SOURCE: Battenhouse, Roy. “Introduction: An Overview of Christian Interpretation.” In Shakespeare's Christian Dimension, pp. 1-14. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

[In the following essay, Battenhouse surveys 150 years of commentary on the Christian aspects of Shakespeare's art.]

Many ordinary readers have felt instinctively that Shakespeare and the Bible belong together. Yet inevitably there have been others who claim for the poet their own reductive beliefs, despite his burial in a church and a Last Will that names Christ his savior. At the turn of the present century, for instance, we find Shakespeare described by Churton Collins as a “theistical agnostic,” and A. C. Bradley saying that he painted the world “without regard to anyone's beliefs.” John Robertson (a celebrated Disintegrator) declared that Shakespeare was groping his way toward the “sanity” of Auguste Comte. And England's poet laureate John Masefield, when writing on Shakespeare and the Spiritual Life (1924), was confident that to the dramatist “orthodox religion” meant almost nothing, since he “held to no religion save that of humanity and his own great nature.” A follow-up to this contention was voiced by D. G. James in his Dream of Learning (1951), where Christianity is equated with “a fierce censorship” and we are assured that Shakespeare “did not write as a Christian.” Even more skeptical are some of today's deconstructionists who seem to say that any author's personal beliefs is irrelevant and also irrecoverable.

Nevertheless a growing body of scholarship tying Shakespeare's plays to Christian insights has been accumulating since the mid-nineteenth century, and so an overview of this history will be helpful as a background to some summary observations on the achievements the present anthology catalogs.

The religious contexts of action in Shakespearean drama are the focus of our anthology. They may help us recall that in Elizabethan England religion was considered the anchor of morals, and the God of Christian faith was generally believed to be the creator, sustainer, and judge of all mankind. The guidebook for understanding good and evil in all sorts and conditions of life was Holy Scripture, a capstone to testimonies provided universally in the Book of Nature. In such a context everyone's history could be one of journey toward self-knowledge and health, or else of opportunities squandered. Do not Shakespeare's stories imply this sense of history? Historical criticism in our time should be open to perceptions that a drama's horizons of understanding can be ultimately Christian in their outreach.

Of signal importance has been Hermann Ulrici's Shakespeare's Dramatic Art, which appeared in English translation in 1846 and grew to a third edition by 1880. Ulrici read Shakespeare as “a Christian in the truest sense” with a “Christian view of life.” He saw the dramatist's achievement as a blending of the “idealistic art” of the Middle Ages with the realism of modern history; and with this perspective he had no difficulty in accepting the ending of King Lear as a salvation of soul for Lear and Gloucester in their coming to see the true nature of love after undergoing a purification. Similarly, Ulrici read The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure as showing that human virtue is possible only in and through an inner love that combines strictness with mercy. In all of Shakespeare's comedies he saw what he called a “dialectics of irony” employed to neutralize one-sided obsessions, and he defended Shakespeare's puns as intrinsic to this comic method. Thus a portrait of the poet as moral philosopher replaced the wild genius presumed by eighteenth-century critics.

In this altered context, English writers began to speak of Shakespeare as Christian, and studies soon appeared in tribute to the national poet's congruence with the Good Book. Of these the most substantial were Bishop Charles Wordsworth's Shakespeare's Knowledge and Use of the Bible (1864) written for the Anniversary ceremonies and expanded in a third edition of 1880; J. B. Selkirk's (pseud. for James Brown) Bible Truths with Shakespearian Parallels (1872), which had a sixth edition by 1888; and, in America, William Burgess's The Bible in Shakespeare (Chicago, 1903; later reprints). Wordsworth devoted a long chapter to Shakespeare's biblical allusions and another to his “Religious Principles and Sentiments derived from the Bible.” He disagreed with Mr. Bowdler's excising from The Family Shakespeare the clown's speech in All's Well about the narrow gate and the porter's speech in Macbeth about the primrose way. He noted that in the tragedies the catastrophe results from sinful passions such as revenge and jealousy. He concluded his book by saying that no other Elizabethan “has paid homage to Christianity as effectually as Shakespeare.” Selkirk arranged parallel quotations from Shakespeare and the Bible on more than a hundred topics. He concluded that Shakespeare's genius had so assimilated and reproduced the Bible's great truths that his words seem to renew its authority. Burgess proclaimed Shakespeare a sincere believer of “the main doctrines of the Christian religion” and offered in evidence from the plays parallels filling 16 pages and 150 pages of quotations on topics such as Conscience, God's Attributes, Thankfulness, etc. He found eight references to Cain, a confused memory of the 23rd Psalm by Mistress Quickly, and “the very likeness of Ahab and Jezebel” in the Macbeths (here citing Thomas Eaton's Shakespeare and the Bible, 1857).

Are there shortcomings in these studies? By hindsight we can observe that some of the moral sentiments cited are less genuinely Christian than they sound. For instance, Iago's discourse on free will is listed by Selkirk among Shakespeare's Bible truths. Actually, however, Iago was here using a Pelagian language to lure Roderigo to enslave himself to his lustful passion. In other passages, even when the moral idea expressed is indeed Christian and may reflect Shakespeare's own faith, Selkirk fails to note that the speaker who voices it was actually using it hypocritically to mislead his listeners—as is the case, surely, in King Henry IV's reference to “Those blessed feet. … nailed / For our advantage to the bitter cross.” Here the king puts piety on display when, for his political advantage, he is about to postpone the crusade he had promised his feet would make. This truth of the drama can be overlooked by readers who look to Shakespeare simply as a storehouse of moral sentiments.

Let me discern also a misapprehension by Burgess when noting Canterbury's reference in Henry V to the Book of Numbers. This indicates, says Burgess, Shakespeare's versatility in using Scripture. A wiser inference would be that the Archbishop is being characterized as an irresponsible exegete, who cites from Numbers a text which (a canny reader might know) is a half-truth since it omits the more pertinent passage in Numbers where Moses disallowed a daughter the right to inherit land from her father if she marries a foreigner. Shakespeare's ironic point, wholly missed by Burgess, is that Henry V has no valid claim to France. A bigger mistake regarding Henry V is made by Wordsworth. He misreads the whole character of this king's piety by failing to see the irony in Shakespeare's having him fulsomely ascribe his Agincourt victory to God's arm alone, right after we have seen the battle won by Henry's order to cut the throats of prisoners. The Victorian Bishop's uncritical feelings of patriotism along with his liking for moral sentiment have left a blindspot in his ability to see. When tabulating Bible allusions he can point us to Matthew 2 as the source for Henry's mention of “Herod's bloody-hunting slaughtermen” but without perceiving in Henry a kinship with Herod. This blindspot, I must add, was also in Ulrici's vision and caused his declaring that Henry's career stands for “the moral purification and amendment of man.” Indeed, it can be said that the deceitfulness of this monarch's piety remained largely unexposed by literary critics until around 1950, when Professor Goddard focused his Quaker intelligence on the specifics of the action in Shakespeare's play. Only then did the possibility arise that our “country” poet might have viewed history with the irony of an Erasmus.

A disillusionment with romantic idealism emerged after World War I and was signalled by T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. While this poem got its popularity from its truth-telling vignettes of hollow love quest, its anthropological diggings encompassed a scope of history from Agamemnon's times to the present day. And its author was eventually discovered to be, surprisingly, an apologist for Christian orthodoxy. His essays in appreciation of Lancelot Andrewes and Dante, while at the same time he questioned Arnold's humanism and Lambeth's churchmanship, made possible a revived scholarly attention to the history of religion and to medieval drama in particular, along with some modern experiments in churchyard drama, and some stageplays that hinted of Christian mysteries hidden in secular experience. Eliot himself proceeded not only to tell us that literary criticism needed to be “completed” by recourse to theological truths, but also to provide avenues to those truths in his Four Quartets begun in the 30s and concluded during World War II in the 40s.

Those two decades are usually described by historians of Shakespeare criticism as an era of “historical” approaches. That is true; but the wide range of history that was reinvigorating scholarship needs to be more fully appreciated. While some students were delving into the history of theatre in general, or of Elizabethan acting companies, or of medieval story conventions, others were looking into schoolbooks and Stratford schoolmasters (two of them of Catholic sympathies) during Shakespeare's boyhood, or assessing the extent of his familiarity with the Bible (42 of its books by R. Noble's count) and the Prayerbook, or reviewing the contents of the Elizabethan Homilies appointed for church use. The history of ideas became important with the publication of Lily B. Campbell's Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes (1930) and Howard Patch's The Tradition of Boethius (1935) and Willard Farnham's The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy (1936). And concurrently, scholars of Old English literature and the medieval poets began to re-estimate the Christian ingredients of Beowulf and the works of Cynewulf, Langland, and Chaucer. All this, when accompanied by the proddings from T. S. Eliot I have mentioned, provided challenging horizons for those of us who underwent our graduate training in the mid-30s.

Historic religion received an increasing attention during World War II when the B.B.C. put on the air some talks by C. S. Lewis, known for his witty Screwtape Letters but now offering the public a core of “mere Christianity.” His The Case for Christianity appeared in 1946. Almost everybody in those years seemed interested in Christianity's relation to culture. A stream of books around that topic issued from both Protestant and Catholic scholars, but was fed especially by Maritain's True Humanism (1938), Ransoming the Time (1941), and Christianity and Democracy (1945), along with Gilson's various expoundings of the medieval philosophers. De Lubac launched his multi-volume Exégèse Médiévale in 1941; and after a while Protestant and Catholic presses alike were publishing each a series of translations from the Church Fathers. Also new journals cropped up with titles such as The Christian Scholar and Christendom, college courses on the metaphysical poets flourished, and literary critics were shown by Erich Auerbach's Mimesis (Eng. tr., 1953) the special qualities characteristic of Judaeo-Christian stylistics.

Shakespeare's relation to Catholic tradition was first probed in the mid-nineteenth century by Richard Simpson, whose papers were assembled and amplified in Henry S. Bowden's The Religion of Shakespeare (1899). The contention of this book was the probability of a personal sympathy for the Old Faith by Shakespeare. Bowden began with some distinctions between Catholic and Protestant doctrines, and then showed how biographical documents relating to Shakespeare can have a hidden religious explanation. His coverage of the plays was chiefly impressionistic, noting the Catholic tone of lines such as “Unhousel'd, disappointed, unanel'd” in Hamlet, or the reference by the Countess in All's Well to “her prayers, whom Heaven delights to hear,” or Prospero's allusion to “her help, of whose soft grace” he has had aid. An overconcern for pious wording, however, misled Bowden to eulogize Henry V as an “ideal” king and to misattribute compassion to Pandulph in King John. His best insights are his likening the persecuted Catholics under Queen Elizabeth to the plight of Edgar in King Lear, and his reply to Harsnett by quoting Thomas More to the effect that occasional fraudulent miracles should not blind us to the reality of true miracles—the kind Bowden finds in the conversion of Lear, in the healing of the King of France by Helena, and in the cures by King Edward in Macbeth.

The argument that Shakespeare “retained a genuine esteem for certain aspects” of Catholicism was renewed by John Henry de Groot in his The Shakespeares and “The Old Faith” (1946). To Bowden's culling of Catholic phrases he added others; and as evidence of Shakespeare's familiarity with the Rheims New Testament he cited the words cockle, narrow gate, and not a hair perished, unique to that translation. But De Groot's important contribution was his convincing argument, based centrally on discoveries made by Herbert Thurston in 1923 and subsequently, that the Last Will and Testament of John Shakespeare, the poet's father, was indeed no forgery but reliable evidence of his probable contact with the Jesuit missioners, since the Will follows a formula for Testaments drawn up by St Charles Borromeo and imported into England by them. This historical evidence justified De Groot in postulating a home training of young William which could have included Catholic lore and its continuing witness in iconography, such as the wall tapestries referred to by Falstaff. Moreover, John Speed's reference in 1611 to the “papist” Robert Persons and “his poet” implies that the dramatist retained Catholic sympathies.

Mutschmann and Wentersdorf's Shakespeare and Catholicism (1952) explained why “religion mattered supremely to Shakespeare” and concluded, on the basis of a large array of evidence both historical and dramatic, that he was a secret Catholic all his life and may have died a papist. M. D. H. Parker in her The Slave of Life (1955) devoted an Appendix to capsulizing and reinforcing the biographical interpretations of Mutschmann and Wentersdorf, and in her earlier chapters she drew on doctrines in Augustine and Aquinas to account for the idea of justice that undergirds Shakespeare's dramaturgy. More recently, Peter Milward has summarized the biographical problem in his Shakespeare's Religious Background (1973), and in Shakespeare Yearbook 1 (1990) has written of Shakespeare's affinities with Thomas More, and has termed the plays “a synthesis of tradition and reform” in which allusions to the contemporary religious scene “cry out from between the lines.”

The horizons of history uncovered by the scholars I have just mentioned, it should be noted, are larger than those entertained by E. M. W. Tillyard in his Elizabethan World Picture (1943) and his Shakespeare's History Plays (1944). For although he attempted in the latter book a providential view of history, the sense of providence he relied on was that of Edward Hall's Protestant overview rather than that of Augustine's City of God (the textbook of More and Erasmus). Tillyard's unawareness of the difference can be seen to be, in retrospect, the cause of the difficulty he got into when interpreting Henry V. In following Hall's portrait of Henry as an ideal king, Tillyard complains, Shakespeare ends with a copybook hero whose platitudes depress us and whose coarseness suggests that the dramatist was “writing up something he had begun to hate.” The play's “slack construction” suggests that its author “had written his epic of England and had no more to say on the matter.” But are these remarks consistent with Tillyard's overall claim that the eight plays constitute a unified chain of moral interpretation? At odds with this is also his comment that in 3 Henry VI Shakespeare failed to make his material significant because he got tired or bored. It seems to me Tillyard approximates a satisfactory reading only when he views Henry Richmond as a godly minister of England's deliverance from Richard's tyranny. Yet, even here, he does not see that Hall's tracing of the happy outcome to a “policy” suggested by Buckingham has been replaced by Shakespeare's scene of the Queen's rejecting of Richard's “policy” pleas. Is not Shakespeare revising Hall's sense of providence by relying on Thomas More's sense of it in the material Hall borrowed from More and tried to overlay with moralizing on the glory of national unity?

Richmond's prayer to the “gracious” eye of God is not recorded by Hall. And when Tillyard cites it, his surrounding commentary reveals a twentieth-century fear of identifying Shakespeare with any settled beliefs:

If one were to say that in Richard III Shakespeare pictures England restored to order through God's grace, one gravely risks being lauded or execrated for attributing to Shakespeare personally the full doctrine of prevenient grace according to Calvin. When therefore I say that Richard III is a very religious play, I want to be understood as speaking of the play and not of Shakespeare. For the purposes of the tetralogy and most obviously for this play Shakespeare accepted the prevalent belief that God had guided England into her haven of Tudor prosperity. And he accepted it with his whole heart, as later he did not accept the supposed siding of God with the English against the French he so loudly proclaimed in Henry V.

(p. 204)

This passage leaves unexplained what Shakespeare did “accept” (believe?) regarding Henry V's status within a providential order, and also it seems to say that Tillyard thinks Calvin the only available interpreter of divine providence, and that “Tudor prosperity” is its goal. If Tillyard had consulted Augustine or Boethius, however, he could have learned that political prosperity is not identical with divine blessing, and that providence punishes a sinner centrally with his own sin and the interior weariness it entails (as in the vanity of “idol ceremony” confessed by Henry). But instead Tillyard supposes a Shakespeare of shifting belief, one who put his heart into Hall's (implicitly Calvinist?) belief when writing Richard III but lost enthusiasm for it subsequently.

Understandably, many readers of Tillyard have been unsatisfied with his explanations. Yet what warrants our skepticism, I would say, is not the premise that Shakespeare's histories reflect a divine providence but rather Tillyard's version of providence. Moreover, to grasp Shakespeare's chain we need to read the eight plays in the order given them in the folio's text rather than in their order of composition. Beginning with Richard's disowning of the balm of grace and ending with Henry Richmond's turning to grace and sacrament, the cycle places Henry V at a midpoint in the downward spiraling, a place in England's history analogous to Julius Caesar's in Rome's history, whereas the later Henry Tudor is analogous to Rome's Constantine.

The historical approaches I have associated with post-Bradleyan criticism were accompanied by a concurrent attention to Shakespeare's language of symbolism. One may regard this development as an amplifying of Romanticism's focus on the poet as a questing Seer, and perhaps as a continuation of Keats's idea that “Shakespeare lived a life of allegory” on which his works comment. G. Wilson Knight became its spokesman in 1930 with his metaphorically titled Wheel of Fire, for which T.S. Eliot provided a Prefatory Note. Eliot here wrote of the need to grasp the “whole design” of a poetic drama and to read both character and plot with an understanding of the work's “subterrene or submarine music.” He also emphasized that the greatest poetry speaks “on two planes at once,” a sensory experience within which there moves a pattern of deeper meaning. Eliot was perhaps remembering Augustine's analysis of a logic we listen for under time-borne sounds.

Knight saw Shakespeare's plays as having a spatial-temporal patterning of Tempest and Music set forth in a language of parable. And the most striking essay in Knight's many volumes was his early “Measure for Measure and the Gospels.” Here he uncovered the affinity of Shakespeare's drama to the parables of Jesus and defended the Duke of this play as embodying in his actions the ethical wisdom of Jesus. Knight was writing not from any knowledge of the history of theology but rather as a post-Romantic who valued human imagination as the key to insight into life; he found in Shakespeare a poet whose genius coincided here with that of Christ—each being, as Knight explained elsewhere, an independent pioneer who challenged “orthodox” morality. Knight's reliance simply on imaginative genius was later to betray him into uncritical admiration for the transrational poetry of Nietzsche, by the light of which his comments on the mystical humanism of Shakespeare became questionable. Nevertheless his emphasis on symbolism has done much to reinvigorate Shakespeare criticism. It has directed attention to dimensions of myth and miracle in Shakespeare's plays, besides encouraging the efforts of Northrop Frye to associate literary genres with seasonal phases in the cycle of human experience.

S. L. Bethell in The Winter's Tale: A Study (1947) probed more radically than either Knight or Frye. Noting this play's atmosphere of supernatural religion, he stated his conviction that Shakespeare wrote “from the standpoint of orthodox Christianity” while using archaic dramatic methods to put his audience into an experiencing of symbolic meanings. Bethell's earlier Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition (1944) had called attention to a multiconsciousness in Shakespeare's language, tracing its source to medieval popular drama. Then in his Literary Criticism and the English Tradition (1948) he proceeded to emphasize that a poem's most significant level is the sequence of events it re-creates in the mind, a narrative that conveys by its author's attitude a criticism of life, for the grasping of which the real world must be co-present with the play world in the minds of the audience. Anticipating some of today's theorists, Bethell insisted that a work's quality of insight into human experience is what critics ultimately judge, and that in this matter

there is no critical neutrality; there are only Christian critics and Marxist critics and Moslem critics—and critics who think themselves disinterested but who are really swayed unconsciously by the beliefs they have necessarily acquired by being members of a particular society in a particular place and time. … The ‘pure critics’ of today adhere in fact to the dogmatic position of nineteenth-century humanism, which has been for so long the atmosphere of English academic circles that it is taken for granted like the air itself. … The Christian, on the other hand, knows that … assumptions, unexamined because scarcely realized as assumptions, are part of the lot of fallen man. Such dogma, untrue or unclear, reflects the curse of Adam, and against it we have only to set the revealed dogma which we experience as a partial clearing of vision. … The Christian critic has little reason for arrogance, and if he should fail to do justice in his calling the fault lies with him and not the Cause he has espoused.

(pp. 25-26)

A similarly Christian response to the special quality of Shakespeare's narrative language may be seen in Nevill Coghill's ground-breaking essay of 1950 on the medieval “Basis of Shakespearian Comedy.” Citing Dante's explanation of the four levels of meaning possible in a story of human journey, Coghill defined Shakespearean comedy as a journey from misery to joy and illustrated the presence of an allegorical import in several of Shakespeare's comedies.

Meanwhile in 1946 there appeared in PMLA my essay arguing that Shakespeare's Measure for Measure was informed by Christianity's doctrine of Atonement. The Duke's role, I explained, is a secular analogue of St Luke's “He hath visited and redeemed his people” and is replete with imagery of a star-led shepherd and king of love who rescues the lost and ransoms the guilty by a conquest such as the Church Fathers describe when explicating the Atonement story. The play's whole action, as I read it, participates by analogy in the biblical cycle of sin, law, sentence, intervention, faith, suffering, and reconciliation. This reading was curtly dismissed by Tillyard, who preferred to view the play as an artistic failure. Yet other scholars—notably Barbara Lewalski, J. A. Bryant, and R. G. Hunter—turned to biblical typology as an under-structure of Shakespeare's art; and by 1969 I was able to argue that biblical “premises” (a baptised Aristotelianism) governed his depicting of tragedy. “Typological Criticism” was the label David Bevington aptly used when discussing Christian interpretations in the Introduction to his textbook Shakespeare (3rd edition, 1980). He credited it, however, only with serving the cause of “image” study and remarked that its dissenters had made it assume “a defensive posture.” True, it has been elbowed to the sidelines during our post-Vietnam era. But in fact its leaven of insight has been quietly enlarging, as will be evident in the range of selections in my present anthology. Arthur C. Kirsch, for instance, has recently invoked the Atonement motif when explaining the structure of Much Ado and also of Cymbeline, while Frances Pearce has invoked it in her commentary on All's Well.

Crosscurrents among Christian interpreters do of course sometimes muddle its impact. Their variety needs to be taken into account. Roland M. Frye, for instance, brought a narrowly Protestant cast of mind to his book on Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine (1963), in which he assailed “The School of Knight,” his label for followers of G. Wilson Knight, especially J.A. Bryant. In Frye's view they were translating Shakespeare “out of dramatic into theological terms” not allowed by Luther and Calvin for secular drama. He therefore spoke of “blatant abuses of criticism” in theological analyses of Shakespeare and insisted that the plays should be read as employing Christian doctrine only for local characterizations and not as “essential” to his art. This argument, while it gave a welcome handle to anti-Christian readers, ignored the use of typology by Elizabethan poets such as Spenser. It also raised the hackles of Professor Knight, who proceeded to charge Frye with grossly misrepresenting him as medieval whereas in fact he regarded Shakespeare as looking “ahead to Ibsen and Nietszche,” and Knight's phrase “miniature Christs” was a “passing analogy” only. (See his Shakespeare and Religion [1967], pp. 293-303.) One can see in Knight's reply his own muddling of a Dionysian with a Christian ethic. Frye, on the other hand, was supposing that Christian typology is essentially irrelevant to everyday life. Barbara Lewalski, herself of Protestant sympathies, has commented on the error of Frye's stance (in a footnote to her essay on Twelfth Night, infra).

But did Bryant's treatment of Shakespeare's tragedies harbor sometimes an ambiguity akin to Knight's? One of Frye's objections was to Bryant's finding “redemptions” in the love-deaths of Antony and Cleopatra. Bryant describes the death of these lovers as a “selfless” expenditure which enabled them to achieve “the distinctively Christian ideal of humanity.” May not some readers question whether the suicides are really “selfless” and resemble a Christian sacrifice? Bryant qualifies by saying they “never really see the parallel” between their human action and “that perfect action which might have saved them.” Does he mean they grasped imperfectly the Christian ideal? I proposed rather, in 1969, that theirs is a parody version of true sacrifice. That is, they unwittingly enact a grotesque analogy to the Christian ideal. Swayed by Wilson Knight's view of Cleopatra, Bryant admired her “strong toil of grace” without noticing that hers is a “riggish” kind of grace beloved by worshipers of Isis. David Kastan, more recently, has commented on the tragic deceptiveness of Cleopatra's grace (see infra).

When interpreting Shakespeare's comedies Bryant made good use of biblical analogy, as have other subsequent critics alert to typology. Applying this approach to tragedy, however, can be more complex. For here an interpreter is tempted to go beyond seeing in the tragic hero a likeness to Saul or Jezebel or some other type of sinful Adamkind and imagine a change in the hero that results in a quasi-Christian serenity. A frequent divergence among practitioners of Christian criticism has been over whether Othello or Hamlet or Richard II can be supposed to have died a saved soul. While skeptics would simply rule out this question as irrelevant, the critics who tackle it do so sometimes unconvincingly.

Pertinent to this issue is some considering of a tragedy's traditional function of catharsis. Can a tragedy exercise our pity and fear if it ends with its hero triumphant? Critics such as O. B. Hardison and John Andrews discussed this. A purging of pity and fear, they argued, depends on our seeing some great failure or failures unintended by the tragic actor but fated by his mischoices. I myself agreed with this interpretation and proposed that ideally a spectator needs to be brought to say at the end of a tragedy, “There but for the grace of God go I.” The auditor needs to arrive at a valid state of pity and fear through the story's cleansing us of muddied or crude modes of pity and fear. In a similar way, a comedy should exercise our emotion of laughter and bring us to a purged mode of joy. Both comedy and tragedy, if thus viewed, are intended to be educative in a therapeutic way—not chiefly in a moralistic or didactic way. Drama is properly an invitation to self-discovery. It is the telling of a story which engages our emotions and minds in their unpurged condition (what Bethell referred to as the crude assumptions of our fallen nature). Then it proceeds to refine these as we react to the story itself, unless we resist or obstruct that process. Do not our best theologians (both nowadays and in early church history) engage us with a story, a “narrative theology,” and does not the dramatist Shakespeare make his appeal through some “old tale” of perennial relevance?

Francis Fergusson has been a critic helpful especially for understanding what Aristotle meant by the imitation of an action. Very simply, according to Fergusson, Aristotle was referring to a basic action of the human psyche, imitated by six means, plot being the foremost. Fergusson's essay on Macbeth, in 1951, defined the basic action of that play as a psychic impulse to “outrun the pauser, reason”—which we see the hero persist in to his own downward destruction. But also, in this unusual tragedy with dimensions more than Aristotelian, we see a counter-movement when Malcolm outruns the pauser reason in an upward and saving direction. Through an engraced faith he overcomes his rational hesitancy regarding the trustworthiness of Macduff, and then with him undertakes a rescue of Scotland under the aegis of “powers above.” A restoring of civic health “by the grace of Grace” closes the action. Supplementing Fergusson, other critics have elaborated on how sin and grace condition the two contrasting directions of psychic action imitated in this drama. It is as if the dramatist were aware of St Paul's providential view of history in Rom 5:20, that where sin increases, grace abounds all the more, since we see an Adam-like tragic fall by Macbeth followed by a grace of intervention by Malcolm (whose mother on her knees “Died every day she lived”) and by England's Edward, the Confessor-king.

For Christian critics there is significance in the fact that a typological reading of history was provided by St Paul's interpretation of the Red Sea crossing. Our forefathers, says Paul, were baptized in the cloud and in the sea (1 Cor 10:2) and drank of the Rock which is Christ. This means that they began to participate in Christian mystery when they escaped from Egyptian values and committed themselves to the faith of Moses. It means that the sea-experience of these pre-Christians was a washing analogous to Christian baptism. It means, by implication, that a washing or purgation can happen anywhere or anytime when a nation or a person undergoes some ordeal that dissolves an old orientation and gives birth to a new. In short, every tempest-moment in human experience can either drown or baptize, either wreck or educate. History is our schoolhouse, not a treadmill. Around that truth Shakespeare constructed his dramas.

King Lear is a foremost example. The spouting hurricanoes to which Lear bares his head serve to drown his pride. They dissolve it, as we see, into a madness like that of Nebuchadnezzar, who had to eat grass in order to discover grace. Critics who find in this play's hero an earnest of redemption—and there are today still many who do—see the saving process as under way but incomplete when the story closes tragic and open-ended. They see a purgation that involves his dying to a blind self and being raised out of that grave by a Cordelia who foreshadows Christ's role. And one recent critic, significantly, has outlined the logic of this story by invoking as its gloss the church's liturgy, for the eve on which candidates are prepared for Easter baptism. That liturgy, as reviewed by John Cunningham (in 1984 in Christianity and Literature) rehearses mankind's journey toward the Light in four stages: 1) into the wilderness; 2) into the baptistry; 3) out of the baptistry in new garments; and 4) at the gate of death, where the soul pants for a higher life. These are the stages Lear experiences analogously in his pagan Britain.

But if historical experience itself mediates baptisms, moments when an old order of life is replaced by a new, can we not apply this framework of understanding to our reading of England's history as dramatized in Richard III? By the end of 3 Henry VI Shakespeare has depicted a national history reduced to a swirl; imagery of wind and tide predominate. At this point the Machiavel Richard turns those waters into a vortex of fraud that drowns almost the whole community in an ordeal of bloodshed. A nadir is reached when innocent babes are massacred, as if by a biblical Herod. But this very outrage causes the warring queens to unite in a sisterhood of weeping mothers, so to speak. Together they renounce their addiction to Fortune's favors and turn to a rescuer from overseas. A secret supporter of this conversion is Lord Stanley (ancestor of the Lord Derby who in Shakespeare's day was suspected of Catholic sympathies), and another supporter is the Bishop of Ely (from whom Thomas More acquired his sense of history). Ely's desertion worries Richard with an anxiety comparable, say, to that felt by ancient Pharaoh when Moses escaped. And in the final showdown at Bosworth, the famous cry of the defeated Richard, “A horse, my kingdom for a horse,” echoes, I think, the Bible's tribute to God in Ex 15:21: “the horse and his rider he hath thrown into the sea.” Shakespeare has a biblical sense of history. Critics such as Tom Driver, Edward Berry, and Emrys Jones have articulated this point with various kinds of evidence.

Even in Shakespeare's lighter comedies it can be seen that the Bible's Red Sea crossing has a secular analogy in the purgation that precedes a lover's achieving of an adult maturity. “True lovers have been ever crossed,” says Hermia in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and in that comedy the cross is their night of misadventures in a moonlit woods. Idolatrous fancies enbondage them in follies until a corrective ointment frees their eyes and they escape from dotage into a daylight understanding. The barking dogs and hunters' horns which help them wake up have a function here like that in Shakespeare's The Tempest, where Ariel sings of watchdogs and chanticleer's cry when directing young Ferdinand's education. In both plays a cleansing of eyes and heart is a necessary preparation for marriage festival. This is the case also in the comedy of Much Ado, which depicts the victimization of lovers to ego-serving fashions until their folly is exposed and they repent it. Figuratively they must undergo a death and rebirth, as is emphasized in each of the plays I have mentioned. Until that crossing is made, the story in each play turns about the wayward antics of deluded questers—for instance, the trashing of marriage by Claudio in Much Ado, or the treacheries plotted by Antonio's party and Caliban's, or Titania's monstrous obsession and Bottom's dream.

Bottom's dream, by the way, has been discovered by Christian critics to be Shakespeare's travesty analogy of St Paul's experience. That is, Paul's report in 1 Cor 2:9 and 2 Cor 12:4 of experiencing a mystery that transcended his daily routine has its parody parallel in the experience Bottom reports in befuddled amazement over having experienced what “the ear of man hath not seen” and his tongue is “not able to conceive.” Bottom's wondrous perception that “Man is but an ass” has its exemplification in the absurd Pyramus and Thisbe story, which ends with pathetic suicides. By contrast, the lovers in Shakespeare's main plot are able to substitute self-mockery for suicide, make a successful transition from self-love to self-knowledge, and then join in wedding festivities which conclude with a hallowing of the household. In metaphoric terms, they have had a crossover experience, a kind of sacramental transformation.

Imagery of death and rebirth, as a little reflection can tell us, is basic to the structure of Shakespeare's romances. In All's Well Helena pretends a death as part of her St Francis strategy for shaming Bertram to death while offering him a rebirth into true love. Hermione in The Winter's Tale simulates death in order to become in due time the disguised bearer of new life for Leontes; and at that play's very middle we hear an old shepherd say, “Now bless thyself: thou mett'st with things dying, I with things new-born.” In Cymbeline Imogen must fall asleep in a grave and emerge as a disguised Fidele in order to re-win her husband while also converting Britain's king. In The Tempest Alonzo must be brought to a mudded state of guilty despair, and Caliban to a literal quagmire, before each of them can receive grace or become wise enough to seek it.

Pericles is the most spacious of Shakespeare's romances, traversing as it does a lifetime journey on the part of its hero, in voyages that involve two episodes of storm at sea and then a calm of melancholy before his being visited by a voice that touches on the music of the spheres and directs him to a temple of joy. The structure of this play—so Cynthia Marshall has recently argued (in 1991)—is a capsulized story of the human race through the Seven Ages of History discerned by St Augustine in the Bible and publicized in The Golden Legend, the people's manual of heroic adventure in medieval times. Thus, for instance, the first storm encountered by Pericles corresponds to that in the biblical Age of Noah; Pericles emerges from it with a recovered armor that symbolizes faith. A second storm accompanies his departure from Pentapolis and entails the seeming loss of a family member, as in the Age of Abraham. Many years later, however, a visiting of Pericles by Marina parallels the biblical Age of the Prophets that brings news of salvation. The poet Gower is the play's Chorus to guide us through what Marshall appropriately calls a Cosmic Overview.

We know that Pericles, along with King Lear, was on the repertoire of some touring actors who performed these plays in the country house of a Yorkshire Catholic family in 1610. Evidently, neither play in such circles was thought to be, as some moderns suppose, haphazardly episodic or destructive of Christian faith. Many evangelical Protestants, also, are likely to have welcomed these plays, since the biblical typology of Pericles is akin to that of those Protestants who chose to risk their lives in voyages to America, and we know (as pertinent to King Lear) that exorcism was practised in Puritan circles as well as Catholic ones (to the dismay of Samuel Harsnett, who had objected to exorcisings by the puritan John Darrell before turning his attack on the “papists”). These parties, alongside many Christians in general in the early seventeenth century, are not likely to have regarded The Tempest, as some of today's critics do, as a recording of European despotism, but rather to have perceived in it a meaning such as James Walter has expounded in an essay in PMLA (1983) which invokes Augustine's allegorical interpretation of Genesis as a key to the metaphors Shakespeare uses in telling the Tempest story of providence in history. As Kenneth Muir has remarked, contemporary voyage literature included William Strachey's account of a shipwreck in Bermuda which carried memories of Paul's shipwreck on an island in which not a hair perished (Acts 27:34).

There is abundant evidence, much more than I have here touched on, for taking seriously the Christian contexts of Shakespeare's dramatic art. But can it nowadays receive a fair hearing? Much of recent critical opinion is not encouraging. Near my desk is a series of books called “The Critics Debate” published by Humanities Press International. T. F. Wharton on Measure for Measure (1989) begins debate by saying that this play's “imperfections are obvious.” When he gets around to summarizing Christian interpretations he does this inaccurately and reductively, and then proceeds to cite with approval critics who help him argue that the Duke is a meddlesome manipulator with no holiness whatever. Bill Overton's review of The Winter's Tale (1989) avoids Wharton's dogmatic skepticism. Overton is painstaking in all his summaries of critics, and he praises Traversi, Bethell, and Knight for helping establish that the play is “worth the fullest attention.” But he objects to their letting the play become a “symbolic vehicle for ultimate truths about life.” He feels that Bethell has “imposed” a Christian perspective on the play. He believes more attention should be paid to “political questions” so as not to abstract the play from the processes of history. What he means by this is implied in his honest confession at the beginning of his study: “I practise no religion, and my politics are socialist.” Plainly, his hermeneutical circle conditions his range of appreciation.

We can expect the Christian dimension of Shakespeare's work to be downplayed or misrepresented by readers whose habit patterns of sensibility resist the acknowledgment of Christian mystery. St Paul recognized that to rationalists the cross would seem scandalous, while to legalistic moralists it was a stumbling block. He had to appeal beyond these obstacles to a latent capacity in human beings to learn through crisis-experience the reality of a divinely reasonable love and its higher moral law. Shakespeare's plays still exercise occasionally a similar function for some of their spectators today. Insofar as this is the case, should we not be grateful that they serve both a timely need and a timeless value? There is after all within today's culture some “good soil” capable of bringing forth a thirtyfold harvest so to speak, and occasionally a hundredfold.