Returning to Religion in Shakespeare Studies - A Review Essay (Part 3)

Darren Dyck, in Will & Love: Shakespeare and the Motion of the Soul, takes the turn to religion in a different direction by demonstrating how the medieval mode of theological romance in Dante, Petrarch, and Chaucer provides the interpretive key to Shakespeare’s preoccupation with the volitional motion of love. By “theological romance,” Dyck means the common narrative in medieval literature “in which there is a romantic relationship which parallels or is similar to the relationship between the individual human soul and God” (16). Dyck makes clear that the four plays he examines are not themselves theological romances but that their dramatization of the will as the kinetic energy of love would not be possible without the tradition of theological romance. Shakespeare is neither a theologian nor a theologian-poet (255), but he inhabits “the cultural and literary Augustinianism that is the background” (7). The opening chapter is a fascinating exploration of the influence on Boethius, Dante, Petrarch, and Chaucer of Augustine’s reflection in Confessions (13.9) that love moves the lover toward the beloved. Paradoxically, the lover actively wills the movement and passively is drawn by love to the worthy object without loss of agency: willingly carried by love. Lust is ill-directed passion that pulls the lover down; love is well-directed passion by which the lover ascends to paradise (Dante), transcendence (Petrarch), and consummation (Chaucer’s Troilus). Dyck carefully sets up the framework of “the lovers paradigm” (129)—the motion of lover, beloved, and love—by which he will anatomize the romantic relationships in the following chapters. Again, Dyck is not arguing that these comedies and tragedies are theological romances but that they are “plays informed by the tradition of theological romance specifically with respect to the agency of their characters” (255).

Romeo and Juliet provides a strong case for the Augustinian paradigm, one that moves from a favourable picture of Romeo’s Petrarchanism in the opening act to the function of sight in the mutual attraction of Romeo and Juliet and to the imagery that characterizes their speech. The carnality of Juliet’s nurse contrasts with the idealism of Romeo and Juliet’s ascent toward a transcendent consummation of their love in death. Dyck uses Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, not as a direct source, but as “a useful point of reference” (104); the two “usefully serve to illuminate one another” (72). The coexistence of physical and metaphysical aspects of love makes Romeo and Juliet exemplary of Augustinian theological romance as mediated by Dante, Petrarch, and Chaucer. Likewise, Dyck’s detailed, close reading of the text in this chapter is exemplary of how the turn to theology (11) corrects the bias of materialist criticism that interprets love in the Early Modern literature as ideology and sexuality (66) to the exclusion of the metaphysical.

Troilus and Cressida intersects with the tradition of theological romance as a parody of the transcendent, revealing the eponymous lovers of this perplexing comedy as motionally opposite to the eponymous lovers in the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. What happens to the motion of the will in the lovers paradigm when the object of love is unworthy? Or when the Augustinian movement of sight-will-action is defective? In this Trojan play, the love-plot and the war-plot coincide in that characters measure worth in transactional terms, resulting in disintegration and immobility. This is evident both in the Trojan camp with the valuation of Paris and Helen and in the Greek camp with the worthiness of Achilles and Patroclus. Rather than reading this play forward as anticipating modern existentialism and anti-essentialism, Dyck shows that the crisis of agency in Troilus and Cressida inversely mirrors the mode of medieval theological romance generally, and in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde particularly.

After Romeo and Juliet and Troilus and Cressida, Dyck turns in chapter 4 to the festive comedy, Twelfth Night. The play’s subtitle (Twelfth Night, or What You Will), together with the anagrammatical punning of “volo” (Latin: “I want, wish, will”) in the names Viola, Olivia, and Malvolio, lends itself well to the title of Dyck’s book, Will & Love. This play evokes the theological romance both negatively and positively. The most egregious failure is Malvolio, whose narcissism places him beyond “the lovers paradigm.” Likewise, love melancholy produces in Orsino and Olivia a physical, mental, and spiritual immobility. The love-sick imagination that deludes Olivia and Orsino prevents them from actively following well-directed love. Thankfully, this is a comedy: proper seeing leads to proper loving for all the romantic partners by the play’s conclusion. In fact, one could argue that Twelfth Night, or What You Will is a comedy precisely because it restores the upward mobility of lover-beloved-love that is typical of the will’s motion in theological romance. The one anomaly in the play is Antonio’s love for Sebastian, which Dyck acknowledges in his conclusion is an underdeveloped aspect of his theological-romantic interpretation of Twelfth Night (263–264).

Dyck’s theological-romantic thesis meets its greatest challenge in The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra. In this play, Shakespeare returns to the question of the possibility of metaphysical love in Romeo and Juliet but with the complications of Troilus and Cressida and Twelfth Night: “we might understand the late tragedy as a kind of summing up of Shakespeare’s thoughts on love and the validity of the Augustinian claim that love functions as will” (225). “The religion of love” in Romeo and Juliet becomes “the religion of passion” in Antony and Cleopatra (234). Unlike Romeo and Juliet, the tragic mode of Antony and Cleopatra is marked by ambiguity (not paradox), hyperbole (not blazon), and indistinctiveness or mirroring (not mutuality), each of which problematizes the upward tendency of well-ordered love. It is only with help that Cleopatra can pull her dying lover’s body onto the monument; this theological-romantic ascent is more physical than metaphysical.

A word about the methodology of the three books under review, before suggesting what may be in store for the turn to religion in Shakespeare studies. Darren Dyck’s Will & Love is about “Shakespeare’s reception and treatment of a singular idea” (6). Because Dyck starts with the assumption that “Shakespeare was thinking theologically” in these plays (255), he is invested in reading the plays for evidence of Augustine’s philosophical idea. David Anonby’s Shakespeare on Salvation is also theological, but more in relation to contemporary debates about the doctrine of salvation in post-Reformation England. The competing soteriologies in Shakespeare’s environment shape his treatment of salvation, recusancy, and religious difference in the plays. Lee Oser’s Christian Humanism in Shakespeare finds evidence of an Erasmian spirit of limited skepticism, locating Shakespeare in the pan-European context of the Renaissance. All three avoid the biographical fallacy that seeks conclusive evidence in the life of the author rather than in the works themselves. Oser uses historical context incidentally to his argument about Shakespeare’s Christian humanism, whereas Anonby integrates Shakespeare’s contemporaries directly into his reading of Shakespeare’s position vis-à-vis salvation. Because Dyck is exegeting literary texts, his orientation toward the plays is a readerly one. (With only a few exceptions, Dyck refers consistently to “the reader” rather than “the audience” of the plays.) All three turn more to theology—the systematic articulation of beliefs concerning God—than to the practice of religion—the performance of rites resultant of beliefs concerning God. A useful distinction can be made between the turn to theology and the turn to religion; as Dyck points out in his introduction, “our projects are often parallel rather than intersecting” (11).

Here, then, is a promising opportunity for Christian scholars working in fields where the relationship between faith and practice invites further exploration. Identifying the implied or stated theological ideas underwriting what people do is a worthwhile exercise in any discipline. If we accept the two axioms, “There is no practice without theory” and “All life is religious,” then the nexus of theology (theory and cognition) and religion (practice and affect) is relevant across disciplines. Christian scholars sometimes speak as though worldview is synonymous with theology, but the three books reviewed here present a more refined definition of the role of theology in religious practice. What distinctives in the control beliefs of a specific practice can we identify? How consciously are these control beliefs concerning God incorporated in practice? What is the theological ancestry of these distinctive control beliefs? How does their theological nature shape the practice? Are these compatible with other faith traditions? Attempting these questions is more difficult in some fields of study than others, particularly when a materialist and skeptical bias is deeply entrenched in one’s discipline. But, as these three books attest, one does not have to take sides or make claims for the validity of theological positions and religious practices: our calling in the social sciences and humanities is to describe faithfully how theological factors affect the data that is before us.

In Shakespeare studies, the turn to religion and theology could helpfully be more sensitive to the plays as theatrical events, and not only as literary texts. Given that performativity currently has considerable purchase in the academy at present, religion and theology could well complement contemporary articulations of subjectivity and personhood. The “tension” between drama and theology that Darren Dyck notes in his conclusion can be productive for intersecting the theological with the religious: “for it is not obvious how Shakespeare might take theological ideas latent in his vocabulary and play them out” (258). What the theatre and the church have in common is the performance of actions whose significance exceeds their physical signifiers. Not only were the years of Elizabeth’s reign a troubled period of transition from Roman Catholic to Protestant liturgy in the Church of England, but they were also marked by disagreement within the Protestant community between the Puritan emphasis on the Word preached and the high church emphasis on the Word displayed. In this approach, the theater becomes a space where the performative aspect of public worship is experienced as rituals acted on the stage, with the audience being affected in a manner similar to a congregation. Shakespeare is shown to exploit the affordances of the affective power of ecclesiastical stagecraft: vestments become costumes, sacred objects become symbolic props, liturgical formulae become rhetorical patterns. This can be seen in resonances with the Book of Common Prayer regarding birth, marriage, and death. The christening of the infant Elizabeth in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, co-written with John Fletcher, is one instance. The performance of marriage rites is another, whether in its carnivalesque inversion with Petruccio and Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew or in its ironic parody with Orlando and Rosalind-as-Ganymede in As You Like It. In Measure for Measure, the Duke-as-Friar-Lodowick counsels Claudio to prepare for death in terms that reflect the theology of the Order for the Burial of the Dead. The mock exorcism of Malvolio by Feste-as-Sir-Topas-the-Curate in Twelfth Night is another site where a formal religious ritual is metamorphosed into a theatrical performance. One could analyze coronation scenes in the plays in this manner, too, since these events are ecclesiastical in form and religious in content. Whether the presence of these symbolic religious actions on the stage supports a secularization thesis is open for discussion. Regardless, juxtaposing the sacred and secular locations of ritual performance—in the church and in the playhouse—affords possibilities for multiple methodologies to engage the return to religion in Shakespeare studies.