Texts and Traditions: Religion in Shakespeare 1592–1604, and: Shakespeare's Christianity: The Protestant and Catholic Poetics of Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Hamlet (review)

There is an oddity in Beatrice Grove's title, the impersonal and abstract Texts and Traditions that contrasts with the more pointed and topical "recent resurgence of interest in Shakespeare's Catholicism" which the book flap cites as the book's context. But the title accurately reflects the task of the book, which is modest and scholarly, to discern the ways in which Shakespeare's plays—that is, the ones discussed here (Romeo and Juliet, King John, the plays concerning Prince Hal, Measure for Measure, with a few others cited)—draw on the visual culture of the mystery plays and also on the rhetoric of the Protestant Bible and sermons. The overall theme is familiar and the book might have appeared decades ago with others dealing with Christianity in Shakespeare. The author's intervention in current "interest in Shakespeare Catholicism" is not ambitious, but rather simply a confirmation that both Catholic and Protestant sources are present in Shakespeare and participate in his dramatic effects. The introductory argument is that the corporeality of the Passion story in the mystery plays influenced Shakespeare's concretely visualized scenes while his Protestant interrogation of this affectivity continued (59). These are familiar themes.

I must quickly add that the book is a model of critical analysis, in the best tradition of the (old) new criticism and a religiously inflected historicism. It opens up many allusions not previously noted in Shakespeare criticism.

With Romeo and Juliet Grove's major project is showing how the Easter plot from Gospels and mystery plays is imbedded in the play. For example, the final tomb scene evokes the women running away from Christ's tomb, and then the arrival of the disciples. In his second quarto, Shakespeare accentuated these sorts of allusions by using "Peter" as the name of church where Juliet and Paris were to be married and using "sepulcher" as the name of the tomb (evoking the medieval liturgies built around a model of the sepulcher) (79). The point of all this is to create for the play an expectation of an Easter comedy that then makes the tragedy all the more starkly contrasting.

In respect to the Catholic question, such analysis establishes only a "less sectarian understanding of the Catholic nuances in Shakespeare's plays … evidence of nothing more striking than that Shakespeare, in common with much of his audience, retained an affection for the old ways" (29). What distinguishes Shakespeare somewhat is that his Catholic references are "something almost ordinary and accepted: the references are part of the furniture of the plays" (31). The modesty of this claim comes under strain, however, in the analysis of King John that follows.

The argument about King John is that Shakespeare, unlike the Protestant versions which emphasized the divinity of the monarch, made the young Arthur the holy center of the play, his execution scene evoking the sacrifice of Isaac and the Passion (90), especially as dramatized in the mystery plays, thus aligning Christian virtue with powerlessness, a new sort of claim to the throne (102). Here the excessive modesty of Groves's thesis reveals itself, as we are led to wonder: why does Shakespeare support such a counterestablishment line to the throne? Is his Catholicism here merely nostalgia, or is he implicitly proposing an alternative to Elizabethan Protestant rule? Groves, perhaps wisely, stays away from this question; but it is the question at the heart of the "recent resurgence of interest in Shakespeare's Catholicism."

The analysis of Prince Hal's reformation in the Henry IV and Henry V plays is perceptive and well-grounded, if a little disappointing. Here the analogy is to the Harrowing of Hell and the triumph of Christ; thus Hal disguises himself in the lowlife world...