Shakespeare S Hybrid Faith

This book throws new light on the issue of the dramatist's religious orientation by dismissing sectarian and one-sided theories, tackling the problem from the angle of the variegated Elizabethan context recently uncovered by modern historians and theatre scholars. It is argued that faith was a quest rather than a quiet certainty for the playwright.

Shakespeare's Hybrid Faith offers a complete review of current scholarship on Shakespeare and religion and a fresh perspective on the vexed question of the dramatist's religious orientation. It throws new light on the issue by dismissing sectarian and one-sided theories, tackling the problem from the angle of the variegated Elizabethan context which modern historians and theatre scholars have recently uncovered. The book - which relies to a large extent on primary material, including archival material (some of which has never been published before) - argues in particular that faith was more of a quest than a quiet certainty for the playwright. Far from being silent on the subject of religion, Shakespeare in fact came back to this issue again and again throughout his career as a poet and dramatist, primarily to find answers to the religious questions that haunted him and his fellow Elizabethans.

This book sets Shakespeare in the religious context of his times, presenting a balanced, up-to-date account of current biographical and critical debates, and addressing the fascinating, under-studied topic of how Shakespeare's writing was perceived by literary contemporaries - both Catholic and Protestant - whose priorities were more obviously religious than his own. It advances new readings of several plays, especially Hamlet, King Lear and The Winter's Tale; these draw in many cases on new and under-exploited contemporary analogues, ranging from conversion narratives, books of devotion and polemical pamphlets to manuscript drama and emblems. Shakespeare's writing has been seen both as profoundly religious, giving everyday human life a sacramental quality, and as profoundly secular, foreshadowing the kind of humanism that sees no necessity for God. This study attempts to reconcile these two points of view, describing a writer whose language is saturated in religious discourse and whose dramaturgy is highly attentive to religious precedent, but whose invariable practice is to subordinate religious matter to the particular aesthetic demands of the work in hand. For Shakespeare, as for few of his contemporaries, the Judaeo-Christian story is something less than a master narrative.

Speculation about Shakespeare's own religious beliefs and responses to the Reformation have dominated discussions of faith in the playwright's work for decades. As a result, we often lose sight of what's truly important-the plays themselves. By focusing on those plays in several succinct, fluently written chapters, Richard McCoy reminds us of the spell-binding power inherent in works like Othello, As You Like It, and The Winter's Tale and shows why they continue to cause audiences to gladly exercise what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called the "willing suspension of disbelief." Faith in Shakespeare ruminates on what it means to believe in the Bard's plays, exploring how their plots can be both preposterous and gripping, and how their characters seem more substantial and enduring than the people surrounding us in the theater. Informed by Coleridge's "poetic faith," the book discusses what this concept shares with religious faith and how it departs from recent historicist approaches to the dramatist's work. Faith in Shakespeare concentrates more on text than context, finding the afterlife of Shakespeare's language more vivid and engaging than theological controversies. The book confirms its convictions in literature's intrinsic powers by exploring the causes for our paradoxical belief in theater's potent but manifest illusions. Plays that ask their audience to "awake your faith" or "believe then, if you please" ultimately enable us to "mind true things by what their mockeries be." Rather than faith in God or the supernatural, McCoy argues that faith in Shakespeare is sustained and explained only by the complex, subtle, and entirely human power of poetic eloquence and dramatic performance.

This volume freshly illuminates the diversity of early modern religious beliefs, practices and issues, and their representation in Shakespeare's plays.

This book analyzes Shakespeare’s use of biblical allusions and evocation of doctrinal topics in Hamlet, Measure for Measure, The Winter’s Tale, Richard II, and The Merchant of Venice. It identifies references to theological and doctrinal commonplaces such as sin, grace, confession, damnation, and the Fall in these plays, affirming that Shakespeare’s literary imagination is very much influenced by his familiarity with the Bible and also with matters of church doctrine. This theological and doctrinal subject matter also derives its significance from genres as diverse as travel narratives, sermons, political treatises, and royal proclamations. This study looks at how Shakespeare’s deployment of religious topics interacts with ideas circulating via other cultural texts and genres in society. It also analyzes how religion enables Shakespeare’s engagement with cultural debates and political developments in England: absolutism and law; radical political theory; morality and law; and conceptions of nationhood.

For years scholars and others have been trying to out Shakespeare as an ardent Calvinist, a crypto-Catholic, a Puritan-baiter, a secularist, or a devotee of some hybrid faith. In Religion Around Shakespeare, Peter Kaufman sets aside such speculation in favor of considering the historical and religious context surrounding his work. Employing extensive archival research, he aims to assist literary historians who probe the religious discourses, characters, and events that seem to have found places in Shakespeare’s plays and to aid general readers or playgoers developing an interest in the plays’ and playwright’s religious contexts: Catholic, conformist, and reformist. Kaufman argues that sermons preached around Shakespeare and conflicts that left their marks on literature, law, municipal chronicles, and vestry minutes enlivened the world in which (and with which) he worked and can enrich our understanding of the playwright and his plays.

A wide-ranging yet accessible investigation into the importance of religion in Shakespeare's works, from a team of eminent international scholars.