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William Shakespeare's Sacramental Vision Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University English Dissertations Department of English 8-10-2021 William Shakespeare's Sacramental Vision Joseph L. Kelly Georgia State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_diss Recommended Citation Kelly, Joseph L., "William Shakespeare's Sacramental Vision." Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2021. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_diss/252 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of English at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S SACRAMENTAL VISION by JOSEPH L. KELLY Under the Direction of Committee Chair Dr. Paul J. Voss, PhD A Doctoral Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University 2021 ABSTRACT The plays Shakespeare produced in the second half of his career, from Hamlet (1600) through The Tempest (1611), offer a way to see the world through the poetics and action on stage so as to effect an essential apprehension of God. That is, 1) how the divine inhabits the elements of the natural world which draw sustaining life from their creator, 2) how divine providence controls—shapes, orders, corrects—the actions of men and political institutions, and 3) how peace and human fellowship lie in the answered call to the Gospel’s shared way of life. The playwright reinvigorates a traditional vision of the immanent sacrality of the material world with such compelling topos as the Ghost in Hamlet, the power of faith in Lear, the conjured infestation of evil in Macbeth, and Prospero’s adumbration of divine omnipotence and sacrificial humility in The Tempest. The selected plays, as they represent the body of Shakespeare’s later works emblematically respond to a desacralizing English Christian culture that variously embraces or endures the combined impact of both the Italian Renaissance and the English Reformation. The plays alert their audiences to the advent and effects of the secular world’s irradicable encroachment on England’s venerable religious heritage, the climactic phase of which ripened during Shakespeare’s 20-year career on the London stage. Seen in light of the sacramental poetics I analyze herein, the plays reveal memorial testaments that speak to not only the erosion of inherited traditional English faith culture but to the erosion of religious engagement altogether. Shakespeare stands, in context, as a distinctive, powerful, and admonitory witness to those in his traditional Christian audience “with ears to hear.” INDEX WORDS: Apophasis, Elliptical, Grotesque, Iconoclasm, Imagery, Immanence, Irony, Metaphor, Metanoia, Nominalism, Oxymoron, Parable, Paradox, Pluralism, Realism, Sacramental, Satire, Transcendence, William Shakespeare Copyright by Joseph L. Kelly 2021 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S SACRAMENTAL VISION by JOSEPH L. KELLY Committee Chair: Dr. Paul J. Voss Committee: Dr. Paul H. Schmidt Dr. Robert S. Lightsey Electronic Version Approved: Office of Graduate Studies College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University July 2021 iv DEDICATION My graduate studies would not have been possible without the love and many sacrifices of my wife and two sons who have so generously supported me in this endeavor and to whom I owe so much. I also wish to acknowledge special mentors Dr. Kenneth Boa (Atlanta Christian Lawyers Forum) and Joseph R. Hope and Robert S. Edmunds, Jr. (Friday Morning Fellowship), all of whom encouraged my work on this project and invited me to share occasional presentations on Shakespeare’s Christianity within their respective forums. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am deeply indebted to my committee, Dr. Paul J. Voss, Dr. Paul Schmidt, and Dr. Robert S. Lightsey, for their guidance and support of this Dissertation. I cannot thank them enough for their time, patience, and inspiration with respect to this project as well for their devoted tutelage and unflagging encouragement throughout my graduate studies. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS v 1. INTRODUCTION: Reformation Sea Change & The Fading Culture of Faith 1 1.1 Hidden in Plain Sight: The Paradox of Experience 6 1.2 Mid-Career Metamorphosis: Meaning Behind the Mystery 10 1.3 Chapter Summaries 14 2. REVIEW of CRITICISM 18 2.1 Confessional Readings: 32 2.1.1 Shakespeare’s Christianity 32 2.1.2 Catholic Shakespeare 34 2.1.3 Protestant Shakespeare 36 2.1.4 No Religious Loyalty (“Secularization Thesis”) 38 2.1.5 Inconclusive 39 2.1.6 “Abstracts and Chronicles. .” 40 2.1.7 Idle Nostalgia or Dream Awakening? 44 2.2 Bias Against the Past: Supersessionist Dilemma 45 2.2 Customary Divisions of Labor: Artificially Isolated Disciplines 53 2.3 CONCLUSION 58 vii 3. REALITY and RELIGION RECONFIGURED 61 3.1 Iconoclasm and Religious Change 64 3.2 Deep Roots 80 3.3 Shakespeare Against the Grain 94 3.4 Innovations in Aid of Sacramental Vision 104 3.5 CONCLUSION 111 4. HAMLET at the CROSSROADS 113 4.1 Outward Show (versus) That Within 116 4.1.1 World Views in Contention 119 4.1.2 The Culture of Dissimulation/Deception/Surveillance 154 4.2 THE PARABLE of the DISINHERITED SON 167 4.2.1 Elizabethan Imagination: perception by analogy 168 4.2.2 The Role of Hamlet: 172 4.2.3 Play as Parable: “revenge upon the revenge tragedy” 179 4.2.4 The Divine Comes Alongside 181 4.3 CONCLUSION 191 5. KING LEAR and MACBETH 194 5.1. General Introduction 194 5.1.1 Prevailing Pluralism 198 5.1.2 The New Regime 199 5.1.3 The Present Predicament 203 5.2 King Lear: Tares among the wheat in Shakespeare’s England 205 viii 5.2.1 Setting and Sources: disguising the attack 205 5.2.2 Brief Critical History 208 5.2.3 Sense Behind the Savagery 211 5.3 The Lear World 213 5.3.1 Apophasis 214 5.3.2 The first two scenes 219 5.3.3 Love, Loyalty & Honor Banished 225 5.3.4 Incongruity and the Satiric Grotesque 229 5.3.5 The Play’s Satiric Muse: The folly of religious change 236 5.4 Lear and Religious Change: “Men are as the time is” 243 5.5 CONCLUSION 247 5.6 MACBETH: FEAR at the ROOT—HOSTING the DEVIL’S BARGAIN 249 5.6.1 The Darkening Mirror 254 5.6.2 FEAR 256 5.6.3 “Nothing is but what is not” 259 5.6.4 “A deed of dreadful note” 264 5.7 “The Equivocation of the Fiend” 267 5.8 CONCLUSION 270 6. EPILOGUE—The Tempest: Creation, Redemption, and Re-Creation 271 6.1 INTRODUCTION 271 ix 6.2 Sources and Backgrounds 276 6.3 Brief Critical Survey 279 6.4 Gateway to the Real 284 6.5 CONCLUSION 287 7. WORKS CITED 288 7.1 Introduction 288 7.2 Review of Criticism 289 7.3 Reality and Religion Reconfigured 297 7.4 Hamlet at the Crossroads 301 7.5 Lear and Macbeth 308 7.6 Epilogue: The Tempest 318 1 1. INTRODUCTION—The Reformation Sea Change: The Fading Culture of Faith and its Way of Seeing “Who hath ears to hear, let him hear” (Matt. 13:9) Precisely how Reformation politics manifest in Shakespeare’s life and work stands as a perennial subject of voluminous commentary and claims. Some seize upon presumed, life-long Roman Catholic sympathies formed as a youth in Reformation resistant Warwickshire; others see an assumed Protestant conformity throughout his 20-year London career that began as a provincial emigré to become an established poet and public theatre playwright. Still others declare his confessional loyalties simply unknowable. However, the recent body of revisionist Reformation historiography, together with related cultural scholarship, prompts a larger theological perspective—way of thinking about the later works that implicates the playwright’s resistance to the desacralized Christianity wrought by the English Protestant Reformation. The provocative point of entry into the mystery of Shakespeare’s religious proclivities lies with a mid-career “sea change” in the substance of his plays. Beginning in the year 1600, Shakespeare offers a distinctively different kind of drama that evokes a way of seeing the world—of understanding reality—that the Protestant English reformers labored to crush out of the devotional life of a traditional English religious culture that had remained undisturbed for over a thousand years.1 I borrow the term “Old Faith” to describe this undisturbed pre- Reformation English religious culture that nurtured a young Shakespeare and that yet remained in the mind and memory of the audience for whom he wrote. 2 1 Eamon Duffy, Reformation Divided. p. 4. 2 I use throughout the commonplace term “Old Faith” to refer to the traditional English fealty to the ecclesiology of the Roman Church, first established in 6th century Britain. The term originated with John DeGroot’s Shakespeare 2 This study contends that William Shakespeare’s later works dramatize the stress of the continuing displacement of a common understanding of the nature of God and witness to the consequential cultural shift in the once shared way of comprehending reality.3 It might seem that the origins of this altered conception of the divine, incubated by the scholastic debates within late medieval universities of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, could not be more remote from the traditional Christianity as understood in Shakespeare’s sixteenth century Warwickshire. However, notwithstanding the millennium of undisturbed English Christian practice, with its inherited understanding of the divine nature, the underlying assumptions about God’s place and purpose in the world had become the subject of profound ontological dispute with the advent of popular Church reform that swept Europe in the sixteenth century.
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