traditional expectation of womanly silence and subservience, but on the other hand affirmed the supremacy of individual conscience, even in women, to whom God could speak directly and, in theory, allow exceptions to the general rule of silence.”56 Paulina’s significance in the play is tied not only to her association with the prophetic role but also to the courtier’s or counselor’s relationship to

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the king. In his Book of the Courtier—a work which discusses the requirements of noble conduct and habits, the responsibilities of good government, and even the definition of love—the Italian courtier and diplomat Baldassare Castiglione engages with the moral parameters at play in defining the good courtier’s service to his lord. Here is a definition of service in Castiglione that is pertinent to our discussion of Shakespeare’s play. The good courtier is exhorted to be open and candid about “the truth of every matter”57 to the ruler that he serves, not fearing repercussions which might result from his displeasure. Courageous in honesty, the good courtier must be prepared to oppose wrongdoing on the part of his prince, dissuading him “from every ill purpose” and setting “him in the way of virtue.”58 This brings us to an important question raised in The Winter’s Tale: How is society to respond when a monarch becomes erratic—maybe insane—and exercises tyrannical authority that no person or law in the land can hope to constrain or bound? What can a loyal subject do when dispensing counsel can mean losing one’s life? Richard Strier has argued that the subject matter of standing up to unjust authority is very much present in The Winter’s Tale, resonating with both Renaissance and Reformation political discourse invested in exploring the responsibility of inferiors in obeying their social and political superiors as well as the conditions under which that responsibility needs to be questioned or even abandoned.59 Strier’s political reading poses further questions: Does Shakespeare in fact show support for the morality of disobeying unjust commands that originate from one’s superiors? If so, what is his relationship to the development of radical political thought in early modern England? In an article, “Shakespeare and the Uses of Power,” published in The New  York Review of Books (April 12, 2007), Stephen Greenblatt argues that political ambition and ideals for Shakespeare are definitionally incompatible, and that “moral” characters are without a will to power whereas those with the ambition to rule lack “an ethically adequate object” (or moral ideal and ethical goal).60 One character in King Lear invoked by Greenblatt for assessing the moral and ethical implications of an act is the Duke of Cornwall’s nameless servant who intervenes to stop his master from committing further violence against Gloucester who just had one of his eyes plucked out. This servant’s decision to retaliate against the duke he serves stems from his sense of basic human decency. His ethically significant act—that of turning against and killing his master for torturing

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another human being—is divorced from political ambition, which he has none.61 Greenblatt’s article received a response from Strier, who reads in the actions of Cornwall’s nameless servant Shakespeare’s interest in the subject of “virtuous disobedience,” where an underling goes against his social and political superior for unconscionable cruelty toward another person.62 For Strier, Shakespeare was always interested in ideas of proper service, and his portrayal of characters—aristocratic or otherwise—choosing to disobey commands and repudiate acts that are immoral and unethical carries radical political implications. Where Greenblatt argues that the nameless servant in King Lear is not performing a radical political act because he accepts as natural the norms of his society and culture, Strier stresses that the action of this servant derives its ideological significance from the political landscape of early modern England in which (radical) questions about the rightness of going against higher authority’s manifest wrongdoing and unethical conduct are being asked and debated. In his book Resistant Structures, Strier foregrounds the character of the Earl of Kent in King Lear as a powerful example of the paradoxical enactment of service through resistance, arguing that such dramatic representation resonated in a society grappling with the assumptions of radical political thought, associated with the writings of John Ponet, Christopher Goodman, John Knox, and George Buchanan.63 Writings such as Ponet’s A Shorte Treatise of Politike Power and Buchanan’s De Jure Regni encouraged meditations on the relationship between ruler and subject and also on the political theory of removing a tyrant from power. If Kent’s “virtuous disobedience”64 in King Lear gestures suggestively in the direction of Buchanan’s De Jure Regni, a work which identifies the person who obeys a tyrannical monarch as the king’s greatest enemy, so does Paulina’s action of telling the king that he has done wrong. Shakespeare’s truth-telling prophet, Paulina is also the king’s outspoken and loyal subject.65 Paulina brings biblical discourse into conjunction with political theory. If Shakespeare portrays Paulina as a character with strength of moral conviction and the courage to act on that conviction, a portrayal that questions cultural expectations of female behavior, he is not consistent in his representation of her character. The indomitable Paulina is susceptible to uncontrolled emotions, evinced in her outburst listing the various tortures Leontes has in mind for her—“wheels,” “racks,” “fires,” “flaying,” “boiling” (3.2.174)—when she brings news that Hermione has died. Paulina’s overwrought language here seems to be out of step with her

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character as a truth-telling prophet who stands up to the king and declares him to be a tyrant. The play registers nervousness about voluble women even as it portrays women of integrity and moral strength in a positive light.

The Law and Radical Politics A family drama about the breakdown of a king’s and queen’s marital relationship and restorative reconciliation, The Winter’s Tale poses sensitive questions about the constitutional relationship between monarch and subject, and, also importantly, between monarch and law. Leontes is not only a king but also a husband and father who finds himself suddenly burdened with the suspicion that Mamillius might not in fact be his biological son. Concerning baby Perdita, he is convinced that she is Polixenes’s daughter and the result of his wife’s adultery with the Bohemian king. A play about the king’s relationship with members of his family, The Winter’s Tale offers a reading of life in the domestic household as an analogy of the monarch’s relationship with the realm over which he rules. Shakespeare’s audience would be familiar with evocations of the familial setting and context to represent the kingdom of England. Early in her reign, Elizabeth I had memorably declared herself espoused to England in a political relationship that overrode familiar cultural expectations of the conjugal relationship. Here is part of the Queen’s response to pressure from Parliament to marry and produce an heir: I have made choyce of this kinde of life, which is most free, and agreeable for such humane affaires as may tend to [God’s] service onely…it is long since I had any joy in the honour of a Husband; and this is that I thought, then that I was a private person. But when the publique charge of governing the Kingdome came upon me, it seemed unto mee an inconsiderate folly, to draw upon my selfe the cares which might proceede of marriage. To conclude, I am already bound unto an Husband, which is the Kingdome of England, and that may suffice you …. And repro[a]ch me so no more, that I have no children: for every one of you, and as many as are English, are my Children, and Kinsfolkes.66

When he became king, James I likewise deployed the spousal analogy to describe his relationship to the kingdom over which he ruled as its head. In a speech to Parliament, he explicates the nature of this relationship:

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What God hath conjoyned then, let no man separate. I am the Husband, and all the whole Isle is my lawfull Wife; I am the Head, and it is my Body; I am the Shepherd, and it is my flocke: I hope therefore no man will be so unreasonable as to thinke that I that am a Christian King under the Gospel, should be a Polygamist and husband to two wives; that I being the Head, should have a divided and monstrous Body; or that being the Shepheard to so faire a Flocke (whose fold hath no wall to hedge it but the foure Seas) should have my Flocke parted in two.67

King James’s symbolization of absolutist authority recalls the Apostle Paul’s subordinationist view of spousal relations in Ephesians 5:22–24. Invoking the familiar command—“Let not man … put asunder that, which God hath coupled [referring to the heteronormative union in marriage] together” (Matt. 19:6)—James I also figures his relationship with his kingdom/people as intimate, indissoluble, and blessed by God. In this specific address to Parliament, James also evokes the familiar scriptural motif of a shepherd tending and looking after his flock to describe his role and responsibilities as a monarch. Appointed and anointed by God as his lieutenant, the king has a duty to his subjects and is answerable to God for their physical and spiritual wellbeing. In James’s use of the family-state analogy, the king is thus also the father of his subjects. Reinforcing this evocative matrimonial and spousal analogy is the politically loaded metaphorization of paternity, focused on the king’s identification of himself not only as pater familias—“head of a family”—but also as pater patriae, or “father of his country.” In The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, James explains that to secure the wellbeing, peace, and flourishing of his subjects as their king, he will be “a loving Father, and careful watchman, caring for them more then for himselfe, knowing himselfe to be ordained for them, and they not for him.”68 A father bestows love on his children without expecting anything in return. As a loving, caring, and “nursing father,”69 he is responsible for protecting his family, shielding them from harm and danger. The portrayal of the king governing his kingdom and subjects as a good husband and caring father offers a moral relevant to the political conception of England as an oikos writ large. England’s wellbeing finds effective expression in the metaphor of the harmonious family unit, built on the foundations of a healthy marriage. In the logic of James’s rendition of the family-state analogy, turbulence in the royal household—such as witnessed in Leontes’s Sicilian court—has disruptive if not tragic repercussions for

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the body politic. If, as Debora Shuger argues, patriarchal authority in the English Renaissance was not always viewed negatively—something James I well knew when representing himself as a kind and compassionate father—the positive conception of this authority is difficult to maintain and sustain when it jostles against the theory of divine-right kingship. Recognizing the importance of salutary patriarchalism in the exercise of royal authority, James saw the monarch as a “trew paterne of Divinitie”: “Kings are called Gods…because they sit upon GOD his Throne in the earth.”70 An important thematic focus in Puritan discourse, obedience of children to both their parents and to the father in particular finds its (ironic) ideological counterpart in absolutist discourse, which affirms, as in Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, that patriarchal authority embodies the form and content of monarchical authority itself. For Filmer, “the first kings were fathers of families,” and this political understanding is articulated with reference to the logic of reproductive lineage.71 For Filmer, Adam represents archetypal monarchical authority, one that extends into the postdiluvian world to be vested in Noah. The patriarchal right of the first man in human history reaches out without interruption to the present time. The structure of the family, which demands that children submit themselves to paternal authority, constitutes a microcosm of the functioning of the state, in which subjects are asked to embrace without murmur or resistance the authority of the king bestowed by God himself. In The Trew Law, King James evokes the Old Testament narrative of Israel supplicating Yahweh for a king to support his elucidation of the nature of absolutist authority. When God gave to Israel a king when they clamored for one and agreed to accept all the terrible things that God said a monarch would do to his people, all subjects under monarchy are required to serve their king, however burdensome the yoke. When ancient Israel demanded a monarchical system of government, they consented to embrace all the problems brought on by royal authority, thereby entering a contractual arrangement they cannot renege on. However intolerable a king’s rule might be, his subjects have no choice but to obey “with patience and humilitie.”72 Scripture, James underscores, condemns rebellion against monarchs, even those who are tyrants. According to James I, the monarch is also a judge over his people. This was made clear in the monarch’s address to a conference of judges at the Star Chamber in June 1616. “Kings,” James declares, “are properly Judges, and Judgement properly belongs to them from GOD: for Kings

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sit in the Throne of GOD, and thence all Judgement is derived.”73 He would often turn to the history of the Old Testament to reinforce the point that when kings of Israel such as David and Solomon assumed the role of judges, righteousness flourished and peace prevailed.74 Arguing through analogy, James elaborates: As Kings borrow their power from God, so Judges from Kings: And as Kings are to accompt to God, so Judges unto God and Kings…. For as Kings are subject unto Gods Law, so they to mans Law. It is the Kings Office to protect and settle the trew interpretation of the Law of God within his Dominions: And it is the Judges Office to interprete the Law of the King, whereto themselves are also subject.”75

The monarch is empowered by God to judge his people, but the subject does not have the right to judge a monarch. Only God can judge a monarch. If a king is wicked, all that the subject can do is to pray for him to amend his ways. In the scenario of a king who torments his people with unlawful commands and fury, the subject can only respond by coming to God with “sobbes and teares.”76 Ian Williams tells us that even though James I did not frequently assume the role of judge in the course of his responsibilities as king, he certainly embraced the idea of the “king-as-­ judge” and engaged in judicial activity both in England and in Scotland.77 James intervened in legal processes, expedited or delayed legal processes, acted as sentencing authority, even ordered punishment without trial. He also understood the value of punishment as deterrence.78 The Winter’s Tale thematizes topics broached in James I’s writings and speeches to Parliament and the judiciary, particularly the spousal metaphor defining the king’s relationship with his kingdom, the role of the monarch as judge, and the dictum that the subject can never rebel against the authority of his/her king. Where Leontes should be a good husband to Hermione in line with James I’s absolutist conception of his royal identity as a husband wedded to his kingdom, he proceeds instead to destroy the marriage relationship, an act associated with the workings of the political tyrant. Here Shakespeare represents tyranny in relation to suspicion, an emotional perspective that gets mistaken for truth and fact supported by unassailable evidence. Shakespeare dramatizes the cultural politics of tyrannical authority by focusing on the setting of the family in which two childhood friends—now the monarchs of Sicilia and Bohemia—meet and reminisce about the past.

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When Hermione persuades Polixenes, the king of Bohemia, to prolong his stay in Sicilia, Leontes becomes suspicious, and then quickly convinced that his queen is having an affair with his friend. Leontes believes he possesses inerrant knowledge of the truth concerning his wife’s infidelity. In Act 3 scene 2, he declares Hermione unfaithful to the marriage bed, affirming his ability as the king to ferret out and bring to light deceit and wrongdoing in the realm. Leontes’s willful blindness is staggering. Or perhaps it does not matter whether what the king believes in is factual or not. As Stephen Greenblatt observes, “A tyrant does not need to traffic in facts or supply evidence. He expects his accusation to be enough. If he says that someone has been betraying him, or laughing at him, or spying on him, it must be the case. Anyone who contradicts him is either a liar or an idiot. The last thing the tyrant wants, even when he appears to solicit it, is an independent opinion.”79 Specifically, Leontes’s tyranny becomes dramatically evident when he sets out to harm both his wife and Polixenes in response to his conviction that Hermione has committed adultery with his childhood friend. Leontes’s actions in the Sicilian court dramatize an absolutist monarch’s brandishing of the law to pass judgment on perceived wrongdoing. Certain features stand out in the king’s roles as husband, father/patriarch, and judge. As a husband, Leontes lacks understanding of his wife, such that he can be convinced she is capable of adultery. He is a failed father whose actions lead to the death of his son and expulsion of his new-born daughter from the realm. As a magistrate, he passes judgment based on a suspicion that he believes is fact, contravening Chief Justice Edward Coke’s legal perspective that a king should not assume the office of a judge when ruling the kingdom. He also allows no space for an accused to plead her case or defend herself, not even feigning pretense of wanting to seek out truth with objectivity. Leontes not only appropriates the role of administering justice (with disastrous consequences) but also invokes the royal prerogative to reinforce his certitude about Hermione’s infidelity. When told by members of the court that they are certain about Hermione’s innocence, Leontes responds: Why, what need we Commune with you of this, but rather follow Our forceful instigation? Our prerogative Calls not your counsels, but our natural goodness

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Imparts this; which, if you—or stupefied Or seeming so in skill—cannot or will not Relish a truth like us, inform yourselves We need no more of your advice. The matter, The loss, the gain, the ord’ring on’t, is all Properly ours. (2.1.163–72; emphasis mine)

Shakespeare’s deployment of the word prerogative in Leontes’s lines here is suggestive if not provocative. This is because James I was known to have tense relations with Parliament over his use of the royal prerogative. What is the royal prerogative? One entry in the OED provides a succinct answer, defining the royal prerogative as [t]he special right or privilege exercised by a monarch over all other persons. royal prerogative n. the prerogative of the British monarch under common law. prerogative of mercy n. the royal prerogative used to mitigate or remove the consequences of a criminal conviction (whether by pardon or by substituting a lesser penalty).

The OED elaborates: In Great Britain, the royal prerogative includes the right of sending and receiving ambassadors, making treaties, making war and concluding peace, conferring honours, nominating to bishoprics, choosing ministers of state, summoning Parliament, refusing assent to a bill, and of pardoning those under legal sentence; with many other political, ecclesiastical, and judicial privileges. Though notionally unrestricted, the exercise of the royal prerogative is practically limited by the rights of parliament or of other bodies or persons and the constitutional obligation to take the advice of ministers.80

In his Commentaries on the Laws of England, Sir William Blackstone had defined the prerogative as “that special pre-eminence, which the king hath, over and above all other persons, and out of the ordinary course of the common law, in right of his regal dignity.”81 Shakespeare portrays Leontes’s conception of monarchical authority in relation to the constitutional idea of the prerogative. This idea of the prerogative is reinforced in Leontes’s condemnation of Hermione in court, with the judicial proceedings described as “a session” (2.3.202) and as “sessions” (3.2.1 and 3.2.139). The concept of the prerogative points in the direction of the tense relationship between monarch and Parliament in

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Jacobean England. James I was known for his frictions with Parliament over the use of the royal prerogative. James’s tensions with Parliament made available for discussion and debate the powers of the monarch, role of Parliament, and status of the common law in early modern England. Leontes’s use of prerogative discourse is reminiscent of an ominous declaration made by James I at the Star Chamber in 1616, when he instructed the judges gathered there to doe Justice uprightly, as you shall answere to GOD and mee: For as I have only GOD to answere to, and to expect punishment at his hands, if I offend; So you are to answere both to GOD and to mee, and expect punishment at GODS hands and mine, if you be found in fault….Now having spoken of your Office in generall, I am next to come to the limits wherein you are to bound your selves, which likewise are three. First, Incroach not upon the Prerogative of the Crowne: If there fall out a question that concernes my Prerogative or mystery of State, deale not with it, till you consult with the King or his Councell, or both: for they are transcendent matters, and must not be [liberally] caried with over-rash wilfulnesse.82

The monarch’s possession of the royal prerogative is tied to the mystery of the king’s power conferred by God himself.83 James’s absolutist conception that the monarch’s authority to rule comes directly from God means that the king is not subject to any form or manifestation of earthly authority, including judges and the institution of Parliament. In The Trew Law, James declared that “kings were the authors and makers of the Lawes, and not the Lawes of the kings,”84 a conception that found support in Filmer’s Patriarcha which subjected both common and statute law to the monarch’s overarching authority and sovereign rule. As the source and voice of law given expression in the Roman maxim rex est lex loquens (“the king is the law speaking”), the monarch transcends the social institutions—such as Parliament and the law courts—set in place for the legislation and interpretation of law. James’s conception of absolutist authority collides with Chief Justice Coke’s understanding that judex est lex loquens (“the judge is the law speaking”). In the 1607 case of “Prohibitions Del Roy,” Chief Justice Coke had declared: [I]t was answered by me, in the Presence, and with the clear Consent of all the Justices of England, and Barons of the Exchequer, that the King in his own Person cannot adjudge any Case; either criminal, as Treason, Felony,

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etc. or betwixt Party and Party, concerning his Inheritance, Chattels, or Goods, etc. but this ought to be determined and adjudged in some Court of Justice according to the Law and Custom of England, and always Judgments are given, Ideo consideratum est per curiam, so that the Court gives the Judgment (64–65) …. [T]he King Cannot take any Cause out of any of his Courts, and give Judgment upon it himself, but in his own cause he may stay it, as it doth appear, 11 H. 4. 8. And the Judges informed the King, that no King after the Conquest: assumed to himself to give any Judgment in any Cause whatsoever, which concerned the Administration of Justice within this Realm, but these were solely determined in the Courts of Justice.85

In 1610, a dispute arose between the Crown and Parliament over, among other things, the monarch’s multiplication of proclamations. In the landmark “Case of Proclamations,” Coke was asked whether the king could by proclamation change existing laws and whether he could extend the royal prerogative into areas that have not been sanctioned by law. Chief Justice Coke responded that “the King by his proclamation of other ways cannot change any part of the common law, or statute law, or the customs of the realm,” clarifying he “hath no prerogative, but that which the law of the land allows him” (emphasis mine).86 For Coke, the common law, derived from custom and built on reason, transcends the royal prerogative. The law is not spoken by the king but through “the very true resolutions, sentences, and judgments of the reverend judges and sages of the law themselves, who for their authority, wisdom, learning, and experience are to be honored, reverenced, and believed.”87 The monarch was not above, but subject to, the common or judge-centered law. Jacobean absolutism was inimical to Coke’s emphasis on the primacy of the common and judge-centered law over the absolutist conception that the monarch is society’s fountainhead of law.

Conclusion In The Winter’s Tale, biblical allusions to miraculous events not only facilitate the dramatization of wonder and the marvelous, but also enable the staging of a play to highlight structural, performative, and thematic analogies between the practice of theater and the practice of religion. If Christianity calls for the necessity of faith in things unseen for the salvation of the soul, theater invites faith grounded in the willing suspension of

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disbelief to apprehend improbable events portrayed on stage. Functioning as an analogy of religious faith, theatrical faith is needed to believe in the resurrection of a long dead queen. With the coming to life of Hermione’s statue, Shakespeare’s audience participates in the exercise of a poetic faith even as it considers the status of religious belief in the existence of miracles. In this late romance, miracles deemed normative in the experience of religious conviction are not all that different from the experience of wonder made possible by theatrical representation. The Winter’s Tale appropriates the discourse of faith both to question the basis of religious conviction and to dramatize the experience of the miraculous. It does so also to consider the relationship between the authority of the Bible and the status of the classical tradition that is understood to be subordinate to Christian religion’s transcendent spiritual dispensation. In a story about a king that had done wrong with tragic consequences, the theological doctrine of repentance becomes a precondition for the restoration of the political order symbolized by the reconciliation between an estranged king and his queen. When Shakespeare evokes the experience of faith to represent the challenges and instabilities encountered in efforts to apprehend truth claims in The Winter’s Tale, he also extends it to his portrayal of Leontes’s character and political tyranny. The play deploys biblical material in a way that facilitates the possibility of questioning the verifiability of religious faith and of thinking about the role of the loyal subject in speaking truth to power. Where words like opinion, faith, and knowledge help to reinforce the play’s interrogatory and destabilizing instincts, allusions to the role of truth-speaking prophets and to the Apostle Paul also allow an audience to consider the ethical implications and practical dangers of standing up for one’s convictions in the court of unjust political authority. Deploying biblical material for the staging of a play, The Winter’s Tale foregrounds the literariness of sacred subject matter even as it connects with early seventeenth-­century England’s cultural engagement with the politics of absolutist authority and the sensitive question of what a subject can or should do when confronted with tyrannical rule. If this late romance unfolds a story of redemption predicated on the doctrines of faith and repentance, it also raises the issue of religious skepticism at the same time as it registers alertness to the contribution of religious themes to the development of radical political thought in the period. If The Winter’s Tale offers a dramatic narrative that allows for audience consideration of the relationship between opinion and confidence in the

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truth of religious conviction, its portrayal of the royal family also affords opportunity for showcasing the workings of tyrannical authority. James I watched a performance of The Winter’s Tale in the Banqueting House at Whitehall in November 1611. Shakespeare’s portrayal of the life of the Sicilian royal family with its ups and downs might have resonated at some level for King James. James’s reign was known for concerns about succession and the monarch’s not always harmonious relationship with his wife Anne of Denmark, a queen who, for a time, had to endure forced separation from her eldest son Prince Henry who was taken away to be groomed as the king’s natural successor. (The Prince of Wales Henry Stuart’s unexpected death in 1612 disrupted James I’s succession plans, making way for his second son to ascend the throne of England as King Charles I in 1625.) In the Jacobean court, both Prince Henry and Princess Elizabeth were taken from the court in infancy to be raised by others.88 Perdita’s sixteen-­ year absence from the Sicilian court suggests a familiar-enough phenomenon in royal and aristocratic life, where children were often separated from their biological parents to be raised by surrogates. The Winter’s Tale shares with the history of Jacobean and Caroline England the themes of marital discord and familial tensions, disrupted succession plans, paternal/absolutist authority, and dynastic continuity. If the family is “understood as part of the larger world, the smallest social unit, the building block of society,”89 it is also a microcosm of political life, reinforced through the logic of analogies and correspondences familiar to the Renaissance worldview. Like The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale also dramatizes reconciliation between perpetrators of wrongdoing and those who have suffered as the result of their misdeeds. In both late romances, reconciliation between rulers is underwritten by the experience of aging, anticipations of retirement, and facilitation of dynastic continuity. Where dynastic continuity in The Tempest is assured by the union of Ferdinand and Miranda, it is secured by the marriage of Florizel and Perdita in The Winter’s Tale. The Winter’s Tale’s thematization of generational transition and continuity, focused on the marriage of a princess to the scion of another ruling family, must have appealed to James I, who invited the King’s Men to stage the play again as part of the wedding celebrations of his daughter Princess Elizabeth’s marriage to Frederick V of the Palatinate in 1613.90 In The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, age stands in contrast to youth, experience in juxtaposition with idealism. Longevity alerts characters to many of the dark traits of human nature found both in themselves and in

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others. Although far from easy, seeking moral improvement by embracing Christian and humanist values becomes a necessary spiritual journey that must be undergone for the stage to be set for one generation to make way for another. In these plays we have moved from Shakespeare’s handling of old age in a tragedy like King Lear, where a king’s blindness in discerning the true nature of his unfilial daughters leads to his mental breakdown and the death of his beloved daughter in an ending where “All’s cheerless, dark, and deadly” (Folio 5.3.265). In King Lear, the geriatric condition does not generate sympathy from the gods; being old also does not mean you have the assurance or right of dying at home surrounded by loving family members. Where poor Lear is deprived of the possibility of a homecoming, Prospero (exiled to an island) and Camillo (in self-imposed exile in Bohemia) are assured theirs in an affirmation that home, family, and community are indispensable conditions for the experiential journey both of proper aging and of proper dying. Political authority and the exercise of power continue to fascinate Shakespeare in the late romances, but these now resonate with the recognition that nostalgia and restoration cannot be extricated from intimations of mortality.

Notes 1. See Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, “Hamlet” to “The Tempest” (New York: Routledge, 1992), esp. 221 and 223. 2. In The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), Louis Montrose has this practice of “breeching” in mind when discussing Shakespeare’s treatment of the yielding of the changeling boy to Oberon by Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a practice that signifies in relation to the play’s articulation of culture’s “man-made system of sex and gender” (167). 3. St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 6–10. 4. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1:217. 5. Cited in Pier Franco Beatrice, The Transmission of Sin: Augustine and the Pre-Augustinian Sources, trans. Adam Kamesar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 24. 6. Richard Strier, “Mind, Nature, Heterodoxy, and Iconoclasm in The Winter’s Tale,” Religion & Literature 47, no. 1 (2015): 31–59, here 39. See also Strier’s chapter of the same title in Shakespearean Issues: Agency,

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Skepticism, and Other Puzzles (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), 228–49, esp. 233–40. 7. Beatrice, The Transmission of Sin, 24. 8. Thomas Traherne, “Poems from the ‘Dobell Folio,’” “Poems of Felicity,” “The Ceremonial Law,” “Poems from the ‘Early Notebook,’” in The Works of Thomas Traherne, ed. Jan Ross, vol. 6 (Suffolk, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2015), 7. 9. For a reading of the significance of economic matters in Traherne’s spiritual thought, see David Hawkes’s “Thomas Traherne: A Critique of Political Economy,” Huntington Library Quarterly 62, no. 3–4 (1999): 369–88. Hawkes argues that, for Traherne, the workings of a money economy distort human perception of value so that emphasis is placed on objects that distract from a true appreciation of things of spiritual value. 10. Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditation, “Select Meditations,” “Miscellaneous works from the Osborn manuscript,” in The Works of Thomas Traherne, ed. Jan Ross, vol. 5 (Suffolk, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2013), 97. 11. Ibid., 93. 12. Ibid. 13. Henry Vaughan, Silex Scintillans, in The Works of Henry Vaughan, ed. Donald R. Dickson, Alan Rudrum, and Robert Wilcher, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 81–82. 14. Strier, Shakespearean Issues, 234. 15. William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. J. H. P. Pafford (1963; rprt., London and New York: Methuen, 1984), 155–56 n. 37. 16. For a reading of the Protestant aesthetics of wonder in The Winter’s Tale, see Huston Diehl, “‘Doth Not the Stone Rebuke Me?’: The Pauline Rebuke and Paulina’s Lawful Magic in The Winter’s Tale,” in Shakespeare and the Cultures of Performance, ed. Paul Yachnin and Patricia Badir (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 69–82. For a reading which identifies “awakening faith” in The Winter’s Tale as poetic/theatrical faith rather than religious, see McCoy, “Awakening Faith in The Winter’s Tale,” 214–30. 17. Julia Reinhard Lupton, Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), esp. 216–17. For the argument that The Winter’s Tale sustains anti-­Catholic satire, see David Kaula, “Autolycus’ Trumpery,” Studies in English Literature 16, no. 2 (Spring 1976): 287–303. Kaula focuses on Autolycus who, as a merchant of popish wares, becomes an important vehicle for enabling this satire. While Kaula draws attention to Catholic resonances tied to Shakespeare’s characterization of Autolycus and his craft(s), he ends up appearing over-deterministic in his allegorized reading of Autolycus’s significance. For a more nuanced reading of the place of Catholic discourse

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on idolatry in relation to Jewish, Greco-Roman, and Protestant ones, see Lupton, Afterlives, 175–218. With Perdita, a character seen by Kaula as an allegory of Christ’s bride, Lupton finds instead a Catholic saint “debunked by the Reformation”; Perdita is, for Lupton, “both icon and idol, both pure image and material relic” (205). For a study of the centrality of the question of idolatry for the Reformation critique of the medieval Church, see Carlos M. N. Eire, War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). For a reading of the ways in which both the body and the senses centrally inform the complex and often-fraught relationship between Protestantism and early modern theater, see Jennifer Waldron, Reformations of the Body: Idolatry, Sacrifice, and Early Modern Theater (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 18. Lupton, Afterlives, esp. 206–18. For a study of the relationship between idolatry and “ceremonialist” ideology, and of the violent conflict between this ideology and Puritanism, see Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 19. Julia Reinhard Lupton, “Pauline Edifications: Staging the Sovereign Softscape in Renaissance England,” in Political Theology and Early Modernity, ed. Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2012), 226. 20. Ibid., 227. 21. Ibid. 22. Strier, Shakespearean Issues, 246. 23. Gillian Woods, Shakespeare’s Unreformed Fictions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 180. 24. Rhema Hokama, Devotional Experience and Erotic Knowledge in the Literary Culture of the English Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 1–14. 25. Ibid., 5, 8. 26. Ibid., 14. 27. See Bacon, “Of Superstition,” in The Major Works, 373–74. 28. Ibid., 373. 29. Ibid., 142. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ann Kibbey, The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism: A Study of Rhetoric, Prejudice, and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), esp. 58 and 102. 33. Ibid., 56–57.

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34. George Herbert, The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 92. All references to Herbert’s poetry are to this edition. 35. Donne, Major Works, 177–78. 36. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “tale, n.,” accessed November 16, 2022, https://www-­oed-­com.libproxy1.nus.edu.sg/view/Entry/197201?rskey =ICmwlk&result=1#eid. 37. Ibid. 38. See Nandini Das and Nick Davis, eds., Enchantment and Dis-enchantment in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama: Wonder, the Sacred, and the Supernatural (New York: Routledge, 2017). 39. For a reading of The Winter’s Tale as a deconstructing text, see Howard Felperin, “‘Tongue-tied Our Queen?’: The Deconstruction of Presence in The Winter’s Tale,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), 3–18; see also Lynn Enterline, “‘You speak a language that I understand not’: The Rhetoric of Animation in The Winter’s Tale,” Shakespeare Quarterly 48, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 17–44. 40. Holger Schott Syme, Theatre and Testimony in Shakespeare’s England: A Culture of Mediation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 209. Invoking the coroner’s inquest and procedures governing possession trials, Syme brings poststructuralist premises into conjunction with New Historicist deployment of cultural practices in arguing that early modern England was a transactional culture of mediation built upon making absence present and representing on behalf of others, a culture inscribed not only in Shakespeare’s theater but also in the forensic marshaling of evidence in both medicine and law, science and jurisprudence (205–256). 41. For contesting accounts of how the Genesis story of Babel functions as an allegory for the subversive, destabilizing, and destructive force of opinions, see Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 83–88. In Shakespeare’s Monarchies: Ruler and Subject in the Romances (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), esp. 1–33 and 107–46, Constance Jordan argues that Leontes’s refusal to accept the ability of his subjects, indeed even his wife, to vocalize and have agency, points to an aspect of absolutist authority that threatens the health of the body politic. The life of the royal family captures the conditions governing the relationship between ruler and subject, between state and citizenry. For a reading of the representation of resistance and disobedience in The Winter’s Tale and the significance of this theme to the discourse of radical political thought, see Richard Strier, Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 200–202.

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42. Plato, “Meno” and Other Dialogues, ed. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 97–143. 43. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (1991; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 47. 44. Ibid., 48. 45. Mary Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 17. 46. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, 142. 47. For an important study of the Bible as a document that was instrumental in influencing and shaping political thinking in seventeenth-century England, see Kevin Killeen, The Political Bible in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 48. Alan Neame, The Holy Maid of Kent: The Life of Elizabeth Barton, 1506–1534 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1971); Diane Watt, “Reconstructing the Word: The Political Prophecies of Elizabethan Barton (1506–1534),” Renaissance Quarterly 50, no. 1 (Spring, 1997): 136–63; Nancy Bradley Warren, Women of God and Arms: Female Spirituality and Political Conflict, 1380–1600 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 119–38. 49. Richard Kalmin, “‘Manasseh Sawed Isaiah with a Saw of Wood’: An Ancient Legend in Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Persian Sources,” in The Archaeology and Material Culture of the Babylonian Talmud, ed. Markham J. Geller (Leiden, NL: Brill, 2015), 289–318. 50. Walter S. H. Lim, John Milton, Radical Politics, and Biblical Republicanism (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2006), 174–75. For an analysis of the distinctive characteristics of Anna Trapnel’s prophetic dreams and visions, see Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 86–95. For a reading of Trapnel’s place in the company of prophesying women in the English Civil War and Interregnum, see Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-century England (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), esp. 87–124. 51. Anna Trapnel, The Cry of a Stone, ed. Hilary Hinds (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000). 52. Elizabeth Bouldin, Women Prophets and Radical Protestantism in the British Atlantic World, 1640–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 21; Naomi Pullin, Female Friends and the Making of Transatlantic Quakerism, 1650–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 8, 225. 53. Elizabeth Stirredge, The Life of Elizabeth Stirredge, ed. Friends of Jesus Christ (Farmington Falls, ME: The Friends’ Library, 1850), 11–12.

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54. In Stage-Wrights: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and the Making of Theatrical Value (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 129–52, Paul Yachnin argues that representations of female articulation and agency in The Winter’s Tale cannot signify outside of the defining parameters established by a male interpretive economy, suggesting an analogy between women’s position in the play and (powerless) theater’s relationship to the masculine world of political power. 55. In Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1991), 15–31, Karen Newman discusses communal participation in the regulation of unruly female sexuality ­ through rituals of public shaming such as the skimmington. In a typical skimmington, a village community, which has been made aware of a shrewish or adulterous wife, might masquerade as one of the offending spouses (a husband is not immune to censure for losing control over his wife) or help parade effigies of the involved subjects supported by a loud improvised band. This community would even occasionally break into the house of an offending party to club the transgressing woman or duck her in the village pond. 56. See “Introduction” in Aemilia Lanyer, The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judæorum, ed. Susanne Woods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), xxxi. 57. Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby (1928; rpt., London: J.  M. Dent, 1975), 261. When quoting from this work, I have modernized and adjusted the spelling for clarity. 58. Ibid. 59. Strier, Resistant Structures, 167. 60. Stephen Greenblatt, “Shakespeare and the Uses of Power,” The New York Review of Books, April 12, 2007, https://www-­nybooks-­com.libproxy1. nus.edu.sg/articles/2007/04/12/shakespeare-­and-­the-­uses-­of-­power/. 61. Ibid. 62. Richard Strier and Stephen Greenblatt, “An Exchange on Shakespeare and Power,” The New  York Review of Books, May 31, 2007, https://www. n y b o o k s . c o m / a r t i c l e s / 2 0 0 7 / 0 5 / 3 1 / a n -­e x c h a n g e -­o n -­ shakespeare-­power/. 63. Strier, Resistant Structures,165–202. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid., 200–201. 66. William Camden, Annales the true and royall history of the famous empresse Elizabeth Queene of England France and Ireland &c. True faith’s defendresse of diuine renowne and happy memory. Wherein all such memorable things as happened during hir blessed raigne … are exactly described, bk. 1 (London: Printed by George Purslowe, Humphrey Lownes, & Miles Flesher for Benjamin Fisher, 1625), 27–28.

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67. James I, “A Speech, as it was delivered in the Upper House of the Parliament to the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and to the Knights, Citizens and Burgesses there assembled, on Monday the 19 Day of March 1603 [sic]. Being the first day of the first Parliament,” in King James VI and I: Political Writings, ed. Johann P.  Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 132–46, here 136. 68. James I, The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, in King James VI and I: Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 62–84, here 65. 69. In Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), 218–49, Debora Kuller Shuger makes a case against the critical instinct to read patriarchy in the English Renaissance in generally negative terms because deeply implicated in the practice of coercive politics. 70. James I, The Trew Law, 62–84, here 64. 71. Filmer, Sir Robert, “Patriarcha” and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1. 72. James I, The Trew Law, 68. 73. James I, “A Speech in the Star-Chamber, the 20 of June 1616,” in King James VI and I: Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 204–28, here 205. 74. Ibid., 206. 75. Ibid. 76. James I, The Trew Law, 72. 77. Ian Williams, “James VI and I, rex et iudex: One King as Judge in Two Kingdoms,” in Common Law, Civil Law, and Colonial Law: Essays in Comparative Legal History from the Twelfth to the Twentieth Centuries, ed. William Eves, John Hudson, Ingrid Iverson, and Sarah B.  White (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 86–119, here 87. 78. Ibid., 112. 79. Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), 123–24. 80. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “prerogative, n.,” accessed November 16, 2022, https://www-­oed-­com.libproxy1.nus.edu.sg/view/Entry/ 150573#eid28581853. 81. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1766–9), 239. 82. James I, “A Speech in the Star-Chamber, the 20 of June 1616,” in King James VI and I: Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 204–28, here 211–13. For a discussion of the relevance of James I’s understanding and use of the royal prerogative in seventeenth–century England to the development of

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constitutional and public law, see Martin Loughlin, Foundations of Public Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), esp. 376–83. 83. For an account of how the study of Roman law influenced the development of political and constitutional thought in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, see Brian P.  Levack, “Law and Ideology: The Civil Law and Theories of Absolutism in Elizabethan and Jacobean England,” in The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture, ed. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 220–41. Legal thinkers such as Alberico Gentili and Dr. John Cowell, the well-known Regius Professor of Civil Law at Cambridge, helped crystallize the conception of the monarch’s prerogative as an extraordinary power free from the law. 84. James I, The Trew Law, 73. 85. Edward Coke, The Reports of Sir Edward Coke, ed. John Farquhar Fraser, vol. 6 (London: Joseph Butterworth & Son, 1826), 281. 86. Case of Proclamations, [1610] EWHC KB J22, (1611) 12 Co Rep 74, 77 ER 1352, http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/KB/1610/ J22.html. 87. Cited in Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1992), 84. 88. Ibid., 78. 89. Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and their Contemporaries (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 86. 90. William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 80.

CHAPTER 5

Grief, Gardens, and the Staging of Tragedy in Richard II

He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did not esteem him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted. (Isa. 53:3–4 King James Bible) O sacred head, now wounded, With grief and shame weighed down, Now scornfully surrounded With thorns, Thine only crown; O sacred head, what glory! What bliss, till now was Thine! Yet, though despised and gory, I joy to call Thee mine. (James W. Alexander’s 1830 translation of medieval hymn)

Grief is an important motif in Richard II, cutting across the experiences of different characters such as the Duchess of Gloucester (widow of Thomas of Woodstock), Bolingbroke, John of Gaunt, the Queen, and the tragic protagonist King Richard II himself. Shakespeare invokes the concept of grief to describe one’s experience of sorrow, which is not only personal but also theological and political. In Richard II, the narrative of Christ’s Passion brings theological subject matter into conjunction with political © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 W. S. H. Lim, Shakespeare and the Theater of Religious Conviction in Early Modern England, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40006-3_5

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circumstance, with King Richard representing his experience of political defeat as possessing not only national but also religious significance. When Richard II invokes Christ’s betrayal by Judas and condemnation to death by Pontius Pilate to frame his treatment by the English people, he not only conceptualizes his royal identity in religious terms but also seeks to generate sympathy in his audience through a self-conscious theatricalization of identity. Grief and sorrow are closely related words and concepts often used interchangeably. For the Duchess of Gloucester, Bolingbroke, and John of Gaunt, grief is mental and emotional pain brought on by misfortune, personal loss, and bereavement, an experience intertwined with the unhappiness and woe associated with sorrow. This is grief brought on by the murder of one’s husband, banishment of one’s son, and recognition that father and son will never meet again once separated by royal decree. Grief calls attention to the existence of personal and private emotions—the human element—beneath the calculating and treacherous world of political machinations and maneuverings. Early in the play, we meet the grieving Duchess of Gloucester pleading with her brother-in-law John of Gaunt to avenge her husband’s murder only to conclude with the plaintive declaration that “Thy [referring to Gaunt] sometimes brother’s wife / With her companion, grief, must end her life” (1.2.54–55; emphasis mine). When exiled by King Richard from the kingdom, Bolingbroke describes himself as “a journeyman to grief” in the experience of exile (1.3.256.7). Richard observes John of Gaunt’s “grievèd heart” (1.3.202; emphasis mine) in receiving news of his son’s exile. Terminally ill, John of Gaunt is still able to joke about the relationship between his diminished physical frame and name by explaining that “Within me grief hath kept a tedious fast, / And who abstains from meat that is not gaunt?” (2.1.75–76; emphasis mine). Richard II is a play filled with the “heavy thought of care” (3.4.2), a universal human experience that finds theological expression in the separation between postlapsarian reality and spiritual otherworldliness. The Duke of York tells us that comfort is only available in heaven, and that, on this earth, we can only expect “crosses, cares, and grief” (2.2.79). When Richard considers that all that he has—and this includes his life—belongs to Bolingbroke, he feels the agonizing humiliation of political defeat and can only think of sad stories that relate the misfortunes, such as deposition and murder, experienced by kings. The presence of death, the great leveler, forces a perspective that ponders the significance of outward forms

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and symbols of authority. Once these forms and symbols are eliminated, the king is vulnerable like other human beings: he eats bread, has physical and emotional needs, and experiences grief (3.2.171–72). Richard’s grief underscores his humanity, his agony intrinsic to the play’s representation of the experience of tragedy. In considering the significance of the grief motif in Richard II, we may find ourselves thinking of King Lear, Shakespeare’s great tragedy in which grief is central to the tragic protagonist’s experience of filial ingratitude, dispossession, and annihilation of identity. Encountering Goneril and Regan’s inhospitality and humiliating disregard for his needs, Lear appeals to the heavens for patience, venting: “You see me here, you gods, a poor old man, / As full of grief as age, wretchèd in both” (Folio 2.2.438–39). Lear grieves over his inability to recognize the goodness of his youngest daughter, his declining physical strength and mental acuity brought on by age, and his inability to secure justice to punish those who have done him wrong. Where he had expected to rely on the care of his two elder daughters, he now finds himself instead wandering the heath on a stormy night railing against nature’s callous indifference to human suffering and pain. The magnitude of Lear’s grief points to the experience of existential nihilism in which life is meaningless and bereft of intrinsic value. In contrast to King Lear, a tragedy set in pre-Christian Britain, Richard II’s England—a society familiar with the idea of divine-right kingship and the Crusades—is defined by its “Christian climate” (4.1.121), the cultural setting in which the deposed monarch interprets his experience of grief. When Richard II seeks salutary meaning in sorrow, he turns to the Judeo-­ Christian tradition’s supreme manifestation of grief and sorrow in Christ in his Passion. In Richard II, Shakespeare’s portrayal of the king’s invocation of the suffering Christ as an analogy for his experience of rejection by his subjects invites an audience to consider the appropriateness of the comparison.

Christ’s Passion in the Devotional Literature of Renaissance England Jesus’s suffering and death on the cross is subject matter that has given religious poets in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England opportunities for literary representation. An important impulse in meditating on and writing about the Passion stems from the felt need to obtain a deeper and

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more nuanced understanding of the theological significance of Christ’s death on the cross not only for the individual but also all fallen humanity. Writing on the Passion has impressed on devotional poets the cosmic implications of Christ’s sacrificial death as humanity’s divine pharmakos, underscoring the difficulty or impossibility often encountered by these poets seeking to undertake representation that captures the full force of Calvary’s significance. When Shakespeare portrays Richard II’s analogization of his personal experience of suffering with that of Christ, his depiction invites comparison with representations of the suffering Christ in the literary production and homiletic work of early modern England. The availability of this larger representational context for positioning Richard II’s invocation of the suffering Christ motif enables an audience to analyze the implications and effects of the monarch’s instinct to identify himself with Christ. In the devotional literature of Renaissance England, attempts to imitate Christ in his Passion are found to be hubristic, erroneous, and untenable. We see this in John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 11, “Spit in my face you Jews,”1 where the poetic persona—arrogating to himself the identity of the crucified Christ—cries out: “Spit in my face you Jews, and pierce my side, / Buffet, and scoff, scourge, and crucify me” (ll. 1–2). Almost immediately, however, the speaker recognizes that his desire to reenact the agony of the cross involves a fantasy of imitation that comes uncomfortably close to blasphemy. This recognition is supported by the speaker’s overpowering sense of the full weight of the sinning self that daily nails the savior to the cross. Because of the ontological distance that separates the sinner from the Messiah at Calvary, all that the speaker can do is marvel at the mystery of divine love manifested in Incarnation. Enjoining the Christian faithful to ruminate on the Son of God’s kenotic love for the sinner as important preparation for partaking of the Eucharist, the Welsh metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan agrees with the purport of Donne’s “Spit in my face” when he writes: But (Oh!) with what language shall I attempt thy passion? thy bloody sweat, thy deep and bitter agony, thy lingring peece-mealed death, with all the lively anguishments, and afflictions of thy martyr’d Spirit? O my most loving and merciful Saviour! It is onely thy own Spirit, that can fully character thy own sufferings.2

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In another Holy Sonnet “What if this present were the world’s last night?”3 Donne ponders if he is saved should the world suddenly come to an end, and he finds himself standing before God’s judgment throne. To quell his anxiety about the state of his soul, he turns to the event of Good Friday to behold there, once again, “The picture of Christ crucified” (l. 3): tortured and bloodied. He asks himself two questions: Does the countenance of the crucified Christ “affright” (l. 4) him? And would the Christ who prayed to his Father to forgive the people who had nailed him to the cross judge and send him to hell? The sonneteer responds to both questions in the negative because he beholds a “beauteous form” (l. 14) in Jesus’s gnarled and tortured body, an unearthly beauty made visible by the Messiah’s compassion and sacrificial love for fallen humanity. In “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward,”4 Donne tries to apprehend and represent the theological significance of Calvary but finds the attempt difficult if not impossible because of the cosmic implications of Christ’s death on the cross. Donne—whose soul (humanly) wants to get as far away from God as possible because of profane desires—finds that the cross of Christ and the momentousness of the first Good Friday cannot be resisted or opposed. The more the poetic persona tries to escape the gravitational pull exerted by Calvary’s timeless event, the larger the cross looms behind him to the point of occupying all space and overwhelming all perspective. Calvary’s cross engulfs everything terrestrial in its cosmic embrace. Defined by the presence of the cross, God’s sacred geography violates our human experience of space and time.5 Another poem about the Passion that comes to mind is George Herbert’s “The Sacrifice.”6 In this poem, the devotional poet tells the story of the Passion by making Christ, the first-person narrator, call the reader’s attention to the major events—Judas’s betrayal, Gethsemane, Pilate’s judgment—leading up to the agony of the cross. Effectively a lament, all but two stanzas of “The Sacrifice” conclude with the refrain “Was ever grief like mine?” Instead of the plaintive question “Was ever grief like mine?” stanzas 54 and 63 affirm the inimitable experience of the Passion with the declarative “Never was grief like mine.” No human being has ever experienced anything resembling Christ’s suffering on the cross. Herbert’s Christ has a broken heart not only because he is rejected by the world he came to save, but also because the Father has—at the time when divine comfort was sought—turned his face from the Son. If grief entails brokenness, Herbert’s Christ grieves/is broken for fallen humanity even as men and women grieve him in their rebellion and sin.

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“The Sacrifice” strives to impress on the reader the cosmic significance of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, recognition of which should lead the sinner to be grievously sorry for his/her sins, to be contrite and repent. As “The Altar”7 strives to achieve: “A broken ALTAR, Lord, thy servant reares, / Made of a heart, and cemented with teares” (ll. 1–2). The Anglican poet who chooses to represent the feelings and thoughts of Christ as first-person narrator in “The Sacrifice” acknowledges that, as a sinner, “There is no dealing with [Christ’s] mighty passion” (l. 2) in “The Reprisall.”8 This line affirms from the outset that the poet can never hope to imitate Christ’s salvific sacrifice on the cross. It also suggests that the theological meaning of Calvary is too vast and deep for the poet’s human understanding, so that, even if the poet were to “die for [Christ]” (l. 3), he can never close the gulf separating the utmost of human endeavor from divinity’s atoning sacrifice. The wounds sustained at Calvary “still my attempts defie” (l. 7), declares the poet in humility and awe. In “The Agonie,”9 an explicatory poem that sets out to define two controlling doctrinal concepts—sin and love—in Christian thought, Herbert invites his reader to meditate on the tortured Christ hanging on Calvary’s cross. If sin is best metaphorized as “that presse and vice, which forceth pain / To hunt his cruell food through ev’ry vein” (ll. 11–12) of incarnate deity, love is Christ’s sacrificial blood experienced by the sinner as wine, “that liquour sweet and most divine” (l. 17). Despite all of humanity’s impressive intellectual accomplishments, “there are two vast, spacious things” (l. 4) that “few there are that sound them; Sinne and Love” (l. 6). Representations of Christ’s Passion and crucifixion, such as found in the above works by Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan, indicate that the subject matter of Holy Week offers rich opportunities for creative expression. We are familiar with works of art such as the visually poignant Pietà, Michelangelo’s sculpture of the Virgin Mary cradling the body of Christ, just brought down from the cross. Housed in St Peter’s Basilica, the solemn delineations of Pietà capture a mother’s quiet agony grieving the death of her son propped up on her lap. The Virgin Mary’s suffering in the Passion of her son is captured in “Stabat Mater,” a thirteenth-century hymn which dilates on the depth of her sorrow as she kept vigil at Jesus’s crucifixion: weeping, mourning, overwhelmed by grief. In this hymn, Mary is “Mater, fons amóris”—“Mother, fountain of love”—remembered in the Roman Breviary, the collection of Latin liturgical rites of the Catholic Church.10 Reciting “Stabat Mater”—which refers to Jesus’s

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mother standing at the foot of the cross—the Christian soul meditates on the Virgin Mary’s distress when witnessing the crucifixion of her son but not being able to do anything about it. Here, the Christian pleads for the ability to participate in Mary’s sorrow and to share her grief. Central to the unfolding of God’s design for the salvation of fallen humanity, the event of the Passion demands humble contemplation because of its cosmic significance. Because God’s infinite love is beyond human comprehension, the topos of ineffability also makes its presence felt in literary representations of the Passion. Viewing himself as a Christ figure, Shakespeare’s Richard II seems impervious to the literary element of this topos when he portrays himself as suffering even more than Christ in his Passion. The story of Christ’s Passion is central to Richard’s performance of identity in the deposition scene in Act 4 scene 1. Richard views himself as a Christ figure who is betrayed by followers that not only had he thought were loyal to him, but also made a spectacle of public humiliation and scorn. Thinking that Bagot, Bushy, and Green have capitulated to Bolingbroke’s camp in Act 3 scene 2, Richard curses his loyal supporters not only as vipers and dogs that will fawn indiscriminately over anyone but also as Judases. Betrayal is an egregious sin and transgressors deserve nothing less than the most extreme punishment in hell. In Dante’s Inferno, Judas is discovered at the very icy center of hell being masticated by Lucifer in one of his three mouths. Dante’s Satan has three faces, his other two mouths munching on Brutus and Cassius, history’s other two evil souls condemned to eternal perdition for the sin of betrayal. Brutus and Cassius were leading conspirators in the plot to assassinate Julius Caesar. Judas, Brutus, and Cassius were all traitors to their masters. Betrayal is an important motif in Richard II, with Richard strongly chafing at how his subjects and even those who are close to him have sold him out to Bolingbroke. Richard’s powerful sense of betrayal stems from his perception of the English people’s disloyalty to him, a perception that shows a lack of recognition about the role he played in contributing to his current political circumstance. Where Christ had only one Judas Iscariot, Richard II laments that he has three Judases in his life, each one three times more despicable than the disciple who betrayed Jesus in the New Testament. Richard II sees all the people who have abandoned him for Bolingbroke as latter-day Judases who have broken faith with their master. Richard’s amplification of the trope of betrayal implies that his experience of persecution exceeds even Christ’s agony in his Passion.

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In Act 4 scene 1, Richard also identifies those who sit in judgment over him as Pilates: “some of you, with Pilate, wash your hands, / Showing an outward pity, yet you Pilates / Have here delivered me to my sour cross, / And water cannot wash away your sin” (4.1.229–32). Pontius Pilate was the Roman governor of Judea who presided over Jesus’s trial and struggled with the implications of setting Jesus free in the face of pressure exerted by the Jews’ insistence that he be condemned to death. He finally acceded to pressure from the Jewish establishment to have Christ crucified, but not before (in)famously disavowing responsibility for meting out the death sentence: “When Pilate saw that he availed nothing, but that more tumult was made, he took water and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just man: look you to it” (Matt. 27:24). Pilate is a character in the Passion narrative who has been found to know what is right and wrong but lacks the courage to stand up for truth. He is associated with false judgment and disavowing responsibility for it. In Salve Deus Rex Judæorum (Hail, God, King of the Jews),11 a proto-­ feminist re-narrativization of Christ’s Passion, Aemilia Lanyer invokes Pilate to reinforce her account of differences between men’s and women’s responses to Christ’s betrayal, trial, and crucifixion. She exhorts Pilate to “heare the words of thy most worthy wife, / Who sends to thee, to beg her Saviours life” (ll. 751–52), a plea aimed at foregrounding women’s capacity for discernment over men. From the cursory and only reference found in scripture (Matthew 27:19) to Pilate’s nameless wife telling her husband not to have anything to do with Jesus because of a dream she had, Lanyer amplifies her role as a defender of Eve as less culpable than Adam in bringing about the Fall. Where Adam should not have sinned because he possessed superior knowledge as the “Lord and King of all the earth” (l. 783), Pilate likewise should have judged rightly in support of “truth and right” (l. 842). As a “faultie Judge [who] condemnes the Innocent” (l. 938), Lanyer’s Pilate is excoriated as “a painted wall, / A golden Sepulcher with rotten bones” (ll. 921–22), whose conscience cannot be appeased by the symbolic washing of hands. For Lanyer, Pontius Pilate was a tyrant. To Richard II, the people who have embraced Bolingbroke as the new king, but show pity for the departing monarch, are hypocrites whose outward display of emotions is unsynchronized with their dark and hidden intentions. When Richard compares himself with the suffering Christ, we are invited to evaluate the soundness of the analogies he sets up. Where

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Christ entered Jerusalem riding on a donkey on Palm Sunday to bring to fruition God’s salvific plan for fallen humanity, a voluntary journey undertaken by the selflessness of divine love, Richard’s suffering is the consequence of his tyrannical rule. The king, however, appears to be myopic about his role in Bolingbroke’s political ascendancy, believing that the realm of England, God’s demi-paradise, can never be snatched from his possession because he dons the diadem of sacred kingship. When Christ was in the same room with Judas Iscariot at the Last Supper, he neither lashed out at him nor revealed his identity to the other apostles, telling Judas instead to execute expeditiously the task he had come to accomplish (Jn 13:27). Unlike Christ in the Upper Room, King Richard rails at those he believes have betrayed him to the treacherous Bolingbroke. Shakespeare’s fractured monarch struggles to consolidate the sense of a unified self, appealing to the doctrine of divine-right kingship for support. This doctrine is, however, in danger of becoming abstract, theoretical, and unreliable as England desperately looks for an able ruler to occupy the political vacuum that has been generated by the king’s tyrannical rule. In his grief and sorrow, Richard II is hard put to find people who are sympathetic to his plight, part of the reason being that his downfall stems from deleterious effects experienced by the citizenry brought on by his own oppressive practices. In the story of the Passion, Jesus also finds himself very much alone without the support of the disciples he had spent the last three years with as he went about his public ministry. When he was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, his disciples fell asleep, depriving him of a source of emotional support at a time of need. When it was clear that the Jews were determined to do their master harm with the cooperation of the Roman authorities, the disciples were overcome by fear, such that even Simon Peter found himself denying that he knew Jesus. Even one’s close friends and companions cannot be relied upon in moments of stress and danger. Lanyer’s Salve Deus underscores the point that women—unlike men— stood by Jesus in his grief and suffering. Jesus’s life cannot be extricated from meaningful interactions with women who are his ardent supporters and defenders. Jesus’s mother looked after him when he was young; women with illnesses were healed by him; women with spiritual needs received forgiveness and comfort from him. Lanyer’s project represents Christ’s suffering and death from a proto-feminist perspective, reinforcing the significance of women in the Passion narrative.12 Where men found

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women to be inferior to them in all aspects of life and in the order of God’s creation, women’s weakness and fragility enable God’s glory to shine with greater intensity. The female gaze is marked by compassion, tenderness, and empathy, a representational emphasis distinctively present in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, a film released in 2004. Grounded in the Catholic tradition, The Passion foregrounds women’s interactions with Christ as he made his way to Calvary and died on the cross. First there is the central figure of the Virgin Mary witnessing the crucifixion of her son. Mary had to endure the pain of watching the son whom she had given birth to and raised suffer an ignominious death. Flashbacks to Mary’s and Jesus’s earlier years in The Passion foreground a world of tenderness, love, and affection, attributes lacking in the world of Roman authoritarianism, Judaic legalism, and masculinist violence. While the women characters in Gibson’s filmic narrative—the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, Veronica—may appear to be helpless in a society controlled by political power and pharisaical religion, they nevertheless allow for love, compassion, and pity to be present in suffering.13 The bond between women and Christ is strong in Gibson’s film, a closeness which translates into emotional evisceration for the women witnessing the crucifixion. In Richard II, the characters present at the ritual of King Richard’s abdication are all male. No woman is present at this event. So, what are the roles of the three female characters in the play? First, we have Richard’s Queen, a character who exhibits tenderness toward her husband’s plight, emotions shaped by the ties of the conjugal relationship. The Queen does not interpret her husband’s political plight through the prism of the Bible’s Passion narrative. Embodying the experience of overwhelming sorrow, Richard’s Queen is a tragic character who—defined by her place in the oikos and experience of the domestic realm—sorely lacks knowledge about the workings of the political world. Appearing only once in the play, another female character, the Duchess of Gloucester—widow of the murdered Thomas of Woodstock—pleads with John of Gaunt to avenge her husband’s death but to no avail. Believing Richard II to be complicit in Woodstock’s death, John of Gaunt nevertheless affirms that he cannot bring the monarch to justice because the person of the king is sacred: Richard II wields the scepter of divine-right kingship. The third female character is the Duchess of York, who memorably pleads with Henry IV to spare the life of her son Aumerle, who is discovered to be involved in a plot to kill the new king at Oxford. Unlike Lanyer’s Jesus who has the

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sympathies and compassion of a female audience, Richard II finds himself facing—at his deposition—a hostile court exclusively made up of men, the majority of whom do not find anything Christ-like in the king brought low by his tyrannical ways and political incompetence.

Act 4 Scene 1: Deposition and the Performance of Identity Act 4 scene 1 dramatizes the king’s devastating humiliation brought on by the unstoppable emergence and ascendancy of Bolingbroke, soon to become King Henry IV.14 Forced into a position from which there can be no escape or hope of circumstantial reversal, the king turns to the familiar New Testament narrative of Christ’s Passion to inflect the meaning of surrendering the crown to a man who—at least from the perspective of divine-right kingship—is both a rebel and a traitor. How does a deposed king recuperate some semblance of dignity from the experience of political defeat turned into formal theater by Bolingbroke? Obviously, the first thing one can do is strive to present a demeanor that appears to be unaffected by all the pressures directed at dismantling one’s selfhood and identity. However, that is not always successful, as witnessed in the example of King Lear, whose loss of royal and paternal authority translates into the annihilation of everything that constitutes a person’s identity as a human being. For Lear, the only logical response to the experience of being reduced to existential nothingness is to become mad. Richard II does not become mad like Lear because he has embraced as inviolable the powerful ideological conception of the divine right of kings. He will invoke this philosophical understanding to support his unassailable political authority, a theoretical postulate subjected to the pressures of social discontent generated by incompetent monarchical rule. Sometimes a people’s unhappiness with a king is so great that it supports the transference of de jure authority to someone like Bolingbroke who—technically speaking—can always only be a de facto monarch because definitionally excluded from the legitimizing requirements of hereditary succession.15 King Richard’s hamartia can be traced to his hubristic conviction that, as the “figure of God’s majesty” (4.1.116) enjoying absolute authority over the realm, he cannot be impeached much less dethroned, however bad a job he is doing as king. The mystification of monarchical authority enabled by the idea of divine-right kingship leads Richard to have the

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arrogant and erroneous assumption that he cannot be brought to account for any of his actions even if they should prove to be ruinous for the body politic. Reaffirming the king’s immunity from judgment by virtue of his position as God’s anointed deputy, the Bishop of Carlisle—an important figure of ecclesiastical authority—predicts that the dethroning of Richard II and coronation of Bolingbroke will result in “tumultuous wars” (4.1.131) and the spilling of so much blood that England will be fertilized with “Disorder, horror, fear, and mutiny” (4.1.133). Instead of fulfilling its destiny as a paradise on earth, grounded in the values and practices of the Christian faith, England will embrace the way of “Turks and infidels” (4.1.130). In Act 4 scene 1, Richard, torn between surrendering his crown and not wanting to do so, descends into hopelessness and despondency, signified by the recognition “I must nothing be” (4.1.191). Forced to relinquish the symbolic appurtenances of monarchical authority, he participates in the ritual of deposition over which he has little to no control but acts as if he does. Richard begins by asking his audience to pay close attention to his divestment of monarchical authority, underscoring the agentic freedom he possesses in playing/acting out his role in this piece of political theater. Reinforcing the centrality of the first-person “I” in Richard’s performance of identity is the reiterated pronoun “mine,” functioning as possessive determiner and as signifier of ownership in the king’s self-referential discourse: With mine own tears I wash away my balm, With mine own hands I give away my crown, With mine own tongue deny my sacred state, With mine own breath release all duteous oaths. (4.1.197–200)

While the anaphoric refrain “With mine own” can convey (a semblance of) control and agency on the part of a king who has been forced to give up his crown, it also registers a radical dislocation of identity attendant on the trauma of political defeat. In trying to show he still possesses (some degree of) control over the ritual of abdication and its meanings through the litany-like chant of his declarative utterances, Richard ends up appearing querulous. Struggling to show he is not unduly overwrought by the drama of deposition foisted on him, Richard’s self-conscious use of language betrays petulance and a theatrical temper. The associations Richard sought to

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establish between his own experience and that of the suffering Christ do not achieve their intended effect. Where Christ—deity entering space and time in Incarnation—suffers an agonizing death on Calvary’s cross, Richard does not participate in any act of kenotic sacrifice that leads to England’s redemption. Where Christ’s unfathomable love in offering up his life for fallen humanity—powerfully represented in the heavenly council in Book 3 of Paradise Lost—has cosmic ramifications, Richard’s suffering is not only self-induced, the result of his insecurity and incompetence as a ruler, but also an occasion for self-indulgent performance. Invoking Christ’s Passion to contextualize his experience of political defeat, Richard comes across as both desperate and egotistical. Richard’s egotism and penchant for the theatrical are dramatically foregrounded in his demand for a mirror to be brought on stage for him to reflect on what he sees there. Richard stares at himself in the looking glass and ponders the implications of the discrepancy that exists between his overwhelming “sorrow” and the seemingly unscathed physical features reflected there. Why has his reflection in the mirror not registered the effects of his mental torment? What is the relationship between the face of a monarch resplendent with majesty and that of a man who has been reduced to a “shadow”? If grief and sorrow are keynotes in Richard II’s theatricalization of identity in Act 4 scene 1, they continue to be significant in Act 5 scene 1 in the king’s brief encounter with his Queen on his way to the Tower of London, later changed to Pomfret Castle. Here, Richard continues to point to his experience of grief and sorrow, now intensified by his imminent separation from his queen who has been instructed to depart England for France. In Act 5 scene 1, Richard’s persistent reminders to his audience not to forget the depth of his suffering come across as maudlin, underscoring the king’s sentimental, emotional, and theatrical temper. Whether or not one considers Richard’s maudlin propensities to be a character flaw, we are here witnessing some of the symptoms of trauma in a king whose belief that God will never permit him to lose his crown has been devastatingly shattered. Peter Lake notes that Shakespeare’s Richard II was adept at manipulating the forms of monarchical authority, one that proved effective in supporting the longevity of sacred monarchy as a political institution.16 The king’s ability to exploit society’s conceptions of divine-right kingship is, however, no guarantee against the forces of dissent that emerge in the face of certain political conditions, central among which is the exercise of

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tyrannical rule. Lake finds King Richard to be unquestionably “guilty of tyranny,”17 evinced in his (hidden) role in the murder of Gloucester, his expropriation of property that belonged to the nobility, and his oppressive taxation of the English people. Even though Richard II is a tyrant, he is also an actor, someone who performs for his own benefit and the consumption of an audience. Pushed to a corner, King Richard turns to the possibilities of theater and performance in a bid to reclaim aspects of selfhood and elements of political identity. Characters in the deposition scene are alert to the theatrical dimension of the political event they find themselves a part of. Toward the end of Act 4 scene 1, the Abbot of Westminster declares “A woeful pageant have we here beheld” (4.1.311), to which the Bishop of Carlisle prophetically declares that England will descend into the condition of chaos and become “The field of Golgotha” (4.1.135). Also familiarly known as Calvary, the anglicized form of the Latin Calvariæ rendered in the Vulgate, Golgotha— the transliteration of an Aramaic word—is the setting of Jesus’s ignominious death. In George Herbert’s typological sonnet “Redemption,” Golgotha/Calvary is marked by “ragged noise and mirth” (l. 12), a place of tumult where a tenant—desperately seeking a new lease because of the burdensomeness and untenability of the old contract—finds his wealthy landlord/Christ not in heaven or at the places of the great but hanging on a cross to die among “theeves and murderers” (l. 13).18 Carlisle’s reference to Golgotha derives its significance from the symbolic matrix of religious allusions generated by Richard in response to moments of stress in experiencing the loss of political power and absolutist authority. It is not only representatives of the church who show pity for King Richard. The Duke of York himself offers a narration of Richard’s role as a secondary actor on stage who enters after the star actor has exited, and whose lackluster performance elicits disapprobation and even hostility. York’s response is a reaction to the spectacle of human pain and suffering that has just taken place. His revelation that the people even threw dust on Richard’s “sacred head” (5.2.30) not only points to the concept of divine-­ right kingship but allows for associations to be made between the fallen king and the crucified Christ. The fall of majesty makes for a heavy spectacle, even for those keen on Richard’s deposition. Richard’s performance of identity manages to draw out an emotional response from some of the people present at the event. He had sought to fashion his identity as a Christ figure to extract sympathy from his audience. If there is pity for Richard’s condition, it is not

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owing to the affective appeal of the king’s Christlikeness but because of the magnitude of his fall. Richard II’s representation of himself as a Christ figure finally lacks conviction, betraying instead a hubristic sense of self susceptible to narcissism and sensationalism. The king taps the affective possibilities and evocative resonance of Christ’s Passion but fails. Discerning similarities between Christ’s suffering and his own, Richard gives the audience an opportunity to consider the appropriateness of his comparisons and what they reveal about selfhood and identity when encroached upon by intense political pressure. Richard’s appropriation of Christ’s Passion to contextualize his performance of identity in the deposition scene invites comparison with other analogical representations in English Renaissance literature. This literature finds opportunity to represent the magnitude of Christ’s agony in his Passion and the (impossible) attempts of fallen human beings to replicate or reenact the experience of the cross.

Richard II as Gardener-King In Richard II, Shakespeare invokes the motif of Christ’s Passion to represent King Richard’s efforts to show that he is still very much in control of his identity as England’s rightful monarch, an authority conferred by God that Bolingbroke is unable to remove by political machination or force. Richard’s attempts to portray himself as a Christ figure are, however, unconvincing, prompting us to ask if the king’s appropriation of elements from the Passion narrative underscores a hubristic temper or personality susceptible to delusions of grandeur. If Shakespeare’s allusions to the Passion of Christ help to reinforce the play’s Christian ethos, so do references made to the Garden of Eden. The garden, functioning as both image and metaphor in the play, brings politics and religion into conjunction so that an audience cannot think of one without taking account of the other. Under Richard II’s rulership, the garden of England had been poorly tended to, such that weeds, infested by caterpillars, sprawl out of control. From John of Gaunt’s great patriotic speech that identifies England as “This other Eden, demi-paradise” (2.1.42) to the elaborate description of Richard’s disastrous management of (the garden of) England in Act 3 scene 4, the potential of the kingdom of England as God’s Garden on earth constitutes an important motif that brings the political significations of horticulture into conjunction with the religious significations of good governance. Having looked at the political

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implications and thematic significance of King Richard’s appropriation of elements of the narrative of Christ’s Passion to frame and contextualize his political downfall, we will find it helpful to analyze the imagistic and metaphorical significance of gardening’s relationship to monarchical rule in the play. For if Christ’s Passion can help move an audience’s emotions in particular directions, applying the idea of Eden to the kingdom of England also brings focus to the problematic aspects of Richard’s rule. Figuratively associated with monarchical rule, Richard’s horticultural responsibilities can be traced to Genesis 2:15: “Then the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden, that he might dress it, and keep it.” This passage identifies the patriarch of humankind as the first gardener, a “job” implied in the name Adam, which is a wordplay on the Hebrew word “Adamah” meaning ground or earth. Created and placed in a garden to tend and cultivate it, Adam and Eve—brought to life from ground, earth, or soil—are responsible for its protection and upkeep. In the Book of Genesis, tending the garden of innocence is natural and joyful; it is only after the Fall that Yahweh imposes on Adam and Eve the following condition: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return to the earth: for out of it wast thou taken, because thou art dust, and to dust shalt thou return” (Gen. 3:19). Taking care of the garden is intrinsic to the condition of prelapsarian Eden, a motif Milton expands in Paradise Lost in portraying Adam and Eve pruning and cultivating Eden’s vegetation and foliage so that they do not grow out of control. In Paradise Lost, God is a “sovran Planter” (PL 4.691), making us think of the authority of a plantation owner. This reference also invites the reader to think of Adam and Eve as indentured servants, laborers who, after proof of hard work and perfect service, can finally enjoy the reward of ascending the ontological chain of being. If the Book of Genesis records that God instructed Adam to “dress” the garden of Eden and to “keep it,” making him in effect humankind’s first gardener, a supporter of the monarchy like Sir Robert Filmer focuses on Adam’s identity as the father of humankind and the first king in human history. In Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings (written before the English Civil War but published posthumously in 1680), Filmer invokes the concept of the family to define the political idea of the state, making the point that, in the same way that children are expected to submit themselves to patriarchal authority, all citizens must subject themselves to the authority of the monarch. Given that “the first kings were fathers of families,”19 Filmer conceptualizes monarchical authority via the logic of

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reproductive lineage: Adam’s patriarchal right/monarchical authority continues uninterrupted to the present day. The structure of the family, within which children submit themselves to the authority of the father, is a microcosm of the political functioning of the state where the monarch rules supreme. If Adam was history’s first king (at least as argued in Filmer’s absolutist discourse), and he was also instructed by Yahweh to be a horticulturalist in the garden of innocence (according to Genesis), it is then also possible for us to view him as the first gardener-king. The relationship between man’s horticultural labor and ordering of the natural environment has both theological and political implications in English Renaissance literature. In addition to its status as a theological concept grounded in the Genesis story of the Fall, the garden is also significant in Queen Elizabeth I’s reign. The Virgin Queen loved gardens, something that encouraged statesmen and courtiers to grow, manage, and adorn gardens, sometimes with an eye to competing for her attention.20 Of course, in early modern England, gardens are not only about imposing order on nature; they also remind us of the paradise that was forfeited by humankind because of Adam and Eve’s disobedience in eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil forbidden by God. The fall of Adam and Eve entails the theological fall of nature itself. We have lost not only the Garden of Eden but also the classical Golden Age. An important metaphysical poet who looked at the world of nature and contemplated its cultural and theological significance in Renaissance England is Andrew Marvell. In a series of four poems collected under the rubric of the “mower poems,” Marvell found opportunity to write about the convention of pastoral, the experience of romantic desire and unreciprocated love, nature in the postlapsarian world, and the cultural and theological significance of man-as-mower. In Marvell’s “mower poems,” the mower—a symbol for fallen man—carries a scythe and enacts violence on nature through mowing, an activity that may benefit plant life and the vegetative environment but is also death dealing. Because of the seasonal nature of his activities, the mower is also a symbol of time. In “The Mower against Gardens,”21 the nameless mower—identified as “Luxurious” (l. 1) or lustful man—tampers with nature through acts of artificial intervention such as grafting. In “Damon the Mower,” the mower is once again seen with his scythe, the symbol of violence and death which brings the mower’s occupation, his experience of unrequited love, and the doctrine of the Fall into provocative conjunction. In “The Mower’s Song,” the

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refrain—“When Juliana came, and She / What I do to the Grass, does to my Thoughts and Me” (ll. 5–6, 11–12, 17–18)22—underscores the point that the mower-lover’s relationship with nature parallels the cruel beloved’s relationship with the mower, intertwining the demands of poetic convention with Christianity’s understanding of the conditions of postlapsarian existence. Shakespeare’s plays find opportunity to invoke the idea of gardens to signify the state and political health of a kingdom. In the final scene of Henry V, after France’s military defeat at Agincourt to the English forces led by King Henry V, the Duke of Burgundy seeks a return of “naked, poor, and mangled peace, / Dear nurse of arts, plenties, and joyful births” to “this best garden of the world, / Our fertile France” (5.2.34–37) that has been neglected and overcome by weeds. Burgundy says that all of France’s “husbandry doth lie on heaps” (5.2.39), a condition that requires the arts of restorative order which the victorious Henry V underscores can only be achieved through France’s acceptance of all of England’s “just demands” (5.2.71). In Hamlet, the grieving prince—palpably disturbed by his mother’s marriage to his uncle—finds the world to be an “unweeded garden,” where “things rank and gross in nature / Possess it merely” (1.2.135–37). Signifying decay and the stench that goes with it, “rank,” which also refers to excessive and undisciplined growth, describes the morally diseased state of Denmark catalyzed by Claudius’s murder of King Hamlet and Gertrude’s lovemaking with Claudius. Railing at his mother in the closet scene, Hamlet gives vent to his repulsion at his mother and uncle’s marriage bed soiled with “rank sweat” and “Stew[ing] in corruption, honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty” (3.4.82–84). The word “rank” here brings us back to the image and metaphor of Denmark as a garden that has been corrupted by the poison funneled by Claudius—likened to the serpent of Genesis—into the body of the sleeping King Hamlet. When she loses her mind after Hamlet’s killing of her father Polonius, Ophelia hands out flowers and weeds to characters she meets as well as imagines. In King Lear, Cordelia points to the coronet of flowers and weeds that Lear places on his head to signify his madness. Shakespeare’s invocation of the Garden of Eden to represent the state of England under Richard II’s rule brings a familiar theological image and metaphor from the Book of Genesis into conjunction with political commentary. Prelapsarian Eden offers a good picture of what the kingdom of England has the potential to become if governed well. Unfortunately,

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Richard’s rule is inimical to England’s potential to be a great land, dramatized through allusions to a postlapsarian world in which weeds grow out of control and labor is necessary for effective husbandry. Act 3 scene 4 begins with a portrayal of England as a garden overrun by weeds and contaminated by caterpillars, the sycophants of the commonwealth who counseled King Richard and led him astray. This scene elaborates on and underscores Richard’s disastrous mismanagement and failure as a king. Here a politically alert and knowledgeable Gardener enters and instructs one of his two companions to bind up some “young dangling apricots” (3.4.30) so they do not put too much weight on the old branches. The second man is told to work on the garden “like an executioner” (3.4.34) beheading the “too fast-growing sprays / That look too lofty in our commonwealth” (3.4.35–36). The Gardener indicates that he himself will proceed to root up the weeds in the garden that are taking away nutrients from the soil to the detriment of “wholesome flowers” (3.4.40). Had Richard been responsible in exterminating the weeds that are draining England’s resources, he would not be in the position he now finds himself. If the profuse abundance of weeds in a garden conjures up an image of disorder, it also points to neglect on the part of the person responsible for the garden’s upkeep. The dialogue between the Gardener and his two assistants makes it clear that they bring an awareness of political events in the realm to their job of managing the upkeep of the garden. Taking care of the garden entails “wound[ing]” (3.4.59) the bark of fruit-trees (bark grafting) at a specific time in the year to facilitate proper growth. The Gardener notes that, unlike he and his helpers, Richard had failed to do what is politically prudent—even if this entails violence—to “great and growing men” (3.4.62) who pose a threat to his rule. Espousing the importance of lopping away “Superfluous branches” (3.4.64), the Gardener indicates that the king is responsible for encouraging redundancy and excess in the realm. The good ruler is an able and hardworking horticulturalist who removes all weeds and vermin infecting the garden/commonwealth, prunes vegetative excess, and imposes order on nature. Under Richard’s rule, the kingdom has been reduced to a sorry state necessitating the intervention of a man like Bolingbroke who sets out to pluck up “root and all” (3.4.53) the life-sapping foliage overwhelming England. For England to be restored to the idyllic condition of “a sea-wallèd garden” (3.4.44), it needs to undergo recuperative violence. The image and metaphor of the garden of England highlight King Richard’s failure to fulfill his duties and

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responsibilities as a monarch. The king-as-gardener trope central to Shakespeare’s portrayal of Richard II’s tyrannical reign signifies the duties and responsibilities of the monarch to the kingdom that he rules, a relationship that is also represented via familial metaphors such as the relationship between husband and wife as well as that which exists between parent and child. It does not surprise us that Richard II, a play which metaphorizes the kingdom of England as a garden, makes frequent references to earth, land, and ground. In Act 3 scene 2, lines 5–26, King Richard—glad to return to his kingdom—kneels, affectionately embraces the soil, and exhorts the earth to bring harm to his enemies. Understanding that God will guarantee his safety since he has been anointed and installed on the throne of England by God himself, Richard believes that even the earth will be aroused to help him against his enemies. Together with the word “earth,” “land” appears with revealing frequency in Richard II. John of Gaunt uses the word “land” affectionately and passionately to describe the England that he loves, underscored in the anaphorically exuberant “This blessèd plot, this earth, this realm, this England, / This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings” (2.1.50–51). On his deathbed, Gaunt bemoans the fact that “This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land, / Dear for her reputation through the world, / Is now leased out” (2.1.57–59) by the king. Where Richard should be taking good care of the garden of state as its king, he acts instead as “Landlord of England” (2.1.113), mortgaging lands in the kingdom to raise money.23 Richard consumes England’s resources with the insatiable appetite of a cormorant, a voracious bird Milton evokes in Paradise Lost to depict the predatory Satan in Eden. England under King Richard cannot live up to its reputation and potential as a terrestrial paradise. As he prepares to go into exile as commanded by Richard II, Bolingbroke bids farewell to “England’s ground” and “Sweet soil,” referring to the kingdom as his “mother and … nurse” (1.3.269–70). When later the Duke of York castigates Bolingbroke for returning to England from exile in defiance of the king’s edict, he points out that Bolingbroke has no right to touch so much as a speck of dust on “England’s ground” (2.3.90) without committing the capital crime of treason. As “home” to English men and women, England is out of bounds to Bolingbroke. The condition of exile entails wandering outside the physical boundaries that constitute England as a kingdom and nation. The Duke of York chastises Bolingbroke for bringing the threat of war to England’s “peaceful bosom” (2.3.92), a

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questionable description of the kingdom given the existence of much unhappiness with Richard’s rule. If John of Gaunt’s nationalistic temper celebrates England as Edenic, Richard’s incompetent rule and Bolingbroke’s political ambitions transform England into a “woeful” (2.2.99) and “revolting” land (3.3.162).

Milton’s Shakespeare: Toward Eikon Basilike and Eikonoklastes The English history play can be relied upon for appeal to a public audience because it deals with the stories of a people and culture. The fact that Shakespeare’s history plays cover a range of topics—including potentially subversive content—has prompted scholars to ponder why Shakespeare did not run afoul of the law despite dramatizing subject matter such as the dethroning of a monarch encountered in Richard II. If representing Richard II’s deposition on stage is said to have perturbed Elizabeth I because of its radical political message that a tyrannical monarch can be ousted from power, it also appears to have anticipated pamphlets in Revolutionary England published both in support of and opposition to the rule of a monarch. In this section of the chapter, I look at two works that emerged from the violence of the English Civil War—King Charles I’s (and John Gauden’s) Eikon Basilike: The Portraicture of his Sacred Majestie in his Solitudes and Sufferings and John Milton’s Eikonoklastes—analyzing the sociocultural, political, and ideological implications of the late monarch’s invocation of the suffering Christ to portray himself as a martyr-king. If Richard II depicts a deposed monarch’s attempt to find meaning in the disastrous turn of political events by likening himself to Christ, Eikon Basilike likewise represents Charles I as a monarch whose suffering allows him to discern analogies between his own agony and that of Christ in his Passion. Richard II and Eikon Basilike share the recognition that the narrative of Christ’s Passion not only bestows meaning when things have fallen apart around you, but also packs evocative and affective potential for manipulating the emotions of an audience. Where Shakespeare’s play portrays Richard II as a failed Christ, Eikon Basilike’s representation of Charles I as a martyr-king deploys the Christ analogy to great polemical effect, posing a significant challenge to republican political narratives.

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Popularly known as the King’s Book and published almost immediately after the execution of King Charles I on January 30, 1649, Eikon Basilike— also translated as “portrait of the king”—has been identified as both a work of spiritual autobiography and political memoir that offers a compilation of the king’s meditations on kingship, piety, and death as well as his defense of royalism and the political decisions he made that led to civil war. Commissioned by the Commonwealth government, Eikonoklastes constituted a major republican response to the royalist propaganda of Eikon Basilike, aiming to undermine the latter’s ideological perspective and political stance. Eikon Basilike became one of the most influential books of the seventeenth century and enjoyed such popularity that there were some seventy-­ five editions in circulation by 1896.24 Dr John Gauden expresses amazement at the popular reception of the King’s Book after Charles’s death: Good God! What shame, rage and despite filled his murderers! What comfort his friends! How many enemies did it convert! How many hearts did it mollify and melt…! What preparations did it make in all men’s minds for this happy Restoration…. In a word, it was an army and did vanquish more than any sword could….25

Analyzing the remarkable ability of the King’s Book to amass public sympathy, Elizabeth Skerpan-Wheeler invokes the modern concept of “celebrity” to explain Eikon Basilike’s long affective reach. Identifying Eikon Basilike as a “collaborative memorial,”26 she argues that this work reached out to touch a large audience partly because of the affective power of William Marshall’s visual emblem which brings Christ’s Passion and Charles’s suffering into conjunction, partly because the work—presented as unfinished product—encourages the participation and contribution of fans, not unlike the workings of “modern fan clubs” or “fan fiction.”27 Commenting on the course of the English Civil War and Puritan Revolution from the moment of the Long Parliament in 1640 to Charles I’s imprisonment in Carisbrooke Castle in 1647, Eikon Basilike represents the late king as a defender of both church and state. In Chapter 27 of the book—addressed to the Prince of Wales, later King Charles II in Restoration England—Charles I says that this work contains “the private reflections of [his] Conscience, and [his] most impartiall thoughts,”28 aimed at instructing his son to subject himself to the sovereignty of God. “The true glorie of Princes,” Charles I points out, “consists in advancing

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Gods Glorie in the maintenance of true Religion, and the Churches good: Also in the dispensation of civill Power, with Justice and Honour to the Publick Peace.”29 Advocating the importance of the “true principles of pietie, virtue, and honour,”30 Charles tells the Prince of Wales not to seek revenge for the wrongs done to him, but to love and protect his mother (Henrietta Maria) and to look after the welfare of his subjects. Emphasizing the virtue of forgiveness reinforces Charles I’s identity as a Christian monarch who takes seriously Jesus’s lesson to Peter that he should forgive those who have done him wrong not “seven times” but “seventy times seven times” (Matt. 18:21–22), which means an infinite number of times. Reinforcing the portrait of King Charles I as a moderate and peace-­ loving monarch is William Marshall’s famous frontispiece to the Eikon Basilike, which offers an emblematic sketch of the king as a saint and martyr. In this image, the kneeling monarch (on one knee) resembles portraits of Christ at the Garden of Gethsemane, kneeling in prayer and looking upward toward heaven. Pious and a martyr-king, Charles is seen kneeling on one knee, with his sight trained upward, and bearing the inscription “Coeli Specto” (“I look to Heaven”). The king sees a crown bearing the word “Gloria” (“glory”), affirmed by the phrase Beatam & Æternam, or “Blessed and Eternal.” This crown of glory that is the martyr-king’s is contrasted with the earthly crown bearing the motto “Vanitas” (“vanity”) next to his right foot and surrounded by the motto “Splendidam & Gravem” (“Splendid and Heavy”). “Vanity” belongs to the terrestrial world, which has been spurned by the king and is signified by “Mundi Calco,” or “I tread on the world.” Between the earthly crown of vanity and the celestial crown of glory is a third crown (of thorns) that inscribes the motto “Gratia” or grace. The martyr-king embraces suffering—like his savior and master Jesus Christ—to attain the heavenly crown of glory. Walking the path marked out by the blood-stained footsteps of the suffering Christ, Charles I follows his divine master to Calvary and to death. Even more than prompting the reader to recall Christ’s agony in Gethsemane, the Marshall frontispiece significantly gestures toward devotional iconography such as the woodcuts that depict burning martyrs in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, inviting viewers to identify Charles I “as suffering Christian.”31 As visual emblem, Marshall’s King Charles presents an ideal pattern of Christian martyrdom. The faithful are exhorted to share the king’s experience—which is a general Christian one—and to recognize that, like him, the crucible of pain leads to eternal life. According to Helmer Helmers, Eikon Basilike functions like a “soliloquy,”32 with

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readers granted access to the private (and therefore genuine and honest) thoughts of a king unjustly condemned to death. Identifying its genre as private meditations, recollections, and confessions, Eikon Basilike does not portray Charles I in an idealistic or adulatory light, but rather as a man who is pious, God-fearing, and steadfast in his convictions.33 Inviting reader and audience participation in contributing to the creation of Charles I-as-icon with which the public can identify and on which it projects “thoughts, feelings, and experiences,”34 the Eikon is not a static but rather vibrant polemical work. In Eikon Basilike, King Charles portrays himself as suffering for the sake and good of England while denouncing the king’s anti-royalist enemies as subverters of social and political order, governed by the spirit of chaos. In Chapter 4 (“Upon the Insolency of the Tumults”), Charles repeats the word “tumult” to describe what supporters of a republican polity have unleashed on England: dismantling “all boundaries of Laws, and reverence to Authority,” assaulting the honor and freedom of Parliament, and other egregious acts.35 In addition to the imagery and metaphor of storms and earthquakes, Charles also likens the agents of chaos responsible for the English Civil War to “Swine” that can only destroy the “Gardens and orderly Plantations” created through monarchical authority’s sound and effective rule.36 Here, the King’s Book makes use of the same conception of England-as-garden already encountered in Shakespeare’s Richard II but identifies radical Puritans and Parliamentarians as the enemies of gardens. In narrating his experience of persecution, Charles I emphasizes his embrace of Christian piety, with every chapter of Eikon Basilike concluding in prayer.37 If the prayers in Eikon Basilike contribute toward building a composite portrait of Charles as a pious Christian king for whom the vicissitudes of political life cannot undermine his relationship with God, it is not the case that the publication of the King’s Book was the first occasion when the monarch’s piety was underscored for the public. As a monarch who was highly conscious of his image, Charles scrupulously did what was necessary to make specific impressions—decorous, pious, and sexually moral, for example—on an audience. Recognizing the importance of self-­ representation, Charles I made his royal presence visible in various guises and symbolic portrayals facilitated by visual art and entertainments such as the court masque. Robert Wilcher tells us that, even though “the religious dimension of the king’s role is not prominent in the royal iconography of Charles’s reign until the 1640s,” he is known for his piety as evidenced in

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his daily prayers, which were performed with great discipline, and in the seriousness with which he undertook his constitutional role as head of the Church of England.38 Not one who was comfortable with the kind of spontaneous and extempore prayers practiced by Protestants, Charles favored set liturgies “as essential for order, decorum and discipline in communal worship,”39 something which was on Milton’s mind when he disparagingly referred to “the whole rosarie of his [Charles’s] Prayers” found in “his Idoliz’d Book.”40 In Chapter 10 (“Upon their seizing the King’s Magazines, Forts, Navy, and Militia”), Charles writes that, not having the benefit of military strength signified by the possession of arms, he could still face life like the early Christians by casting himself “into the protection of the living God, who can save by few, or none, as well as by many.”41 Taking comfort in the Old Testament story of God sending ravens with food for Elijah, Charles seeks succor “in the wings of Faith and Prayer.”42 Eikon’s compositional strategy of allowing the reader access into the (private) meditations of the king as he presents himself as always remaining true to the dictates of conscience and reason made space for readier possibilities of sympathetic identification with England’s martyr-king. “Conscience” is an important concept in Eikon Basilike, reinforcing the rhetorical point that the king’s political actions that had resulted in clashes with both Puritans and Parliament were carefully considered and in line with his morals and principles, defined as doing right by God. When Charles refused to accede to specific demands made by Parliament, he remained true to his conscience, permitting no compromise. Newsbook exposés of the period had in fact portrayed the king as a man and monarch who willingly suffered for the sake of conscience.43 In the literature and polemical works of Revolutionary England, the motif of Charles as suffering martyr sometimes found representational reinforcement from associative allusions made to the familiar story of Christ’s Passion.44 We recall here Richard II’s portrayal of himself as a martyr-king in Shakespeare’s history play, a necessary narrativization of identity following the forfeiture of his crown. Where once he represented the kingdom’s inviolable, even sacrosanct, center of political authority, now his right to rule is challenged by Bolingbroke and the English people. Responding to the erosion and collapse of his royal authority by likening himself to the suffering Christ, Richard wallows in self-pity, a situation that the author of Eikon Basilike does not wish to find himself in.

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Gregory Doran’s Royal Shakespeare Company production of Richard II provocatively dramatizes the Christ motif invoked by the fallen monarch in Act 4 scene 1.45 In Doran’s deposition scene, David Tennant’s King Richard makes his entry in a white gown with cross obtrusively hanging around his neck. Clean shaven, Richard sports golden tresses that cascade to his shoulders, recalling Christ in popular portraiture. There is a feminine aspect to Tennant-as-Richard II, a representation rendered more pronounced when juxtaposed against the haughty and impatient figure of Henry Bolingbroke played by Nigel Lindsay. Lindsay’s Bolingbroke makes no effort to hide his desire to ascend the throne quickly. Compared to the more effeminate Richard, Bolingbroke appears both rough and tough. The deposition scene centers on King Richard’s surrender of his crown. He enters the scene and is handed the diadem for its formal transfer to Bolingbroke. How does a monarch manage the forced abdication of power while maintaining some semblance of dignity and control? Richard does this by way of sarcasm and derision. In 1:53:22, the king authoritatively proclaims “God save the king,” prompting confusion on the part of the court audience as to who—Richard or Bolingbroke—is being addressed at that moment. When Richard—in 1:54:24—peremptorily commands his cousin to “seize” the crown from his hand, Bolingbroke does not do so because this verb connotes grabbing or snatching something that is not yours. Richard discomfits Bolingbroke with a crown that is in sight but not yet surrendered, the tussle between deposed/de jure and incoming/ de facto monarchs entailing nothing short of posing the radical question whether a people have the right to dethrone—whatever the reason might be—a king anointed by God to rule. While Richard is holding on to the crown, engaging in a mock tug of war for its possession with Bolingbroke, he gleans a parable from it about how someone’s rise to power entails the inevitable downfall of another. A variation of the wheel of fortune metaphor, Richard’s evocation of the two buckets—one dancing in the air representing Bolingbroke, the other down in the well and filled with water/tears representing himself— amounts to disavowing his responsibility for the political turn of events in his life. Richard in effect places the blame for his downfall on fortune, unable to recognize his contributory role in the tragedy. If identifying analogies between himself and the suffering Christ is also an attempt on the part of Richard II to present himself as a pious king to his audience, that attempt falls short of the effect it seeks to achieve. If—as Debora Shuger observes—Richard struggles “to come to terms with

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defeat by reimagining his life in the categories of Christian selfhood,”46 he has a hard time sustaining that role. Richard is not one who is readily able to embrace the Christian virtue of patient bearing of affliction and adversity. Seeking religious detachment to deal with the pain of his circumstance, he only ends up “quickly sour[ing] into rage and morbidity” to become “an angry bitter Christ.”47 In contrast, King Charles portrays himself in Eikon Basilike as a pious man who—knowing he is a fallen human being—seeks God’s forgiveness for his mistakes and wrongdoing that had brought pain to others and the realm. Remarkably Charles invokes the theological idea of atonement to frame his supplication for God’s mercy to be extended both to himself and the people of England: “when thy wrath is appeased by My Death, O remember thy great mercies toward them! and forgive them [the king’s enemies] O my Father! for they know not what they doe.”48 Here the king appropriates Luke 23:34—“Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. And they parted his raiment, and cast lots”—to conclude his prayer, boldly conflating his suffering with that of Christ. He presents himself as a willing sacrifice for “the sins of [his] People,”49 a role that may be read by some as hubristic if not blasphemous. In Chapter 5 of Eikon Basilike, Charles invokes the New Testament accounts (in Matthew 4:1–11 and Luke 4:1–13) of the devil placing Jesus on the pinnacle of the Jewish temple and asking him to hurl himself down to contextualize his fraught relationship with Parliament: [I] saw that My letting some men go up to the Pinnacle of the Temple, was a temptation to them to cast Me down headlong. Concluding, that without a miracle, Monarchy it selfe, together with me, could not but be dashed in pieces, by such a precipitious fall as they intended.50

An odd biblical allusion, Charles’s parabolic use of the third temptation offered to Christ by Satan in the Gospel of Luke is unclear about what is meant by the king “letting some men go up to the Pinnacle of the Temple,” only to have them be tempted to hurl him down. However, what appears to be obvious is Charles’s equation of Parliament with the devil and he himself with Christ. Where Christ, in both Matthew’s and Luke’s accounts of the temptation in the wilderness, does not fling himself from the pinnacle, telling the devil instead not to tempt God (Matt. 4:7; Luke 4:12), Charles’s enemies would have forcibly destroyed both the king and God’s divinely sanctioned institution of monarchical rule.

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Allusions to Christ’s Passion facilitate Charles’s strategic representation of his life as one committed to living in imitation of Christ. However, while Eikon Basilike strives to portray Charles as a Christ figure, it also contains allusions to Old Testament monarchs such as King David and King Solomon. The presence of King David is evident in the psalmic quality of some of Charles’s prayers. The prayer that concludes Chapter 2 (“Upon the Earl of Strafford’s Death”) offers a good example of this. The alert reader notes that the language of Charles’s prayer is heavily indebted to King David’s familiar penitential Psalm 51, in which David, recognizing the enormity of his sin in committing adultery with Bathsheba and orchestrating the death of her husband Uriah in battle, pleads with God for forgiveness and not to cast him off. Succumbing to parliamentary pressure to support John Pym’s bill enabling Parliament to sentence Strafford summarily to death, Charles now equates his “complicity” in Strafford’s execution with King David’s role in Uriah’s death. The Psalms—many of which are attributed to King David—capture the vast range of human experience and include songs/poems of thanksgiving, repentance, mourning, encouragement, and lament. Psalms of lament capture experiences relating to suffering, loss, sorrow, and fear of the enemy, all of which the psalmist pleads with God for deliverance from. When Saul was king of Israel, he was envious and fearful of David’s popularity, so much so that he wanted David killed. Anxieties about being pursued by adversaries are palpable in many of the psalms, which often allow the psalmist to give expression to the pain of present circumstances and to petition for God’s succor and protection. The motif of being surrounded and hunted by enemies is central to Charles’s accounts of his skirmishes with anti-royalist forces in the English Civil War. Charles makes use of verses from the Old Testament such as Psalm 86 and Psalm 25 to represent his experience of siege and persecution. In the King James Bible translation of Psalm 86, we read: 14 O God, the proud are risen against me, and the assemblies of violent men have sought after my soul; and have not set thee before them. 15 But thou, O Lord, art a God full of compassion, and gracious, long suffering, and plenteous in mercy and truth. 16 O turn unto me, and have mercy upon me; give thy strength unto thy servant, and save the son of thine handmaid. 17 Shew me a token for good; that they which hate me may see it, and be ashamed: because thou, Lord, hast holpen me, and comforted me.

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Compare these verses with Charles’s words in the prayer in Chapter 9 (“Upon the Lifting, and Raising Armies Against the King”): O my God, the proud are risen against Me, and the assemblies of violent men have sought after my soule, and have not set Thee before their eyes. Consider My enemies, O Lord, for they are many, and they hate me with a deadly hatred without a cause.51

The first line cited from King Charles’s prayer here is transcribed almost verbatim from Psalm 86:14, while the second line is taken from Psalm 25:19: “Consider mine enemies; for they are many; and they hate me with cruel hatred.” A prayer in Eikon Basilike can be a compilation of different verses from the Psalms, a compositional feature that strategically links Charles I to King David. By associating himself with David the musician-­ king and bard, Charles taps an Old Testament discourse in which the psalmist cries out to God in his struggles, supplicating for deliverance, protection, and forgiveness. In Chapter 3 of Eikonoklastes, Milton identifies Charles as a warning to kings how not to “use presumptuously the words and protestations of David, without the spirit and conscience of David” (6:302). David is also an important model for King Charles because the son of Jesse, whom Yahweh instructed the prophet-judge Samuel to anoint as Israel’s new king after Saul, represents sacred kingship. The Davidic kingship lends support to divine-right kingship because sanctioned by God. Even though God chose David to succeed Saul as king, republican discourse emphasizes that Old Testament Israel demanded a monarch in contravention of God’s divine will. For Milton, God was angry with Israel for sinning when they demanded to be given a king to rule over them. Aware of the impact of Eikon Basilike on the public and popular consciousness, Milton makes the case in Eikonoklastes that the King’s Book sways emotions through the deceitful manipulation of image and rhetoric. If effective deployment of imagery is found to contribute significantly to Eikon’s affective reach, Milton recognizes he must respond in kind with his own repertoire of imagery supportive of political republicanism.52 In Eikonoklastes, Milton clarifies that Charles’s sufferings are of his own making and totally unconnected with Christ’s experience of Holy Week. In Chapter 6 (“Upon His [Charles’s] Retirement from Westminster”), we read:

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[Charles] had rather wear a Crown of Thorns with our Saviour. Many would be all one with our Saviour, whom our Saviour will not know. They who govern ill those Kingdoms which they had a right to, have to our Saviours Crown of Thornes no right at all. Thornes they may find anow, of thir own gathering, and thir own twisting: for Thornes and Snares, saith Solomon, are in the way of the froward; but to weare them as our Saviour wore them is not giv’n to them that suffer by thir own demerits. (6:322)

Milton highlights Charles’s misappropriation of biblical models and analogies in the King’s Book. Part of Milton’s strategy in this tract is to point out the many misfits between royalist representation and historical/political fact, incongruities associated with Charles I’s penchant for deceptive misapplication of examples and illustrations as well as dubious use of genres for rhetorical effect. There is Milton’s criticism of Charles I’s transcription of a prayer—almost verbatim—uttered by the character Pamela in Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (a pastoral romance first published in 1590) as both plagiaristic and heathen.53 For Milton, Charles’s lifting of material from Arcadia reveals not only a lack of literary sense but also willingness to enact the sacrilegious act of offering up a heathen prayer to the Christian God. Poor literary judgment and political failure go hand in hand.54 The author of Eikon Basilike shares with Shakespeare’s Richard II an instinctive need to appropriate the story of the suffering Christ to frame one’s experience of political defeat and underscore the pathos intrinsic to human tragedy. I am not suggesting here that Charles I’s (and William Marshall’s) evocation of Christ’s Passion to move readers in certain emotional directions is borrowed from Richard II. Rather, I highlight the ways in which the events of Holy Week find their way into literary works, political writings, and propaganda that deal with the controversial question of whether a monarch can be dethroned if he or she is a tyrant who threatens the good of the people and stability of the realm. Reading Richard II in conjunction with Eikon Basilike, we note there are familiar religious motifs and biblical narratives—such as the Passion of Christ— that inform literary representations of power and polemical defenses of ideological/political positions. Shakespeare’s plays contain material that will prove relevant to the pamphleteering wars of Revolutionary England. Specifically, we can identify moments in Milton’s prose work when Shakespeare’s plays are invoked to lend support to a polemical point or political argument.

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Literary allusions to Shakespeare’s plays like Macbeth and Richard III lend support to the arguments of Milton’s regicide tracts, telling us that the matter of entertainment—the staging of a play—can carry political meanings that resonate for future audiences not only in England but (as Cassius puts it in Julius Caesar) “In states unborn and accents yet unknown” (3.1.114). Shakespeare’s Macbeth has, for example, an allusive presence in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (6:131–85). This tragedy is relevant to the politics of the English Revolution, specifically as it relates to the actions of the Presbyterian “faction” highlighted by Milton in The Tenure. In the opening paragraph of The Tenure, Milton berates the Presbyterian clerics, who after they have juggl’d and palter’d with the world, bandied and born armes against thir King, devested him, disanointed him, nay curs’d him all over in thir Pulpits and thir Pamphlets, to the ingaging of sincere and real men, beyond what is possible or honest to retreat from, not only turne revolters from those principles, which only could at first move them, but lay the staine of disloyaltie, and worse, on those proceedings, which are the necessary consequences of thir own former actions; nor dislik’d by themselves, were they manag’d to the intire advantages of thir own Faction. (6:151)

Later in The Tenure, he warns his reader about Presbyterian duplicity and hypocrisy: Nor let any man be deluded by either the ignorance or the notorious hypocrisie and self-repugnance of our dancing Divines, who have the conscience and the boldness, to come with Scripture in thir mouthes, gloss’d and fitted for thir turnes with a double contradictory sense, transforming the sacred verity of God, to an Idol with two Faces, looking at once two several ways; and with the same quotations to charge others, which in the same case they made serve to justifie themselves. (6:153–54)

In these passages, Milton evokes language used by Shakespeare to capture Macbeth’s consternation upon learning that he had misinterpreted the Weird Sisters’ pronouncements about his invincibility: And be these juggling fiends no more believed, That palter with us in a double sense, That keep the word of promise to our ear. (5.10.19–21; emphasis mine)

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When Milton considered the prevarications of Presbyterians in first opposing Charles I and then rallying to save him from trial and execution, he recalled the equivocations of the three witches in Macbeth. If Shakespeare’s audience associated the idea of equivocation with Jesuitical sophistry— given impetus by the English Jesuit priest Henry Garnet’s A Treatise of Equivocation—Milton’s reader was asked to interpret Presbyterian duplicity as a form of equivocation. Nicholas McDowell notes that by the time of the publication of The Tenure, “Milton had come to see Presbyterians and Jesuits as different forms of the same spirit of clerical tyranny: the allusion to Macbeth not only associates the Presbyterians with sorcery but suggests that for Milton the Presbyterians are as responsible, for all their feigned outrage, for the execution of Charles Stuart as the Jesuits were for the attempted assassination of his father.”55 Shakespeare’s plays can also be relied upon for representations of tyrants. In Eikonoklastes, Milton invokes Shakespeare’s Richard III as an example of the tyrant who dissembles behind a cloak of piety. For Milton, the hypocritical and treasonous Charles I speaks the same language of high piety as Richard III. In Chapter 1 of Eikonoklastes, he cites the following lines uttered by Shakespeare’s “poisonous bunch-backed toad” (1.3.244) in Act 2 scene 1 of Richard III: I doe not know that Englishman alive. With whom my soule is any jott at odds, More then the Infant that is borne to night; I thank my God for my humilitie. (6:291)

Acknowledging that King Charles had Shakespeare as his “Closet Companion” (6:291) while in prison, Milton invokes the bard to lend support to his rhetorical assault on the late king’s pious posturing in Eikon Basilike. Milton’s Shakespeare was a playwright who did much to portray theater-­in-politics and politics-as-theater, generating images, symbols, and metaphors that have become part of the rhetorical vocabulary of Revolutionary England’s pamphleteering wars. Milton read Richard II in his copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio.56 However, when he made the following reference to Richard II in Chapter 6 of Eikonoklastes, his source appears to have been the third volume of Holinshed’s Chronicles rather than Shakespeare’s play:

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Our forefathers were of that courage and severity of zeale to Justice, and thir native Liberty, against the proud contempt and misrule of thir Kings, that when Richard the Second departed but from a Committie of Lords, who sat preparing matter for the Parlament not yet assembl’d, to the removal of his evil Counselors, they first vanquish’d and put to flight Robert de Vere his chief Favorite; and then comming up to London with a huge Army, requir’d the King then withdrawn for feare, but no furder off then the Tower, to come to Westminster. (6:315–16)

In Holinshed’s chronicle of Richard II’s reign, Robert de Vere was a favorite of the king who was promoted to the aristocratic ranks of Marquess of Dublin and Duke of Ireland.57 Holinshed calls attention to the arbitrary ways in which Richard II advances the interests and fortunes of men that he likes. Practicing nepotism and high-handedness toward Parliament contributed to the English people’s dislike of and opposition to their king. Eikonoklastes shares Shakespeare’s invocation of the sun-king motif in Richard II, a rhetorical feature familiarly found in works valorizing the nature of monarchical authority. Because the sun’s symbolic connection with the king is commonplace in political discourse, it is not necessarily the case that Richard II was the direct source for Milton’s polemical use of the sun-king analogy in Eikonoklastes. Milton would also have been familiar with King Louis XIV who, ruling France from 1643 to 1715, styled himself Roi-Soleil (or “Sun King”) to signify the absolute power of monarchical authority. Endowed by God with the divine right to rule, the Sun King is the center of absolutist authority around which the kingdom revolves. In Eikon Basilike, King Charles affirms his authority on the basis of the doctrine of divine-right kingship, invoking the image and symbol of the sun: [A]lthough I can be content to eclipse my own beams, to satisfie their fears, who think they must needs be scorched or blinded, if I should shine in the full lustre of Kingly power, wherewith God and the Laws have invested me; yet I will never consent to put out the Sun of Sovereigntie to all Posterity, and succeeding Kings…. Happily, when men have tried the horrours and malignant influence, which will certainly follow My enforced darknesse and eclypse occasioned by the interposition and shadow of that bodie, which (as the Moon) receiveth its chiefest light from Me) they will at length more esteem and welcome the restored glory and blessing of the Suns light.58

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Elsewhere, the king describes how his “reputation shall like the Sun (after Owls and Bats have had their freedome in the night and darker times) rise and recover it self to such a degree of splendour, as those ferall birds shall be grieved to behold, and unable to bear.”59 Royalist imagery is very much at work here with the king’s majesty likened to the sun. Charles presents himself as possessing the agency to eclipse his glory or not, even as he concedes that the darkness of his eclipse is “enforced” or compelled. Human and political attempts to eradicate the majesty of monarchical authority are futile because the glory of the sun’s rays can never be diminished. Focusing on the sun-king analogy rhetorically deployed by King Charles in Eikon Basilike, Julia Walker notes the affective force of this association, an effect that the republican Milton must find a way to counter and subvert. Walker argues that, keeping an eye on this analogy, Milton strives to undermine its logic in Eikonoklastes by equating Charles with clouds that hamper the sunlight of Reformation from shining through, as well as by accusing the king of blasphemy for conflating his identity with that of Christ based on the sun/Son (of God) pun. Milton identifies Charles’s improper exercise of his prerogative as a source of “the mistie cloud … made between us and a peacefull Reformation, which is our true Sun light” (6:343). Because the aim of the King’s Book is to bestow on Charles iconic stature, an image worthy of veneration, Milton’s project seeks to demolish the royalist icon through “the unmaking of metaphor, the reimagining of an image.”60 Deployed to represent the experience of declining and emerging or ascendant monarchical authority, the image and metaphor of the sun in Richard II and 1 Henry IV point an audience in the direction of certain familiar terms of reference found in both royalist and republican political discourse. In Richard II, Shakespeare evokes the sun-king motif to dramatize the encounter between King Richard and Bolingbroke, highlighting the political significations of this motif especially within the context of usurpation and authority. In Act 3 scene 2, Richard boasts that when the treasonous Bolingbroke encounters him rising like the sun on his throne, supported by God’s own special anointing, “this thief, this traitor” (3.2.43) will be so overwhelmed he will “tremble at his sin” (3.2.49). Rebellion to topple a monarch not only constitutes the capital crime of treason, but also sin against God. In Act 3 scene 3, Bolingbroke likens the appearance of King Richard holed up at Flint Castle to “the blushing discontented sun” (3.3.62) fully aware of the dark clouds threatening to

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eclipse his glory. In Act 4 scene 1, Richard acknowledges that “the sun of Bolingbroke” (4.1.251) has divested him of power and authority, reducing him to nothingness. When looking at himself in the mirror, Richard ponders his loss of authority and identity, recalling how—at one time—he was the (royal) sun that shone with such intensity it hurt his subjects’ eyes to look at him. Now, the world has been turned upside down, with Richard completely outshone by Bolingbroke (4.1.273–76). In 1 Henry IV, the sequel to Richard II in the Second Tetralogy, the sun motif reappears in the context of Prince Hal’s confidential revelation in soliloquy that his irresponsible ways—seen in his relationship with Falstaff and time spent in the tavern world—have a strategic purpose: the manipulation of public impressions. Hal’s cronies are likened to “base contagious clouds” (1.2.176) that he calculatingly permits to cloak his true nature as England’s sun/son (heir apparent to the throne), encouraging the impression that he is a prodigal whose abilities as a (future) ruler are in question. Hal tells us that when the time is right, he will break through the cover of “foul and ugly mists” (1.2.176) with such intensity he will dazzle his subjects with his brilliance, attracting their respect and allegiance. For a reader familiar with Shakespeare’s Henriad, reading Eikon Basilike and Eikonoklastes affords opportunity for considering the ideological implications of Shakespeare’s representation of divine-right kingship and monarchical authority in Richard II, 1 & 2 Henry IV, and Henry V. As critical debates continue to take place concerning the representational sensitivity of radical politics—the dethroning of a king—central to Richard II, the first play of the Henriad, it is interesting for readers of Milton’s regicide prose to consider how the early modern English stage yielded motifs, symbols, and metaphors that exerted affective power in the pamphleteering wars of Revolutionary England.

The Scaffold and Political Theater Richard II shows us that the experience of political defeat can lead a ruler to make use of theater and performance to recover aspects of fragmented identity and to secure the sympathies of an audience. If the ritual of deposition is a piece of political theater stage-managed by the new monarch to invest himself with the formal appurtenances of royal authority, its meaning can be destabilized by the king who has just been dethroned. We have seen how Richard II sought to exercise control over representation in

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Bolingbroke’s theater of power by analogizing himself with the suffering Christ. Linking his experience of political humiliation and deposition with Christ’s Passion through the eloquence of his poetic utterances, Richard “completely dominates the stage,” with “[a]ll eyes in the theatre, including Richard’s own…fixed on Richard’s face.”61 Phyliss Rackin postulates that both Shakespeare’s audience and the characters on stage witnessing Richard’s deposition are implicated in delivering the king to his “sour cross,” a political event that replicates “the quintessential crime of the crucifixion.”62 If an audience had earlier supported Bolingbroke’s return to England from exile to repossess (by force if necessary) his inheritance expropriated by the king, they may now find themselves sympathizing with Richard, a response prompted in part by the tragic spectacle of a king painfully struggling with the fact of his ouster. Even though Richard II’s political shortcomings and misrule are obvious and have led to his alienation from the people, the formal staging of dethronement affords space for representing one’s political downfall as a tragedy, a genre with the potential to manipulate the emotions of an audience. Staging tragedy is a familiar motif in the literature and polemical production of Revolutionary England. The performance of identity mounted as an instinctive response to the experience of political defeat is—as we have already seen—central to the project of Eikon Basilike. In the case of Eikon Basilike, Charles I’s fashioning of identity as a martyr-king in the likeness of the suffering Christ generated an emotive appeal that touched the hearts of many, making the work a surprisingly successful piece of royalist propaganda. To counteract the affective power of Eikon Basilike, Milton finds himself focusing on the performative features of the King’s Book, invoking the idea of tragedy to frame the momentous event of the execution of Charles I. Milton was not alone in invoking the genre of tragedy when engaging with the controversialist battles of Revolutionary England. Supporters and apologists on both sides of the political divide—royalism and republicanism—found ample opportunity to think of Charles’s reign and death in terms of the staging of tragedy. A well-known poem that set out to represent Oliver Cromwell’s historical emergence and Charles I’s death in the seventeenth century is Andrew Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland.” In this poem published after the poet’s death, Marvell registers amazement and awe at Cromwell’s momentous acts on England’s political scene even as he offers a sympathetic portrayal of Charles I. Where Cromwell is politically astute

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and militarily formidable, Charles I is noble and dignified. King Charles is “the Royal Actor” (l. 53) whose execution transpires on a “Tragick Scaffold” (l. 54) applauded by “armed Bands” (l. 55) that “Did clap their bloody hands” (l. 6). This historically “memorable Scene” (l. 58) is shaped by Charles’s noble bearing: from the calmness of his visual measure of “The Axes edge” (l. 60) to his refusal to reach out to the gods in “vulgar spite” (l. 61). At a time when the theaters in England were shut down by order of Parliament (in September 1642), political events such as the regicide offered theatrical entertainment for the army and people. What is being performed, however, is an act whose meaning is passionately contested, with unforeseen historical consequences. Invocations of the idea of tragedy in the pamphleteering wars of Revolutionary England can be deployed by enemies of the king to portray Charles I as an actor on the stage of English history whose travails are of such magnitude as to evoke audience reactions of pity and awe, or, conversely, to denigrate the king as lacking in substance worthy of consideration. If royalist propaganda metaphorizes the trial and execution of Charles I as theater with the potential to change the political fabric of the English nation and must therefore be prevented, republican polemics figure the event as a theater of justice in which a king has been rightly punished for crimes committed against the English people. In A True copy of the journal of the High Court of Justice for the tryal of K. Charles I, we read: But certainly, no Age, no Time, no Country, is able to afford us a Parallel to that horrible Tragedy which was so lately Acted upon our own Theatre: Never was there a more horrid, premeditated Conspiracy, whose Foundations were laid so deep, so secret, and with so much devilish Art: Never was any Treason, after it once came to look abroad, and was fledg’d into the Cockatrice of Rebellion, more furious and impetuous: Never any Rebellion more dismal, bloody, wicked, or outrageous; and never did Prosperous Treason animate the Traitors to those unheard of flights of insolent Wickedness, so as not only to subvert the Government, and dethrone their Soveraign, but to Arraign and Judge, Condemn and Execute their King, with all the solemn and impudent Formalities of pretended Justice, even in the Face of the Sun, and view of the whole World, as if they would at the same instant defie both the Vengeance of Heaven and Earth.63

In Eikonoklastes, Milton portrays the late king as a tragic actor who was forced to leave the stage of life, associating Eikon Basilike with theatrical performance that lacks seriousness in its rendition of history and political

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events. In its opposition to Charles, the English nation was like a dissatisfied and angry audience who found themselves “almost hissing him and his ill-acted regality off the Stage” (6:287). The tyrant is a bad actor, something that anyone with clarity of vision can discern. Monarchs in early modern England knew that the idea of theater could be strategically harnessed to lend support to the mystification of royalist authority. In his 1599 Basilicon Doron (“Royal Gift”), an epistolary treatise on kingship written for his eldest son Prince Henry, King James invoked the theatrical metaphor in his address “To the Reader”: But as this is generally trew in the actions of all men, so is it more specially trew in the affaires of Kings: for Kings being publike persons, by reason of their office and authority, are as it were set (as it was said of old) upon a publike stage, in the sight of all the people; where all the beholders eyes are attentively bent to looke and pry in the least circumstance of their secretest drifts: Which should make Kings the more carefull not to harbour the secretest thought in their minde, but such as in the owne time they shall not be ashamed openly to avouch; assuring themselves that Time the mother of Veritie, will in the due season bring her owne daughter to perfection.64

In this passage, a king is first and foremost a public person because, as head of state (and also church), his rule—which affects the lives of individual subjects and society as a whole—is open to scrutiny and judgment. James presents the mind of monarchs as accessible to scrutiny, and it is therefore important “not to harbour the secretest thought in their minde”—an inversion of the absolutist idea that nothing in the realm can escape the all-seeing gaze of monarchical authority. Elizabeth I, James Stuart’s predecessor on the English throne, was reported by Raphael Holinshed to have uttered the following lines to a joint delegation of Lords and Commons: “we princes … are set on stages, in the sight and view of all the world dulie observed; the eies of manie behold our actions; a spot is soone spied in our garments; a blemish quicklie noted in our dooings.”65 The tenor of Queen Elizabeth’s speech to Parliament here shares the implications of James I’s lines from Basilicon Doron cited above, in that the display of princes on the public and political stage for the scrutiny of the realm necessarily entails vulnerability. Because of the monarch’s susceptibility to prying eyes—King James elaborates in Basilicon Doron—it is important to maintain control over what you want people to see and what you do not want them to know. Knowing that you

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are the most important actor on stage requires you to know how to manage the monarchical image on not only the “publike stage” but also theater of state. In a speech made to Parliament on March 21, 1610, King James evokes the same metaphor earlier used in Basilicon Doron: “Kings Actions (even in the secretest places) are as the actions of those that are set upon the Stages, or on the tops of houses: and I hope never to speake that in private, which I shall not avow in publique, and Print it if need be.”66 If the monarch is on a stage for the entire realm to behold and be in awe of, he is also alert to theater’s ability to mystify absolutist authority, a controlling theme of New Historicist criticism.67 If the monarch is anxious about the potential of theater to disseminate seditious ideas and encourage rebellion, he also makes use of theater to exercise his authority and enact discipline and punishment. The scaffold is a potent form of theater deployed by the monarch from time to time to impress upon the citizenry that he is the head of the body politic and has power over the lives of all his subjects. In early modern England, the word “scaffold” refers to both a place of execution and the stage on which a play is performed. Cautionary and admonitory theater such as the spectacle of execution played out on the scaffold makes the point that it is pure folly to plot rebellion against the monarch. When Charles I, James I’s son and successor, stood trial for tyranny and treason against the English people at Westminster Hall, he noted the theatrical quality of the courtroom and its actors.68 On the first day of his trial, the king referred to the people who were trying him for tyranny and treason as “my pretended judges.”69 It was of course not only the defendant— King Charles I—who called attention to the court proceedings as farce. Even John Cook, the solicitor general who led the prosecution of the king, declared that Charles I was guilty of “the highest Treason [that] was ever wrought upon the Theatre of England.”70 In A Short View of the Life and Reign of King Charles (the second monarch of Great Britain) from his birth to his Burial, the royalist pamphleteer and historian Peter Heylyn evokes the idea of tragedy to describe Charles I’s political involvement in and entanglement with Scottish politics in which the Scottish Kirk played an important part. For his summary of important events that transpired in 1637, Heylyn identified Scotland as the “fit” setting in which “the first part of the Tragedy” of King Charles I should unfold.71 In 1637, the Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud and the king had forced the church in Scotland to use the prayer book of the Church of England, an imposition that was resented as interference in

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Scottish affairs and that led to a riot and signing of a Covenant criticizing the monarch. On the morning of King Charles’s execution, Heylyn recounts, the Bishop of London who visited the king read Chapter 27 of the Book of Matthew, which relates [T]he History of our Saviours Sufferings under Pontius Pilate, by the practise of the chief Priests, the Scribes and Pharisees, and others of the Great Council of the Jewish nation. At first his Majesty conceived that the Bishop had made choice of that Chapter, as being very agreeable to his present condition; But when he understood that it was the Chapter which the Church had appointed for that day in her publick Kalendar, he seemed to understand it with some signes of rejoycing.72

Heylyn’s account here carries dramatic force: No sooner had he done his Devotions, but he is hurried to White-Hall, out of the Banqueting-house, whereof a way was forced to a Scaffold on which he was to act the last part of his Tragedy in the sight of the people. Having declared that he died a Martyr for the Lawes of his Kingdome, and the liberties of his Subjects, he made a Confession of his Faith, insinuating that he died a true Son of the Church of England, he betook himself to his private Devotions, and patiently submitted that Royal Head to an Executioner, which had before been crowned with so much outward Pomp and Splendour.73

He next lambasts the Presbyterians whose hands are steeped in blood for the trial and execution of Charles I, however much they sought to distance themselves from the regicide. The Presbyterians “had carried on this Tragedy to the very last Act from the first bringing in of the Scots to the beginning of the war, and from the beginning of the war till they had brought him prisoner unto Holmby-House, and then quarreled with the Independents for taking the work out of their hands, and robbing them of the long-expected fruits of their Plots and Practices.”74 Royalist discourse had in fact compared the Scots to Judas Iscariot for their role in selling out King Charles to Parliament, an analogical reading reinforced by the king who found opportunity to taunt the Scots for having betrayed him “at too cheap a rate.”75 Heylyn’s allusion to Pontius Pilate’s symbolic act of distancing himself from Jesus’s death sentence is obvious enough, its resonance supported by

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representational associations forged between Charles I and Christ in royalist discourse. Both Presbyterians and Independents are guilty of “this most execrable Act” of sending Charles I, “the meekest of Men and the best of Princes,” to the scaffold.76 Heylyn’s sympathetic account of King Charles’s trial and execution found support in the publication of Eikon Basilike, which enjoyed a wide readership, not only in England but also in the Dutch Republic. Shakespeare’s dramatic deployment of the story of Christ’s Passion to frame Richard II’s attempt to work out the terms of his identity when dispossessed of political power is repeated—almost as a commonplace rhetorical strategy—in the polemical work of Revolutionary England. Likening those who had betrayed him to Judas Iscariot, Richard II’s instinctual appeal to biblical discourse to lend clarity to his political experience becomes a familiar feature in rhetoric and apologia of the English Civil War. In a poem titled A Faithfull Subject’s Sigh, the author (anonymously referred to as a “gentleman now resident in the court of Spaine”) describes the English people who had put Charles to death as “base Jewes” whose “Sanhedrim” and “Libertine” had combined forces “’Gainst Christ’s Anointed.”77 According to this poem’s referential logic, the Independent and the Presbyterian are allegorized by the two thieves crucified with Christ. The conflation of Charles I with Jesus on the cross underscores the theological significance of the king’s execution: His life He laid down, for th’sins of’s Foes (Like Christ) for the peculiar faults of those That shed His Bloud; who their good King accus’d Of th’salfe-same Crimes, wherewith they Him abus’d. In all things Christ’s true Picture, and who dies So like’s Redeemer, I dare Canonize.78

Charles’s death is portrayed as sacrificial and one that entails atoning for the sins of the people who had sent him to the block.

Conclusion In this chapter, we considered possible audience responses to Richard II’s invocation of the suffering Christ to shed light on the significance of his own travail. We next noticed that this dramatic representation of Christ’s Passion resonates in portrayals of Charles I’s response to the experience of

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political aggression and assault that find powerful expression in Eikon Basilike. The narrative of Christ’s suffering and death offers a familiar point of reference for poets, playwrights, and political writers who aim to achieve certain emotional effects in their work. Even though Shakespeare was a playwright and committed to mounting successful plays on stage, his complex portrayal of politics and power encourages audiences to think about political forms and content such as divine-right kingship, royalism, and the right of a people to challenge tyrannical authority. Polemical works of the English Revolution that allude to political representations in Shakespeare’s plays tell us that Shakespeare’s dramatization of the workings of political power possesses topical resonance. Topics— such as Christ’s Passion and the idea of the Garden of Eden—signify in both literary and political registers. There are motifs, metaphors, and narratives that have become familiar points of reference for a society’s understanding of culture and politics, as well as for the possibilities of a people’s signifying practices at a particular historical moment. When we look at Shakespeare in conjunction with Milton based on shared allusions, we find that our critical analysis involves more than considering the nature of influence, or what Shakespeare gave to Milton by way of the possibilities of political representation. It also entails considering Shakespearean representation through critical lenses afforded by the literature and polemics of Revolutionary England.

Notes 1. Donne, Major Works, 176–77. 2. Henry Vaughan, The Mount of Olives (1652), in The Works of Henry Vaughan, Vol. 1: Introduction and Texts, 1642–1652, ed. Donald R. Dickson, Alan Rudrum, and Robert Wilcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 307. 3. Ibid., 177. 4. Ibid., 241–42. 5. See Michael Schoenfeldt, “‘That Spectacle of Too Much Weight’: The Poetics of Sacrifice in Donne, Herbert, and Milton,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31, no. 3 (2001): 561–84. 6. Herbert, The English Poems, 94–110. 7. Ibid., 92–94. 8. Ibid., 116–18. 9. Ibid., 118–21.

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10. Abraham Coles, Latin Hymns with Original Translations in Four Parts: Dies Irae; Stabat Mater, Dolorosa; Stabat Mater, Speciosa; Old Gems in New Settings (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2010). 11. Aemilia Lanyer, The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: “Salve Deus Rex Judæorum,” ed. Susanne Woods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). All references to Lanyer’s work are to this edition. 12. Lucy Busfield, “Gender and the Spectacle of the Cross: Aemilia Lanyer in Context,” Reformation & Renaissance Review 17, no. 2 (2015): 129–41; Patricia Phillippy, “Sisters of Magdalen: Women’s Mourning in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” English Literary Renaissance 31, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 78–106; Elizabeth M.  A. Hodgson, “Prophecy and Gendered Mourning in Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 43, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 101–116. 13. For studies of the religious and cultural significance of Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary, see Margaret Arnold, The Magdalene in the Reformation (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018); Lilla Grindlay, The Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin in Early Modern English Writing (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 2018); Patricia Badir, Maudlin Impression: English Literary Images of Mary Magdalene, 1550–1700 (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 2009). 14. For a suggestive essay on the dramatic and political possibilities of Act 4 scene 1 of Richard II as not only a deposition-of-royalty scene but also portrayal of Parliament, see Jean-Christophe Mayer, “The ‘Parliament Sceane’ in Shakespeare’s King Richard II,” XVII-XVIII.  Bulletin de la société d’études anglo-américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles 59 (2004): 27–42; https://doi.org/10.3406/xvii.2004.1993; https://www.persee. fr/doc/xvii_0291-­3798_2004_num_59_1_1993. Pointing out that editions of Richard II printed during Queen Elizabeth I’s reign did not include the scene of Richard’s deposition by his own Parliament (4.1.155–318), Mayer argues that this textual omission suggests the political sensitivity of Shakespeare’s dramatization of the “sensational relation of cause and effect between Parliament and the fall of the Yorkist sovereign” (29). Richard II poses the potentially radical question: “Who makes, creates kings?” (38). 15. For a reading of Shakespeare’s thematization of de jure and de facto monarchical authority in Richard II, see Northrop Frye’s chapter, “The Bolingbroke Plays (Richard II, Henry IV),” in Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, ed. Robert Sandler (Markham, CA: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1986), 51–81. 16. Peter Lake, How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 251. 17. Ibid., 238. 18. Herbert, The English Poems, 129–34.

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19. Sir Robert Filmer, “Patriarcha” and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1. 20. Trea Martyn, Queen Elizabeth in the Garden: A Story of Love, Rivalry, and Spectacular Gardens (Katonah, NY: BlueBridge, 2012). 21. Andrew Marvell, “The Mower Against Gardens,” in The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, Vol. 1: Poems, ed. H.  M. Margoliouth and Pierre Legouis, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 43–44. All references to Marvell’s poetry are to this edition. 22. The last two lines/refrain of stanzas 4 and 5 of “The Mower’s Song” offer a slight variation of the refrain found in stanzas 1, 2, and 3: “For Juliana comes, and She / What I do to the Grass, does to my Thoughts and Me.” 23. See William O. Scott, “Landholding, Leasing, and Inheritance in Richard II,” SEL 42, no. 2 (2002): 275–92; Ariel Hessayon, “Restoring the Garden of Eden in England’s Green and Pleasant Land: The Diggers and the Fruits of the Earth,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 2, no. 2 (2008): 1–25; and Donna B. Hamilton, “The State of Law in Richard II,” Shakespeare Quarterly 34, no. 1 (1983): 5–17. 24. Accounts of Eikon Basilike’s publication history and circulation include Robert Wilcher, “Eikon Basilike: The Printing, Composition, Strategy, and Impact of ‘The King’s Book,’” in The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution, ed. Laura Lunger Knoppers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 289–308; Ian Ward, “The Apotheosis of King Charles I,” in Law and Imagination in Troubled Times: A Legal and Literary Discourse, ed. Richard Mullender, Matteo Nicoloni, Thomas D. C. Bennett and Emelia Mickiewicz (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), 53–72; and Giuseppina Iacono Lobo, Writing Conscience and the Nation in Revolutionary England (Toronto, CA: University of Toronto, 2021), 36. 25. Cited in Helmer J. Helmers, The Royalist Republic: Literature, Politics, and Religion in the Anglo-Dutch Public Sphere, 1639–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 115. 26. Elizabeth Skerpan-Wheeler, “The First ‘Royal’: Charles I as Celebrity,” PMLA 126, no. 4 (October 2011): 912–34, here 913. 27. Ibid., 929. 28. Charles I, Eikon Basilike, The Pourtraicture of His Sacred Majestie in His Solitudes and Sufferings (London: Henry Hills, 1649), 216. All references to Eikon Basilike are to this edition. 29. Ibid., 218. 30. Ibid., 232. 31. Skerpan-Wheeler, “The First ‘Royal,’” 920. 32. Helmers, The Royalist Republic, 119. 33. Ibid., 115.

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34. Skerpan-Wheeler, “The First ‘Royal,’” 913. 35. Charles I, Eikon Basilike, 16. 36. Ibid., 22. 37. Robert Wilcher, “‘The Royal Actor’: King Charles I and the Performance of Prayer,” in Prayer and Performance in Early Modern English Literature: Gesture, Word and Devotion, ed. Joseph William Sterrett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 169–80. As a monarch who was fond of seeing portraits and representations of himself in visual art, Charles I “took his ‘calling’ as head of the Church of England seriously” (172); that having been said, “the religious dimension of the king’s role is not prominent in the royal iconography of Charles’s reign until the 1640s” (172), the decade of the English Civil War. 38. Ibid., 172. 39. Ibid., 173. 40. John Milton, Eikonoklastes, in The Complete Works of John Milton, Vol. 6: Vernacular Regicide and Republican Writings, ed. Neil Keeble and Nicholas McDowell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 251–424, here 293. All references to Eikonoklastes are to this online edition with volume and page number(s) indicated in parentheses in the text. 41. Charles I, Eikon Basilike, 67. 42. Ibid., 68. 43. Lobo, Writing Conscience and the Nation, 35. 44. Ibid. Lobo comments on the ideological and political implications of Charles I’s representation of the conscience in Eikon Basilike: “Charles envisions his conscience as representative of the nation, with his subjects’ individual consciences dependent upon the King’s for validation …. [I]t is this representation of the King’s unimpeachable conscience that grants Eikon Basilike its rhetorical punch: establishing the privilege of the royal conscience, the King’s book seeks to compel national obedience by securing anew the consciences of Charles’s subjects. This state of conscious obedience to its beheaded King is meant to captivate England, priming the nation for the royalists’ hoped-for restoration of his son” (35). See also Kevin Sharpe, “Private Conscience and Public Duty in the Writings of Charles I,” The Historical Journal 40, no. 3 (September 1997): 643–65. 45. William Shakespeare: “Richard II,” directed by Gregory Doran (London: Opus Arte, 2014), DVD. 46. Shuger, “In a Christian Climate,” 45–46. 47. Ibid., 46. 48. Charles I, Eikon Basilike, 66. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 31. 51. Ibid., 63.

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52. Thomas N. Corns, “Imagery in Civil War Polemic: Milton, Overton and the Eikon Basilike,” Milton Quarterly 14, no. 1 (March 1980): 1–6. 53. Nicholas McDowell, “Milton, the Eikon Basilike, and Pamela’s Prayer: Re-Visiting the Evidence,” Milton Quarterly 48, no. 4 (December 2014): 225–34; Elizabeth A. Spiller, “Speaking for the Dead: King Charles, Anna Weamys, and the Commemorations of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia,” Criticism 42, no. 2 (March 2000): 229–51. 54. Jane Hiles, “Milton’s Royalist Reflex: The Failure of Argument and the Role of Dialogics in Eikonoklastes,” in Spokesperson Milton: Voices in Contemporary Criticism, ed. Charles W.  Durham and Kristin Pruitt McColgan (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994), 87–100. Hiles argues that, instead of counteracting the effect of Eikon Basilike’s emotive appeal with his own more robust republican adjurations, or of demonstrating with concrete examples Charles’s manifest unfitness to rule, Milton mounts instead “an essentially stylistic response to a work that he considered a literary fiction” (88). Milton’s focus on Eikon Basilike’s lack of artistic merit—directly associated with Charles I’s “political demerits” (94)—detracts from the construction of a convincing account of the king’s treachery against the English people. 55. Nicholas McDowell, “The Nation’s Poet? Milton’s Shakespeare and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms,” in Celtic Shakespeare: The Bard and the Borderers, ed. Willy Maley and Rory Loughnane (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 205–16, here 211–12. See also Nicholas McDowell, “Milton’s Regicide Tracts and the Uses of Shakespeare,” in Oxford Handbook of Milton, ed. Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 252–71; and Gregory Foran, “Macbeth and the Political Uncanny in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates,” Milton Studies 51 (2010): 1–20. Milton’s allusions to Macbeth were first noted by Martin Dzelzainis in “Milton, Macbeth, and Buchanan,” The Seventeenth Century 4, no. 1 (1989): 55–66. 56. Nicholas McDowell, “Reading Milton reading Shakespeare politically: What the Identification of Milton’s First Folio does and does not tell us,” The Seventeenth Century 36, no. 4 (2021): 509–525. The identification in 2019 of Milton’s copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio currently held in the Free Library of Philadelphia has excited scholars of Shakespeare and Milton, leading Nicholas McDowell to assess the extent to which a reader is able to evaluate Milton’s political reading of Shakespeare’s plays, especially when allusions to these plays can be identified. An upshot of the discovery of what can be referred to as Milton’s First Folio is our recognition that Shakespeare’s plays were already—in Stuart England and into the Interregnum—striking some audiences as possessing literary value that approximates, if not resembles, works associated with the classical tradi-

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tion. For McDowell, Milton’s markings and scribblings in his copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio amount to “a record of Milton’s reading of Shakespeare for commonplaces, sententiae, and textual variants, mainly in the 1637–41 period, with a 15-month gap while he was in Italy, and perhaps most intensively in 1637–8, when he was associating with Hales and his highly literary circle, with their great regard for Shakespeare” (519). While the Philadelphia First Folio is limited in the kind of information it can offer readers and critics keen on deciphering Milton’s use of Shakespeare for political ideas and representation, at the very least it offers evidence of the republican poet’s broad reading of Shakespeare’s plays. 57. See 1587 edition of Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, in The Holinshed Project: Comparing and Linking Two Editions of Holinshed’s Chronicles, ed. Ian Archer, Felicity Heal, Paulina Kewes, and Henry Summerson, vol. 3 (Oxford: University of Oxford, n.d.), 14.3 “Richard the Second,” para. 1, The Holinshed Texts (1587, Volume 3, p. 73) (ox.ac.uk). 58. Charles I, Eikon Basilike, 65–66. 59. Ibid., 126. 60. Walker, “Eclipsing Shakespeare’s Eikon,” 60. For a study of the relationship between metaphor and Miltonic iconoclasm, see Lana Cable, Carnal Rhetoric: Milton’s Iconoclasm and the Poetics of Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). Cable argues that the force of Milton’s rhetorical performance in both his polemical and literary works relies less on the persuasive capacity of discursive logic and formal reasoning and more on metaphor’s persuasive power. 61. Phyllis Rackin, “The Role of the Audience in Shakespeare’s Richard II,” Shakespeare Quarterly 36, no. 3 (1985): 262–81, here 269–70. 62. Ibid., 270. 63. J. Nalson, A True copy of the journal of the High Court of Justice for the tryal of K. Charles I as it was read in the House of Commons and attested under the hand of Phelps, clerk to that infamous court (London: H. C., 1684), II-III. 64. James I, Basilicon Doron, in King James VI and I: Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 4. All references to the writings of James I are to this edition unless otherwise indicated. 65. Cited in Louis Montrose, “Shakespeare, the Stage, and the State,” SubStance 25, no. 2 (1996): 46–67, here 46. 66. James I, “A Speech to the Lord and Commons at White-Hall, on Wednesday 21 of March 1609 [sic],” in Political Writings, 184. 67. New Historicist studies that include readings of the relationship between theater/performance and power include Stephen Greenblatt, ed., The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books,

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1982); Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1975); Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989); Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 68. Paul Raffield, The Art of Law in Shakespeare (Portland, OR: Hart Publishing, 2017), 104–105. 69. Charles Carlton, Charles I: The Personal Monarch 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), cited on 345. 70. Cited in Raffield, The Art of Law, 105 n. 198. 71. Peter Heylyn, A Short View of the Life and Reign of King Charles, (The second monarch of Great Britain) from his Birth to his Burial (London: Richard Royston, 1658), 72. 72. Ibid., 150–51. 73. Ibid., 151–52. 74. Ibid., 159. 75. Cited in Carlton, Charles I, 309; see also Helmers, The Royalist Republic, 124–30, esp. 119, for a good account of how royalists in both England and the Dutch Republic made comparisons between Charles I’s suffering and Christ’s Passion to represent the late king’s conscious effort to undergo travail in imitation of Christ. 76. Heylyn, A Short View, 161. 77. Gentleman now resident in the court of Spaine, A faithful subjects sigh, on the universally-lamented death, and tragicall end, of that virtuous and pious prince, our most gracious soveraigne, Charles I. King of Great Brittaine, most barbarously butchered by his rebellious subjects (1649), 5. 78. Ibid., 6.

CHAPTER 6

Surety, Usury, Hazard, and Spiritual Commercialism in The Merchant of Venice

The Lord hath sworn, and will not repent, Thou art a Priest forever, after the order of Melchizedek.) By so much is Jesus made a surety of a better Testament…. Wherefore, he is able also perfectly to save them that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth, to make intercession for them. (Heb. 7:21–22, 25)

The Merchant of Venice occupies a fascinating place in the Shakespearean canon for its controversial portrayal of Shylock, the Jewish Other, as well as for its rendition of shifting economic currents of the day. When considering the play’s interest in economic issues, critics usually focus on the practice of usury. In early modern England, usury was met with much disapprobation, a hostility that has been traced to society’s transition from the conditions of declining feudalism to a “capitalistic” economic culture.1 The Merchant dramatizes the sociocultural implications of emerging capital in the enmity between the usurer and the merchant. In demonizing the usurer, Shakespeare revises the commercial ethos of early modern Venice that is the controlling setting of the play. In Europe’s exfoliating trans-commercial networks, Venetian Jews played an important role as merchants. Where, in Italian commercial life, merchant-usurers helped promote new forms of banking and consolidate a set of practices associated with capitalist culture, Shakespeare emphasized instead the separation © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 W. S. H. Lim, Shakespeare and the Theater of Religious Conviction in Early Modern England, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40006-3_6

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of the merchant from the usurer, more directly relevant to sixteenth-­ century English commercial life. Shakespeare’s dramatization of the enmity between the merchant and the usurer focuses on aspects of Jewish quasi-feudal fiscalism that exist in tension with the merchandising practices of bourgeois mercantilism.2 Shakespeare’s dramatization of the period’s materialist processes and contradictions brings usury’s secular commercial contexts into conjunction with theological ones, given provocative expression in the typological confinement of the usurious Jew inside an outmoded theological dispensation. This chapter argues that equally important with the idea of usury embodied by Shylock is the metaphor of surety. Where Shylock sets the terms of reference for determining the play’s engagement with the cultural significance of usury, the merchant Antonio facilitates consideration of surety’s relation to the legal principles of contract and equity. If Shylock represents the spirit of legalism that is opposed to the liberating spirit of mercy, Antonio stands for generosity and sacrificial friendship. The character of Antonio portrays the merchant as someone who exemplifies the spirit of altruism, his willingness to embrace risk in his economic endeavors and investment ventures resonating with the spiritual significance highlighted by the practice of surety. The Merchant of Venice allows for the idea that God’s providential care operated to protect Antonio and safeguard his interests, rewarding the merchant for his generosity and willingness to make himself susceptible to “hazard” in the interest of capital accumulation. The play also invites us to understand God’s providence as surety for Antonio’s “hazard,” promoting overseas voyaging and merchandising ventures as important pursuits in the life of the Christian faith. When we consider the ties made by Shakespeare between economic practice and Christianity, we find that familiar topics of doctrinal import such as grace and charity/love acquire culture-specific implications traceable to Renaissance England’s dreams of economic and political expansionism.

The Merchant and the Discourse of Surety In 1593, William Burton, a minister of the Cathedral Church in Norwich, published A Caveat for Sureties: Two Sermons on Proverbs 6:1–5, highlighting Elizabethan England’s interest in the economic and legal aspects of surety.3 What is surety? The OED gives us the following definitions:

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(a) A pledge, bond, or security given as a guarantee of good conduct, the fulfilment of certain duties, etc. Also: money, etc., deposited or pledged by or on behalf of a person, and liable to be forfeited in the event of failure to abide by an agreement or fulfil certain conditions. (b) A person who undertakes a specific responsibility on behalf of another person who remains primarily liable for that responsibility; a person who is liable for the default or misconduct of another, or for ensuring the performance of some act on another’s part, such as payment of a debt or appearance in court.4 These two definitions found in the OED anchor the significance of surety in the discourses of economics and law, and for good reason. Facilitating economic transactions, surety takes place in a social and economic space defined by legal principles and practices, specifically the law of contract related to agreement, breach, remedy, and restitution. An important aspect of the law of contractual obligations, surety also broaches the controversial subject of the wisdom of putting oneself at risk in a social world where irresponsible acts and mistrust are perceived to be normative. If surety derives its significance from the workings of the early modern marketplace and law, it is also an important concept in the Christian faith, where Jesus came down to earth from heaven as fallen humanity’s divine surety to enable the restoration of Eden. In early modern England, poets, preachers, and sermonizers found ample opportunity to highlight Christ’s identity as the sacrificial lamb slaughtered for the “propitiation for our sins” (1 John 2:2, King James Bible). Sometimes used interchangeably with “expiation” and “reconciliation,” “propitiation” has to do with the idea of substitutionary atonement in soteriology: “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Cor. 5:21, King James Bible). In Renaissance England, the concept of surety brings theological discourse into conjunction with economic and legal principles.5 William Burton’s A Caveat for Sureties is a document which undertakes a detailed explication of the relationship between suretyship and Christian charity, of wise and unwise decisions in the practice of surety, and of the significance of this legal and economic practice in contemporary society. I will analyze in some detail here the conceptual contradictions and explanatory instabilities in Burton’s sermon on surety for their sociocultural implications for early modern England. Here is Proverbs 6:1–5, the passage Burton expounds on in his sermon:

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1 My son, if thou be surety for thy neighbor, and hast stricken hands with the stranger, 2 Thou art snared with the words of thy mouth: thou art even taken with the words of thine own mouth. 3 Do this now, my Son, and deliver thyself: seeing thou art come into the hand of thy neighbor, go, and humble thyself, and solicit thy friends. 4 Give no sleep to thine eyes, nor slumber to thine eyelids. 5 Deliver thyself as a Doe from the hand of the hunter, and as a bird from the hand of the fowler.

Burton’s “First Sermon” begins with a cautionary note on the importance of breaking free from “such discommodities and annoyances as commonly come to Sureties by undiscreteness and rashness.”6 For this preacher, God offers counsel on how to be wise in managing suretyship because it has many pitfalls and dangers that can result in serious economic losses. The sermon offers a definition of surety that captures effectively early modern English culture’s understanding of its legal and economic features. Burton explains: To become a surety is, nothing else but by word or writing or by pledge to make another sure (so far as man can) of that which before he was not sure of: or to put a man out of doubt so far as law and equity will require for the receiving, or enjoying, or recovering of something, whereof he stood in doubt before, & therefore it is called security.7

The pledge serves the same function as a surety because “if the principal do fail, the surety must answer the debt.”8 The problem with suretyship is that a person might willingly serve as a pledge for a friend thinking that the principal involved is not substantial and therefore secure. But “a small matter amongst rich men, may be a great matter amongst poor men.”9 To complicate the issue, a pledge can be made on behalf of someone who is involved in “unlawful and dishonest”10 transactions, activities that bring embarrassment and shame. Remarkably, Burton turns to the unusual and enigmatic story of Judah and Tamar narrated in Genesis 38 for his example of a pledge marked by the experience of shame. In this story from Genesis 38, Judah, upon the death of his eldest son Er, offered his daughter-in-law Tamar to his second son Onan, who performed coitus interruptus to avoid impregnating his late brother’s wife. Yahweh punished Onan with death for this transgression, and this

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narrative concludes with Tamar who, in disguise as a prostitute, sleeps with her father-in-law Judah and bears him twins. Judah of course did not know that the prostitute with whom he had sex was in fact his daughter-­ in-­law. In exchange for sex with Tamar, Judah promised her a young goat, but, since he did not have the goat with him, arranged to “pledge” (Gen. 38:17–18) his seal, cord, and staff as “surety” for the promised payment. However, after this encounter, Judah decided he was not going to ask for a return of the items he had left the prostitute as pledge given the shame and “infamy”11 of the context of his relationship with her. When later it was reported that Tamar worked as a prostitute and as a result had become pregnant, Judah wanted her burnt to death. Of course, Tamar produced the items that Judah had left with her as “pledge” to reveal that he was responsible for sleeping with her and making her pregnant. Burton next lists various scenarios in which the practice of surety can take place: examples include standing surety for a man’s person (what today we refer to as standing bail), for his debts and bargains, for his reputation, and so on. While Burton’s sermon does not evade the obvious risks and dangers of suretyship—especially for the person standing surety or presenting himself as pledge—he nevertheless affirms that this legal and economic practice is lawful, supported by the principles of Christian duty and necessity.12 Christian duty is defined in relation to “[t]he rule of charity,” which is “to do for others as we would be done unto ourselves.”13 For Burton, charity is what makes suretyship lawful, a postulate that interlinks the good deed of helping others with an anticipation of reciprocity, that is, when you hope someone would stand surety for you when you are most in need of it. Here the virtue of charity cannot be disentangled from the pragmatics of legal and economic relations and necessities that include interests of self-preservation. Burton’s alertness to some of the negative aspects of suretyship does not prevent him from identifying suretyship as “a duty so necessary, so charitable, and so Christian,”14 exemplified by the good Samaritan in Christ’s familiar parable.15 In Luke 10:25–37, Jesus told the parable of the good Samaritan to an expert of the law who, in addition to asking what he needs to do to inherit eternal life, also asks who is his neighbor—someone whom he should love as much as himself. When a man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho was robbed and viciously beaten, a Samaritan stopped to render help whereas a priest and Levite, respected people of the Jewish community, did not. That Jesus identified the kind passerby as a Samaritan is significant because Samaritans were despised by Jews. The Samaritan put

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aside the animosity that existed between his people and the Jews to help a human being in distress, not allowing prejudice to get in the way of doing what is right. Burton’s lesson here is that when someone is in dire need of help, one must not hesitate to extend charity, which is what surety really means. Burton does not hold back from identifying those opposed to surety as lacking in understanding and Christian charity. However, Burton finds it difficult to sustain a consistent reading of surety in the life of a Christian. Burton’s “Second Sermon,” for example, proceeds to identify areas of concern for people who wish to stand surety for another, such as one’s personal financial standing as well as “the estate and condition of that party for whom thou art to give thy word.”16 The decision to stand surety can stem from arrogance, ambition, rashness, gullibility, negligence, and self-centeredness, all of which can lead to a bad end. It is important to note that words—what you say—“are bonds and snares that men cannot untie,”17 a basic common law principle which states that offer and acceptance—basic elements for the formation of a contract—can be performed orally for legal enforceability. If you decide to be a surety without the right motivations, understanding, and wisdom, the repercussions can be severe if not disastrous: going to prison; being forced to leave the country; suicide; and being tarnished by everlasting disgrace and shame. The Book of Proverbs contains explicit verses that lend support to Burton’s “caveat,” his cautions and warnings about the potential dangers of suretyship. Proverbs 11:15, for example, reads: “He shall be sore vexed, that is surety for a stranger, and he that hateth suretiship, is sure.” Likewise, Proverbs 22:26–27 reads: 26 Be not thou of them that tough the hand [that give pledges], nor among them that are surety for debts. 27 If thou hast nothing to pay, why causest thou that he should take thy bed from under thee?

And Proverbs 17:18 identifies the person who “becometh surety for his neighbor” to be “a man destitute of understanding” and lacking in sense. The text of A Caveat lacks consistency in its elucidation of the relationship between the importance of Christian charity—encapsulated in suretyship—and the risks—or what Shakespeare calls hazard in The Merchant of Venice—intrinsic to this legal and economic practice.

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The practice of suretyship by human beings is a hazardous venture, presenting a definitional contrast to Jesus Christ who, in Hebrews 7:22, is “made a surety of a better Testament” (emphasis mine). Expounding on the role of Christ as heaven’s high priest who intercedes without ceasing on behalf of fallen humanity before the Father, the author of the Book of Hebrews invokes the concept of surety or sponsor (ἔγγυος in the Greek New Testament) to ground his theology. When Adam and Eve violated the Genesis prohibition against eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, humanity entered the condition of the Fall and incurred a debt it could not discharge. The legal penalty for the inability to settle this debt is eternal death unless a willing celestial being who possesses all the requisite attributes volunteers to serve as humanity’s divine guarantor. If the word “surety” signifies a person who serves as a guarantor for and assumes the legal obligation of another, its application to the Son of God in the Book of Hebrews underscores the theology that humanity’s high priest in the heavens guarantees the realization of the new covenant of grace as the believer’s representative. In A Caveat, Burton describes Jesus as “that great Surety of mankind” because—as the sacrificial lamb slain from before the foundation of the world—he satisfies the demands of the Father’s justice and has “answer[ed] unto God whatsoever his law can charge us withal.”18 Suretyship is the controlling principle at the heart of the theological logic of Incarnation, when deity entered time and space as man, divesting himself of glory and majesty in the voluntary humiliation of kenosis. Charles Wesley depicts Christ’s Incarnation and kenosis in these resonant lines from his hymn “And can it be that I should gain”: “He left His Father’s throne above, / So free, so infinite His grace; / Emptied Himself of all but love, / And bled for Adam’s helpless race.”19 Unlike the old covenant that was made between Yahweh and Israel in the Pentateuch, the new covenant of grace supersedes the old dispensation of law and insures total forgiveness. As negotiator caelestis, Jesus brings salvation to a fallen world by becoming humanity’s all-sufficient surety. In the Council in Heaven in Book 3 of Paradise Lost, Milton’s pre-existent Son offers to bear the punishment deserved by humankind for disobeying and rebelling against God: Behold mee then, mee for him, life for life I offer, on mee let thine anger fall; Account mee man; I for his sake will leave Thy bosom, and this glorie next to thee

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Freely put off, and for him lastly die Well pleas’d, on me let Death wreck all his rage. (PL 3.236–41)

The sinner’s faith in Christ’s sacrifice on the cross settles the debt when the righteousness of the Messiah is transferred to all fallen men and women who believe they are saved by grace through faith. This is the theological idea of imputation central to Reformation thought. In these terms, grace involves divinity taking the initiative to set in place the mechanism of salvation that fallen humanity is powerless to effect because of sin. As a motif, surety brings the theological idea of salvific sacrifice into conjunction with the legal ideas of pledge and guarantee. However, when a person steps up to function as a guarantor for another, the risks involved are numerous, unsettling any idealization of this economic and legal practice. As early as Trade and Usury, Martin Luther—highlighting the morally reprehensible nature of trade and merchandising activities—laments: “A common error which has become a widespread custom not only among the merchants but throughout the world, is the practice of one person becoming surety for another.”20 According to Luther, “[s]tanding surety is a work that is too lofty for a man; it is unseemly, for it is a presumptuous encroachment upon the work of God.”21 Any person who steps in as a surety for another commits the sin of hubris or pride because he presumes to have control over life, time, and history, a prerogative that belongs exclusively to God. Such a person forgets that he must place his trust in God and completely rely on him. Not only has he transferred this trust to another fallen human being, but he has in effect committed the primary satanic sin of “making himself God.”22 Espousing the importance of humility and contentment with one’s status and estate in life, Luther describes surety as the fruit of unbelief. Sermons on surety—such as encountered in Burton’s A Caveat—recognize the problems and shortcomings of contemporary society’s practice of suretyship and underscore the theologically grounded distinction between postlapsarian contract law and God’s inviolable covenants. The subject matter of A Caveat captures the ambivalence of the Christian faithful toward surety as a theological concept centered on Christ and the legal practice of agreeing to pay a borrower’s debt if this borrower is unable to do so himself or herself. There are immense legal risks for the person who gives a guarantee that a debtor would meet his or her financial obligations to the creditor, barring which the guarantor is required by law to step in and do so.

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Suretyship is a controlling theme in The Merchant of Venice. Antonio is the merchant of Venice whose friendship with Bassanio prompts him to act as a surety for his friend who needs to borrow money from Shylock, the Jewish usurer, so that he can pursue a love interest abroad. In his kindness and generosity, Antonio’s action in securing a loan from the usurer contributes to commercial, legal, and philosophical debates taking place in Shakespeare’s England, such as exemplified by Arthur Golding’s 1578 translation of Lucius Annaeus Seneca’s De Beneficiis. De Beneficiis offers an instructional and affirmational treatise on the principles of good giving, summarized in the title page as “Benefiting, that is to say the doing, receiving, and requiting of good Turns.”23 The work defines “benefit” and clarifies its proper social practice. Seneca had described “benefit” as “a friendly good deed, giving gladness and taking pleasure in giving” (sig. 5v). In De Beneficiis, which distinguishes the higher morality of good turns from the inferior morality of commerce and profit seeking, usury has a negative valence. According to Seneca, “it is a vile Usury to keep a reckoning of benefits, as of expenses” (sig. 2v); also “the Usurer is wont to be ill spoken of, if he be too hasty in demanding: and as ill be spoke of, if he seek delays and be slow and loth to receive” (sig. 19r). Seneca’s reading of the morally inferior practices of the usurer contributes to Elizabethan England’s consolidation of an anti-usury discourse from which Shakespeare’s Shylock derives his cultural meaning and significance. One’s state of mind is an important motif in De Beneficiis, as a good turn consists not in “the thing that is done or given” (sig. 5v). That is why ideas of conscience and ingratitude are central to Seneca’s emphasis on the importance of trust to the social and cultural practice of “benefiting.” The proper doing of a good turn is always counterpoised by the threat of compromise posed by the inferior morality of commercial practices. Seneca’s focus on the importance of mind infuses his discourse with an idealistic strain. There are positive attributes associated with an “upright” human nature that set the defining parameters for the give-and-take of social relations. Given the proclivity of human nature toward ingratitude, the practice of standing surety is unwise since it feeds a morally inferior system of commerce predicated on profit-making. Viewed from Seneca’s perspective, Shylock’s practice of usury ruptures the conditions necessary for “benefiting” and for upholding proper and healthy social relations. Occupying a world shaped by “contractually enforceable promises and networks of mutual material need,”24 the supremely isolated Shylock

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appears incapable of upholding the kind of proper social relations prioritized by De Beneficiis over profit-making motivations. Shakespeare’s merchant Antonio is someone who exemplifies the virtue of doing a good turn for a friend as extolled by Seneca. When Antonio enters a contractual agreement with Shylock to serve as a surety for Bassanio, he does not preoccupy himself with the risks involved in giving a legal guarantee that Bassanio will not renege on his financial obligations. For Antonio, friendship ties overshadow anxieties that a guarantor would normally have about the possibility of incurring a legal detriment when agreeing to settle all debt payments in the event of a default on the part of the debtor. When Antonio sets out to help Bassanio secure a loan from Shylock, he exemplifies the spirit of Christian charity espoused by Burton in A Caveat. Antonio’s willingness to serve as a pledge for Bassanio is generous and selfless, bringing into focus the idea of “bond,” an important word in the play which refers both to Antonio and Bassanio’s friendship and to the legal contract entered between Shylock and Antonio.25 In the context of friendship, a bond signifies a tie or ligature that binds a close relationship. In the discourse of law, “[a] bond was a legal instrument whereby one party ‘confessed himself to be bound and obliged’ to another party, and it was ‘the most significant single legal ligament in early modern society.’”26 Interchangeable with the idea of obligation, a bond is also a pledge that refers to the sealed document that enforces a legal duty to pay for sums owed. To act as Bassanio’s guarantor, Antonio offers one pound of his flesh— demanded by Shylock—as collateral, recognizing the risks entailed in his decision. If the terms of the loan are not met, Antonio must literally cut off the legally agreed upon weight of flesh from his body to be given to the creditor. Surety comes with risk, an important motif that is signified by the word “hazard” in the play. In addition to denoting “chance, accident, unpredictability of outcome” as well as “risk, danger, jeopardy,” “hazard”—the OED tells us—also refers to “a gambling game with two dice in which the chances are complicated in a number of arbitrary rules.”27 In portraying the friendship between Antonio and Bassanio, Shakespeare deploys the trope of hazarding to shed light on the workings of human and social relationships. While the friendship bond between Antonio and Bassanio is portrayed as positive, it can lead to actions that are risky and harmful. By extending kindness and generosity because of friendship, Antonio comes close to losing his life.

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The principle of charity in suretyship—as A Caveat explicates at some length—is not straightforward because of the many uncertainties found in social interactions that court the possibility of legal liability. When Antonio loses control over his argosies imperiled by the vagaries of the ocean, we can appreciate the logic of Burton’s practical wisdom about how not to get into ruinous legal entanglements, how—in other words—to be accurate in one’s handling of risk assessments. If Shakespeare encourages his audience to find in Antonio’s actions attributes such as loyalty and putting others ahead of self, he also asks them to consider the possibility that these actions might constitute recklessness when one embraces those activities that carry enormous risks. Antonio and Bassanio’s close friendship can benefit from closer analysis because of the cultural and ideological implications of their respective class positions in society. Is Bassanio an aristocrat? In terms of what he does, one could argue that he is associated with aristocratic habits, given the luxury he enjoys in spending his time pursuing the heart of a young heiress even when short of financial resources.28 What about Antonio? In Shakespeare’s England, where the hierarchies of class are powerfully embedded, the merchant is a man of trade and therefore excluded—by virtue of his birth and “occupation”—from the jealously guarded world of the gentry and aristocracy. In what way then is Bassanio Antonio’s “most noble kinsman” (1.1.57)? The close relationship between Bassanio and Antonio points an audience in the direction of the social world of early modern English commercialism in which the figure of the merchant was gaining increasing recognition and stature. Bassanio and Antonio’s friendship suggests that Shakespeare was alert to an emerging phenomenon in England wherein the capitalist merchant class engaged with and undertook strategic alignment with the gentry and aristocracy. Richard Hakluyt’s monumental compilation of travel narratives had helped elevate the merchant’s social significance and encouraged increased participation in trade and mercantile activities among the upper classes.29 The merchant and overseas merchandising activities enjoyed normative recognition in the world of England’s expanding economic and commercial interests. We encounter praise in Elizabethan literature for men of trade, that occupational category to which the merchant belongs. We are also familiar with the highly suggestive title of the “merchant adventurer,” evoked to designate the member of a trading guild licensed with exclusive commercial privileges.

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The English merchant signifies in ways not always necessarily akin to the cultural meanings of the powerful and instrumental Venetian merchant. In the Venetian context, Antonio can be a “merchant prince,” conventionally associated with the powerful merchant families of Venice that exerted political influence over European courts and even the Holy See itself. This “merchant prince” would sometimes lend large sums of money to the nobility and aristocracy. Venetian merchants were known for their wealth—secured by sea contracts, money lending, and grain and salt manipulations—and for their supposed avarice and cunning.30 Shakespeare refers to Antonio as a “royal merchant” (3.2.238), the first time such a designation was used in the English language. The OED defines the “royal merchant” as someone “who either conducts business with or is likened in some way to royalty, esp. in being very wealthy, enjoying high status in society, or in controlling large territories.”31 Even though Shakespeare portrays Antonio in a positive light, especially in contrast with the usurer, it is not the case that the merchant is immune to denigration. Influenced by the medieval view that money does not produce money, Luther had attributed widespread poverty and rising prices to the activities of merchants and trading companies. In Trade and Usury, he linked the economic practices of both usury and merchandising to the sin of avarice: “A merchant can hardly act without sin, and a tradesman will hardly keep his lips from evil.”32 For Luther, the making of profit “flies squarely in the face not only of Christian love but also of natural law.”33 Likewise an anonymous poem, “A Libell, fixte upon the French Church Wall, in London” (1593), savages the “Machiavellian Marchant” for his usurious practice that “doth leave us all for deade” and for hawking their wares to empty people’s purses. Described as “Cutthroate,” merchants are also “like the Jewes [who] eate us up as bread.”34 In Siuqila, a work whose title reverses the spelling of the Latin word “aliquis” (“someone” in English), Thomas Lupton presents a dialogue between two characters with prominent emphasis given to discussing the lives of rich and poor people in society. With the story of Dives and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31) invoked as moralizing context, Lupton describes the rich—who will be rewarded by the devil in hell—as self-absorbed, uncharitable, and hedonistic, reluctant to do anything to help the poor whom they despise.35 People who seek riches and earthly security are prone to practicing usury and engaging in investment ventures that are susceptible to catastrophic losses. Here the character Siuqila deploys anaphora to underscore the fragility of human ambition and desire while identifying

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the merchant as a component in society’s culture of avarice, acquisitiveness, and materialism: And what is gained by the money laid out for Merchandise? is not the ship and all the merchandise lost sometimes? is it not sold sometimes to such as never pay therefore? is not much thereof sometimes consumed by unthrifty servants? nay, is not the Merchant’s throat sometimes cut for the money he took therefore? And though none of these things chance, the greatest gain that the Merchant can have, is to be rich, build fair house, fare finely, and go trimly, which, if he use ungodly, and bestow uncharitably, he shall gain thereby hell fire eternally: and what will be the gain they shall have for their money lent to usury?36

Merchandising activities can bring a person wealth, comfortable homes, and a comfortable life. However, if the merchant manages his material achievements in ungodly fashion and without a thought for charity, there will be spiritual consequences in hell. Shakespeare’s representation of the merchant is more positive than Lupton’s despite his unease with overseas commercial activities that involve major risks and hazard. For a society beginning to channel energy into the nation’s commercial activities, one’s social rank and class no longer necessarily served as the barometer of a person’s worth as producer.37 The pursuit of commercial enterprises could now potentially confer a degree of social status from which one was normally excluded by one’s class position in society, regulated, for example, by Elizabeth I’s Sumptuary Laws. Even as the merchant set out to foreground a social presence in this emergent culture of bourgeois self-creation, members of the gentry and aristocracy also found themselves becoming more willing participants in the activities of trade. The merchant and the gentry or aristocratic class came into closer contact through shared participation in overseas speculative ventures.

Writing Usury in Early Modern England In The Merchant of Venice, two models of economic practice are brought into juxtaposition for the purpose of contrast and comparison. One is usury, the practice of lending money at unreasonably high rates of interest; the other is the practice of surety. In early modern England, usury was met with much disapprobation, a hostility that has been traced to society’s

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transition from the conditions of declining feudalism to a “capitalistic” economic culture.38 In Christ’s Tears Over Jerusalem, Thomas Nashe gave a colorful description of the usurer and his activities: Bursa Avari os est diaboli, The usurer’s purse is hell-mouth. He hath hydropem conscientiam (as Augustine saith), a dropsy conscience, that ever drinks and ever is dry. Like the fox, he useth his wit and his teeth together; he never smiles but he seizeth; he never talks but he takes advantage. He cries with the ill husbandmen (to whom the vineyard was put out in the gospel): This is the heir; come let us kill him, and we shall have his inheritance. Other men are said to go to hell; he shall ride to hell on the devil’s back (as it is in the old moral), and if he did not ride, he would swim thither in innocents’ blood whom he hath circumvented. No men so much as usurers coveteth the devil to be great with; he is called Mammon, the god or prince of this world, that is, the god and prince of usurers and penny-fathers. Nay more, every usurer of himself is a devil, since this word daemon signifieth naught but sapiens, a subtle worldy-wise man.39

While usury was often viewed negatively, sixteenth- and seventeenth-­ century English society nevertheless recognized that its practice was necessary for the functioning of the economy. Hostility toward usury found support from scriptural passages that inveighed against its practice. Here are some examples: 1 If thou lend money to my people, that is, to the poor with thee, thou shalt not be as an usurer unto him: ye shall not oppress him with usury. (Exod. 22:25) 2 Moreover, if thy brother be impoverished, and fallen in decay with thee, thou shalt relieve him, and as a stranger and sojourner, so shall he live with thee. Thou shalt take no usury of him, nor vantage, but thou shalt fear thy God, that thy brother may live with thee. Thou shalt not give him thy money to usury, nor lend him thy vittles for increase. (Lev. 25:35–37) 3 He that increaseth his riches by usury and interest, gathereth them for him that will be merciful unto the poor. (Prov. 28:8)

The great Reformers had themselves held inconsistent views on usury. Luther identified it as a sin whereas Calvin accepted circumstances in which lending at interest was permissible. Martin Bucer sought to formulate some form of cooperation between theology and commerce,

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recognizing that many legitimate enterprises could not advance without the practice of lending at interest. Much of the debate surrounding usury entails grappling with the implications of perceived incompatibility between scriptural injunctions and the demands of social practice. The critique of usury is a reaction to how this form of economic practice privileges profit maximization at the expense of everything else. In the symbolic dimension, usury is associated with a carnal and outmoded Judaism as well as with the transgressive practice of sodomy. The practice of usury is also understood to participate in unnatural reproduction, a conception traceable to Aristotelian-Thomistic morality which postulates that the practice of profit seeking goes against natural law because money—something inanimate—cannot breed money.40 Money is by definition barren because its natural telos is the facilitation of exchange.41 According to this understanding, usury is unnatural because it replaces the exchange value of money with a self-seeking use value aimed at the “reproduction” of profit-making. While the evils of usury were both made familiar and excoriated at length, people in England recognized that the practice of usury served to strengthen the economic health of the nation. As someone who understood that English domination of commerce was indispensable for England’s national prosperity, Francis Bacon recognized that “MANY have made witty invectives against Usury.”42 Even as he summarizes negative perceptions of the usurer and affirms the need to regulate the practice of usury, Bacon concludes that “to speak of the abolishing of usury is idle. All states have ever had it, in one kind or rate, or other.”43 Sir Philip Sidney, Essex, and Leicester found themselves thousands of pounds in debt. Even Queen Elizabeth I herself had borrowed large sums of money from European bankers.44 While usury might have been considered a sin, its practice was countenanced in early modern England. If the Bible does not lend support to the practice of usury because it is exploitative, it also does not hesitate to highlight the risks and dangers attending the practice of surety, evidenced, for example, in Proverbs 6:1–5 that constitutes the basis of Burton’s sermon. The literature of early modern England contains advice on the importance of observing prudent economic practices, such as not getting into the habit of borrowing and lending money as well as recognizing the dangers of standing surety for others. Even Polonius, the foolish counselor mercilessly ridiculed in Hamlet, can offer his son Laertes a healthy dose of worldly wisdom, which incorporates the discourses of usury and suretyship: “Neither a borrower

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nor a lender be, / For loan oft loses both itself and friend, / And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry” (1.3.75–77). The Anglican preacher George Herbert stresses that borrowing is a sure way to end in debt. He counsels in “The Church-porch,” at the start of The Temple (1633): “By no means runne in debt.”45 And Herbert also enjoins, “Yet be not surety,”46 distinguishing between surety that entails a father’s natural obligation to look after his children’s well-being and the other surety of acting as a pledge for one’s friend. For this country parson who embraces the godly habits of hoarding, calculation, and thrift, the security of one’s family is more important than one’s obligations to friends.47 Early modern English society registers palpable anxiety about losing control in and over social situations. Putting trust in others entails vulnerability, opening oneself up to manipulation, exploitation, and serious harm.48 Interactions between people are fraught with risks and danger. In The Merchant, usury is portrayed as both self-serving and exploitative, deriving its significance from a social world in which human relationships are influenced or shaped by economic transactions, contractual arrangements, and legal machinations. Shakespeare considers the significance of usury not only in a secular and commercial but also religious context, supported by a typological reading of economic, commercial, and legal practices. The discourse of typology confers moral valence on both the economic practice of usury and legal practice of surety, associating the first with the dispensation of law and the second with the dispensation of grace. Based on the theory that characters and events of Old Testament history foreshadow the spiritual fulfillment of God’s salvific plan enabled by Jesus Christ, typology is a mode of biblical interpretation Shakespeare invokes as a contextual backdrop for analyzing the relationship between law and grace in a play like The Merchant of Venice. If The Merchant allows characters like Shylock and Portia to portray the respective qualities of legalism and mercy, it does so to highlight the influence of Christian values on activities such as courtship rituals, the pursuit of economic development, and the establishment of political relations with foreign lands, rulers, and governments. Typological discourse can help shape an audience’s perception of and attitude toward certain legal principles and commercial practices by pointing to lessons and wisdom gleaned from the Bible. Scripture makes available God’s divine perspective on usury and surety, practices that carry deep economic and legal significance.

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Shakespeare’s audience would have been familiar with the idea that the letter of the law privileged by Shylock in his dealings with people and the court differs substantively from the New Testament focus on grace and spirit. The play’s typological underpinnings tie Shylock’s economic dealings directly to the ethos of the Old Testament’s legalistic dispensation. Grounded in the importance of essence and content over form, grace forgives and sets free. When Portia lyrically espouses the virtue of mercy, she evokes the familiar typological conception of the superiority of grace over law, the transcendence of Christian revelation over an outmoded Judaic dispensation. Shakespeare’s interest in England’s contemporary economic and commercial landscape cannot be separated from his familiarity with the Old Testament perspective on usury and on the theology of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross as humankind’s divine surety. If Shylock exemplifies the spirit of usury as exploitative, vengeful, and anti-Christian, Antonio represents the spirit of surety as selfless and generous. Even though surety has identifiable positive features in the play, it is not idealized, seen especially in the ways in which it opens a person to dangers such as legal liability and financial loss. In The Merchant, Shakespeare thought about the implications of risk-taking, especially as it pertained to the conduct of merchandising activities. Excited that Antonio was making himself vulnerable by engaging in speculation ventures across the seas, Shylock considers the possibility of the merchant’s failure: He hath an argosy bound to Tripolis, another to the Indies. I understand moreover upon the Rialto he hath a third at Mexico, a fourth for England, and other ventures he hath squandered abroad. But ships are but boards, sailors but men. There be land rats and water rats, water thieves and land thieves—I mean pirates—and then there is the peril of waters, winds, and rocks. The man is, notwithstanding, sufficient. Three thousand ducats. I think I may take his bond. (1.3.15–23)

Bassanio also foregrounds the dangers of overseas investment ventures when responding to news of Antonio’s ill-fated argosies: Hath all his ventures failed? What, not one hit? From Tripolis, from Mexico, and England, From Lisbon, Barbary, and India, And not one vessel scape the dreadful touch Of merchant-marring rocks? (3.2.266–69)

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One can overreach in one’s management of risks, which Shylock hopes will be the case with Antonio. His uncharitable anticipation aside, Shylock’s understanding of the risks of overseas merchandising ventures resonates with the perceived dangers of distant travel. Death can readily happen not only because of pirates and cut-throats (Shylock’s “water thieves” and “land thieves”) but also disease, one reason why life assurance grew conspicuously toward the end of the sixteenth century. The literature of early modern England provides ample examples of cultural anxiety pertaining to the activities of the merchant. In The Tempest, Gonzalo refers to calamities that take place on the seas: [E]very day some sailor’s wife, The masters of some merchant, and the merchant, Have just our theme of woe. (2.1.4–6)

Likewise, in Chapman, Jonson, and Marston’s Eastward Ho!, a character named Security expresses a viewpoint reminiscent of Shylock’s: [A]ll trades complain of inconvenience, and therefore ’tis best to have none. The merchant, he complains and says, ‘traffic is subject to much uncertainty and loss’. Let ’em keep their goods on dry land, with a vengeance, and not expose other men’s substances to the mercy of the winds.49

Jonson’s eponymous Volpone, dissociating himself from the world of economic and commercial activities, tells the audience: I use no trade, no venture; … … expose no ships To threat’nings of the furrow-facèd sea; I turn no moneys in the public bank; Nor usure private.50

There appears to be a general disapproval in early modern England of speculating or gambling on God’s mercy, particularly in relation to the various forms of distant travel taking place in the period.51 While Shakespeare was aware of and sensitive to the obvious dangers of distant travel, he was equally open to the idea that useful economic activity—involving the export of goods for profit in particular—rests upon the

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necessity of ocean travel. Hazarding capital by way of overseas merchandising ventures is not always a necessarily negative thing. The kinds of speculative ventures embarked on by Antonio are needed for the acquisition of wealth and circulation of capital.

Barabas, Shylock, and Early Modern Capitalism Antagonism toward Shylock dramatized in Shakespeare’s play has a long history in England, one that preceded King Edward I’s expulsion of the Jews from the land in 1290. The metonymic relationship connecting Jewishness to exploitative economic practices was not an early modern invention. It was already observable in England in the Middle Ages. In an analysis of the social, cultural, and political experience of Jews in medieval Europe, Geraldine Heng notes that Jews intermingled with Christians “in neighborhoods, markets, fairs, towns, and cities,” forming “concentrations of domestic aliens on whose religion and activity the intellectual and theological traditions, and the economic life, of Christian Europe were deeply and inextricably dependent.”52 In medieval England, Jews “dominated credit markets—the basis of economic life, trade, business, construction, war, agriculture, and all activity requiring financing—and were vital to the development of a commercializing land market in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.”53 As in Europe, England recognized the importance of business-savvy Jews for the activities and projects of capital accumulation. It needed them for loans as well as for their wealth that could be confiscated at a short moment’s notice by the state. The Jews’ utility as profit-generating instruments also contributes to their vilification and demonization by the English who often find themselves defined by a relationship of dependence on this racial minority that embodies everything that is alien and resistant to cultural accommodation in society. If we were to invoke the (highly clichéd) binary opposition between self and Other to analyze the action of The Merchant and find that Shakespeare’s representation of Venetian society’s relationship with the Jew is highly prejudicial if not—at least from a post-Holocaust historical perspective— anti-Semitic, we might also notice that Shakespeare does not always maintain or sustain the (symbolic) distinctions separating the dominant culture from the subhuman subject. Binary distinctions in the play reveal susceptibility to overlapping. In the court scene, Portia, disguised as a male judge, asks, “Which is the merchant here, and which the Jew?” (4.1.169). On the surface this question lends support to Portia’s masquerade as an

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impartial judge who does not know the identities of the plaintiff and defendant in this case. However, the question can also be read as symptomizing Renaissance England’s cultural nervousness about the ease with which the self may potentially slide into the symbolic domain and category of the Other, with the Englishman assuming the identity of the Jew and vice versa. As James Shapiro tells us, the Jew is more than simply a person distinguished by physical characteristics and cultural practices. He/she is an ideational object manufactured from representation found in myth, sermons, religious writings, popular understanding, and narratives of (apparent) encounters, raising vexed questions about who and what is a Jew.54 An Englishman could “turn Jew,”55 the figure of and metaphor for irredeemable difference, just as he was also susceptible to “turning Turk.”56 Reacting to Christian Venice’s xenophobic attitude toward the Jew, Shakespeare’s Shylock reveals his visceral resentment in his demand for Antonio’s pound of flesh. Julia Reinhard Lupton notes that, for Shakespeare, “resentment is a mark of villainy under the law, the sign of a soulless legalism, a kind of second-order secularized Judaism that separates the modern ethos of markets, contracts, and Realpolitik from the (nostalgically reconstructed) civility of dying feudal institutions of life and love.”57 If, borrowing Lupton’s critical terminology, Shylock’s resentment identifies him as a villain under the law, the reader/audience can understand this resentment given Christian Venice’s unrestrained animosity toward the usurer. We learn early in The Merchant that Shakespeare’s merchant Antonio is in the habit of calling Shylock cur and dog, an insult that defines the Jew not only as society’s ethnic and cultural but also ontological Other. A dog can belong to the society of men—loved, tolerated, and even kicked or spurned—but it can never be a member of the human species. Christian Venice speaks about the Jew in stridently disparaging terms. In Act 4 scene 1—the courtroom scene of Shylock demanding his legal right to a pound of flesh—many things are said about the Jew by the Venetians. The Duke of Venice refers to Shylock as “[a] stony adversary, an inhuman wretch” (4.1.3). When he describes Shylock’s “apparent cruelty” toward the merchant as “strange” (4.1.20), he is responding to the unintelligibility of Shylock’s particular pursuit of consequential damages. Surely, a pound of flesh—apart from its anomalous status as compensation—possesses no monetary value or benefit of any kind. Graziano calls Shylock “damned, execrable dog” (4.1.127) whose “currish spirit / Governed a wolf”

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(4.1.132–33), the wolf’s predatory nature perfectly describing the bloodsucking usurer. These descriptions of Shylock relegate him to the level of the subhuman—the Jew is bereft of the natural human instinct of and capacity for mercy—and even to the level of the beast. Early in the play, Antonio has already portrayed Shylock unkindly as “[t]he devil [who] can cite Scripture for his purpose” (1.3.94), alluding to Matthew 4:6 and Luke 4:10–11, in which Satan invokes Psalm 91:11–12 in his temptation of Jesus in the wilderness.58 Focusing on the tension-fraught relationship between the Jew and the Venetian merchant, Shakespeare maps English political and social realities onto the Italian setting that is at the center of the play’s dramatic narrative. In both The Merchant and Othello, Venice is identified as a Christian society in which foreign and alien characters like Shylock and Othello must work out the terms of their identities. However, Othello’s and Shylock’s experiences in Venice do not follow the same trajectory. Where Othello strives to be an intrinsic part of Venetian society only to find at the end that he is Christian society’s indelible Other, Shylock finds himself systematically marginalized, humiliated, and ultimately crushed by the dominant culture. The presence of the Jew in Venice elicited ambivalence from the local population. While Jews represented society’s visible racial and religious Other, they nevertheless contributed significantly to the economic health of the republic as bankers and tradesmen. An important feature of society’s economic life, Shylock is involved in a controversial form of economic practice that, while inviting disapprobation, nevertheless facilitates the activities of borrowing and lending necessary for the conduct of commercial life. However, Shylock is not only defined by his significance as a cog in the economic machinery of the state. He is society’s radical cultural Other distinguished by his relation to the old dispensation of law in which legal rigidity constitutes the normal order of things. The cultural politics of home and belonging is central to the portrayal of Jews in The Merchant. Shylock is fully aware of society’s antagonism toward them as subjects of radical cultural difference. The vilification of the Jew cannot be extricated from the historical experience of the archetypal diaspora, Nebuchadnezzar’s deportation of the Jews from Eretz Yisrael to Babylon some ten years before the final destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE. Harrowing and traumatic, exile is about forced separation from one’s natal homeland, cultural displacement, and existential dislocation. Because it is easy to lose faith and hope in this condition, the

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prophet Jeremiah exhorted the exilic Jews not to lose their faith, a message reinforced by Ezekiel who, discoursing on the ruin of the Temple, departure of Yahweh, and scattering of the nation, likewise emphasized that God would facilitate a home return one day for Israel based on the faith of his people. When later Cyrus the Persian granted a political dispensation for the Jews to return to their (home)land, many Jews chose instead to remain in Babylon. The passage of time had led to degrees of assimilation into Babylonian society. But assimilation is not always straightforward, and it is possible for the exilic subject to find himself or herself living in a foreign land that is inhospitable to his or her people. Shakespeare’s dramatization of Shylock’s exploitative economic practices critiques both the institution of usury and the social and cultural Other located in one’s midst. This dramatization can be beneficially compared with Marlowe’s portrayal of the Jew in The Jew of Malta, a popular play regularly performed in the early 1590s and that almost certainly influenced Shakespeare’s The Merchant.59 Marlowe’s “villain” is the protagonist Barabas, a character who shares the namesake of the malefactor released by Pilate at Jesus’s trial. Barabas is characterized by his love of money which he manages through concealment, treachery, and even murder. Marlowe’s Barabas recognizes that Jews “are a scattered nation” (1.1.120).60 However, despite their “disadvantaged” status, he exults: [B]ut we have scrambled up More wealth by far than those that brag of faith. There’s Kirriah Jairim, the great Jew of Greece, Obed in Bairseth, Nones in Portugal, Myself in Malta, some in Italy, Many in France, and wealthy every one: Ay, wealthier far than any Christian. (1.1.121–27)

If the Jewish “nation” is defined by the condition of diasporic dispersal, its reconstitution can only await completion in the future, subject to the passage of time and movements of history. In the meantime, however, the experience of being “a scattered nation” does not prevent Jews like Barabas from imagining a business-savvy “nation” of entrepreneurs made up of diasporic subjects arrayed against the exploitations of the dominant Christian culture.

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Barabas’s relationship with Malta is ambiguous, defined by a fragile amicability that is susceptible to manipulation, deceit, and exploitation. He is welcomed for his entrepreneurial abilities and success in a society defined by the ruthless energies of its economic activity and business adventurism. The Jew is an important part of what makes Maltese economy function; and he can, of course, also be a source of ready income when needed by the state. Like Shylock, Barabas’s wealth is susceptible to expropriation, marking a major power differential separating the exilic subject from his (adopted) homeland. Experiencing prejudice and discrimination, the Jew—whether in Malta or in Venice—feels animosity and even hatred toward the dominant Christian culture in relation to which he is the alien Other, viewed as belonging to the people who put Christ on the cross. Responding to hostility, Shylock likewise tells the audience that the merchant Antonio hates and scorns his “sacred nation” (1.3.43), mocks him, undermines his business, and sabotages his friendships (3.1.45–49) even while he is willing to turn to the usurer for a loan. In Marlowe’s Malta, profit interests, exploitation, and opportunism are signified by the controlling metaphor of economic transactions: scheming, haggling, and negotiating. This transactional motif also applies to the politics of belonging and marginalization, sovereignty, and international relations, such that Malta, “a thinly veiled London,”61 is susceptible to the machinations of a character who will not hesitate to exploit the opportunity, when offered, to barter off the security of an island and its people for lucre. However, notwithstanding the fact that Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Marlowe’s play all participate in the exploitative culture of economic exchange and transactions without any consideration for the ethical valence of an act, the play concludes with the triumph of Christian society over the infidel and pagan, whether Muslim or Jew. In Marlowe’s play, Christian Malta’s triumph over the treacherous Jew is brought about by its governor Ferneze, who sets up the trap for Barabas to fall into a cauldron, the play’s symbolic vision of the Jew’s deserved descent into hell. If Barabas is characterized by a remarkable resilience to society’s hostility toward him to the point that he literally returns from the dead in Act 5 scene 1 to assume the mantle of governor of Malta, he also embodies the enormities stereotypically associated with the Jew: someone “[w]ho smiles to see how full his bags are crammed” (Prologue 31), rips “the bowels of the earth” (1.1.108) for its treasures, “stands accursèd in the sight of heaven” (1.2.64), and believes “[i]t’s no sin to deceive a Christian” (2.3.311).62 Marlowe’s Jew may believe that “all are heretics that are not

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Jews” (2.3.314) but he lives in a world in which, as the Turkish slave Ithamore puts it: “To undo a Jew is charity, and not sin” (4.4.77). Barabas revels in his identity as “a great usurer” (4.1.39) who also participates in overseas merchandising ventures of the kind Shakespeare’s merchant Antonio is involved in. Early in Marlowe’s play, in Act 1 scene 1, we find a merchant cheering that Barabas’s “ships are safe” (1.1.49) and “all the merchants / With other merchandise are safe arrived” (1.1.50–51) at Malta, showing cooperation between the usurer and the merchant in the creation of wealth. The normality of joint usurer-merchant ventures portrayed by Marlowe differs from the antagonism between the usurer and the merchant in Shakespeare’s play. The Jew of Malta affords a remarkable vista of the vast mercantile world of the Mediterranean and the Near East, its ethos of exuberant international commercialism reinforced by numerous placenames and geographical locations. Represented by the controlling symbol of the counting-house, this trading culture defines not only Barabas’s but also Maltese society’s significance in the play. The Merchant likewise registers interest in encounters between characters from different lands, encounters propelled not only by individual interests like the pursuit of love but also vibrant activities of economic exchange. Shakespeare’s choice of the Venetian setting conjures up a world pulsating with vibrant economic life. A sovereign maritime republic in the sixteenth century when Shakespeare wrote and staged The Merchant, Venice was a major economic and trading power in the Renaissance. Early modern Venice was known for its cosmopolitan character. When Thomas Coryate, an eccentric and inveterate late Elizabethan and early Jacobean traveler, nicknamed Venice “little Christendome”63 in 1608, he explained why: There you may see many Polonians, Slavonians, Persians, Grecians, Turks, Jewes, Christians of all the famousest regions of Christendome, and each nation distinguished from another by their proper and peculiar habits. A singular shew, and by many degrees the worthiest of all the Europæan Countries.”64

In The Merchant, Shakespeare recognizes “that the trade and profit [of Venice] / Consisteth of all nations” (3.3.30–31). Shakespeare portrays the coming of the outside world to Portia’s Belmont in the form of characters who hail from different lands and

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cultures. We encounter not only Morocco and Aragon but also references to “the Neapolitan prince” (1.2.34), “the County Palatine” (1.2.39), “the French lord, Monsieur le Bon” (1.2.46), and “Falconbridge, the young baron of England” (1.2.55–56). In portraying the activities and adventures of young lovers in Belmont and in Venice, he found opportunity to consider some of the cultural and ideological implications for a society when the habits of commerce and mercantilism help shape the form and content of human relationships. The pursuit of love and desire is inflected by the language of economics and commerce in the play, suggesting that considerations of profit have a way of intruding to compromise idealisms sometimes attached to expressions of human relationships. Not only is wealth the root of enmity between people, but its pursuit, assuming the forms of commercial transactions and business speculations, can impact romantic relationships.65 In fact, the sacred institution of marriage itself—while associated with love and the perpetuation of generation—cannot be dissociated from considerations of economic interest.66 Lorenzo’s relationship with Jessica, Shylock’s daughter, offers an example of how romantic love can be affected by the motivations, both implicit and explicit, of economic considerations. Lorenzo can barely contain his excitement about the material objects such as gold and jewels that Jessica will bring with her when she breaks free from the constraints of her father’s house. The association between Jewish women and wealth has been invoked by Coryate: In the roome wherin they celebrate their divine service, no women sit, but have a loft or gallery proper to them selves only, where I saw many Jewish women, whereof some were as beautiful as ever I saw, and so gorgeous in their apparel, jewels, chaines of gold, and rings adorned with precious stones, that some of our English Countesses do scarce exceede them, having marvailous long traines like Princesses that are borne up by waiting women serving for the same purpose. An argument to prove that many of the Jewes are very rich.67

When, in Shakespeare’s play, Launcelot the clown jokes that Jessica would be excluded from “mercy … in heaven” (3.5.27) because she is a Jew, he also refers to the economic law of supply and demand that ensures Jessica’s conversion will “raise the price of hogs” (3.5.19) because of an increase in Christian numbers.68

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When Bassanio, Portia’s suitor, declares with excitement “In Belmont is a lady richly left, / And she is fair” (1.1.161–62), it is possible to propose that he is thinking about Portia’s material value before her beauty. Shakespeare presents Bassanio’s pursuit of Portia in terms of winning a prize: For the four winds blow in from every coast Renownѐd suitors, and her sunny locks Hang on her temples like a golden fleece, Which makes her seat of Belmont Colchis’ strand, And many Jasons come in quest of her. (1.1.168–72)

The young man setting forth to seek the lady of his dreams recalls The Taming of the Shrew in which Petruchio, a suitor of Katherina the shrew, attributes his presence in Padua to the same “happy gale” (1.2.45) that “scatters young men through the world / To seek their fortunes farther than at home, / Where small experience grows” (1.2.47–49). Men take their chances to find love in new cities and places, reinforcing the idea that finding a bride involves adventure. In The Excellencie of Good Women (1613), a work which extols the attributes of virtuous women highlighted in Chap. 31 of the Old Testament Book of Proverbs, the English author and soldier Barnabe Rich commented that “who so ever marries a wife may well be called a Merchant venturer.”69 If a woman is likened to a merchant vessel (see Prov. 31:14)70 navigating the vagaries of the seas to transport goods from one place to another—a simile that portrays the virtuous woman as one who provides for the needs of her family with grace, intelligence, diligence, and courage—the man entering marriage embarks on “a great adventure” with many risks involved: “his credit, his reputation, his estate, his quiet, his libertye.”71 In marriage, men “do not onely adventure there bodyes but many times their soules.”72 Rich underscores the potential for a man to marry the wrong woman to his great detriment with a dramatic warning: “[H]e that goes about a wife had neede to looke aswell about him, least hee make such a choice that for one daies pleasure, he doth purchase repentance all the dayes of his life after.”73 Marriage entails hazard, risktaking, and a high-stakes gamble with potentially devastating consequences for the man. In The Merchant, Bassanio describes his pursuit of Portia as a great adventure that involves outmaneuvering competitors from the far ends of

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the earth all seeking to capture this singular object of desire metaphorized as the promise of gold. Framed as an adventure, the pursuit of love is also associated with fortune hunting. Familiar with classical mythology, Bassanio imagines himself as Jason who, in the company of the Argonauts and with the assistance of Medea’s magic arts, succeeds in obtaining the potent prize of the golden fleece of the ram that he was sent by Pelias to capture. Portia’s gorgeous “sunny locks / Hang on her temples like a golden fleece” (1.1.169–70; emphasis mine). The association unabashedly forged between Portia as the object of male desire and the promise of gold in the discourse of Bassanio’s pursuit finds a relevant context in early modern England’s courtiers, pirates, privateers, and merchants that sailed the seas in quest of gold, profit, and fame.74 The Jason story had been used to lend credence to and energize the vast possibilities of Renaissance England’s commercial and colonial ventures. When projects such as Walter Raleigh’s rivalry with Spain for the gold of the Americas, Sir Francis Drake’s and Thomas Cavendish’s charting of commercial seaways to Asia, and Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s and Martin Frobisher’s efforts to discover an overseas trade route to China are alluded to for cultural context, Bassanio’s desire for Portia lends support to the close relationship that exists between literary narratives of romantic love and cultural articulations of masculine colonial desire.75 Sidestepping the cultural and ideological constraints of the male lover frustrated by the non-reciprocating and cruel mistress of the courtly love tradition and participating instead in a masculinist worldmaking forged by the rigors of overseas (ad)venturing, patriarchal discourse replaces literary imaginings of the conquest of the lady’s heart with the challenging vision of sallying forth and conquering lands through the fantasy of penetrating—to borrow Raleigh’s evocative metaphor for imprinting English presence on Guiana—foreign lands figured not only as female but virginal. The figuration of love’s pursuit as an endeavor that necessitates crossing bodies of water not only denotes risk-taking, but also brings into metaphorical entanglement the discourses of romantic desire and of merchandising activities. Early modern England’s nascent colonial and imperial fantasies find expression in literary representations of courtship as a venture that partakes of the dangers experienced in the activities of trade, merchandising, and mercantilism. Requiring labor and effort, the pursuit of love can function as an evocative metaphor for a nation’s expansionist ambitions and imperial fantasies, a metaphor constructed out of early modern European conceptions of sexuality and race.76

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If Shakespeare’s Portia is figured as an object pursued and acquired by male desire, she is not strictly defined by this cultural narrative, playing an active role in manipulating legal structures to her advantage and ratifying the capitalist values of independence, individualism, and power. A character who has been treated as a high-quality merchant good by her late father, Portia applies economic principles to the management of romantic desire, love, and friendship, exercising power over characters who make their way to Belmont. She is adept at manipulating events to her advantage and to achieve a goal. In Act 5, we see her getting some pleasure from arousing anxiety in Bassanio when she tells him she will give her body to the young “civil doctor” (5.1.209) who supposedly has her ring. We know that it was Portia, disguised as Balthazar, who had earlier asked for Bassanio’s ring as a token of gratitude for the services that s/he had rendered Antonio. In a world in which the close relationship between men can potentially weaken the marital bond, Portia acts decisively to ensure that Bassanio’s relationship as her spouse remains uncompromised.77 She does this by generating anxiety in both Bassanio and Antonio—even if only momentarily—who ardently swear their fidelity and commitment to her. To assure Portia that Bassanio will “never more … break an oath with thee” (5.1.247), Antonio says that, even as he had once served as the latter’s surety for a loan from Shylock, he is also now willing to guarantee Bassanio’s faithfulness in matters of the heart (5.1.248–52). Portia responds with “Then you shall be his surety” (5.1.253; emphasis mine), a demand that reminds us of Antonio’s anxiety-filled experience with Shylock. In Act 5 scene 1, however, the motif of surety derives from the joyful context of friendship ties, cheerful teasing, and marital unions. As a surety, the merchant brings the friendship bond into conjunction with the commercial bond in the role he plays in financing Bassanio’s pursuit of Portia, enabling him to secure her hand in marriage. Venice’s commercial success is enabled by the freedom to contract, a freedom maintained, as Marc Shell perceives, “at the potential cost of taking away the freedom of some men by imprisoning, enslaving, or killing them.”78 In Venice, people are bought and sold by the mechanism of legal arrangements and through the marriage economy. Ownership of persons is an important metaphor that controls The Merchant’s dramatization of economic negotiations and legal transactions, informing even the holy institution of marriage itself. Gender politics shapes social manifestations and literary expressions of the ownership of persons in early modern

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England. Viewed from within the cultural parameters of late sixteenth-­ century English patriarchal discourse, Portia could be a potentially transgressive figure—one thinks here of her role as a woman who strategically deploys crossdressing to achieve her goals—even as she ratifies the normative value of the heterosexual union in marriage that typically brings Shakespearean comedy to its close. We also note that Shylock’s case against Antonio rests on the system of law that lends support to the vibrancy of Venetian commercial life itself. Shylock believes he can turn to a court of law to reinforce his contractual claims and legal rights. His action against Antonio for breach of contract evokes both medieval and early modern developments in contract law. Shylock’s informal/parol agreement with Antonio translates into formal legal proceedings in a court of law, where Shakespeare’s audience might have detected the basic structures of informal contract law in Elizabethan England. In court, Shylock meets Portia disguised as Balthazar, a doctor of the law. Portia applies the law not only to save the merchant but also to expropriate Shylock’s goods and possessions for the state, according one half of it to the aggrieved party Antonio. Her injunction to Shylock not to shed “One drop of Christian blood” (4.1.305) represents a hyper-literalist reading of the law, bringing legal interpretation to its irrational extreme. Venetian authority goes even one step further to force the Jew to convert to the Christian faith. Kenneth Graham notes that Shylock’s forced conversion to the Christian faith, presented by the Venetian court as the only alternative to death for the Jew, constitutes “[t]he sourest Shakespearean conversion of all.”79 Judaism’s relationship with the Christian faith is a familiar topic broached in writings on Jews in early modern England. When having a chance to visit the Jewish ghetto in Venice, for example, Coryate observes that fewe of [the Jews] living in Italy are converted to the Christian religion. For this I understand is the maine impediment to their conversion: All their goodes are confiscated as soone as they embrace Christianity: and this I heard is the reason, because whereas many of them doe raise their Fortunes by usury, in so much that they doe not only sheare, but also flea many a poore Christians estate by their griping extortion; it is therefore decreed by the Pope, and other free Princes in whose territories they live, that they shall make a restitution of all their ill gotten goods, and so disclogge their soules

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and consciences, when they are admitted by holy baptisme into the bosome of Christs Church.80

At the Jewish ghetto, Coryate was at history’s original parcel of land officially set apart by the state for a minority constituency or group of people to live in. We often associate the ghetto with America’s inner cities, but the idea of the ghetto has its historical origin in Venice’s attempt to manage the presence of Jews in its midst. The word we know as ghetto derives from “getto,” which refers to a foundry in old Venetian dialect.81 When Shakespeare considered Venice’s reputation as one of Europe’s largest cities that boasted a cosmopolitan and international identity, he also looked at the London of his day to contemplate affinities and dissimilarities between the two cities. According to a foreign visitor to London in the period: London is a large, excellent and mighty city of business, and the most important in the whole kingdom; most of the inhabitants are employed in buying and selling merchandise, and trading in almost every corner of the world, since the river is most useful and convenient for this purpose, considering that ships from France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Hamburg and other kingdoms, come almost up to the city, to which they convey goods and receive and take away others in exchange.82

Late sixteenth-century London was a “‘world city’ … loosening its dependence on Antwerp and diversifying its trade relations, geographically and in content”; the experience of London was characterized by meetings between peoples from foreign lands who brought with them linguistic variety and foreign material cultures.83 Facilitating London’s intercultural encounters and enhancing the city’s international climate was the presence of the Royal Exchange founded by the English merchant and financier Sir Thomas Gresham and officially opened by Queen Elizabeth I in 1570. Modeled on the Antwerp Bourse, England’s Royal Exchange—a gathering place for international merchants and a center that sold wares and luxury goods—not only brought foreigners to London but also pointed to the important role of merchants in shaping the city’s cosmopolitan identity.84 In Shakespeare’s oeuvre, Venice is a maritime republic whose setting offers opportunities for a dramatist to portray a Renaissance city historically known for its status as a leading European economic and trading

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power. It enables Shakespeare in The Merchant to capture the exuberant ethos of a society animating the activities of young lovers in pursuit of love while facilitating dramatic representation of some of the ways in which economic pursuit can have an effect—both salutary and otherwise—on culture and values. Another play of Shakespeare’s that offers a setting defined by its historical ethos of vibrant commercialism is his early work The Comedy of Errors. Where the Roman playwright Plautus set his Menaechmi, the source text for The Comedy, in the ancient Greek city of Epidamnus, Shakespeare changed this setting to Ephesus, a major trading center in the ancient Mediterranean world. Capital of the Roman province of Asia, this port-city was a lucrative commercial center situated on one of the busiest trade routes of the Roman world. Shakespeare’s choice of Ephesus as the controlling setting of The Comedy was not incidental. Like the vibrant port-city of Venice in The Merchant, Ephesus is an apt setting for representing the spirit of a society defined by economic interests, trading activities, and material acquisitions. Where the pursuit of economic profit and romantic love is framed by identifiable features (e.g., law versus grace) associated with Christian belief in The Merchant of Venice, the commercial ethos of Ephesus in The Comedy is likewise dramatized with reference to economic values associated by Max Weber with the Protestant ethic of hard work, frugality, and efficiency in managing the resources afforded by God for achieving economic profit and success. The Protestant ethic confers religious value on the idea of worldly “calling” in which the pursuit of profit is considered a Christian virtue.85 Richard Strier has argued that The Comedy represents “a world of merchants—every one of whom is honest, generous, and admirable,”86 that—in conjunction with the theme of the companionate marriage— offers in effect a celebration and even sanctification of bourgeois life. Identifiable Protestant values are intertwined with the workings of the marketplace in a play in which commerce, human relations, and married life are—after the comedy of errors has run its course—represented as generally wholesome.87 The Comedy bases its plotline on mistaken identities brought about by the existence of two sets of identical twins. Mistaken identities allow characters to become interchangeable, facilitating the motif of exchange that lies at the heart of the comedy. However, it is not only characters and, by extension, identities that are exchangeable. Signifying a culture of materialism, objects such as a gold chain, diamond ring, and guilders contribute to the ethos of a society in which the practice of exchange drives human

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relationships, desire, and even the workings of law. One character gets beaten up for not bringing bail money while another character—a Syracusan merchant—desperately needs 1000 marks to escape the death penalty for being found in the city of Ephesus. Characters in this play include merchants and a goldsmith, people whose occupational activities fuel economic life. A courtesan who owns a diamond ring which costs a precise “forty ducats” (4.3.78)—an object of ostentation generally affordable only to the aristocratic class—strategizes to trade it for a gold chain that is calculated to be of greater value. We encounter a piece of Turkish tapestry (4.1.104)—testament to Elizabeth I’s pro-Ottoman policy— silks, and jewels. Characters are involved in ocean travel for merchandising activities and the pursuit of commercial interests. In Act 4 scene 1, a merchant tells us that he is bound for Persia. In this play, exchange is the controlling principle enabling trade and commerce, one which when applied to human relationships erases identity, making individuals fungible. When encountering Ephesus on stage, Shakespeare’s audience might have noticed similarities between the experience of the marketplace dramatized in The Comedy and the energetically charged merchandising and trading activities enabled by the existence of London’s Royal Exchange. In Act 4 scene 3, Antipholus of Syracuse marvels: There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me As if I were their well-acquainted friend, And everyone doth call me by my name. Some tender money to me, some invite me, Some other give me thanks for kindnesses, Some offer me commodities to buy. Even now a tailor called me in his shop, And showed me silks that he had bought for me, And therewithal took measure of my body. Sure, these are but imaginary wiles, And Lapland sorcerers inhabit here. (4.3.1–11)

Shortly after, he continues: “here [in Ephesus] we wander in illusions. / Some blessèd power deliver us from hence!” (4.3.39–40). These lines bring the discourse of the marketplace into entanglement with the discourse of the magic arts, alluding to stories such as that found in Acts 19:11–20, where the sons of Sceva—a Jewish high priest—arrogated to

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themselves the authority to perform exorcisms by invoking Jesus’s name. In an episode of attempted but failed exorcism, a demon viciously attacked Sceva’s sons because they did not have the authority of Christ’s disciples to cast out demons. Ephesus is also the controlling setting of Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, a letter that contains numerous references to the spiritual world. Examples include the following verses: 1 Wherein, in times past ye walked, according to the course of this world, and after the prince that ruleth in the air, even the spirit, that now worketh in the children of disobedience. (Eph. 2:2) 2 For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, and against the worldly governors, the princes of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness, which are in the high places. (Eph. 6:12)

With its distinctive references to “principalities and powers in heavenly places” (Eph. 3:10), the Book of Ephesians is about the warfare of the faithful in the spiritual realm governed by Satan, manifested in Ephesus’s heavy involvement in magic and other mystery rites. When characters in The Comedy respond to behavior, conversations, and events that are baffling and inexplicable by looking at Ephesus as a city in which sorcery and witchcraft are practiced, Shakespeare was invoking accounts of Ephesian life found in the New Testament. In Act 4 scene 3, Antipholus of Syracuse and Dromio of Syracuse, chancing on the Courtesan, decide that she must be a witch, a sorceress, and the devil when she asks Antipholus for the chain that he had promised her. Never having met the Courtesan before, Antipholus is understandingly baffled and convinced that Ephesus is a city of ungodly enchantment and sorcery. In dramatizing Ephesus as a city under the influence of the demonic arts, Shakespeare indicates familiarity with not only the Book of Ephesians but also Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. Warning the Corinthian church to recognize and defend the true gospel of Jesus Christ that he has been commissioned by Christ to preach, Paul calls for supreme vigilance against false prophets and different gospels. It is important to be on one’s guard because good and falsehood may appear identical, “[a]nd no marvel: for Satan himself is transformed into an Angel of light” (2 Cor. 11:14). In Act 4 scene 3, Dromio of Syracuse responds to his master’s exclamation

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that the Courtesan is indeed “the devil” (4.3.46) with the following qualification: Nay, she is worse, she is the devil’s dam; and here she comes in the habit of a light wench. And thereof comes that the wenches say ‘God damn me’— that’s as much to say, ‘God make me a light wench.’ It is written they appear to men like angels of light. Light is an effect of fire, and fire will burn. Ergo, light wenches will burn. Come not near her. (4.3.47–52)

Remarkably, in this episode, the Courtesan responds to Antipholus’s strange behavior with the (rational) conclusion that he must be mad, which means his wife ought to be apprised of this.

Ocean Travel in Early Modern England In this chapter, we considered the cultural significance of surety’s relationship to economic-legal practice and biblical understanding in The Merchant of Venice. We looked at the representation of risk-taking in the merchant’s investment ventures, in which the element of “hazard” is heightened by the dangers of ocean travel. The idea of ocean travel generated both anxiety and excitement. Imaginations and representations of overseas (ad)venturing have been influenced by both secular and religious perspectives, often involving an entanglement of the two. Secular perspectives have been especially alert to the dangers of ocean travel while religious perspectives have served to underwrite and support the spiritual value of such travel, often framed with reference to the joys of commercial success and economic gain. The Merchant is a play that is alert to the activities of ocean travel in the early modern period, activities that inspired a sense of adventure as well as trepidation brought about by stories of danger on the high seas. There is always something enticing about the seas and oceans, an instinct encouraged by the great Elizabethan geographer Richard Hakluyt who recognized early on that control of the seas would make England a great nation. Having taught the new cosmography and cartography at Oxford, Hakluyt was a leading authority on maritime enterprises who understood that a vibrant commercial life was indispensable for England’s development and prosperity as a nation with imperial potential. Lending material support to his sense of the destined order of the English empire, Hakluyt undertook the monumental compilation of travel writing that has come down to us

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as The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589–1600), a project that inscribes English oceanic activities on the map of European expansionism.88 Hakluyt’s arousal of geographical interest and curiosity in the sixteenth century led to a notable increase in English maritime activities, especially in the 1580s. According to Richard Helgerson, Hakluyt’s collection of travel narratives was instrumental in foregrounding the important contribution of merchants to England’s economic life even as it encouraged the gentry class to participate in trade. Hakluyt’s focus on merchants and their activities helped to ground the concept of the English nation as a transcendent and uncontested point of reference.89 When merchandising vessels plied the seas, the stage was set for closer encounters between peoples, cultures, and far-flung lands, encouraging connectivity that we in the twenty-first century might refer to as international or global. Merchandising vessels are now viewed as having potential to facilitate the conduct of foreign relations. Recognizing that commercial activities would connect England to the larger outside world, Hakluyt, who believed that “Godlinesse is great riches,”90 brought theological piety into conjunction with economic ambition. Samuel Purchas, the other great compiler of travel narratives in the period, also recognized that there existed an inextricable relationship between Christian conversion and commerce, between theological imperialism and territorial acquisition.91 In Virginia’s Verger (1625), a work which affirms that holiness and godliness will be richly rewarded by God in this world, Purchas figures Virginia as a bride awaiting the arrival of her bridegroom, a typological figuration charged with considerations of economic profit.92 The moral is clear: If England undertook the divinely sanctioned project of settling the Virginia colony, God would bless the English with its wealth. Virginia’s Verger shows Purchas advocating a theology of materialism supported by scriptural validation. The idea that godliness brings wealth and promise of profit supports the Calvinistic understanding that the prosperous man evinces God’s favor and election. Early modern England possesses its own version of the prosperity gospel. “The Protestant ethic,” as Max Weber puts it, supports “the spirit of capitalism.”93 The entanglement of Protestant values and capitalist pursuit finds typological expression particularly in James I’s perception of himself as England’s King Solomon, an association given artistic expression in Peter Paul Rubens’s The Peaceful Reign of James I adorning the ceiling of the banqueting house at Whitehall. Where Elizabeth I is Deborah—a female

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judge of pre-monarchic Israel—of the Tudor dynasty, James I portrays himself as rex pacificus or “the royal peacemaker,” his typological association with King Solomon underscoring both his wisdom and internationalist temper. 1 Kings 10:1–12 and 2 Chronicles 9:1–13 tell us that the Queen of Sheba traveled to Solomon’s court to determine for herself whether the king was in fact as wise as rumor would have it. This narrative not only affirms that Solomon is wise but also that he is wealthy, his court brimming with gold and myriad other forms of precious objects. Solomon’s incomparable wealth can be traced to the enormous quantity of gold brought back from Ophir, a narrative that has been invoked to frame English ambitions to gain access to the spice trade of the East Indies. Wisdom and wealth enjoy equal emphasis in early modern English readings of Solomon and the gold of Ophir. In The Voyages and Peregrinations made by Ancient Kings, Patriarchs, Apostles, Philosophers, and others to and through the remoter parts of the known World,94 Purchas— who identifies traveling as an act of Christian piety—offers an allegorical reading of the sea voyaging of Solomon’s men to Ophir. In this reading, the “naturall man”95 who does not leave England for the larger and outside world is spiritually insular, relying only on his own wisdom. When this sinning soul takes the courageous step of leaving land and setting sail on the seas, it experiences divine illumination from the “winde”96 of the Holy Spirit and guidance from the lodestar and compass that is Christ. In Purchas’s allegory, the gold and precious metals of Ophir stand for God’s spiritual treasures, which—when mined—edify, enrich, and adorn the soul, described as a “Temple.”97 If James I is England’s own King Solomon, Jesus is both “the Heavenly Solomon” and the “Temple in the New Jerusalem,” the antitype of all the types found in both the Old Testament and English history.98 James I’s typological relationship with Solomon serves the Stuart monarch’s representation of his rule as an “international” one that supports forging foreign alliances through diplomacy and economic ties. The significance of Shakespeare’s dramatization of oceanic activities in The Merchant is not restricted to the storyline of Antonio’s merchandising activities but expands to include the ethos of early modern English overseas ventures and activities. An important motif in the genres of epic and romance, the sea not only functions as a medium for enabling characters to reach a telos, but it also symbolizes the dangers of the unknown that threaten the voyager with destruction. Buffeted on the ocean of Chaos in

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Paradise Lost, Milton’s Satan almost never makes it to earth when he suddenly finds himself careening and plummeting out of control. Navigating the challenge of the seas affords opportunity for contemporary English poets to deploy the motif of ocean travel for representing experiences as varied as the separation between lovers, voyages of discovery, and even one’s relationship with God. In English Renaissance literature, John Donne comes to mind as a poet who makes distinctive use of the suggestive analogy and metaphor of ocean travel to depict all three experiences in his poetry and religious writing. In “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” which thematizes the experience of parting between two lovers, Donne evokes the metaphysical conceit of the tear to emblematize profuse grief that, if not constrained, could metamorphose into seas that drown the male speaker in their overwhelming deluge. In “Hymn to God, my God, in my Sickness,” he represents the experience of his illness as a voyage through the straits of fever, which—when it reaches its destination in death—will touch the resurrection. As he ponders the imminence of entering the ocean of eternity, Donne invokes different straits—Magellan, Gibraltar, and the mythic Straits of Anyan—to metaphorize (the passage of) his critically declining health to arrive at the typological affirmation that Christ, the second Adam, confers eternal life even as his mortal body pays the penalty for the first Adam’s transgression in the Garden of Eden. In his theological explication of faith’s primacy over reason in Christian experience, Donne likens people who seek God through the faculty of their reason to mariners who sailed the seas before the invention of the compass. Because there is no sure guiding principle in such ventures— after all, the compass has not yet been invented—the mariner is unwilling to leave sight of land. For Donne, faith—“the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1)—is the paradoxical experience of navigating through life with a reliable compass: “But as by the use of the Compass, men safely dispatch Ulysses dangerous ten years travell in so many dayes, and have found out a new world richer then the old; so doth Faith, as soon as our hearts are touched with it, direct and inform us in that great search of the discovery of Gods Essence, and the new Hierusalem, which Reason durst not attempt.”99 Before Christ ascended into heaven, he gave his apostles the “great commission” to make disciples of all nations. But how is the gospel going to find its way to the far corners of the earth? The answer: through ships. Donne’s God is the archetypal shipbuilder who makes use of sea-going

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vessels to spread the good news of salvation to the world. He is, in other words, the God of ocean travel. In a sermon preached before members and friends of the Virginia Company on November 13, 1622, Donne refers to God as a “Shipwright” who gives to man the model of a ship in the form of an ark. This ship is given by God to facilitate transnational crossings. God, Donne affirms, “taught us to make Ships, not to transport our selves, but to transport him.”100 The shipping metaphor directly appeals to supporters and builders of the Virginia plantation. Donne advances a spiritualized vision of ocean travel when describing God’s designs for enabling transnational evangelism. His emphasis on God’s control over sea-going vessels supports the related vision of England’s planting of colonies in the New World as participating in the advancement of the gospel. In early seventeenth-century England, interest in the New World focused on the activities of the Virginia Company, which was established by King James I to build a permanent colony in North America. The political/colonial project of setting up plantations in America cannot be dissociated from the religious impulse to bring the good news of the gospel to the natives of the New World. For the Virginia Company, the desire to reap the benefits of colonization such as gaining access to natural resources across the Atlantic and finding new markets for English goods goes hand in hand with seeking to bring civility and good governance to the savage in America, subject matter thematized by Shakespeare in The Tempest. Evoking the theological implications of typological discourse and the commercial possibilities of overseas merchandising activities, The Merchant anticipates the discourse of the Virginia Company in which God encourages ocean travel with the promise that he will bless the faithful for bringing the light of truth and civilization to the New World. Religiosity and profit maximization are two sides of the same coin for both the Virginia Company and The Merchant. An important site on the map of early modern English colonial ambitions, Virginia might have focused the attention of English ocean travel but so did the East Indies. In The Merchant, Shakespeare includes “the Indies” and “India” in the catalogue of geographical placenames— Tripolis, Mexico, England, Lisbon, Barbary (1.3.15–17; 3.2.268)— invoked to capture the vast expanse of Antonio’s overseas ventures and global reach of his business activities. If Antonio has ships bound for Mexico, rumored for its gold, and known for Spain’s conquest of the Aztec Empire, then the merchant’s investment activities extend beyond

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the ambit of Venice’s focus on Mediterranean commerce and facilitation of trade between the Levant and Europe to include the Americas. Pointing to Asia, the East Indies highlights the growing importance of the Pacific Ocean to the cartographical imagination of early modern England. In 1600—the year in which The Merchant was published as a quarto— Queen Elizabeth I, attracted by news of India’s wealth, granted a formal charter to London merchants trading in the East Indies. Luís Vaz de Camões’s Os Lusíadas (1572)—the great Portuguese epic of empire which identifies control over mercantile commerce as the defining feature of Portugal’s rise as a colonial power—identified India as a land blessed by its liberal possession of spices and whose riches are displayed by the gold and precious stones of its courts. Camões exuberantly dilates for his reader an India that is “bursting with merchandise of every kind, thanks to its maritime traffic with other lands from China to the Nile.”101 Recognizing the supreme importance of dominating the spice trade, the Portuguese had set out to control and monopolize the commerce of the Indian Ocean by endeavoring to squeeze out Muslim traders as well as other European competitors such as the Venetians and Spaniards. In Os Lusíadas, Camoes traces Portugal’s political stature as an imperial power to God’s providential control over history, which helps to ensure that Vasco da Gama—the hero of the epic poem—is protected from the schemes and practices of treacherous Muslims. However, if Os Lusíadas extols the exploits of the Portuguese who are renowned for defending the true Catholic faith against pagans and infidels, its celebration of fame does not always coexist comfortably with anxieties about the quest for glory and renown linked to the sin of overarching ambition. Before da Gama and his men set sail from Portugal for India in canto 4, he was confronted by an old and reverend-looking man (of Restelo) who inveighed against the voyage because of the dangers involved and ultimate hollowness of fame and glory chased after by the seafaring Portuguese. Religious anxiety about God’s disapproval of man’s desire for renown and material wealth— brought into focus in canto 8’s litany of the numerous ills that love for gold can bring—is, in the larger picture, almost always balanced by Camoes’s palpable excitement about the benefits enabled by the voyage to India, in particular the acquisition of precious spices: pepper, mace, nutmeg, cloves, and cinnamon. Enjoying the monopoly to transport goods from India to England, the East India Company was set up—through a formal charter granted by Elizabeth I—to challenge Portuguese and Dutch domination of the spice

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trade in the East Indies. Several Englishmen from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—Ralph Fitch the London merchant, William Hawkins, Sir Thomas Roe (England’s first official ambassador to the Mughal court), and Thomas Coryate among them—visited India and even brokered diplomatic deals with North India’s foremost Islamic empire. The Mughals, the best known being Shah Jahan who built the Taj Mahal, were famous for the lavishness and splendor of their cities and courts. Mughal India became synonymous with the dazzling wealth of the Orient. Calicut, the last city visited by da Gama in India and the chief emporium of Arab trade on the Malabar Coast, was the most important trading center in southern India, attracting clients ranging from Europeans who came overland via the countries of the Ottoman Empire to Muslim and Jewish merchants hailing from North Africa, Turkey, Persia, and Egypt.102 In Elizabethan and Jacobean England, ocean travel to the East Indies—a designation that covered a vast area including India and what we know today as Southeast Asia—was generally understood to be risky if not dangerous. When in 1621, John Fletcher’s The Island Princess identified “India” as its controlling setting, it referred not to the Indian subcontinent but the Maluku Archipelago or Moluccas.103 Portraying the Portuguese presence in the court of Tidore, an island in the Moluccas, Fletcher evokes a historical setting in which different European powers vied for control of the spice trade.104 Recognizing the importance of controlling the spice trade of the East Indies, the Portuguese had sought to dominate the commerce of the Indian Ocean with the aim of squeezing out Muslim traders and other European competitors. Fully aware that Portuguese ambition to establish commercial supremacy over the Indian Ocean necessitated seizure and control of important geopolitical locations in South and Southeast Asia, the famous military commander Afonso de Albuquerque captured Goa in 1510. The conquest of Malacca one year after Goa marked the scope of Portuguese imperial ambitions. Tidore and Ternate—the controlling settings of The Island Princess— were not the only islands in the Moluccas experiencing the effects of European imperial rivalry. Another island, Amboyna—settled by the Portuguese in 1521 but captured by the Dutch in 1605—was the scene of an event that reshaped Anglo–Dutch relations in both Europe and Asia. Jerry Brotton tells us that competition between Portugal and Spain for control of the Moluccas, the prized possession of the spice trade, helped inaugurate the beginnings of early modern geography. In the employment

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of the imperial courts of both Portugal and Castile, geographers produced maps that lent support to the political claim to territory advanced by the respective masters they served. When the Flemish mathematician and cartographer Gerardus Mercator served as a major geographer in the Castilian court, he saw the world in terms of the eastern and western dominions of the Portuguese and Spanish Empires.105 In Mercator’s day, Portugal was the European power reputed for controlling the flow of merchandise from Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean back into Northern Europe. In contrast, Habsburg Spain focused its expansionist activities on the Americas and the Pacific Ocean to the west. Merchandising activities and crossing oceans to foreign lands can bring the ambitions of colonial expansionism into conjunction with a nation’s religious culture. These activities can be grounded in the pursuit of secular interests where profit-making is the primary goal, or they can be viewed as important instruments for facilitating the advancement of the Christian faith. The figure of the merchant and motif of ocean travel have contributed to inflecting the meanings of religious themes found in the polemical works, devotional literature, and epic poems of Renaissance England. An important literary work in seventeenth-century England that framed the idea of India within a theological perspective is Milton’s Paradise Lost, published in response to the experience of the Puritan Revolution, English Civil War, and Republican experiment. Milton’s allusions to India derive their significance from a literary desire and ideological need to engage with Camões’s Os Lusíadas, translated into English by Sir Richard Fanshawe in 1655. Paradise Lost registers its author’s deep cartographical imagination, captured in the invocation of geographical placenames. In relation to our discussion in this section of the chapter, I wish at this point to consider Milton’s allusions to India in Book 2 of Paradise Lost. In Book 2, Milton’s Satan sits resplendent on a “Throne of Royal State” (PL 2.1) that far outshines “the wealth of Ormus and of Ind” (PL 2.2), oriental settings that abound in “Barbaric Pearl and Gold” (PL 2.4). Located at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, Ormuz is a rich trading city that facilitated the export of luxury Ottoman and Mamluk goods (including copper, mercury, saffron, carpets, porcelain, and even opium) to Calicut in exchange for access to Indian merchandise and spices found in the islands of the East Indies. In Book 2, the reader also finds Satan making his way to the gates of hell in a flight that alludes to the trading activities of merchants in the Indian Ocean world and Southeast Asia. And in Book 3, a vulture-like Satan—bred in “Imaus” (PL 3.431), a mountain range which

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stretches roughly northeast from Afghanistan to the Arctic Ocean and separating Tartary (roughly Siberia) from Mongolia and the Gobi Desert— flies from a precipitous terrain to an Eden-like Kashmir, where the “Hydaspes” (PL 3.436) River rises. Pointing to literary works such as the Odyssey, Aeneid, Argonautica, and Os Lusíadas, Milton’s sailing imagery tells the reader that Satan is a fallen being. In classical mythology, it was the loss of the Golden Age that made it necessary to build the first boat, Jason’s Argo, launched in search of the Golden Fleece. Religious allusions often inflect late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literary representations of interactions with foreign countries and peoples. The primary medium through which international contacts are enabled, the oceans become an important symbol that captures the nascent dreams of English expansionist desire. Ocean travel accommodates many forms of individual, political, and national desire: to discover new lands and achieve fame; to challenge Catholic Spain’s territorial acquisitions and imperial ambitions; to pursue the promises of commerce as an important instrument of nation-building. Navigating the seas can have religious significance in early modern England, especially when undertaken to support Christianity’s missionizing mandate. If sailing vessels serve as instruments of evangelization, they also enable the growth of commercial activities and pursuit of expansionist ambitions, activities that fuel the energies of a secularizing modernity.

Conclusion The Merchant of Venice gestures in the direction of a vaster world which exists far beyond Venice and fictitious Belmont, Portia’s wealthy estate, that Shakespeare borrowed from his source text Il Pecorone. It points to this larger world through geographical naming—Morocco, Aragon, Tripolis, Mexico, England, the Indies—highlighting Venice’s and Belmont’s positioning in a highly connected planet enabled by ocean travel. If the entire world is the field of the merchant’s business activities, the possibilities it presents for profit-making cannot be disentangled from nervousness about the risks and dangers associated with ocean travel. This nervousness notwithstanding, The Merchant concludes not only with the familiar symbolic closure of marriage but also restoration of Antonio’s argosies. It is possible that Antonio did not suffer disastrous loss because Portia intervened behind the scenes, lending a generous hand with her wealth.

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Unlike the merchant who takes risks for the generation of wealth and accumulation of capital, Shylock is excoriated for his usury, an exploitative economic practice. Paul Stevens finds that Shylock “is most virulently satirized [in the play] for not being a capitalist, that is, for not being an adventuring, risk-taking, truly globalizing capitalist.”106 Even as New Testament grace gets conceptualized as the workings of capital, the vision of “global capitalism” dramatized in The Merchant “is idealized as a manifestation of [the] circulation of grace.”107 If Christ taught that one could not serve both God and Mammon, he also stressed that faithful service and stewardship require wise investment that translates into healthy profit returns. In Jesus’s parable of the talents (Matt. 25:14–30), the servant who was averse to risk-taking and instead hid his lord’s money in the ground was severely punished. Shakespeare’s Christian characters belong to the genre of comedy which protects their capital(ist) assets and prospers their speculation ventures even as it promises the fulfilment of romantic love in nuptial union. If the Christian merchant is blessed with material success by God’s outpouring of grace, the usurious Jew is punished by exclusion from the benefits of that grace. Belonging to the dominant culture, children under grace enjoy the privilege of wielding the state’s legal machinery to subjugate the Other via the expropriation of property and deprivation of cultural identity. In this chapter, I invoked words like cosmopolitan, international, and intercultural to describe interactions between people, societies, and cultures in early modern England and Europe, dealings dramatized in The Merchant and The Jew of Malta. These words may remind the reader of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century discourses of multiculturalism, transnationalism, and globalization, asking whether we are in fact engaging in interpretive anachronism when suggesting that the economic landscape of Renaissance England shares features with our own at the start of the new millennium. I find Paul Stevens’s comment, extracted below, helpful in offering a perspective on some of the ways in which we can think of the idea of the global in relation to the economic activities of sixteenthand seventeenth-century England and Europe: What a deeper historical perspective would make most immediately clear is that modern Western capitalism was global from its inception. How else are we to explain the genuinely paradigm-shifting expansion of Europe in the Renaissance, if not in terms of the beginning of the present world economy?

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As Immanuel Wallerstein and many others have emphasized, it is in the sixteenth century, not the twentieth, that the global economy begins. In the sixteenth century the massive influx of gold and silver from America first financed the voyages that established a vast network of ‘factories,’ or trading settlements, in Africa, India, the East Indies, China, and Japan, and brought silk, porcelain, nutmeg, and pepper to Lisbon, Amsterdam, and rain-soaked Deptford. In order for economic activity on this worldwide scale to develop in early modern Christendom, it had to articulate itself in religious terms, and one of the many ways it did this was through the Christian argument of grace. Nowhere is this argument more clearly seen at work than in the popular drama The Merchant of Venice.108

If grace, as Stevens has analyzed, is a theological concept that has bearing on the development of trade and commerce in sixteenth- and seventeenth-­ century England in affirming God’s blessings on the “capitalist” activities of the faithful, it is also entangled with cultural discourses that register anxieties about the existence of the alien, the Other whose existence— though unwelcomed—is necessary for the economic prosperity of the nation. If grace is divine generosity lavished on fallen men and women who are not worthy recipients because of sin, it can also be coercive when functioning in a secular court of law, as evidenced in Portia’s handling of Shylock’s demand for Antonio’s pound of flesh contractually owed to him. When grace/mercy is espoused in court by Portia in the guise of a judge, it does not seem to be readily or willingly extended to the Jew. Christian Venice’s treatment of Shylock in court is everything but forgiving, an unsettling of the idea that “[t]he quality of mercy is not strained. / It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven” (4.1.179–80). Grace not only benefits those under its aegis, but it also distinguishes the people of an outmoded dispensation—the Jews—from the redeemed in its typological logic. Christians can act prejudicially toward people of cultural difference, a disposition that does not get in the way of the abundant blessings showered by God on his people, manifested in the restoration of the merchant’s argosies that concludes the play. The Merchant broaches the complex terms of the debate on the advantages and disadvantages of merchandising activities in its dramatization of the conflict between the usurer and the good if naïve man who decides to put himself forward as a surety for his friend. That conflict is inseparable from a society’s theological worldview. If such a worldview exerts cultural

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pressures on the emerging shape of early modern English capitalism, it finds itself reshaped in turn by the developing impulses of a secularizing modernity in which overseas commercial ventures are beginning to receive recognition for advancing England’s international political presence. Grace must be disseminated from England to the world through the medium of ocean travel, facilitating not only transnational activity but also international encounters that afford space for the development and fulfillment of a nation’s nascent colonial and imperial ambitions.

Notes 1. For a discussion of the subject from a Marxist critical perspective, see Walter Cohen, “The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism,” in Materialist Shakespeare: A History, ed. Ivo Kamps (London and New York: Verso, 1995), 71–92. 2. Ibid., 75. Cohen finds that the play poses ideological discrepancies in its representation of the Venetian setting, for at the time of the play’s production, Venice represented a more advanced stage of commercial development than England. 3. William Burton, A Caveat for Sureties (London: Richard Field, 1593). When quoting from this work, I have modernized and adjusted the spelling for clarity. 4. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “surety, n.,” accessed September 11, 2021, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/surety_n?tab=meaning_and_ use#19763390. 5. John Donne is an example of a poet and preacher who is steeped in economic imagery for theological matters, especially in the sermons. For a reading of this subject, see Winfried Schleiner, The Imagery of John Donne’s Sermons (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1970), esp. 122–37. 6. Burton, Caveat, 3–4. 7. Ibid., 20 (emphasis mine). 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 20–21. 10. Ibid., 21. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 24. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., 31. 15. Ibid., 29–30. 16. Ibid., 44.

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17. Ibid., 64. 18. Burton, A Caveat, 24. 19. Charles Wesley, “And can it be that I should gain,” in The United Methodist Hymnal, ed. Carlton R.  Young (Nashville, TN: United Methodist Publishing House, 1990), 363. 20. Martin Luther, Trade and Usury, in Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, vol. 45 (Saint Louis, MO: Concordia, 1955–86), 233–310, here 252. 21. Ibid., 45:253. 22. Ibid., 45:254. 23. Seneca, The Woorke of the Excellent Philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca, trans. Arthur Golding (Amsterdam, NL: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1974). When quoting from this work, I have modernized and adjusted the spelling for clarity. 24. See Greenblatt, ed., Norton Shakespeare, 1084. 25. For a reading of Shakespeare’s exploration of the nature of the marriage bond and of human bondage, of the principal bond to the human species and of the bond to one’s tribe, see Marc Shell, Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophic Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 47–83. 26. Alison A. Chapman, The Legal Epic:“Paradise Lost” and the Early Modern Law (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 145. 27. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “hazard, n. and adj.,” accessed February 24, 2023, https://www-­oed-­com.libproxy1.nus.edu.sg/view/Entr y/84853?rskey=cctiy3&result=1#eid. The OED registers different meanings for the word “hazard.” It first refers to “a gambling game with two dice in which the chances are complicated in a number of arbitrary rules.” It also denotes “chance, accident, unpredictability of outcome” as well as “risk, danger, jeopardy.” As a count noun, “hazard” also denotes “[a] risk of loss or harm posed by something; a possibility of danger or an adverse outcome; a condition or situation involving such a possibility. In later use also: a person or thing which represents or poses such a hazard; a physical object which is regarded as a source of potential difficulty or danger.” 28. For critical readings of Bassanio as an aristocratic figure, see Seymour Kleinberg, “The Merchant of Venice: The Homosexual as Anti-Semite in Nascent Capitalism,” in Literary Visions of Homosexuality, ed. Stuart Kellogg (New York: Haworth Press, 1983), 113–26, esp. 117; Alan Sinfield, “How to Read The Merchant of Venice Without Being Heterosexist,” in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (New York: Methuen, 1985), 2:122–39, esp. 136; Jonathan Hall, Anxious Pleasures: Shakespearean Comedy and the Nation-State (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 1995), 62; and Karoline Szatek, “The Merchant of Venice

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and the Politics of Commerce,” in “The Merchant of Venice”: New Critical Essays, John W.  Mahon and Ellen Macleod Mahon, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2002), 325–52, esp. 333. 29. For an important study of the relationship between merchandising activities, ocean travel, and literary genre, see Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 151–91. Helgerson analyzes the social and representational tensions that exist between a dominant aristocratic ethos and the spirit of mercantilism in the literature of early modern Europe and England. Where the aristocratic ethos is associated with the discourse of conquest and imperial expansionism, the commercial ethos focuses on profit-making, offering an economic and commercial definition of the English nation. For a reading of the often-­ambivalent signification of merchant adventuring in relation to the epic narrative of martial heroics, see David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 248–67. 30. Albert William Levi, The High Road of Humanity: The Seven Ethical Ages of Western Man, Donald Phillip Verene and Molly Black Verene, eds. (Amsterdam, NL: Rodopi, 1995), 95. 31. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “royal merchant, n.,” accessed September 11, 2021, https://www-­oed-­com.libproxy1.nus.edu.sg/view/Entr y/168245?redirectedFrom=royal+merchant#eid193109257. 32. Luther, Trade and Usury, 45:233–310, here 250. 33. Ibid., 45:247. 34. See Appendix, “The Dutch Church Libel,” in Marlowe, Jew of Malta, 117. 35. Thomas Lupton, Siuqila too good, to be true (London: H.  Bynneman, 1580), 29–30. When quoting from this work, I have modernized and adjusted the spelling for clarity. 36. Ibid., 30. 37. Joan Pong Linton, The Romance of the New World: Gender and the Literary Formations of English Colonialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 73. 38. In “The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism,” Cohen notes that “once the majority of the traditional ruling class had adapted to capitalism, the issue of usury faded away” (73). 39. Thomas Nashe, Christ’s Tears Over Jerusalem. Whereunto is annexed A comparative admonition to London (London: James Roberts, 1593), 53. 40. David Hawkes, Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580–1680 (New York: Palgrave, 2001), esp. Chaps. 4–5. Focusing on Shakespeare’s sonnets, Chap. 4 analyzes the literary and cultural associations perceived to exist between usury and unnatural sexuality, especially sodomy. In Chap. 5, Hawkes discusses the topic of usury and typology’s complicity in anti-Semitic discourse.

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41. See Hawkes’s discussion in Idols of the Marketplace, Chap. 4. 42. Bacon, Major Works, 421. 43. Ibid., 422. 44. See “Introduction” in William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. John Russell Brown (1955; rprt., London and New  York: Methuen, 1984), xliii. 45. Herbert, The English Poems, 55. 46. Herbert, The English Poems, 57. 47. In Resistant Structures, Richard Strier analyzes George Herbert’s focus on the importance of seeking secure grounding in the social world, a practical instinct that sometimes finds expression as “straightforward spiritual commercialism” (100). 48. Frank Whigham, Seizures of the Will in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 7. See also Lacey Baldwin Smith, Treason in Tudor England: Politics and Paranoia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). Smith argues that relationships between people in early modern England appear to be marked by a pervasive sense of social life as war. Despite a certain hyperbolism, Smith’s reading of the conditions of social and political life in Tudor England as “paranoid” does seem to have a point. 49. Ben Jonson, George Chapman, and John Marston, Eastward Ho! ed. C. G. Petter (London: Ernest Benn, 1973), 2.2.86–90. 50. Ben Jonson, Volpone, in “The Alchemist” and Other Plays, ed. Gordon Campbell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), Act 1 scene 1 lines 33–40. 51. John Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (London: Fontana, 1993), 149. 52. Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 56–57. 53. Ibid., 58. 54. James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). In Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 163–98, Daniel Vitkus considers the mediatory role of the Jews in early modern England’s relations and interactions with the Ottoman Empire as well as the slippery interchangeability of identities between Jews, Muslims, and Englishmen in the “Machiavellian marketplace” (195). 55. Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, 24. 56. Studies on the relationship between England and the Islamic world include Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Gerald

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Maclean and Nabil Matar, Britain and the Islamic World, 1558–1713 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 57. Julia Reinhard Lupton, “Creature Caliban,” Shakespeare Quarterly 51, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 1–23, here 10. 58. “For he shall give his Angels charge over thee to keep thee in all thy ways. / They shall bear thee in their hands, that thou hurt not thy foot against a stone” (Ps. 91:11–12). 59. For a reading of the influence of The Jew of Malta on The Merchant of Venice, see Ian McAdam, “New Directions: The Jew of Malta and The Merchant of Venice: A Reconsideration of Influence,” in “The Jew of Malta”: A Critical Reader, ed. Robert A. Logan (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 107–28. 60. In The Civilization of Europe, John Hale summarizes the situation of the Jews in Europe this way: “For many centuries, deprived of a homeland first by a Christianized Roman Empire and then by Muslim occupation of the Levant, Jews had been on the move throughout Europe, chiefly to avoid persecution, sometimes to seek new opportunities for business skills” (167). 61. Sarah K. Scott, “A Survey of Resources,” in The Jew of Malta: A Critical Reader, ed. Robert A. Logan (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2013), 169. 62. For a reading of The Jew of Malta as a play that represents the Jew as a characteristic product of Christian society and also as its most-hated enemy, see Stephen Greenblatt, “Marlowe, Marx, and Anti-Semitism,” in Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990), 40–58. For Greenblatt, “[t]he self-destructiveness [that] is built into the very structure of Barabas’ identity” (55) is a virtue very much admired by Marlowe, associated with an anarchic and even nihilistic impulse. 63. Thomas Coryate, Coryat’s Crudities, vol. 1 (Glasgow: James MacLehose & Sons, 1915), 326. 64. Ibid., 1:318. 65. Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love (London and New York: Methuen, 1973), 117–50. 66. See Katharine Eisaman Maus’s commentary in The Norton Shakespeare, 1086. 67. Coryate, Coryat’s Crudities, 1:372–73. 68. In Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), Sigurd Burckhardt reads Jessica and Lorenzo’s affair as an “inversion of true, bonded love” (224), tying it to the thoughtless squandering of stolen substance. 69. Barnabe Rich, The excellency of good women, the honour and estimation that belongeth vnto them. The infallible markes whereby to know them (London: Thomas Dawson, 1613), 9.

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70. Ibid., 6. 71. Ibid., 9. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid. 74. In The Romance of the New World, Linton writes: “The quest for the golden fleece is a common trope in the period for gold- and treasure-­ hunting, and pirates like Drake and Martin Frobisher were often celebrated in the ballads as Jasons…. Whereas the mythic Jason obtains the fleece to reclaim his usurped kingdom, latter-day Jasons ventured abroad to find the patrimony that eluded them at home” (31); the “myth of the golden fleece is generally used in the period to glorify piracy and the search for gold” (56–57). 75. For the role of interracial romance in underwriting the development of early modern English and European imperial ambitions, see Carmen Nocentelli, “The Erotics of Mercantile Imperialism: Cross-cultural Requitedness in the Early Modern Period,” The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 8, no. 1 (2008): 134–52. According to Nocentelli, “If travelers, poets, and playwrights could assimilate mercantile expansion to romance, marriage manuals and conduct books [of the period] routinely troped courtship and marriage as mercantile ventures” (141). 76. Carmen Nocentelli, Empires of Love: Europe, Asia, and the Making of Early Modern Identity (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), esp. 115–36. Even as tropes of miscegenation found in works such as John Fletcher’s The Island Princess point to both early modern European and English views of heteronormativity, marriage, and sexual behavior, they also lend support to representations of West-East and European-Asian cultural and geopolitical encounters. 77. Shakespearean criticism and gender(ed) readings have analyzed the ease with which the dramatization of close friendship between men in Shakespeare’s work appears to slide readily enough into suggestions of homoerotic desire and same-sex relationships. Studies that analyze representations of same-sex attraction in Shakespeare’s work as well as early modern English and European attitudes toward sexual behavior and practices include Julie Crawford, “Shakespeare. Same Sex. Marriage,” in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race, ed. Valerie Traub (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 251–68; Marie Helena Loughlin, ed., Same–sex Desire in Early Modern England, 1550–1735: An Anthology of Literary Texts and Contexts (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2014); Goran V.  Stanivukovic, “Between Men in Early Modern England,” in Queer Masculinities, 1550–1800, Katherine O’Donnell and Michael O’Rourke, eds. (Houndmills and New  York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 232–51;

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Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Richard Halpern, Shakespeare’s Perfume: Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Stephen GuyBray, Homoerotic Space: The Politics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Toronto, CA: University of Toronto Press, 2002); Bruce R.  Smith, “Premodern Sexualities,” PMLA 115, no. 3 (May 2000): 318–29; Steve Patterson, “The Bankruptcy of Homoerotic Amity in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 50, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 9–32; Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Mario DiGangi, “Queering the Shakespearean Family,” Shakespeare Quarterly 47, no. 3 (Fall 1996): 269–90; Mario DiGangi, The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Jonathan Goldberg, ed., Queering the Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994); Joseph Pequigney, “The Two Antonios and Same-Sex Love in Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice,” English Literary Renaissance 22, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 201–21; Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992); Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and Gregory W. Bredbeck, Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). 78. Shell, Money, Language, and Thought, 68. 79. Kenneth Graham, “Shakespearean Comedy and Early Modern Religious Culture,” in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy, ed. Heather Hirschfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 105–121, here 118. 80. Coryate, Coryat’s Crudities, 373–74. 81. In Venice from the Ground Up (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), James H. S. McGregor finds that the Venetian motive for confining members of the Jewish community in a specific space relegated for habitation involved “a poisonous blend of prejudice and benign, if not positively, good intentions…. The Ghetto was an invidious form of segregation, but it was an end in itself, not a steppingstone to further disenfranchisement or a prelude to annihilation” (276). 82. Cited in Arthur F. Kinney, “A Modern Perspective: The Comedy of Errors,” in The Folger Shakespeare (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library,

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2020), accessed January 18, 2022, https://shakespeare.folger.edu/ shakespeares-­w orks/the-­c omedy-­o f-­e rrors/the-­c omedy-­o f-­e rrors-­a -­ modern-­perspective/. 83. Crystal Bartolovich, “‘Baseless Fabric’: London as a ‘World City,’” in “The Tempest” and Its Travels, Peter Hulme and William H.  Sherman, eds. (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 15. 84. Linda Levy Peck, Consuming Splendor: Society and Culture in Seventeenth-­ Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 45–46. 85. Richard Strier, The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2011), 153–203. 86. Ibid., 154. 87. In Chap. 1 of Members of His Body: Shakespeare, Paul, and a Theology of Nonmonogamy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 17–41, Will Stockton offers an analysis of The Comedy of Errors in which Shakespeare’s dramatization of sameness and difference, the one and the many, is found to embrace a subversive vision in which siblings can have sex with one another, married couples can sleep with their in-laws, and Jesus Christ—the (male) head of the church—is gendered female. Responding to Richard Strier’s reading of The Comedy as a play that “endorses the Protestant dispersal of holiness among all lawful earthly affairs, including business and marriage” (20), Stockton argues that the play’s farcical elements, predicated on confusion of mistaken identities, destabilize conventional understanding of Paul’s epistolary explication of male–female sexual relations and the godly marriage. 88. Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 44–61. 89. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 151–91. 90. Thomas Moisan, “‘Which is the Merchant Here? And Which the Jew?’: Subversion and Recuperation in The Merchant of Venice,” in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor, eds. (New York: Methuen, 1987), cited on 191. 91. For a contrast between Hakluyt’s and Purchas’s conceptualizations of the English nation, see David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 61–99. Armitage argues that “consistently anti-papal and only incidentally antiSpanish,” Purchas’s geographical histories had “placed England firmly in the context of the history of the Three Kingdoms, of Europe, and of a wider world conceived within sacred time” (81). In contrast, Richard Hakluyt’s works remained thoroughly English in scope. Hakluyt’s corpus does not appear to have been shaped much by religious consideration either at the generic or rhetorical level. He did not conceive of English nationhood from within the frame of divine election. Purchas, on the

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other hand, held a conception of England’s place within sacred history, conferring upon his works a “more elect-nationalist and more cosmopolitan” (85) dimension. For a reading of the theological and ideological implications of Purchas’s travelogues for England’s overseas ambitions, especially the national desire to compete—albeit belatedly—with Portugal and Spain for access to the East Indies, see Amrita Sen, “Solomon, Ophir, and the English Quest for the East Indies,” in England’s Asian Renaissance, Su Fang Ng and Carmen Nocentelli, eds. (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2022), 125–42. Sen points out that the Old Testament story of King Solomon’s incomparable wealth, built up by gold brought back from Ophir, functioned as an important narrative for English ambitions to gain access to the East Indies reputed for its spices and other precious commodities. The story of Solomon and Ophir enables Purchas to bring together “[t]he mercantile and the religious … making way for Protestant kings and their subjects to claim that they are the inheritors of Solomon” (137). 92. Samuel Purchas, Virginias Verger: Or a Discourse shewing the benefits which may grow to this Kingdome from American-English Plantations, and especially those of Virginia and Summer Ilands, in Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes: Containing a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Lande Travells by Englishmen and Others, vol. 19 (Glasgow: James MacLehose & Sons, 1905–7), 218–67. 93. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner, 1958). 94. Samuel Purchas, The Voyages and Peregrinations made by Ancient Kings, Patriarchs, Apostles, Philosophers, and others to and through the remoter parts of the known World, in Hakluytus Posthumus or, Purchas His Pilgrimes Contayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Lande Travells by Englishmen and Others, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 1–135. 95. Ibid., 6. 96. Ibid. 97. Ibid. 98. Ibid., 7. 99. John Donne, Essays in Divinity, ed. Evelyn M.  Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 20. 100. John Donne, “A Sermon Preached to the Honourable Company of the Virginian Plantation,” in The Sermons of John Donne, Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter, eds., vol. 4 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1953–62), 265–66. 101. Luís Vaz de Camões, The Lusiads, trans. William C. Atkinson (London: Penguin, 1952), 169.

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102. Lisa Jardin, Worldly Goods (London: Macmillan, 1996), 289. 103. John Fletcher, The Island Princess, ed. Clare McManus (London: Methuen, 2012). 104. For a reading of the inscriptions of nascent English imperial desire in The Island Princess, see Nocentelli, Empires of Love, 115–36. 105. Jerry Brotton, Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 167–68. The essays in Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in Early Renaissance Drama, John Gilles and Virginia Mason Vaughan, eds. (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 1998), consider the impact of geographical knowledge and cartographic practice on the cultural expressions of English Renaissance theatrical practice. 106. Paul Stevens, “Heterogenizing Imagination: Globalization, The Merchant of Venice, and the Work of Literary Criticism,” New Literary History 36, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 425–37, here 429. 107. Ibid., 430. 108. Ibid., 428.

Index1

A Absolutism, 40, 166 Acts, Book of, 256 Adam and Eve, 8, 14, 17, 36, 58, 89, 107, 131, 192, 193, 231 Adultery, 19, 20, 84, 104–108, 111, 128, 151, 152, 159, 163, 204 Advancement of Learning, The (Bacon), 39, 141, 150 Aeneid, The (Virgil), 14, 55 Aeschylus, 54 Afterlife, 19–21, 101, 117 Alighieri, Dante, 110, 183 Allegory, 36, 89, 91, 97, 171n17, 172n41, 260 Ambrose, Saint, 84 America(s), 254, 262, 263, 265, 268 Amerindian, 90 Ames, William, 39

Anglican Church, 34, 60, 61, 69n29, 72n66, 123n64, 201, 215, 216, 221n37 See also Church of England Anne of Denmark, 168 Antinomianism, 37 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), 12–14 Antwerp, 254 Ariosto, Ludovico, 91, 98 Aristotle, 56 Arminianism, 61 Asia, 251, 255, 263, 264 As You Like It (Shakespeare), 111 Atlantic, 108, 262 Augustine, Saint, 48, 55, 76–98, 120n23, 120n28, 131, 132, 134, 238 Austen, Jane, 9

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 W. S. H. Lim, Shakespeare and the Theater of Religious Conviction in Early Modern England, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40006-3

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INDEX

B Bacon, Francis, 39, 67n14, 141, 146, 150, 239 Baptist, 153 Barton, Elizabeth, 153, 155 Blackstone, Sir William, 164 Boleyn, Anne, 106, 153 Book of Common Prayer, 9, 10, 34, 42, 69n24 Book of the Courtier (Castiglione), 157 Britain, 14 Bucer, Martin, 117n1, 238 Buchanan, George, 158 Burton, William, 226–232, 234, 235, 239 C Calvin, John, 45, 46, 58, 59, 61, 83, 84, 132, 134, 140, 142, 238 Calvinism, 142 Camões’s, Luís Vaz de, 263, 265 Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer), 7 Capitalism, 243–259, 267, 269, 271n38 Cartography, 258 Castiglione, Baldassare, 157 Catherine of Aragon, 153 Caveat for Sureties, A (Burton), 227 Cavendish, Thomas, 251 Celibacy, 83, 124n64 Chapman, George, 242 Charity, 7, 8, 93, 226, 227, 229, 230, 234, 235, 237, 248 Charlemagne, 98 Charles I, King, 20, 23, 61, 108, 153, 168, 197–200, 203, 205, 206, 208, 210, 212, 213, 215–217, 221n37, 221n44, 222n54, 224n75 as author of Eikon Basilike, 20, 23, 197–200, 203–205, 209, 210, 212, 217, 218, 221n44, 222n54

and conscience, 198, 201, 221n44 as England’s martyr-king, 197, 199, 201, 212 as pious monarch, 199, 200, 203, 208 and prayer, 200, 201, 203–206 as tragic actor on stage, 212–216 Charles II, King, 154, 198 Charles V, King, 98, 99 Chastity, 21, 76, 80–88, 91, 93–97, 103, 106, 107, 109, 117, 122n41, 122n44, 123n46 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 7 Church of England, see Anglican Church City of God, The (Augustine) defining purity in, 85, 86 rape of Lucretia in, 120n23 response to Lucretia’s suicide in, 86 Classical tradition in Hamlet, 32, 65 in The Winter’s Tale, 127, 135, 167 Coke, Sir Edward, 163, 165, 166 Colonialism, 251, 258, 259, 262–266 Comedy of Errors, The (Shakespeare) economic life in, 255, 256 merchants in, 255, 256 Pauline theology in, 257, 258 sorcery and witchcraft in, 256–258 Commerce, 233, 238, 239, 249, 255, 256, 259, 263, 264, 266, 268 Commons, House of, 61 Comus (Milton) as Christian allegory, 96 sexual assault in, 95 use of Celtic mythology in, 96 virtue of chastity in, 95 Concupiscence, 107, 120n28 Confession, 1, 5, 10, 19, 20, 32–53, 65, 67n6, 68n20, 70n47, 79, 100–102, 200 Confessions (Augustine) babies as proof of original sin, 131, 132

 INDEX 

effect of Aeneid on Augustine, 55 experience of concupiscence, 82, 83, 85 Confessor, 39, 68n20, 71n47, 100, 102, 117 Conscience awakening of, 35, 36, 38, 39, 64 in Hamlet, 39 influence of the Holy Spirit, 10, 149 leading to recognition of sin, 46 Luther on, 49 in The Winter’s Tale, 137 Consent, 85–88, 113–115, 119n16, 119–120n18, 120n23, 165, 209 Contract and covenant, 232 law, 232, 253 and surety, 226 Contrition, 36, 38, 39, 70n47, 79, 144 Cook, John, 215 Coryate, Thomas, 248, 249, 253, 254, 264 Counsel, 18, 40, 51, 58, 60, 65, 100, 149, 157, 163, 228, 240 Counter-Reformation (Catholic Reformation), 98 Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, The (Sidney), 206 Court(s) church, 102, 108, 124n64 common law, 104 ecclesiastical, 104, 108, 112, 124n64 European, 236, 264 Jacobean, 168 of justice, 166 Mughal, 264 Sicilian, 128, 160, 163, 168 of Solomon, 260 Venetian, 253 Courtier(s), 92, 93, 156, 157, 193, 251

281

Courtly love, 92, 251 Covenant, 216, 231, 232 Cromwell, Oliver, 154, 212 Crossdressing, 253 Crucifixion, 23, 182–184, 186, 212 Cummings, Brian, 62, 63, 72n69 D Da Gama, Vasco, 263, 264 Damnation, 1, 6, 19, 31, 33, 34, 37, 38, 41, 42, 47, 49, 53, 60, 64, 80, 143 Daniel, Book of, 111 David, King (Bible), 152, 162, 204, 205 De Albuquerque, Dom Afonso, 264 Death row, 20, 82, 100, 116, 117 De Beneficiis (Seneca), 233, 234 Decalogue (Ten Commandments), 83, 107 Demonic possession, 2 Deuteronomy, Book of, 152 Devotional literature, 17, 23, 133, 179–187, 265 Discipline, 38, 50–52, 71n49, 76, 77, 79, 101, 103, 112, 114, 115, 117, 139, 201, 215 Disobedience, 131, 172n41, 193, 257 Divine right of kings (divine-right kingship), 187 Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), 36 Donne, John, 7, 17, 18, 23, 24, 44–46, 48, 81, 143, 180–182, 261, 262, 269n5 Doran, Gregory, 202 Dracula (Stoker), 43 Duchess of Malfi, The (Webster), 109 E Eden, Garden of, 36, 107, 131, 191–194, 218, 261

282 

INDEX

Edward I, King, 243 Edward VI, King, 105 Egypt, 13, 264 Eikon Basilike (Charles I) analogy of Christ’s passion in, 197, 206, 217 and doctrine of divine-right kingship, 209 the king’s conscience in, 198, 201, 205 the suffering Christian in, 199 the temptation of Christ, 203 William Marshall frontispiece, 199, 206 Eikonoklastes (Milton) accuses Charles of misappropriating analogies, 206 invocation of Shakespeare in, 20, 209 republican response to Eikon Basilike, 198 theatrical metaphor in, 211–216 Elect (Calvinism), 59, 83, 142, 143 Elizabeth I, Queen, 10, 92, 94, 159, 193, 197, 214, 219n14, 237, 239, 254, 256, 259, 263 and chastity, 94 as Deborah, 259 and the Earl of Essex, 11 and the East India Company, 263 espoused to England, 159 in The Faerie Queene, 92–94 relationship with courtiers, 92, 93 use of theatrical metaphor, 214 English Civil War, 23, 108, 149, 153, 192, 197, 198, 200, 204, 217, 265 Enlightenment, 8 Ephesians, Book of, 257 Ephesus, 16, 255–257 Epic, 9, 12, 14, 47, 54, 55, 58, 61, 89, 90, 92, 110, 145, 260, 263, 265

Equity, 117, 226, 228 Eschatology, 44 Essex, Earl of (Robert Devereux), 11 Ethics, 35, 41, 53, 54, 107, 148, 255 Eucharist, 79, 180 Euripides, 54 Europe, 225, 243, 254, 263, 264, 267, 271n29, 273n60, 276n91 Exodus, Book of, 113 Exorcism, 2, 16, 257 Expansionism, 226, 259, 265, 271n29 Ezekiel, Book of, 143, 246 F Faerie Queene, The (Spenser) allegorizing lust in, 90 chastity as militant virtue, 94 Elizabeth I and, 94 representing rape in, 90–93 representing the erotic in, 91 Family, 40, 62, 75, 88, 97, 99, 108, 114, 122n46, 131, 155, 156, 159–162, 168, 169, 172n41, 192, 193, 236, 240, 250 Fanshawe, Sir Richard, 265 Fifth Monarchist, 153 Filmer, Sir Robert, 161, 165, 192, 193 First Corinthians, Book of, 79, 156 First Folio, The (1623), 146, 208, 222–223n56 First John, Book of, 227 First Kings, Book of, 260 First Peter, Book of, 15 First Timothy, Book of, 50 Fitch, Ralph, 264 Fletcher, John, 264 Forgiveness, 7, 21, 33, 37–41, 50, 52, 60, 64, 102, 143, 185, 199, 203–205, 231

 INDEX 

Fornication, 20 Fortune, 46, 57, 58, 62, 72n69, 202, 209, 250, 251, 253 Foxe, John, 199 France, 11, 153, 189, 194, 209, 254 Frederick V (Elector Palatine), 168 Free Library of Philadelphia, 222n56 Free will, 37, 53, 54, 56, 61, 100, 132, 142 Friar(s), 4, 39, 98–100, 102, 118n3, 118n4 Friendship, 112, 130, 131, 226, 233–235, 247, 252, 274n77 Frobisher, Martin, 251, 274n74 G Galatians, Book of, 50, 52 Garden(s), 111 Gardener-king, 191–197 Garnet, Henry, 208 Gauden, Dr John, 197, 198 Genesis, Book of, 36, 192, 194 Ghetto, 253, 254, 275n81 Gibson, Mel, 186 Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, 251 Globe, the, 59 Goa, 264 Golden fleece, 98, 251, 266 Golding, Arthur, 233 Good Friday, 16, 22, 181 Goodman, Christopher, 158 Grace, 1, 5, 7–9, 17, 20, 31, 34, 36–39, 41, 42, 48, 50, 59, 60, 65, 70n43, 83, 96, 101, 113, 117, 138, 142–144, 199, 226, 231, 232, 240, 241, 250, 255, 267–269 Greenblatt, Stephen, 2, 46, 101, 121n40, 123n62, 157, 158, 163 Gresham, Sir Thomas, 254 Grief, 6, 42, 55, 101, 261 Grymeston, Elizabeth, 33

283

H Habakkuk, Book of, 137 Habsburg, House of, 98, 265 Hakluyt, Richard, 235, 258, 259, 276n91 Hamlet (Shakespeare) the afterlife in, 19–21, 117 ghost from purgatory, 3 importance of shriving in, 19 and predestination, 59, 61, 64 providence in, 57 suicide in, 65 Hampton Court Conference, 61 Hardy, Thomas, 119n18, 120n18 Harsnett, Samuel, 2, 17, 27n4, 29n27 Hathaway, Anne, 102 Hawkins, William, 264 Hazard, 225–278 Heaven, 8, 12, 13, 31, 32, 34–36, 41, 43, 46, 47, 56, 66, 79, 83, 96, 100, 130, 132, 139, 145, 154, 178, 179, 190, 199, 227, 231, 247, 249, 261, 268 Hebraism, 53–61 Hebrews, Book of, 8, 34, 111, 138, 231 Helgerson, Richard, 259, 271n29 Hell, 12, 13, 16, 28n26, 31–35, 41–43, 46, 55, 66, 81, 110, 132, 135, 181, 183, 236–238, 247, 265 Henry IV, Part 1 (Shakespeare), 210, 211 Henry IV, Part 2 (Shakespeare), 211 Henry V (Shakespeare), 10, 11, 40, 194, 211 Henry VI, Part 1 (Shakespeare), 3, 153 Henry VIII, King, 3, 25, 69n29, 99, 106, 118n3, 123n64, 153, 155 Henry Stuart, Prince, 168 Herbert, George, 17, 23, 24, 142, 143, 181, 182, 190, 240, 272n47

284 

INDEX

Heresy, 37 Heteronormativity, 111, 274n76 Heylyn, Peter, 215–217 Hobbes, Thomas, 149 Holinshed, Raphael, 208, 209, 214 Holocaust, 243 Holy Communion, 79 Holy Roman emperor, 98 Holy Spirit, 10, 36, 37, 49, 149, 154, 155, 260 Homer, 56 Howard, Catherine, 106 Humanism, 6 Husbandry, 194, 195, 240 I Icon(s), 91, 138, 139, 142, 144, 210 Idolatry, 138, 140–142, 171n17 Image(s), 3, 40, 60, 79, 81, 92, 137, 139–142, 191, 194, 195, 199, 200, 205, 208–210, 215 Imperialism, 259 Incarnation, 96, 180, 189, 231 Incest, 48, 70n44, 90, 105, 107, 108 India, 241, 262–265, 268 Indies East, 98, 260, 262–265, 268, 277n91 West, 98 Indulgences, 5, 7, 83 Inferno (Dante), 110, 183 Institutes of the Christian Religion (Calvin), 45 Internationalism, 247, 248, 254, 259, 260, 262, 267, 269 Ireland, 10, 11 Isaiah, Book of, 36, 152 Island Princess, The (Fletcher), 264, 274n76 Israel, 14, 15, 22, 107, 143, 152, 154, 161, 162, 204, 205, 246, 260

J James I, King, 14, 22, 49, 61, 77, 113, 128, 159–162, 164, 165, 168, 214, 215, 259, 260, 262 Basilicon Doron, 214, 215 christmas celebrations, 77 destruction of tenements, 77 as England’s King Solomon, 259 and internationalism, 260 relationship with Parliament, 128 as rex pacificus, 260 James, Book of, 49, 204, 227 Jerusalem, 185, 229 Jesuit(s), 2, 208 Jesus Christ, 60, 109, 199, 231, 240, 257, 276n87 Jew(s), 9, 180, 184, 185, 226, 229, 230, 236, 243–249, 253, 254, 267, 268, 272n54, 273n60 Jew of Malta, The (Marlowe), 246, 248, 267 Joan of Arc, 3, 153 John, Gospel according to, 10 Jonson, Ben, 95, 242 Judaism, 239, 244, 253 Judas Iscariot, 183, 185, 216, 217 Judeo-Christian tradition, 6, 7, 32, 54, 56, 57, 65, 129, 135, 144–146, 179 Judge, 7, 14, 15, 22, 36, 75, 107, 111, 113, 161–163, 165, 166, 181, 184, 213, 215, 243, 244, 260, 268 Judges, Book of, 14 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 207 Justice, 19, 35, 38, 57, 58, 76, 78, 89, 92, 104, 108, 109, 112, 113, 117, 152, 163, 165, 179, 186, 199, 209, 213, 231

 INDEX 

K King Lear (Shakespeare), 2, 16, 52, 57, 64, 65, 71n55, 77, 157, 158, 169, 179, 194 Kingship divine-right, 25, 144, 179, 185–187, 189, 190, 205, 209, 211, 218 and tyranny, 21, 92, 108, 144, 148, 162, 163, 167, 190, 208, 215 Kirk, Scottish, 215 Knapp, Jeffrey, 4, 27n1, 99 Knox, John, 158 L Lambeth Articles, 60, 61 Lanyer, Aemilia, 23, 184–186 Latimer, Hugh, 105, 106 Laud, William, 61, 215 Law canon, 42 common, 85, 104, 155, 164–166, 230 constitutional, 159, 164, 176n82, 201 contract, 232, 253 criminal, 77 ecclesiastical, 42, 104 moral, 39, 47, 85, 102 of nature, 236, 239 Levant, 263, 273n60 Leviathan (Hobbes), 149 Lex talionis, 113, 117 Liberty, 59, 149, 209, 216 Light of nature, 39 Lindsay, Nigel, 202 Liturgy, 10, 201 Locke, John, 149 London, 11, 14, 77, 98–111, 236, 247, 254, 256, 263, 264 Long Parliament, 108, 198

285

Lords, House of, 61 Louis XIV, King, 209 Luke, Gospel according to, 109, 203 Lupton, Thomas, 236, 237 Lust, 76, 82, 83, 86, 87, 89–93, 103, 107, 110, 111, 120n28 Luther, Martin, 2, 7, 11, 38, 39, 45, 49, 59, 144, 232, 236, 238 M Macbeth (Shakespeare) Jesuitical equivocation in, 208 and pamphleteering rhetoric, 207–208 quoted by John Milton, 207 Madness, 57, 133, 194 Magic, 3, 6, 7, 16, 92, 94–96, 128, 136, 137, 251, 256, 257 Magistrate(s), 76, 78, 97, 98, 103, 108, 113, 115, 163 Malacca, 264 Malta, 246–248 Mark, Gospel according to, 12, 153 Marlowe, Christopher, 36, 246–248, 273n62 Marriage, 10, 21, 47, 48, 63, 70n44, 75–77, 83–85, 87, 94, 95, 97, 100, 105, 106, 108, 111, 113–117, 119n18, 122n44, 136, 140, 149, 155, 159, 160, 162, 163, 168, 194, 249, 250, 252, 253, 255, 266, 270n25, 276n87 Marriage Act (1753), 102 Marshall, William, 198, 199, 206 Marston, John, 242 Marvell, Andrew, 193, 212 Masque, 6, 95–97, 123n46, 200 Material form(s), 139, 141, 142 Matthew, Gospel according to, 12, 50, 57, 58, 113, 117, 184, 203, 245

286 

INDEX

Measure for Measure (Shakespeare) arousal of anxiety, 39, 100, 101 bed trick, 85, 114, 116, 117 corporal mortification, 81 discipline and punishment, 76, 101, 103, 114, 115, 117, 215 eroticization of spiritual experience, 81 as problem play, 18 regulating the body, 77 venereal disease, 21, 77, 103 Vienna’s “lower world,” 103 virtue of chastity, 21, 109 Mediterranean, 14, 248, 255, 263 Meno (Plato), 148 Mercator, Gerardus, 265 Merchant(s), 111, 170n17, 225–237, 241–245, 247, 248, 250–256, 258, 259, 262–268, 271n29 Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare) hazard and risk-taking, 250, 258, 267 merchandizing activities, 24 overseas adventuring, 267 practice of surety, 226, 237 practice of usury, 225, 240 Michelangelo, 182 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare), 111, 169n2 Milton, John, 9, 12, 45, 47, 58, 61, 69n33, 84–98, 107, 109, 123n46, 135, 145, 149, 192, 196–213, 218, 222n54, 222–223n56, 223n60, 231, 261, 265, 266 allegorizing chastity, 91, 97 apologist for tyrannicide, 61 on divine providence, 58 invocation of Shakespeare, 197, 209 and ocean travel, 9, 261, 265, 266 on pagan deities, 135 on Presbyterians, 207, 208, 216, 217

on reason, 9, 107, 223n60 representing the Fall, 47, 107, 117 and Shakespeare’s First Folio, 208, 222–223n56 Ministry, 4, 16, 49–52, 101, 185 Miracle(s), 3, 22, 141, 144, 151, 167, 203 Modernity, 9, 266, 269 Moluccas, 264 Monarchy, 92, 161, 189, 192, 203 Monasteries, 69n29, 99, 118n3, 118n4 Mortalism, 45, 69n33 Mortification, 81, 89, 90 Mughal(s), 264 Muslim(s), 98, 247, 263, 264, 272n54, 273n60 Mystic(s), 81 Mythology, 7, 96, 127–136, 145, 151, 251, 266 N Nashe, Thomas, 103, 238 Nation(hood), 13, 19, 25, 92, 122n40, 196, 213, 214, 216, 221n44, 237, 239, 246, 248, 251, 258, 259, 261, 265, 268, 269, 271n29 Nature, 6, 19, 21, 22, 33, 35, 45, 47, 52, 83, 89, 90, 95, 96, 98, 100, 107, 108, 110, 122n40, 129, 131, 132, 136, 138, 144, 149, 151, 153, 159, 161, 168, 169, 179, 193–195, 209, 211, 218, 232, 233, 245, 270n25 Netherlands, the, 254 New England, 71n49, 108 New Historicism, 2, 101, 102, 172n40, 215, 223n67 New World, 261, 262 New York Review of Books, The, 157 Nihilism, 179

 INDEX 

Ninety-five Theses (Luther), 7 North, Thomas, 12 Nunnery, 99 O Ocean travel, 9, 18, 23, 24, 243, 256, 258–266, 269, 271n29 Oedipus Rex (Sophocles), 128 Old age, 71n55, 169 Ophir, 260, 277n91 Opinion (in epistemology), 147–150, 163, 167, 172n41 Original sin, 8, 38, 83, 84, 89, 130–132, 134 Orlando Furioso (Ariosto), 91, 98 Os Lusíadas (Camões), 263, 265, 266 Othello (Shakespeare), 10, 64, 245 Ottoman Empire, 98, 264, 272n54 Ovid, 127, 129, 135, 136, 151 Owen, John, 89 Oxford University, 258 P Pacific Ocean, 263, 265 Paradise Lost (PL, Milton), 9, 47, 58, 107, 109, 135, 189, 192, 196, 231, 232, 261, 265, 266 Paradise Regained (Milton), 110, 145 Parliament, 22, 128, 159, 160, 162, 164–166, 200, 201, 203, 204, 209, 213–216, 219n14 Passion of Christ, 191, 206 Pastoral, 16, 18, 50–52, 129–131, 149, 150, 193, 206 Patronage, 7 Paul, Saint, 16, 43, 50, 54, 78, 79, 131, 138, 144, 156, 160, 167, 257, 276n87 Pelagius, 131, 132 Penance, 38, 51, 67n6, 68n20, 70n47, 112, 144

287

Pentateuch, 151, 231 Perdition, 5, 6, 17, 20, 41, 183 Performance, 1–3, 5, 22, 23, 35, 112, 140, 146, 168, 183, 187–191, 211–213, 223n60, 223n67, 227 Perkins, William, 84, 104, 106, 107 Pietà (Michelangelo), 182 Pilate, Pontius, 23, 178, 181, 184, 216, 246 Plantation, 192, 200, 262 Plato, 117n1, 148, 149 Plautus, 255 Playhouse, 1, 2, 4, 102 Plutarch, 12 Political treatise, 18 Ponet, John, 158 Portugal, 263–265, 277n91 Prayer, 5, 7, 20, 31, 35–41, 47, 48, 82, 136, 199–201, 203–206, 215 Preacher, 18, 48, 49, 51, 52, 89, 227, 228, 240, 269n5 Predestination, 36–38, 58–61, 64, 135 Prerogative, Royal challenged by Chief Justice Coke, 163, 165, 166 and the common law, 165, 166 defended by James I, 163 and tyrannical rule, 163, 164 in The Winter’s Tale, 142 Presbyterians, 207, 208, 216, 217 Pride, Colonel Thomas, 108 Principal Navigations of the English Nation (Hakluyt), 259 Prophet(s), 22, 35, 137, 140, 152, 153, 155, 158, 159, 167, 246, 257 Protectorate, 149 Proverbs, Book of, 227, 230 Providence, 18, 25, 53, 57–59, 96, 226 Psalms, Book of, 204, 205, 245

288 

INDEX

Punishment, 6, 7, 21, 28n11, 39, 41, 52, 76, 77, 97, 101, 103, 105, 106, 113–115, 117, 152, 153, 162, 165, 183, 215, 231 Purchas, Samuel, 259, 260, 276–277n91 Purgatory, 1, 20, 32, 34, 35, 46, 65, 66, 70n38 Puritan(s), 20, 21, 39, 45, 61, 89, 104, 108, 109, 145, 149, 161, 200, 201 Puritan Revolution, 23, 198, 265 Pym, John, 204 Q Quakers (Society of Friends), 154 R Radicalism, 22, 154, 157, 158, 167, 172n41, 173n50, 173n52, 197, 200, 202, 206, 211, 219n14, 220n23 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 251 Rape and contamination, 87 by deception, 85 in The Faerie Queene (Spenser), 91, 121n35 in Rape of Lucrece, The (Shakespeare), 86, 120n23 and spiritual purity, 86, 97 in Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare), 87, 88 Reason, 9, 16, 35, 37, 48, 56, 57, 64, 68n20, 77, 107, 110, 121n28, 144, 155, 166, 185, 201, 202, 214, 227, 242, 253, 261 Rebellion, 11, 47, 161, 181, 210, 215 Reformation, 2, 5, 8, 10, 11, 20, 36, 38, 39, 59, 66, 70n47, 77, 123n64, 140–142, 144, 147, 157, 210, 232

Regeneration, 9, 142, 143 Relic(s), 138, 141, 171n17 Religious conviction, 1–26, 32, 50, 64, 95, 127, 128, 135, 145, 150, 151, 167, 168 Repentance, 5, 6, 10, 36, 37, 40–42, 48, 50, 52, 64, 68n20, 71n47, 79, 101, 102, 112, 144, 145, 154, 167, 204, 250 Republicanism, 14, 23, 25, 205, 212 Restoration, 19, 129, 136, 137, 144, 145, 154, 167, 169, 198, 221n44, 227, 266, 268 Resurrection, 16, 43–45, 138, 142, 144, 167, 261 Reubens, Paul Peter, 7 Revelation, Book of, 12–14, 44 Revenge tragedy, 20, 46, 65, 69n38 Revolutionary England, 20, 23, 197, 201, 206, 208, 211–213, 217, 218 Rich, Barnabe, 250 Richard II (Shakespeare) analogies of the Passion, 20 divine-right kingship, 179, 186, 211 England as garden, 200 kingship de jure and de facto, 187, 219n15 theater of abdication, 186 theme of betrayal, 178, 183 Richard III (Shakespeare), 207, 208 Roe, Sir Thomas, 264 Romance (genre), 18, 128, 260 Romans, Book of, 38, 138 Romanticism, 134 Rome, 85–87, 99, 110 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 39, 99 Rowlands, Samuel, 104 Royal Exchange, 254 Royal Shakespeare Company, 116, 202 Rump Parliament, 108

 INDEX 

S Salvation, 1, 8, 19, 20, 24, 31–33, 37, 38, 42, 43, 48, 59, 60, 64, 101, 138, 143, 144, 166, 183, 231, 232, 262 Salve Deus Rex Judæorum (Lanyer), 184 Scaffold, 23, 68n20, 211–217 Scold, 151, 155 Scotland, 19, 162, 215 Second Corinthians, Book of, 257 Second Kings, Book of, 130, 137, 141, 152 Second Tetralogy, 211 Secularity, 1, 9 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, 54, 233, 234 Shah Jahan, 264 Shame, 47, 51, 80, 83, 86–88, 92, 95, 102, 103, 121n28, 137, 156, 198, 228–230 Shrew, 155, 250 Shriving, 19, 20 Shuger, Debora, 100, 110, 161, 202 Sidney, Sir Philip, 206, 239 Sin, 5–8, 10, 15, 17, 19–21, 28n11, 32–42, 46–53, 60, 64, 65, 71n47, 76–80, 83, 84, 86, 89, 97, 98, 101, 102, 105–107, 109, 110, 112, 117, 122n40, 130–134, 141–145, 149, 152, 154, 181–184, 203, 204, 210, 217, 227, 232, 236, 238, 239, 247, 248, 263, 268 Skepticism, 8, 9, 19, 64, 112, 146, 153, 155, 167 Society of Friends, 154 Sodom and Gomorrah, 106 Solomon, King (Bible), 204, 259, 260, 277n91 Sophocles, 54, 128 Sorrow, 6, 87, 101, 129, 154, 177–179, 182, 183, 185, 186, 189, 204

289

Soteriology, 227 Southeast Asia, 264, 265 Spain, 98, 251, 262, 264, 277n91 Spenser, Edmund, 7, 11, 84–98, 121n35, 121n40 Spice(s), 260, 263–265, 277n91 Spice Isles, 260, 263–265 Spirituality, 21, 70n43, 79, 81, 117 Statue(s), 22, 135–141, 144, 146–148, 167 Stevens, Paul, 8, 9, 267, 268 Stirredge, Elizabeth, 154, 155 Stoicism, 56, 57, 59 Stoker, Bram, 43 St Peter’s Basilica, 182 Strafford, Earl of, 204 Strier, Richard, 132, 134, 140, 157, 158, 255, 272n47, 276n87 Stuart, Elizabeth (daughter of James I), 61 Stubbes, Philip, 41, 104, 105 Suicide, 19, 32, 42, 43, 46, 64, 65, 68n20, 68n24, 69n26, 86–88, 230 Suleiman the Magnificent, 98 Sumptuary laws, 237 Supernaturalism, 16, 19, 136 Superstition, 2, 139, 141 Surety against the practice of usury, 233, 239, 240 dangers of, 228, 239 as fruit of unbelief, 232 and Incarnation, 231 in The Merchant of Venice, 23, 225–278 relationship with charity, 229, 230, 235 and sin of hubris, 232 Suspicion, 21, 148, 159, 162, 163 Swift, Daniel, 9, 10

290 

INDEX

T Taming of the Shrew, The (Shakespeare), 250 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 5 Temptation(s), 8, 21, 76, 77, 82, 89–91, 93, 95, 98, 109, 110, 121n40, 203, 245 Tennant, David, 202 Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, The (Milton), 207 Teresa of Avila, Saint, 81 Ternate (island in the Moluccas), 264 Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Hardy), 119n18 Theater of abdication, 188 performance of identity, 23, 188 of political authority, 187 of power, 6, 35, 212 public playhouse, 1, 2 Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, 34 Tidore (island in the Moluccas), 264 Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare), 87, 88 Trade, 16, 232, 235, 237, 242, 243, 248, 251, 254–256, 259, 260, 263, 264, 268 Traherne, Thomas, 24, 133, 134 Trapnel, Anna, 153–155, 173n50 Travel narratives, 18, 235, 259 Trew Law of Free Monarchies, The (James I), 113, 160 Turk(s), 98, 248 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 16, 111 Typology, 117, 240 Tyranny, 21, 92, 108, 144, 148, 162, 163, 167, 190, 208, 215 Tyrone, Earl of, 11 U Unction, extreme, 49

Usurpation, 210 Usury, 18 V Vaughan, Henry, 24, 134, 180, 182 Venice, 225, 236, 245, 247–249, 252–255, 263, 266, 269n2 Vienna, 16, 21, 75, 77, 97–99, 102, 103, 108, 115, 116, 123n62 View of the Present State of Ireland, A (Spenser), 11 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), 14, 28n25, 55, 110 Virginia Company, 262 Virginity, 75, 80, 82, 88, 93–96, 119n16, 122n41, 122n44 Virgin Mary, 140, 141, 182, 183, 186, 219n13 Visionary women, 155 Volpone (Jonson), 96 Vulgate, 190 W Wales, 97, 168, 198, 199 Weber, Max, 255, 259 Webster, John, 109 Wesley, Charles, 231 Westminster Hall, 215 Whitehall, 168, 259 Whitgift, Dr John, 60 Winter’s Tale, The (Shakespeare) art and nature, 129, 136 knowledge and epistemology, 149 portrait of tyrannical authority, 157 responsibilities of prophetic authority, 151 speaking truth to power, 151, 167 status of classical mythology, 127, 145 Wittenberg, 7 Woods, Gillian, 3, 99, 118n4, 140 Wordsworth, William, 134