Shakespeare's Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (review)

Inquiry into religion and early modern drama, Knapp confesses at his book's start, is no match for a good smoke. Where his earlier work on tobacco habitually drew forth speculation about his own dependence on the weed—linking, as it were, scholars joined in vice—readers of Knapp's latest work simply presume piety on the author's part. And virtue, it would seem, does not draw company. Quite the contrary, Knapp suggests. Still very much wed to the Romantic conception of Shakespeare as the "secular sublime" (xii), modern scholars have dodged the question of religion in his plays as the hallmark of conservatism. Shakespeare has come to be a cipher, signifying anything and everything, except religious doctrine.

Knapp's book heroically sets out to challenge these assumptions, asking what the religious value of early modern plays might have been and detailing in the process a rich "trafficking between the pulpit and the stage" (3) which has been all but forgotten, if not repressed, in critical memory. Knapp is unabashed in wanting to claim a religious intentionality for the period's drama. To this end, he argues that "Shakespeare and his contemporaries were capable of envisaging their profession . . . as a kind of ministry," and that "religion had a crucial say in the creation of plays" (9). In making these claims, Knapp is eager to avoid the trap, fallen into by many contemporary critics, of reading all religious utterance in the plays as mere politics in drag.

Early chapters focus on how antitheatricalists and theater people alike perceived a radical religious potential in the stage. While puritans invoked doctrine to constitute themselves as an exclusive community, Knapp suggests that playwrights developed a language of "tribes," "good fellows," and "rogues" to promote an inclusive vision of "civil" Christianity. Joined in commitment to an Erasmian notion of doctrinal minimalism, dramatists refused affiliation with violent sectarianism.

Attention to "fellowship" and "brotherhood" in the larger context of "Christendom" is the focus of the book's latter half. Here, Shakespeareans will find a compelling rereading of the history play along with Knapp's interrogation of the critical commonplace that this genre fosters nationalism. He suggests that these plays dramatize less the consolidation of English identity than its breakdown. Retrieving their engagement with the splintering of Christian unity through a recurring reference to the Crusades, Knapp reads these plays as arguing for "a supranational Christian church" (63) and as advancing "a program of antinationalist propaganda" (83). His claim, then, is that history plays seek to broaden conceptions of "good Christian fellowship" by expanding bonds beyond the confines of "any one nation" (55). Such plays as I Sir John Oldcastle (1599), The Lamentable Tragedie ofLocrine (1592), and Edward I (1593) stand beside Henry V in fashioning "a new image of 'home' that is not . . . confined to England at large" (79).

I found rather unconvincing Knapp's location of transnational unity in an "internationalism" at home, however. While acknowledging critics who have read Shakespeare's history plays as expressing an imperialistic stance toward a British periphery (see page 91), Knapp nevertheless persists in reading these moments benignly, as forging community with "fellow islanders" (89). Inclusion is not, it might help to recall, necessarily equivalent to "charitable openness" (71), as Knapp often seems to posit. It may be that in defining internationalism in opposition to nationalism, Knapp disregards the extent to which nationalisms emerge in and through international engagements, most notably imperial ones.¹

In the final section of his book, Knapp performs a truly innovative reading of the stage in interpreting it " as a kind of ministry" (9), capable of transmiting "spiritual strength" to an audience (119). Turning first to Shakespeare's histories, he traces an ongoing critique of episcopacy and asserts that, ultimately, a play such as Henry V responds to the church's failure by striving to resituate spirituality in the stage's sacrament—its...