Shakespeare and the Apocalypse: Visions of Doom from Early Modern Tragedy to Popular Culture by R. M. Christofides (review)

Sheer innocence is presumably the ideal posture in which to face Doomsday. While that event has yet to arrive, as R. M. Christofides frequently reminds us (“We are still here. For now.” [202]), his book leaves the impression that in contemplating the Doom’s imaginary anticipations—they range from medieval church depictions to contemporary science fiction—a strong admixture of worldly wisdom is in order.

Applying poststructuralist theories of language and psychoanalysis, Christofides seeks to show how A. C. Bradley’s “big four” tragedies, through apocalyptic imagery, create the expectation of divine intervention to end the span of human time and assign damnation or salvation according to merit. This implies the manifestation of God as Transcendental Signifier, but, as with the endless deferral of meaning along the chain of signification, the revelatory moment never arrives. The withholding, Christofides argues, is what generates tragedy, in contrast with the deus ex machina solutions in Shakespeare’s comedies. Throughout, analogies with contemporary popular culture illustrate the imaginative carrying power into our secular present of this fundamental tenet of medieval and early modern Christianity.

Given that Shakespeare’s allusions to apocalypse are readily accessible as such, it is the general approach and play-by-play application that will measure Christofides’s contribution. Arguably, the most fundamental problem with the approach itself entails disparity between the apocalyptic expectation he posits—“a promise Shakespeare breaks” (199)—and the imperatives of genre. There is little reason to suppose that an audience of the period, conditioned to tragedy as English playwrights cultivated it from neo-Senecan roots, expected to see even poetic justice straightforwardly enacted, much less the divine variety. Moreover, the destiny of souls is hardly a running preoccupation (Doctor Faustus being the exception that proves the rule). Even Macbeth’s immortal part compels interest chiefly as an object of contestation between ambition and conscience. Surprisingly, the latter faculty, and the turmoil it regularly produces, receive little attention from Christofides.

Indeed, there are further issues bound up with the concept of apocalypse that one might have expected Christofides to address. Certainly, the universal Doom is evoked by characters on sporadic occasions; individual doom, by contrast, is a constant, often to the point of obsession. There is, of course, a vast amount of criticism, some of it cited by the author, which presents the protagonists as negotiating the processes of time. That negotiation is associated, moreover, with at least imaginative manipulation of events and persons—to the point where virtually every major figure in these plays attempts, at some point, to reimagine his role, to rewrite the script. Most of the outright references to apocalypse are linked to such a metadramatic impulse. The paradigm was succinctly established and harnessed to the eminently apocalyptic motif of vengeance in The Spanish Tragedy, where the inadequacy of language is notably foregrounded.¹ Yet Christofides cites Kyd’s play only for the unapocalyptic words of what he terms a “classic revenger” (38)—Lorenzo, not Hieronimo.

What interpretations does Christofides attach to apocalypse? Hamlet is approached in Lacanian terms through the absent Name-of-the-Father, a role the protagonist must finally assume himself; Othello presents a diabolical Iago adept, like the medieval Vice, at exploiting the instability of language against an insider/outsider; Macbeth turns on equivocation—verbal, temporal, moral; King Lear deploys a poisonous/curative pharmakon in Cordelia, only to reveal, by her murder, “pain, anguish and death as shorn of any deliverance” (182). Not only do these readings not depend on the main theme, but there is also little novelty in them. Nor is there much in the supporting analysis, which tends to follow well-worn critical paths, sometimes verging on plot summary. Several lapses of understanding sap one’s confidence: the author makes “Goodman Delver” (19, 57, 58, 59) the name of the First Gravedigger in Hamlet (5...