The Gospel According to Shakespeare by Piero Boitani, and: Faith in Shakespeare by Richard C. McCoy (review)

Both of these slim, admirable volumes have titles evoking the old-fashioned, now newly fashionable, topic of religion in Shakespeare. Like an amiable prophet or preacher, Piero Boitani reads Hamlet, Lear, and the four late romances or tragicomedies alongside Job and the Gospels, and finds “the motifs of living, generating, dying, and being reborn that form the substance of the unique Gospel according to William Shakespeare” (xiii). Making no claims for influence or creed, he presents Shakespeare as a fifth evangelist for salvation by love. Though Boitani’s argument is inconceivable without Christianity, Shakespeare’s gospel makes us more human, not more Christian. Boitani presents Shakespeare as “a spy of God” exploring “the human spirit and human vicissitudes” who also wants “to gain insight into God’s own intimate being” (132).

Professional rather than prophetic, Richard McCoy acknowledges once having been absorbed by Reformation theological controversies. “I now see faith in Shakespeare as more theatrical and poetic than spiritual,” he says (ix). He carefully locates himself in relation both to critics such as Johnson, Coleridge, and Hazlitt and to the academic scholarship on Shakespeare of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Coleridge is the crucial figure in McCoy’s version of faith in Shakespeare, a faith that McCoy sees as “‘the willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith’” (4, quoting Biographia Literaria). Though discussing other plays in passing, his main chapters focus on The Comedy of Errors, As You Like It, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale. McCoy acknowledges that Keats, whose “‘negative capability’” (4) he associates with Coleridge’s great formulation, believes that Shakespeare offers “a system of Salvation which does not affront our reason and humanity” (7). (Boitani might agree with Keats.) While embracing Shakespeare’s rationality and humanity, McCoy will have nothing to do with “a system of Salvation.” “For me,” he writes, “the hopes inspired by Shakespeare are modest rather than grand, and they do not include hopes for salvation; I will settle instead for ‘food for thought’ and ‘enjoyment’” (7). Recent religiously oriented criticism he dismisses as what T. E. Hulme called “‘spilt religion’” (7). Lively and cool, McCoy, for each of his principal texts, guides the readers through important recent critical controversies and then makes his own case. His notes, voluminous and lucid, could serve as an excellent annotated bibliography of scholarship worth reading.

If we strip “faith” of its religious meanings, what remains? McCoy’s implicit answer varies—perhaps even wavers—from chapter to chapter. Discussing The Comedy of Errors, McCoy argues that at or near the beginning of his career, “upstart crow” Shakespeare is trying to win audience faith in the importance of his own theatrical project. The Comedy of Errors was performed at Gray’s Inn as part of the 1594 Christmas revels. Shakespeare may have seen that performance as compensation for Greene’s (or perhaps Chettle’s) mockery. The Gesta Grayorum performed before The Comedy of Errors by the members of Gray’s Inn suggests to McCoy imperfect faith in playing on the part of the lawyers and their distinguished guests. Like Theseus, like Berowne and the other academic gentlemen in Love’s Labor’s Lost, they lack faith in the powers of imagination. The improbable events of The Comedy of Errors, however, demand from its characters a faith in more than cool reason. Yet, though the language of The Comedy of Errors can be (and often has been) taken as religious, “the ‘blessed power’ at work in these plays is still more poetic and theatrical than holy” (50). In this chapter, “faith” is what audiences need to enjoy performances and what characters discover as their actions end...