Birth Places: Shakespeare’s Beliefs / Believing in Shakespeare

Reading Henry James’s Birthplace, Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality, and passages from a range of recent biographies of Shakespeare, this essay looks at the place of religion in Shakespeare life writing. Modern biographies of Shakespeare reject hagiographic legend in favor of documentary evidence, gradually sifting the anecdotal and speculative from the verifiable and historical. At stake is not the death of the author so much as the birth of the author: by what coincidence of temperament and disposition, education and early exposure, and collaboration and context did the baby from Stratford become the man behind the Folio? Nativity in the theological sense plays no explicit role in such a project, yet Shakespeare’s life remains suffused with the enduring rewards of his writing and with the enigma of his exceptionalism. If early Shakespeare biographies resemble a preconfessional Christianity of relics, legends, and nativity shrines, and if critical biographies borrow their historical consciousness from the crisis of the Reformation and secularization, then the virtuoso biographies of Stephen Greenblatt and Graham Holderness are postsecular in their courting of religious possibilities for both the Shakespeare lives they reconstruct and the scholarly lives they enact. In all of its phases, Shakespeare biography draws on religion not only as a topic of historical investigation, but also as part of the literary lineage and affective stakes of life writing. The hagiographical element should be cultivated with care as a legitimate part of biography’s curatorial and performative vocation.