UC Irvine UC Irvine Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Such Terrible Impression: William Shakespeare's Dramatic Theology of Sin Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/69z3n0k7 Author Aijian, Phillip Publication Date 2018 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA IRVINE Such Terrible Impression: William Shakespeare’s Dramatic Theology of Sin DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English by Phillip Aijian Dissertation Committee: Associate Professor, Rebecca Helfer Professor Julia Lupton, Co-Chair Associate Professor Victoria Silver, Co-Chair 2018 © 2018 Phillip S. Aijian DEDICATION For Janelle—my beloved wife and dearest friend. Your constant inspiration, encouragement, and occasional cajoling were essential to not only writing this dissertation but, indeed, for the entire enterprise of the PhD. The success and honor belong more to you than anyone else. I love you so much. For my beautiful children, Malcolm and Evelyn, who patiently bore with my divided attention. I love you. And to my parents, who gave me a life full of books, stories, and art, kindling a life of faith and imagination. Blessed is the man against whom the LORD counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit. For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away Psalm 32:2-3 ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv CURRICULUM VITAE v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION vi PREFACE 1 CHAPTER 1: Bewayle the Intolerable Burden: Sin and Early Modern Religious Experience 10 CHAPTER 2: Such Terrible Impression: 66 Horror, Self-Deception, and Divided Selves in Richard III CHAPTER 3: Our Sceptre’s G(u)ilt: Flattery and Ecologies of Sin in Richard II 119 CHAPTER 4: All the Perfumes of Arabia: Macbeth and the Burden of Knowledge 178 EPILOGUE 248 BIBLIOGRAPHY 251 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my greatest appreciation to my committee members, Julia Lupton, Victoria Silver, and Rebecca Helfer. My tenure at UCI has been such a time of growth and wonder under your tutelage. I honestly hadn’t thought that I could find a place in the academic world where my interests and strengths would both be so confirmed and so challenged as they were by your example and instruction. In the midst of rigor and discipline, you have been boundless in patience, unwavering in hospitality, and rich in encouragement. Thank you for the research and teaching opportunities you extended, and for sharing your scholarship. My special thanks in this to Victoria Silver for sharing work from her upcoming book. I also would like to thank Rebecca Helfer, who persisted in asking me those hard, blunt questions so necessary to establishing the stakes and purpose of my work. iv CURRICULUM VITAE Phillip Aijian 2006 B.A. in English, Biola University 2010 M.A. in English, University of Missouri, Columbia 2015 M.A. in English, University of California, Irvine 2018 Ph.D. in English, University of California, Irvine FIELD OF STUDY Early Modern Drama and Literature v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Such Terrible Impression: William Shakespeare’s Dramatic Theology By Phillip S. Aijian Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Irvine, 2018 Professor Julia Lupton, Co-Chair & Associate Professor Victoria Silver, Co-Chair Much recent Shakespeare scholarship has maintained the assumptions of New Historicism when considering questions of religion, with the result that religion continues to be treated as politics in disguise, and very little attention is given to the dimension of personal experience. This dissertation argues that though politics and religion often intertwine in early modernism, Shakespeare and his contemporaries regarded the possibility of authentic religious experience with credulous sobriety. Drawing upon the Protestant Reformed theology of figures like Martin Luther and John Calvin, and Elizabethan devotional texts like the Book of Common Prayer, Shakespeare’s drama stages individual experiences of sin as authenticating marker for religious experience. Viewed through these sources, sin emerges as a phenomenon of despair, terror, and horror that can overwhelm individuals often characterized by self-deception. Sin exists and occurs not merely as a spiritual or moral event, but as a force capable of afflicting an individual, their community, and even their environment. Further, my investigation of sin in Shakespeare’s plays to posit the idea of a moral ecology in order to account for the complicated interpolations of personal and communal guilt where sin results both from commission of wickedness and the neglect of moral responsibility. Shakespeare stages sin and its attending consequences as vi impediments human flourishing. With a view to his history plays in particular, the figure of King Henry V emerges as a portrait of human flourishing. Where villains like Richard III and Macbeth encounter the horror of their sin and experience despair or self-justification, Henry’s acknowledgement of his troubled legacy instead leads to grace, victory, and peace. vii PREFACE During the 2016 American presidential campaign, Donald Trump visited Liberty university—one of the largest evangelical universities in the United States—and made a speech in which he referred to the Pauline epistle, 2 Corinthians, as “Two Corinthians” instead of “Second Corinthians.” His blunder of mispronunciation drew immediate and apparently uniform laughter from the students in attendance and confirming for many commentators Trump’s failure to clear the rather low hurdle of correctly naming one of the books of the Bible.1 Trump went on to both defend the pronunciation by citing his Scottish grandmother for the precedent as well as blaming Tony Perkins, the president of the Christian charity group, Family Research Council, for providing him faulty information.2 This episode became somewhat proverbial in the midst of ongoing debates about the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s Christian faith, as well as troubling the moral authority of the evangelical base that helped elect him. Debate over how to certify faith and other aspects of religious experience as authentic animated Shakespeare’s milieu as they animate our own. Shakespeare poses the problem, for example, in the character of George, Duke of Clarence, from his early history play, Richard III. Clarence’s experience invites audiences not only to perceive faith as merely sincere or counterfeit, but to consider religious experience as a spectrum whose intensity ranges from the powerful and overwhelming to the merely nominal. What are we to make of the fact that Clarence identifies himself as a “Christian faithful man” (Richard III 1.4.4) but then describes a nightmare in which he descends into hell? He confesses to his jailer: “I have done these things, / 1 Bradner, “Trump Blames Tony Perkins for 2 Corinthians.” 2 Perkins provided notes to Trump which included the biblical reference which he had written as “2 Corinthians.” 1 That now give evidence against my soul” (1.4.66-67)? Clarence identifies as a Christian but laments the experience of a guilt so profound, apparently motivated by heinous sins, that he fears the real possibility of eternal damnation. How are we to distinguish between the quality of his faith as a “faithful man” and that of someone like Henry V, who likewise struggles with the burden of sin and guilt, but who ultimately finds redemption, victory, and a cleansed conscience? The academic community has a responsibility to take such questions and distinctions seriously for the way they shape our understanding of Shakespeare and also for the way such distinctions can help clarify our own often bewildering present. The interest in questions of religion, religious experience, and the markers of its authenticity has by no means diminished but is often underserved by current scholarship. This disparity between audience and literature was recently clarified on my way to a conference in Texas. On my way to the gate, I stopped at a bookstore and was surprised to find Stephen Greenblatt’s most recent book The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve stacked among the more expected New York Times’ best-sellers. In his book, Greenblatt allows for denominational variances in Christianity but describes them all as “orthodox.” The term appears nearly twenty times in the course of his book, sometimes applied to specific branches of the church, like the “Ethiopian Orthodox Church,” but at other times applied more generally as with “orthodox theologians.”3 The Oxford English Dictionary describes “orthodox” as “in accordance with what is accepted or authoritatively established as the true view or right practice,” but the very fact of denominations can only indicate the refusal to accept certain views or practices as authoritative. I side with Marilynne Robinson’s complaint that Greenblatt’s use of this term represents a 3 Greenblatt, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, 23, 255. 2 sloppiness in argument that verges on irresponsible. She explains how John Milton, for example, vexes Greenblatt’s view of “orthodoxy.” Scholars without a specialty in religious history are understandably reluctant to immerse themselves in all the varieties and phases of Christianity, so the pious are often all assumed to be “orthodox,” as Greenblatt frequently refers to them. But Milton was among the robust and diverse part of the English population called “dissenters” or “nonconformists.” He insisted on the sanctity of the individual’s response to Scripture, a freedom of conscience that could never legitimately be coerced, or conformed to any orthodoxy, even willingly…The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve is an ambitious attempt at an important cultural history. It is cursory, and, to the degree that its treatment of these influential texts and movements is uninformed, it is not a help in understanding them.4 Though critical, Robinson seems sympathetic to the apprehension that non-religious scholars are apt to feel when confronting the intricacies of religious doctrine and expression.