1 THE UNIVERSITY OF HULL Shakespeare and the Seven Deadly Sins: a necessary evil being a Thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University of Hull by Lesley Agar B.A. (Hull) M.Phil. (Newcastle-upon-Tyne) May, 2016 2 Abstract This thesis investigates the idea that using the religious, moral and literary construct of the Seven Deadly Sins as an interpretative key to Shakespeare’s plays may provide further insight into his dramatic art. It has involved reviewing and developing the body of research which maintains that medieval literary and cultural references continued to influence and adapt to new cultural, literary and religious contexts in early modern literature, more specifically, that of Shakespeare. The development of the Sins in a cultural, literary and religious context is outlined, exploring the extent to which they survived the impact of the Reformation on Catholic imagery and continued to be a common frame of reference in post-Reformation literature. It considers the likely early influence of the Sins on Shakespeare as a writer, exploring the idea of a personal commonplace book as an early and accessible resource of Sins-related classical and secular references, a resource shared with most of the Elizabethan and early Jacobean audiences. Finally the thesis seeks to provide a reading of a representative collection of Shakespeare’s plays chronologically; according to genre, and by individual sins and virtues, using the religious, cultural and literary lexicon of the Sins, and to demonstrate the way in which the Sins were deployed to provide dramatic interpretation of source material, as well as psychological insight into character. It is the contention of this thesis that the popular, semi-secular nature of the Sins and the way in which they became embedded in most aspects of art and culture enabled them to slide beneath the bar of Protestant reform to provide continuity of moral and religious reference and, more importantly, to remain in the collective cultural memory of Shakespeare and his audiences as a ‘polemically safe’ resource through which to explore issues of good and evil, salvation and damnation. 3 Contents Abstract 2 Table of Contents 3 Acknowledgements 5 Introduction 6 Chapter 1 The Seven Deadly Sins: a necessary evil 10 1.1 The tradition of the Sins 10 1.2 A pagan birth 11 1.3 The Sins and their role in the development of Christian confession 15 1.4 The Virtues 21 1.5 Catechism, the Sins and the Reformation 22 1.6 The art of confession: the iconographic and literary heritage of the Sins 26 1.7 From Vice to vice: allegory and the development of mimetic tragic character. The Sins and the psyche 36 1.8 Christian humanism: moral reading and the role of the Sins 45 1.9 The Commonplace Book and its role in moral ‘framing’ 49 1.10 Living in sin: how chivalry made a virtue out of a necessity 53 1.11 Shakespeare and the seven deadly sins 57 Chapter 2 Moral History: from Sloth to Duty. 66 2.1 Henry VI 66 2.2 Richard III 84 2.3 Richard II 89 2.4 Henry IV 100 2.5 Henry V 105 Chapter 3 The Devil’s sins and the development of tragedy 110 3.1 The sin of anger and its relationship to the tragic hero 110 3.2 Titus Andronicus 115 3.3 Hamlet: thwarted anger and the sin of sloth 127 3.4 Othello and envy 139 3.5 King Lear 152 3.6 Macbeth and vainglory 163 3.7 Coriolanus 174 3.8 The ‘stamp of one defect’ and the incitement to sin 185 Chapter 4 Comedies and the Virtues 187 4.1 The Contrary Virtues 187 4 4.2 The Taming of the Shrew 190 4.3 The Merchant of Venice 197 4.4 Twelfth Night 212 4.5 Mongrel tragicomedy 219 Chapter 5 ‘Some rise by sin and some by virtue fall’ 220 5.1 Three ‘problem plays’ 220 5.2 Troilus and Cressida 221 5.3 Measure for Measure 239 5.4 All’s Well That Ends Well 253 5.5 The Sins ancient and modern 266 Chapter 6 ‘Smiling extremity out of act’ 268 6.1 The late plays: anger and patience 268 6.2 Pericles 274 6.3 The Winter’s Tale 281 6.4 Cymbeline 288 6.5 The Tempest 295 Conclusion 302 Bibliography 306 Primary Sources 306 Secondary Sources 315 5 Acknowledgements With sincere thanks to my supervisors, Dr Jason Lawrence and Dr David Bagchi, for their patient guidance and stimulating discussion. Thanks also to Cambridge University Library for generously providing reader’s access for over four years. Also thanks to Dr Tim Smithson, Dr Jane Kingsley- Smith, Dr Ann Kaegi, Professor Veronica O’Mara, Professor Eric Carlson and Nigel Coulthard. 6 Shakespeare and the Seven Deadly Sins: a necessary evil Introduction Research originally carried out on Shakespeare’s Othello in 2006 furnished evidence that using the religious, moral and literary construct of the Seven Deadly Sins as an interpretative key to Shakespeare’s plays might provide further insight into his dramatic art. This path inevitably led to the, until relatively recently, somewhat unfashionable area of research surrounding Shakespeare’s medieval cultural, literary and dramatic heritage, abandoned in favour of classical scholarship or new forms of literary theory and critical approaches. However, what became clear and which has been more recently and ably demonstrated by the work of Helen Cooper, Gordon McMullan and others1 is that not only is the work led by Bernard Spivack (1958) and David Bevington (1962) not a critical cul-de-sac, but that rather medieval literary and cultural influences continued to be referenced and adapted to new cultural, literary and religious contexts in early modern literature. More specifically, it is in theatre that this continuity is more readily traced, leading to Helen Cooper’s regret that ‘drama is perhaps the area where the significance of the medieval has been most extensively overlooked’ (Cooper 2013: 43). This research has presented several challenges. The first has been, in order to enable interpretative reading, to catalogue and trace the history of the Sins; to include a brief review of their development and cultural, literary and religious interaction up to and including the early modern period in England, and briefly to examine a representative range of works which might reflect a Sins medieval literary tradition or heritage. It was then important to challenge the conclusion of Morton Bloomfield that by the late sixteenth century ‘the tradition of the Sins was dead; they no longer evolved; they no longer inspired great writing’ (Bloomfield 1952: 243). This task has been greatly assisted by the medieval historian Richard Newhauser, whose 1 See Reading the Medieval (2007) edited by Gordon McMullan and David Matthews and Medieval Shakespeare: pasts and presents (2013) edited by Ruth Morse, Helen Cooper and Peter Holland 7 opportunely timed work on the Sins in the medieval and, latterly, early modern period has proved invaluable. It was also important to look more specifically at Shakespeare himself and attempt to explore the exposure he may have had to the religious, literary and cultural influence of the Sins, including to what extent it could be claimed that his drama might be consciously or unconsciously influenced by such a resource. In particular, the thesis examines the practice of ‘moral reading’ and ‘commonplacing’ taught in most grammar schools at the time Shakespeare and his audiences were being educated, and seeks to establish the theory that this practice and the habit and resources thus acquired might have had considerable impact on Shakespeare’s management and interpretation of dramatic source material throughout his career as a dramatist. It is the contention of this thesis that the popular, semi-secular nature of the Sins and the way in which they became embedded in most aspects of art and culture enabled them to escape the more doctrinally contentious associations with Catholic liturgy, and slide beneath the bar of Protestant reform to provide continuity of moral and religious reference and, more importantly, to remain in the collective cultural memory of Shakespeare and his audiences as a ‘polemically safe’, dramatically and visually entertaining resource through which to explore issues of good and evil, virtue and vice, salvation and damnation. This has involved referencing the work of religious historians, notably Eamon Duffy (1992) and Alexandra Walsham (1999) on what seems to be a parallel conviction to that of recent literary criticism regarding the blurring of distinction between pre- and post-Reformation beliefs. In addition to this assumption, in reference the critical contention described by Quentin Skinner (2008) between those who regard Shakespeare as ‘a jobbing playwright’ and those who prefer to see ‘an author shaping a literary career’, it seems reasonable not to dismiss either influence over the length of Shakespeare’s writing life. Finally the thesis seeks to provide a reading of a representative collection of Shakespeare’s plays chronologically; according to genre, and by some individual sins and virtues, using the religious, cultural and literary lexicon of the Sins. This has proved to be particularly difficult in terms of structure; the final presentation avoids most, but not all, of the pitfalls of repetition and rehearsal. The history plays, taken together enable a closer look at the sins of pride, sloth, anger and envy while 8 enabling an opportunity to observe their function and application as a dramatic model over time. They also provide an opportunity through closer study of the source and reference material to evaluate the extent to which Shakespeare may not only have read the source in the context of the Sins, but also edited the source material to reflect them.