Shakespearean Resurrection: The Art of Almost Raising the Dead 9780820705071

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Shakespearean Resurrection

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Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies

General Editor: Albert C. Labriola Advisory Editor: Foster Provost Editorial Board: Judith H. Anderson Diana Treviño Benet Donald Cheney Ann Baynes Coiro Mary T. Crane Patrick Cullen A. C. Hamilton Margaret P. Hannay A. Kent Hieatt Michael Lieb Thomas P. Roche Jr. Mary Beth Rose John T. Shawcross John M. Steadman Humphrey Tonkin Susanne Woods

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Shakespearean Resurrection The Art of Almost Raising the Dead

Sean Benson

DUQUESNE UNIVERSITY PRESS PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

Copyright © 2009 Duquesne University Press All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by DUQUESNE UNIVERSITY PRESS 600 Forbes Avenue Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15282

No part of this book may be used or reproduced, in any manner or form whatsoever, without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of short quotations in critical articles or reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Benson, Sean, 1966– Shakespearean resurrection : the art of almost raising the dead / Sean Benson. p. cm. — (Medieval & Renaissance literary studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8207-0416-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Resurrection in literature. 2. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616— Criticism and interpretation. 3. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616— Technique. 4. Dead in literature. I. Title. PR3069.R44B46 2009 822.3’3—dc22 2008053649 ∞ Printed on acid-free paper.

A shortened version of chapter 5 appeared in Renascence 61, no. 1 (Fall 2008).

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To Derek, best bud, and Gabrielle, precious princess

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ......................................................... INTRODUCTION

ix

Shakespeare’s Art of Almost Raising the Dead ...............................................

1

The Comedies: Recognition and Quasi Resurrection ..............................

35

Failed Resurrections in Romeo and Juliet and Othello ................................

77

Cordelia’s Quasi Resurrection and Shakespearean Revision ......................

98

The Limits of Stage Resurrection in Pericles and Cymbeline ......................

122

Raising the Dead in The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest .................................

149

Mock Resurrections ...................................

184

Notes ...............................................................................

188

Works Cited ....................................................................

201

Index ...............................................................................

212

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

Appendix

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is a privilege to acknowledge the many debts I owe: to Albert Labriola, whose editorship has guided this project from its early stages; to Susan Wadsworth-Booth, Kathy McLaughlin, Lori Crosby, and the entire staff at Duquesne University Press for their work as well as their support in bringing the book to press; and to the anonymous readers for their many fine suggestions. I owe special thanks to my colleagues in the SouthCentral Renaissance Conference, especially Donald Stump, who listened and responded to portions of the manuscript; to Jim Brownlee, my colleague in the Department of Language and Literature who read and responded to a draft of the third chapter; and to Susanne Fendler for her assistance with the German translations. That third chapter had its origins many years ago in a graduate seminar taught by Thomas Moisan; though he did not live to see the final form it would take in this book, his fine intellect and constant goodwill continue, I hope, to guide me. Stan Terhune and the entire staff of Cattell Library offered their usual unflagging assistance. Joanna Taylor encouraged me to submit the manuscript to Duquesne; her acumen as a former student helped me to become a better reader of early modern drama. I appreciate all of my students and research assistants whose comments and questions have ix

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Acknowledgments

helped me to think through Shakespeare’s abiding interest in the role religion plays in the lives of human persons. I also wish to thank Malone College for a summer research grant that facilitated the research and writing of this book. I would be remiss, too, if I did not acknowledge my debt to Elza Tiner for having spiritedly directed me to the REED Web site. It almost goes without saying that any faults remaining in the book are my own. My greatest debt is to my wife, Jennifer, for her patience, intellect, and grace.

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INTRODUCTION

z

Shakespeare’s Art of Almost Raising the Dead The thesis of this book is that Shakespeare repeatedly evokes Christ’s resurrection from the dead when long-lost characters reunite; at those moments, he subtly superimposes the Resurrection on his “recognition scenes.” Shakespeare does so by using tropes and figurations of resurrection to suggest that these reunions offer theatrical equivalents of the Resurrection, even if these stage adaptations understandably pale before and cannot live up to that one earthshaking (Luke 23:44–45) event. Shakespeare gives us, in effect, quasi resurrections. As the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1988) notes, almost in passing and with lapidary precision, Shakespeare “takes the risk of portraying the return from the realm of the dead as a pure gift to those in mourning. In these self-contained plays the Christian resurrection from the dead becomes the reappearance of those believed dead” (384).1 Indeed, characters who have been lost for years suddenly reappear and thus seem to have come back, tantalizingly, from the dead. The sense of a resurrection or quasi resurrection 1

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having taken place is a recurrent motif in Shakespeare’s comedies and romances, while the countervailing frustration of a failed resurrection is a prominent feature in a number of his tragedies. Two caveats immediately come to mind. First, not every quasi resurrection in the plays invokes the Resurrection directly by means of biblical tropes or figurations — many of them do, but even those that do not are nonetheless related, in part by analogy, in part by the pervasive influence of the Resurrection on early modern life and culture. Coming after the resurrections of the miracle and mystery plays, Shakespeare’s stage resurrections can hardly fail to evoke a trace or memory of the one resurrection at the heart of the Christian faith.2 Even his plays set in pagan worlds do not avoid the impress of the Resurrection; Shakespeare in fact cultivates the anachronism, yoking the pagan horror at the idea of resurrection to a beatific vision of the joy resurrection might bring. Shakespeare’s dramas are multilayered enough that one can overlook the allusion and make sense of the accompanying joy of the reunion. Recognizing the evocation does, however, afford audiences a deeper sense of the moment’s power. Second, there are, it almost goes without saying, no real representations of resurrections from the dead; Hermione’s return in A Winter’s Tale is the lone possible exception, but even that quasi resurrection bears signs of being a pseudoresurrection staged by Paulina. Lest my title seem to be a bit of false advertising, let me assert that figurations of resurrection exist in 14 of the plays, a surprisingly high number, especially when one considers that the history plays, as bound as they are by their sources, almost of necessity do not contain resurrections: Henry IV, to point out the obvious, was never resurrected in real life, much less in Shakespeare’s histories.3 But repeatedly in his tragedies, comedies, and romances, Shakespeare gestures toward the Resurrection even as he

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adapts it in the form of quasi resurrections. Yet far from Christianizing his drama in a didactic sense, Shakespeare makes theatrical use of the resurrective potential intrinsic to the recognition scenes with which many of his plays conclude. One will search in vain to find in Shakespeare the intrusive or proselytizing impulses that frequently accompany the medieval mystery or miracle plays, though these plays are certainly an ineradicable part of his heritage. Shakespeare is simply too urbane and less strident than such didacticism usually requires. But in the course of doing research for this book, I became convinced that Shakespeare repeatedly adapts his material and alters his sources at key moments in order to connect the quasi-resurrective potential of a scene with the Resurrection. To do so once may be an accident; to do so in one-third of his corpus suggests intention and design (or at least preoccupation) at work. This book is an exploration into what Shakespeare was doing in and with these variations on resurrection.4 The Shakespearean impulse to draw upon the Resurrection by means of allusions, tropes, and imagery is quite pronounced. He surely realized the cultural purchase of adapting (even as he adumbrates) the Resurrection in his plays; its symbolic significance in early modern England can scarcely be overstated. Although Shakespeare’s theatrical transformation of the Resurrection is most daring in the late romances, the adaptation is present early on and attests to his abiding interest in the possibilities of the theme. According to Peter Ackroyd (2005), Shakespeare seems primarily to have borrowed from himself. He was a self-plagiarist who reused phrases, scenes and situations. . . . In his late plays he can sometimes revert to an earlier style, as if all stages of his growth were still within him. . . . There are also many scenic and structural parallels between the plays; there are strong resemblances between As You Like It and King Lear, for example, as well as between A

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Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest. That was how his imagination worked. It took on archetypal forms. In the process of imitating himself, however, he also revises himself; he knew by instinct what was worthy to be preserved, so that there is a continuing process of self-distillation. (238)

Shakespeare’s resurrectionary variations are cut from the same cloth, deriving much of their potency from the endless fecundity of the Resurrection in Western artistic representation. That they rise to their aesthetic heights in the romances, works of consummate self-distillation written late in his career, is no surprise. That Shakespeare continually mines the quasi-resurrective potential of his sources — heightening the effect at times, even injecting it occasionally when absent from the sources — is the first and central subject of this book. A related question is, Why was he so intrigued by the Resurrection as to have made variations of it a staple of his dramatic fare? What captured his attention, made his endlessly creative imagination keep turning back to, and turning over in his mind, the stage possibilities of seeming to bring back the dead?

I My view of Shakespeare as being sensitive to religious issues and responsive to them in his work coincides with what Ken Jackson and Arthur Marotti call the “turn to religion” among scholars interested in the role and force of religion in Renaissance drama.5 Where much of this criticism focuses on various Reformation issues and doctrinal points raised in the plays as well as the related question of whether Shakespeare was a Catholic or a Protestant, to my mind his work betrays no real sectarian bias and treats most doctrinal divisions as mere adiaphora, matters indifferent in the larger scope of things. His ecumenism — or what Jean-Christophe Mayer (2006) calls Shakespeare’s “hybrid faith” — is a hallmark of the plays. Shakespeare’s concern, moreover, appears to be

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primarily aesthetic rather than religious; or, to say it another way, the religious finds expression in the plays through aesthetic modulation. Park Honan (1999) speaks of the “profound religious and moral sense that underlies Shakespeare’s urbanity” (50). Shakespeare is the most unobtrusive poet, seldom given to moralizing in his drama. He even pokes fun at the idea of evil as the direct manifestation if not embodiment of the devil: Othello declares of Iago’s treachery, “I look down towards his feet; but that’s a fable.”6 One can only find such cloven feet, markers of Satan’s presence, in the stuff of fables, not in drama that aspires to approach the complexity of real life. Honan rightly speaks of Shakespeare’s religious and moral sense as underlying, like a bass line, his urbanity: it informs and structures his drama without overwhelming, much less intruding, into the worldly sophistication of the plays. Germaine Greer (1986) offers a view as to the particular form Shakespearean ethics take: It must be remembered that while Shakespeare’s concept of virtue tends to the active rather than the contemplative, his view of redemptive action is Christian. Christ, the paradigm for both men and women, redeemed humanity by suffering and dying on the cross. The Christian concept of passive heroism places a high value on endurance, which in Shakespeare’s ethic is cognate with constancy and hence with truth. (112–13)

In Greer’s view, constancy and passive suffering in Shakespeare’s plays resonate with the Christian iconography of the suffering servant; even when such values are lost or destroyed, the frame remains broadly Christian. I would only add that the plays subtly but repeatedly open vistas onto a religious understanding of life, especially in their evocations of the Resurrection. This is not a widely shared view, and I would like to specify two of the positions that have now virtually become settled conclusions among Shakespearean scholars, particularly those of a materialist bent.

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The first assumption, as described by Jeffrey Knapp (2002), is of the early modern stage as a secular — “even secularizing” — space.7 Much of this work adopts what Knapp calls a “saturation theory,” in which scholars concede at the outset that the stage was secular terrain, despite the fact that religion so permeated Renaissance culture. Thus framed, religion makes its way onstage by way of an inevitable osmosis, seeping in from a point of high concentration in the culture at large to a point of low concentration in the theater. Against this mythopoesis of the secular stage, Knapp argues that Shakespeare and some of his fellow playwrights viewed their plays “as a kind of ministry” (9). Surely not all early modern theater — certainly not Shakespeare’s, as Mayer (2006, 11) remarks — was thus didactic, much less preachy. Knapp’s broader point, however, is valid: any rigid wall of separation between religion and theater is largely untenable.8 An impressive number of clergy wrote and acted in professional plays: James Shirley, for one, left his pulpit for the stage, while John Marston gave up his life as a player to take orders. Ben Jonson’s Catholicism never seems to have stood in his way as a playwright. What would be hard to believe is a stage as hermetically sealed in its secularism as some materialist criticism presents it. In brief, a view that pits the church against the theater in simple opposition is, as Paul Whitfield White (1997, 135–36) argues, reductive of the relationship between the two. Thanks in part to the Records of Early English Drama (REED) project, we now know that, as a result of plague, intermittent prohibitions against the public theaters in London, and the peripatetic tradition of early modern theater troupes, companies such as those for whom Shakespeare worked were frequently on the road presenting their plays throughout the country.9 Where did they perform? John Wasson (1997) notes that “every village in England had a parish large enough to hold all the inhabitants and almost none had any more suitable acting space” (25). Indeed, the antitheatricalist Anthony

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Munday (1580) inveighed against the alleged profanation of churches by the practice of actually allowing players to perform in them, “so that now the Sanctuarie is become a players’ stage” (78). The old, standard argument, advanced by E. K. Chambers (1903), was that vernacular plays were performed outdoors on pageant wagons in marketplaces — in short, secular spaces neatly corresponding to the professional theaters that were home to the companies in London. But, “Contrary to Chambers’s position, it is now apparent that drama did not necessarily pass from the church to the marketplace and elsewhere; that it did not develop in any chronological order from clergy to folk to professional actors; and that clerical, folk, and professional actors existed together throughout” the early modern period (Wasson 1997, 35). More recent scholarship demonstrates that early modern professional companies performed in a variety of suitable sites, from more secular, such as inns and taverns, to more religious venues: parish churches; church houses; at least one monastic residence near Whalley, Lancashire; a parish house in Somerton, Somerset; and of course converted monasteries, the most famous of which was the Dominican Blackfriars theater, closed in 1538 due to Henry VIII’s dissolution of monastic properties, and the winter home to Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, from 1608 onward. Such nominally religious sites saw theatrical performances, both ecclesiastical and secular, on a continual, if erratic, basis (REED Patrons and Performances Web Site 2003–08).10 Though the use of churches was preeminently a practical consideration, it would be odd to think that the church and the theater were in opposition to one another or that the players had no interest in a kind of synergy between the two. When Hermione is resurrected, what more fit space is there for her quasi resurrection from the dead than a church, even a converted one such as Blackfriars? The play is by no means liturgical drama, but its religious intonations are flexible enough to work, and work especially well, in church-related

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environs. We know that Shakespeare was acutely sensitive and responsive to the diverse range of his audiences, encompassing as they did all of English society — the high and the low, the rich and the poor; everyone from Elizabeth, peers of the realm, and courtiers to tradesmen, students, and the prostitutes who worked the crowds. Shakespeare would uncharacteristically have had to turn a blind eye to the role of religion if he were to ignore the physical spaces of churches where he knew his plays could and probably would be performed as a matter of theatrical course. His blindness would also have to extend to the religious beliefs of his audiences, which were surely replete — be it in the professional playhouses or in the parish churches — with those whose beliefs ranged from radical skepticism to devout belief at the extremes, and every gradation in between. Just as Shakespeare’s theater appealed to the educated and the vulgar, it would be similarly odd to regard his theater as thoroughly secular when religious belief and practice were such a daily feature of life in early modern England. Shakespeare’s figurations of resurrection belie the assumption of the secular stage — one must in fact say “stages” to accommodate the requisite adaptability of the plays. Some consideration of basic terminology would be helpful here. In one sense, “secular” literary works are those that are “not concerned with or devoted to the service of religion; not sacred; profane” (OED 2.a). While the early modern stage is certainly not liturgical drama, and had moved beyond the miracle and mystery plays, religious concerns are still central to much of this civic, professional drama. A secondary definition is that “of or belonging to the present or visible world as distinguished from the eternal or spiritual world; temporal, worldly” (3.a). The professional stage was certainly more secular in this sense than liturgical drama (though plays such as Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus undermine such an easy distinction), but Shakespeare’s resurrection language repeatedly reminds

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audiences of the spiritual in the midst of the mundane realities of his plays. The late Philip Rieff would concur: “The world does not become ‘secularized’; it can only endure more profanations” (2:39). In Rieff’s (2007) view, which offers a challenge to materialist presuppositions, “there is nothing outside sacred order in the range of its authority” (1). Thus, any view that posits a simple divide between the secular and the religious on the early modern stage is in need of serious reconsideration. Coinciding with the myth of secularism on the early modern stage is that of a secular Shakespeare who, though he may have once held religious faith, had lost it.11 Stephen Greenblatt (2004) writes that Shakespeare’s plays reflect their author’s “lingering sense of lack.” What was missing? Shakespeare began his life with questions about his faith, his love and his social role. He had never found anything equivalent to the faith on which some of his contemporaries had staked their lives. If he himself had once been drawn toward such a commitment, he had turned away from it many years before. To be sure, he had infused his theatrical vision with the vital remnants of that faith. (388)

For Greenblatt, religious belief, both Shakespeare’s and that which he represents in the plays, is vestigial, empty of any real devotional content.12 In a related passage, Greenblatt suggests that Shakespeare’s transformation of the Vice figure from the morality plays into Bottom of A Midsummer Night’s Dream registers a secular high note: “Here, and throughout his career, Shakespeare altogether scrapped the piety that marked the plays he saw in his youth” (2004, 35). Greenblatt is certainly correct that the kind of overt piety one finds in the miracle and mystery plays is quite different from what, again, Honan (1999) calls “the profound religious sense that underlies Shakespeare’s urbanity” (50). One senses his urbanity in Bottom’s rendition of 1 Corinthians

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2:9: “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was” (4.1.209– 12). Greenblatt comments, “this is the joke of a decisively secular dramatist, a writer who deftly turned the dream of the sacred into popular entertainment” (2004, 36). Northrop Frye offers a more nuanced view: “It would be wrong to sentimentalize Bottom, but equally wrong not to feel that perhaps Bottom, with what Puck calls his own fool’s eyes, has seen something in the heart of comedy that our wisdom does not see” (1965, 109). Frye’s “perhaps” strikes the right note, it seems to me, of possibility. Likewise, the assurance with which Greenblatt asserts Shakespeare’s skepticism is unwarranted — Greenblatt is well aware of the risk one runs by extrapolating from the lines of a character to Shakespeare’s personal beliefs. Shakespeare need not have been a Christian in order to recognize the cultural and theatrical power of the Resurrection; he also need not have been a secularist in order to permit Bottom to misquote Scripture as laughably as he does. It is, after all, perfectly in character. Antitheatricalists in Shakespeare’s day objected to what the Reverend John Northbrooke called “mingl[ing] scurrility with Divinity” (1577, 65), which is what Bottom does, but this is precisely, as Erich Auerbach (1953) demonstrated a half century ago, the great movement in the history of Western literary representation, with biblical texts actually forging the crucial mix between the spiritual and the material, the high and the low. Christ was born in a stable, and such incongruities between the religious and the profane surely coexist in Bottom’s speech. Bottom has it partially right that “the eye of man hath not heard,” nor, in Shakespeare’s comically brilliant synesthesia, “his tongue to conceive” the sheer oddity of Bottom’s “dream,” even as the biblical passage he invokes reminds us of what he has temporarily forgotten: “the things,” in the words of the Geneva Bible (1560) that Shakespeare knew so well, “which God hath prepared

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for them that love him” (1 Cor. 2:9). Bottom’s mangling is funny, yes; a bit irreverent, to be sure; but the mark of a “decisively secular dramatist”? All we see is the typically naïve and probably illiterate Bottom; behind him, orchestrating it all, is Shakespeare, the author and finisher of Bottom’s idiosyncratic faith. Representations of Shakespeare’s life and plays as secular are typically a result of various materialist criticisms — Marxist, new historicist, cultural materialist — that have done a great deal to illuminate the material conditions (everything from the cost of props and costumes to the original layout of stages, the complicated business of textual production, and so on) under which Shakespeare and his contemporaries worked. But materialist criticism, insofar as it embraces philosophic materialism, has its limitations. One of the metaphysical presuppositions of materialism, as the OED informs us, is “the opinion that nothing exists except matter.” If a critical approach adopts a strictly materialist view, the result is that plays that deal with spiritual entities such as God (who in a most immaterial way is said to create the universe ex nihilo) and phenomena such as resurrection (which contravenes the laws of biology) remain largely unexamined.13 Shakespeare also makes it easy for us to pass by the spiritual because he grounds almost everything in his plays in the material reality of life. His ability to concretize events and ideas in the everyday has led to a wealth of materialist criticism. In the introduction to his recent Spiritual Shakespeares (2005), Ewan Fernie lights upon Hermione’s seeming resurrection at the close of The Winter’s Tale. Confessing that “such moments have embarrassed the predominantly materialist criticism of the last twenty years,” Fernie expresses the hope that “a fresh consideration of spirituality might reinvigorate and strengthen politically progressive materialist criticism” (3). I for one welcome this desire to reconsider spirituality, but if the purpose in doing so is to strengthen materialist criticism, it may well overlook the spiritual dynamics of a work,

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which, like Hermione’s resurrection, often defy materialist accountings. The problem is well understood now by materialist scholars themselves: “historical/materialist approaches to Shakespearean drama,” writes Jonathan Dollimore, “have been unable to handle its spiritual dimensions” (2005, 213).14 Richard Strier (1995) similarly notes the quandary: “Religion in general is something of a problem for New Historicism, which tends — unlike Renaissance English culture — to have a radically secular focus” (75). Strier also suggests that a new historicist examining early modern religion “is like that of a keenly observant anthropologist who does not speak the language of the community he is observing” (75). Rieff (2006) offers a related analysis. Discussing postmodernism’s general denial of revealed religion and its absolutist truth claims, Rieff refers to the Renaissance as part of an earlier “second world culture,” which consisted, he argues, of the great monotheisms characterized by faith in a transcendent order. Our present “third world culture,” he says, tends to negate second world faith and substitute fictions with the knowledge that they possess no transcendent truth claims.15 One of the roles of Renaissance artists, Rieff argues, was to function as symbolists who would remind their audiences of the great truths of that culture, creating it anew, in marked contrast to postmodern (that is, third culture) deconstructions: “That turn of the second culture doctrine of creation and of a complete world is turned by the third culture elites into a doctrine of de-creation in which the new world is a series of . . . negations of the complete and ever completing world of the older symbolists who saw in what there is that which is” (1:26). Shakespeare is in my view one of those artists who sees in what there is that which is, who gestures in quasi resurrections to realities beyond them, and who adumbrates in recognition scenes the potential resurrection of the body and, with it, the life of the world to come. But he is never so explicit; he works, rather, at the margins of imaginative possibility.16 A generation of materialist critics

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has been able to deny Shakespeare’s religious intimations in part because they are so unobtrusive. Shakespeare makes use of the stage as a medium to point toward the congruity of theater and faith: both rely on an imaginative reconstruction of reality, to evidence of things either not seen, or seen as shadows of the real. Paulina tells us at the quasi resurrection of Hermione, “It is requir’d / You do awake your faith” (WT 5.3.94–95). Our faith in precisely what is never specified, though it is fair to see it as a call for faith in the powers of the imagination, of theater. The possibility of a resurrection from the dead is as viable an option, if not more so, as the other interpretations of Paulina’s polysemous line. This book examines how Shakespeare evokes the Resurrection for aesthetic ends, gesturing in the plays toward the joy such an event might evoke as well as the despair and sense of loss characters experience in the face of hoped-for resurrections that never take place within the temporal frameworks of the plays. My own approach makes use of the material conditions of Shakespeare’s stage, the limits of which he was well aware. In this life, death simply cannot be overcome, a disturbing fact Shakespeare often makes light of. The fatally stabbed Mercutio declares, “Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man. I am peppered, I warrant, for this world” (Romeo & Juliet 3.1.96–98); Hamlet tells the searchers that they need not hurry to where Polonius’s dead body lies: “[He] will stay till you come” (4.3.40); and the inimitable clown in Antony and Cleopatra warns the queen of the asp he has procured for her, “his biting is immortal. Those that do die of it do seldom or never recover” (5.2.246–48).17 Shakespeare cannot simply resurrect characters from the dead without appearing to write miracle plays; he can, however, add the language and images of resurrection, as he so often does, without enacting one on stage: “he comes as close to [death and revival],” as Northrop Frye (1965) notes, “as credibility will permit” (83). This is one of his great artistic accomplishments, variations

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of which he offers us repeatedly. To an extent, all readers find in the plays what their predilections predispose them toward; Shakespeare warmly accommodates us, as Harold Bloom (1998) informs us in his endearing querulousness: Shakespeare perspectivizes his dramas so that, measure for measure, we are judged even as we attempt to judge. If your Falstaff is a roistering coward, a wastrel confidence man, an uncourted jester to Prince Hal, well, then, we know something of you, but we know no more about Falstaff. If your Cleopatra is an aging whore, and her Antony a would-be Alexander in his dotage, then we know a touch more about you and rather less about them than we should. (15)

Shakespeare’s perspectivalism allows materialists and the religious alike to find in Shakespeare an endorsement, if you will, of their beliefs. Bloom points out not the relativism of the plays but their uncanny ability to accommodate the beliefs of audiences. Knapp identifies Shakespeare both with Erasmus, the great figure of religious accommodationism, and with Paul, who famously stipulated, “I am made all things to all men, that I might by all meanes save some” (1 Cor. 9:22). According to Knapp, Shakespeare’s own dramaturgic accommodationism has been seriously misread: “Crediting him with what Keats called ‘negative capability,’ modern scholarship has treated the ‘elusiveness’ of Shakespeare’s ‘personality’ as the hallmark of his secularism; yet the ability to tolerate ‘uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts,’ as Keats defined negative capability, was a virtue that Erasmus repeatedly claimed for himself as a Christian” (52). Having said that, this book is not an attempt to Christianize Shakespeare. He is not an allegorist à la Spenser, nor are certain older arguments compelling when they suggest, for instance, that the duke in Measure for Measure is a surrogate for God, or that Timon of Athens, of all characters, is a Christ-figure (Knight 1957, 236; Siegel 1968, 52). Of such Christianizing, there has fortunately come

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an end.18 The goal here is to demonstrate the multitude of ways in which he gestures in the midst of his plays’ worldliness, their grounding in the material conditions of the everyday, to something beyond. His doing so does not invalidate, much less trump, the quotidian material; Shakespeare merely directs our gaze in the direction of the immaterial and transcendent. Shakespeare turns our eyes toward the penumbra of the Resurrection even as he adapts it for the civic, and mundane, stage. As Kiernan Ryan (2005) writes, miraculous “transfigurations” in Shakespeare’s comedies are always rationally explicable, but the audience is also left with the “impression that something ‘supernatural and causeless’ has taken place that cannot be reasoned away” (36).

II Shakespeare’s quasi resurrections have their ultimate roots in the world of classical (Greek) comedy and romance, one of whose conventions is the “recognition” (or, as Aristotle’s anagnorisis is also sometimes translated, “discovery”) in which characters separated by various means — shipwreck, abduction, wandering, a sleeping potion, even disguise — rediscover one another in a joyous reunion.19 In one variation that Shakespeare frequently employs, a character who is lost to another is presumed to be, under the dire or lengthy circumstances of the separation, dead. When the characters reunite, one of the initial reactions — so strong is the belief that the lost person died — is that he or she has been miraculously resurrected from the dead; what really happened, they may later learn, was merely a separation and subsequent but false presumption of death. But in the interim between the separated characters’ initial reunion and their realization that no one died — a realization often withheld, as Frye (1965, 84) notes, from them entirely — the time is Shakespeare’s, and he uses it to tantalize characters and occasionally us with the possibility of a resurrection. Paulina’s explanation of Hermione’s

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resurrection, for instance, is outside the temporal framework of the play, closed off to us and, thus, never quite explained. Within that space, before actual knowledge comes, wonder predominates: has someone actually come back from the dead? The moment is occasionally as ephemeral and fleeting as it is real and joyous. Shakespeare sometimes provides a mundane explanation for the reunion, but he also teases out the quasi-resurrectionary possibilities of the recognition scenes. They do not lose their character as classical recognition scenes, but Shakespeare deepens them in the process, adapting them by his evocations of the Resurrection. In its broad contours the Christian story itself can be viewed as a romance, representing in second world culture God’s writing and directing of history, through all its tortuous twists and turns — of sin, grace, and renewal — toward the union of the redeemed with the triune God in the new Jerusalem.20 Christ’s Crucifixion and Resurrection from the dead are the sine qua non of the story, as Paul made clear in his famous concatenation: Now if it be preached, that Christ is risen from the dead, how say some among you, that there is no resurrection of the dead? For if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen. And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vaine, and your faith is also vaine. And we are founde also false witnesses of God: for we have testified of god, that he hathe raised up Christ: whom he hathe not raised up, if so be the dead be not raised. For if ye dead be not raised, then is Christ not raised. And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vaine: ye are yet in your sinnes. And so they which are a slepe in Christ, are perished. If in this life onely we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the moste miserable. But now is Christ risen from the dead, and was made the first frutes of them that slept. (1 Cor. 15:12–20)

Resurrections are not exclusive to the Christian tradition, but Shakespeare’s use of such figurations draws almost exclusively on the Christian understanding of resurrection and on

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Christ’s Resurrection itself, which, it scarce needs saying, functions in the early modern period as an iconic and cultural lodestone, exerting its pull nearly everywhere. Shakespeare, too, had to experience, on some level, that same tug in sermons he heard, in the liturgical practices and language he encountered in church, and in the medieval mystery, miracle, and Passion plays he quite likely knew from his youth.21 To take just one example from those plays, in the second part of the Digby Mary Magdalene (1480–90), the queen of Marseilles dies and is resurrected from the dead — “from grevos slepe she gynnyt revive!” (Anon. 1967, 2.44.1896) — through her faith and the ministrations of the eponymous heroine. The phenomenon is standard fare for the genre.22 Similarly, the mystery cycles’ recurrent use of recognition scenes could hardly go unnoticed by Shakespeare,23 and even if they had, he knew their sources from Scripture. There, in good romance fashion, Jesus has multiple recognition scenes: with two travelers on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13–35),24 with the apostles, most notably his encounter with doubting Thomas (John 20:24–29), and perhaps most poignantly with Mary Magdalene who, much to her surprise, encounters two angels outside Christ’s empty sepulcher: And they said unto her, Woman, why wepest thou? She said unto them, Thei have taken away my Lord, and I knowe not where they have laid him. When she had thus said, she turned her self backe and sawe Jesus standing, and knewe not that it was Jesus. Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why wepest thou? Whome sekest thou? She supposing that he had bene the gardener, said unto him, Syr, if thou hast borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laide him, and I wil take him away. Jesus saith unto her, Marie. She turned her self, & said unto him, Rabboni, which is to say, Master. (John 20:13–16)

Here the recognition contains a resurrection embedded in it: Mary believes Christ to be a gardener (perhaps an oblique reference to paradise, or the garden of Eden, now reclaimed

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for humanity), but recognizes him as soon as he speaks her name. Unlike a classical recognition scene, which over time became the convention, no strictly naturalistic account can explain Christ’s miraculous presence; he has not been abducted or lost at sea; he was, by all accounts, actually dead. (He has, though, been on a romance quest if one considers the orthodox view of his harrowing of hell.) Mary is immediately forced to acknowledge that Christ has demonstrated his mastery over death and the grave. Thus, as the romance par excellence, the Resurrection embodies the classical conventions of the recognition scene, even as it extends and in a sense fulfills the recognition scene’s potential. One presumed to have been irretrievably lost is brought back from the dead in a scene that is neither illusory nor transitory: “Now is Christ risen from the dead” (1 Cor. 15:20). A good portion of this book deals with what Felperin calls “the pervasive presence of romance within Shakespeare’s entire work, even within the major tragedies” (1972, 57). The romances and comedies employ the same stock of conventions, including the recognition scene — romance conventions in name, but such generic specificity belies their broader use. Shakespeare adapts many of his characters’ reunions to hint at the possibility of resurrection, since recognition scenes involve the rediscovery of one who was lost and often presumed dead.25 What is remarkable is that Shakespeare’s figurations of resurrection preserve, almost inviolably, the identity of the classical recognition scenes they transform; they subtly remind us of the Resurrection without imposing a mystery play on the workings of the action. Even in the tragedies, Shakespeare still points us to the frustration of romance expectations, especially in the failed resurrections of such plays as Othello and King Lear. It is those plays in particular, where the hope and even prospect of resurrection are most keenly felt, that one can witness Shakespeare’s rich and abiding interest in the resurrectionary potential of his material.

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III As noted, quasi resurrections also take place in his plays with pre-Christian settings, thus allowing Shakespeare the opportunity, which he seems to relish, to conflate pagan and Christian understandings of resurrection. Even though evocations of the Resurrection are anachronistic in pagan milieux, and further find themselves in stark contrast with pagan conceptions of resurrection, Shakespeare allows or invites the clash to occur repeatedly in his plays. It is worth paying some attention to the humanism, and specifically Christian humanism — what H. Richard Niebuhr (2001, 120–29) calls the “synthesis of Christ and culture,” including pagan culture — that informs many of these competing figurations of resurrection.26 Even if Shakespeare were the secularist that some modern critics make him out to be, his birth in 1564 made him a de facto heir to the syncretistic tradition established in Italy (with Aquinas and Petrarch at its center) and later articulated in its English variant by men such as William Grocyn (1446?–1519), John Colet (1467–1519), Thomas More (1478–1535), and, most importantly, Erasmus of Rotterdam (1467–1536). Broadly understood, the agenda of the Christian humanists was to recuperate the wisdom and learning of classical Greek and Rome, to add the insights of antiquity to those revealed by the Christian faith, “and out of that knowledge,” as John Milton put it in Of Education (1644), “to love [God], to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection” (631).27 The humanist program controlled English grammar education by Shakespeare’s time, thus giving him easy access to the classical works he cites so familiarly in his works. As Robert Miola (1999) notes, “Shakespeare read the classics very much as a man of his age. As the humanists recommended, he read the ancients dynamically and competitively, boldly

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transforming texts and traditions” (184). This is amply evident in his use and adaptation of resurrection language and imagery from Ovid and elsewhere. Erasmus (1503), too, argued in Enchiridion militis Christiani “that a sensible reading of the pagan poets and philosophers is a good preparation for the Christian. . . . I am sure that you will nonetheless find many examples in the classics that are conducive to right living” (1.2.71).28 This receptivity to and affinity for the incorporation of classical, pagan literature became pervasive enough that Shakespeare’s works are merely one, though very rich, expression of it.29 Well before Shakespeare’s birth, Christian humanism had cut a wide swath across English literary culture. The martyrologist John Foxe, for instance, declares in the prologue to his Latin drama, Christus triumphans (1556), that his matter is totally sacred (Res tota sacra [Smith 1973, Prol. 13]). The characters in his cosmic drama comprise Eve, Mary, Satan, the archangel Raphael, the apostles Peter and Paul, and even, as one might expect from such an arch-Protestant, Pseudamnus, the Antichrist who represents the pope in Foxe’s fulminating imagination. Associating much of the pagan world with the infernal, Foxe nonetheless feels free to mix his cosmic biblical drama with the names of “Styx” (1.3.29), the Furies (1.3.51), Pluto and Tartar (2.3.3, 6), the harpies (2.5.42), Cerberus (3.1.59), and so on. But he is not just dropping names to showcase his erudition; the play draws upon classical forms such as the epithalamion and freely combines elements of the medieval moralities with the Roman comedies of Plautus and Terence (Smith 1973, 39–40).30 Popular in its day, Christus triumphans was performed at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1562–63, and was edited and reissued as a school text over a century later in 1672 (ibid., 34–35). The editor of the 1672 edition, one “T. C.” (Thomas Comber?) of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, included a poem in praise of Foxe: “In one stroke, one strike you may learn the wit of

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Plautus and with it that of Christ. Why hesitate? What do you fear, since divine scripture has preeminence over profane scripts? If he who mixed the useful with the sweet won the applause, so does this one, who mixed the useful with the sacred” (qui miscuit utile sacro).31 Humanist syncretism ran deep: it is no stretch of the imagination to see the same willingness on Shakespeare’s part to adapt and use his sources, biblical and pagan, in the service of his own drama. Shakespeare is simply more subtle, less strident than Foxe or, well after his own death, Milton. The truly radical thing would be for a sixteenth century playwright, steeped in the classical education of a grammar school education, to cast off this classical heritage. Milton, along with the Christian humanists, certainly believed in the supremacy of Christian revelation,32 but Of Education calls for a broad and thorough education in biblical and classical literature that all Renaissance schoolboys received. Shakespeare’s easy synthesis of pagan and Christian elements is demonstrably — empirically — evident in his work, as we shall see in his tropes of resurrection. What is distinctive about Shakespeare’s plays is that they betray no anxiety to reform classical drama or to render audiences more pious through explicit instruction. He makes considerable use of the deus ex machina convention of classical drama; the gods’ descent, however, is often figurative, even occupying the space of dreams; they act rather as images, perhaps messengers, of an overarching providence that directs the course of action. Likewise, conventional recognition scenes already have resurrective potential built into their genes, so to speak; Shakespeare takes classical conventions and creates from them a fusion of pagan and Christian without, in effect, violating the integrity of either tradition. He holds them, especially in the romances, in a delicate equipoise. Pagan belief and Christian orthodoxy coexist, even in Shakespeare’s plays with pre-Christian settings: their worlds

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collide, but each remains intact, and in the end it is the light of Christianity’s belief in the resurrection of the body that illumines, but does not distort, pagan fears of the same. To humanists such as More and Erasmus, as Hoar (1962) remarks, “Christianity necessarily offered that which paganism could never hope to approach: hope of eternal happiness” (34). Shakespeare foregrounds that distinction, as well as the Christian hope of beatitude, by evoking in conventional recognition scenes language and staging that recall the Resurrection;33 if the characters do not — indeed, they cannot within the temporal framework of the plays — receive eternal happiness at such moments, they do attain an earthly fulfillment: the recovery of one who was thought to be lost, and the consequent joy that ensues. Recognition scenes are already powerful devices in their own right; drawing upon the language of the Resurrection, Shakespeare deepens them, exploiting the characters’ wonder at finding one who was presumed dead. In so doing, he relates that revelatory joy to the Christian hope and promise of resurrection. The association of the Resurrection with a moment in any particular play is neither instantaneous nor explicit nor even necessary for the scene to work — the joy of the reunion has its own compelling force — but the evocation is nevertheless often present. The resurrective import offers readers a sense of the depth and power of the reunion by way of analogy with the Resurrection, the central image of Christendom and its concomitant message of a joy that overcomes death, which can only defer such realization for a time. As John Donne, poet and deacon of St. Paul’s, puts it, “Death, thou shalt die” (1633, line 14). And as the Chorus in Henry V asks of us only to sit and watch imaginatively, “Minding true things by what their mockeries be” (4.prologue.53), we are offered simulacra of the Resurrection — stage epiphanies of what such joy means in Shakespeare’s triumphant recognition scenes — as well as the pathos that follows from failed resurrections in the tragedies.

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IV Despite the renewed interest in Shakespeare and religion, virtually no one has sustained a focus on the resurrection motif in Shakespeare’s plays.34 One study, Paffrath 1993 (119), notes but does not fully explore the classical recognition scene or the quasi-resurrectionary potential therein, even though that is where the real action is. Shakespeare employs the organizing frame of the classical recognition scene: someone who was lost (and presumed dead) is found; explanations can be, though are not always, given and stories examined to give a natural, if sometimes bizarre, account of how the reunion can be rationally understood. Here is where Shakespeare’s evocation of the Resurrection tweaks that frame: a miraculous resurrection is not so readily amenable to mundane, prosaic explanation; it remains numinous, of supernatural causes; the characters, and sometimes the audience, are occasionally left to ponder the meaning as well as the cause of the reunion. Classical recognition scenes contain resurrections only in potential; the possibility of one coming back from the dead is almost always denied or otherwise explained away. But the potential is there, and in the biblical recognition scene of Christ’s encounter with Mary Magdalene, as well as in the medieval miracle plays, the potential is realized. Shakespeare moves toward similar fruition, but it is a mark he never quite reaches; instead, he tantalizes us, adhering to the frame of the classical recognition scene while reminding us by means of his language of the Resurrection. Shakespeare knows well the conventions of classical and biblical recognition scenes, and these plays explore the potential overlap. Shakespeare employs the equivalent of a filmic lap dissolve to superimpose, perceptibly but unintrusively, the language of the Resurrection (or resurrection more generally) on the conventions of the classical recognition scene; we “see,” in effect, both, simultaneously. Instead of using — again the

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cinematographic term — a simple wipe going from a classical to a biblical model of the recognition scene, Shakespeare fuses the two by means of the rich tradition of Christian humanism in which he was immersed and, in an undogmatic sense, trained. Paffrath also sees more than just a mere resurrection motif; he finds resurrections everywhere. In the romances alone, Hermione, Perdita, Leontes, Marina, Pericles, Ferdinand, Alonzo, Prospero, and Miranda all return, in his view, from the dead. Of course, these are largely symbolic resurrections, but Paffrath tends to make no sharp distinction between real and figurative resurrections. Shakespeare’s recognition scenes often comprise figurative resurrections, but since Paffrath does not delve into Shakespeare’s manipulation of the conventions of recognition scenes, classical or biblical, his study has the inadvertent effect of almost transforming Shakespeare’s drama into a collection of miracle plays, which they borrow from, but never become. In further contrast to Paffrath, I examine in detail Shakespeare’s sources because of his extensive reliance on them and the recognition scenes they contain. At times Shakespeare leaves such scenes intact as they are; at others he adds resurrectionary language, contrasting the conventions of classical romance with tropes and images of the Resurrection. On occasion, especially in the romances, the classical pagan and the Christian tread the same ground, though to different effect. “Graves at my command,” Prospero claims, “Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ’em forth / By my so potent art” (Tempest 5.1.48–50) — a resurrective passage, to be sure, but it derives from the pagan horror of resurrection, specifically Medea’s words in Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: “I call up dead men from their graves” (7.275; quoted in Bullough 1958–75, 8:314–15). Such confluences are always intriguing in light of the syncretist tradition, and Shakespeare makes the most of such opportunities when his sources allow him to do so. But

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it is important to distinguish between the language of resurrection already in the sources and that which Shakespeare adds to or subtracts from them in the course of his own creative variations. Some of Shakespeare’s sources are overtly religious and refer to the Resurrection explicitly, while others make no mention of it. Shakespeare adapts accordingly: he paints at times with a flick of his brush here and there, subtracting the more overt source material so as not to obtrude on the focus of his composition, adding texture at times to deepen and enrich the meaning. Shakespeare’s adaptations have the effect of adding to the recognition scenes a religious dimension by which joy and despair, the emotions that attend such moments, are better understood, even felt. Since the plays were occasionally performed in churches, and characters believe that some sort of miraculous resurrection from the dead has just taken place — or might — these moments in and of themselves almost inescapably remind us of the Resurrection. Shakespeare tips the scales by means of his religious allusions and figurations. In addition, because his book was published in 1993, Paffrath could not have access to Naseeb Shaheen’s Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays (1999), a nearly exhaustive list that established the range of Shakespeare’s biblical, homiletic, and liturgical allusions. Though scholars have long had a good intuitive sense of Shakespeare’s command of Scripture, Shaheen’s work documents the extent of his biblical erudition. Shakespeare cites the Bible thousands of times, far outdistancing his use of any other source. He relied, too, on his audience’s extensive knowledge of the Scriptures: the Bible was, as David Daniell (1999) remarks, “the one book that everyone read, or heard read” in the century after Tyndale’s translation of the English Bible in the 1530s (159, 168). Moreover, Shaheen’s cataloguing of those references and allusions demonstrates that Shakespeare was no more a slavish imitator of the Bible than he was of his other sources.

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He absorbed Scripture from his own reading and from hearing the liturgical cadences recited continually at church. He then transformed such language, often altering the letter while retaining the spirit. He can cite Medea’s resurrective claim in Ovid, for instance, and meld it seamlessly into the fabric of Prospero’s (Christian) penitential regret over the abuses of his power. As he does in the case of Bottom’s muddling of Scripture, Shakespeare plays with biblical passages, making them his own. Moreover, Shaheen offers judicious advice as to when Shakespeare is actually drawing upon a biblical or liturgical source and when he may appear to be doing so but, for one reason or another, is not. Distinguishing biblical language from other discourse is important to my enterprise. Shaheen notes, “In the final analysis, the decision whether doubtful passages are references to Scripture or have valid overtones of Scriptures is based on the reader’s personal judgment” (1999, 72). Indeed, his weighing of the evidence occasionally conflicts with my own, but in all such instances Shaheen helped me to clarify my thinking and, in cases of doubt, to err on the side of caution. There is no need to suggest quasi-resurrective language in questionable cases; enough is already there without adducing dubious examples.

V A word about argument and approach. Chapter 1 focuses on Shakespeare’s pliant, flexible use of Scripture to inform the recognition scenes in his comedies, especially when he evokes the Resurrection during the reunion of the principals. Where Paffrath believes that the resurrection motif in Shakespeare leads to a rather linear progression until we reach what he calls the “perfection” of the late romances, I see in plays as early as The Comedy of Errors as well as Romeo and Juliet a healthy skepticism of stage resurrections. Again, Shakespeare never violates the integrity of a recognition scene. He

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evokes — calls to mind — the Resurrection, and does so perhaps with greater intensity in the romances, but such perfection as he reaches is the ability to explore the Resurrection from within the boundaries of the recognition scene that he inherits from classical, biblical, and medieval sources. Thus, instead of suggesting quantitatively more and more resurrections, I find Shakespeare remarkably consistent in his skepticism of the theater’s power to represent the miraculous on stage. From the beginning of his career to the end no one, with the possible exception of Hermione, is resurrected on stage. Shakespeare realizes the risks he would run were he to do so: such a scene could fall terribly flat, a point his chorus emphasizes in apologizing for the inability to recreate the real Henry V: But pardon, gentles all, The flat unraisèd spirits that hath dared On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth So great an object. (Henry V, Prol. 8–11)

The raising of spirits might also seem a bit blasphemous to the more religiously scrupulous among his audience and would contravene his sources as well as the realism — the verisimilitude or plausibility — of his drama that re-creates the complexities of life as we know it. He is, after all, a playwright of this world. Chapters 2 and 3 examine three of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and King Lear. As tragedies these plays function in part, as Felperin (1972, 62–63) reminds us, as anti-romances, but they do so in pointed reference to frustrated recognition scenes and thus to the conventions of romance. Quite intriguingly, they pose the question of a resurrection taking place in their midst, an occurrence that would alter their generic standing, to say the least. More important, though, they suggest that resurrection is never far from Shakespeare’s interest in issues of genre and audience expectations, especially in a play such as King Lear, where

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his sources uniformly point to a happy ending. Shakespeare first broaches the possibility of a resurrection — or two — in the early Romeo and Juliet, but it is a motif that he continues and develops in several other tragedies. The possibility of resurrecting Romeo, Juliet, Desdemona, and Cordelia had to have been tempting, even if he ultimately resists the urge in tragedies that mirror the reality of life, including the apparent insurmountability of death. Still, one of the variations that Shakespeare first introduces in King Lear, the subject of Chapter 3, is the problem of how to deal with the Christian hope and promise of resurrection from the dead in plays whose setting is pre-Christian. Despite the historical impossibility of the characters’ having a Christian understanding of the afterlife, Shakespeare repeatedly employs anachronistic biblical allusions in ways that ought to appear incongruous and jarring but, oddly enough, do not. As out of historical place as such anachronisms are, they are deftly placed and largely go unnoticed unless a director goes out of his or her way to underscore the anomaly. By means of such devices, audiences “are never allowed,” Greer (1986) writes, “to forget their separate existence qua spectators”; “the audience’s own set of values is always relevant” (60–61). Given the prominence of Christianity in Renaissance England, Shakespeare’s anachronisms are hardly a surprise: they lived and thought in a language and a culture shaped by religion. We ought, as Northrop Frye (1965) suggests, to view anachronism “positively and functionally. . . . The past is blended with the present, and event and audience are linked in the same community” (20).35 By means of anachronisms, Shakespeare appears to have been interested, as many in his audience would have been, in what light the Gospel sheds on pagan cultures. The Scriptures purport to apply to all persons in all times — they chronicle the beginning of time, when “the earth was without form and void” (Gen. 1:2), to the apocalyptic fiery end — and as such

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Shakespeare brings that universalizing perspective to bear on pagan worlds, at least as far as the possibility of resurrections is concerned. He also seems interested in the audience’s reaction to these pagan worlds. With the Gospel suffusing and ordering much of early modern life, it would not be unusual for audience members to bring their faith to bear in viewing a play with a pre-Christian setting. That Shakespeare does it for them, usually subtly, is a remarkable feature of his playwriting. As for Shakespeare’s pagan characters, the thought of a resurrection usually horrifies them. In the romances, the subjects of chapters 4 and 5, we see the characters’ revulsion at the unearthly, unnerving prospect of the dead coming back to life. Their recoiling at the prospect has to do with their perception, which Hollywood mimics and parodies in films such as Night of the Living Dead (Romero 1968), of soulless bodies being reanimated, coming back to frighten and perhaps harm the living. Shakespeare juxtaposes the pagan horror at this prospect with the joy reserved in the Christian tradition for the resurrection of the dead. Though Paffrath (1993, 198) and Lomax (1987, 106), among others, have long noted Shakespeare’s use of Christian language and imagery in pagan settings, the incongruity has not fully been explored in light of the humanism that informs the plays. The appendix examines two unusual cases of resurrection, the mock resurrections in Henry IV, Part I, and Antony and Cleopatra. I initially resisted the inclusion of either instance, but I have come to regard them as further variations on Shakespeare’s concern with stage, and staged, resurrections. These two plays function without traditional recognition scenes, and thus their quasi resurrections are distinct from other figurations of resurrection in this study. As actors extraordinaire, Cleopatra and Falstaff take on their toughest roles: faking their deaths and then rising from the dead. In Falstaff’s case it is pure shenanigans, perhaps a parody of

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the Resurrection, but in any case perfectly consistent with what Frank Kermode (2000) describes as his corrosive attitude and effect on traditional values, religious ones included. Cleopatra, too, stages her own death and then comes back to life in a comical reminder of Juliet’s more serious ruse. Her longing, in the end, is for an afterlife shared with Antony, a world where she envisions them living as husband and wife. Her intimation of a future life lived in defiance of death recalls Lear’s and Othello’s visions, and is in the end equally tragic.

VI Finally, a work titled Shakespearean Resurrection might raise questions about Shakespeare’s religious affiliation or commitments. What I regard as the myth of a thoroughly secular Shakespeare is counterpoised by a longstanding and continuing tradition of finding a sectarian Shakespeare. The current vogue, as illustrated by Beauregard (2008), is for a Catholic Shakespeare.36 As tantalizing as some of this evidence is (especially the near-conclusive proof that Shakespeare’s father was Catholic), much of it remains speculative, based on tidbits of information, anecdotes, lost documents, and other evidence that probably will never be definitive on the issue of Shakespeare’s faith or lack thereof. What we have, however, are the thousands of biblical and other references that attest to the pervasiveness of religion in the culture as well as in his drama; Shakespeare’s adaptation of the Resurrection is an important manifestation of that pervasiveness. I share Knapp’s view that Shakespeare is the least doctrinaire of poets, never really betraying any denominational affiliations other than, perhaps, a general unease with the severity of certain strains of Puritanism. His religious language is broadly ecumenical, typically irenic rather than partisan, more concerned with aesthetic aims than doctrinal

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ones. This is not to say that Shakespeare had no specific affiliation, only that his work does not reveal it. One of the distinguishing traits of his work is, as critics from Hazlitt (1818, 47) to Virginia Woolf (1929, 98–99) have pointed out, his invisibility, an unwillingness to give away his personal beliefs or propagandize. Maurice Hunt (2003) observes that “Shakespeare’s syncretistic method for incorporating Protestant and Catholic elements into his plays is virtually singular among early modern English playwrights” (ix). This conversancy with competing traditions has given rise to the view that since the work reveals no clear sectarian affiliation on Shakespeare’s part, he may well have had none. Such a conclusion is unwarranted; his syncretism suggests instead that his plays are not limited to a particular realm of experience, religious or otherwise. Geoffrey Bullough (1958–75) articulated a view of Shakespeare as a bricoleur who brings together the pagan and the Christian along with a myriad of other influences into the great admixture of his art: Shakespeare here shows himself rather the anima naturaliter Christiana [soul of the natural Christian]37 than the exponent of particular Christian doctrines, though it is wrong to limit his religious ideas to wellings up from an unconscious heritage, in view of . . . pervasive references to Christian teaching. Rather the Christian heritage is blended in a wide pattern of humane ethics which allows of inconsistencies, touches of pagan feeling, bawdiness, delight in crooked ways. (2:417)

Shakespeare’s art intermingles the transcendent and the quotidian, the sacred and the profane, Christian and pagan; he adds tones and textures in a combination that Bullough captures as the essence of what I consider Shakespeare’s farreaching humanism: the ambit of his art is life itself. In a penetrating analysis of this humanist phenomenon, Balthasar (1988) refers to Shakespeare’s use of the Resurrection as “post-figurations” that transmute the language of theology into that of the civic stage:

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In the remote background there are the Christian miracles of the medieval mystery plays. But Shakespeare performs a “post-figuration,” transforming the Christian elements into a fluid, elusive metaphor for the grace of existence. We can hardly say whether his is fired more by themes of antiquity or by Christian themes; the atmosphere is inconceivable apart from the Christian background, but this background only diffuses an anonymous light over the miracles of earthly love. (384)

Indeed, the language of resurrection that one finds in Shakespeare’s plays is that of art, not of salvation theology, or soteriology.38 The historian Kevin Sharpe (2000) writes of the variety of ways in which religion found expression in the early modern period: “Religion was not just about doctrine, liturgy or ecclesiastical government; it was a language, an aesthetic, a structuring of meaning, an identity, a politics” (12). As an aesthetic, Shakespeare’s language directs the human desire for transcendence toward what Jackson and Marotti (2004) call “a reality within and beyond the phenomenal world” (169). The expression of religious content in Shakespeare’s plays is similar to that which one finds in Raphael’s stunning Mond Crucifixion (ca. 1502–03): the vibrant colors of the composition, especially the breathtaking blue of the sky and the equally vivid red of the loincloth draped around Christ’s beautifully proportioned, quiescent body. One almost forgets the painting’s subject matter in light of its aesthetic splendor. Shakespeare’s figurations of resurrection constitute what a line of critics including T. S. Eliot called an “objective correlative,” “the technique in art of representing or evoking a particular emotion by means of symbols, which become associated with and indicative of that emotion” (OED). Shakespeare’s symbol is the Resurrection, which he reminds us of in his recognition scenes; the emotion he evokes is that of the joy of reunion after seeming death. We are not asked to reflect explicitly on Christ’s resurrection, only and subtly

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allowed through evocations of the Resurrection to see in the reunions of characters an intimation of that joy. An adaptation of the Resurrection by way of quasi resurrections in the plays is a way of understanding the fullness, the richness, the plenitude of such reunions. The Resurrection thus becomes for Shakespeare not a doctrinal point but an aesthetic of joy. If this sounds abstract, read or attend performances of the plays and see the reunions that take place after characters are believed to be dead; such moments speak for themselves. It is the same, curiously enough, with the obverse case: the failed resurrections in the tragedies point not so much toward the critical vogue for nihilist readings as toward what it means to experience in this life the problem and insurmountability of death. Romeo, Juliet, Lear, and Othello all hope for a resurrection that might redeem all suffering, but such hope is deferred in the plays, as in life, to the beyond, to a temporal frame that exists, if at all, outside the boundaries of the drama. Only in the comedies and romances can an evocation of the Resurrection bear its fruit in joyous reunion. In the tragedies its absence is one of bitter frustration, made all the more poignant by comparison to Christ’s triumph over death, a juxtaposition Shakespeare reminds us of when he repeatedly employs the language of resurrection in those plays. The approach of this book is therefore phenomenological rather than ideological: the interest lies in how religious thought and imagery — his figurations of resurrection and of the Resurrection — actually inform his art. Shakespeare employs biblical language with consummate mastery in the same way he plumbs the depths of Ovidian thought and imagery. It is possible that Shakespeare was not a Christian; I suspect otherwise, but this book is not concerned with his personal religious beliefs, much less mine; its focus is the adaptation of the Resurrection that he brings to bear on his drama again and again.39 In most cases, especially in Shakespeare’s plays set in pagan worlds, figurations of the Resurrection are

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out of place, incongruous, and ought (from a purely mundane perspective) not to be there. But they are, permeating the landscape, offering another vista through which the plays can be understood. Shakespeare’s technique here reminds me of the resurrection motif in Geoffrey Anketel Studdert-Kennedy’s (1883–1929) lyrics for the Anglican hymn, “Morning Song”: Not here for high and holy things we render thanks to thee, but for the common things of earth, the purple pageantry of dawning and of dying days, the splendor of the sea, the royal robes of autumn moors, the golden gates of spring, the velvet of soft summer nights, the silver glistering of all the million million stars, the silent song they sing, of faith and hope and love undimmed, undying still through death, the resurrection of the world, what time there comes the breath of dawn that rustles through the trees, and that clear voice that saith: awake, awake to love and work! The lark is in the sky, the fields are wet with diamond dew, the worlds awake to cry their blessings on the Lord of life, as he goes meekly by.

“Not here for high and holy things,” Studdert-Kennedy nonetheless embeds the “resurrection of the world” amid the beauty of the natural world he experienced. This book is the tale of that same encounter in the world of Shakespeare’s plays.

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z

The Comedies: Recognition and Quasi Resurrection So, till the judgment that your self arise, You live in this. — Shakespeare, Sonnet 55

Comedies in their movement from sadness to joy — from separation, loss, and death to reunion and reconciliation — offer Shakespeare the opportunity, which he seldom resists, to deepen the conventional recognition scenes of his sources by means of the quasi-resurrectionary figurations he employs. In each of the five comedies I treat in this chapter, the connection between recognition and quasi resurrection is close, sometimes remarkably so. Felperin (1972) notes that recognition is always the goal — it is “recognition toward which romance [and by extension comedy] moves” (25). The culmination of these comedies occurs precisely at that moment where one who has been lost is rediscovered. Shakespeare

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learns early and well how a recognition scene allows him to tantalize his characters, and sometimes his audience, with the possibility of a resurrection. He does so with religious tropes and allusions that recall the Resurrection itself. I will pay particularly close attention to Shakespeare’s alterations of his sources, beginning with the faintest of touches he employs in the early comedies. Since Shakespeare’s figurations of resurrection, and of Christ’s Resurrection, emerge only gradually and are not what we would call systematic (he is not a theologian), one has to examine each variation to get a sense of Shakespeare’s range and development. The comedies are perhaps the best place to start, as his experimentation with figurations of resurrection in these plays serves him well in the tragedies and romances, most of which were written later. Taken together, these five comedies evince Shakespeare’s growing interest in the resurrective possibilities his source material affords him.

The Comedy of Errors Let us begin with The Comedy of Errors (ca. 1593), which in its indebtedness to its classical sources serves as an apprentice work, anticipating the later comedies both stylistically and, for my purposes, thematically in terms of the resurrection leitmotif. Given that “Plautus was a pagan,” as Shaheen (1999) notes matter-of-factly, “and had no knowledge of Scripture” (101), one ought not to expect biblical language, much less an adumbration of the Resurrection, in an adaptation so heavily dependent on Plautine comedy. This is hardly an impediment for Shakespeare, though, who has no scruples about anachronistically importing scriptural language in any of his plays, all of which, even those such as Julius Caesar and Timon of Athens, resonate with biblical, liturgical, and homiletic language. From the outset, Epidamnum, the setting in Plautus’s Menaechmi, has been changed to Ephesus, site of one of the

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apostle Paul’s journeys (Acts 19:1) as well as the destination of his canonical letter to the church there.1 But instead of resurrecting the dead, sorcerers in Ephesus threaten the body and soul’s destruction, at least if the report Antipholus of Syracuse has heard can be believed: They say this town is full of cozenage: As nimble jugglers that deceive the eye, Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind, Soul-killing witches that deform the body, Disguisèd cheaters, prating mountebanks, And many such-like liberties of sin. (Comedy of Errors 1.2.97–102)

The passage is modeled on Messenio’s description of Epidamnum in Plautus, with the important additions of sorcery and witchcraft, Pauline details clearly deriving from Acts, chapter 19 (Shaheen 1999, 105). Aside from this free amalgamation of pagan and Christian details, which is an early indication of the synthesis Shakespeare later refines in the romances, Shakespeare largely Christianizes both the setting as well as the characters in the play: Antipholus of Syracuse implores one of the Dromio twins, “Now, as I am a Christian, answer me” (1.2.77); the Second Merchant calculates the dates on which his loan becomes due according to the church calendar: “You know since Pentecost the sum is due” (4.1.1); and references to “Satan” (4.3.48, 4.4.54); “the devil’s dam” (4.3.51); “an evil angel” (4.3.20); and “hell” (4.2.32) litter the text. With sorcerers and witches able to “deform the body” (1.2.100), one might reasonably expect their opposite, Emilia — “a virtuous and a reverend lady” (5.1.134) who is now abbess at Ephesus — to effect some sort of resurrection of her lost and separated family and servants. Shakespeare ripens that possibility by means of the admixture of tragic material with which he frames the beginning and end of his comedy. The Duke tells the “hapless” Egeon,

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“thou art adjudged to the death, / And passed sentence may not be recalled” (1.1.146–47). The threat of death hovers over the play, almost coming to fruition at the end when Egeon is led toward his execution and Angelo nonchalantly tells the Second Merchant, “See where they come. We will behold his death” (5.1.128). Loss and the separation of family members only add to the ambiance of death from which the characters must be rescued, miraculously or otherwise. Harold Bloom (1998) asserts that “mature Shakespeare almost always is beyond genre” (616), and even this early play shows multiple generic impulses at work, the effect of which is to create conditions suitable for a possible resurrection. Plautus’s play is farce, and Shakespeare adheres closely to this frenetic pacing and ethos, especially by means of the two Dromio, who are far wilier servants than their lone counterpart in the Menaechmi. Resurrection might seem to be too serious a vehicle for farce, but since both are closely tied, in the end, to reunion, celebration, and festivity — farce is a variant of comedy, after all — a resurrection cannot be ruled out. Moreover, Shakespeare pulls it off in Henry IV, Part 1, in Falstaff’s mock resurrection, even though that scene borders, as we shall see, on lighthearted parody. While it is true that farce might lose its levity when the discovery involves a possible resurrection — most of the other comedies thus written become sober — The Comedy of Errors never seems to lose much of its steam. The play also incorporates its resurrection motif, which is nowhere to be found in the Menaechmi, by way of the romance conventions that Shakespeare again adopts from Plautus: “the note struck at the beginning of the play,” David Bevington (2004) reminds us, “might seem tragic were we not already attuned to the conventional romantic expectation that separated members of a family are likely to be restored to one another again” (3). Such restorations are part and parcel of romance and, again, the potential for a resurrection is embedded within romance conventions, specifically in the

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recognition scene. Shakespeare further gives us romance material in abundance: he adds the character of Egeon as well as a set of twin servants, all of whom are reunited in what becomes a very grand recognition scene. Shakespeare alters but still romanticizes the separation of the Antipholi: in Plautus’s account, one of the Menaechmi explains, “How I went with my father to Tarentum, to a great mart and there in the preasse I was stolne from him” (Bullough 1958–75, 1:38). Shakespeare relocates the separation at sea, a romance device he found particularly congenial, and further bases Emilia’s seaborne separation on that of the priestess in John Gower’s Appolonius of Tyre. Bevington (2004) comments: “The wife who is lost at sea, like her counterpart in Appolonius or Pericles, takes to a life of cloistered devotion, suggesting a pattern of symbolic death, healing, and ultimate rebirth. The ending of The Comedy of Errors has just a hint of death restored mysteriously to life” (3). The resurrection motif here is merely a hint; Emilia celebrates these characters’ “delivery,” a kind of figurative rebirth: Thirty-three years have I but gone in travail Of you, my sons, and till this present hour My heavy burden ne’er delivered. The Duke, my husband, and my children both, And you the calendars of their nativity, Go to a gossips feast, and joy with me; After so long grief, such nativity!

(5.1.401–07)

Her reunion with her lost husband, children, and servants offers a symbolic resurrection — “such nativity” is her expression for it — and in one sense the resurrection potential of this recognition scene remains largely that — symbolic or figurative. Shakespeare thus differentiates his work from that of the miracle plays, while he also follows expertly the contours of his classical model. It is a pattern he will repeat time and again, though it will be all the more striking when

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Shakespeare gestures toward literal as opposed to figurative resurrections in later plays. The Comedy of Errors is Shakespeare’s lightest and perhaps earliest invocation of a resurrection, and as such it is worth examining in some detail in light of the recognition scenes to follow in the comedies and romances. Shakespeare here establishes the theme; variations to follow. When Adriana first sees the two Antipholi together, she plays a role that Olivia will later reprise to much more dramatic effect in Twelfth Night: “I see two husbands, or mine eyes deceive me” (Comedy 5.1.332). What follows are questions about a possible doppelgänger or attendant spirit, as the amazed Duke enquires: “One of these men is genius to the other; / And so of these, which is the natural man, / And which the spirit? Who deciphers them? (333–35). Egeon, too, questions whether he wakes or sleeps: “If I dream not, thou art Emilia” (347) he says to his long-lost wife, and what follows is a thisworldly explanation, quite in keeping with classical recognition conventions still alive in Shakespeare’s day. It will be telling in later plays when the explanation is not strictly so mundane or is withheld from others (the audience included) or, which is much the same thing, pushed beyond the frame of the play: they will learn later, after the celebration with which the play closes. Many promises of future explanations go unfulfilled in the two hours’ traffic on stage. The resurrection is largely symbolic because the characters’ survival is never in serious doubt; the threat of death is held curiously at bay in the play. The characters all know from the outset that those from whom they were separated were seemingly rescued at sea: “And in our sight,” Egeon tells Solinus, “they three were taken up / by fishermen of Corinth, as we thought” (1.2.110–11). Lest there be any doubt, Emilia tells the same story of their separation from her Ephesian standpoint (5.1.350–56). No one has apparently died, and thus it is no surprise when Antipholus of Syracuse leaves home on his quest to find his brother whom he has

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not seen for 20 years (327). Yet that very span of time ought to raise the possibility of some of the characters having died in the interim: Emilia tells us that after she lost sight of her Syracusan husband and one son, “What then became of them I cannot tell” (355). As far as she knows, they might have died, and this at least allows for the possibility of a quasi-resurrection scene at the moment of recognition. What follows, though, is something curiously in-between: none of the characters ever really entertains the idea that those from whom they were separated have actually died, yet the length of the separation and the fact that time has so altered them (312– 13), especially the aging parents (an idea Shakespeare later revisits in A Winter’s Tale), renders their reunion a symbolic resurrection or rebirth: “After so long grief, such nativity!” (5.1.407). The play ends firmly within romance conventions, though the religious connotations of “nativity” suggest that even early in his career Shakespeare was not quite content with merely imitating the recognition scenes that were a staple of his classical influence. He transforms them greatly in the romances, but even in The Comedy of Errors he uses the resurrective potential intrinsic to the conventional recognition scene, potential that Shakespeare increasingly mines with an eye toward biblical tropes and, indeed, the Resurrection itself. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians reminds us of another symbolic resurrection that was made possible by means of a presumably real one: “And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins wherein in time past you walked” (2:1–2). Such opportunistic adaptation soon becomes part of Shakespeare’s own repertoire.

Much Ado about Nothing Much Ado about Nothing (ca. 1598) contains the famous subplot in which the chaste Hero is falsely accused of adultery, as are, later and to more disastrous effect, Desdemona,

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Imogen, and Hermione. The subplot appears to be a revision of Romeo and Juliet’s tragic ending, complete with friarorchestrated death and the heroine’s quasi resurrection. Hero is not literally resurrected from the dead, but the echo of such an event — its leitmotif — is certainly present and amplified by Shakespeare at certain moments of the play. From Claudio’s point of view, Hero may as well have been raised from the dead because he can think of no other explanation — certainly not a mundane one — for her reappearance and their subsequent nuptials. The plotlines of Much Ado about Nothing are ultimately of Italian origin, though there are English analogues. For instance, in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1596), Phedon relates the story of his erroneous belief in his beloved Claribell’s infidelity: I home returning, fraught with fowle despight, And chawing vengeance all the way I went, Soone as my loathed love appeard in sight, With wrathfull hand I slew her innocent.

(2.4.29.1–4)

Unlike Hero, however, Claribell is not resurrected in any sense. It is impossible to know whether Shakespeare had Spenser’s account in mind when he wrote Much Ado about Nothing, but Hero’s father, Leonato, shares Phedon’s lethal intent: “Death is the fairest cover for her shame”; “Do not live, Hero, do not ope thine eyes”; “Hence from her! Let her die” (Much Ado 4.1.116, 122, 154). Fortunately, the friar’s cooler head prevails and turns Leonato’s paternal rage in a more constructive direction: “Let here awhile be secretly kept in, / And publish it that she is dead indeed” (203–04). Claudio’s jilting of Hero at the altar will be the alleged reason for her death. As a co-conspirator, Leonato inveighs against Claudio, “Thy slander hath gone through and through her heart, / And she lies buried with her ancestors”; “Thou hast killed my child. / If thou kill’st me, boy, thou shalt kill a man” (5.1.68–69, 78–79).

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The intention, as Friar Francis informs us, is to create such remorse in Claudio that he will remember Hero as she was, only better: When he shall hear she died upon his words, Th’idea of her life shall sweetly creep Into his study of imagination, And every lovely organ of her life Shall come appareled in more precious habit, More moving-delicate, and full of life, Into the eye and prospect of his soul, Than when she lived indeed. (Much Ado 4.1.223–30)

Such imaginative recall reminds us of Romeo’s dream of his own revivification: I dreamt my lady came and found me dead — Strange dream, that gives a dead man leave to think! — And breathed such life with kisses in my lips That I revived and was an emperor. (Romeo & Juliet 5.1.6–9)

Reworking Romeo and Juliet, Friar Francis offers Beatrice the hope of a figurative resurrection: “Come, lady, die to live. This wedding day / Perhaps is but prolonged. Have patience, and endure” (Much Ado 4.1.253–54). To be sure, dreams and staged deaths are only fictive. Thus, both plays attest to the difficulty of effecting, by human means, actual resurrections from the dead. Leonato says as much to the repentant Claudio and Don Pedro: I cannot bid you bid my daughter live — That were impossible — but, I pray you both, Possess the people in Messina here How innocent she died. (Much Ado 5.1.273–76; italics mine)

Shakespeare never attempts to avoid this problem; miracle plays are not, again, his style; and Hero’s living renders any resurrection unnecessary, literally impossible. The forlorn

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hope Leonato expresses is echoed in the song the minor character, Balthasar, addresses in the graveyard to Diana, patroness of chastity: Pardon, goddess of the night, Those that slew thy virgin knight; For the which, with songs of woe, Round about her tomb they go. Midnight, assist our moan; Help us to sigh and groan, Heavily, heavily. Graves, yawn and yield your dead, Till death be utterèd, Heavily, heavily. (5.3.12–21; italics mine)

The italicized line raises the possibility of resurrection, only to envision it, again, as an impossibility.2 What follows, then, ought to be a straightforward recognition scene, one that avoids any accompanying intimation of a resurrection. Shakespeare, however, quickly complicates this moment by revisiting the resurrection-from-sleep device he had employed in Romeo and Juliet. The device belongs to romance conventions, as is clear from its use in folktales such as Sleeping Beauty. But Shakespeare, seldom one to stay neatly within conventional bounds, probably drew upon one of his sources for its hint of a resurrection: Matteo Bandello’s twenty-second novella (from Novelle, 1554) concerning Timbreo and Fenicia. Traduced just as Shakespeare’s Hero is, Bandello’s Fenicia “stood as though stricken dead” and “s[u]nk down like a dead woman” (Bullough 1958–75, 2:118–19). More pious (and loquacious)3 than her Shakespearean counterpart, Fenicia appears to die — her doctors believe of a broken heart — and lies for “five or six” hours with no perceptible pulse (2:120– 21). Prepared for burial, Fenicia suddenly awakes from her deathlike state. Her father, Lionato, takes her to his brother’s home outside Messina. The plot then closely follows that

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of Much Ado. Her beloved Timbreo, like Claudio, is newly contrite after learning he had falsely accused her: Timbreo, in fact, promises to marry a woman of Lionato’s choosing. After one year of seclusion in the country, another nice conventional length of time, Fenicia is selected for the second time. Timbreo does not recognize her because of her apparently rapid physical development, and marries her (renamed Lucilla) without knowing her true identity. Even at his wedding, though, Timbreo is overcome by his love for what he believes is his deceased fiancée: “For although I am indeed happy with my lady Lucilla, nevertheless I feel for another, whom I loved — and still love in death — more than I love myself” (ibid., 2:129). Moved by his love, the bride’s aunt enquires, “But tell me if you can; if, before this lady had been given you as a wife, you had been able to revive your beloved, what would you have done to have her alive again?” (2:129–30). This fantasy of a resurrection is delivered neatly into Shakespeare’s hands. Timbreo responds with sacrificial, penitential language: “if I could have bought back the maid who is dead, I would have given half of my lifetime to have her restored, besides my wealth” (2:130). What follows quickly is the conventional recognition scene — Lionato simply reveals Fenicia’s identity to the amazed Timbreo who, although he does not say anything, must believe for a moment that he is seeing his resurrected fiancée. Lionato dispels his wonder by revealing the mundane reality of what, in fact, had happened. If Shakespeare knew this source, and it appears almost certain that he did, he carries its intimation of a resurrection into the last scene of Much Ado about Nothing, where he expands upon it. Believing that he is marrying Hero’s cousin — “Almost the copy of [Leonato’s] child that’s dead” (5.1.284) — Claudio humbly defers to the now-veiled Hero, “I am your husband, if you like of me” (5.4.58). At this point she apparently lifts her veil:

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(unmasking). And when I lived, I was your other wife; And when you loved, you were my other husband. CLAUDIO. Another Hero! HERO. Nothing certainer. One Hero died defiled, but I do live, And surely as I live, I am a maid. (5.4.59–63) HERO

Claudio’s reference to “another Hero” may simply mean that he regards the woman in front of him as the “copy” he had been promised in Hero’s cousin, a mere look-alike. This would suggest no resurrection, simply a substitution of the living cousin for the dead Hero. But it may also be a reference to a seemingly resurrected Hero, as in Bandello’s account: “the suggestion is very strong in Much Ado,” writes Northrup Frye (1965), “that Hero really dies and comes back to life” (84).4 Both readings are possible; the passage is ambivalent. Hero ironically confirms Claudio’s words — “Nothing certainer” — even as she tantalizes us with the possible meanings of “one Hero died defiled, but I do live.” What she confirms, quite accurately, is that this is and is not a resurrection; it is a symbolic, not literal return from the dead. Claudio, however, remains, as did Timbreo for a moment, in the dark. Don Pedro, too, believes that this is no copy in the person of a cousin, but the original herself: “The former Hero! Hero that is dead!” (64). The present tense “is” neatly captures the confusion as well as the suggestion that she is both living and dead — or, more precisely, that she who was presumed dead appears to be alive. Such is the spirit of Bandello’s language, and it is yet another suggestion that Hero has been resurrected. Leonato and Friar Francis then prolong the two men’s amazement: LEONATO.

She died, my lord, but whiles her slander lived. All this amazement can I qualify, When, after that the holy rites are ended, I’ll tell you largely of fair Hero’s death.

FRIAR.

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Meantime let wonder seem familiar, And to the chapel let us presently.

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(65–70)

Wonder must seem familiar to Claudio at this moment, as he is unsure whether he is marrying Hero’s likeness in her cousin or, alternatively and tentatively, his resurrected fiancée. The revelation is held in abeyance (much longer than in Bandello’s account), the friar hastening them instead to their nuptials. But his statement that, afterward, “I’ll tell you largely of fair Hero’s death,” would seem to be a promise to explain the recognition by revealing the plan he had concocted to fake her death. However, given his priestly calling as well as the effect this staged resurrection has had on Claudio in particular, it is by no means clear that he will simply explain away the “mystery” of Hero’s figurative death. Hers is a quasi resurrection, symbolic rather than literal, but the friar does not disclose this now, and what he says later Shakespeare leaves unsaid, beyond the temporal boundary of the play’s close. In addition, the friar’s use of the word “largely,” though it fills the metrical lines of the blank verse, is equivocal: the word, as the OED indicates, is inexact, quite slippery at times. It can mean “in full, fully,” which would suggest a completely forthcoming account from the friar. But it also denotes, as it still does today, “to a great [though not complete] extent,” “generally,” “loosely,” or even “inaccurately,” a usage now obsolete but dating from 1449 and perfectly suited to Shakespeare’s polysemous uses. Given that Hero did not, in fact, die, the friar’s “I’ll tell you largely of fair Hero’s death” hardly reveals what he will actually tell Claudio and Don Pedro. The moment underscores how a recognition scene can evoke the possibility of a resurrection. Shakespeare seizes upon the resurrection potential of the recognition in order to tantalize us. In doing so, Shakespeare follows the trajectory of Bandello’s storyline, even as he prolongs the intimation of a resurrection and never quite relinquishes it in favor of

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something more mundane. The resolution from a possible resurrection to a mere recognition scene will occur offstage, if at all, but for now her presence has the prima facie appearance of the miraculous, or at least quasi miraculous. Even if the resurrection proves specious, for Claudio Hero’s return at this moment can only be compared to a resurrection that, like that of Christ, is a perfect herald of joy where “wonder seem[s] familiar.”

Twelfth Night Twelfth Night (ca. 1600–1602) contains one of the most famous, and perhaps most poignant, recognition scenes in all of Shakespeare’s comedies: the reunion of Viola, disguised as the male page Cesario, and her fraternal twin, Sebastian. As a staple of romance conventions, recognition scenes involve the recovery of someone who has been lost, in this case at sea where a shipwreck separates brother and sister before the play opens. As joyous as Viola and Sebastian’s reunion is in act 5, such moments in Shakespeare’s plays can, on one level, be understood by audience and characters alike as constituting reunion after physical separation, but not after death. But in my view Shakespeare is still exploring ways to express the joy and celebration of such reunions, and Twelfth Night demonstrates that the Resurrection is not far from his mind at such moments, in part because of the resurrective possibilities intrinsic to the recognition scene. In addition, the Resurrection serves as a powerful objective correlative for the joy that reunited characters experience in the world of his plays. Paffrath bases his assertion of multiple resurrections in Shakespeare’s plays on the ignorance as well as the surprise of the characters who have been reunited with someone they have not seen since their separation at sea, at birth, by abduction, or by any of the other standard means. Given the lengthy, often decades-long duration of some of these separations, the sudden reappearance of one lost can seem, as Olivia says,

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“most wonderful!” (Twelfth Night 5.1.225), and constitute at least the momentary suggestion, for the characters and occasionally for the audience as well, of a resurrection. One can, and recognition scenes often do, dispel the initial evocation of a resurrection in favor of something more mundane: the one presumed dead was really washed ashore on a deserted island, or abducted to another locale, or subject to any number of prosaic happenings. But Shakespeare repeatedly delays or even thwarts such explicable, naturalistic attributions. Paffrath (1993) overlooks the modus operandi of the recognition scene and suggests that Shakespeare is resurrecting characters. But Shakespeare holds in exquisite equipoise the dialectic between the natural, mundane causation that is quite typical of, and certainly the convention in, recognition scenes and the numinous quasi resurrections of his comic reunions. He gives us something not as slight as a motif of resurrection (as Paffrath calls it) nor full resurrections themselves, but what I would call the substance of a quasi resurrection, and thus my frequent use of that term. Not real, not a mere reminder, Shakespeare’s figurations of resurrection give us, to use a religious metaphor, something like the “real presence” as articulated in the Lutherans’ Eucharistic practice wherein Christ is really present, and yet not quite. Shakespeare’s dead are not quite resurrected, but they appear to be so, and in the background lies a subtle evocation of the Resurrection itself. The liminal, suggestive status of the quasi resurrection is perfectly in keeping with the imaginative practice typical of Shakespeare’s drama. Moments of quasi resurrection in Shakespeare are less easily explained away by the workings of mundane chance and are more amenable to the suggestion of the supernatural order superimposing itself upon the natural world of material cause and effect. If The Comedy of Errors only touches upon the possibility of a resurrection embedded in the recognition scene, Much Ado about Nothing explores that possibility in a more expansive way. Twelfth Night represents

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a further development, as its recognition scene evokes the Resurrection itself, but with a subtlety that distinguishes Shakespeare from his direct sources as well as from the mystery plays. Shakespeare continues to exhume from the recognition scene the resurrective possibilities that inhere within it, but this play constitutes a real move forward in his evocation of language associated with the Resurrection. To be sure, romance conventions in general, and the famous recognition scene in particular, govern Twelfth Night’s action. Viola and Sebastian’s separation and reunion fit easily into a broad pattern of death and separation in Illyria. At the outset, Valentine, Orsino’s gentleman attendant, informs us that Olivia’s tears “season / A brother’s dead love” (Twelfth Night 1.1.29–30) — the syntactic emphasis lies on her useless devotion to a “dead” love when she might find a living one in a suitor, presumably the lovesick Orsino. Her killjoy mourning bothers others as well, including her uncle Toby: “What a plague means my niece to take the death of her brother thus?” (1.3.1–2); and Feste, who catechizes her in order to remind her that since her brother’s “soul is in heaven” (1.5.66), he needs no such protracted grieving. But loss seems to be the order of the day for Olivia, since her father — as ephemeral a presence in the play as the one line in which he is mentioned — apparently “died some twelvemonth since” (1.2.37). As Toby’s reference to the plague suggests, death is in the Illyrian air in a figurative sense as well. Feste sings a song whose funereal lyrics find a receptive audience in Orsino: “Come away, come away, death, / And in sad cypress let me be laid” (2.4.51–52). Orsino’s languishing for Olivia also constitutes what Viola calls his “deadly life” (1.5.260). Even his thoughts are morbid. He puns on the “dying fall” of both music (1.1.4) and the beauty, if not lives, of women: “For women are as roses, whose fair flower / Being once displayed, doth fall that very hour” (2.4.38–39). Viola agrees: “And so they are. Alas that they are so, / To die even when they to perfection grow!” (40–41).

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As part of the play’s dramatic irony, the audience knows that neither Viola nor Sebastian has died. But even this statement is in need of qualification: there is a noticeable delay in our knowledge of Sebastian’s survival. We learn very early — at the outset of act 1, scene 2 — that Viola survived; we must wait until the opening of act 2 to learn that Sebastian is also alive. Although this is still early in the play, the suggestion of his death is felt for the entire, and rather lengthy, first act. Shakespeare places them both squarely within this milieu of death, thus preparing for the quasi-resurrection scene that later follows. Disguised as Cesario, Viola tells Orsino her “father had a daughter loved a man” but “never told her love, / But let concealment, like a worm i’th’bud, / Feed on her damask cheek” (2.4.107, 110–12). The floral metaphor is soon laid bare: “But died thy sister of her love, my boy?” Orsino asks, only to receive the evasive, “I am all the daughters of my father’s house, / And all the brothers too — and yet I know not” (119–21). Her knowledge of her brother’s fate (and he of hers), as she confesses, is incomplete. At first each assumes the other’s death: Sebastian fears his sister “is drowned already . . . with salt water” (2.1.29); Viola in turn declares, “My brother he is in Elysium” (1.2.4), even though the captain whose ship they were on gives her hope by suggesting the indeterminacy of Sebastian’s fate (6–17). Viola vacillates between hope and despair: hearing Antonio’s later pleas for help, she notes, “He named Sebastian” (3.4.381), and voices the wish, “Oh, if it prove, / Tempests are kind, and salt waves fresh in love” (385–86). Such kindness does indeed follow, as each finally learns of the other’s preservation; what remains initially unclear to each sibling is how the other can be alive. Facing her brother, Viola speculates that what she sees may be demonic, the kind of spectral visitation that Solinus in The Comedy of Errors envisioned and that Shakespeare’s pagan characters, as we shall see in the romances, routinely conjure: “If spirits

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can assume both form and suit, / You come to fright us” (5.1.235–36). Sebastian quickly allays her concerns, declaring his spirit is that of an embodied Christian soul: “A spirit I am indeed, / But am in that dimension grossly clad / Which from the womb I did participate” (5.1.236–38). For his part, Sebastian notes that Viola appears to be not simply a spirit, but to have the resurrected body — thus the first note of the motif — of his dead sister: “Were you a woman, as the rest goes even, / I should my tears let fall upon your cheek, / And say, ‘Thrice welcome, drownèd Viola!’” (239–41). The play’s earlier focus on death had prepared us for Sebastian’s resurrection discourse: separated at sea, each remained ignorant of the other’s fate and feared the worst. Now only a resurrection is seemingly able to account for Viola’s presence before him or, for that matter, for Sebastian’s before her. Counterpoised to this bit of dramatic irony is the audience’s awareness that this is no real resurrection, but a mutual and fortuitous escape from death. What we have, straight from the conventions of romance, is a recognition scene, but here again — this time more expansively — Shakespeare’s mines the resurrective potential of the moment by means of Sebastian and Viola’s reciprocal wonder. But are they to learn shortly that they have both been duped by circumstances, that this is only an illusion, that death cannot be overcome? One might expect such an outcome, given Shakespeare’s earlier emphasis on the pervasiveness and finality of death in Illyria. But that emphasis really only prepares for the quasi resurrection of the moment. Even Viola, who had earlier left open the possibility of her brother’s survival, seems incredulous, as if fearing that her revived hope might be quickly dashed. Warily, she reads against the evidence of her brother’s living body, telling him, “Such a Sebastian was my brother, too. / So went he suited to his watery tomb” (233–34). Sebastian in turn echoes her: “I had a sister, / Whom the blind waves and surges have devoured” (228–29).

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If death is final, then how is each sibling to account for the other’s seeming presence? Surely they will be disabused of the idea that an actual resurrection has taken place, but not before Shakespeare mines further the potential of his material. Shakespeare’s development of the resurrection motif here is, as Paffrath (1993, 87–88) notes, an addition to his sources. One of his probable sources was the anonymous Gl’ingannati (The Deceived), a Siennese play dating from 1531. Fabrizio and Lelia, the brother and sister figures separated before the play opens, never meet on stage. Fabrizio only learns secondhand from his nurse that his sister survived, and their reunion takes place outside the play’s boundaries (Bullough 1958–75, 2:338). Likewise, in Barnaby Riches’s prose tale, “Apolonius and Silla” (1581), a definite source for Twelfth Night, the fraternal twins, Silla and Silvio, also reunite, but in a scene markedly different from the one between Viola and Sebastian. Searching for his sister, Silvio hears from Constantinople rumors of her famed beauty: “Silvio . . . remained in those partes to enquire of his sister: he being the gladdest manne in the worlde, hasted to Constantinople, where coming to his sister he was joyfullie receved and most lovyinglie welcomed” (ibid., 2:362). Thus, when Shakespeare dramatizes the siblings’ reunion and gives Viola the following lines, he introduces a biblical trope in the midst of the recognition scene: If nothing lets to make us happy both But this my masculine usurped attire, Do not embrace me till each circumstance Of place, time, fortune, do cohere and jump That I am Viola — which to confirm I’ll bring you to a captain in this town Where lie my maiden weeds, by whose gentle help I was preserved to serve this noble count. All the occurrence of my fortune since Hath been between this lady and this lord. (5.1.249–58)

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On the surface, this may appear to be a full accounting, or promise thereof, of her preservation and disguise as well as the aid she has received from the ship’s captain, Orsino, and from Olivia. Taking advantage of Viola’s promised explanation here, Ko (1997) declares that the scene “contains no promise of transcendent fulfillment” (398). But as Ko notes, Viola’s imperative, “Do not embrace me” is a deft and hardly accidental allusion to the Noli me tangere literary topos popularized by Thomas Wyatt’s poem, “Whoso list to hunt.” The reference derives ultimately from Christ’s words to Mary Magdalene in the Gospel of John: “Touch me not: for I am not yet ascended to my Father” (20:17).5 Let us set the biblical allusion aside for a moment and consider whether there is any other reason she should not embrace Sebastian at this moment. In part, Viola appears both stunned and incredulous: she wants to “confirm” “each circumstance / Of place, time, [and] fortune” of this revelation lest there be a premature celebration. This is possible, though unlikely, since they have by this time already undertaken physical examinations of each other and conducted extensive background — lineal — checks: (seeing Viola). Do I stand there? I never had a brother; Nor can there be that deity in my nature Of here and everywhere. I had a sister, Whom the blind waves and surges have devoured. Of charity, what kin are you to me? What countryman? What name? What parentage? VIOLA. Of Messaline. Sebastian was my father. Such a Sebastian was my brother, too. So went he suited to his watery tomb. If spirits can assume both form and suit, You come to fright us. SEBASTIAN. A spirit I am indeed, But am in that dimension grossly clad Which from the womb I did participate. SEBASTIAN

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Were you a woman, as the rest goes even, I should my tears let fall upon your cheek And say, “Thrice welcome, drownèd Viola!”

At this point, stichomythia leads to a quick resolution: VIOLA.

My father had a mole upon his brow. And so had mine. VIOLA. And died that day when Viola from her birth Had numbered thirteen years. SEBASTIAN. O, that record is lively in my soul! He finishèd indeed his mortal act That day that made my sister thirteen years. (5.1.226–48) SEBASTIAN.

Then follows Viola’s crucial command that he not embrace her. After such thoroughness, a more likely reason for Viola’s unwillingness to embrace her brother lies in the resurrection motif that her allusion introduces. Shaheen (1999), for all his careful documentation of biblical and liturgical references in Shakespeare’s plays, overlooks her phrase, “Do not embrace me,” not even listing it as a possible biblical reference, even though that is his usual practice in questionable cases.6 Viola’s words are indeed an apposite allusion: Christ addresses Mary Magdalene immediately after his resurrection from the dead, suggesting that he cannot be touched, perhaps because, as the editors of the Geneva Bible gloss in the margins, “she was to muche addicted to the corporal presence, Christ teacheth her to lift up her minde by faith.” Such faith is requisite here as well: Viola has in the eyes of her brother just been resurrected from the watery depths to appear before him in flesh and blood. Recognition scenes hold out the promise of an explanation to supplement or replace the numinous and mystical with the naturalistic and realistic. But even when an explanation seeks to substitute for the quasi-miraculous nature of the discovery, wonder is not entirely removed for the characters. This is the norm within Shakespeare’s recognition scenes. In the very midst of Viola’s purported explanation of

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her survival, she introduces a trope of resurrection, which is precisely why her explanation of what really happened supplements the quasi-resurrectionary quality of the moment; the two are held in equipoise. On a realistic level, the recognition scene in Twelfth Night seems to be unnecessary. As David Scott Kastan (1982) remarks, “Twins separated for only three months would hardly need to test their identities in order to reestablish their relationship” (577). Likewise, Irene Heyartz (1963, 6–7) reads their elaborate interrogation as mocking the convention of such recognition scenes, being completely unnecessary after such short separation. Jean Howard (1984), too, notes how the scene defies reality and offers us instead a “ritual of recognition” (200). We saw a similar ritual in The Comedy of Errors, one that finds expression in several of Christ’s recognition scenes postresurrection: his encounter with Mary Magdalene; with his disciples, particularly Thomas (John 20:24–28); and presumably with at least some of the more than 500 of his followers he is reported to have appeared to after his resurrection (1 Cor. 15:6). Thus connected to biblical conventions, the ritual of recognition lends itself readily to the idea of resurrection. Viola and Sebastian’s mutual, protracted interrogation is also a concerted attempt to sort out what they see before their eyes. The possibility of a resurrection — latent as always in the recognition scene — comes to the forefront by means of Shakespeare’s tantalizing language. Viola’s (promised) naturalistic account for her appearance is counterbalanced by her allusive biblical language of the supernatural. If this moment were in another context, one might not place as much emphasis on Viola’s “Do not embrace me,” but since the recognition already contains the seed of a resurrection within its conventions, her language merely tips the balance toward what each sibling now believes; namely, that the other has come back from the dead. Shakespeare exploits this possibility to stunning effect. Indeed, to view the play in almost any production is to get

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a sense of the revelatory wonder of the two characters upon seeing each other, an effect made all the more poignant in light of their reciprocal belief that they are each seeing one whom they had given up for dead. Is the scene, then, as Paffrath (1993, 86–89) would have it, a “mutual resurrection” that partakes, as he repeatedly asserts, of the “miraculous”? On one level, no: the mundane explanations of Viola’s preservation coexist alongside the wonder of the moment and its intimation of the Resurrection. If Paffrath overreads the implications of Viola’s line, then Ko (1997) underreads it, as the recognition scene is tinged with a suggestion of “transcendent fulfillment” in the form of a quasi, or seeming, resurrection from the dead. We know, of course, that neither of the characters is literally resurrected from the dead. Shakespeare never dramatizes a literal resurrection, his dramatic palette and sensibilities being, in my view, too refined for such an impastoed technique; but the impression the characters initially experience is precisely that, and Shakespeare elaborates on this evocation of a resurrection. For the audience, too, Viola’s line is a reminder of Christ’s Resurrection, even as the play takes pains not to allegorize the moment. Still, the reverberation is there, an association that one can pass over (as certain materialist-oriented readers do) without doing terrible violence to the scene, but the import of its placement at a crucial juncture in the recognition scene is worth considering. For one thing, Shakespeare never really reconciles the mundane explanation with the resurrective suggestion of Viola’s line. She uses only four words, but their effect is immediate and really incomprehensible apart from the biblical connection. It is the kind of fusion between the profane and the miraculous, between the quotidian and the wondrous, that Shakespeare comes to relish in his later plays set in pre-Christian worlds, particularly in King Lear and in the romances. As in Much Ado about Nothing and to a lesser extent in The Comedy of Errors, the resurrectionary potential

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of the recognition scene emerges: both the mundane and the quasi miraculous exert powerful influences on how we experience the play. To be sure, a number of critics such as Garber (1981, 21), Barton (1974, 405), and Lomax (1987) have pointed out the metaphoric and symbolic resurrections in Shakespeare’s plays: Sebastian’s quasi resurrection enables him to fill the place of the dead brother Olivia mourns at the play’s outset; Sebastian is the son of his father, another “Sebastian” (2.1.16), whom he embodies as his offspring and namesake; and so on. I have no quibble with the assertion that Shakespeare makes ample and clever use of such symbolic resurrections; I would add, however, that Shakespeare often references Christ’s presumably real one and gestures toward it and toward quasi resurrections in many such reunions. Shakespeare alludes to the Resurrection at key moments in his plays as a reminder of what was, and what could yet be in the imaginative space of the theater as well as our minds. By comparison, of course, the joy experienced by Sebastian and Viola is only a simulacrum of the divine joy associated with Christ’s triumph over death. Viola’s language indeed imitates and is modeled on Christ’s, but this hardly suggests that she is in some way a Christ figure. By way of Viola’s language, Shakespeare recalls the Resurrection, associating its power with the dramatic moment of her reunion with Sebastian. That association helps us to understand and feel the poignancy of what these siblings surely experience as a blessed, if perhaps unmiraculous, event.

All’s Well That Ends Well Given the source material upon which Shakespeare based All’s Well That Ends Well (ca. 1604), its language and imagery ought not to suggest the possibility of a resurrection, but in marked contrast to those sources, almost in creative

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defiance of them, they do. One gets the impression that by 1604, when Shakespeare had been developing and extending his evocations of resurrection for over a decade, he begins to rely on his own capacity for deepening stories by means of such language. Though such figurations in All’s Well are not as pronounced as they become in the romances, even at this date one can see clear evidence of the leitmotif gathering momentum in a play whose source hardly points to a recognition scene, much less to a resurrection. Shakespeare’s departure, then, in the direction of such evocations is all the more striking. The plot of All’s Well derives from Boccaccio’s Decameron, day 3, story 9, but internal evidence indicates that Shakespeare relied directly upon a translation of the story that he found in William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure (1566). In the thirtyeighth novel of Painter’s work, Giletta, the Helena character, saves the King by means of a medicinal “pouder of certain herbes,” only to be rebuffed by the husband, Beltramo, Count of Rossiglione, whom she then chooses as her reward from the King (Bullough 1958–75, 2:390). Beltramo, a confirmed bachelor and philanderer, refuses to return to his land unless Gileta fulfills two ostensibly impossible requests: “ ‘Let her do what she liste: for I do purpose to dwell with her, when she shall have this ring (meaning a ring which he wore) upon her finger, and a sonne in her armes begotten by mee.’ He greatly loved that ring, and kepte it very carefully, and never toke it from his finger, for a certain virtue that he knew it had” (ibid., 2:392). If the ring is difficult to procure, a child will be more so: Beltramo refuses to consummate the marriage, and his departure to Florence further renders his fatherhood a geographic impossibility. A lovesick Gileta, in turn, was lothe the Counte for her sake should dwell in perpetual exile: therefore shee determined to spende the reste of her time in Pilgrimages and devotion, for preservation of her Soule, prayinge [his countrymen] to take the charge and

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governemente of the Countrie, and that they would let the Counte understande, that shee had forsaken his house, and was removed farre from thence: with purpose never to returne to Rossiglione againe. (2:392–93)

This is as far as Boccaccio goes: Gileta neither dies nor is rumored nor presumed to be dead by anyone at any time. Though she then comes to Florence, Beltramo is too concerned with seducing an unnamed “gentlewoman” (Shakespeare’s Diana Capilet figure) to give Gileta a second thought. When she again appears at the end of the story with Beltramo’s ring and children (twins, no less), he is “greatly astonned” not by the fact of her living but by her ability to fulfill the seemingly impossible preconditions he had given for their eventual cohabitation. Faced with such evidence, having “abjected his obstinate rigour” against her, as Painter phrases it, “from that time forth [Beltramo] loved and honoured her as his dere spouse and wyfe” (ibid., 2:396). In other words, Boccaccio’s story offers a minimalist recognition scene: as Gileta “passed through the people without chaunge of apparell,” wearing “her pligrimes weede,” she first identifies herself, “My Lorde, I am thy poore infortunate wife” (ibid., 2:396). As soon as Beltramo recognizes her, he expresses no surprise at her being alive. Unlike a typical recognition scene, neither of them has been lost at sea, abducted by pirates, or subject to any of the conventional devices that lead characters to believe another person might be dead. What concerns him after these few years are her possession of the ring and the presence of his twin sons, “whiche were very like unto their father” (2:396); no paternity test will apparently be necessary. Thus, without any real recognition scene, there can hardly be resurrection language, and indeed none is to be found, either in Boccaccio’s tale or in Painter’s translation. At his own prompting, then, and probably drawing on his own plays as source material, Shakespeare employs a more expansive

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recognition scene in Bertram and Helena’s reunion, and deepens the encounter by means of adding resurrection language and imagery. He does so with a sure, and by now characteristically Shakespearean, hand. Because of its lack of a “festive mood” that C. L. Barber (1959) thought typical of Shakespeare’s comedies, All’s Well That Ends Well is considered a problem play; its tonal qualities are darker, more disturbing than the lightheartedness one might expect from the genre. Measure for Measure, another problem play, shares with All’s Well a focus on the occasionally debilitating urges of human sexuality. Bertram’s mother, the Countess, recognizes her similarity, or connaturality, with the passionate Helena: “Even so it was with me when I was young. / If ever we are nature’s, these are ours. This thorn / doth to our rose of youth rightly belong” (All’s Well 1.3.125–27). Lavatch, the clown, offers a more openly carnal answer when the Countess asks his reason for marrying: “My poor body, madam, requires it. I am driven on by the flesh, and he must needs go that the devil drives” (28–30). Helena’s passion for Bertram similarly drives her: believed to be weeping excessively in “remembrance of her father” (1.1.49), she denies it in soliloquy: “I think not on my father” (82). Her thoughts of death (a well known synonym in the period for sexual consummation) are more erotically tinged: “The hind that would be mated by the lion / Must die for love” (93–94). This prolepsis of her figurative death is another example of how Shakespeare, as he had a decade earlier in Romeo and Juliet (see chapter 2), intermingles death and life, foreshadowing ways in which life and love can defeat death. Helena’s language here, though, is not as resurrective as it is edgily erotic: death threatens to overwhelm and consume her. Death pervades the play. Shakespeare takes his initial cue from Boccaccio’s tale, which mentions the deaths of Gileta and Beltramo’s respective fathers. Shakespeare foregrounds those deaths in the Countess’s opening lines: “In delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband” (1.1.1–2).

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Figurative and literal deaths (Bertram’s and her husband’s, respectively) coalesce and become indistinguishable; the Countess simply adds them together to sum her double loss. The son whom she “delivered” appears, now that he is heading off to war, as if he is being delivered up to death. Bertram, in turn, “weep[s] o’er [his] father’s death anew” (3–4), and we quickly learn — all of this in the first 25 lines of the play — of the King of France’s impending death as well (22–24). The King, however, not only holds death at bay, but also recuperates. His quasi-miraculous recovery allows Lafew the opportunity to rehearse a Reformation controversy: “They say miracles are past, and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless” (2.3.1–3). Despite his implication, however, the King’s recovery is not really a “miracle” in the usual acceptation of the word; his cure is pharmacological rather than supernatural. Still, Shakespeare’s characters believe that God uses the medical talents of human beings to work his ends: Lafew and Parolles see the “Very hand of heaven” “In a most weak” “And debile minister,” Helena (2.3.31, 33–34). She, too, attributes her pharmacological prowess ultimately to God: “Heaven hath through me restored the King to health” (2.3.64). Although restoring the near dead to life may be a divine prerogative, Lafew had earlier claimed that Helena’s father was so skilled as almost to be able to render “nature immortal, and death should have play for lack of work” (1.1.21–22). And this is not all: “I have seen a medicine,” Lafew tells us, “That’s able to breathe life into a stone, / Quicken a rock,” thus animating the inanimate (2.1.73–75). Having asserted such an impossibility, resurrection would be comparatively — a fortiori — easy. The drug’s simple touch Is powerful to araise King Pepin, nay, To give great Charlemain a pen in’s hand And write to [Helena] a love line.

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No such language of resurrection appears in Boccaccio’s account. The King’s recovery is also described in the unmistakable terms of a quasi resurrection from the dead: LAFEW.

Of All the learned and authentic fellows — Right so, I say. LAFEW. That gave him out incurable — PAROLLES. Why, there ’tis ; so say I too. LAFEW. Not to be helped. PAROLLES. Right! As ’twere a man assured of a — LAFEW. Uncertain life and sure death. (2.3.12–18) PAROLLES.

Lafew goes on to call it “A showing of a heavenly effect in an earthly actor” (23–24); again, the emphasis is on the quasimiraculous recovery from certain death. Boccaccio’s heroine is pious, a trait Shakespeare deepens in his own depiction of Helena. She tells the skeptical king before his cure, “But most it is presumption in us when / The help of heaven we count the act of men” (2.1.153–54). She promises to cure him; having done so, the King becomes a believer: “she has raised me from my sickly bed” (2.3.111). Such biblical echoes are, again, nowhere in Boccaccio’s tale: “The yong maiden began to minister her Phisicke, and in short space before her appointed time, she had throughly cured the king” (Bullough 1958–75, 2:391). Shakespeare elaborates, sometimes discursively, on the role of providence, even hinting at the role this “heavenly” drug can play in resurrecting the dead or those near death (2.1.170–91). So confident is Helena of her success that she is willing to undergo torture and even death if she should fail: “I’d venture,” she tells the Countess, “The well-lost life of mine of mine on His Grace’s cure” (1.3.245–46). Helena repeatedly displays an almost Machiavellian ethic, willing to employ any means, even death, in order to accomplish her ends: “The hind that would be mated by the lion / Must die for love” (1.1.93–94). With her own death hanging in the balance, and Shakespeare’s reminder of a resurrection in the

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King’s recovery, one can begin to sense the full reach of the title’s claim: all is well that ends well. In this major departure from Boccaccio’s storyline, Shakespeare reiterates his interest in evoking a resurrection as part of the recognition scene. He first plants the news of Helena’s death by assigning a secondhand report of it to two lords: FIRST LORD.

And [during her pilgrimage] the tenderness of her nature became as a prey to her grief; in fine, made a groan of her last breath, and now she sings in heaven. SECOND LORD. How is this justified? FIRST LORD. The stronger part of it by her own letters, which makes her story true even to the point of her death. Her death itself, which could not be her office to say is come, was faithfully confirmed by the rector of the place. (4.3.49–58)

Almost everyone soon learns of and believes in the alleged reality of her death: Bertram (4.3.87); the Countess (4.5.8–9); Lafew (4.5.69); and the King of France, who laments, “We lost a jewel of her” (5.3.1). This misconception is sheer dramatic irony, as the audience and a select few characters are aware of her staged death: “You must know,” Helena tells widow Capilet, “I am supposèd dead” (4.4.10–11). That false supposal makes it clear that this is no miracle or resurrection drama, but it does open the way for the play to become what Hunter (1965) calls a “comedy of forgiveness,” anticipating as it does the dénouement of the late romances, especially that of The Winter’s Tale. Inexplicable as his clemency is from a purely human standpoint, the King extends grace to Bertram in the play’s last scene: I have forgiven and forgotten all, Though my revenges were high bent upon him And watched the time to shoot. ........ Let him not ask our pardon. The nature of his great offense is dead,

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And deeper than oblivion we do bury Th’incensing relics of it.

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(5.3.9–11, 22–25)

The nature of Bertram’s offense is figuratively dead and buried, just as they believe Helena to be literally so. In keeping with the comedic and romance convention of all’s well that ends well, the suddenly contrite Bertram enters and humbly asks, “My high-repented blames, / Dear sovereign, pardon to me” (5.3.37–38), to which the King responds with two of the play’s most poignant lines: “All is whole; / Not one word more of the consumèd time” (38–39). Time both consumes and redeems in the play: Helena assures Diana that, with preparation and patience, “time revives us” (4.4.34) — perhaps another foretaste of her later restoration. Shakespeare also wonderfully compresses the time of Bertram’s past and present attitudes toward Helena: Thence it came That she whom all men praised and whom myself, Since I have lost, have loved, was in mine eye The dust that did offend it. (5.3.53–56)

The King then laments that we devalue “serious things we have” “until we know their grave” (62–63), and declares with a sense of finality that “she is dead” (119), a view echoed by Lafew: “By my old beard, / And every hair that’s on’t, Helen that’s dead / Was a sweet creature” (77–79). Diana then both corroborates and contradicts the men with her riddle: “Dead though she be, she feels her young one kick, / So there’s my riddle: one that’s dead is quick — / And now behold the meaning” (5.3.303–05). Helena enters and the King thinks he is seeing the work of a sorcerer: KING. Is there no exorcist Beguiles the truer office of mine eyes? Is’t real that I see?

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No, my good lord, ’Tis but the shadow of a wife you see, The name and not the thing. BERTRAM. Both, both. Oh, pardon! (305–09)

Helen almost confirms the King’s fears that she is indeed a spirit recalled from the dead — “The name and not the [real] thing” — but Bertram sees her in soul and body — “Both, both.” His sudden sobriety, not to mention his awareness that a woman is more than just a body, represents a striking change for a man who had said of Diana a few minutes earlier, “Certain it is I liked her, / And boarded her i’th’ wanton way of youth” (211–12). This quasi resurrection utterly transforms Boccaccio’s comparatively prosaic encounter between his own lead characters. Bertram is left, if not in disbelief, at least at a loss as to how all this can be: “If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly, I’ll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly” (5.3.316–17). He wants a rational accounting to replace the seeming miraculous resurrection with something he can more easily understand, but the explanation, like so many others, is cut off by the end of the play. One senses, too, a bit of Bertram’s old machismo in his conditional challenge, “If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly.” Helena answers in kind with another conditional statement, this one of ironic certainty: “If it appear not plain and prove untrue, / Deadly divorce step between me and you! — ” (318–19). She promises to provide the explanation Bertram seeks and, if she cannot, to be divorced by her death, which in effect is a wish to reinter herself, this time literally. One can see Shakespeare playing with tropes of resurrection, teasing out one further possibility with Helena’s sudden sight of the Countess, whom she has not seen for some time: “O my dear mother, do I see you living?” (320). The Countess also appears to have emerged unscathed by, if not literally to have returned from, death.

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Thus, by 1604 Shakespeare demonstrates his mastery of the recognition scene; here he expands upon Boccaccio’s minimalist version, and in so doing fleshes out the possibilities of Helena’s quasi resurrection from the dead. Shakespeare’s use of resurrection language in the midst of his recognition scenes continues a pattern he had established in the early plays, one that he will enrich and deepen in plays such as King Lear and the late romances. What is equally striking is Shakespeare’s unwillingness to falsify his sources or Christianize his material in a didactic or moralizing way; his Christianity is aesthetic, his figurations of resurrection intuitive and suggestive rather than overt and proselytizing. Bevington (2004) sees providence at work in the play: “Human perversity accentuates the need for divine grace” (373), and the play does gesture in that direction. Still, Shakespeare often represents the human condition as benighted, as Greer (1986, 99) suggests; questions of divine intervention are typically left open, as if knowledge of such intervention is not easily discernible in this life. To be sure, Helena’s is not a resurrection from the dead; her quasi resurrection is, however, the human acknowledgement that all can be forgiven and made whole despite the apparent impossibility. Hovering in the background of such a romance convention is the Christian archetype of resurrection, which complements the romance by acting precisely as a reminder of such overcoming. As we have already seen, a number of Shakespeare’s plays evoke a victory over death that hints at more than the mere following of romance conventions. Just as it is possible to say that the Resurrection is the basis of the Christian romance, a quasi resurrection similarly informs the ending of All’s Well That Ends Well. In her unflagging optimism and piety (which often accompany one another in life), Helena offers the play’s titular refrain: “All’s well that ends well. Still the fine’s the crown; / Whate’er the course, the end is the renown” (4.4.35–36; see also 5.1.24–25).

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Surely this is in part Machiavellian, as it allows her to equivocate at times: having chosen Bertram as her reward for curing the King, Helena promises, in a paraphrase of the marriage service, to obey his wishes: “I dare not say I take you, but I give / Me and my service, ever whilst I live, / Into your guiding power” (2.3.102–04; italics mine). Thus, her faked death allows her to trick Bertram into impregnating her. Still, if all’s well that ends well, the redemptive trajectory of her work does seem to bear itself out in the end, no matter how turbulent the ride. Helena’s quasi resurrection from the dead is its final, and perhaps most fitting, form, even as their future happiness as a married couple, if it is to be fully realized, may well involve something of a miracle as well.

Measure for Measure The late comedy Measure for Measure (1604) concerns, in relevant part, the near execution of Claudio and his quasimiraculous escape, if not quite resurrection, from death. The play is replete with Christian tropes and images: the title, for instance, is taken almost directly from Mark 4:24: “With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured unto you.” Shakespeare further teases us with the often overt religious language of the play as well as some suggestive lines, such as Angelo’s awed response when he learns late in the play that Duke Vincentio has known all along of his abuse of power: “Your Grace, like power divine, / Hath looked upon my passes” (5.1.377–78). Shaheen (1999) comments, “The religious overtones in the play have given rise to many farfetched religious interpretations, as if the play were a religious treatise or was intended to be Christian teaching, but most of these interpretations greatly distort the play” (247). Such readings were prevalent in the early- and mid-twentieth century: Battenhouse (1946), for one, paid considerable attention to Angelo’s lines above and thus envisioned the Duke as “the Incarnate Lord” (1030); Paffrath (1993) considers

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Claudio’s appearance at the end of the play to constitute yet another resurrection from the dead. Countervailing voices have also been heard. Leech (1970) notes the pagan overtones of the Duke’s exhortation preparing Claudio for death, suggesting to Leech that even though Christian overtones “well up . . . from Shakespeare’s unconscious inheritance, [they do] not determine the play’s action” (67). Bullough’s response to Leech is worth revisiting: Shakespeare here shows himself rather the anima naturaliter Christiana than the exponent of particular Christian doctrines, though it is wrong to limit his religious ideas to wellings up from an unconscious heritage, in view of . . . pervasive references to Christian teaching. Rather the Christian heritage is blended in a wide pattern of humane ethics which allows of inconsistencies, touches of pagan feeling, bawdiness, delight in crooked ways. (2:417)

Shakespeare’s blending comprises recognition scenes and the resurrectionary potential they contain. Having emerged from Greek (pagan) romance and having been adapted by the writers of Scripture, the recognition scene allows Shakespeare to make full use of this rich heritage. This is what one finds especially in the romances — free and unconstrained interplay between pagan and Christian elements. In Measure for Measure, Shakespeare gives us a recognition scene that both is and is not resurrective. As Bullough (1958–75, 2:415–16) notes, and as any reader of the sources soon discovers, Shakespeare’s version of the story is decidedly more religious in tone than that of his predecessors. Part of this religiosity stems from the play’s focus on human sinfulness, sexual sin in particular, a refrain that cascades over our ears repeatedly: “Our natures do pursue, / Like rats that ravin down their proper bane, / A thirsty evil, and when we drink we die” (Measure 1.2.128–30). With original sin as the backdrop and sexual license as its particular manifestation, neither Claudio nor Angelo nor Lucio has

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mastered his libido, the “prompture of the blood” (2.4.179). That the Viennese state has the statutory power to enforce “the drowsy and neglected act” (1.2.167) criminalizing premarital sex with death is clear; more murky is the Duke’s plan to invest the strict Angelo with plenipotentiary powers — “Lent him our terror, dressed him with our love” (1.1.20) — to make an example of an offender. With life and death at stake, Shakespeare introduces, more forthrightly in Measure for Measure than perhaps in any other play, what Paffrath calls the resurrection motif. Shakespeare prepares for such language by making Isabella a novice in the order of Saint Clare, a vocation she has in none of the sources that Shakespeare consulted for his writing of the play. Making Isabella a religious allows Shakespeare to imbue her speech with tropes and imagery of resurrection. Consider Angelo’s telling her that all pleas for Claudio’s life are fruitless: Your brother is a forfeit of the law, And you but wasted your words. ISABELLA. Alas, alas! Why, all the souls that were forfeit once, And He that might the vantage best have took Found out the remedy. How would you be, If He, which is the top of judgment, should But judge you as you are? Oh, think on that, And mercy then will breathe within your lips, Like man new-made.

(2.2.76–84)

This last line alludes to Paul’s letter to the Ephesians: “Put on the newe man” (4:24; see also 2 Cor. 5:17). From the old to the new, from death to life, Christ’s death on the cross “found out the remedy” for the sinfulness of humankind. Isabella’s is a plea for clemency premised upon the forgiveness effected by Christ’s death and resurrection. Angelo answers in kind, perhaps taking his cue from her own religious discourse, perhaps also from his possible Puritan

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background — he is referred to as being “precise” (1.3.50), a term of derision Anglicans used to refer to their more abstemious, and nonconformist, coreligionists. Whatever the reason, Angelo speaks her language, though in perverted fashion. He cajoles her with the prospect of saving Claudio: “redeem him / Give up your body to such sweet uncleanness” (2.4.53– 54). Rebuffed, he hardens: “Then must your brother die,” to which she retorts, And ’twere the cheaper way. Better it were a brother died at once Than that a sister, by redeeming him, Should die forever.

(105–09)

Isabella speaks of both bodies and souls: in order to spare her brother’s body, she must imperil her soul; her body must “ransom” her brother’s (112), a word that in context is another glance in the direction of Christ’s ransoming of souls: “the Sonne of man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life for the ransome of manie” (Matt. 20:28). Of course, “ransom” also refers, in its typical sense, to the release of a prisoner, here Claudio; the connotations counterbalance one another in Shakespeare’s punning upon the word. After hearing the Duke as the disguised friar counsel, “Be absolute for death” (3.1.5), Claudio resigns himself: “To sue to live, I find I seek to die, / And seeking death, find life: let it come on” (42–43). Paffrath (1993) subtitles his section on the play with these lines, pointing to their (ostensible) resurrective import as well as resonance with the Bible: “Whosoever wil save his life, shall lose it: and whosoever shal lose his life for my sake, shall finde it” (Matt. 16:25). Shaheen (1999), remarks, however, that Claudio’s language is “at best an analogy rather than a reference” to Scripture (259). Indeed, Claudio is not losing his life for Christ’s sake; he is no martyr but a criminal — subject to an unduly severe punishment — and he steels himself, with a bit of recklessness (“let it come on”), to stoic acceptance of the inevitability of his

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fate. Even then, he quickly reverses course later in the same scene and pleads with Isabella to give her body for his sake to Angelo (119–38). Thus, the play repeatedly counterbalances the religious tropes, especially those of resurrection, against secular connotations of the same words and language, just as the lex talionis of “measure for measure” is superseded, in the end, not by divine dispensation, but by human mercy. Among Shakespeare’s numerous sources for Measure for Measure, the one upon which he relied for his final recognition scene, is George Whetstone’s play, Promos and Cassandra (1578). Late in Whetstone’s drama, Cassandra, the Isabella figure, laments her losses: My brother slain, my husband ah, at point to lose his head, Why live I then unhappy wench my succors being dead? O time, O crime, O cause, O laws, that Judged them thus to die, I blame you all, my shame, my thrall; you hate that harmless try. (Bullough 1958–75, 2:511)

O mechanical verse: this is the same turgid style Shakespeare lampoons to such sterling effect in the Pyramis and Thisbe playlet (5.1) from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (ca. 1594– 95). Whetstone’s recognition scene quickly follows, with the servant Ganio explaining that Andrugio (the Claudio figure), Cassandra’s brother who is betrothed to Polina (the Juliet figure), was never beheaded: GANIO.

O sweet news for Polina and Cassandra: Andrugio lives. POLINA. What doth poor Ganio say? GANIO. Andrugio lives, and Promos [the Angelo figure] is repriev’d. CASSANDRA. Vain is thy hope, I saw Andrugio dead. GANIO. Well, then from death he is again reviv’d. Even now I saw him in the market stead.

Returning from the market, Andrugio soon enters for the crucial, if brief, recognition scene:

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POLINA.

My good Andrugio! ANDRUGIO. My sweet Polina. CASSANDRA. Lives Andrugio? Welcome sweet brother. ANDRUGIO. Cassandra! CASSANDRA. I. ANDRUGIO. How fare, my dear Sister? KING. Andrugio, you shall have more leisure To greet one another: it is our pleasure That you forthwith your Fortunes here declare, And by what meanes you thus preserved were. (Bullough 1958–75, 2:511)

Having just seen the man he believed had been executed some time ago, Ganio suggests that if Andrugio were in fact dead, as Cassandra claims, he is now returned from it — “reviv’d.” His simple deduction awakens the scene’s potential for a resurrection. The moment, however, soon passes: their recognition, as well as the suggestion of a resurrection — “Lives Andrugio?” — is exceedingly short, however intensely it may be performed. Intervening, the King quickly relates that the head of an executed prisoner was substituted for what almost everyone thought was Andrugio’s. The momentary wonder created for Cassandra and Polina by the possibility of a resurrection is soon eclipsed by the King’s ready explanation. In the end everyone realizes that Andrugio has escaped death “from whose bourn,” as Hamlet attests, “No traveler returns” (3.1.80–81). Shakespeare models the recognition scene in Measure for Measure in part on Promos and Cassandra: PROVOST.

This is another prisoner that I saved, Who should have died when Claudio lost his head, As like almost to Claudio as himself. (He unmuffles Claudio.) DUKE (to Isabella). If he be like your brother, for his sake Is he pardoned, and for your lovely sake, Give me you hand, and say you will be mine;

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He is my brother too. But fitter time for that. By this Lord Angelo perceives he’s safe; Methinks I see a quick’ning in his eye. (5.1.498–506)

Shakespeare adds to Whetstone’s recognition scene a playful twist that recalls his handling of a similar moment in Much Ado about Nothing where Claudio is presented with “Another Hero” (5.4.61) — “Almost the copy of [Leonato’s] child that’s dead” (5.1.283). The provost and Angelo here present Claudio as a near copy of himself, using the conditional, “If he be like your brother, for his sake / Is he pardoned” — the criminal pardon cleverly substituting for the real pardon of his life. Unlike the same moment in Promos and Cassandra, no explanation is given: “but fitter time for that” is the usual Shakespearean stratagem for evading any mundane explanation. Thus Isabella probably regards her brother, once she realizes that this is Claudio, as having come back to life. The Duke had earlier told her that Angelo “hath released him, Isabel, from the world. / His head is off and sent to Angelo” (Measure 4.3.115–16) and minutes before the recognition scene he had again assured her, “Your brother’s death, I know, sits at your heart” (5.1.397). Unfortunately we do not know her reaction, or Claudio’s for that matter, since neither of them has any more lines in the play, yet the moment has to have the appearance to Isabella of a quasi resurrection; this is no near copy of Claudio but the man himself. This is how the play both evokes and subtly turns aside the intimation of a resurrection: Claudio died, his likeness lives in his stead, but that likeness is Claudio. The Duke’s revelation of another Claudio is an almost cruelly excessive lie at this point; his intent is to delay the real discovery for another moment until Isabella realizes, as she must, that this could be no one other than Claudio, her never-dead brother. Her speechlessness probably indicates both her confusion and amazement.

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As in Whetstone’s play, the quasi resurrection is embedded within the recognition, though Shakespeare develops it further. He even plays with the mundane explanation in the provost’s denial that Claudio was the one reprieved: “This is another prisoner that I saved, / Who should have died when Claudio lost his head, / As like almost to Claudio as himself” (5.1.498–500). The conventional explanation of the recognition becomes quite unconventional in Measure for Measure, with Shakespeare preferring the after-the-play device: the play concludes with the Duke’s, “What’s yet behind, that’s meet you all should know” (550). Where Whetstone explains the resurrection to the incredulous Cassandra and Polina, Shakespeare leaves Isabella in a state of limbo. Shakespeare further toys with the language of resurrection. The offended Duke declares peremptorily of Angelo, “Away with him to death!” (5.1.437). Angelo’s subsequent relief when he learns Claudio did not die involves the imagery, as Duke Vincentio says, of revivification: “By this Lord Angelo perceives he’s safe; / Methink I see a quick’ning in his eye” (506–07). In addition, earlier the Duke advises Mariana — a virtual Marian intercessor, so relentless is she — not to insult Isabella by asking her to intercede with her on behalf of the condemned Angelo: Against all sense you do importune her. Should she kneel down in mercy of this fact, Her brother’s ghost his pavèd bed would break, And take her hence in horror.

(441–44)

This is the kind of spectral visitation that Viola had envisioned in Twelfth Night (5.1.233–36), and that Shakespeare will revisit with such power in plays whose pagan characters can only imagine resurrection as a horrific event to be avoided at all costs. The ghost of the undead Claudio will rise, even if his body cannot; by such means Vincentio underscore’s Claudio’s alleged death and subsequent quasi resurrection. It is all

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very clever, and one can see that once Shakespeare starts to explore the resurrective potential of recognition scenes, permutations begin to proliferate. Thus expanding Whetstone’s use of the recognition scene, Shakespeare’s handling is more adroit and shows glimpses of the heights to which he will ascend in later plays. To that end, Measure for Measure serves as an apprentice work, another variation on the aesthetic potential resurrections and the Resurrection afford him as a playwright. Here he explores at considerable length the language and tropes — “ransom,” “redeem,” “man new-made” — that come to characterize his recognition scenes. He exploits to dizzying effect the language of resurrection in the late romances and even, surprisingly enough, in the tragedies.

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TWO

z

Failed Resurrections in Romeo and Juliet and Othello The great differences between the tragic hero and Christ are that Christ is without sin and that his death is prelude to resurrection. — C. L. Barber and Richard P. Wheeler, The Whole Journey

One of the most rudimentary distinctions between comedy and tragedy is that the former ends with reconciliation, reunion, life: in its most congenial form, “happily ever after.” Tragedies, with their countervailing movements, end in division, dissolution, and death. In Shakespearean comedy and romance, the most frequent means of effecting comic resolution is to bring the seemingly dead back to life again. This takes various forms, from the Pygmalion appropriation in The Winter’s Tale to Viola and Sebastian’s seaborne reunion in act 5 of Twelfth Night. One might object that these are

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mere quasi resurrections as opposed to representations of literal resurrections, but the distinction is not at all clear to the characters present: even the representation of a literal resurrection is an illusion, the mere imitation, as Aristotle would say, of a real action (1449b1). Those who were presumed to be dead reappear as if miraculously risen from the dead; there may be a mundane explanation offered — more often there is not — but in either event characters experience the moment as one of joy. Quasi resurrections remind us of the triumph over death as well as the possibility of reconciliation that the Christian Resurrection represents, and thus the sacred reminder suffuses the profane present of the stage. Quasi resurrections constitute an enduring Shakespearean mode of ensuring a comic ending, often against all human odds. Shakespearean tragedy often presents, curiously enough, failed resurrections as part of their movement toward dissolution and death. Certain tragedies tantalize us with the prospect of a theatrical resurrection about to take place, only to dash any such hope against the inescapable reality of death. Romeo and Juliet is the earliest example of a failed resurrection, a figuration that becomes a leitmotif of Shakespearean tragedy. That the plays resound with an image central to Christian belief does not mean Shakespeare wrote allegories or prefigured Christ’s resurrection, but such iterations do suggest and evoke its memory, and encourage, I maintain, a consideration of life sub specie aeternitatis.

Arthur Brooke and Romeo and Juliet Written sometime between 1594 and 1596, Romeo and Juliet follows The Comedy of Errors and precedes Much Ado about Nothing and Twelfth Night, comedies in which Shakespeare was employing quasi resurrections in his recognition scenes. Moreover, the play has long been regarded as a tragic counterpart to the roughly contemporaneous A Midsummer Night’s

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Dream (ca. 1595), in which, as Groves (2007) remarks, Bottom in the role of Pyramus “does not remain dead but leaps up to explain the redemptive aspect of the plot to the spectators: ‘no, I assure you, the wall is down that parted their fathers’ [5.1.347–48]” (60). The end of Romeo and Juliet contains no such levity; its protagonists do not rise from the dead. Still, beginning with this early play the tragedies demonstrate that the possibilities of a resurrection are never far from Shakespeare’s mind. The contrast between life and death is felt more keenly in the tragedies, but that contrast becomes for Shakespeare fodder for exploring the effect of failed resurrections on his characters and audience. In Romeo and Juliet, the use of antitheses is perhaps the dominant trope: Kristeva (1992) argues for the inextricability of love and death in the play, “the fearful passage,” as the prologue tells us, “of their death-marked love” (9). Such antinomies are everywhere, and I would only alter Kristeva’s formulation slightly so as to reflect an even more basic opposition between life and death in this world, as well as the play’s adumbration of the life to come. Figurations of resurrection gesture toward another life, and Shakespeare had already begun to explore this possibility in his comedies. He may have taken a further interest in such figurations because of his immediate, and probably lone, source, Arthur Brooke’s Romeus and Juliet (1562). In his prefatory “To the reader,” Brooke, at times a fairly stern moralist, declaims, “The God of all glorye created universallye all creatures, to settte forth his prayse, both those whiche we esteem profitable in use and pleasure, and also those, which we accompte noisome, and lothsome,” Romeus and Juliet being among these latterday loathsome sinners for “thralling themselves to unhonest desire” (Bullough 1958–75, 1:284). Carnal desire leads to spiritual bankruptcy. What is most striking, however, is that from the outset Brooke casts his poulter’s couplets in both mundane and spiritual terms, a framework Shakespeare found

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amenable to his own, if more subtle, style. Shakespeare mutes Brooke’s stridency to a considerable extent, and he begins with life and death as they appear in the natural world. Friar Laurence, herbalist extraordinaire, notes the inextricability of life and death in nature: “Within the infant rind of this weak flower / Poison hath residence and medicine power” (Romeo & Juliet 2.3.23–24). The flower is both life destroying and life restoring. Likewise, the play’s heavy foreshadowing of the lovers’ end often pairs life and death within the same line: concerning her kinsman Tybalt’s death, Juliet placates her mother with, “Indeed, I never shall be satisfied / With Romeo, till I behold him — dead — ” (3.5.93–94), She had just seen him descend from her window: “Methinks I see thee, now thou art so low, / As one dead in the bottom of a tomb” (3.5.55–56). Romeo complains that Laurence “bad’st me bury love,” to which the friar responds with a hint of the quasi resurrection to come: “Not in a grave, / To lay one in, another out to have” (2.3.83–84). Later, too, Laurence exhorts the banished Romeo, “What, rouse thee, man! Thy Juliet is alive, / For whose dear sake thou wast but lately dead” (3.3.135–36). Life and death intermingle in a volatile mix: the living are often seen as though dead and, as we shall see, vice versa. During Romeo’s auricular confession, which Brooke calls “the kay of whoredom, and treason” (Bullough 1958–75, 1:284–85), the Friar gives Romeo what turns out to be, pace Brooke, rather prescient advice: “Wilt thou slay thyself, / And slay thy lady, that in thy life lives” (3.3.116–17), and shortly thereafter sounds the same life-in-death note: “Thy Juliet is alive, / For whose dear sake thou wast but lately dead” (135–36). The refrain is picked up even by the minor members of the cast: Lady Capulet enjoins the prince, “Romeo slew Tybalt; Romeo must not live” (3.1.180). Without elaborating, Brooke describes the potion he gives Juliet as a “quiet slepe” (Bullough 1958–75, 1:341), whereas Shakespeare expands on the paradox of life hidden beneath the signs of death, a theme more typical of comedy:

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no pulse Shall keep his native progress, but surcease; No warmth, no breath shall testify thou livest; The roses in thy lips and cheeks shall fade To wanny ashes, thy eyes’ windows fall Like death when he shuts up the day of life; Each part, deprived of supple government, Shall, stiff and stark and cold, appear like death. (4.1.96–103)

The play repeatedly adverts to the liminal threshold between life and death, as in Mercutio’s comic pun, “Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man” (3.1.96–97). And if the living appear deathlike in Romeo and Juliet, so too do the dead appear lifelike, with Shakespeare even hinting at the possibility of resurrection. Perhaps he takes the briefest of cues from Brooke, who describes Romeo speaking to the dead Tybalt as if alive, “Bold Tybalts carkas dead, which was not all consumed yet. / To whom (as having life) in this sort speaketh [Romeo]” (Bullough 1958–75, 1:354). In Shakespeare’s play, when Romeo sees Juliet in her family’s burial vault, his sense of her life is palpable: O my love, my wife! Death that hath sucked the honey of thy breath, Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty. Thou art not conquered; beauty’s ensign yet Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks, And death’s pale flag is not advancèd there.

(5.3.91–96)

She seems closer to life than death. Romeo here twice describes feeling a “lightening before death” (90, 91), which the OED defines (and cites this as the first usage) as “that exhilaration or revival of the spirits which is supposed to occur in some instances just before death.” The pun is actually multivalent, with “lightening” referring to the torch he brings into the crypt, to his own heightened state before death, and finally to the light of her lifelike beauty, which

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is “yet so fair,” as he says, to “[make] / This vault a feasting presence full of light” (102, 85–86). She is lightening, in fact, because she is coming back to life — her spirits are reviving, like his, just before their death. We have seen this trajectory before. What ought to follow, and nearly does, is a recognition scene straight out of a comedy or romance: Romeo sees the woman he believes has been irrevocably lost to him, yet he wishes with all of his being that he could be (as in fact he is) reunited with her in life. She too has the same expectation when she first awakes. “The tragic heroes, and we along with them,” as Felperin (1972) remarks, “persist in expecting romance and get tragedy” (63). With the play’s recognition scenes and the dual set of expectations frustrated, their tragedy comes with a particular vengeance, one that audiences, because of their past romance training, find painful to witness. The play gestures toward the supernatural, to the afterlife and possible resurrection of the body. Hard upon Mercutio’s death, Romeo suggests that his “soul / Is but a little way above our heads” (3.1.125–26). Conferring such a liminal status on Mercutio, whose soul is caught between this world and the next, Shakespeare again appears to takes a cue from Brooke’s account, in which the souls of the recently dead flit about everywhere, just overhead. Brooke takes the afterlife quite seriously, referring in his poem to Christ’s taking on human flesh in order to ransom souls (Bullough 1958–75, 1:354) as well as to the resurrection of the body, “when,” as Brooke’s guilty friar confesses, “wormes, the earth, and death doe cite me every howre, / T’appeare before the judgement seate of everlasting power” (ibid., 359). Brooke also makes pointed reference to Juliet’s discovering of the newly dead Romeo in the tomb and wishing, ineffectually, to resurrect him: “And then with all her force and strength, the ded corps dyd embrace, / As though with sighes, with sobs, with force and busy payne, / She would him rayse, and him restore from death to lyfe agayne” (ibid., 355–56).

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Shakespeare, who read Brooke closely, could scarcely have overlooked this, and in fact he elaborates on the moment. He first gives to the friar a speech — nowhere in Brooke — in which he consoles Juliet’s parents, who believe she has died in the night. Friar Laurence points to another life: Heaven and yourself Had part in this fair maid; now heaven hath all, And all the better is it for the maid. Your part in her you could not keep from death, But heaven keeps his part in eternal life. The most you sought was her promotion, For ’twas your heaven she should be advanced; And weep ye now, seeing she is advanced Above the clouds, as high as heaven itself?

(4.5.66–74)

But the afterlife, the resurrection of the body at doomsday, is not the only note of resurrection the play strikes. Groves (2007) suggests that the “apparent death and resurrection of Juliet” (60) represent Shakespeare’s evocation “of the paschal motif which runs through Romeo and Juliet” (61).1 The play certainly follows Brooke’s account of Juliet’s wish to resurrect Romeo; Shakespeare even realizes the wish, but only in Romeo’s dream. He tells Balthasar, I dreamt my lady came and found me dead — Strange dream, that gives a dead man leave to think! — And breathed such life with kisses in my lips That I revived and was an emperor. (5.1.6–9)2

Setting up this dream, the two lines immediately prior to this passage intermingle the prospect of death with the hope of transcendence: “And all this day,” Romeo muses, “an unaccustomed spirit / Lifts me above the ground with cheerful thoughts” (4–5).3 Continuing the play’s emphasis on antithesis, the Friar tells us “all things change them to the contrary” (4.5.90), which opens the way for Romeo’s dream to become a reality. Indeed, finding him dead, Juliet follows his formula: “I will

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kiss thy lips; / Haply some poison yet doth hang on them, / To make me die with a restorative” (5.3.164–66). The cordial she would drink is poison: it would not restore Romeo to life but consign her to death. Death and life intermingle once again, the restorative evoking not a wish for Romeo’s resurrection from the dead, but to join him in death, or perhaps in the afterlife because of her choice of the word “restorative.” Romeo is scarcely dead, his life tantalizingly within her reach; she kisses him, registering the play’s most poignant line: “Thy lips are warm” (167). Shakespeare compresses the time from Romeo’s death to Juliet’s resurrection — twin events which in Brooke’s account are separated by “an howre too late” (Bullough 1958–75, 1:355) — to at most only a few minutes, and at the least to the agonizing near simultaneity offered in Baz Luhrmann’s 1998 filmic adaptation.4 The rapid crosscutting Luhrman uses everywhere as part of his montage-inspired cinematography is well suited to render the close proximity of life and death. In Romeo’s coda to his wife, Shakespeare evokes once again the line separating life from death, this world from the next: Eyes, look your last! Arms, take your last embrace! And lips, O you The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss A dateless bargain to engrossing death!

(5.3.112–15)

His voice is lovingly but eerily disembodied and addresses his body as if from somewhere not quite in life, not yet in death. The alliteration is varied and magnificent, striking a perfect counterpoise between life and death, between the wish for resurrectionary transcendence and the mundane reality of their deaths. But the play does allow us one resurrection, that of Juliet in the tomb, a staged resurrection that we almost overlook because it is so brief. But it is a resurrection, a word that signifies primarily “the rising again of Christ after His death

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and burial,” but also, secondarily, the mere “action or fact of rising again from sleep” (OED, 1, 3). Chaucer used “resurrection” in this sense, and Shakespeare’s language evokes images of both sacred and profane senses of the word. To be sure, Shakespeare never uses the word “resurrection” in reference to Juliet’s revival, yet this absence does not diminish Romeo’s longing for such fulfillment. Instead, such absence might seem to point to a frustration of the transcendent in this play, with an attendant muting of Brooke’s overt religious framework into Shakespeare’s more ambivalent reference to Romeo and Juliet as mere “star-crossed lovers” (Prol. 6). Neither Romeo nor Juliet seeks divine intervention; they want to revive each other by their own devices. With the exception of the Friar, the play’s characters are relentlessly of this world: vengeful, carnal, fiery down to the last servant; concerned with this life only. Instead of God breathing life into his creation, as in the Old Testament’s account (Gen. 2:7), Romeo and Juliet want to effect a kind of cardiopulmonary resuscitation, each kissing the other in the vain human longing to restore life. Brooke never seems to have considered the plot device of the sleeping potion — deriving as it too does from fifth century Greek romance5 — a malleable enough instrument with which to suggest an analogy with the Christian resurrection. The closest Brooke comes to any resurrection other than Juliet’s awakening from the potion is a quite mechanical one — the mere exhuming of the bodies from the burial vault: “The prince did straight ordaine, the corses that wer founde / Should be set forth upon a stage, hye raysed from the grounde” (Bullough 1958–75, 1:358). The dead shall be raised, but in Brooke this is quite literal — their bodies will be displayed “upon a stage.” Brooke’s nondramatic poem can only envision what Shakespeare’s play enacts with its bodies on stage. He even

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outdoes the marble tombs Brooke promises to confer on the unhappy couple (ibid., 363): old Montague promises Capulet, “For I will raise [Juliet’s] statue in pure gold” (5.3.299). Such an image is opulent, but stolid, lifeless. A raised statue, gilded or otherwise, is hardly a substitute for the living Juliet, and the gesture seems, in the end, as barren as his lineage will be. “Grace and rude will,” the Friar had earlier told us, coexist in human beings, “And where the worser is predominant, / Full soon the canker death eats up that plant” (2.3.28–30). Though one ought to be cautious about such ready-made formulations, it does seem that human will predominates in the play, with the supernatural — adumbrated at times — set quietly aside. Real grace is attenuated, perhaps masked, by such simulacra of resurrection as dreams and statues, pale imitations indeed. Thus it must be with tragedy or else this play would turn into something like Much Ado about Nothing or one of the romances — worlds in which theatrical or quasi resurrections from the dead are commonplace. But Romeo and Juliet’s intimation, or rather figuration, of resurrection is a failed one. As Levin (2004) remarks, “Each of them dies alone — or, at all events, in the belief that the other lies dead, and without the benefit of a recognition-scene” (171–72). Still, the play’s images and language, even in something as simple as a kiss given in the hope that it will restore the beloved to life, can hardly fail to remind a thoroughly religious culture (as Shakespeare’s surely was) of a larger, resurrective context. “What mattered most about Jesus,” Harold Bloom (1998) notes, “was the Resurrection” (19); Saint Paul, of course, repeatedly proclaimed the centrality of the Resurrection: “For if the dead be not raised, then is Christ not raised” (1 Cor. 15:16). The consequences of such failure are stark: “And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vaine, and your faith is also vaine. . . . And if Christ be not raised . . . ye are yet in your sinnes. And so they which are asleep in Christ, are perished. If in this life onely we have hope in Christ, we are of

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all men the moste miserable” (14, 17–19). The tragedies with their failed resurrections certainly hold out this possibility of existentialist nihilism, and certain materialist critics, as we will see in relation to King Lear, have taken such readings as far as they can go. But as Auerbach (1953) said of biblical figurations, “The total content of the sacred writings was placed in an exegetic context which often removed the thing told very far from its sensory base, in that the reader or listener was forced to turn his attention away from the sensory occurrence and toward its meaning” (48). Though Shakespeare is no typologist, the sheer number of his evocations of the Resurrection become explorations into the possible, even in tragic worlds where such possibilities are frustrated or denied. After his own concatenation of the consequences of a hypothetical failure of Christ’s resurrection, Paul reminds the Corinthians, “But now is Christ risen from the dead, and was made the first frutes of them that slept” (1 Cor. 15:20). Such rhetorical reminding has dramatic, if more subtle, purchase initially in Romeo and Juliet, but even here it is only a promise in futuro. Their deaths, their inability to rise, evokes by way of contrast the memory of the Christian resurrection, even as its promised end is deferred before the this-worldliness of their tragedy with its unresurrected bodies raised high on the stage.

Postmortem Speech in Othello If Shakespeare continued his variations on resurrection in the comedies, as he did, then it is no surprise that Romeo and Juliet was not his last tragic exploration into failed resurrections. Approximately a decade later, he revisited the subject in two plays, Othello (ca. 1603–04) and King Lear (ca. 1605– 06). In Othello, the last scene opens with Othello’s monologue rationalizing why he must kill Desdemona, refusing at the same time to “scar that whiter skin of hers than snow”

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(Othello 5.2.4). He then notes his ability to put out both the literal light of the torch or lamp he has with him in their bedchamber and the metaphorical “light” of Desdemona’s life. Only one light can be relit: Put out the light, and then put out the light. If I quench thee, thou flaming minister, I can again thy former light restore, Should I repent me;

(5.2. 7–10)

The Christian trope of repentance is out of place in reference to the extinguishing of a lamp, but it becomes metaphorically appropriate when Othello continues in the second half of the line: but once put out thy light, Thou cunning’st pattern of excelling nature, I know not where is that Promethean heat That can thy light relume.

(10–13)

His language of resurrection is more classical than biblical: Othello is no Prometheus who can steal fire from the gods and give it to humankind; much less can he resurrect Desdemona should he repent of his murder. He gives us one further trope of his incapacity: “When I have plucked thy rose, / I cannot give it vital growth again; / It needs must wither” (13–15). His redundancy here underscores his despair that the murder he is about to commit cannot then be undone. But as Othello then “smothers” Desdemona (5.2.87, s.d.), a necessarily protracted event, there is some question as to whether she actually dies at this moment or later in the scene. (The macabre humor is that Othello, the great warrior, is unable to dispatch his own wife as he intends.) What complicates the actual time of death are some material differences between the quarto edition (Q1) published in 1622 by Thomas Walkley and that of the First Folio (F1) the following year. Immediately after the stage direction at line 87 telling us that Othello “smothers her,” Q1 alone gives Desdemona

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another line, “O Lord, Lord, Lord!,” which of course suggests that she is still alive at this point, though presumably in her death throes. In contrast, F1 assigns an expanded and slightly altered form of Desdemona’s line to the newly arrived Emilia: “My lord, my lord! What, ho! My lord, my lord!” (5.2.88). Othello’s response then, which is perfectly understandable in light of Desdemona’s continued speaking in Q1, is rather uncanny in F1: What noise is this? Not dead? Not yet quite dead? I that am cruel am yet merciful; I would not have thee linger in thy pain. So, so.

(89–92)

The ostensible noise he hears, in F1 at least, is that of Emilia’s repeated “My lord” at the door to the bedchamber. Perhaps Shakespeare simply did not take the time to revise the “what noise is this” line in F1, as it appears to contain the remnants of Othello’s hearing Desdemona (not F1’s Emilia) speak in Q1, even though she does not here in F1.6 The First Folio is more ambiguous, ambivalent really, as Othello appears to hear Emilia’s repeated importuning — “Who’s there?” he later says in reply (92) — even as, as in Oliver Parker’s film version (1995), he seems to confuse Emilia’s earlier call, “My lord, my lord!” (88) with what he thinks is the dead Desdemona speaking from nearly almost beyond the grave; thus his “What noise is this? Not dead? Not quite dead?” (90). Despite Desdemona’s silence here in F1, it is possible that Othello both responds to Emilia’s call and detects some sentient movement or sound from his wife. If so, then she is still alive at this point in both Q1 and F1. Her lingering in life is short lived, however, as Othello’s “so, so” three lines later refers to his second — presumably more efficacious — attempt to murder her. Perhaps given his initial lack of success in smothering her, Othello then takes considerable pains to make sure he does

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not bungle it again. He delays Emilia’s entrance even though he hears her call again — “Oh, good my lord, I would speak a word with you!” (5.2.93) — probably reassuring himself (especially in light of Q1’s clear indication that Desdemona did not die immediately) that this is Emilia, not Desdemona, calling him: “Yes, ’tis Emilia. — By and by. — She’s dead” (94). His speech announces Desdemona’s death, but also unwittingly forecasts Emilia’s as well (the antecedent of “she” is, strictly speaking, Emilia). Nevertheless, Othello continues to have his doubts about having heard his presumably dead wife speak: ’Tis like she comes to speak of Cassio’s death. — The noise was here. Ha! No more moving? Still as the grave. Shall she come in? Were’t good? — I think she stirs again. No. (95–98)

“She” becomes ambivalent here as Othello rapidly switches his thoughts from one woman to the other, from the living Emilia — “Shall she come in” — to the dead Desdemona — “I think she stirs” — though it is not clear, even now, that Desdemona is dead. He still seems to think that Desdemona is making sounds — “The noise was here” — either speaking as in Q1, or murmuring, breathing, perhaps even ruffling the sheets of her bridal bed in F1. Again, though, the variants come together as he twice checks to make sure Desdemona is really dead this time; Othello only allows Emilia to enter the bedchamber once he is assured that his wife is indeed gone. Although it remains possible that in his distracted state Othello is still unable to kill Desdemona — he later mentions his martial incapacity, “Man but a rush against Othello’s breast / And he retires” (5.2.279–80) — the multiple assurances he seeks of her death would seem, in both Q1 and F1, to confirm that Desdemona is in fact dead when Emilia enters. Still, one cannot be absolutely certain. What follows when Desdemona later speaks again raises the question as to whether this, her latest and final speech act, constitutes

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her continuing to linger in life (which seems to defy credibility), or is a momentary resuscitation, or is something more substantive, the kind of failed resurrection that Shakespeare soon returned to, as we shall see, with Cordelia’s death in King Lear. If her speaking is in fact a kind of quasi, but ultimately failed, resurrection, then her last speech exonerating her husband appears to be a kind of speaking from beyond the grave — a return to life — in order to speak her valedictory words. The quarto edition, though, defeats such an interpretation, as the stage direction after her final, “Oh, farewell!” reads “she dies,” which dates the point of her death precisely at this moment, not before, despite Othello’s earlier pronouncements. But F1 has no such stage direction, thus leaving open the possibility of Desdemona’s speaking from beyond the grave. It is, in the end, impossible to discern the cause for the differences between the Q1 and F1 versions of the play — it could have been a compositor’s error or any number of mistakes in the transmission from a manuscript or copy to the independent printed versions. I tend to agree, however, with the growing consensus, most forcibly put forward by Taylor and Warren (1983), that F1 represents in King Lear a revision of an earlier version (Q1) also written by Shakespeare (see also Warren 1978 and Jowett 2007, 1–3, 41–42). If this is the case, then it shows an abiding fascination with Desdemona’s death scene and the decision to render it more mysterious, even numinous, over time. Quasi resurrections are, and come to be, important signatures in Shakespeare’s work. Desdemona’s rising from the dead was a possibility that intrigued Shakespeare, and clearly so if the more cryptic representation of her death in F1 represents an alternate version to that of Q1. Desdemona’s death is not instantaneous in Shakespeare’s main source for Othello, Giambattista Cinzio Giraldi’s Gli Ecatommiti (The Hundred Tales, 1565). In Giraldi’s telling, after being struck by the ensign, the Iago figure who assists

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in the murder, she “fall[s] down at once, scarcely able to draw her breath” (Bullough 1958–75, 7:250). She calls for the Moor’s help; he accuses her of infidelity: “The wretched Lady, hearing this and feeling herself near to death (for the Ensign had given her another blow), called on Divine Justice to witness to her fidelity, since earthly justice failed; and as she called on God to help her, a third blow struck her, and she lay still, slain by the impious Ensign” (ibid., 251). She speaks after the first and second blows and is only killed by the third and final one, which silences her. Shakespeare’s device of having her linger in life is thus quite faithful to Cinthio’s account, though F1 opens the possibility of her speaking from beyond the grave.7 The First Folio’s quasi-resurrective vista is the one that has been adopted more often by editors and performers alike.8 In the initial variorum edition of the play (1886), H. H. Furness took the unusual step of writing eminent scholars, asking them, among other things, “If she were smothered . . . could she speak after apparent death?” (304). William Hunt replied, “You have asked me some interesting questions about Desdemona’s death. I am happy to be able to answer you positively and at once; her sad end is no pathological puzzle to me. She died of fracture of the cricoid cartilage of the larynx” (ibid., 306). Such a fracture apparently leaves some little breathing room for speech, thus allowing Hunt to offer a medical diagnosis that fits, neatly if absurdly, with Q1’s suggestion that Desdemona dies only after her final words. Furness remarks, however, that the weight of opinion in the nineteenth century lay in the opposite direction: “Thus far Editors and Actors, with a ground-tone from the public at large to the effect that there does seem to be something not altogether true to physiology in the subsequent revival of Desdemona; yet, such is the Anglosaxon faith in Shakespeare, that, in any variance between him and Nature, Shakespeare is considered quite able to hold his own” (ibid., 303). Though Furness’s romantic sensibilities appear a bit quaint today,

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they point to a suspicion, supported by F1, that her speech at this moment is eerily inexplicable, as Thomas Keightley protested in 1865: “It would not be possible, in the whole compass of poetry, to find a more glaring absurdity than this of making Desdemona speak after she had been smothered” (ibid., 309). But in some ways her recovery is conventional: first, in patient Griselda fashion, Desdemona returns only to exonerate her murderer. In reply to Emilia’s question, “O, who hath done this deed?” Desdemona points not to the obvious answer in the person of Othello, but to a phantom: “Nobody; I myself. Farewell” (5.2.127–28). Her first tentative answer, “nobody,” is an absurdity that by default implicates her husband, the only other person who had been in the room with her. As if recognizing this, she immediately places the blame, almost equally absurdly, on herself. Doing so, however, serves her purpose of covering up for Othello and giving him an alibi, which he at first tries to use — “You heard her say herself it was not I” (131) — before he confesses his crime. In addition to the Griselda evocation, Desdemona’s deathbed speech may well have ties to domestic tragedy, the subgenre to which Shakespeare made his nearest approach in Othello. One of domestic tragedy’s conventions, as Henry Hitch Adams (1943, 106, 111) first identified it, is the inevitable revelation of the culprit in these grisly — typically spousal — murder plays. When Thomas Winchester, the servant of Thomas Merry in Robert Yarington’s Two Lamentable Tragedies (1594), is asked if he knows who killed and dismembered a wealthy chandler, without thinking he replies, “What? Shall I then betray my maisters life?” (H3v). Similar revelations in domestic tragedy are typically effected by quasimiraculous means. In Arden of Faversham (1592), Thomas Arden’s bodily imprint lingers on his land for two years after his death, serving as a continual reminder of just where his wife Alice and her lover dragged and left his dead body. In the anonymous A Warning for Fair Women (ca. 1590), George

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Brown kills George Sanders, the husband of the woman he loves, and a servant, John Bean, who has knowledge of the crime. Having received ten mortal stab wounds, Bean lingers for several days, unable to speak, and then — seeing his killer — recovers his speech momentarily, identifies Brown, and then collapses in death. Despite a lineup of only one, Desdemona refuses to name Othello to Emilia and thus frustrates the domestic tragedy’s murder-will-out topos. But, having toyed with the convention, Shakespeare ultimately follows its trajectory: Othello, again, confesses, “She’s like a liar gone to burning hell! / ’Twas I that killed her” (5.2.133–34). With the centrality of its own spousal murder, Othello glances at the domestic tragedies in other ways as well, both in the inevitable revelation of the murderer and in Desdemona’s quasi-miraculous ability to speak from (almost) beyond the grave. To be sure, Othello is no straightforward domestic tragedy or simple variant of the patient Griselda story, much less a miracle play where it would be unexceptional to have characters rise from the dead. There is the trace or figuration of such scenes in Romeo and Juliet and Othello, but they both present frustrated and unrealized resurrections instead. Shakespeare’s art is subtle and multivalent in its significations. There is a glimmer of resuscitation in Othello, and perhaps of a momentary, unearthly resurrection, only to be submersed beneath the unavoidable weight of the story’s tragic end: “Yet she must die” (5.2.6). Emilia’s hopes (and perhaps our own) for Desdemona’s revival are dashed: “O lady, speak again!” (5.2.124). Similarly anguished by her death, the late seventeenth century critic Thomas Rymer (1692) posed a question concerning the apparent lack of divine justice in the play: “What instruction can we make out of this Catastrophe? Or whither must our reflection lead us? Is not this to envenome and sour our spirits, to make us repine and grumble at Providence; and the government of the World? If this be our end, what boots it to be Vertuous?” (137–38).

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As one possible response to Rymer’s question, Rieff (2007) suggests that it is a mistake to equate human justice, especially the lack thereof, with divine justice or “sacred order”: There is no way of ruining religion and morality so long as we believe that sacred order is not the same thing as justice. What we mean by ruin, as when evildoers die peacefully and in their beds, is that we cannot see how sacred order can exist if such an offender gets off scot-free from his lowerings. But sacred order does not come to an end because a child dies and a Hitler lives; rather, its commanding truth only just begins, and we are under the responsibility of our response to that truth. (2:33)

The death of a Desdemona is no cause to “grumble at Providence”; sacred order places a high value on — presents a command for — human action, even where such agency cannot reverse the effects of evil. King Lear offers perhaps Shakespeare’s best illustration of such a perceived call. The suffering Lear suggests that divine grace cooperates with human efforts to feed and clothe the homeless: Take physic, pomp, Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them And show the heavens more just. (Lear 3.4.33–36)

For humans to work in concert with the divine is clearly biblical (see Lev. 19:9–10). Notice, too, Lear’s careful phrasing: to “show the heavens more just” indicates that human participation works to reveal the justice at the heart of the divine, even if that justice is not always immediately apparent or is temporarily obscured.9 Compensatory justice is never promised in this life, either by Scripture or Shakespeare’s own tragic writ. Resurrection promises the opposite of the tragic fate; its glimmer here, however, is as inescapable as it is fleeting. But the counterpoise between death and resurrection is perfect and evocative: the absence of any resurrection renders Desdemona’s death all

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the more painful and unjust, as it must be. Nonetheless, the abundance of resurrections — failures included — in the plays become explorations into the possible, and offers at the least a recurrent trace of the one resurrection promised to make all things whole. Shakespeare does not employ the tropes of resurrection in all of his plays, but from Romeo onwards he uses such figurations to effect the endings of numerous plays. The efficaciousness of resurrections is an easy generic marker that distinguishes the plays: the failed resurrections of certain tragedies counterpoise the successfully staged quasi resurrections of the comedies and romances. To be sure, Shakespeare’s drama is of this world, especially in the tragedies and histories where he is more bound by his source material10 or the demands of genre, less able to use devices such as the deus ex machina to rescue his protagonists. Resurrections are simply out of bounds — historic, generic, realistic — in such contexts. And when characters are resurrected in the comedies and romances, these are decidedly theatrical, the quasi resurrections of romance conventions. But it does not follow from this, pace materialist criticism, that stage (or staged) quasi resurrections “empty” or desacralize the Christian understanding of resurrection. Othello reminds us of that understanding when he refers to the general resurrection of the dead at the day of judgment. He tells his deceased bride, “When we shall meet at compt, / This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven, / And fiends will snatch at it” (5.2.282–84). He even wishes that his body could experience now the kind of torture he imagines his resurrected body will experience at the last judgment: Whip me, ye devils, From the possession of this heavenly sight! Blow me about in winds! Roast me in sulfur! Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire!

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The passage recalls the depths of Dante’s Inferno. Othello’s imagined recognition scene with Desdemona — “This look of thine” — at the day of judgment is one that he does not want, is more than he can bear, but it is the only resurrection they will ever know. His real recognition — the Aristotelian “change from ignorance to [the] knowledge” (1452a1) that his uxoricide destroys an innocent woman — recalls Oedipus’s horror at his own patricide. Recognizing the cultural centrality of the Resurrection, Shakespeare continually uses it as dramatic capital, reconfiguring it and allusively reminding his audience of its power, even and perhaps especially in the failed resurrections that he offers us by way of contrast. Desdemona becomes in Othello’s vision a resurrected soul in communion with the triune God; he in turn becomes the archvillain, a “circumcised dog” who must kill the “turbaned Turk” inside himself in a futile attempt to align himself with Venice and justice. Such binary logic has been his all along: Desdemona is either an absolutely chaste wife or a whore who “with Cassio hath the act of shame / A thousand times committed” (5.2.218– 19). Her future redemption in the afterlife is as imaginary at this point in the play as her past alleged infidelity. Her resurrection is denied us in the world of the play and offered to us, tantalizingly, only in Othello’s mind. “Unless I mistake,” Bradley (1904) writes, Desdemona’s murder is “the most nearly intolerable spectacle that Shakespeare offers us” (147). The same can be said of the nearly intolerable spectacle of Cordelia’s death in King Lear.

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THREE

z

Cordelia’s Quasi Resurrection and Shakespearean Revision In the death chamber for a moment Death Shamed by the presence of that living Might Blushed to annihilation, and the breath Revisited those lips, and life’s pale light Flashed through those limbs, so late her dear delight. — Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais

In one version of Shakespeare’s King Lear, a dying Lear looks upon the dead Cordelia and declares, “Do you see this? Look on her. Look, her lips. / Look there, look there” (5.3.286–87).1 R. A. Foakes comments, “What he sees or thinks he sees has been much debated; to some it seems a final cruel delusion if he imagines Cordelia to be alive, to others a blessed release for him in a moment of imagined reunion.” From the first scene of the play where Lear asks her to declare her love — “Which of you shall we say doth love us most” (1.1.51) — he receives

98

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only her terse, “Nothing, my lord” (87). Cordelia would not then speak; by play’s end, she cannot speak and is again silent (Foakes 1993, 211, 219). Critical response over the centuries to Cordelia’s quasi resurrection has neatly divided along two lines, though it is fair to say that nihilist-oriented readings of the play now predominate. The failure of the opposing “redemptionist” readings of the play to tease out the possibilities of what Lear thinks he sees in those last moments reveals much about the play’s modern reception, and thereby hangs a tale.

I Of the innumerable responses to Cordelia’s death, Samuel Johnson’s in the eighteenth century is easily the most legendary: “I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor” (Wimsatt 1960, 98). Lear’s carrying the dead Cordelia in his arms constitutes a pagan variation of the pietà: their fortune turns from bad to worse; their final recognition becomes funereal. Johnson’s distress can be understood in light of Aristotle’s observation that recognition and peripety (reversal of fortune) are the “most powerful elements” in a tragedy (1450a1), the immediate agents of the pity and fear that audiences experience (1452a1). The ending further perplexed Johnson: “Shakespeare has suffered the virtue of Cordelia to perish in a just cause, contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope of the reader, and what is yet more strange, to the faith of the chronicles” (97). Nahum Tate’s own frustration with the play’s ending led him to rewrite it in 1681, leaving Lear and Cordelia to live, and live happily ever after. Such responses coincide nicely with redemptionist accounts of the play. At one end of the continuum, Anna Jameson (1883) described Cordelia as “a saint ready prepared for heaven” (213).2 Believing that Lear’s suffering leads to his

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death of “unbearable joy” (291), Bradley (1904) wanted to revise the title: “Should we not be at least as near the truth if we called this poem The Redemption of King Lear, and declared that the business of ‘the gods’ with him was neither to torment him, nor to teach him a ‘noble anger,’ but to lead him to attain through apparently hopeless failure the very end and aim of life?” (285). Bradley’s influence was palpable: Harley Granville-Barker (1952) suggests that the play represents Lear’s “agony, his spiritual death and resurrection” (266); and for R. W. Chambers (1940, 38–39), Cordelia becomes a sacrificial victim, a martyr in a world where good triumphs over evil. Such redemptive readings are in short supply these days, having been effectively counterpoised by readings that veer increasingly in the direction of nihilism. G. Wilson Knight (1957) called King Lear the “most fearless artistic facing of the ultimate cruelty of things,” and D. G. James (1951) similarly described it as “bleak,” offering “no crumb of Christian comfort” (80, 92–93). Barbara Everett (1960, 175) thought the play Shakespeare’s “supreme tragic horror,” and N. S. Brooke (1963) opined, “the process of the play seems . . . calculated to repudiate every source of consolation with which we might greet the final disaster” (57). Were it not for the postmodern readings we will examine shortly, William Elton (1966) might have been thought to deliver the coup de grâce when he wrote that the play depicts the “annihilation of faith in poetic justice . . . within the confines of a grim pagan universe” (334). For Elton and other modern critics such as Barber and Wheeler (1986, 38) and even Felperin (1972, 112–13), the play’s pre-Christian setting accounts for what these writers envision as an anti-Christian ethos that permeates the play, perhaps most crucially in Cordelia’s death and Lear’s inconsolable, “Howl, howl, howl!” (5.3.262). But the paganism of King Lear is a curious beast. Noting its presence and texture in the play, R. B. Heilman (1963) nonetheless thought that what Lear learns through his suffering “produces almost a Christian

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transvaluation of the values of Lear’s pagan world” (221). Should one believe Elton or Heilman? How does one reconcile pagan and Christian elements of this hopelessly anachronistic play, much less its diametrically opposed critical reception? Bernard Mc Elroy (1973) focuses on the play’s “complementarity”: it depicts both a “glorious and transcendent dream of human redemption” and an “unstintingly pessimistic indictment of the absurd human condition” (161). His weighting, however, is clearly on the side of the “absurd human condition” as opposed to the mere “dream” of redemption, a view Foakes (1993) shares: “Both Gloucester and Lear undergo a symbolic death and restoration, and both are denied the release they desire from suffering; both might say, as Lear does, ‘You do me wrong to take me out o’th’grave,’ since the play offers no hint of a life beyond death, and to prolong their life in this world is only to test their endurance further” (217; italics mine). Foakes suggests that the play offers no such hint, but Cordelia’s death scene is seemingly just such a gesture, even though, given the paganism of the play, the hint is neither more nor less than that and, realistically, can go no further. But the hint is unmistakably present in Cordelia’s quasi resurrection, and it appears to be, on Shakespeare’s part, deliberate. One of Shakespeare’s great achievements in the play is thus to bring paganism and Christianity into collision. Criticism, as we have seen, tends to divide along the two fault lines whereas Shakespeare fuses the two worlds into a magnificent, if occasionally jarring, whole. His means of yoking Christianity and the paganism of the play is identical to his approach in his romances whose mise-en-scène is largely if not entirely pagan. What he does, first in King Lear, is to superimpose a Christian frame of reference through which an audience can contextualize the pre-Christian world he explores. At times the superimposition appears incongruous, but he holds, as in a film dissolve, the pagan world firmly, and predominantly, in view. We still see, however, the outlines

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of Christendom in the background, faintly impinging on both the play as well as the consciousness of his audience.

II If Samuel Johnson were so disturbed by Cordelia’s death that he could not return to the play for many years, perhaps this is so because Shakespeare purposely exacerbates our pain, first by preventing the stay of execution that the dying, repentant Edmund means to effect: I pant for life. Some good I mean to do, Despite of mine own nature. Quickly send, Be brief in it, to th’ castle; for my writ Is on the life of Lear and on Cordelia.

(5.3.218–21)

He “pant[s] for life” — his own and perhaps, at last, for theirs as well, but to no avail. Lear enters “with Cordelia in his arms” (231, s.d.) and registers with, “Howl, howl, howl!” his despair at what he believes to be her utter extinction: “She’s gone for ever. / I know when one is dead and when one lives. / She’s dead as earth” (234–36). The monosyllabic simplicity of the lines, deriving as David Daniell (2001, 7–8) points out from the Anglo-Saxon roots of the language, bears a sense of finality as surely as a death knell. Remarkably, however, Lear takes the extraordinary, if arguably demented, step of calling for a mirror to see if she has any “breath [that] will mist or stain” it (5.3.237). “Why, then,” he reasons, “she lives,” which Kent questions in the second half of the same line: “Is this the promised end?” (236). Shaheen (1999) notes, “The reference is to the foretold end of the world” (620), with specific reference to the endtimes mentioned throughout Scripture ( for example, Matt. 24). Shakespeare thus juxtaposes Cordelia’s would-be end, or resurrection, as Lear would have it, with the “general resurrection” promised by Scripture: “The rising again of man-

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kind at the Last Day” (OED). Kent seems incredulous, and he ought to be, pagan that he is. Without exception, as we shall see in the romances, Shakespeare’s pagan characters regard the resurrection from the dead as constituting the grotesque reanimation of lifeless bodies — and they recoil from the prospect. But Kent imagines that if Cordelia were to rise, it would be doomsday, an imitation of which, as Edgar’s rejoinder has it, they may now be witnessing: “Or image of that horror?” (239). The apocalyptic end outweighs, even as it invokes, the intimation of a resurrection. How does one account for such Christian-speak in Lear’s pagan world? One answer is that pagan worlds, here and elsewhere in the histories and romances, allow Shakespeare to delve into contentious theological issues that might be more risky to broach in plays about contemporary life. Henry VIII, for instance, contains scant concern with religious controversies despite (or perhaps because of) its proximity to the Reformation. Historical distance offers certain freedoms, but King Lear is really a mixed bag in terms of its religious discourse. On the one hand, Shakespeare divests the play of most of the religious language he found in his main source, the anonymous The True Chronicle History of King Leir, and his three daughters, Gonorill, Ragan, and Cordella, published in 1605 but performed as early as 1594. As Shaheen (1999) notes, Unlike Shakespeare’s play the action of Leir takes place in a Christian world, and the play has strong Christian overtones. Leir . . . hopes that his late wife is now “possest of heavenly joyes,” and that she rides “in triumph ’mongst the Cherubins.” After being rejected, Cordella feels nought but love and Christian forgiveness for her father, although he had called her a “bastard Impe” and considered Gonorill and Ragan “the kindest Gyrles in Christendome.” (604)

The kindest girls in Christendom, indeed. Shakespeare largely scraps this framework and the extensive biblical

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references in Leir and reverts to the pagan setting of earlier versions (ibid., 604–05), the first of which was Geoffrey of Monmouth’s pseudo-historical account in Historia Regum Britanniae (ca. 1136). But vestiges of Leir remain, if greatly transfigured, in King Lear’s biblical references: the allusion to the apocalypse; Edgar’s (Poor Tom’s) references to “The Prince of Darkness” (Lear 3.4.134) and to the Sermon on the Mount (as well as the Ten Commandments): “swear not; commit not with man’s sworn spouse” (Lear 75–76; Shaheen 1999, 611); Cordelia’s reference to Luke 2:49: “O dear father, / It is thy business that I go about” (4.3.23–24; Shaheen 1999, 616); and a gentleman’s allusion to original sin, telling Lear, “Thou hast a daughter / Who redeems nature from the general curse / Which twain have brought her to” (4.5.201–02). Granted, one has to be listening to such passages carefully in order to hear the biblical resonance, but they increasingly dot the play’s verbal landscape. Shakespeare’s weaving of them into the story is typically subtle and in marked contrast to the overtness of Leir’s biblicality. Shakespeare thus conflates the pagan elements and setting from the earliest versions of with the contemporary, biblicized Leir, an achievement that he deepens and enriches in his last romances.3 Edgar, for instance, tells his despairing father, Gloucester, that he has been miraculously saved by divine intervention: “Think that the clearest gods, who make them honors / Of men’s impossibilities, have preserved thee” (4.5.73–74). Shaheen (1999, 616) suggests a possible connection between these lines and Scripture: “With men this is unpossible, but with God all things are possible” (Matt. 19:26; see also Luke 18:27). But the world of this play, as Edgar’s lines attest, is polytheistic, pagan, a point made repeatedly by means of various references to the “gods.” Shakespeare is content not to overturn that paganism, having elected to follow his earlier sources rather than Leir;

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the Gospel nonetheless impinges on it. As Michael Edwards (2000) suggests, “by such shafts of alien thought Shakespeare opens the pagan universe of the play to the illumination of what he must have considered to be Christian truth” (23) — or, to be more neutral, Shakespeare opens the pagan play to the illumination of Christian revelation, whether he personally considered it truth or otherwise. (The difference is between aesthetics and propaganda.) He superimposes on the pagan milieu of the story, and on the earliest versions of that account, a frame of reference by which his audience can contextualize Lear’s world without invalidating it. He draws upon Leir, but does so in such a way as to juxtapose Lear’s world with Shakespeare’s for aesthetic purposes, not didactic religious ends. His audience may do the latter, but Shakespeare only obliquely refers to “the promised end” of an apocalypse in which Cordelia shall be, but is not yet, raised from the dead.

III Unlike Kent and Edgar, however, Lear looks not to an apocalyptic future but to Cordelia’s immediate resurrection: “This feather stirs. She lives,” only to question his perception in the second half of the line: “If it be so, / It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows / That ever I have felt” (5.3.240–42). Such talk of redemption, though not specifically Christian in context, can hardly fail to invoke for its Jacobean audience the contrast between the Christian hope of resurrection and Cordelia’s unresurrected corpse. In his anguish, Lear continues to alternate between believing Cordelia resurrected and resigning himself to her death: “I might have saved her; now she’s gone for ever. — / Cordelia, Cordelia: stay a little. Ha? / What is’t thou say’st” (245–47). Such vacillation intensifies in Lear’s final speech:

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And my poor fool is hanged. No, no, no life? Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more. Never, never, never, never, never.

(381–84)

At this point, there is a striking divergence between a quarto version of the play published in 1608 and that of the First Folio of 1623. In the quarto, Lear concludes the speech by asking Kent, “Pray you, undo / This button. Thank you, sir. O, O, O, O!” (Q1, 24.303–04). After others speak, the quarto then assigns him one last line, “Break heart, I prithee break” (306) as if to emphasize his despair, and shortly thereafter he dies. Shaheen notes that the line “Thou’lt come no more,” which appears in both versions, is a possible allusion to Job 7:9–10: “Hee that goeth downe to the grave, shall come up no more. He shall returne no more” (1999, 620). If Shaheen is correct, the line further underscores the unrelieved abyss into which the play plunges at the moment, ostensibly corroborating the nihilist-oriented reading of modern criticism. Lear dies without hope, he calls for his own heart to rend, and Cordelia is “dead as earth.” But the First Folio gives to Lear the lines cited at the outset of this chapter: “Do you see this? Look on her. Look, her lips. / Look there, look there” (5.3.286–87). Look where, exactly? Lear may be deranged at this moment, but possibilities other than mere delusional fantasy also exist: he sees the beginnings of a resurrection that never takes place (as with Desdemona) or, alternatively, has a vision of the afterlife. Unfortunately, all we see is his immediate death following fast upon Cordelia’s. Certain materialist critics explain his pointing to “there” as a chimera, but it is plausible to read the scene as yet another failure of a failed resurrection in a tragedy, with a glimpse of a life beyond into which Lear and Cordelia may now enter. Such a possibility is strengthened by the traditional attribution of clairvoyance on the point of death, which Shakespeare

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himself enacts elsewhere, as in the dying Gaunt’s prophetic appeal to York in Richard II (2.1.31–68). Likewise, Cleopatra’s last speech also adumbrates an afterlife in which her “immortal longings,” connubial as they are, come to fruition: Methinks I hear Antony call; I see him rouse himself To praise my noble act. I hear him mock The luck of Caesar, which the gods give men To excuse their after wrath. Husband, I come!

(5.2.283–87)

In all these cases, Shakespeare does not foreclose the possibility of clairvoyance in favor of delusional raving; with Lear in particular, the hope of a “promised end” in the next life is weighed against a failed resurrection in this. The First Folio also assigns Lear’s, “Break heart, I prithee break” to Kent, with Lear dying before Kent delivers the line. Kent probably regards Lear’s “Look there” as delusional, and one cannot rule out that possibility, but something else is also at work here, what Peter Milward (2007) calls “this sudden supervention of joy upon sorrow that, like Gloucester, the heart of Lear is too weak to endure” (15). The consensus, again, is that Shakespeare actively revised the 1608 quarto version into what became, over time, the First Folio; it is hard to attribute the striking addition of Lear’s two lines here to anything other than authorial revision.4 Shakespeare gestures toward failed resurrections in this life and the possibility of life beyond, even as he withholds any explicit confirmation of this apart from Lear’s emphatic language. In other words, if Shakespeare did revise the quarto version, the effect of his redaction is to ameliorate the despair of the scene; to point toward the possibility that all is not lost forever for these two; and to hold the hope and despair of the moment in a delicate, and finally unresolved, balance of his art. The novelist Frederick Buechner (2001) asks of Lear’s final moments, “Is it possible that we are being asked to

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wonder if, as one of God’s spies, he saw deeper into the mystery of things than any of them?” (152). Shakespeare never definitively resolves this question for us.

IV Materialist critics routinely dismiss such inquiries as “immaterial” in both senses of the word.5 Since their nihilistoriented interpretations tend to predominate in discussions of King Lear, let us examine two of its most influential critics. First, the cultural materialist Jonathan Dollimore, whose Radical Tragedy is in its third edition (2004), would dissuade us from the notion that Lear’s suffering — long the redoubt of redemptionist critics — can be redeemed either by human perseverance (what he calls the “humanist” view) or by divine intervention (the “Christian” view). He opposes the use of metaphysical language (grace, redemption, atonement) — both by the play and its critics — that would invest characters with a quasi-transcendent identity or essence (195–96). Dollimore’s cultural materialist reading declares the idea of any redemption in the play as mere fiction. When Cordelia and Lear die, Albany voices what Dollimore considers the unpersuasive Christian view of a god who redeems: when [Albany] cries “The Gods defend her!” — i.e., Cordelia — instead of the process being firmly consolidated we witness, even before he has finished speaking, Lear re-entering with Cordelia dead in his arms. Albany has one last desperate bid for recuperation, still within the old punitive / poetic [that is, providentialist] terms: All friends shall taste The wages of their virtue, and all foes The cup of their deservings. (5.3.[278–80]) Seconds later Lear dies. The timing of these two deaths must surely be seen as cruelly, precisely subversive. (206; italics mine)

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Dollimore assumes that divine justice, if it were to exist, would right the wrongs in the play; in its stipulated absence, we “must” read Lear and Cordelia’s deaths as subversive of any idealist or religious reading. We are fortunate to have even this much of an explanation, since earlier Dollimore informs his readers, “I do not mean to argue again the case against the Christian view since, even though it is still sometimes advanced, it has been effectively discredited” (196). Is teleological justice thus frustrated? Lear and Cordelia are defeated, it is true, but their efforts help put an end to the cruelties practiced by Goneril, Regan, Cornwall, and Edmund. With Albany, Edgar, and Kent now in power, it is by no means clear that divine justice, long delayed as it is (and at a cost), is simply frustrated.6 The question appears open rather than closed. But there certainly is no resurrection. Citing this failure at length, Stephen Greenblatt inadvertently corroborates Dollimore’s view: What would it mean to “redeem” Lear’s sorrows? To buy them back from the chaos and brute meaninglessness they now seem to signify? To reward the king with a gift so great that it outweighs the sum of misery in his entire life? To reinterpret his pain as the necessary preparation — the price to be paid — for a consummate bliss? In the theater such reinterpretation would be represented by a spectacular turn in the plot — a surprise unmasking, a sudden reversal of fortunes, a resurrection — and this dramatic redemption, however secularized, would almost invariably recall the consummation devoutly wished by centuries of Christian believers. (Greenblatt 1988, 125; italics mine)

Such suffering can only be redeemed, in his view, by the great recompense of resurrection. But, Greenblatt adds, This consummation had in fact been represented again and again in medieval Resurrection plays, which offered the spectators ocular proof that Christ had risen. Despite the

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pre-Christian setting of Shakespeare’s play, Lear’s craving for just such proof — “This feather stirs, she lives!” — would seem to evoke precisely this theatrical and religious tradition, but only to reveal itself, in C. L. Barber’s acute phrase, as “post-Christian.” If it be so: Lear’s sorrows are not redeemed; nothing can turn them into joy, but the forlorn hope of an impossible redemption persists, drained of its institutional and doctrinal significance, empty and vain, cut off even from a theatrical realization. (125; italics in original)

Sounding a bit like Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, Greenblatt declares that without the hope of the resurrection, Lear’s life is one of “brute meaninglessness.” Greenblatt rightly suggests that Lear’s language evokes the Christian resurrectionary tradition — how can it do otherwise? — but the conclusions he draws from its failure are more tenuous. Greenblatt’s call for a “surprise unmasking” or resurrection is the stuff of miracle plays (or, one might add, Shakespearean variants of them in the romances), but hardly incumbent upon the realistic dramaturgy of a tragedy. For Shakespeare to resurrect Cordelia at this juncture would alter the play radically; it makes little sense to say that Shakespeare’s failure to do so necessarily pushes the play toward existentialist nihilism. A failed (or simply nonexistent) resurrection in this life is entirely consistent with the Christian understanding of things. It is precisely “the forlorn hope of an impossible resurrection” in this world that makes the play so poignant to those with religious sensibilities. To evoke the possibility of a resurrection only to deny it is a moving reminder of another resurrection; the likely effect upon a Jacobean audience, as one suspects on audiences today, is the same desire for transcendence that Samuel Johnson felt and Nahum Tate gave us. Greenblatt asks, “What would it mean to ‘redeem’ Lear’s sorrows?” and then uses anaphora to offer multiple, but converging, answers: “To buy them back from the chaos”; “To reward the king with a gift so great”; and “To reinterpret his

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pain as the necessary preparation.” Only a resurrection could redeem such loss. Its absence, however, does not signal that the play “drain[s]” the Christian resurrectionary tradition of “its institutional and doctrinal significance, empty and vain” (125); instead, its painful absence after such evocation registers its import more powerfully. Shakespeare rightly keeps resurrection as a desired end, not a theatrical actuality. Exactly what kind of catharsis the play offers, or ought to, is at issue. Both Greenblatt and Dollimore draw upon the framework of the miracle play to insist that what Dollimore calls providentialist drama ought to end with some measure of justice; in short, material suffering deserves a tangible reward. As Johnson noted, Shakespeare’s sources uniformly point in this direction. In Leir, for instance, divine intervention (Michie, ed. 1991, scene 19) saves the day, preserving Lear and Cordella so that they live, in the end, happily ever after (ibid., 27.78–79). But King Leir is, as Michie (1991) points out, “wooden and ponderous” (39); Shakespeare’s play, by contrast, does not strike a hollow note precisely because seemingly inconsolable death is a reality people experience. Dollimore and Greenblatt argue that if Shakespeare were to write a drama consistent with the teachings of Christianity, then it would end with material reward, such as Cordelia’s resurrection for the suffering she has endured. Their view, in brief, is that material suffering deserves or merits for its victims tangible compensation. But this, of course, is understandably a component of their own materialist orientation, though it is also, to be sure, part of the way in which miracle plays work. Greenblatt explicitly extrapolates the workings of the miracle play onto King Lear, which Shakespeare purposefully directs, as we have seen, away from the workings of plays such as Leir. Regan’s servant registers his own frustration at the possible triumph of the butcher Cornwall: “I’ll never care what wickedness I do, / If this man come to good” (Q1, 14.97–98). “If this be our end,” to recall Thomas Rymer’s similar frustration with Othello, “what boots it to

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be Vertuous?” (138). If King Lear resists this-worldly justice, what is at work here? In his study of hermeneutics, Gadamer (1995) discusses Aristotle’s theory of tragedy, noting at one point, We learn from Aristotle that the representation of the tragic action has a specific effect on the spectator. The representation works through eleos and phobos. The traditional translation of these emotions as “pity” and “fear” gives them a far too subjective tinge. Aristotle is not at all concerned with pity . . . and similarly fear is not to be understood as an inner state of mind. Rather, both are events that overwhelm man and sweep him away. (130)

We are swept away because, for a moment, the play induces “self-forgetfulness” (126) in us and thereby “puts the spectator in the place of the player” (110). We suffer vicariously as characters suffer and learn that if anything is affirmed in tragedy, it is “Certainly not the justice of a moral world order. The notorious theory of the tragic flaw, which plays scarcely any role in Aristotle, is not an explanation suitable even for modern tragedy. For tragedy does not exist where guilt and expiation balance each other out, where a moral bill of guilt is paid in full. . . .Rather, the excess of tragic consequences is characteristic of the essence of the tragic” (131). Balthasar (1988) reaches largely the same conclusion: “Great tragedies witness the fragility of human justice” (462) — not its perfect realization. Greenblatt and Dollimore’s conception of the way tragic justice ought to operate in this play if it were an affirmation of Christian truth fits Leir perfectly, but hardly King Lear. Gadamer suggests that the effect of a real tragedy is not purgation, but overwhelming sadness that carries us away. Moreover, he argues, “The spectator recognizes himself and his own finiteness in the face of the power of fate. What happens to the great ones of the earth has an exemplary significance. Tragic pensiveness does not affirm the tragic course

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of events as such, or the justice of the fate that overtakes the hero but rather a metaphysical order of being that is true for all” (1995, 132). If Gadamer is correct, what we see in King Lear is both a specific instance — Cordelia’s — as well as the universal injustice of death, which indiscriminately takes everyone. Nihilist-oriented critics can thus point to what they perceive to be the absurdity of life in the face of death. Christianity certainly offers the consolation of a life hereafter, but Shakespeare renders even that obscure by means of the play’s paganism as well as Lear’s insistence that he sees in Cordelia something that no one else does. Cordelia deserves a better fate than she receives, as even Edgar admits, and the seeming proximity of resurrection in the last scene would be precisely the kind of material restitution to which Greenblatt and Dollimore refer. But that must occur, if at all, offstage in another world. What does occur onstage, however, is a kind of rough justice: Albany, in many respects the moral center of the play, tells Goneril, If that the heavens do not their visible spirits Send quickly down to tame these vile offences, It will come, Humanity must perforce prey on itself, Like monsters of the deep. (Q1 16.45–49)

He looks initially for divine judgment (à la Pericles), though his use of “if” signals his own uncertainty about such direct intervention. In lieu of it, the predatory actions of Edmund, Goneril, and Regan are self-consuming and self-destroying; the wages of their sin, as they belatedly learn, is death: “all three / Now marry in an instant” (5.3.203–04). The play’s language of redemption frames the characters’ lives in a way perfectly consistent with Christianity’s situating of human suffering, not in view of earthly reward but in light of eternity. That such a perspective necessarily clashes with the pagan one Lear and his contemporaries hold is one of the paradoxes of the play. Paul reminds us, “If in this life

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onely we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the moste miserable” (1 Cor. 15:19). Lear is miserable, yet he gestures toward some sort of afterlife, and the play jars us with its anachronistic religious language drawn from the Christian tradition. Such language offers a Christian horizon from which to understand these pagan lives, but leaves open the question of what happens in eternity. The human perspective, both that of characters and audience alike, is benighted, but that does not mean that the resurrectionary tradition is vacated simply because the characters are unresurrected. Christianity is not a “this life only” religion; in fact, it repudiates such an understanding. The question of resurrection is open, ultimately, because the play pointedly evokes it. Part of King Lear’s power is its tension between that transcendent longing for resurrection and the impossibility of its realization, much less realistic representation, onstage. Lear’s suffering is given meaning — certainly is capable of being understood — by Christianity, even though that resurrective end is denied or at least occluded from his and our vision. Materialist criticism may conceive of Lear’s life as utter loss because he is not saved or redeemed in the here and now. The flaw in such criticism, of course, is this jump from the physical reality of death to the presumption of how divine justice ought to work in the play: either we must see tangible evidence of providential intervention — Cordelia’s resurrection — or else it does not exist.7 A belief in such immediate, demonstrable, and direct intervention, as in a resurrection or, negatively, as in the “fire from heaven” that destroys the incestuous Antiochus and his daughter in Pericles (2.4.9), was relatively naïve in Shakespeare’s day, which is why he relegates such instances exclusively to the romances. Lear implores the gods, but his prayers, like those of Shakespeare’s more pious characters, may be heard but are seldom if ever immediately answered.8

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It is unlikely that a writer as sophisticated as Shakespeare held such a primitive view of the religious life; if he did, his plays show no evidence of it. What Dollimore and Greenblatt allow for, in the end, is the slim possibility of a dramatic theodicy, one that would only be realized if the play should (as it does not) offer palpable, this-worldly justice and reward. While such readings are regrettably tendentious, one ought also to guard against the other extreme; namely, redemptionist accounts that argue for Lear and Cordelia’s salvation or ultimate vindication. Shakespeare does not obtrude on the world of King Lear with a Christian deus ex machina. As we have seen, Shakespeare clearly has a polytheistic framework suitably in mind for the play, and repeated appeals to these nonintervening gods are a distinctive feature of the play. Though Christianity posits that God works in pagan contexts, precisely how is not clear, and the play does not attempt to solve this enigma. Instead, the purposefully anachronistic language gestures toward a redemption and resurrection that is out of place in Lear’s world. The very incongruity of resurrectionary language in a pre-Christian setting is no simple anachronism;9 it serves, rather, to heighten the contrast between their transcendent aspirations and the mundane reality of their unresurrected corpses.

V Germaine Greer (1986) writes perceptively about the modus operandi of Shakespeare’s art: The chief pitfall threatening any discussion of Shakespeare’s thought is the common assumption that the opinions of any character in a Shakespearian play are Shakespeare’s own. Shakespeare was not a propagandist; he did not write plays as vehicles for his own ideas.10 Rather he developed a theatre of dialectical conflict, in which idea is pitted against idea and from their friction a deeper understanding of the issues

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emerges. The resolution which is reached is not the negation of the conflict, but the stasis produced by art. (17–18)

Shakespeare superimposes Christianity on the paganism of Lear’s world; the perspectives converge but do not resolve into negation. Both are held in equipoise; neither violates the integrity of the other; each investigates, especially in Cordelia’s death, the perspective of its counterpart. Let us examine one further instance of this phenomenon — Edgar’s staging of Gloucester’s “fall” from Dover cliff, tricking him into believing that he has been divinely preserved: “Think that the clearest gods, who make them honors / Of men’s impossibilities, have preserved thee” (4.5.73–74). Such a scene recalls Leir’s modus operandi. Greenblatt (1988) does not buy Edgar’s gloss: Edgar tries to create in Gloucester an experience of awe and wonder so intense that it can shatter his suicidal despair and restore his faith in the benevolence of the gods: “Thy life’s a miracle” (4.6.55), he tells his father. For Shakespeare . . . this miracle minting is the product of specifically histrionic manipulations; the scene at Dover is a disenchanted analysis of both religious and theatrical illusions. (118)

Staged resurrections and preservations are, in a sense, transparent: we see right through them. Greenblatt asserts, “Performance kills belief; or rather acknowledging theatricality kills the credibility of the supernatural” (109). Insofar as the staged miracle is seen as being the work of human hands, audiences do not attribute it to divine intervention. But he posits it as a universalizable statement in which all credibility of the supernatural is questioned: “King Lear is haunted by a sense of rituals and beliefs that are no longer efficacious, that have been emptied out. The characters appeal again and again to the pagan gods, but the gods remain utterly silent” (119). Greenblatt would have absence of evidence in regard to divine intervention constitute evidence of absence. Either

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the gods respond materially, here and now, or belief in such providential control is vacuous. Foakes (1993) nearly echoes Greenblatt’s view: “Characters invoke the gods when it suits them, but there is no sign that the gods listen, or are even there” (214). Gary Taylor (2001) offers perhaps the best response to this argument from absence: “But isn’t that what a Christian audience would expect to happen? that appeals to non-existent gods would remain unanswered?” (21). Moreover, Shakespeare’s staging of the scene can be read in other ways. In 1972 Maynard Mack demurred at the then “fashionable existentialist nausée” that attempted to read into Lear’s resurrection language the idea that “we inhabit an imbecile universe.” Perhaps we do — but Shakespeare’s King Lear provides no evidence of it that till now we lacked. . . . Shakespeare can hardly have imagined that in King Lear’s last scene he was telling his audiences something they had never known, or was casting his solemn vote on one side or other of the vexing philosophical and theological questions involved in the suffering of the innocent and good. The scene has, besides, his characteristic ambiguity and balance. No world beyond this one in which “all manner of things will be well” is asserted; but neither is it denied. (115–16)11

As a case in point, F. W. Brownlow (1993) demurs specifically to Greenblatt’s interpretation: “when Edgar takes his father through the strange ritual of the false suicide, the effect should not be to turn the audience against miracles but to make them wonder what the definition of a miracle might be. Edgar’s fiction, after all, saves the old man from suicidal despair by proving more real than his suffering (126). Edgar certainly stages this preservation, but the effect on Gloucester — “Grace go with you, sir” (5.2.4) — as on Lear when he believes his daughter is alive, is the quasi-miraculous, if momentary, hope that all things may yet be well. But in a tragic world of staged preservations and failed resurrections, they cannot be.

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Yet even a failed resurrection in the pagan world of Lear opens a window onto a religious understanding of life. Perhaps this is what made the play so painful to Samuel Johnson, and to audiences before and after: a failed resurrection can do no other in light of Christianity’s promise of the cross. It is no accident that King Lear invokes for a second time the same romance convention that is at the heart of Christianity: resurrection. As Felperin (1972) noticed, “When the stormtossed Lear awakens to music in the presence of his long-lost daughter and says, ‘You do me wrong to take me out of the grave’ [4.7.46], his figurative resurrection brings us very close to the world of the romances to come, where literal resurrections are possible” (118–19). Felperin’s phrasing of “longlost daughter” alerts us to the romance convention at work here as well: a recognition scene between the principals after long separation. What is different here is that Cordelia knows Lear is not dead, though she notes that he probably should be: “’Tis wonder that thy life and wits at once / Had not concluded all! — He wakes.” (4.6.34–35). Lear too envisions this reunion as a quasi resurrection: “You are a spirit, I know. Where did you die?” (42). Shakespeare thus repeatedly offers variations on the theme of resurrection in King Lear, more so and more thoroughly than in any other of his plays. Even here Shakespeare is not done; he revisits the convention a third and final time. Edgar at play’s end hopes in vain that Lear only “faints” and attempts, as Cordelia had done, to revive him, calling out, “My lord, my lord!” and imploring him, “Look up, my lord,” thus again holding out the possibility of a romance ending (5.3.287–88). Kent, however, envisions the prospect as anti-romance: “Vex not his ghost. O, let him pass. He hates him / That would upon the rack of this tough world / Stretch him out longer” (289–91). Only then does Edgar relinquish his hope and acquiesce to the finality of Lear’s death: “He is gone indeed” (291). Lear will not rise again, figuratively or literally.

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Such moments bring us close to the romance of the Resurrection itself. King Lear repeatedly invokes romance conventions, raises our expectations, and prepares us for what would be, if the play were not an anti-romance, Cordelia’s resurrection from the dead, and perhaps Lear’s as well. Shakespeare soon disabuses characters and audience alike. Although we are prepared for the aged Lear’s death, Cordelia’s is another matter; if she were to live, as Lear tells us, that fact might be able to “redeem all sorrows” (5.3.241). For an audience that knows the romance convention (and archetype) of the Resurrection, Cordelia’s quasi resurrection is especially tantalizing. Shakespeare makes it all the more poignant by means of Lear’s own pseudo-resurrection from sleep and his suggestion, upon waking and seeing Cordelia, that she can transcend death: “You are a spirit, I know. Where did you die?” (4.6.42). King Lear is in some ways a failed miracle play,12 though Shakespeare’s purpose in it is aesthetic, not moralistic in the old style; the stasis he achieves is precisely his commingling of Christianity and paganism, hope and despair. Such bravura chiaroscuro is echoed in the division of critical views, which have had the unfortunate effect of dividing that which in King Lear is whole, cut from the cloth of Shakespeare’s Christian humanism. His technique of blending contraries can perhaps best be understood by reference to Keats’s famous comment on Shakespeare’s “negative capability”: “it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (66). Cordelia’s quasi resurrection is precisely such a moment. Contemporary productions, despite their general embrace of the postmodern emphasis on uncertainty, routinely move away from it in this scene. In director Richard Eyre’s film

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version (1997), for instance, instead of having the dying Lear (Ian Holm) looks toward Cordelia’s lips when he says, “Look there, look there!,” Holm looks off into space, away from Cordelia. A sympathetic Edgar holds the clearly deranged man in this his last hallucination.13 Another, and to my mind more intriguing, possibility exists: to have the living actress who plays the dead Cordelia at that very moment move her lips or even perceptibly breathe one more time, as Lear in F1 suggests she does. Lear could be holding the body forth to the audience, thus obscuring her face from Kent and Edgar. Such a performance I have yet to see, but it would be quite in keeping with the uncertainties and mysteries with which Shakespeare was so manifestly at ease in his figurations of resurrection. Finally, as Felperin reminds us, “Shakespearean tragedy maintains the possibility of a romantic outcome right to the bitter end, as a feather seems to stir at Cordelia’s lips and Desdemona awakens from death just long enough to exonerate her husband with her final breath” (122). I would add Romeo and Juliet to the mix: each of the star-crossed lovers thinks the other may awaken at any moment, so tantalizingly lifelike they appear; here too, however, the recognition scene in which the lost is found, the loved one miraculously preserved from death, is evoked only to be denied. “The promise of resurrection,” as Groves (2007) comments, “is subverted” (85).14 To an extent greater than in any other play, and in stark contrast to the comedies and romances, Shakespeare presents a series of subverted recognition scenes in King Lear: Gloucester’s “flawed heart” “Burst smilingly” at the news of Edgar’s true identity (5.3.188–91); the moment gestures toward joyous quasi resurrection but ends in death.15 Similarly, Edmund’s “reunion” with Edgar is a duel that costs him his life, though he too lives long enough to learn that Edgar is alive (155–60). And at the very moment when Lear believes Cordelia is rising from the dead — “This feather

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stirs, she lives” — Edgar reveals Kent’s identity to the dying king: “’Tis noble Kent, your friend.” Lear refuses the recognition: “A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all” (240–44). In the romances to come, such subversion ceases; the possibility of resurrection from the dead becomes a reality, or at least as close to one as credulity will allow. But in a tragic world, whether pre-Christian or Christian, resurrections fail in part because of the generic demands of tragedy; in part because these are not miracle plays; and in part because as anti-romances they plumb the depths of human suffering and loss where, as in the opening sections of a requiem, death seems inconsolable and irreversible. Shakespeare holds a window open for our view of a possible resurrection, either now or in the life of the world to come, and then closes it within in the mundane world of the play.

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FOUR

z

The Limits of Stage Resurrection in Pericles and Cymbeline They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose, Nor spake, nor moved their eyes; It had been strange, even in a dream, To have seen those dead men rise. — Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner

After the anti-romance of the tragedies, where expectations of a resurrection remain unfulfilled, it is scarcely surprising that in his turn to the romances Shakespeare fulfills those hopes insofar as he can without re-invoking the old miracle plays — though Pericles for one, with its deliberate archaizing, comes quite close to the old form. In his chapter “Tragicomic Resurrections — Perfection,” Paffrath (1993, 119) notes that Shakespeare adapts the conventional (Greek) formula of reuniting long-lost characters by means of resurrections. In his view, there are no less than four resurrections

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in Cymbeline (1608–10) — those of Posthumus, Guiderius, Arviragus, and Imogen (148, 152, 156–57, 144). Unfortunately for this view, not all such reunions constitute resurrections. Guiderius and Arviragus, for instance, were “stol’n, and to this hour no guess in knowledge / Which way they went” (1.1.60–61), thus rendering suspect any such description of their later reunion with their father as a resurrection. They are not, after all, even presumed to be dead. I view these last plays as a continuation of Shakespeare’s development of quasi resurrections within his recognition scenes, and also, as a countervailing movement, of his concern with the limitations of the theater and of the playwright to dramatize resurrections. Stage resurrections remind us of the joy of the Resurrection even as Shakespeare underscores the artificiality of stage resurrections and the need for both divine and human “grace,” a word especially prevalent in the romances. Such concerns with stage resurrections were evident in Romeo and Juliet as well as the early comedies; these plays, rather than suggesting a resurrective crescendo, as Paffrath would have it, register instead an awareness of the artificiality of romance conventions, especially of the deus ex machina and the often all-too-pat recognition scenes that reunite characters. Pace such easy conventions, the romances point to the indispensability of human repentance and forgiveness, thus rendering the recognition scene a necessary but in itself insufficient condition for a joyous reunion. What Shakespeare does in the romances, as he had in the comedies and tragedies, is to remind us of the Resurrection in the midst of his recognition scenes (and elsewhere), thus deepening their significance for his first, predominantly Christian, audiences — without, however, distorting their typically pagan settings. His tropes and figurations of the Resurrection coexist alongside Diana and Neptune, the deities of conventional romance, thus illustrating with a flourish the syncretism of his art. In the end, such adaptation

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is almost an imaginative necessity if Shakespeare is to suggest the furthest reach of transformative reconciliations; no other language conveys as immediately or as emotively the idea of personal reunions as a subtle resonance between the Resurrection and the “high miracle[s]” of the romances (Tempest 5.1.179).

Pericles Though the classification of these late plays as romances occurred well after Shakespeare’s death — The Tempest is placed first among the comedies in the First Folio — their difference from the comedies and tragedies is evident, and represent something of a hybrid form. After the preceding tragedies, the romances reinvoke the festive reunions of the comedies, but in darker ways. Some of the tragic elements, in turn, are not overcome in the romances, but magic and a sense of providential care play an increasingly prominent role. In suggesting the plays’ continuity with one another, I have tried to demonstrate that Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and King Lear also invoke the sacred in various, and often deeply moving, ways. That those plays offer failed resurrections is, again, not an evacuation of religious content, but an acknowledgment of mundane human existence where death is inescapable. Providence does not intervene in certain matters, and the romances lead possibly to the same conclusion: is Shakespeare asking us in Pericles (1607–08) to believe that Diana exists or that she really affects actions in the play? Providence may intervene, but such action is usually secondary in Shakespeare, working through the primacy of human agency. The exception that proves the rule is the heavenly fire that “shriveled up” the bodies of Antiochus and his daughter (Pericles 2.4.9), but this moment stems from his primary sources, one of which, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (ca. 1383–93), informs us,

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That for vengeaunce, as god it wolde, Antiochus as men maie witte, With thonder and lightnyng is forsmitte. His doughter hath the same chance: So ben thei both in o balance.1

The persistence of such archaisms in Pericles demonstrates Shakespeare’s fidelity to his sources, but his own cosmology largely works otherwise. Pericles may declare his reunion with Thaisa and his daughter Marina as “this great miracle” — thus invoking the mystery and miracle plays (Felperin 1972, 153–60) — and consequently “offer night oblations” to “pure Dian” (Pericles 5.3.60, 71–72), but Shakespeare complicates such easy attributions as quickly as he gives them. Thaisa praises the physician Cerimon’s healing of her: “this man, / Through whom the gods have shown their power” (Pericles 5.3.61–62); Pericles likewise tells him, “Reverend sir, / The gods can have no mortal officer / More like a god than you” (63–65). Earlier in the play, too, a gentleman tells Cerimon, “Your Honor has through Ephesus poured forth / Your charity, and hundreds call themselves / Your creatures, who by you have been restored” (3.2.45–47). Miola (2001) comments, “Spectators who witnessed Cerimon’s medical skill could see in Pericles’ ‘great miracle’ natural causality rather than divine intervention, pleasing improbability rather than wondrous impossibility” (40). Certainly, though we need not see it in terms of a binary opposition. Restoration is not the same as resurrection, to be sure, but the play suggests that providence works through human agency in the healing arts. Lest the point be missed, the play’s narrator Gower — the fourteenth-century poet whose person and Confessio amantis Shakespeare playfully resurrects — declares in the sententiousness of his rhyming couplets, “Virtue preserved from fell destruction’s blast, / Led on by heaven, and crowned with joy at last” (Pericles 5.3.91–92; italics mine). As the tragedies

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demonstrate, heaven does not always grant bliss, but the suggestion of providential care and guidance, while not strictly demonstrable (unless one believes the Diana bit), is nonetheless suggested and affirmed in the romances through the characters’ faith in divine beneficence. Another way of understanding Shakespeare’s method is to say that the supernatural works through the natural — not always, of course, and certainly not as visibly as in Antiochus’s case, but the plays’ language carefully and consistently accommodates the possibility of providential influence. Are there natural explanations, as Miola suggests, for the miraculous, for seeming resurrections, in these plays? The answer is usually yes, but Shakespeare partially withholds those explanations from us while he gestures at the same time in a vertical direction, either to a deus ex machina or to the language of resurrection that he subtly incorporates in Pericles and other plays. As Philippa Tristram (1983) says, “the resurrections in this play may have their terrestrial explanations, but they are resurrections nonetheless” (206). The play contains both horizontal and vertical axes of action. As in King Lear, Pericles conjoins the worlds of paganism and Christianity; Shakespeare deploys in it the language of Christian humanism that so typifies the romances. In his demurral to one of many Christianizers of the play, Bullough (1958–75) declares Pericles to be “a Diana-play because it is a play set in pagan times and contains much about chastity. . . . In her supposed bereavement [Thaisa] vows herself to the chaste goddess, and Marina is saint-like in her purity” (6:372). As in Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale, the paganism of Pericles derives from classical Greek romance. That derivation is still palpable: the aptly named Hymen, Greek god of marriage, is present at the consummation of Pericles and Thaisa’s marriage (3.Chorus.9–11); Diana appears in Pericles’s dream in theophany (5.1.243–52), a scene anticipating Jupiter’s visitation to Posthumus (Cymbeline 5.4.93–113); and Thaisa becomes a vestal virgin in Diana’s famed temple

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in Ephesus (Pericles 3.4.1–17). The play abounds in these and other polytheistic references, from Simonides’s mild oath, “Now, by the gods” (2.3.92) to the more sinister announcement of Antiochus and his daughter’s end: “the most high gods not minding longer / To withhold the vengeance” for their incest punished them: “A fire from heaven came and shriveled up / Those bodies even to loathing” (2.4.3–4, 9–10). If this world is pagan, the idea as well as the Judeo-Christian vocabulary of “sin” once again suffuses it: Pericles fears he may have “erred or sinned” in his behavior (1.3.21); “Thaliard came full bent with sin” to murder Pericles (2.Chorus.23); and, not surprisingly, Antiochus’s incest with his daughter is repeatedly described as “sin” (1.1.93, 122). Gower as Chorus tells us at the outset the course of the incest: “But custom what they did begin / Was with long use account’d no sin” (1.Chorus.29–30). What is striking is that although Shakespeare elaborates on the idea of sin in this pagan setting, Gower’s Confessio amantis introduces the idea for him: Thus hath this kynge all that hym liste Of his likinge and his plesance, And last in such a continuance, And such delite he toke therin, Him thought that it was no sin.

(350–54)

Shakespeare virtually quotes Gower, perhaps showing him the highest form of flattery, and includes his presence in the play as a gesture to its archaic form. Part of the play’s archaism is its untroubled religious anachronisms; what are we to make of Shakespeare’s adoption and elaboration of such incongruities?2 We ought to recall Northrup Frye’s (1965) idea that in anachronism, “the past is blended with the present, and event and audience are linked in the same community” (20). Shakespeare’s more historically informed audience members know that the presence of sin is an incongruity in the play, an inconsistency that draws

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attention to itself continually. The reason for this is instructive: for Christians, among others, sin has pervaded human existence since the time of Adam and is the inheritance of all (Rom. 6:23). When these source writers — many of whom, Raphael Holinshed and Gower included, are Christians — explore pagan worlds, they do so through a lens, sometimes nominal, sometimes devout, of a Christian understanding of the world. Pagan characters are subject to the consequences of their actions, and their world is infused at times with the Christian sensibilities of God, sin, death, virtue, and other concepts. Shakespeare renders the pagan setting intelligible to a Christian understanding; his characters face the same moral decisions as those persons in the theater, and do so with almost an identical moral vocabulary. Aristotle’s discussion in the Poetics that tragedy represents exemplary people who are nonetheless recognizably like us is another way of understanding the framing of the stories in Shakespeare’s source material (1452b1–1454a1). His humanism is more subtle but in some ways more thoroughgoing than Gower’s, as Shakespeare underscores it continually through evocations of resurrection as well as his use of biblical tropes and imagery. Anticipating the materialism of modern criticism, Barber notes the religious dimension of Shakespeare’s civic theater: To see analogies with Christian ritual and symbolism in the plays can be illuminating, sometimes wonderfully so. But to substitute the Christian archetype for the dramatized reality is to falsify the basic situation in which Shakespeare worked, where precisely the absence of the resource of Christian discipline, the necessity of dealing in another, secular, artistic way with needs worship might meet, is often the ground of the dramatic action. (Barber and Wheeler 1986, 324)

One ought not to substitute, as Barber rightly insists, “the Christian archetype for the dramatized reality” of the play;

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but why cannot the Christian archetype serve as a backdrop for that dramatized reality, to “illuminate,” as he says, “analogies with Christian ritual and symbolism”? Shakespeare appears to be perfectly comfortable with such an approach; in fact, he repeatedly adopts it in his evocations of the Resurrection, especially in the romances. Barber takes further aim at those who would turn the plays into mystery or miracle plays: “To identify the dramatic action with its religious analogues is to ignore the radically new situation of the Elizabethan drama in a secularizing culture”; the romances embrace that culture by hearkening “back to the form of medieval secular romance he had known in his youth” (Barber and Wheeler 1986, 325).3 If one were to identify the dramatic action of Pericles only and exclusively with its religious analogues, then one certainly would be ignoring other realities of the play. To be sure, Pericles recalls the quest form of the medieval secular romance and thus the play hardly looks like a traditional miracle or mystery play. Yet a nonreligious form does not require the play to be as radically secular, or as secularizing, as Barber claims. While there were secular elements at work, the question here is one of balance, and the play represents a typical admixture of the sacred and the profane. What is one to make, for instance, of Leonine’s request to Marina (recalling Othello’s to Desdemona [Othello 5.2.26]), “Come, say your prayers” (Pericles 4.1.68), shortly before his attempted murder of her? Clearly, this is religious language, but it also reminds contemporary readers of the secular western with its taunts (comically parodied by Yosemite Sam) of “Say your prayers!” The pagan Leonine continues and anachronistically grants Marina what appears to be shriving time: “If you require a little space for prayer, / I grant it,” telling her to be brief because “the gods are quick of ear” (70–72). It is striking how often Shakespeare mutes religious elements (perhaps this is why Barber believes the plays are

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relentlessly secular) where, as in the Confessio amantis, the penetration of Christianity into the pagan world is quite abrupt, almost comically so: This maiden tho for feare shright, And for the love of god allmight She preith that for a litell stounde, She mighte knele upon the grounde Towarde the heven for to crave Her wofull soule that she maie save.

(1391–96)

A medieval secular romance such as Gower’s is secular in terms of form — a hero’s nonreligious quest or adventure — but this does not mean that it or its Shakespearean adaptation excludes the religious. The division between medieval secular and religious romances is not as neat as Barber suggests, and even if it were there is ample evidence that Shakespeare made use of Gower’s medieval romance with its religious language. Shakespeare is no slavish imitator, however. Unlike Gower, he never Christianizes his pagan characters; his more subtle intermingling, as well as his creative use of anachronism, has no better example than Pericles’s prayer for Neptune to quiet the stormy seas: “Thou god of this great vast, rebuke these surges, / Which wash both heaven and hell! And thou that hast / Upon the winds command” (3.1.1–3). Shaheen (1999) comments: “Based on the account of Jesus calming the stormy Sea of Galilee. Compare the words ‘rebuke,’ ‘winds,’ and ‘command’ in Shakespeare with the account in Luke 8.24– 25: ‘He arose, and rebuked the winde, and the waves . . . and it was calme. . . . Who is this that commandeth both the windes and water, and they obey him?’ ” (691). But Pericles is not Christ and has no such command over the seas: Thaisa is shortly pronounced dead and summarily cast overboard. The biblical resonance of his prayer, however, is unmistakable and shows the effortlessness with which Shakespeare late in

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his career interweaves paganism and Christianity. He even substitutes “heaven and hell” for what should be a reference to the underworld and perhaps to Olympus as well. Later believing that his daughter is lost to him as well through death, Pericles in the midst of a dumb show “puts on sackcloth” (4.4.22, s.d.), a recurrent biblical motif for repentance (see Ps. 30:11; Dan. 9:3; Job 16:15), but in none of Shakespeare’s direct sources for the play. Pericles’s putting on sackcloth constitutes shorthand for the suffering he experiences, but it does not convert him into an Old Testament figure. The image concerns suffering; the biblical language is a vehicle for conveying the tenor. Shakespeare never falsifies or Christianizes the plays in ways that distort the reality of the worlds they present; the biblical elements subtly illuminate how the Gospel impinges on even pagan worlds. Shakespeare evokes the Resurrection in Pericles, too, beginning with the stage resurrection from the dead of Gower as his narrator: “To sing a song that old was sung, / From ashes ancient Gower is come, / Assuming man’s infirmities” (Pericles 1.1.1–3). Though Shaheen (1999, 687) cites this as only a possible biblical reference, the lines in context appear to derive from both Matthew 8:17, “He himself took our infirmities,” and from the classical mythology of the phoenix rising from the “ashes.” Both the biblical and Egyptian mythologies are of resurrection, with the idea that the authorial presence and person of Gower has been brought back to life onstage in order to retell the story of Apollonius of Tyre, of which Pericles is a redaction. Gower’s resurrection aside, Shakespeare’s evocations of the Resurrection remain more typically within the standard romance convention of wandering, loss, and recovery. Part of the play’s artifice stems from Shakespeare’s close adherence to the wandering plot of his source material, which includes three generic deaths at sea: to protect himself, Thaliard lies, telling Antiochus that Pericles perished at sea (1.3.26–29);

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Leonine loses Marina to pirates and attempts to save face: “I’ll swear she’s dead / And thrown into the sea” (4.1.102–03); and Thaisa is presumed dead and buried at sea (3.1.17–18). With a setup of so many putative deaths, Pericles is rife with the potential for quasi resurrections. Though Shakespeare’s lone authorship of this play remains in doubt, critical consensus attributes the last three acts of the play to him (Shaheen 1999, 686). No evidence exists that Shakespeare had acquired a reputation for writing scenes of resurrection; it is nonetheless tempting to see the resurrection motif struck early in act 3. With the bodies of mariners floating on the Ephesian shore, the physician Cerimon disclaims any medicinal power over death, telling a servant, “Your master will be dead ere you return; / There’s nothing can be ministered to nature / That can recover him” (Pericles 3.2.7–9). Thaisa’s restoration from near death (a detail established for Shakespeare in Gower’s account [1196–97]) is clear, as Cerimon declares, “Gentlemen, this queen will live. Nature awakes” (3.2.94); in other words, her quasi resurrection owes itself to natural rather than to supernatural causes. Joyously celebrating the moment, Cerimon notes her proximity to, as well as her narrow recovery from, death: She is alive! Behold, Her eyelids, cases to those heavenly jewels Which Pericles hath lost, begin to part Their fringes of bright gold. The diamonds Of a most praisèd water doth appear, To make the world twice rich. (Pericles 3.2.99–104)

Her eyes, diamonds whose “water” — lapidary luster and clarity — also refers by way of a pun to her rescue at sea, which becomes in his view “a most praisèd water.” Her two eyes “make the world twice rich” by the fact of their being two, but the idea of resurrection (despite the fact that hers is clearly only a resuscitation or restoration from near death) is also subtly conveyed: Thaisa’s reawakening enriches the

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world, to which she had been lost as a “dead queen” (3.1.18), for a second time. The intimations of his speech, not to mention the beauty of the poetry, are nowhere to be found in the sources. Loss and recovery are standard fare among the romances, but Shakespeare adds the intimation and language of resurrection; the moment bears his signature impress. Having recovered and believing Pericles to be irrevocably lost to her — “My wedded lord, I ne’er shall see again” (3.4.8) — Thaisa takes on the vestal livery of Diana, thus preparing the way for their mutual recovery in act 5. That latter recognition scene is instantly familiar as a romance convention. Realizing the voice and story of her husband, Thaisa declares, “Voice and favor! / You are, you are — O royal Pericles!” (5.3.13–14) and apparently faints straightaway because Pericles immediately cries, “What means the nun? She dies! Help, gentlemen!” (15). When she subsequently rises and speaks, he replies incredulously, “The voice of dead Thaisa!” (35); this is the moment of her quasi resurrection from the dead, in his eyes at least. When she clarifies matters — “That Thaisa am I, supposèd dead / And drowned” (36– 37) — he can only exclaim, “Immortal Dian!” (38), perhaps in praise of the goddess’s preservation of Thaisa, perhaps with the suggestion that to be “immortal,” as Thaisa appears to be at this moment, she can only be Diana herself. As a pagan, the idea of a resurrection from the dead is foreign to him and thus he is unwilling to believe the evidence of his eyes. Barber notes that “Shakespeare is working with a tale saturated with Christian associations by centuries of retelling” (Barber and Wheeler 1986, 325), yet Shakespeare remarkably preserves that historicity, including the person of the actual (Athenian) Pericles, in stark contrast to his other main source for the play, Thomas Twine’s prose romance, The Patterne of Painefull Adventures (1594?). In that work, the Pericles figure declares, “Blessed be the moste mightie God of heaven, which sitteth above and beholdeth the state of men on earth, and dealeth with them according to his great mercie: who nowe

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also of his unspeakeable goodnesse, hath restored unto mee my wife and my daughter” (Bullough 1958–75, 6:473). This is almost comically Christianized. Shakespeare avoids the bathos by having Pericles, finally recognizing Thaisa, call for a descent into figurative death that is in reality a restored life: “Oh, come, be buried / A second time within these arms!” (5.3.44–45). Theirs is, in short, a reunion that is a symbolic resurrection. The play similarly moves toward its other multiple discoveries. Pericles had earlier experienced a similar shock when he discovered Marina alive: “This cannot be. / My daughter — buried! — Well, where were you bred?” (5.1.167–68). The dashes show his mind switching rapidly from seeing her alive — “My daughter” — to believing her dead — “buried!” — to a questioning of her birth that recalls Sebastian and Viola’s similar exchange in Twelfth Night. As is typical, Shakespeare also recalls the Resurrection by giving to Pericles language that corroborates his incredulity: “Are you flesh and blood? / Have you a working pulse, and are no fairy?” (5.1.152–53). Shaheen’s (1999) intuitive sense of the passage is instructive: “This passage seems to have overtones of Scripture. Compare Jesus’ post-resurrection appearance to his disciples as recorded in Luke 24.38–39: ‘Then hee saide unto them, Why are ye troubled? . . . Behold mine hands and my feete: for it is I my selfe: handle me, and see: for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have’” (694). This is not, as Barber suggests, “to substitute the Christian archetype for the dramatized reality” and thus “falsify the basic situation in which Shakespeare worked” (Barber and Wheeler, 1986, 324), but to hold the Christian archetype, the paganism of the setting, and the naturalistic reality in relative equipoise. The tentacles of Shakespeare’s lines here are, as is typical, multifarious, drawing upon English folklore (the “fairy” of line 153) within the play’s pagan setting, and adding to it the delicate resonance of the Resurrection. Given the

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reunion and quasi-resurrective context of the moment, such an association is most likely a deliberate evocation of the Christian story, though one must also concede that, as Shaheen (1999) remarks, Shakespeare may have occasionally “echoed Scripture without being aware of it, since the thought had become his own” (70). The echo is characteristically subtle, in contrast to Twine’s account, which gives to Apollonius at the same moment the outburst, “O mercifull god, which beholdest heaven, earth and hell, and discoverest all the secretes therein, blessed bee thy most holy name for ever” (Bullough 1958–75, 6:467). Shakespeare reconfigures the passage in such a way as not to distort the play’s pagan mise-en-scène. Even the characters’ valedictory claims that “the gods have shown their power” and that Pericles has been “led on by heaven” (5.3.62, 92) does not disqualify the role of fortune in human affairs, as much a staple of the romance diet as providence. Gower informs us in the Confessio that even though Apollonius’s luck is out at the moment, “Fro this daie forth fortune hath sworne / to set hym upwarde on the whele. / So goth the world, now wo, now wele” (1744–46). Shakespeare’s Gower likewise informs us, “Fortune’s mood / Varies again” (Pericles 3.Chorus.46–47), and again acknowledges at the end, despite his omniscient choric assurance of divine guidance, that Pericles has also been “assailed with fortune fierce and keen” (5.3.90). The characters’ benighted human perspective is allegedly clarified at the end, but without distorting the role of (pagan) Fortuna. The inconsolable Pericles is indeed fortunate that Marina, whose name indicates her sea- and romance-borne capacities, restores him to a familial life he had thought irrevocably lost: this great sea of joys rushing upon me ........ Oh, come hither, Thou that beget’st him that did thee beget,

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Thou that wast born at sea, buried at Tarsus, And found at sea again! (5.1.197, 199–02)

Two final components are worth mentioning in light of Shakespeare’s other, later romances. Bullough (1958–75) views Pericles as the first of the romances as a “laboratory for experiments,” which “may well have turned Shakespeare’s mind towards themes of a similar kind” in the later romances (6:373–74). Two of those elements that resurface are the twin themes of revenge and forgiveness so ably discussed by Hunter. Both are lacking at moments from Pericles, at least in comparison to the other romances and to the sources, the latter of which, Twine’s The Patterne of Painefull Adventures, tells us that the bawd figure who wanted to prostitute Marina gets his just reward: in “due revenge,” the townspeople “bound him hand and foot; and they made a great fire, and at Apollonius commaundement cast him alive into it, and burnt him to ashes” (Bullough 1958–75, 6:469–70). Shakespeare’s bawds, conversely, fade from view, presumably converted along with their clientele by means of Marina’s virtue. What the play does record, however, is the vengeance taken upon Cleon, the governor of Tarsus, and Dionyza, his wife, for their betrayal of their guardianship and attempted murder of Marina: to rage the city turn, That him and his they in his palace burn; The gods for murder seemed so content To punish — although not done, but meant. (Pericles 5.3.99–102)

This information comes at the very end, almost as an epilogue, and Gower relates it. But in the Confessio amantis (lines 1956–57), the characters are first hanged and drawn — a more elaborate torture — and only then burned. In both main sources, Apollonius acts as instigator, taking special trips to Mytilene and Tarsus, in both places inciting the townspeople

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to violence in order to avenge his family. Shakespeare’s version is almost an afterthought, with Pericles not the agent of the action, but at best a distant recipient, and then of revenge only against Cleon and Dionyza. As Shakespeare’s narrator, Gower does not sound like himself. Shakespeare’s muting or inattention to the revenge component of the play, which he prominently raises only to overcome in the other romances, is here most likely a result of his focus on the reunion of the hero’s family. While these characters scarcely need any intrafamilial forgiveness and reconciliation, Pericles points to what they do need, and to what becomes an issue that preoccupies Shakespeare throughout the romances; namely, the restoration of the family. Paffrath (1993) neatly connects such restoration with biblical resurrections: The different stories of [Jesus’] resurrections — the resurrection of Jairus’ daughter (Mk. 5.35–43), the youth from Nain (Lk. 7.11–17), of Lazarus (Jn. 11.17–44) and of the son of a royal servant (Jn. 4.50) — emphasize the restoration of the family connections severed by death as was the case in the resurrections by the prophets in the Old Testament [see 1 Kings 17:17–24, 2 Kings 4:18–37]. Furthermore, several times a reference to the belief of the relatives and those standing around is being established, which is demanded by Jesus as a precondition of the resurrection. (4–5)

The point is well taken. The resurrections from the dead in Pericles all concern such restoration, with the stunned hero asking Cerimon in the end, “Will you deliver / How this dead queen re-lives?” (Pericles 5.3.65–66). One is tempted to say that her resurrection requires his belief in its possibility, as well as our allowance of the conventions of romance. Such familial reunions and their attendant evocations of the Resurrection are at the heart of Shakespeare’s other romances.

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Cymbeline As in Pericles with its pre-Christian setting, Cymbeline is similarly fraught with anachronistic Christian language and history, though the anachronisms are cultural rather than temporal. Holinshed, the historian whose English Chronicles (1577 and 1587) Shakespeare relied on here and elsewhere in his plays, commented on the historical Cymbeline’s contemporaneity with Christ: “Kymbeline or Cimbeline the sonne of Theomantius was of the Britains made king after the deceasse of his father. . . . Little other mention is made of his dooings, except that during his reigne, the Saviour of the world our Lord Jesus Christ the onelie sonne of God was borne of a virgine, about the 23 yeare of the reigne of this Kymbeline” (Bullough 1958–75, 8:43). Even so, such historical contiguity hardly accounts for Shakespeare’s elaborate fusion of classical and biblical within the play. Recalling the medieval Books of Hours, Imogen anachronistically “charged” her banished husband, Posthumus, “At the sixth hour or morn, at noon, at midnight / T’encounter me with orisons” (Cymbeline 1.3.31–32); and Iachimo notices that the “roof” in Imogen’s “chamber / With golden cherubins is fretted” (2.4.88–89), which is strange coming from a pagan Celt. The soothsayer, too, while appropriately seeking auguries from Jove’s bird, does so by “fast[ing] and pray[ing] (4.2.350), the biblical locution that renders him as much an early apostle as it does a pagan (see Acts 13:3; Shaheen 1999, 701, 703, 711). Later, learning that her husband believes her to be an adulteress worthy of death, Imogen apostrophizes him for breaking his oath of steadfast fidelity to her, only this time her references are predominantly classical: True honest men being heard like false Aeneas Were in his time thought false, and Sinon’s weeping Did scandal many a holy tear, took pity From most true wretchedness. So thou, Posthumus, Wilt lay the leaven on all proper men;

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Goodly and gallant shall be false and perjured From thy great fail. (Cymbeline 3.4.58–64)

The reference to the first books of the Aeneid, particularly to the Greek Sinon’s duplicity, is balanced by the reference to “leaven,” which in Scripture refers repeatedly to falsity: “Take hede and beware of the leaven of the Pharises and Sadduces” (Matt. 16:6). Shakespeare also gives to Jupiter in his deus ex machina appearance has no less than five biblical allusions in the midst of his many classical references (5.4.93–143; Shaheen 1999, 705, 713–14). As is typical in Shakespeare’s syncretism, Christianity impinges upon the pagan world both in word and imagery. Thematically, too, the romances hinge on the pagan theme of revenge and the Christian response of forgiveness. As for the revenge in Cymbeline, it is especially prominent and an almost exclusively male4 — meaning testosterone-driven — phenomenon: Cymbeline banishes Posthumus for marrying Imogen and, earlier, Belarius for allegedly committing treason. He in turn kidnaps Cymbeline’s two sons in revenge (3.3.100–02). Iachimo, too, curtly but unsuccessfully bids Imogen to revenge herself on Posthumus for his alleged infidelity: “Be revenged” (1.6.126). Dolt though he is, Cloten’s intended actions are perhaps the most vicious in the play. Having been passed over by Imogen in favor of Posthumus, he vows “To be revenged upon her” (3.5.79), which he elaborates down to the fastidious detail of the clothing he will wear: “With that suit upon my back will I ravish her; first kill [Posthumus], and in her eyes. There shall she see my valor, which will then be a torment to her contempt. He on the ground, my speech of insultment ended on his dead body, and when my lust hath dined . . . to the court I’ll knock her back, foot her home again. She hath despised me rejoicingly, and I’ll be merry in my revenge” (138–46). Scripting his own revenge tragedy — a genre unto itself in Shakespeare’s day (and here with parodic echoes of

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Roman [Senecan] drama and the Iliad) — the hapless Cloten intends to dishonor Posthumus’s corpse, feed his lust by raping Imogen (4.1.17), and finally “knock” (with obscene sexual connotation) her back to court. Posthumus, too, is caught up in the cycle of revenge, wishing to destroy Imogen as Othello had Desdemona: “Oh, that I had her here, to tear her limbmeal! (2.4.150). Like Cloten, he plans her death (3.4.24), only to be thwarted when the morally just Pisanio plots to hide her, as had the friars in Much Ado about Nothing and Romeo and Juliet, and as Paulina later does with Hermione in The Winter’s Tale. Imogen is aware that hiding will be no simple feat; in response to the proposal, she asks Pisanio, Why, good fellow, What shall I do the while? Where bide? How live? Or in my life what comfort, when I am Dead to my husband? (3.4.28–31)

Where bide indeed? Dead to her husband, what are they to do with her in the interim before the stage resurrection? Pisanio simply recycles the old Shakespearean trick of cross-dressing Imogen, but he remains unsure how to bring about their reconciliation. What Pisanio does is typical of virtuous pagans in Shakespeare’s plays — he looks to the gods for succor. The scene closes with the invocation, “May the gods / Direct you to the best!” (3.4.193–94), and he later humbly acknowledges that in his own benighted condition he “remain[s] / Perplexed in all” (4.3.40–41). While he allows Fortune a role in human events (46), he also points to an inscrutable but beneficent providence behind it: “The heavens still must work” (41). The soothsayer shares his piety: “The fingers of the powers above do tune / The harmony of this peace” (5.5.470–71), as does a contrite and renewed Cymbeline late in the play: “Heaven mend all!” (5.5.69).

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All of these sentiments — nominally pagan though consonant with Christianity as well — point to the secondary agency through which providence effects its purposes. The question is what role the heavens play in the ultimate reconciliations of Imogen and Posthumus as well as of other characters in the play. The only instance of direct divine intervention is Jupiter’s dual theophany and theodicy in which he declares that, in spite of appearances, all shall be well: “Whom best I love, I cross, to make my gift, / The more delayed, delighted. Be content” (5.4.101–02). This is, as Shaheen (1999, 713) notes, a “clear echo” of Hebrews 12:6: “For whome the Lord loveth, he chasteneth”; and resonates with other scriptural passages as well (Rev. 3:19 and Prov. 3:12). None of Shakespeare’s sources contains this moment of classical and biblical fusion, and thus Jupiter’s speech demonstrates the growth of Shakespeare’s Christian humanism that reaches its full flowering in The Tempest.5 Jupiter also announces his intervention by means of dilatory time as well as the initial crossing of those he loves. In other words, he appears to announce (somewhat ironically) that his intervention comes through the auspices of time: his appearance is neither as direct nor as immediate as his appearance might lead one to believe. He speaks to the apparitions of the deceased Leonati, while their living offspring, our hero, sleeps and receives the communication only in his dream. Jupiter may introduce supernatural aid, but his own reign, as Felperin (1972) wryly notes, is passing: “Jupiter is a divine lame-duck whose term of office is about to expire, and the ending of the play has more to do with the doctrine of another deity whose reign is about to begin” (183–84). Jupiter, the traditional deity of romance, gives way to Christ as the archetype of another romance. The tablet the ghosts leave behind declares, “when from a stately cedar [that is, Cymbeline] shall be lopped branches [Guiderius and

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Arviragus] which, being dead many years, shall after revive, be jointed to the old stock, and freshly grow; then shall Posthumus end his miseries” (5.4.140–43). The language is that of pastoral romance, of natural death and rebirth, but it also hints at a close association with resurrection. The play then offers Imogen’s quasi resurrection in act 4, scene 2, where she, in a variation of Romeo and Juliet, takes a drug that she believes to be salubrious but that produces instead the physiological signs of death: “Enter Arviragus, with Imogen, dead, bearing her in his arms” (4.2.197, s.d.). Her resurrection from mere sleep soon follows, at which point she discovers the headless Cloten, who will not share her good fortune. Performing a cursory examination of the corpse, she concludes that it is Posthumus’s, and leaves no hope for her (posthumous) husband’s return to life. Such resurrectionary possibilities, even of the natural kind, collide in the last act with the paganism of the characters and their world. Posthumus cannot even begin to imagine Imogen could possibly be alive when she interrupts his confession to Cymbeline: Every villain Be called Posthumus Leonatus, and Be “villainy” less than ’twas! O Imogen! My queen, my life, my wife! O Imogen, Imogen, Imogen!

(5.5.225–29)

Some critics find this a bit histrionic, if not self-pitying, but it serves the dramatic purpose of spurring her to reveal herself immediately, interrupting him in midline: “Peace, my lord. Hear, hear — ” (229). The pun on “hear” reveals her presence to the unwitting Posthumus, who believes her to be merely a presumptuous page. The discovery is realized by means of Posthumus’s outburst and striking of her for having interrupted him. Pisanio implores, “Oh, my lord Posthumus, / You ne’er killed Imogen till now” (232–33). Posthumus recognizes her as Imogen at the precise moment that Pisanio

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announces what might be, given the force of Posthumus’s blow, her real death. Posthumus “staggers” (234) with the realization of whom he has just struck, suggesting the gods will in turn, “strike me / To death with mortal joy” (236–37). The moment passes quickly, though, as she wakes and soon discovers that what she had at first believed to be her own resurrection — “for I was dead” — was in fact the more mundane work of the doctor Cornelius’s drugs (239–61). Still, to Posthumus and Cymbeline it appears as if she has been resurrected, the laws of nature suspended: “Does the world go round?” (234). Shakespeare is not finished with her yet, effecting a unique moment in his plays, what Paffrath (1993) calls “Imogen’s double resurrection” (144), even if it is, in the end, merely her second stage revival. She emerges even more quickly this time from her feared death, soon questioning her beloved, “Why did you throw your wedded lady from you? / Think that you are upon a rock, and now / Throw me again” (5.5.264– 66). Her willingness to sacrifice herself for him, while on one level dangerously reckless (recalling Desdemona), is also consistent with her devotion throughout the play and reminiscent of the biblical injunction that she who would seek to gain her life must first lose it (Matt. 10:39). With her almost allegorical disguise as Fidele, she is willing to live and die for Posthumus, to sacrifice her life for his. Such self-sacrifice, fortunately, is not needed, as Posthumus delivers his moving rejoinder, “Hang there like fruit, my soul, / Till the tree die!” (266–67), lines “resonant,” as Felperin (1972) remarks, “of both the fall and the atonement” (185). That echo of the first Fall is here inverted with no one tasting of the tree of life and dying as a result of the disobedience (Gen. 2:15–3:24). They come together instead in a symbolic resurrection, the image of the tree doing double duty: “For as in Adam all die, euen so in Christ shall all be made aliue” (1 Cor. 15:22). In the end, these two learn that self-sacrifice is the highest expression of love. That they love each other to an extent is

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evident from the outset, but Posthumus must learn that love “disdaineth not: it seketh not her owne things: it is not provoked to anger: it thinketh not evil” (1 Cor. 13:5); in short, he must learn not to revenge himself on his allegedly adulterous wife. He also realizes how ineffectual his revenge has been, both literally and emotionally; it fails to produce the solace for which he had hoped. The play does end happily ever after, however, and it is instructive how Shakespeare emphasizes the human role in reconciliation, even to the point that Imogen’s resurrections are the result of human ministrations — first Cornelius’s, then Pisanio’s. Imogen has cause enough to seek revenge against her detractors, but she, as her pseudonym, Fidele, indicates, never wavers in her opposition to it. Even when she finds what she believes is the dead body of her husband, she vehemently and understandably curses his alleged killers, Cloten and Pisanio, but at no point considers the possibility, much less the satisfaction, she might receive from avenging Posthumus’s death (4.2.315–35). Thus, her anger leads her to despair over her husband’s death, not to seek revenge. It is an instructive moment in the play, quite different from the broken and impious world articulated at the play’s outset: “You do not meet a man but frowns. Our bloods / Nor more obey the heavens” (1.1.1–2). Revenge, though clearly a pagan value at this time in Celtic England (as Beowulf attests), is part of this brokenness, to be healed by human forgiveness. The paradigm for the extension of clemency is the play’s intimation of the Resurrection, the mundane manifestations of which are Imogen’s quasi resurrections and the scriptural allusions that attend them. Just as Imogen implicitly forgives Posthumus and offers her life for his, so too has Posthumus learned from his grief the desire to sacrifice his life for hers. His education is gradual: once he believes Pisanio has murdered her at his request, he vows, “so I’ll fight / For thee, O Imogen, even for whom my

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life / Is every breath a death” (5.1.24–26). “For Imogen’s dear life,” he likewise tells his jailers, “take mine; and though / ’Tis not so dear, yet ’tis a life” (5.4.22–23); and then to the gods themselves, “And so, great powers, / If you will take this audit, take this life” (26–27). Shaheen (1999) compares Posthumus’s lines to several biblical passages, including Matthew 20:28: “Even as the Sonne of man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life for the ransome of manie.” He then comments, “Although none of the above passages in Shakespeare is a clear reference to Scripture, yet the play’s stress on Posthumus’s giving up his life in behalf of Imogen, stated in terminology reminiscent of the Christian doctrine of the ransom, is too strong to be ignored” (712). Shaheen is right not to overemphasize the sacrificial quality of Posthumus’s offering since it can be viewed as a mere death wish, but at the same time the language Shakespeare uses will not allow us simply to discount the resemblance between Posthumus’s sacrificial love for Imogen and that of Christ for humanity. Posthumus wishes he could redeem his faults through the sacrifice of his life for hers; simulacrum that it is, it calls to mind the sacrifice of the Crucifixion and subsequent Resurrection. Posthumus’s contrition, repentance, and sacrificial love prove infectious: even Iachimo becomes a repentant Iago (no doubt his namesake and inspiration), imploring Posthumus, “Take that life, beseech you, / Which I so often owe” (5.5.418– 19). Posthumus, though, forgives him, offering the most powerful lines of the play: Kneel not to me. The power that I have on you is to spare you; The malice towards you to forgive you. Live, And deal with others better.

(5.5.421–24)

It is a primer in ethics, but the resonance of Christian forgiveness — “And forgive us our dettes, as we also forgive our detters” (Matt. 6:12) — is clear. Posthumus’s lines are not

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the expression of a pagan ethos, but thoroughly if anachronistically Christian. Posthumus insists vengeance is beyond his power, which is logically false as well as unfaithful to Shakespeare’s two sources for this moment in the play: the Iachimo figure is impaled in the one, beheaded in the other (Bullough 1958–75, 8:62, 77). Posthumus’s denial of the ability to avenge does, however, resonate with scriptural passages, notably Romans 12:19: “Vengeance is mine: I will repay, saith the Lord.” One can also hardly avoid a resemblance between Posthumus’s lines and Paul’s description of Christ: “He humbled him self, and became obedient unto the death” (Phil. 2:8), relinquishing rather than seizing power in order to reconcile others to him. As Holinshed (1587) reminds us, Christ’s birth, however far removed culturally from Cymbeline’s Rome, impinges upon the world of pagan antiquity (Bullough 1958–75, 8:44). What the romances in particular suggest is that divine restoration works in concert with personal reconciliation and, where necessary, forgiveness.6 Providence may well preside over human affairs, but seldom intervenes as directly as in the old miracle plays. Shakespeare teases us with the suggestion of divine preemption by means of Jupiter (and Diana in Pericles), and then quietly returns us, as he does with Imogen and Posthumus, to the mundane work of forgetting wrongs and extending mercy in imitation of divine love. What is more, Cymbeline never lets us forget Shakespeare’s ongoing evocation of the Resurrection, as when Belarius and Imogen’s half-brothers find her after having buried her in the preceding act: BELARIUS.

Is not this boy revived from death? ARVIGARUS. One sand another Not more resembles that sweet rosy lad Who died, and was Fidele. What think you? GUIDERIUS. The same dead thing alive. (5.5.121–25)

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The audience knows Imogen is not supernaturally resurrected from the dead, but the language is that of resurrection and hardly fails to evoke a sense of her quasi-miraculous, if romance-driven, preservation. Earlier, the Roman general Lucius had told Imogen, who thought she likewise had to inter her husband’s body, “Be cheerful; wipe thine eyes. / Some falls are means the happier to arise” (4.2.405–06). The felix culpa or happy fall is the Christian topos this Roman unwittingly employs here, and the story bears it out as both she and her husband figuratively rise from seeming death and are reunited. By such anachronisms, Shakespeare continually evokes the Resurrection, simulacra of which he offers in the mundane happenings of the play. As in most of the comedies, the possibility of veering into the tragic is nearly realized, as the consequences of revenge continually add the threat of death to these last plays. If anything, the romances intensify this potential, giving us darker worlds altogether, worlds that no doubt emerge from the preceding tragedies. Cloten and the Queen do in fact die — deservedly, according to romance conventions; Cymbeline believes he has lost both his sons and his daughter to death; Pisanio reveals Cymbeline’s threat to kill him (5.5.280–81); Cymbeline informs Guiderius, “Thou’rt dead” for having killed Cloten (303); and Belarius too “shalt die” for his misdeeds (314). Cymbeline threatens the characters with death at every turn, “only to awaken them,” as Felperin (1972) remarks, “to a resurrected life, not unlike that promised by Pauline Christianity, in which the old man dies that the new may be born” (184). It is not the same as Pauline Christianity, but it is also “not unlike” it. Shakespeare’s evocation of the Gospel is no more nor no less than that; he intimates the connection and then subsumes it within the pre-Christian setting of the play. The formula, which is most pronounced in the romances, is one in which quasi resurrections effect

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personal reconciliation and spiritual regeneration. Even Iachimo implores Posthumus, “Take that life, beseech you, / Which I so often owe” (5.5.418–19). These characters owe many deaths, but the romantic trajectory that culminates in recognition leads instead to contrition and forgiveness. In the end, Cymbeline, the contemporary of Christ, offers a pagan valediction: “Laud we the gods, / And let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils / From our blest altars” (5.5.480–82). Their offering of “smokes” is “crooked” precisely because of human wandering, erring — in short, sinning — that is made straight ultimately, he suggests, through divine grace, but we ought not to forget its human manifestation in Posthumus’s “Live, / And deal with others better” (5.5.423–24). This is the real resurrection of the dead in Cymbeline.

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FIVE

z

Raising the Dead in The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest In the most high and palmy state of Rome, A little ere the mightiest Julius fell, The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets. — Hamlet 1.1.117–20

At the outset of his essay on this late play, the political philosopher Allan Bloom (1993) writes, “The Winter’s Tale takes place in Sicily and Bohemia at an uncertain date, and its characters seem to partake in equal measure of the religion and life of old Greece and Rome and of Christianity” (109). The time frame is inexact, indeterminate, which thus allows Shakespeare to create the wonderful tension between the paganism of classical antiquity and the Christianity that eventually challenged and superseded it in much of the West, certainly in Bohemia and Sicily. It is easy, however, to

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lose sight of Shakespeare’s fine balancing act, especially in Hermione’s quasi resurrection in the final act: “Underlying [the reunions of act 5] is the one Ovidian myth that — beyond all others — informs the play: the story of Proserpina, the daughter of Ceres, the harvest goddess, who was stolen away by the god Pluto, or Dis, taken to the underworld, and then permitted to return to the earth for eight months of the year” (Garber 2004, 847–48; italics mine). Perdita explicitly refers to the scene of Proserpina’s abduction: “O Proserpina, / For the flow’rs now that, frighted, thou let’st fall / From Dis’s wagon!” (4.4.116–18). Hermione’s story is surely analogous to Proserpina’s, though Garber’s assertion that this lone source trumps all others is unnecessary. The Pygmalion story from book 10 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which Venus grants the artist’s prayer to animate his sculpture, is also a major influence on the scene as well, as are possibly some scenes from French and Spanish romances where statues are brought to life. Any one of those, such as the Spanish Amadis de Gaule (1532), may be the “old” or “winter’s” tale to which the play refers. Thus, The Winter’s Tale represents not so much the triumph of one source over another as it does Shakespeare’s masterful blending of these sources into his own unique vision. With typical astuteness, Garber also points to the overtones of resurrection in the play. She describes Paulina as “the final artist and wonder-worker of the play” (849) and calls her “a true descendant of her namesake, the Apostle Paul” because she, too, awakes our faith in a way similar to Paul’s call in Ephesians and elsewhere for the church to awake from its slumber to redemption (850). Shakespeare conjoins the Christian story to classical myths; as variations on the theme of death and rebirth, they offer kaleidoscopic but converging perspectives on Hermione’s quasi resurrection. The synthesis that is Shakespeare’s art is eclectic, opportunistic even, as regards his depiction of her return from near death.

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But to speak of Hermione’s return in the last act as a “resurrection” has elicited at least one objection: “Before we attempt to give a Christian meaning to the ‘resurrection’ scene, we should ask ourselves if by the same logic a similar meaning should be given to Ovid’s pagan Pygmalion story” (Shaheen 1999, 720). The question is rhetorical, the intended answer is no. But that is not the end of the issue. The moment is one of rich synthesis: the classical pagan and the Christian intimations of the moment coalesce in what appears to be an indissoluble whole, without either one predominating or canceling the other. Shaheen’s point is that there is no real Ovidian religious content behind the Pygmalion story; thus, Shakespeare and his audience would not have regarded the story as relaying a religious meaning. Shaheen suggests that if there is no Ovidian religious content in the moment, then one ought likewise to dismiss as similarly fanciful allegorical or other Christian intimations of the moment. But Shakespeare’s audience would have made a fundamental distinction between the mythological veracity of the story of Pygmalion on the one hand, and that of Christ on the other. Shakespeare creates this tension by fusing classical and pagan referents at the moment of Hermione’s resurrection. Shaheen continues, “Attempts to find hidden religious meaning in Shakespeare’s plays fail to convince” (720). To be sure, Shakespeare is no cryptographer. The real question, however, is whether the “religious meaning” of the play is hidden here. It is not as explicit or as overt as one might expect in a mystery play, but that is, again, not how Shakespeare operates. Hermione’s “resurrection” — a term, by the way, applied not just by would-be Christianizers of the play (see Allan Bloom 1993, 125; Fernie 2005, 2) — can hardly fail, in light of the play’s religious language, to call attention to the Christian tradition. The scene recalls the Resurrection, but not to the exclusion of other myths. Shakespeare does not simply add an Ovidian or biblical touch without transforming

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or, as is the case here, amalgamating them. Shakespeare’s use of his sources, like the statuary in Ovid’s tales, hardly remains static. Consider, for instance, Shakespeare’s primary narrative source for the play, Robert Greene’s clunky prose romance, Pandosto (1588). In Greene’s version, when Bellaria (the Hermione figure) learns of her son’s death in response to the oracle, “she fell downe presently dead, and could never be revived” (Bullough 1958–75, 8:171) — never, of course, until Shakespeare handles the material, “beautif[ying]” himself in Greene’s “feathers,” the famous charge that Greene had leveled against the “upstart Crow” some 20 years earlier (quoted in McDonald 1996, 15). Shakespeare’s artistic plumage is a bit more variegated, however, than Greene sees it. Shakespeare often employs the idea of resurrection quite broadly, often in the sense of revival or awakening from slumber. We already have seen this in Romeo and Juliet as well as in his intermingling of death and life in the cyclical world of nature. Given the pastoral idyll of Bohemia, it is scarcely surprising to see Shakespeare invoke again the language of natural death and rebirth. The effect is quite pronounced in The Winter’s Tale: The old shepherd tells his son, “If thou’lt see a thing to talk on when thou art dead and rotten, come hither” (3.3.78–79). His language is comical, to be sure, but it conjoins death and life, as well as the life of a world to come, in a way we recognize as characteristically Shakespearean. Later in the same scene, the clown informs us that he was witness to many mariners’ deaths at sea as well as Antigonus’s on land: “The men are not yet cold under water, nor the bear half dined on the gentleman” (102–03). His shepherd father responds with a strain familiar to romance: “Thou met’st with things dying, I with things newborn” (110–11). With Perdita’s birth and the men’s deaths, the cycle of nature encompasses the human world as well. Antigonus is soon “put . . . i’th’ ground” (131–32), while Florizel, whom

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Antigonus calls “Blossom” (45), is taken home and reared, or perhaps “nurtured” would be more in keeping with the bucolic setting. At the sheep-shearing feast, Perdita tells us that being unable to gather the flowers Proserpina once lost, she has no fleurs-de-lis for her guests, including her beloved Florizel: Oh, these I lack To make you garlands of, and my sweet friend, To strew him o’er and o’er! FLORIZEL. What, like a corpse? PERDITA. No, like a bank for Love to lie and play on, Not like a corpse; or if, not to be buried, But quick and in mine arms. Come, take your flowers. (4.4.127–32)

She will not accept his morbid imagery of a corpse — “or if” she must, she tells him playfully, she will turn it to her own pastoral image of quickening both his life and love with a death-defying embrace. Perdita changes the funereal to connubial bliss, death to life. Nature, however, even in the idyll of Bohemia, is not always malleable enough to allow cyclical rebirth in perpetuity. People die and are irreplaceable. At the feast the old shepherd recalls his dead wife: When my old wife lived, upon This day she was both pantler, butler, cook, Both dame and servant; welcomed all, served all; Would sing her song and dance her turn; now here, At upper end o’th’table, now i’th’middle. (4.4.55–59)

His “now here” has become “nowhere”; her absence is acutely felt, her life relived only in the joyous, if momentary, space of memory. But in Shakespeare’s romances, as Bevington (2004) remarks, characters “are brought back to life by apparently miraculous devices” (1527). True, though in his plays with pagan settings, Shakespeare frequently allows his characters to imagine the resurrection of the dead on their own

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terms — without the benefit of revelation. Antigonus tells the infant Perdita of a dream he had: I have heard, but not believed, the spirits o’th’ dead May walk again. If such thing be, thy mother Appeared to me last night, for ne’er was dream So like a waking. (Winter’s Tale 3.3.15–18)

This is the first shadowing of Hermione’s later bodily resurrection, though it is couched in a spectral dream in which only her spirit “walk[s] again.” What Antigonus offers us is a vaguely defined spiritual world, more phantasmagoria than anything identifiably Christian. Act 5 likewise underscores a pagan understanding of resurrection. Paulina refers to the “secret purposes” of the “gods,” including Apollo, whose oracle had declared That King Leontes shall not have an heir Till his lost child be found. What that it shall Is all as monstrous to our human reason As my Antigonus to break his grave And come again to me, who, on my life, Did perish with the infant.

(5.1.39–44)

This is not the resurrection of the dead as envisioned by Christianity, but the same ghastly scenario dreamed by her now-deceased husband: a sort of nightmare, which she accordingly describes not as being blessed, but as “monstrous” to “human reason.” We have, in brief, a pagan vision similar to that of Proserpina’s sorrow-laden (because only semiannual) resurrection in Ovid’s account. The contrast with the Resurrection and its countervailing sensibilities could not be more striking. Shortly thereafter, Shakespeare conjures for us yet another image of spectral resurrection when Leontes declares that he shall remain a widower unless Paulina chooses a wife for him:

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No more such wives, therefore no wife. One worse, And better used, would make her sainted spirit Again possess her corpse, and on this stage, Where we’re offenders now, appear soul-vexed, And begin, “Why to me?” (5.1. 56–60)

The idea horrifies him, as her mere apparition is no substitute for his living wife. Paulina promises to find him a new spouse, with Hermione’s hypothetical ghost looking on approvingly: She shall not be so young As was your former, but she shall be such As, walked your first queen’s ghost, it should take joy To see her in your arms. (78–81)

Pagan that he is, Leontes imagines that his “great profaneness against [the] oracle” (3.2.154) can end not in forgiveness and reconciliation but only in divine vengeance — the retributive deaths of Mamillius and Hermione. In Greene’s version not only is there no resurrection, but Pandosto is so distraught over Bellaria’s death that “to close up the Comedie with a Tragicall stratageme, he slewe himself” (199). Shakespeare conjures the bleakness of this vision by way of the characters’ “monstrous” imaginings of the soul-vexed dead returning from the grave. Having called to mind the Resurrection in so many of his recognition scenes, Shakespeare perfectly imagines (as he had done in King Lear) what such moments constitute for his pagan characters, especially in light of the play’s Ovidian awareness. In addition to Paulina and Leontes’s spectral vision, Shakespeare offers the competing perspective, as in a filmic dissolve, of Christianity. What is monstrous to human reason becomes reality in the world of romance; what renders it so is the suggestion of providential care. Shakespeare quite carefully lays the foundation for what Florizel calls “almost a miracle” (4.4.537) by his anachronistic use of tropes and

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expressions from the Christian tradition. Even Leontes’s initial desire to burn those he suspected of treachery (a detail Shakespeare borrows from Greene) finds expression in the language of the Reformation: Paulina tells him, “It is an heretic that makes the fire” (2.3.115). Grieving over his misdeeds, Leontes expresses a “saintlike sorrow” for his “trespass,” which his “penitence” has “redeemed” in the eyes of “the heavens” (5.1.2–5). He informs us, “Once a day I’ll visit / The chapel where they lie, and tears shed there / Shall be my recreation” (3.2.238–40), in both senses of the word, no doubt. Such anachronisms pervade the pre-Christian setting of the play. Polixenes refers to original sin when he discusses the innocent childhood he and Leontes spent together: 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. (1.2.69–75)

Their hereditary sinfulness must be redeemed, not by human efforts — Leontes’s own power proves dramatically and theologically ineffectual — but by (supervening) “grace,” a key word in the play (Traversi 1956, 267; Tiffany 2000, 421). Hermione, for instance, chastens Leontes for having said that she has spoken to good purpose twice: My last good deed was to entreat his stay. What was my first? It has an elder sister, Or I mistake you. Oh, would her name were Grace! But once before I spoke to the purpose. When? Nay, let me have’t; I long. LEONTES. Why, that was when Three crabbèd months had soured themselves to death Ere I could make thee open thy white hand

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And clap thyself my love. Then didst thou utter, “I am yours forever.” HERMIONE. ’Tis grace indeed. (1.2.97–105)

Her choice was free and, even at that early date, undeserved by Leontes: an act of gracious acceptance, bestowing upon him her love forever. In act 5, when Leontes sees the statue for the first time, he recalls his wife: “she was as tender / As infancy and grace” (5.3.26–27). The play thus lightly but unmistakably touches upon original sin and its antidote, human and divine grace. Hermione in the end embodies grace, and one is left with the impression that providential grace also plays a part in her quasi resurrection and reconciliation with Leontes. What part, precisely, is hard to say, though the motif is frequently heard. When the old shepherd reveals to Leontes and Camillo how he found Perdita — the play’s first recognition scene, told secondhand — the first gentleman describes their reaction: “They looked as they had heard of a world ransomed, or one destroyed. A notable passion of wonder appeared in them” (5.2.15–17). How can an entire world be thus “ransomed”? As in Cymbeline, such language inevitably resonates with Christ’s ransoming of souls: “the Sonne of man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life for the ransome of manie” (Matt. 20:28; see also Mark 10:45; 1 Tim. 2:6). Leontes and Perdita’s recognition makes them appear as though they are hearing of a world ransomed, even as the consequences of Leontes’s actions had once destroyed the world they knew. Time, who “slide[s] / O’er sixteen years” (4.1.5–6), ages them all — Leontes remembers a less wrinkled Hermione (5.3.28–29) — and reminds us that the lives of Mamillius and Antigonus, if not Hermione as well, are lost. The Winter’s Tale transforms this brokenness in a number of ways: even the dissolute Autolycus promises to amend his life (5.2.155–56). Yet the real transformation takes

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place during the play’s final recognition scene in which Shakespeare fuses the stories of Pygmalion, Proserpina, and the Resurrection. Hermione’s quasi resurrection is the only moment in Shakespeare’s plays where first-time audiences are not privy to the fact that she has apparently been alive all this time. Shakespeare’s decision to exclude the audience from all knowledge of what happened to Hermione during those 16 years places it in the situation of most of the characters: the audience shares in the tension as well as the final release that Leontes undergoes. Shakespeare takes considerable pains to make Hermione’s death appear to be an established fact. Earlier, Paulina twice declares her dead, and then avouches, “I’ll swear’t. If word nor oath / Prevail not, go and see” (3.2.203–04). After telling her to descend, Paulina’s “I’ll fill your grave up” (101) implies, as Cynthia Marshall (1999) notes, “that Hermione has actually been dead” (125). Paulina then challenges Leontes to display his own prowess at raising the dead: If you can bring Tincture or luster in her lip, her eye, Heat outwardly or breath within, I’ll serve you As I would do the gods.

(3.2.204–07)

She mocks Leontes, who is neither a Christ figure nor, in keeping with the reference to the polytheistic “gods,” a Pygmalion sculptor who might add luster to her lip. Antigonus’s dream, as we saw (3.3.15–36), further corroborates the allegation of Hermione’s demise. When Hermione finally steps down, then, her appearance is all the more startling for those assembled around her since they have variously imagined her reanimation in much more ghastly fashion. They cannot, in fact, comprehend it: Leontes suggests the use of “magic” (5.3.110), a charge of necromancy that Paulina anticipates and denies twice (89–91, 96–97). Her art is natural, as “lawful as eating” (111). Paulina

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underscores the Pygmalion connection by claiming that the unveiled Hermione is the work of the sculptor Julio Romano. Polixenes, in turn, highlights the myth of Proserpina as she suggests that Hermione might be “stol’n from the dead” (116). Strikingly, however, among these classical — pagan — evocations, Paulina also sounds a different note when she admonishes Leontes, and presumably all of us, “It is requir’d / You do awake your faith” (94–95). It would help at this juncture to consider how Shakespeare employs biblical and other religious language in his plays. The thousands of passages Shaheen (1999) cites demonstrate Shakespeare’s easy familiarity with the Bible, The Book of Common Prayer, and other ecclesiastical language, some of which appears verbatim in the plays. Most of Shakespeare’s borrowings, however, merely resonate with their sources, having undergone change in transmission from source to stage. Shakespeare absorbs and assimilates language as part of his thinking process: language enters his thought process and is sometimes regurgitated in rote fashion, but more often is transformed as he crafts his drama. Shaheen’s study of Shakespeare’s biblical references makes it abundantly clear that he was an artist, not a scripturist. Hermione’s use of “faith” serves as a reminder of the Christian resurrection of the dead.1 Having said that, I believe the referent is imprecise: Paulina’s words may also refer to our “faith,” or suspension of disbelief, in theatrical contrivances; or to art itself as a medium of truth and beauty; or perhaps to Shakespeare’s skills as a playwright. “Faith” is an overloaded term here, probably intentionally so, yet the word is preeminently religious and only secondarily comes to have other associations as well. These usages are not mutually exclusive, however, and richly coexist, even though the religious resonance of the passage, especially in light of Hermione’s quasi resurrection, is primus inter pares. Balthasar (1988–98) comments:

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Paulina promises [Leontes] even greater things if he will rouse up his “faith.” . . . the audience too had thought Hermione to be dead and experiences her “resurrection” as profoundly as Leontes. Neither the Pygmalion motif (bringing the statue to life) nor that of Alcestis is sufficient to explain Shakespeare’s action. In the remote background there are the Christian miracles of the medieval mystery plays. But Shakespeare performs a “postfiguration,” transforming the Christian elements into a fluid, elusive metaphor for the grace of existence. We can hardly say whether he is fired more by themes of antiquity or by Christian themes; the atmosphere is inconceivable apart from the Christian background, but this background only diffuses an anonymous light over the miracles of earthly love. (384)

Balthasar’s descriptions of these quasi resurrections are telling: “a pure gift to those in mourning,” “the grace of existence,” “the miracles of earthly love.” Such, in short, is Shakespeare’s translation from theology to the stage, where the sacred suffuses the profane. Is Hermione really resurrected, though? Of course not, but this does not obviate the parallel. Hermione is not really a statue, either, as in the story of Pygmalion, nor does she, Proserpina-like, return from the underworld during the summer months. No one, however, is suggesting that we ought to discount these mythological associations simply because Shakespeare’s own art, like that of Ovid, or of Julio Romano, or of God himself by means of the Resurrection — “is an art / Which does mend nature” (4.4.95–96). Paulina’s language is without question resurrectionary as well. Hermione’s judicial condemnation — her sham trial — had been predicated on, as she told Leontes, “what your jealousies awake” (3.2.113). Now he must awaken its opposite, faith — to trust the truth of what he sees rather than his unseen suspicions of 16 years earlier. His faith must now come to life just as she appears to do before his eyes. The moment is poignant, though Shakespeare threatens to deny us the romance convention

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and return us to Robert Greene’s account where no resurrection takes place. Paulina informs Leontes that had she known the “statue” of Hermione would have had such an effect on him she would not have displayed it. Leontes implores, “Do not draw the curtain” (5.3.59). Much of the scene then becomes a contest between the two, with Paulina threatening, “I’ll draw the curtain” (68); “Shall I draw the curtain?” (83); only to have Leontes plead, “Let be, let be” (61); “Let’t alone” (73); and “No, not these twenty years” (84). The moment is to an extent metatheatrical, calling attention to the possibility of frustrating his (not to mention our) hopes, with the additional suggestion of reverting to Pandosto and an unresurrected Bellaria/Hermione. If the curtain is drawn, the play is over: Greene’s version is transcendent, Hermione forever lost, and Leontes simply “mocked with art” (68). A Romano statue is not enough to satisfy Leontes, perhaps us as well — mere art, as The Tempest soon reminds us, has its limitations. Leontes recapitulates the dying Lear’s hopes for Cordelia when he sees the living statue of his wife: “See, my lord, / Would you not deem it breathed?” (63–64); and “Still methinks / There is an air comes from her” (77–78). But this corpse, unlike Cordelia’s, is living, seemingly resurrected from the dead. What else shall we believe? That Hermione has been living — “preserved” is Paulina’s mundane explanation (5.3.128) — for 16 years in some sort of cloistered condition unknown to any of the principals other than Paulina? The rational explanation defies credibility and thus lends credence to the possibility of her resurrection from the dead. As Paulina says, the awakening of our faith is not optional at this moment, but “requir’d,” a point underscored by both theatrical necessity and the tenets of Christian orthodoxy: “I look for the Resurrection of the dead,” to use the Nicene Creed’s formulation, “and the Life of the world to come.” When the stunned Camillo asks at this moment, “If she pertain to life, let her speak too,” Polixenes concurs: “Ay, and

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make it manifest where she has lived, / Or how stol’n from the dead” (5.3.114–16). Eric Mallin (2009) comments, “Believers are fortunate the play ends when it does: because to ‘make it manifest where she has liv’d’ is entirely to explode the miracle of her revival, and expose the machinations of Paulina” (68). What this reading overlooks, however, is Polixenes’s balancing act between Paulina’s possible hiding of Hermione and the quasi-resurrectionary possibility of her having been “stol’n from the dead.” Mallin dismisses the supernatural in favor of a natural explanation as the only possible reading of the scene. But in Shakespeare’s recognitions, the equipoise is everything. Believers may be fortunate that it ends where it does, but their good fortune is a result of Shakespeare’s typical unwillingness to resolve his recognition scenes in favor of some naturalistic explanation, especially one whose 16 years of “machinations” simply defy credibility. Bevington (2004) suggests that we are called to have faith in a “narrative of death and return to life that cannot ultimately be comprehended by reason” (1528–29). For such a narrative, Shakespeare suggests there is “an art” — his, or Ovid’s, or that of providence — that both “shares with” and “mends” “great creating nature” (4.4.87–88, 96). The visitation of the supernatural into the world changes it, even as the effects such divine artistry initiates are natural, with a restored Hermione “hang[ing] about [Leontes’s] neck” (113) as a vine or tendril would its support: “The art itself is nature” (4.4.97). Shakespeare’s art balances this tension between the natural “preservation” of Hermione and the supernatural suggestion of her resurrection from the dead. The resurrection motif swirls around the scene. Marshall (1991, 124) notes what is in effect a return to the noli me tangere trope in Twelfth Night. When Perdita tells the statue “give me that hand of yours to kiss,” Paulina will not allow it: the paint is not yet dry (5.3.46–48). Leontes is similarly rebuffed when he attempts to kiss the statue: “The ruddiness upon her lip is wet; / You mar it if you kiss it” (81–82).

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Moreover, “When ‘Hermione comes down’” (5.3.103, s.d.), “the scene suggests the iconography of Christ’s Resurrection” (Marshall 1991, 126).2 The suggestion is only that; we are left with “almost a miracle” (4.4.537) that takes the form of Hermione’s quasi resurrection. “The return from the realm of the dead” serves theatrically, as Balthasar (1988, 384) remarks, as “a pure gift to those in mourning.”

The Tempest At the end of a learned discussion on the Greek origins behind many of Shakespeare’s plays, The Tempest (1610– 11) in particular, A. D. Nuttall (2000) explains his purpose in doing so: “I have felt the need to explore the ‘Greekness’ of Shakespearian romance at some length partly to undermine the excessively Christian predisposition of many readers. Prospero belongs not in the ethically warm universe of Christianity but in the hard, bright, far-off world of Greek legend, with its demons, sun, sea and mortality” (261). Nuttall has a point. Tiffany (2000) writes, “In The Tempest human repentance is facilitated by Ariel, twice called a ‘comforter’ (2.1.196, 5.1.57) as is the [Holy] Spirit in John 14:26. Ariel ‘flame[s] amazement.’ . . . His elemental nature links him with the ‘mightie wind’ and ‘tongues, like fyre’ in which the Holy Spirit visits the apostles at Pentecost (Acts 2:2–3), as well as with baptismal water” (429). The initial fallacy in this argument is that of the undistributed middle: noting a term (“comforter”) that is said to be a property of two discrete entities, and then suggesting that those two entities are somehow equivalent. They are not; they only share that property; Ariel is hardly the Holy Spirit simply because both are described as comforters.3 Further evidence is necessary, but it is not forthcoming. Ariel may “flame amazement,” but that particular phrase comes directly from one of Shakespeare’s nonbiblical sources (Bullough 1958–75, 8:278–79), not from the Bible. That Ariel’s actions contribute

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to the men’s penitence is well established, but it remains difficult to credit the view that the flames Ariel creates on ship have much if any connection to Pentecost or to baptismal water. While Nuttall rightly warns against “excessively” Christianizing the play, he almost falls prey to the other extreme; namely, foregrounding the demonic, elemental, Greek — pagan — aspects of the play to the exclusion of the scriptural allusions that also inform The Tempest. As tempting as it may be for critics on both sides of the issue to draw a hard and fast line between Christianity and paganism in the play, the dichotomy is somewhat foreign to Shakespeare, who in the course of his career increasingly intermingles the two in the crucible of his art. Probably the last play he wrote wholly on his own, The Tempest represents the demonstrable apogee of this development. Criticism of the play has undergone a sea change in the last 30 years, away from humanist — mostly Neoplatonic — readings in which a beneficent Prospero teaches one lesson to those who usurped his dukedom and another to Caliban, the alleged rapist of his daughter. Today one “finds virtually unanimous assent,” as Cox (2000, 31) notes, among readings of the play that expose the fault lines of Prospero’s rule: a volcanic irascibility; an obsession with Miranda’s sexuality; the desire to exact revenge against his brother; and his colonization of the isle and dispossession of Caliban who, along with Ariel and Ferdinand, he enslaves.4 His faults, suffice it to say, are hardly in the ethically warm universe of an ideal Christianity. What is more, though it is usually not emphasized in readings of the play, Prospero has been raising people from the dead, dabbling in magical arts that render dubious the possibility of his reconciliation with those who have wronged him. The play evokes these resurrections in marked contrast to the Resurrection and the symbolic quasi resurrections during the final recognition scene. Prospero renounces his “rough

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magic” because his resurrective powers cannot make all things whole; instead, the limitations of his theatrical and human powers may make things decidedly worse. The Tempest is unique among Shakespeare’s romances in that its setting is not pre-Christian, a majority of its characters not pagan. As always, he carefully delineates the religious context of his characters’ world, here that of the Neapolitan and Milanese Catholics at sea somewhere in the Mediterranean. When it concerns a necessary question of the play, Shakespeare typically drops hints about a character’s religious beliefs, as in Othello’s negative, “Are we turned Turks, and to ourselves do that / Which heaven hath forbid the Ottomites? / For Christian shame” (Othello 2.3.164–66). The Tempest, too, is carefully framed between prayers for divine aid: a rushed opening — “All lost! To prayers, to prayers! All lost!” (1.1.52) — and a more measured closing — “And my ending is despair, / Unless I be relieved by prayer” (Epilogue 15–16). Judeo-Christian tropes thus frame and suffuse the play. Notice the response to Prospero’s question “But are they, Ariel, safe?” concerning the ship’s passengers: “Not a hair perished. / On their sustaining garments not a blemish, / But fresher than before” (1.2.218–20). As Shaheen (1999) notes, Ariel’s lines may glance at Acts 27:34 and, especially, Christ’s assurance to his disciples at Luke 21:18, “there shal not one heere of your heades perish” (1.2.740–41). They seem nearer, however, to the Old Testament Book of Daniel’s similar phrasing concerning the miraculous preservation of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego from the fiery furnace into which they were thrown: “not an heere of their head was burnt, nether was their coats changed, nor any smel of fire came upon them” (Dan. 3:27; Shaheen 1999, 741). The play also includes Ariel’s injunction to Alonso that his only hope to escape the “Ling’ring perdition” of divine judgment “is nothing but heart’s sorrow / And a clear life ensuing” (3.3.77,

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81–82). This is a formula for nothing less than contrition and repentance. In addition, hearing Ariel’s tabor and pipe and fearing for his life, Trinculo exclaims, “Oh, forgive me my sins!” (3.2.132), a line that recalls the Lord’s Prayer (Shaheen 1999, 746). Superimposed on this Christian framework, or rather imperceptibly penetrating it, is the Bermudan paganism of the isle and its earlier inhabitants. “This damned witch Sycorax,” Prospero fumes, had been banished from civilization “For mischiefs manifold and sorceries terrible” (1.2.265–66). G. Wilson Knight (1957), who relished the mythical and mystical aspects of the plays, comments, “All of pagan superstition, black-magic and infra-human, infra-natural evil, is in her suggested” (220). Likewise, in his disillusionment with his co-conspirators, Trinculo and Stephano, Caliban mocks, “O Setebos, these be brave spirits indeed!” (5.1.263).5 When the shipwrecked travelers reach the shore, Shakespeare is bringing their world into collision with the almost palpable paganism of the isle and its earliest inhabitants. In bringing together the two, Shakespeare tends to fuse rather than distinguish between them. Kermode (2000) associates Caliban and Sycorax with a “base natural magic, the antithesis of Prospero’s ‘Art,’ the product of virtue and learning” (243).6 Beneath the surface, however, such hierarchies do not hold. For one thing, Sycorax, Caliban, and Prospero invoke “natural magic,” and for base ends at times: Sycorax enslaved Ariel, but Prospero enslaves Ariel, Caliban, and Ferdinand, all of whom earn our sympathy well before their master offers them the least crumb of compassion. Yet he becomes a quasi-providential figure of solicitude on the one hand, caring and providing for others, even those he claims have offended against him; on the other hand, he is a thundering patriarch, resurrectionist, and unmerciful judge. Such chiaroscuro shading is a Shakespearean trademark.

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North African paganism thus commingles with Christianity in The Tempest, itself a generic admixture of Greek legend, hagiography, travel narrative, comedy, pastoral tragicomedy, commedia dell’arte, and court masque. Perhaps it is, as Polonius says, “tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited” (Hamlet 2.2.398–400). But the play’s ultimate genetic marker — its DNA — lies in the world of romance, the plots of which invariably deal with the loss or separation of family members followed by their reunion in the conventional recognition scene at play’s end. The plot of The Tempest is thus simple, yet Shakespeare weaves around this easily recognizable frame a density of references that hold in tension the exotic paganism, probably of the Bermudas, and the Christianity of the travelers, creating the peculiar Shakespearean mythology that fuses both “into something rich and strange” (1.2.405). In addition to the commingling of the island’s exotic paganism with Christianity, Shakespeare adds classical paganism to the mix as well. The paganism of the play is thus twofold: some of its elements are drawn from the Setebos/North African and Bermudan connection, while the remainder comes from the numerous classical references to harpies and the like. Shakespeare melds them together so that they become virtually indistinguishable at times, part of the rich syncretism of the play. As Miola (1999) remarks of Shakespeare’s plays, “classical and Christian values continually engage each other in complex harmonies and counterpoints” (182). Indeed, the shipwreck and other elements recall both Homer’s Odyssey as well as Virgil’s Aeneid. Romances, too, as Shakespeare knew, were a staple of classical literature long before they were adopted and adapted by Christian writers; his use of romance conventions registers both the old and new associations. Shakespeare’s conjunction of Christian and classical is nearly ubiquitous in The Tempest. It begins in a minor key,

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typically and innocuously enough, as the benevolent Miranda informs her father, Had I been any god of power, I would Have sunk the sea within the earth or ere It should the good ship so have swallowed, and The freighting souls within her.

(1.2.10–13)

The reference to “any god of power” appears to be vaguely polytheistic, though she ends with her apparent concern for the cargo or freight of “souls” the ship carries, a reference that evokes a biblical context. Since Middle English “fraght” denotes cargo, Miranda’s reference also hints by way of a pun at the weight of sin with which Antonio and the other usurpers are laden. Ariel’s famous pronouncement of judgment against Antonio and his co-conspirators is an apt illustration of the play’s humanist synthesis: You are three men of sin, whom Destiny — That hath to instrument this lower world And what is in’t — the never-surfeited sea Hath caused to belch up you.

(3.3.53–56)

Dressed “like a harpy” (52, s.d.), the classical half-bird, halfwoman agent of divine vengeance, he declares their “sin” to them, a word for which there is no neat classical equivalent. Ariel further declares that he and his “fellows / Are ministers of Fate” (60–61), a ministry — a term to which he refers again (65) — whose task is to work on behalf of some nebulous deity, perhaps the three goddesses of classical mythology, the Fates or Parcae, who spun each person’s destiny. Shakespeare thus begins to join classical and Christian almost indissolubly. Ariel continues, “The powers, delaying, not forgetting, have / Incensed the seas and shores, yea, all the creatures, / Against your peace” (73–75). The purpose of such powers is not inconsistent with Shakespeare’s recurrent intimation that God intervenes in human affairs most often indirectly,

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over time, and with the help of cooperating human agency. The language, however, is curiously unspecific, richly ambivalent. Shakespeare’s fondness for such juxtaposition appears even in the pious Gonzalo’s “the wills above be done,” another line that derives from the Lord’s Prayer, though again Shakespeare renders those “wills” in the pagan plural, whereas Matthew’s “Thy will be done” (6:10) as well as Luke’s “Let thy will be done” (11:2) are both monotheistic. Shakespeare fuses Christian tropes with a variety of classical sources, as in Miranda’s expression of her desire for Ferdinand in the Neoplatonic language of the correspondence between outer and inner beauty: “There’s nothing ill can dwell in such a temple. / If the spirit have so fair a house, / Good things will strive to dwell with’t” (1.2.461–63). Her first line derives from 1 Corinthians 3:16: “Knowe ye not that ye are the Temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?” Such Pauline piety gives way to her belief that this temple is as perfectly proportioned, perhaps as sensually appealing, as Michelangelo’s David. By this point in his career, biblical and liturgical cadences so inform Shakespeare’s language that they make their appearance in even the subtlest of ways. Take, for instance, Gonzalo’s depiction of his would-be ideal commonwealth, where there would be “No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil” (2.1.154). His description of a utopia is borrowed from John Florio’s 1603 translation of Montaigne’s “Of the Cannibals,” but Shakespeare slightly alters the passage, as Shaheen (1999) comments, into a biblical cadence: “Shakespeare transformed Florio’s ‘wine, corne, or mettle’ into a clear biblical reference. Shakespeare’s ‘corn, or wine, or oil,’ with ‘corn’ being mentioned first and ‘oil’ added, is patterned on Scripture. In Psalm 4.8 (4.7, Geneva) the Psalter has, ‘their corne and wine and oyle increased’” (743). The phrase “corn, wine, and oil” appears by Shaheen’s count at least 10 times in the Old Testament, and Shakespeare could easily have known it from

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the daily recitation of the Psalter in the Church of England (744). Such fusion is further apparent in Prospero’s memorable speech, thought by some to be Shakespeare’s own farewell to the stage:7 Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air; And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vexed. (Tempest 4.1.148–58; italics mine)

The passage is modeled on William Alexander’s play, The Tragedie of Darius (1603), but Shakespeare added language and imagery from 2 Peter 3:10–12: “The heavens shal passe away with a noyce, and the elements shal melt with heate. . . . Seing therefore that all these things must be dissolved . . . [at] the day of God, by the which the heavens being on fyre, shalbe dissolved, & the elements shal melt with heat?” (quoted in Shaheen 1999, 748; italics mine). Indeed, Prospero’s language suggests that just as the artifice of this masque of dancing reapers and nymphs must end (4.1.128–42), so too will human civilization as we know it. The reference is not to the splendor of the heavenly Jerusalem as depicted in Bunyan or Dante, not to mention Scripture, but to the Apocalypse at which the dead shall rise and judgment meted out. Prospero’s shift from talking about the pageant’s end to his and ours — “We are such stuff” — reminds him that his own artifice will dissolve before the apocalyptic fires “at the day of God.” His vexation constitutes a realization of his

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own mortality as well as the judgment he will face, a fact evident in his borrowing of literary language from Peter. The analogue between his own artifice and that of God, the ultimate dramaturge, sobers and humbles him. Prospero’s vision of destruction is not unlike that of Saint John the Divine on another isle — Patmos. Shakespeare thus repeatedly syncretizes an array of biblical and pagan sources within The Tempest. They come together, so to speak, in the figure of Prospero, since he belongs to both worlds, having been thrust from Christendom in the “dark backward and abysm of time” (1.2.50) and now seemingly embracing the paganism of the isle. He looks, too, to the dark forward and abysm of the Apocalypse. Prospero is a man in denial. He is not quick to examine his own moral practices, much less the state of his own soul, preferring instead to associate pagan practice with others: Caliban as rapist who would have, had Prospero allowed him, “peopled else / This isle with Calibans” (1.2.353–54);8 and Sycorax as sorceress and enslaver. Caliban turns the charges against him — “I say by sorcery he got this isle” (3.2.51) — and what Prospero later confesses virtually corroborates the charge (5.1.40–50).9 Having closed himself off from others — “being transported / And rapt in secret studies” (1.2.76–77) — his black magic surpasses that of Sycorax, who could only imprison Ariel in an already “cloven pine” (279). Prospero, in contrast, threatens Ariel, “If thou more murmur’st, I will rend an oak / And peg thee in his knotty entrails ” (296–97). The 2006 Rupert Goold production of The Tempest by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with Patrick Stewart in the lead role, underscored Prospero’s own embrace of paganism. He entered the play with his back to the audience, draped in a bearskin that shrouded his figure, the bear’s head extending well over his own — Prospero as shaman. In a kind of trance, Stewart gestured silently, creating and manipulating the sea storm by means of his magic. When he later removed the bearskin and resumed his human

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form, he was an islander: cargo pants, shirtless, shaved head. The impression he gave, however, went well beyond the relaxed unkempt: Stewart’s Prospero had “gone native” and become unhinged, raving at times. Criticism that idealizes Prospero as a kind and good ruler occludes a more dangerous side of his character; the RSC production gave us this more menacing Prospero. His studies once, he tells us, were “all dedicated / To closeness and the bettering of my mind” (89–90). Now his mind seems darkened, his actions coarsened. He commands Caliban, for instance, by means of crude scatological reference: Hagseed, hence! Fetch us in fuel and be quick, thou’rt best, To answer other business. Shrugg’st thou, malice? If thou neglect’st or dost unwillingly What I command, I’ll rack thee with old cramps, Fill all thy bones with aches, make thee roar That beasts shall tremble at thy din. (1.2.368–74)

It is hard to distinguish between Caliban’s curses and Prospero’s threats; both resonate with invective; neither involves charity. If he once acted humanely, his current moral practice shows little trace of it. Moreover, he now commands the elements, spirits such as Ariel, and has acquired the divine prerogative of resurrecting the dead. Prospero’s spiritual journey, which the play charts, reveals something profound about the human condition: turning from kindness to cruelty, from mercy to hard-heartedness, or from good to evil (an Augustinian perverse turning away from the good) is a temptation for Prospero as for all human beings. By the time the play opens, however, he seems to have his plan for reconciliation already in place, despite his continuing taste for revenge. Toward the play’s end, perhaps moved by Ariel’s tenderness toward the suffering and separated men, Prospero declares his willingness to forgive:

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Though with their high wrongs I am struck to th’ quick, Yet with my nobler reason ’gainst my fury Do I take part. The rarer action is In virtue than in vengeance. They being penitent, The sole drift of my purpose doth extend Not a frown further. (5.1.25–30)

Prospero rejects the natural inclination to fury in favor of forgiveness, signaling a movement away from the pre-Christian practice of avenging one’s wrongs.10 His repentance is closely tied to the recognition that his own actions have more often resembled those of a magus than of the Christian he is supposed to be. While he had been back in Milan “neglecting worldly ends” (1.2.89), he had begun to acquire some otherworldly skills, most notably the ability to resurrect the dead, that he apparently perfected while on the isle: “graves at my command,” he tells us in soliloquy, “Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ’em forth / By my so potent art” (5.1.48– 50). As yet another example of the humanist impulse that informs The Tempest, the passage derives from the classical story of Jason and Medea in Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in particular her words, “I call up dead men from their graves” (7.275; quoted in Bullough 1958–75, 8:314–15). The passage is also reminiscent of Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, the eponymous magus who disdains the study of medicine because of this very incapacity: Couldst thou make men to live eternally, Or being dead, raise them to life again, Then this profession were to be esteemed. Physic, farewell. (Faustus 1.1.24–27)

Having sold his soul to the devil, Faustus, like Prospero, acquires from his own set of books the ability to conjure spirits and raise the dead.11 He tells his would-be assassins, And had you cut my body with your swords, Or hewed this flesh and bones as small as sand,

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Yet in a minute had my spirit returned, And I had breathed a man made free from harm. (Faustus 4.3.75–78)

Prospero’s potent “art,” like that of Faustus, reminds us by way of contrast with Paulina’s disclaimer in The Winter’s Tale that her art is lawful, natural, that she is not “assisted / By wicked powers” (5.3.90–91; Felperin 1972, 275). As we have seen on a number of occasions, from Twelfth Night to the other romances, characters frequently speculate on the possible use of black magic whenever they are confronted with the prospect of a seeming resurrection from the dead. In this case alone the charge — sorcery — appears to be confirmed. Prospero’s claim to be able to raise the dead is all the more striking for coming last in a litany of his powers: he has “bedimmed / The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds” (5.3.41–42); “rifted Jove’s stout oak / With his own bolt” (45–46) (another touch of Greek mythology to which Nuttall [2000] refers);12 and “plucked up / The pine and cedar” (47–48). Prospero’s ability to resurrect the dead is merely the culmination of his magical powers. After Shakespeare’s varied and extensive figurations of resurrection in other plays, the reference is hardly surprising and, by now, part of what Ackroyd (2005) calls Shakespeare’s “imitating himself” in a “continuing process of self-distillation” (238). Shaheen (1999, 749) notes a possible allusion in Prospero’s language to Matthew 27:52–53: “And the graves did open themselves, and many bodies of the Saints which slept, arose, and came out of the graves.” If the biblical reference is present, it works by way of contrast: Prospero’s language is not a positive reference to the immediate effect of Christ’s death and the resurrection of deceased saints. Instead, he recoils from the thought of what he has done, recalling such resurrections with the same horror as did Medea, and as the pagan characters do in Shakespeare’s other romances. In a pagan world, the idea of resurrection is something grotesquely

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unnatural, verging on black magic. Prospero not only does not deny this, he confirms it: “But this rough magic / I here abjure” (5.1.50–51). Stewart’s virtuosic performance as Prospero aptly illustrated this perversion, even as he attempted to turn from it. When he declared, “graves at my command / Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ’em forth,” he was virtually shouting the lines, full of himself and the heights to which his necromancy had reached. But he was also torn, his shouting simultaneously a sign of fear and self-loathing at his transformation into a magus who must now renounce his powers, or else fully inhabit what he has done. Stewart’s anguish reminds one of Mr. Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness crying out at what he had done in life: “The horror, the horror!” Stewart’s ambivalent performance registered perfectly how as Prospero’s powers became greater they also grew more corrupt. It is not even clear that he renounces such practice as a penitent Christian or as a pagan horrified by the thought of reanimation, so intertwined are the pagan and Christian elements in the play. Prospero renounces his resurrective powers, but immediately thereafter Shakespeare gives us a series of quasi resurrections from the dead. Prospero finally appears to the shipwrecked travelers in the recognition scene, which, because it reunites those who have been separated and often presumed dead, carries within its very structure the possibility of resurrection. Shakespeare here as elsewhere in his corpus exploits the moment for its potential, as Prospero reintroduces himself to Alonso: Behold, sir King, The wrongèd Duke of Milan, Prospero. For more assurance that a living prince Does now speak to thee, I embrace thy body; And to thee and thy company I bid A hearty welcome. (Tempest 5.1.106–11)

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Prospero confirms only that he is alive, not that he has survived all these years: the possibility of a resurrection, which surely must occur to the men, remains open. The effect on Alonso, who believes he is seeing a dead man before him, is a mixture of wonder and repentance: Whe’er thou be’st he or no, Or some enchanted trifle to abuse me, As late I have been, I not know. Thy pulse Beats as of flesh and blood; and, since I saw thee, Th’ affliction of my mind amends, with which I fear a madness held me. This must crave — An if this be at all — a most strange story. Thy dukedom I resign, and do entreat Thou pardon me my wrongs (5.1.111–19)

Another quasi resurrection soon follows. As always, Shakespeare prepares for such moments by thoroughly establishing the presumption that the lost have died. Miranda informs us of the ship’s passengers and crew, “Pour souls, they perished” (1.2.9). More particularly, Alonso and Ferdinand, father and son, each believes the other to have died. Fearing that Ferdinand had “drown’d” (3.3.8), Alonso despaired, “he’s gone” (2.1.124), and tells his companions, “my son i’th’ooze is bedded” (3.3.100). In an exquisite dirge, Ariel ensures that the feeling is reciprocal for Ferdinand, who then declares himself King of Naples because he had “with mine eyes . . . beheld / The King my father wrecked” (1.2.439–40): Full fathom five thy father lies. Of his bones are coral made. Those are pearls that were his eyes. Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea change Into something rich and strange. Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell.

(1.2.400–406)

The coral is a repository for the dead man’s bones. When the two are finally reunited, Sebastian declares it “A most high

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miracle” (5.1.179), recalling the mystery play formula with its providential inflection. Ferdinand tells his father, “Though the seas threaten, they are merciful; / I have cursed them without cause” (180–81). For his part, Alonso again asks for forgiveness, this time of Miranda, his soon-to-be daughter-inlaw (199–200). Thus, the play ends with personal and familial reconciliation made possible by the sequence of quasi resurrections Shakespeare creates. Threatening apocalyptic resurrections of the dead in judgment upon Prospero’s dark magic, the play reverts instead to its romance trajectory. What follows are the quasi resurrections of the (mostly) joyous recognition scene. For Kermode (2000), the end represents “that unmistakable flavour of Christian joy at the ‘high miracle’ which turns the discord of human tragedy into the harmony of divine comedy” (240). As Kermode is well aware, however, the concord is provisional in at least two cases: Prospero’s “flesh and blood” brother Antonio, who “expelled remorse and nature” in deposing him, remains taciturn and apparently unrepentant throughout the scene. Prospero forgives him, too, but qualifies the terms of his mercy: For you, most wicked sir, whom to call brother Would even infect my mouth, I do forgive Thy rankest fault — all of them; and require My dukedom of thee, which perforce I know Thou must restore.

(5.1.130–34)

All is not as simple as one might expect from the resolution of the action in a typical romance. The Tempest contains anti-romantic elements in its mix, a sign that Prospero’s art — Shakespeare’s as well if the play is to some extent a commentary on his own capacities — cannot make all things well. Caliban and Prospero’s reconciliation is similarly held in abeyance by the fact that any such rapprochement must take place, if at all, beyond the play’s temporal boundaries.

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Prospero’s parting words to him, “This thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine” (5.1.278–79), are of course ambivalent. Is Prospero acknowledging his part in dehumanizing and enslaving Caliban, or still considering him a racially dark “thing” that is still his — “mine” — to control? Perhaps both, as he acknowledges his hand in shaping Caliban into what he is. In addition, he had earlier told Miranda that his brother Antonio is not simply a one-dimensional villain; rather, Prospero’s inattentive rule in Milan had “in my false brother / Awaked an evil nature” (1.2.92–93). Prospero thus acknowledges his own partial culpability; he is his brother’s keeper. Yet his anger is such that until very late the audience (and perhaps Prospero himself) remains unsure whether he intends to exact his revenge. Though Paffrath (1993) considers The Winter’s Tale the culmination of Shakespeare’s resurrection plays, The Tempest in my view represents the fullest statement of Shakespeare’s abiding uneasiness with the artifice of stage resurrections. They can offend civic or religious authorities as blasphemous, or mimic the antiquated miracle plays with their staged resurrections. As noted in the introduction, the attempt to raise the dead, even if only figuratively so as to reenact their lives on stage, can always fall hopelessly flat, the possibility of which Shakespeare was acutely aware: But pardon, gentles all, The flat unraisèd spirits that hath dared On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth So great an object. (Henry V, Prologue.8–11)

What his plays generally, and The Tempest specifically, appeal to on an ethical level is spiritual regeneration — forgiveness, repentance, reconciliation — the inner workings and complement to the promise of the Resurrection. But within the theater itself, Shakespeare subtly employs the quasi-resurrective potential at his disposal in the classical recognition scene, in the process making it wholly his own.13 Even so, Shakespeare, like Prospero, realizes the limitations of his art.

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After the quasi resurrections take place and everyone is reunited, Gonzalo rejoices: in one voyage Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis, And Ferdinand, her brother, found a wife Where he himself was lost; Prospero his dukedom In a poor isle; and all of us ourselves When no man was his own. (5.1.210–15)

Shaheen (1999) suggests that there “may be an echo of Luke 15.31 . . . the parable of the prodigal son: ‘This thy brother . . . was lost, but he is found’” (749). The echo finds corroboration, first from its context of people straying, geographically and morally, and second from their reintegration as a family: old relationships are reconciled, new ones established through marriage. The ending underscores precisely this creation of a new world out of the old: “How beauteous mankind is!,” Miranda intones: “Oh, brave new world / That hath such people in’t!” (5.1.185–86). Prospero’s knowing rejoinder, “’Tis new to thee” (186), acknowledges his inability to create new worlds as well as his presumptuousness in bringing back the dead. Miranda’s prospective marriage to Ferdinand — metaphorically rendered in the mating they attempt at chess — signals that they will not be resurrecting people, but creating them anew. Amid this creational impulse, Ferdinand acknowledges providence’s blessings. In response to Alonso’s query as to whether Miranda is a (pagan) “goddess that hath severed us, / And brought us thus together?,” Ferdinand explains, “Sir, she is mortal; / But by immortal Providence she’s mine” (189–91). He also remembers to thank Prospero for his quasi-resurrective role: “She / Is daughter to this famous Duke of Milan” “of whom I have / Received a second life” (193–94, 196–97). Prospero has indeed waked sleepers from their graves, but his joining of these two is a far more benign use of his “so potent art.” He too recalls that his temporal powers pale before those of God. Asked by Miranda how they were saved from

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destruction many years ago, he prefaces his comments with the simple, “By Providence divine” (1.2.160). Such piety probably comes straight from Shakespeare’s two historical sources for the play, William Strachey’s A True Reportory of the Wreck and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight (1610) and Silvester Jourdain’s A Discovery of the Bermudas (1610). Both men were aboard the flagship the Sea Venture, en route to the new English colony in Jamestown, Virginia, when the fleet was scattered in a storm and the Sea Venture alone was lost — presumably shipwrecked, its crew presumably perished — off the coast of the Bermudas in 1609. Everyone aboard survived, and nearly a year later, on May 23, 1610, they sailed into Jamestown to meet their fellow colonists in what must have been an astounding recognition scene. Strachey repeatedly refers to God’s “mercy” and “providence” (Bullough 1958–75, 8:278–80, 289); Shakespeare could scarcely miss his unstinting piety: “In these dangers and divellish disquiets (whilest the almighty God wrought for us, and sent us miraculously delivered from the calamities of the Sea, all blessings upon the shoare, to content and binde us to gratefulnesse)” (289). Jourdain repeats the refrain: It pleased God out of His most gracious and merciful providence so to direct and guide our ship (being left to the mercy of the sea) for her most advantage. . . . Every man bustled up and gathered his strength and feeble spirits together to perform as much as their weak force would permit him; through which weak means it pleased God to work so strongly as the water was stayed for that little time. (106–07)

Such a view is perfectly congruent with the cosmology of The Tempest, though the triumphalist notes come largely from Gonzalo, the figure who represents the perspective of Strachey and Jourdain — but not necessarily that of Shakespeare. One ought to be wary of such an easy formulation given the limits of art and of stage resurrections to which the play directs

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us. One should focus rather on the self-control that refuses to resort to revenge, on the hard-won personal reunions that take place, and on the reconciliations that have yet to occur. Prospero may give credit to providence, but his own behavior throughout much of the play points to disturbing attempts to usurp providential control. The boatswain mocks Gonzalo’s calm at the outset of the storm: “if you can command these elements to silence and work the peace of the present, we will not hand a rope more. Use your authority” (1.1.22–24). The irony of course is that Prospero can command these elements, and has, as Miranda suspects: “If by your art, my dearest father, you have / Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them” (1.2.1–2). Her subsequent statement that if she “were any god of power” (10) she would have saved them is realized in Prospero’s plenipotence. But Prospero is neither omnipotent nor innocent: his raising of the dead suggests not resurrectionary hope, but a darker potentiality. Vexed by the imperfection of his own godlike powers, as well as by the temptation to abuse them, Prospero repudiates his dark erudition: “And deeper than did ever plummet sound / I’ll drown my book” (5.1.56–57). He follows a penitential path, first by renouncing his past, then beginning the process of owning up to his wrongdoing. Deferring to a control beyond his own, Prospero will retire to Milan “where / Every third thought shall be my grave” (314–15) — a sobering realization that he does not have power over his own life and death. He acknowledges, too, the vacuousness of his own artifice and the emptiness of human pretension in general — “The cloudcapped towers, the gorgeous palaces” (152) — that will fade as so much smoke. Rather than commanding nature, he becomes subject to it; instead of controlling those around him, he frees them. Human imperfectability and the temptation to impose one’s will on others, especially when one has the power to do so, can compromise the best of intentions. In The Tempest

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Shakespeare reminds us of the miracle of Christian resurrection, even as the play suggests that human powers are more properly mundane. Having resurrected the dead, Prospero had apparently unleashed a kind of nightmarish world, the soulless reanimation envisioned elsewhere in the romances. The best that human beings can do, as all of the romances underscore, is to forgive and attempt to reconcile with others who have wronged us, and with those whom we have wronged. All such chances at a second or restored life are contingent upon the “fragility of goodness,” to use Martha Nussbaum’s term. That goodness, be it the result of fortune, human effort, or ultimately of providence, finds expression in the quasi resurrections that offer a temporary stay against death and the concomitant hope for a better future where all is made whole. Such is the world of romance, even if Shakespeare’s variations withhold complete and idealized resolution. “But the real dramatist of forgiveness,” Balthasar (1988) reminds us, “is and remains Shakespeare” (466). Prospero’s final appeal, fittingly enough, is to the need for reciprocity in matters of forgiveness: “As you from crimes would pardoned be, / Let your indulgence set me free” (Epilogue.19–20). Despite this echo of the Lord’s Prayer, Nuttall (2000) situates the play not in the “ethically warm universe of Christianity,” but in “the far-off world of Greek legend” (261). The Gospel, however, penetrated even those reaches two millennia ago: Paul preached in the Areopagus of Christ crucified and resurrected, claiming, “in him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28), a line that Paul appropriated from Greek poetry. Humanist extraordinaire that he is, Shakespeare does no less in offering another variation on the Resurrection in The Tempest, fusing pagan and Christian visions into a complex whole. And in the end, since resurrections are not easy to come by, either in real life or on the stage, this late play comes to mirror life and to reflect the limitations of even Shakespeare’s imaginative art. He nonetheless delves into the

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resurrection of the dead with a seriousness that manifests his interest in the human desire to transcend death and to live reunited (and reconciled) with others. Such is the meaning of the Resurrection in its adaptations on Shakespeare’s stage.

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APPENDIX

z

Mock Resurrections Shakespeare had probably known about stage resurrections from the miracle and mystery plays he had in all likelihood seen in his youth. His own “poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,” might well have glanced “from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven” with the possibilities of raising the dead on stage (Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1.11–12). His interest no doubt was also piqued by the potential he saw and then exploited in the recognition scenes that he found in his sources and later, as in The Tempest, created on his own. Still, theatrically raising the dead was a possibility that Shakespeare largely rejected, opting instead for the quasi resurrections of the plays. Such moments continually remind us of the Resurrection itself, with the accompanying joy that attends the biblical account as well as Shakespeare’s mundane staging. Shakespeare’s plays are of this world, suggesting the need for personal reconciliation and forgiveness, yet they gesture toward the need for divine grace at times and of human life lived in light of eternity. I would like to conclude with two unusual expressions of the resurrection motif, both

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of which Paffrath’s (1993) study initially brought to my attention. Neither involves a recognition scene proper, but both illustrate Shakespeare’s interest in staging—and in these two cases, staged—resurrections. The first is Falstaff’s mock resurrection in act 5 of The First Part of King Henry IV (1596–97). In the midst of the battle of Shrewsbury, the Earl of Douglas enters and, as the stage direction informs us, “He fighteth with Falstaff, who falls down as if he were dead” (5.4.76, s.d.). A real death follows, as Hal slays Hotspur, who unceremoniously becomes food for worms (87). As Falstaff plays dead “on the ground,” Hal then sees his old companion: What, old acquaintance, could not all this flesh Keep in a little life? Poor Jack, farewell! I could have better spared a better man. Oh, I should have a heavy miss of thee If I were much in love with vanity.

(102–06)

The moment alternates between expressions of sadness and humor, as Hal finds everything about Falstaff, even his death, fit subject for his wit and humor. He exits and “Falstaff riseth up” (110, s.d.), giving us a rather lengthy disquisition about his counterfeit death, which I quote in relevant part: “To die is to be a counterfeit, for he is but the counterfeit of a man who hath not the life of a man; but to counterfeit dying, when a man thereby liveth, is to be no counterfeit but the true and perfect image of life indeed” (115–19). When the Prince reenters the scene with Lancaster, both men are surprised: LANCASTER.

Did you not tell me this fat man was dead? I did; I saw him dead, Breathless and bleeding on the ground.—Art thou alive? Or is it fantasy that plays upon our eyesight? I prithee, speak. We will not trust our eyes Without our ears. (131–36)

PRINCE.

The scene could come out of any comedy or romance, as Hal believes that either he is seeing a dead man alive or there is

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some magic at work. Even when Falstaff speaks and assures him that he is alive, Hal momentarily believes that there has been a resurrection—“Why, Percy I killed myself and saw thee dead” (5.4.142). “Didst thou?,” Falstaff parries, “Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying” (143–44). The pun on “lying” as well as the transparency of the scene deflects attention away from the suggestion of a resurrection—the audience in fact sees the duplicity for themselves, and Hal quickly sees through it as well. Still, the scene works on one level as a light parody of the Resurrection. Falstaff’s sanctimony is quite in character—his touch on all things religious is comically corrosive—while the play’s representation of a resurrection is merely a mock one. The joy that attends his resurrection is his and his alone. Something quite similar occurs in Antony and Cleopatra. Fearing Antony’s anger at her for having fled in the heat of battle, Cleopatra listens to Charmian’s advice: CHARMIAN.

To th’ monument! There lock yourself and send him word you are dead. The soul and body rive not more in parting Than greatness going off. CLEOPATRA. To th’ monument! Mardian, go tell him I have slain myself. Say that the last I spoke was “Antony.” (4.13.3–8)

Antony is thus informed and, in response, attempts to dispatch himself. Mortally wounded, having bungled his own suicide attempt in most un-Roman fashion, Antony learns from Diomedes that Cleopatra’s “death” was merely more fakery: DIOMEDES.

Most absolute lord, My mistress Cleopatra sent me to thee. ANTONY. When did she send thee? DIOMEDES. Now, my lord. ANTONY. Where is she? (4.14.122–24)

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Though the moment can and often has been played quite seriously, the stichomythia in the last line lends itself to a comic, parodic version of a recognition scene. In an instant— too late, unfortunately—he learns that she was not dead, and the fleeting moment where he must wonder if she has been resurrected from the dead passes within the space of one line. The wonder of the quasi resurrections we saw in the other plays is gone, resolved into these two manifestly faked deaths and staged “resurrections.” This is not their only resemblance to the quasi resurrections of the other plays. Interestingly, both plays also gesture toward an afterlife: Falstaff on his deathbed is said by the hostess to have “babbled of green fields” (Henry V 2.3.16),1 another seeming conflation of the classical Elysian fields and the Christian heaven, where the hostess is sure Falstaff resides in “Arthur’s bosom” (10), Shakespeare’s wonderful malapropism for Abraham’s bosom (Luke 16:22). The allusions are all neatly cobbled, or “babbled,” together. Cleopatra, too, has “immortal longings” in her and claims to see Antony “rouse himself” in a pagan afterlife that they will share together (5.2.281, 284). Such a serious turn is counterweighted by the potential comedy of the mock resurrections both plays contain. The evocation of the Resurrection is only lightly if at all evident in these mock resurrections, but they are variations on Shakespeare’s quasi resurrection. Each illustrates in its own way the potential pitfalls of resurrecting characters on stage, or seeming to do so. Shakespeare imparts to each the potential for comic, lighthearted interpretation, while at the same time reserving his more serious treatment, his evocation of the Resurrection, for the quasi resurrections of his plays—mock resurrections, in a sense, but not mockeries of resurrection.

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NOTES

Notes to Introduction A small portion of this chapter appeared as Sean Benson, “Short Shrift?: Religion and Materialist Criticism,” Literature Compass 2, no. 1 (2005): 1–7; available at http://blackwell-compass.com/subject/literature. 1. Marshall (1991) corroborates the observation: “An inherent motif in each of Shakespeare’s last play is afterlife—or its corollary in the theater, the return of the dead” (xiv). 2. As Marshall (ibid.) remarks, “The revelation of Christ’s Resurrection to humankind stood at the center of the Corpus Christi cycles, which dominated England’s native tradition for several hundred years and continued to be performed sporadically into the 1560s and 1570s” (122); the latter dates intriguingly correspond to the young Shakespeare’s opportunity to see them in performance. 3. The exceptions are Henry IV, Part 1, and Antony and Cleopatra, the subjects of the appendix. Both contain mock resurrections, which are distinct from the other representations of resurrection in this study. 4. Though the adjectives “resurrectionary” and “resurrective” are not in wide use today, they are, as a quick glance at the OED confirms, by no means obsolete. To say “resurrectionary (or ‘resurrective’) variations” instead of “variations on the theme of resurrection” seems less cumbersome, though both phrases are, admittedly, imperfect. Still, no less an authority than Vendler (1997) wrote of Sonnet 55, “The other chief ingenuity of the sonnet is the gradual transformation of a memorializing and commemorative impulse

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into a resurrective one” (268). In addition, the adjectives nicely encompass resurrections and the Resurrection alike; at times his audience, if not Shakespeare himself, has both in mind at once. 5. Dennis Taylor (1996), too, has written cogently of the need in the contemporary academy “for ways of discussing religious or spiritual dimensions in works of literature” (124). 6. Othello 5.2.294, in Bevington 2004. With the exception of chapter 3, unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Shakespeare’s works are from this edition. 7. Even the recent reinterest among contemporary scholars in the role of religion in early modern drama cedes too much ground, Knapp (2002) argues, to this secularizing view. While many materialist critics do operate within such a paradigm, he overstates the case for critics such as Targoff (2001), Shuger (1997), and Diehl (1997), each of whom is acutely sensitive to the religious dynamics at work in plays of the early modern era. 8. Knapp further argues that the “secularist hypothesis” of Shakespeare’s theater is a result of modern critics’ overreliance on Puritan antitheatricalist harangues: “The temple is despised,” wrote Anthony Munday in 1580, “to run unto Theaters; the Church is emptied, the yard is filled; we leave the sacrament, to feed our adulterous eyes with the impure, & whorish sight of most filthy pastime” (18). As titillating as his vehemence is, Munday represents only one position, and probably a minority one given the popularity and spread of professional playhouses at the time. For a more recent argument concerning the theater’s opposition to religion, see Bouwsma 2000, 129–42. 9. On the itinerant tradition of the Queen’s Men and Shakespeare’s possible early association with them, see McMillin and MacLean 1998, esp. xv, 5–7, 160–66. 10. J. R. Mulryne (2007, 14–15) points out as well that the Guild Hall in Stratford, where Shakespeare probably witnessed the itinerant companies in his youth, was founded as the “Guild of the Holy Cross,” with Mass celebrated in its buildings. See also McMillin and MacLean 1998, 60, 76. 11. A myth may be true or false in the end, and I wish to make it clear that I am not taking an absolute position on Shakespeare’s religious beliefs. My use of “myth” serves to underscore the hypothetical, suppositional nature of speculation about Shakespeare’s religious beliefs. It is worth noting, too, that claims regarding Shakespeare’s precise denominational affiliation strike me as equally speculative. For a more recent argument regarding Shakespeare’s alleged secularism, see Mallin 2007. 12. In an earlier study, Greenblatt (2001) acknowledges, “It is conceivable that Shakespeare, with his recusant family background,

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his education in Stratford by teachers linked to [Edmund] Campion and the Jesuits, [and] his own possible links to Lancashire recusants, felt a covert loyalty to these structures and a dismay that they were being gutted” (254). Greenblatt further notes, “Plays can borrow, imitate, and reflect much of what passes for everyday [spiritual] reality without necessarily evacuating this reality or exposing it as made up” (253). Three years later, however, he seems largely to have dismissed this possibility (see Greenblatt 2004). 13. This is a best-case scenario. In the worst, the spiritual is described as a mere mask for the political. This is occasionally true; Shakespeare himself makes the point in his depictions of Richard III and Henry V, each of whom is quick to cloak his territorial and regal aspirations in the mantle of divine sanction. But the religious cannot always be thus elided or denied standing altogether. 14. For a similar consideration of cultural theory’s inability to treat religion, see Eagleton 2003, 99–101. 15. Rieff (2006) argues that three cultures have historically existed: first worlds, which are pagan and characterized by fate; second world cultures, which are the great monotheisms characterized by faith; and third worlds, characterized by fictions (1:4–6). As James Hunter (2006) notes, third world culture posits no “world beyond the visible and [no] authority beyond the self. In their radical skepticism, third world cultures exist primarily as negations of second cultures; negations of their sacred authorities and their various doxa” (xxi). Though Rieff may overstate what he considers the antipathy of postmodernism toward the sacred, he is able to find ample evidence of it in the arts and in the academy. 16. I focus on Shakespeare’s (sometimes mere) evocation or reminder of the Resurrection; as such, the religious intonations of his art are more subtle, less didactic than traditionally conceived by critics sensitive to the religious in his art. Shakespeare is scarcely, in my view, a typologist, as is the general idea in Roy Battenhouse’s compilation (ed., 1994). And while he does not write anagogic works in the same way Dante did, he is sensitive to the ways in which the religious permeates and informs life. 17. The humor of the clown’s lines was pointedly brought home to me by Julian Bleach’s inspired performance for the Royal Shakespeare Company (Doran 2006). 18. Roland Frye (1963, 19–42) offers a mid-twentieth-century survey of “theological analyses” then in vogue. 19. Aristotle (1984) conceives of recognition very broadly: “A discovery is, as the very word implies, a change from ignorance to knowledge” (1452a1), as in Oedipus’s discovery of his patricide and incest. It is not clear that Shakespeare knew the Poetics directly—it was not translated into English until 1623, as Herrick

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(1930, 34) notes—but it was widely known indirectly and as a playwright Shakespeare would be intuitively aware of phenomena such as anagnorisis and peripeteia, constituent elements of many of his plays. On Shakespeare’s debt to Greek romance, see in particular Gesner 1970. 20. The story of Christ is clearly a romance, but so too, as Felperin (1972) notes, the Book of Job “is technically a perfect example of romantic form” (27n.15). 21. Jones 1977, 33–34, 51, argues in particular that the Passion plays served as models for Shakespeare’s writing of histories and tragedies. See also Groves 2007. 22. Womack (1999) demonstrates that Mary Magdalene also relies on Confessio amantis and that, further, romance and miracle plays share “a common repertoire of plots and plot devices” (172). 23. As Beadle and King (1995) note, “The York Cycle . . . enjoyed a generally continuous run of annual performances until the late 1560s, and Shakespeare’s lifetime” (ix). On Shakespeare’s connection to the miracle and mystery plays, as well as the recognition scenes one finds in them, see Jones 1977, chap. 2; Fraser 1976; Felperin 1972, 10–29; and Marshall 1991. 24. As Jones (1977) remarks, a play on this encounter on the road to Emmaus “occurs in all four of the English [mystery] cycles” (64). 25. In the mythic origins of the romance tradition, as Northrop Frye (2000) argues, “the hero has to die, and if his quest is completed the final stage of it is, cyclically, rebirth, and, dialectically, resurrection” (192; see also Gesner 1970, 4). This is true, although the level of abstraction here, as well as Frye’s attempt to fit everything into a particular type or category, overlooks individual variations. The quasi resurrections in Shakespeare’s plays may be viewed in dialectical terms, but each is individuated and thus they are collectively more varied than a blanket categorization suggests. 26. The Christian humanists, following Petrarch and deriving their interest from the humanist movement to recover classical texts and ideas, wanted, as Kelley (1991) notes, “to reconcile classical learning and Christian doctrine” (66). Shakespeare is not really reconciling so much as he is juxtaposing the Christian, pagan, and other perspectives; his work is too irenic, as in the work of Erasmus, to be an argument; both men find sympathy between Christianity and classicism. Loewenstein (1996, 271) views Milton’s work as representing the apogee of humanist syncretism; the difference between Milton and Shakespeare is that Milton senses paganism as something Christianity supersedes or overcomes; Shakespeare privileges Christianity, too, but it coexists peacefully with the paganism he finds in his sources.

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27. For a more detailed discussion of the origins of Renaissance humanism, see Cooper 2002, 46–47; Mann 1996, 2–17; Greengrass 1998, 33–37; Soellner 1972, 3–40; and Kristeller 1965. For Christian humanism and Shakespeare’s relation to it, see Ulanov 1960, 3–5; Carroll 1996, 247–53; Kelley 1991, 63–67; and Jones 1977, 8–18. 28. Étienne Gilson called this view “the perpetual charter of Christian humanism” (quoted in Olin 1987, 9). Also, in a letter dated October 1527, Erasmus anticipates the wonderful conflation of Christian and pagan that suffuses Shakespeare’s plays: “I have taught good literature, previously nearly pagan, to celebrate Christ” (ibid., 36). For the particular connection between the Christian humanists and Shakespeare’s work, see Brown 1999, 29–30. 29. Although it is not clear that Shakespeare was reading the Italian humanists such as Pico della Mirandola’s oration on the dignity of man, or Erasmus’s arguments reconciling Christianity and classical tradition, their influence is pervasive by the end of the sixteenth century. See esp. Kinney’s discussion (1986) of the Christianizing of classical texts by Philip Sidney (274), Robert Greene (192), Thomas Nashe (365–66), and Thomas Lodge (381), among others. 30. As Herrick (1955) argues, these “Christian Terence” writers “were fully aware that they should not imitate classical models slavishly; they were trying to reform classical drama as well as medieval, for they believed that western Europe in the sixteenth century needed a new kind of drama, one that was adapted to a new religion, new manners, new customs” (61). 31. The passage in full: Ictu uno actuque sales ediscere Plauti, Et Christi hisce datur. Mora quae vos, quidve timetis, Quum scriptis scriptura praeest diina prophanis? Si tulit is punctum, qui miscuit utile dulci, Sic tulit hic punctum, qui miscuit utile sacro. (Quoted in Smith 1973, 35–36). 32. As Kristeller (1965) notes, pagan mythology “was not intended to replace the use of Christian religious thought and imagery but to supplement it. In most instances it was no more than a literary ornament sanctioned by ancient precedent. Where it served a more serious intention, its use was justified by allegory—by attributing to the pagan stories a hidden meaning that was in accordance with Christian truth” (39). 33. I do not mean the precise staging of Shakespeare’s plays when they first appeared onstage, since information beyond what appear to be original stage directions is largely unknown. I refer instead to the staging possibilities that follow from the resurrection language

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and situations one encounters in the plays. The pietà scene with Lear carrying in the dead Cordelia is one such case in point, as I will discuss later; such scenes lend themselves quite naturally—or supernaturally—to evoking a resurrection in their staging, whether Shakespeare made use of such potential or not. 34. The lone exception is Paffrath 1993, a study that not only preceded mine but directed me to a number of passages that I might otherwise have overlooked. But my approach is significantly different from his, enough so to warrant some discussion of our divergences and methods. 35. On the tendency of early modern audiences to view pagan antiquity through the lens of its own Christianity, see Miola 2001, especially 31–32 and 44–45. 36. On Shakespeare’s alleged Catholicism, see also Gary Taylor 2001, Milward 2005, Asquith 2005, and esp. Honigmann 1985. 37. Tertullian first used the phrase in relation to virtuous pagans such as Cicero and Virgil, and as such the phrase is usually contrasted with the anima pagana. In this sense, then, Shakespeare need not have been any more a Christian than Virgil; his work draws upon multiple traditions. 38. For an account of various ways in which the early modern stage was used for doctrinal persuasion, see White 1992. 39. In agreeing with Honan’s remark (1999) about the “the profound religious sense that underlies Shakespeare’s urbanity” (50), I suspect that that profundity reveals some trace of Shakespeare’s faith. At the very least, his use of resurrectionary language is an expression of the aesthetic impression the Resurrection made on him.

Notes to Chapter 1 1. It is possible that Shakespeare chose to relocate the story to Ephesus because in another of his probable sources, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1554), the wife of Apollonius of Tyre comes to Ephesus where she becomes the priestess in the town’s famous temple of Diana (Shaheen 1999, 101–02). Even if Gower’s account is the source for the name change, Shakespeare’s depiction of the town is without question also influenced by the scriptural account of Ephesus. 2. Shaheen (ibid., 213) lists the line as a possible reference to Matthew 27:52: “And the graves did open themselves, and many bodies of the Saints which slept, arose, and came out of the graves.” Shakespeare uses an almost identical line in Julius Caesar—“Graves have yawned and yielded up their dead” (2.2.18)—and again later in

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The Tempest. But the biblical connection strikes me as tenuous: Diana as presiding deity here is being asked to “pardon” those who have wrongfully caused the death of the innocent Hero. 3. Bedridden, Fenicia summons the breath to make a lengthy speech, demonstrating her deep-seated piety: “Now may God with me as is most pleasing to Him, and grant that this my trouble may tend to the salvation of my soul. . . . It is enough for me that before the just tribunal of Christ I shall be known innocent of such baseness; and thus to him who gave it I commend my soul, which longs to escape from this earthly prison and now takes its way towards Him” (Bullough 1958–75, 2:120). 4. Frye (1965, 83–85) also traces at some length what he calls the “same theme of death and revival” in the other plays, though his emphasis is on the primitive mythos involved. 5. Wyatt’s famous last line reads, “Noli me tangere for Caesar’s I am” (1978, 77). Shakespeare, as Ko (1997, 399) notes, may not have known Wyatt’s poem, but surely his thoroughgoing knowledge of the Bible would have allowed him to appropriate the line as he does so deftly here. Ko also calls Viola’s line about resurrection (with no apparent irony) a “buried allusion” (392n6); so it is, and this is precisely how Shakespeare’s subtlety works. It is also worth noting that Shakespeare does not use the phrase “Do not touch me,” but “Do not embrace me.” “Embrace” fits perfectly the metrical requirements of the iambic line, whereas “touch” throws them off; perhaps this explains the divergence from the biblical phrasing. But “embrace” has, in addition to acting as a synonym for “touch,” another possible connotation of kissing. In this sense, her unwillingness to kiss is a sign of the characters’ uneasiness with homoerotic dress and attraction: she may not want to kiss her brother while she is cross-dressed as a man. Sebastian quickly follows, warning Olivia, So comes it, lady, you have been mistook. But nature to her bias drew in that. You would have been contracted to a maid, Nor are you therein, by my life, deceived. You are betrothed both to a maid and man.

(5.1.259–63)

The pun on “maid and”—maiden—“man” in the last line is another playful conjuration of such anxieties. See Martin and Pesta 2003, 49–66. 6. Here the case is hardly questionable: not only is the language quite close to that of Scripture, Lewis (1988) had already noted the biblical allusion over a decade before the publication of Shaheen’s text. In a later essay, Lewis (2002) elaborates on the earlier note.

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Notes to Chapter 2 1. Groves (2007) points out that the imagery of light in the second quarto (Q2) of 1599 is more pronounced than that of the shorter and seemingly corrupt first quarto (Q1) of 1597, and she ties this piece of evidence to the claim that in the Bible also “there are bright angels in the tomb and in the Chester Resurrection light pours out of the tomb” (80). Groves argues that Q2 may well represent a revision of Q1, a plausible but as yet unsubstantiated claim that has yet to replace the standard view of Q1 as a memorial reconstruction. Taking no precise position, Levenson (2000) appear to opt for a reading in which “the two substantive quartos witness the multiplicity of what Shakespeare wrote” (124). Groves’s other evidence of the paschal motif, such as Romeo’s and the Friar’s running to Juliet’s tomb representing an alleged analogue to the youthful John and the aged Peter racing to Christ’s sepulcher, is tenuous. She and I agree with Paffrath (1993) that the play contains a motif of resurrection, yet instead of allowing for the natural and mutual hope that Romeo and Juliet each have for the other to rise from the dead, Groves looks for specific passages from passion plays and the Bible to connect the Easter motif directly to the play. 2. This passage is from Q2, as are all of the other quotations from the play. The last two lines of the passage are identical in Q1, while the first two contain only slight, and for my purposes immaterial, differences from Q1. Both versions are reprinted in Levenson (2000); although she gives them equal weight “as two versions of the play,” “Q2 takes its traditional place at the front of the volume” (127). 3. These two lines are present in Q2 but absent from Q1. 4. Balthasar tells Friar Laurence that Romeo has been in the tomb “Full half an hour” (5.3.130); given Romeo’s fight with Paris and his subsequent speeches to Juliet, the time of his suicide and Juliet’s awakening must be quite close, as the Friar enters immediately and finds her just coming to. 5. The locus classicus is the Ephesiaca of Xenophon of Ephesus. 6. As Taylor (1983) argues, Q1 and F1 are printed from different manuscripts. Thus, F1 is not simply a revision of Q1, though the view that Shakespeare did indeed revise the play now seems almost certain. The two versions of the play are independent but connected by means of revision, much of which is difficult to discern with certitude. I am thus persuaded by Taylor’s view: The hypothesis that Shakespeare, like every other author, revised his work, depends fundamentally upon the sheer weight of historical and bibliographical evidence for variation in the canon as a whole—variation which cannot be convincingly

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explained in any other way. That is why, although all previous editions have been based on the unexamined belief that Shakespeare did not revise his work, all future edition should be, and I believe will be, based on the recognition that he habitually did. (294) I am also cognizant of the reluctance toward the revisionist hypothesis that Evans (1974) adopts in his edition of the plays, a circumspection shared by Werstine (2004): one ought not “reduc[e] the differences among the early printed texts to a fantasy of boundless authorial fecundity”; one should also look to “the multiple and dispersed agencies that could have produced the variants” (312). 7. And she is not alone: having been stabbed, Roderigo, Emilia, and Othello all speak before dying. 8. One might call this a resuscitation in the sense of a revival from apparent death (OED, s.v. “resuscitation”). But, as we have seen, Othello takes pains to satisfy himself that Desdemona is dead when he allows Emilia to enter the bedchamber. The First Folio also holds out the possibility that this is postmortem speech, a refutation of the murder-will-out convention as she comes back to life and exonerates her husband for the murder. 9. As reassuring as this may be from a redemptionist perspective, Thomas Moisan pointed out to me how Lear speaks these lines while a storm rages around him, perhaps thus rendering the lines incomprehensible beneath the din. They are, however, still spoken. 10. The notable exception, of course, is King Lear. Noting Shakespeare’s divergence from his sources in that play, Buechner (2001) suggests, “Shakespeare seems to be saying that, like all these predecessors, he ought to have ended it in a way to suggest that good ultimately triumphs over evil in this world and that, all in all, life makes sense. But that is clearly not what Shakespeare felt” (131).

Notes to Chapter 3 1. A shorter version of this chapter appeared as “Materialist Criticism and Cordelia’s Quasi-Resurrection in King Lear,” Religion and the Arts 11 (2007): 436–53. Jowett (2007) begins with a similar discussion of the differences between Q1 and F1. References in this chapter to King Lear are to Q1 and F1 of King Lear, and are from The Oxford Shakespeare (Wells and Taylor 2006). 2. Campbell (1948) similarly Christianized the play, asserting that Lear finds in Cordelia’s “unselfish love the one companion who is willing to go with him through Death up to the throne of

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the Everlasting Judge” (107). Much of this material is also cited by Foakes (1993), whose survey of redemptionist and nihilist interpretations of King Lear I rely on throughout this section. 3. In Maynard Mack’s words (1972), which corroborate those of Ackroyd (2005), “Shakespeare works and reworks tirelessly the same themes” (54). 4. For an overview of the current state of textual criticism, see Jowett 2006, esp. 14–16. 5. John Drakakis (1992, 10–12), for one, attempted to refute the idealist claims of such early critics as A. C. Bradley and Irving Ribner, both of whom argued for a universal moral order ultimately righting things in the tragedies. Drakakis rightly considers idealist conceptions of tragedy to be in essence religious, as in Bradley’s idealism of “eternal justice,” in which the cosmos teleologically and mystically purges itself of evil. 6. Implicit in Dollimore’s argument is the idea that if God were to intervene in this play, he would do so on Cordelia’s side. This seems a bit presumptuous. The blinding of Gloucester is a horrific act, as is shutting Lear out of Gloucester’s house (as well as Edmund’s treatment of Edgar), but one can also argue, as critics have, that Lear’s division of his kingdom lawfully transfers authority to his two daughters, and that he and his faction have no subsequent moral or legal justification for their insurrection. 7. Claudius, for one, is aware of what he believes to be the real, if delayed, presence of divine justice: In the corrupted currents of this world Offense’s gilded hand may [shove] by justice, And oft ’tis seen the wicked prize itself Buys out the law, but ’tis not so above: There is no shuffling, there the action lies In his true nature, and we ourselves compell’d, Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults, To give in evidence. (Hamlet 3.3.57–64) 8. That some people held such a view in Shakespeare’s day is no doubt true, but they were generally outside the mainstream. Calvin in the Institutes devotes considerable attention to divine judgments, which he says in the case of believers are slight and limited to the purpose of (mere) chastisement, “while the wicked are beaten with God’s scourges they already begin, in a manner, to suffer punishments according to his judgment” (1.660–62). This is a perfectly sound rationalization, if I may call it that, for the lack of direct and severe divine judgment. Hooker, too, in Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, devotes considerable attention, especially in book 8, to duly constituted authorities acting as agents of God’s

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judgment. Neither Hooker nor Calvin denies the divine prerogative of intervening peremptorily, but they argue from Scripture that the absence of immediate judgment is a sign of mercy toward sinners. They look, too, for the resurrection of the body in the life of the world to come. On the difficulty of discerning whose side, if any, providence intervenes on behalf of in the plays, see Kelly 1970. 9. Shakespeare registers his awareness of these anachronisms in the Fool’s self-proclaimed prophecy (3.2.81–94), after which he declares, “This prophecy Merlin shall make; for I live before his time” (95–96). 10. Northrop Frye (1965) similarly suggests that Shakespeare “refrains from trying to impose any sort of personal attitude on us” (34). 11. In his study of Shakespearean complementarity, Norman Rabkin (1967) reaches a similar conclusion: “we find ourselves able at almost any point in the play to read its world as godless or divine” (10). Despite the closeness of Mack’s view to my own, he too regards Cordelia’s quasi resurrection as merely “illusory” (116). Jowett (2007) likewise calls Lear’s alleged sight of Cordelia’s breathing that of “enraptured delusion” (2). 12. Milward (2007) argues that “King Lear is not only Shakespeare’s Passion Play, culminating in the final scene of Act V, but it also implicitly looks forward to the Resurrection of Christ, anticipated in the incredibly blissful ending of Act IV” (16). 13. An almost identical approach can be seen in Edwin Sherin’s film of the New York Shakespeare Festival’s 1974 production starring James Earl Jones in the title role. 14. Marshall (1991, 53) offers a similar analysis of the moment. 15. Recognition scenes are typically coupled with marriages; here, Edmund’s promise to marry both sisters—“Yours in the ranks of death” (4.2.25), he tells Goneril—finds its perverse fulfillment in their deaths: “all three / Now marry in an instant” (5.3.203–04).

Notes to Chapter 4 1. John Gower, Confessio amantis, in Bullough 1958–75, 6:395, lines 1006–10; hereafter cited by line number in the text. 2. On Shakespeare’s use of religious anachronisms in his Roman plays, see David Kaula on Julius Caesar (1981, 197–214) and Robert Miola (2002) on Titus Andronicus. 3. Barber and Wheeler (1986, 19–37) fully rehearse the idea of a secular stage, an idea that, as I argue in the introduction, has increasingly been challenged. 4. The exception is the conventionally wicked stepmother, the Queen.

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5. In general I agree with Roland Mushat Frye’s (1963, 168, 243) objection to scholars who argue that Jupiter should be interpreted as the Christian God; such an approach elides distinctions that are central to the Christian humanism of Shakespeare’s art. M. M. Mahood (1957), for instance, argues that “figures like Jupiter are best seen as masks of God” (150). Citing and affirming Mahood’s view, Grace Tiffany (2000) writes, “Indeed, Jupiter’s thundering visit to Posthumus’ cell evokes Paul’s visitation by the Holy Spirit in the Philippian jail” (428). In my view, such positions are unpersuasive and reveal an attempt to Christianize the plays when there is no need to do so. Shakespeare gives his pagan dei ex machina biblical language without sacrificing the paganism of the deities to the biblicism of their language. That the providence of the Christian God may ultimately be at work in the play (or be interpreted as such by an audience) is certainly plausible, but that is not the same as reading Jupiter as a mask for the Holy Spirit, as Tiffany also does with Apollo’s oracle in The Winter’s Tale (428). 6. None of my comments here or elsewhere should be taken to suggest an absolute division between human action and divine agency, since many Christians and other persons of faith would in part assign human actions such as the expression of love and forgiveness to the promptings, or infusing, of divine grace (see, for instance, 1 John 1:1). Whether human action is motivated by strictly human impulses or in some combination with divine promptings, the action does appear requisite for the well-being of the human community. That Shakespeare’s quasi resurrections almost always evoke or allude to the Resurrection suggests that, for Shakespeare, the human and the divine work in concert.

Notes to Chapter 5 1. Shaheen (1999) demurs, “But Hermione’s words are not based on Hebrews 11 [a chapter discussing faith], nor do the words ‘awake’ and ‘faith’ occur together anywhere in Scripture” (719). Yet, as Shaheen is aware, “awake” and “faith” need not appear together in the Bible for Shakespeare to be making a Christian reference. 2. She also adds, “In the visual arts, the risen Christ steps forth from his tomb to form a visual emblem of life triumphing over death” (Marshall 1991, 126). 3. A classic, syllogistic formulation provides a clearer instance of the fallacy: All dogs are mammals; all cats are mammals; therefore, all dogs are cats. 4. Schneider (1995) provides a helpful summary of articles critical of Prospero’s behavior.

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5. Setebos is the deity whom Richard Eden, in his History of Travel (1577), reports was worshipped by South American natives. 6. Knight (2000), too, asserts, “Caliban’s deformity symbolizes . . . the anomalous, and therefore provisional, ascent of evil within the creative order,” with Prospero, “a close replica of Christ,” at the top of that order (225, 227). Such a hierarchy exists, as critics have long noted, on a superficial level: a Platonic Chain of Being with the earthy Caliban at one end of the spectrum, Ariel at the other. 7. For an account of the way in which the play has been read as a biographical allegory, see Nuttall 1967, 1–14. 8. Miranda, it should be noted, never precisely corroborates the charge that Prospero levels against Caliban. Caliban, however, does not deny it. While rape is taboo in Judeo-Christian culture, it is not so everywhere; given his non-Christian background, Caliban does not appear to accept the taboo as legitimate. 9. Of the numerous modern accounts to assert Caliban’s humanity against Prospero’s charges, the most persuasive to my mind is that of Vaughan and Vaughan 1991. 10. As Cox (2000, 37) notes, Stephen Orgel considers this a scene of false sentimentality: underneath the forgiveness lies the reassertion of his power and control. See Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Orgel, 53–55. 11. Shakespeare’s use of Faustus as a model for Prospero is most vigorously and, to my mind, persuasively argued by Bate 1998, 101–32. Prospero promises to drown his books, Faustus to burn his (Tempest 5.2.200). 12. For fear of blasphemy, actors were forbidden by a 1606 law to use the name of “God or Christ Jesus, or of the Holy Ghoste or the Trinitie” (quoted in Gurr 1992, 76). The necessary substitution of “Jove” or another deity fits perfectly with Shakespeare’s capacity and willingness to combine pagan and Christian in his plays, especially in The Tempest. He made use, that is, of the prohibition. 13. There are a few, a very few, other Renaissance plays that employ a resurrection motif. Paffrath (1993) treats them ably in appendix B (221–29).

Note to Appendix 1. F1 reads “a Table” for “’a babbl’d,” which, following an anonymous conjecture that Shakespeare intended “’a talked,” was changed by Theobald to its present form.

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INDEX

Ackroyd, Peter, 3–4, 174 acting companies, 6 actors, 6–7 Adams, Henry Hitch, 93 adaptations. See also sources, 1, 8, 15–21, 30–33, 36, 41, 53, 69, 79–83, 183 Aeneid (Virgil), 139, 167 afterlife, 82–84, 97, 106–07, 113–14, 121 Alexander, William, 170 All’s Well that Ends Well (Shakespeare), 58–68 allusions, 3, 36 anachronisms, 28 Anglican, Anglo-Saxon, 71, 92, 102 Antichrist, 20 antiquity, 146, 149 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), 13, 29, 186 apocalypse, 104, 170–71 “Apolonius and Silla” (Riche), 53 Appolonius Tyre (Gower), 39 Arden of Faversham, 93 Aristotle, 15, 78, 97, 99, 112, 128, 190n19 As You Like It (Shakespeare), 3–4 audience: awareness, 52, 57, 64, 105, 116–17, 127–28, 147, 186; and culture, 12; effects on, 79; experience, 82, 97, 99, 123, 158; interest of, 27–28, 36; Jacobean, 105, 110; perspective, 114, 117;

piety of, 21; reactions, 29, 49, 51; religious beliefs of, 8, 14, 23, 151 Auerbach, Erich, 10, 87 Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 1, 112, 159–60 Bandello Matteo, 44–47 Barber, C. L., 61, 77, 100, 110, 128–30, 133–34 Barton, Anne, 58 Battenhouse, Roy W., 68 Beauregard, David N., 30 Beowulf, 144 Bevington, David, 38–39, 153, 162 Bible, biblical: allusions, 25, 28, 54; connection, 57; conventions, 56; figurations, 87; injunction, 143; language, 33, 36, 56, 88, 131, 199n5; literary representation of, 2, 10, 21, 168; Old Testament, 85, 131, 137, 165, 169–70; references, 55, 63, 194n5, 195n1; sources, 159, 163, 171; tropes, 2, 21, 41, 53. See also Scripture Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays (Shaheen), 25 blasphemy, 27, 178, 200n12 Bloom, Allan, 149 Bloom, Harold, 14, 38, 86 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 59–64, 66–67 Bohemia, 149, 153 Book of Common Prayer, The, 159 Books of Hours, 138

212

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Index Bradley, A. C., 97, 100, 197n5 Brooke, Arthur, 78–87 Brooke, N. S., 100 Brownlow, F. W., 117 Buechner, Frederick, 107–08 Bullough, Geoffrey, 31, 69, 126, 173 Calvin, John, 197n8 Catholic, Catholicism, 4, 6, 30–31, 165 Chambers, E. K., 7 Chambers, R. W., 100 characters: adaptation of, 18; awareness of, 64; lost, 1, 38; pagan, 29, 51, 75, 103, 128, 130, 142, 155; perspective of, 78–79, 96, 114; reunion of, 30, 33, 55; and staging, 22, 49, 174; survival of, 40–41, 148; wonder of, 57 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 85 Christ. See Jesus Christ Christian, Christianity: antiquity, 149; archetype, 67, 128–29, 134, 141; beliefs, 21–22, 78, 113, 121, 127; depiction of, 67, 155–56; Erasmus on, 14, 192n29; ethos, 100; forgiveness, 145; heaven, 187; hope, 28, 43, 51–52; humanism, 20, 123–24, 126, 141, 150; iconography, 5; imitations, 151; and paganism, 2, 19, 21–22, 31, 37, 69, 101–02, 114–16, 119, 130–31, 164, 175, 182, 191n26, 192n28; promise, 118; in Renaissance, 28; resurrection, 1, 16, 85, 96, 182; revelation, 105; ritual, 129; romance, 67; soul, 52; teaching, 68–69, 111, 166; tradition, 16–17, 24, 29, 110–11, 114, 151–52, 192n32; tropes, 68, 88, 169; view, 109, 128 Christus triumphans (Foxe), 20 church, 7–8, 25 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 122 Colet, John, 19 Comber, Thomas, 20 Comedy of Errors, The (Shakespeare): as classical source, 36; ritual in, 56; setting of, 57; themes in, 26, 36–41, 51, 78 comedies: conventions of, 18, 65, 124, 147; development of, 36, 185; endings of, 78; and farce, 38; Greek influence of, 15; motifs in, 2, 35, 40, 79; resolution if, 77; Roman, 20 Confessio amantis (Gower), 124–25, 127–30, 135–36, 193n1

BENSON_index_212-219.indd 213

213

Conrad, Joseph, 175 Cox, John, 164 creation, 12, 179 criticism, 4, 6, 11–12, 19, 31–33, 101, 108, 119, 128, 164, 172, 189n8 Crucifixion, 16, 145 cultural materialist, 11 culture, 2, 6, 12, 16, 86 Cymbeline (Shakespeare), 122–23, 126, 138–48, 157 Daniell, David, 25, 102 Dante, Alighieri, 97, 170 David (Michelangelo), 169 death: overcoming, 15, 18, 40–42, 47, 50–52, 58; symbolism of, 61–64, 66–67, 77–80, 83–84, 95, 128, 142, 147, 152; triumph of, 33, 38, 182–83 Decameron (Boccaccio), 59–64, 66 deus ex machina, 21, 96, 115, 123, 126, 139, 199n5 Digby Mary Magdalene, The, 17 Discovery of the Bermudas, A (Jourdain), 180 divine: artistry, 162; grace, 95, 123; intervention, 67–68, 85, 104, 108, 111, 116, 141; judgment, 197n8; justice, 92, 109, 113–14; prompting, 199n5; restoration, 146; vengeance, 155 Dollimore, Jonathan, 12, 108–09, 111–14, 197n6 Dominican Blackfriars, 7 Donne, John, 22 Dr. Faustus (Marlowe), 8, 173 Drakakis, John, 197n5 drama: classical forms of, 20, 39–41, 88, 139–40, 149–50, 159, 168–69, 192n29, 192n30; Elizabethan, 129; medieval Resurrection plays, 109; providentialist, 111; resurrection, 8, 65 Edwards, Michael, 105 Eliot, T. S., 32 Elton, William, 100–101 Enchiridion militis Christiani (Erasmus), 20 England, English, 6–8, 28, 134, 144, 180 English Chronicles (Holinshed), 138 Erasmus of Rotterdam, 14, 19–20, 22, 192n28, 192n29 eternity, 113–14, 184 Eucharist, 49

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214

Index

Europe, 1925n30 Everett, Barbara, 100 existentialist, existentialism, 87, 110, 117 Eyre, Richard, 119–20 Faerie Queene, The (Spenser), 42 faith, 2, 4, 9–13, 16–17, 19, 29–30, 92, 159, 193n39 family, 38, 137, 179 fate, 95, 112 fear, 99, 112, 175 Felperin, Howard, 18, 27, 35, 82, 100, 118–20, 126, 141, 143, 147 Fernie, Ewan, 11 figurations: biblical, 87–88, 115, 118; of resurrection, 22–25, 31–33, 36, 49–50, 60–62, 75, 123, 147, 160, 174; theatrical, 1–2, 16, 18–19, 96 First Folio, 88–93, 106–07, 120, 124 Florio, John, 169 Foakes, R. A., 98–99, 101, 117 foreshadowing, 61, 80 forgiveness, 139, 145, 148, 155, 178, 182 Foxe, John, 20–21 Frye, Northrop, 10, 13, 15–16, 28, 46, 127, 191n25 Furness H. H., 92 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 112–13 Garber, Marjorie, 58, 150 Geneva Bible, 10–11, 55 genre, 27–28, 96 Giambattista Cinzio Giraldo, 91–92 Gli Ecatommiti (Giambattista), 91–92 Gl’ingannati (The Deceived), 53 God, 10–11, 14, 16, 19, 21, 92, 97, 128, 160, 170–71, 179, 199n5 Golding, Arthur, 24, 173 Gospel. See Scripture Gower, John, 39, 124–25, 127–31, 135–36, 193n1 grace, 16, 86, 95, 123, 148, 156–57 Granville-Barker, Harley, 100 Greek, Greece, 15, 19, 85, 122, 126, 139, 149, 182 Greenblatt, Stephen, 9–10, 109–14, 116–17 Greene, Robert, 152, 156, 161 Greer, Germaine, 5, 28, 67, 115–16 Grocyn, William, 19 Groves, Beatrice, 83, 120, 195n1

BENSON_index_212-219.indd 214

Hamlet (Shakespeare), 149 Hazlitt, William, 31 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 175 heaven, 126, 187 Heilman, R. B., 100–101 Henry IV Part I (Shakespeare), 29, 38, 185 Henry VIII (Shakespeare), 103 Henry V (Shakespeare), 22, 27, 187 Herrick, Marvin, 192n30 Heyartz, Irene, 56 Historia Regum Britanniae, 104 histories, 2, 96, 103 Hoar, George, 22 Holinshed, Raphael, 138, 146 Holm, Ian, 120 Honan, Park, 5, 9 Hooker, Richard, 197–98n8 Howard, Jean, 56 Hubt, Maurice, 31 human: action, 95, 199n5; agency, 124, 169; condition, 67, 101, 172; desire, 183; existence, 128; imperfection, 181–82; mercy, 72; perspective, 114; reason, 155; sexuality, 61, 69; sin, 69; suffering, 111, 113, 121, 177; will, 86 humanist, humanism, 19–22, 24, 29, 31, 37, 108, 119, 123, 126, 128, 139, 141, 150, 164, 173, 182, 191n26, 192n28 Hundred Tales, The. See Gli Ecatommiti Hunt, William, 92 Hunter, James, 64, 190n15 Illiad, 139–40 imagery, 3, 19, 29, 33, 58 imagination, 13 imaginative possibility, 12–13 Inferno (Dante), 97 Institutes (Calvin), 197n8 irony, 51, 64 Jackson, Ken, 4, 32 James, D. G., 100 Jameson, Anna, 99–100 Jason and Medea, 173 Jerusalem, 16 Jesus Christ: Areopagus of, 182; death of, 70, 174; depiction of, 71, 130, 134, 138, 141, 145–46; hope in, 114; life of, 82; Resurrection of, 16–18, 32–33, 36, 48, 55, 57, 70, 78, 84–87,

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Index 188n1; sepulcher, 195n1; triumph of, 33, 58; wit of, 20; words of, 54 John, Gospel of, 54 Johnson, Samuel, 99, 102, 110–11, 118 Jonson, Ben, 6 Jourdain, Silvester, 180 Jowett, John, 91 joy, 2, 13–16, 22, 25, 29, 32–35, 48–50, 53, 58, 78, 177 Judeo-Christian, 127, 165 judgment, 96–97, 171, 197–98n8 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 36 justice, 95, 97, 99, 109, 112–14 Katstan, David Scott, 56 Keats, John, 14, 119 Keightley, Thomas, 93 Kelly, Donald, 191n26 Kermode, Frank, 30, 166, 177 King Lear (Shakespeare): archetypal form, 3–4; failed resurrection in, 18; Gadamer on, 112–13; as miracle play, 111; nihilism of, 99, 105–13; paganism in, 99–101, 104–05, 113–19; redemptionist reading of, 99–105; setting of, 57; source of, 103–04; themes in, 27–28, 67, 97, 124, 126, 155; version, 91, 98, 120 King’s Men, 7 Knapp, Jeffrey, 6, 14, 30, 189n8 Knight, G. Wilson, 100, 166 knowledge, 16, 97 Ko, Yu Jin, 54, 57, 194n5 Kristeva, Julia, 79 language: biblical, 33, 36, 56, 88, 131, 199n5; of death, 152; ecclesiastical, 159; and imagery, 58–59, 86; and intimation, 133; moral, 128; resurrection, 8–9, 19, 22–25, 31–32, 50, 60–61, 63, 67, 75, 88, 115, 147, 160; Shakespeare’s, 19, 32, 56, 58–59, 85, 126, 145, 169, 193n39 Latin, 20 Leech, Clifford, 69 leitmorif, 78 Levin, Harry, 86 Lomax, Marion, 58 London, 6–7 Lord’s Prayer, 169 love, 143–44 Luhrmann, Baz, 84 Lutheran, 49

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Machiavelli, 63, 68 Mack, Maynard, 117 Mallin, Eric, 162 Marlowe, Christopher, 8, 173–74 Marotti, Arthur, 4, 32 Marshall, Cynthia, 162 Martson, John, 6 Mary Magdalene, 17, 23, 54–56 material criticism, 11–14, 96, 108, 114, 128, 189n7 materialism, 15 material reality, 11 Mayer, Jean-Christophe, 4–6 McElroy, Bernard, 101 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 14, 61, 68–76 medieval, 20, 23, 109, 192n30 medieval mystery, 17 medieval romance, 130 Menaechmi (Plautus), 36–39 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 24, 150, 173 metaphor, 51, 58, 88 metaphysics, 11, 113 Michelangelo, 169 Midsummer’s Night Dream, A (Shakespeare): structural parallels in, 3–4; themes in, 9, 72, 78–79, 184 Milton, John, 19, 21 Milward, Peter, 107 Miola, Robert, 19 miracle, miraculous, 48, 57, 62, 66, 68, 117, 182 miracle play: in culture, 2, 24, 94, 119; differentiation from, 39–40, 43, 121, 122, 178, 184; Greenblatt on, 110–11; invoking, 125; as liturgical drama, 8; medieval, 3, 17, 23, 129; piety in, 9 modern criticism, 128 modus operandi, 49, 115–16 Mond Crucifixion (Raphael), 32 monotheism, 12, 169, 190n15 Montaigne, Michael de, 169 morality, 95, 171–72 More, Thomas, 19, 22 “Morning Song” (Studdert-Kennedy), 34 motifs, 2, 27, 33, 35, 39–40, 52–58, 70, 132, 157, 162, 184–85 195n1 Much Ado about Nothing (Shakespeare), 41–48, 57, 78, 86, 140

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mundane: explanation, 9, 15–16, 23, 33–34, 40–42, 49–50, 57–58, 74–75, 78–79, 144; reality, 84 Munday, Anthony, 7, 189n8 mystery cycles, 17 mystery play: in culture, 2, 151; differentiation from, 50, 64, 184; formula, 177; invoking, 125; as liturgical drama, 8, 18; medieval, 3, 129; piety in, 9 mystical, mysticism, 55 mythology, 99, 131, 160, 168, 192n32 nativity, 41 nature, natural world, 34, 55–56, 80, 92, 152–53 negative capability, 14, 119–20 New Historicism, 12 Night of the Living Dead, 29 nihilist, nihilism, 87, 99, 106–11, 113 Northbrooke, Rev. John, 10 Nussbaum, Martha, 182 Nuttall, A. D., 163–64, 178 Odyssey (Homer), 167 Of Education (Milton), 19, 21 “Of the Cannibals” (Montaigne), 169 Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (Hooker), 197–98n8 Othello (Shakespeare), 18, 27, 77, 87–97, 124, 129, 165 Ovid, 19, 24, 26, 150–51, 154, 160, 173 Paffrath, Bernhard, 23–26, 29, 48–49, 53, 57, 68–70, 122–23, 137, 143, 178, 185, 195n1 pagan, paganism: antiquity, 146; beliefs, 21, 116–17, 141, 149; Bermudan, 166; characters, 29, 51, 75, 103, 128, 130, 142, 155; and Christianity, 2, 19, 21–22, 31, 37, 69, 101–02, 114–16, 119, 130–31, 164, 175, 182, 191n26, 192n28; culture, 28–29, 31, 33, 139–40, 154; depiction of, 100–101, 104–05, 113–14, 123, 142, 155, 171–72; ethos, 146; mythology, 99, 192n32; overtones, 69; philosophy, 20; resurrection, 133; sources, 171 pageant wagons, 7 Painter, William, 59–60 Palace of Pleasure (Painter), 59–60 Pandosto (Greene), 152 Parker, Oliver, 89

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Passion play, 17 Patterne of Painefull Adventures, The (Twine), 133–34, 136 Paul, 16, 37, 41, 70, 86–87, 150, 182 Pentecost, 164 Pericles (Shakespeare): source of, 128–31, 135–37; themes in, 39, 114, 122–24, 125–27, 132 Petrarch, 191n26 philosophic materialism, 11–12 philosophy, philosophers, 20 piety, 63, 67, 180 Plautus, Titus Maccius, 36–39 Plautus and Terence, 20 players. See actors Poetics (Aristotle), 128 profane, 8, 10, 20, 31, 57, 85 Prometheus, 88 Promos and Cassandra (Whetstone), 72–75 Protestant, Protestanism, 4, 31 providence, 63, 95, 124–25, 141, 146, 155, 181–82, 199n5 Puritanism, 30, 70–71 Pygmalion story, 150–51, 158–60 Pyramis and Thisbe (Shakespeare) quasi resurrection: adaptation of, 2–4, 33, 159; convention of, 49–50, 99, 184; and death, 52–53; explanation of, 16; and forgiveness, 67; portrayed, 29, 38–39, 42, 49, 65, 101, 175–76; possibility of, 41, 47; potential, 23, 132; pre-Christian, 19; preparation for, 51; and recognition, 75, 123; representation of, 77–78, 80, 86, 91–92, 178, 199n5; as reunion, 118; roots of, 15; sequence of, 176–77; symbolism of, 12, 39, 47, 58, 164–65, 179, 191n25; and transformation, 66, 68 quatro version, 91–92, 106–07 Queen Elizabeth, 8 Radical Tragedy (Dollimore), 108 recognitions scenes: boundaries of, 27; classical, 23, 40; convention of, 45, 49–50; depiction of, 64, 72, 142, 162; expansive, 60–61, 67; and fulfillment, 57; integrity of, 26; parody, 187; placement of, 57–58; portrayal of, 82, 99, 155, 158, 175; and quasi resurrection, 75, 118, 123; religious dimension of, 25; resurrectionary potential in,

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Index 57–58, 76; and reunions, 1, 55–56; revisions to, 56; in romances, 52; as triumph, 22 reconciliation, 77, 144, 147–48, 155, 172, 177–78, 184 Records of Early English Drama, 6, x redemption, 68, 97, 101, 114–15 redemptionist critics, 108 REED project. See Records of Early English Drama Reformation, 62, 103, 156 religion, religious: culture, 86; discourse, 103; ideas of, 4; meaning, 151–52; and morality, 95; pervasiveness of, 30; role of, 8, 32, 189n7; and theater, 6, 9 Renaissance, 4, 6, 12, 21, 28 repentance, 88, 123, 145, 166, 173, 178 resurrection: actuality of, 43; and afterlife, 82–84; analogy, 22; cardiopulmonary, 85; Christian, 1, 16, 85, 96, 182; cultural power of, 10, 97; development of, 53; expectation of, 122, 137; explained, 56; failed, 2, 86, 91, 94, 96–97, 106–07, 117–18; fantasy of, 45; figurations of, 2, 8, 18, 24, 33, 36, 49, 67, 118, 174; hope of, 105, 110; ideas of, 56, 152; images of, 13, 38, 70; imitation of, 45; invocation of, 40; language, 8–9, 19, 22–25, 31–32, 50, 60–61, 63, 67, 75, 88, 115, 147, 160; literal, 78; motif, 24, 39, 55, 70, 132, 162, 184–86, 195n1; mutual, 57; pagan, 133; phenomena of, 11; plays, 109; possibility of, 48, 56, 58–59, 67, 79, 81, 110, 121, 142, 176; potential for, 38, 73, 76; promise of, 120; and recognition, 18, 123; reminder of, 63–64; and reunion, 123; simulacra, 86; spectral, 154; staging of, 47, 116, 131, 180–81, 184, 187; suggestions of, 186; symbolism of, 39–40, 46, 52, 58, 143, 164–65; trope, 36, 55–56, 66, 72, 96; understanding of, 16–17, 96 Resurrection (of Christ): archetype of, 119; artistic representation of, 4, 119, 155; culture of, 97; embodiment of, 18, 58; evoking, 1, 33, 49, 59, 64, 87, 131, 146, 158, 187, 190n16; fecundity of, 4; imitation of, 144; joy of, 123;

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meaning of, 183–84; parody of, 186; promise of, 178; resonance of, 134; revelation of, 58, 188n1; as symbol, 3, 32, 36, 57; triumph of, 78 reunion: character, 30, 32–33; imitation of, 57; joyous, 15–16, 22–23, 26, 38; and reconciliation, 35, 77, 118, 137; and resurrection, 123; theatrical, 1–2 revenge, 137, 139, 144, 147, 172 Richard III (Shakespeare), 107 Riches, Barnaby, 53 Rieff, Philip, 9, 12, 95, 190n15 Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Coleridge), 122 romances: aesthetics of, 4; characters, 174; classical influence, 15, 24, 41, 191n25; conventions, 18, 38–39, 41, 50, 65, 67, 69, 96, 114, 118–19, 122–24, 131, 133, 160–61, 167; figurations in, 36; formula, 147–48; Greek, 85, 126; intensity in, 27; later, 64, 76; medieval, 130; motifs in, 2, 40, 86; pagan influence, 103, 155; pastoral, 142; recognition scenes in, 52; refinement, 37, 185; settings of, 57, 101, 137, 153, 165, 177; supernatural in, 51–52 Rome, Roman, 19, 139, 149 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare): Brooke on, 78–87; ending, 79; figuration in, 96; motifs in, 28, 42–44; source of, 79–83; themes in, 13, 26–27, 61, 81, 94, 120, 123, 140; variation of, 142 Royal Shakespeare Company (Ann Arbor), 171–72 Ryan, Kiernan, 15 Rymer, Thomas, 94–95 sacred, 85, 95 sacrifice, 145 Saint John the Divine, 171 salvation. See redemption Scripture: and mystery cycles, 17; application of, 10, 25, 28, 95, 102–03, 135, 139, 145, 147; divine, 20; language, 36, 69, 71; reference to, 170. See also Bible, biblical sectarianism, 31 secular, secularism, 6, 8–9, 11–12, 14, 30, 129, 189n8 Sermon on the Mount, 104 Shaheen, Naseeb: on King Lear, 151, 159, 170, 179; regarding biblical

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references, 25–26, 36, 55, 102–06, 134–35, 139, 145, 169–70, 174 Shakespeare, William: aesthetic purpose, 105; faith of, 4–5; imagination of, 4; language of, 19, 32, 56, 58–59, 85, 126, 145, 169, 193n39; modus operandi of, 115–16; personality, 14; punning, 71; religious beliefs of, 9–10, 23, 30, 63, 115, 147, 155–56, 189n11; sensibilities, 57, 92–93; skepticism of, 10; urbanity of, 5, 9–10; works by: All’s Well that Ends Well, 58–68; Antony and Cleopatra, 13, 29, 186; As You Like It, 3–4; The Comedy of Errors, 26, 36–41, 51, 56–57, 78; Cymbeline, 126, 138–48, 157; Hamlet, 149; Henry IV Part I, 29, 38, 185; Henry V, 22, 27, 187; Henry VIII, 103; Julius Caesar, 36; King Lear, 3–4, 17, 27–28, 57, 67, 87, 91, 95, 97, 98–121, 124, 126, 155; Measure for Measure, 14, 61, 68–76; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 3–4, 9, 72, 78–79, 184; Much Ado about Nothing, 41–48, 57, 78, 86, 140; Othello, 18, 27, 77, 87–97, 124, 129, 165; Pericles, 39, 114, 122, 125–37; Pyramis and Thisbe, 72; Richard III, 107; Romeo and Juliet, 13, 26–27, 42, 44, 61, 77–87, 94, 96, 120, 123–24, 140, 142; The Tempest, 2, 124, 141, 161–83, 177–78, 184; Timons of Athens, 36; Twelfth Night, 40, 48–58, 75, 78, 134, 162, 174; A Winter’s Tale, 2, 11, 64, 77, 126, 140, 149–63, 174, 178. See also Shakespeare plays Shakespeare plays: adaptations, 1, 8, 15–16, 18–19, 21, 25, 30, 33, 36, 41, 53, 58, 69, 183; audiences of, 8; biblical references in, 10, 25–26, 55, 95, 159; characters in, 1; Christianizing, 3, 5, 37, 67; classical conventions in, 21; comedies, 2, 15, 18, 20, 35–36, 38, 40, 77–80, 85, 96, 123–24, 147; devices in, 92; figuration in, 2, 16, 18; First Folio of, 88–93, 106–07, 120, 124; histories, 2, 96, 103; leitmotif of, 78; and motif, 2, 27, 33, 35, 39–40, 52–58, 70, 132, 157, 184–85 195n1; quarto edition of, 91–92, 106–07; religious issues in, 4, 49; revisions,

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195–96n6; romances, 18, 38–39, 41, 50, 65, 67, 69, 96, 114, 118–19, 122–24, 133, 137, 147–48, 153, 165, 167, 177; scholars on, 5; sources for, 3, 21, 24–25, 36, 58, 72, 79–83, 91, 96, 122, 134–41, 159–60, 163, 167–70 180, 193n1; staging of, 13, 22, 185; syncretism, 151; tragedies, 2, 33, 36, 37, 76–79, 86–87, 96, 99, 106, 112, 121–26, 147; tropes, 1–3, 21, 24, 36 41, 53, 55–56, 66, 70, 72, 76, 79, 123, 155–56; variations in, 28. See also Shakespeare, works by Sharpe, Kevin, 32 Shirley, James, 6 Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, 20 Siegel, Paul, 14 sin, 16, 69, 127–28, 148, 156–57, 168 skepticism, 10, 27 Sleeping Beauty, 44 Somerton, Somerset, 7 sorcery, 37 soul, 19, 37, 71, 82, 96–97 sources. See also adaptations: biblical, 159–60, 163, 170–71; classical, 135–40; for plays, 3, 21, 24–25, 36, 58, 72, 79–83, 91, 96, 124–30, 180, 193n1 Spenser, Edmund, 14, 42 spirit, spirituality, 11, 66 Spiritual Shakespeare (Fernie), 11 stage. See theater Stewart, Patrick, 171–72, 175 Strachey, William, 180 Strier, Richard, 12 Studdert-Kennedy, Geoffrey Anketel, 34 suffering, 111, 113, 121 supernatural, 23, 51–52, 82, 86, 116, 126, 141, 147, 162, 166 symbolism, 12, 39–40, 46–47, 52, 58, 143, 164–65, 179, 191n25 syncretism, 21 Tate, Nahum, 99, 110 Taylor, Gary, 91, 117, 195n6 Tempest, The (Shakespeare): sources, 163, 167–68, 171–72, 177–78, 180–83; themes in, 4, 124, 161–68 170–77 temporal world, 8 Ten Commandments, 104 theater, 6–7, 10, 13, 58, 78 Timon of Athens (Shakespeare), 36 Tragedie of Darius (Alexander), 170

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Index tragedies: concept of, 197n5; and conventions, 94, 96, 122; elements of, 77–78, 86–87, 93, 99, 121, 124–26; figurations in, 36; language in, 76; modern, 112; motifs in, 2, 27, 33, 106; revenge, 139; theories of, 112 “Tragicomic Resurrections” (Paffrath), 122–23 transcendence, 54, 57, 83, 85 Trinity College, Cambridge, 20 Tristram, Philippa, 126 tropes: biblical, 2, 21, 41, 53; Christian, 68, 88, 169; classical, 24; dominant, 79; resurrection, 36, 55–56, 66, 72, 96; use of, 1, 3, 70, 76, 123, 155–56 troupes. See acting companies True Chronicle History of King Leir, and his three daughters, Gonorill, Ragan, and Cordella, The, 103, 116 True Reportory of the Wreck and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight, The, (Strachey), 180 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare): dramatic effect in, 40, 51; motifs in, 52–58, 162; pagan characters in, 75; recognition scenes in, 48–51, 78; reunion in, 77; themes in, 134, 174

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Twine, Thomas, 133–34, 136 Two Lamentable Tragedies (Yarington), 93 vengeance, 146, 155, 168 Virgil, 167 virtue, 128, 166 visible world, 8 Walkley, Thomas, 88 Walley, Lancashire, 7 Warning for Fair Women, A, 93–94 Warren, Michael, 91 Wasson, John, 6 Western art, 4, 9 Wheeler, Richard P., 77, 100 Whetstone, George, 72–76 White, Paul Whitfield, 6 “Whoso list to hun” (Wyatt), 54 A Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare): quasi resurrection in, 2, 11–12, 64; source of, 150, 156; themes in, 77, 126, 140, 149–55, 174, 178 Woolf, Virginia, 31 Wyatt, Thomas, 194n5 Yarington, Robert, 83

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