Spiritual Shakespeares (review)

Spiritual Shakespeares is a provocative collection of eight essays, plus a preface by postmodern philosopher of religion John D. Caputo, an excellent introduction by Ewan Fernie, and a critical afterword by Jonathan Dollimore. A recent addition to Terence Hawkes's bold Accents on Shakespeare series, this book more than lives up to the series' mission to interpret Shakespeare's works in light of cutting-edge developments in the world of theory. Each of the essays in Spiritual Shakespeares explores the implications for reading Shakespeare of the so-called "religious turn" in postmodern theory—the various efforts by Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, and others to translate Jewish and Pauline messianism into a politics of potentiality and possibility. In some ways, this move will be familiar to Shakespeareans. Critics such as Julia Lupton, Ken Jackson, and Lowell Gallagher (who also appears in this compilation) have been productively working in the intersections of Shakespeare, religion, and theory. Joining that critical trend, the essays in this collection use the religious turn to two related ends. The first is to read Shakespeare as a writer whose fascination with the supernatural shows him to be a serious, if also eclectic, spiritual thinker. As Fernie explains in his introduction, for Shakespeare, spirituality cannot be equated with religion. While religion is institutional and normative, spirituality is a metaphysical experience of otherness that leads to "ideas of emancipation and an alternative world" (8). The second, broader aim of this anthology is to play spirit against materialist criticism. As Fernie argues, materialist criticism reduces spirit to religion by proceeding as if the spiritual can be explained in terms of historicizing religion. By contrast, Fernie argues, attending to "spiritual intensities" in Shakespeare's works might paradoxically breathe new life into "progressive materialist criticism" (8, 3). If spirituality is the imaginative experience of emancipation, then it might be precisely what could invigorate materialist criticism by lending it a progressive edge. The argument is a clever, contemporary, and substantial challenge to more familiar ways of treating religion in Shakespeare and early modern literature more widely.

Three essays explicitly take up the problem of locating and defining spirituality in Shakespeare's plays. Kiernan Ryan's opening essay, "'Where hope is coldest': All's Well That Ends Well," powerfully describes Shakespeare's handling of spirituality in what Ryan identifies as "a materialist miracle play" (43). In part, his concern is to show how Shakespeare preserves "everything that confounds 'common sense'" by using the resources of religious drama to express political redemption in a class-bound, secular world (37). However, Shakespeare's is no feel-good spirituality. As Ryan shows, spirituality is expressed in anger, force, and action: for example, the "repressed rage" of an inflexibly willful and obsessive Helen, who gives class comeuppance to the "ruling-class rake" Bertram (45). In her essay, "'Salving the mail': Perjury, Grace, and the Disorder of Things in Love's Labour's Lost," Philippa Berry finds a "heterodox meditation upon the grace and salvation" in the play's self-referential attention to its own status as play text (95). Playfully and brilliantly reading a complex series of sexual and theological puns in English and Latin that run throughout the play, Berry argues that Shakespeare locates spirituality in "the perceived mutability of things" and "the supplementary slipperiness . . . of these mutable objects," somewhat, although not entirely, associated with Catholicism and feminine sexuality (99). Lowell Gallagher, in "Waiting for Gobbo," gives a provocative reading of a very familiar topic—gift-giving in The Merchant of Venice. Instead of following the 1980s trend of reading the gift through anthropology, however, Gallagher uses theological interpretations of the gift by Derrida, Badiou, Jean-Luc Marion, and Emmanuel Levinas to argue that Old Gobbo's gift of "'a dish of doves' (2.2.134)" stands as a third term between Jewish and Christian version of exchange in the play (76). In the exchange between Old Gobbo and Lancelot, Gallagher reads a much more radical engagement with Paul than has...