Religions in Shakespeare’s Writings Religions Shakespeare’s in • David V. Urban V. • David Religions in Shakespeare’s Writings Edited by David V. Urban Printed Edition of the Special Issue Published in Religions www.mdpi.com/journal/religions Religions in Shakespeare’s Writings Religions in Shakespeare’s Writings Special Issue Editor David V. Urban MDPI • Basel • Beijing • Wuhan • Barcelona • Belgrade Special Issue Editor David V. Urban Calvin University USA Editorial Office MDPI St. Alban-Anlage 66 4052 Basel, Switzerland This is a reprint of articles from the Special Issue published online in the open access journal Religions (ISSN 2077-1444) from 2018 to 2019 (available at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions/special issues/shakespeare). For citation purposes, cite each article independently as indicated on the article page online and as indicated below: LastName, A.A.; LastName, B.B.; LastName, C.C. Article Title. Journal Name Year, Article Number, Page Range. ISBN 978-3-03928-194-7 (Hbk) ISBN 978-3-03928-195-4 (PDF) Cover image courtesy of Wikimedia. c 2020 by the authors. Articles in this book are Open Access and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which allows users to download, copy and build upon published articles, as long as the author and publisher are properly credited, which ensures maximum dissemination and a wider impact of our publications. The book as a whole is distributed by MDPI under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND. Contents About the Special Issue Editor ...................................... vii David V. Urban Introduction to “Religions in Shakespeare’s Writings” Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 655, doi:10.3390/rel10120655 ................... 1 John D. Cox Shakespeare and Religion Reprinted from: Religions 2018, 9, 343, doi:10.3390/rel9110343 .................... 5 Cyndia Susan Clegg The Undiscovered Countries: Shakespeare and the Afterlife Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 174, doi:10.3390/rel10030174 ................... 16 Grace Tiffany Paganism and Reform in Shakespeare’s Plays Reprinted from: Religions 2018, 9, 214, doi:10.3390/rel9070214 .................... 24 Matthew J. Smith “At War ’Twixt Will and Will Not”: On Shakespeare’s Idea of Religious Experience in Measure for Measure Reprinted from: Religions 2018, 9, 419, doi:10.3390/rel9120419 .................... 35 Bethany C. Besteman Bondage of the Will: The Limitations of Political Theology in Measure for Measure Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 28, doi:10.3390/rel10010028 .................... 53 Sarah Skwire Curse, Interrupted: Richard III, Jacob and Esau, and the Elizabethan Succession Crisis Reprinted from: Religions 2018, 9, 331, doi:10.3390/rel9110331 .................... 63 Feisal G. Mohamed Raison d’´etat, Religion, and the Body in The Rape of Lucrece Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 426, doi:10.3390/rel10070426 ................... 73 Benedict J. Whalen “For One’s Offence Why Should so Many Fall”?: Hecuba and the Problems of Conscience in The Rape of Lucrece and Hamlet Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 38, doi:10.3390/rel10010038 .................... 85 Benjamin Lockerd Hamlet the Heretic: The Prince’s Albigensian Rhetoric Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 19, doi:10.3390/rel10010019 .................... 98 Bryan Adams Hampton “I Knew Him, Horatio”: Shakespeare’s Beliefs, Early Textual Editing, and Nineteenth-Century Phrenology Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 236, doi:10.3390/rel10040236 ...................109 Debra Johanyak Shifting Religious Identities and Sharia in Othello Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 587, doi:10.3390/rel10100587 ...................123 v John E. Curran Jr. That Suggestion: Catholic Casuistry, Complexity, and Macbeth Reprinted from: Religions 2018, 9, 315, doi:10.3390/rel9100315 ....................140 Emily E. Stelzer Lear, Luke 17, and Looking for the Kingdom Within Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 456, doi:10.3390/rel10080456 ...................157 David V. Urban Prospero, the Divine Shepherd, and Providence: Psalm 23 as a Rubric for Alonso’s Redemptive Progress and the Providential Workings of Prospero’s Spiritual Restoration in Shakespeare’s The Tempest Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 448, doi:10.3390/rel10080448 ...................194 Julia Reinhard Lupton The Tempest and Black Natural Law Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 91, doi:10.3390/rel10020091 ....................210 vi About the Special Issue Editor David V. Urban is Professor of English at Calvin University. He is the author of Milton and the Parables of Jesus: Self-Representation and the Bible in John Milton’s Writings (Penn State University Press, 2018), the co-editor of Visionary Milton: Essays on Prophecy and Violence (Duquesne University Press, 2010), and the co-compiler and co-editor of John Milton: An Annotated Bibliography, 1989–1999 (Duquesne University Press, 2011). His articles on Milton, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Fugard, Tolstoy, Hopkins, Hawthorne, Melville, C. S. Lewis, and ancient rhetoric and the Bible have appeared in journals such as Milton Studies, Milton Quarterly, Studies in Philology, Christianity and Literature, Renascence, Religions, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, Connotations, Appositions, Journal of Markets and Morality, Liberty Matters, Christian Libertarian Review, Australian Slavic and East European Studies, and Calvin Theological Journal, as well as in several essay collections. He is a contributor to The Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible, The Milton Encyclopedia, and the Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception. He holds degrees in English literature (B.A., Northwestern University; M.A. and Ph.D., University of Illinois at Chicago) and in divinity (M.Div., Trinity Evangelical Divinity School). He thanks Calvin University for providing a course release through the Calvin Research Fellowship, and the Calvin Center for Christian Scholarship for assistance in distributing this book. vii religions Editorial Introduction to “Religions in Shakespeare’s Writings” David V. Urban Department of English, Calvin University, Grand Rapids, MI 49546, USA; [email protected] Received: 28 November 2019; Accepted: 29 November 2019; Published: 2 December 2019 This special issue of Religions on “Religions in Shakespeare’s Writings” invited contributors to explore the gamut of religious issues and characterizations throughout Shakespeare’s writings. The issue’s call for papers welcomed a variety of perspectives while emphasizing that the resultant volume would not try to present a Shakespeare whose particular religious beliefs can definitely be known or are displayed in a unified manner throughout his canon. Because this volume benefits from John Cox’s expert essay on “Shakespeare and Religion” (Cox 2018), and because each essay has its own abstract, I will not here attempt a survey of the field of Shakespeare and religion, nor will I summarize the essays that follow. Rather, this brief Introduction will identify and discuss important themes that emerge within this special issue, recognizing that these themes, which developed organically through the individual authors’ work and not by explicit editorial instruction, display themselves in various essays herein but by no means in all of them. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this collection is its elucidation of not simply the various manifestations of religions that appear in Shakespeare’s writings, but, indeed, the tensions between these religions within Shakespeare’s creative depictions. For example, the tensions between ancient pagan religion and Christianity are explored in a number of essays. Grace Tiffany identifies the turn from devotion to the Roman goddess Diana to a commitment to self-sacrificial marriage in The Winter’s Tale as an embrace of Protestant Christianity. Tiffany’s emphasis on tensions between religions is also evident in her argument that, in Shakespeare, devotion to Diana supports a Protestant marriage ideal rather than a Catholic ideal of celibacy. She shows that, in The Comedy of Errors and Pericles, Diana herself is transformed from patroness of virgins to Christian matron, offering scripture-based advice on how to be a companionate wife (Tiffany 2018). Benedict Whalen observes the conflict in The Rape of Lucrece between, on one hand, Tarquin’s embrace of “Love and Fortune” as his “gods” in a way that justifies his sexual assault, and, on the other hand, the poem’s allusion to 1 Corinthians 3.16–17, in which St. Paul warns against the violation of “the temple of God,” which includes the bodies and souls of all Christians (Whalen 2019). Also discussing The Rape of Lucrece, Feisal Mohamed notes the tension between the depiction of female virginity in Roman civic religion and the heavenly reward for chaste obedience—in spite of any forced violation—offered through Christianity (Mohamed 2019). David Urban explores the tension between the pagan spiritual control that Prospero exercises throughout The Tempest and the Christian Providence that transcends Prospero’s problematic efforts, a Providence whose workings ultimately precipitate Prospero’s renunciation of such dubious control (Urban 2019). And Emily Stelzer details at length the history of King Lear criticism, observing throughout the significance of Shakespeare’s often befuddling blending of pagan and Christian elements throughout the play (Stelzer 2019). Various other kinds of tensions between religions in Shakespeare are also explored in this special issue. For example, contrary to the position