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  • Shakespeare the Renaissance Humanist: Moral Philosophy and His Plays by Anthony Raspa
  • Noam Reisner
Anthony Raspa. Shakespeare the Renaissance Humanist: Moral Philosophy and His Plays. Palgrave MacMillan. x, 200. $69.99

Was Shakespeare a Renaissance humanist? In this monograph, Anthony Raspa seeks to show through a serious of illuminating and often surprising articles that the answer to this question depends on refining what we understand to be Renaissance humanism in the first place. Aligning his study with such scholars and critics as A. D. Nuttall and Tzachi Zamir, who have forged a new path in recent decades into reclaiming our sense of Shakespeare as a profound and complex moral "thinker," Raspa seeks to reconstruct the intellectual context of what he recognizes in the plays as a deeply ingrained Christian Renaissance humanism. He does so by dipping into the philosophical writings of such Christian humanist luminaries as William Baldwin, Philippe de Mornay, Pierre de la Primaudaye, and Pierre Charon, among others, as he paints in bold, lucid strokes the outlines of a Renaissance humanist anthropology deeply infused with the immanence of the divine and the transcendental. The emerging moral and ethical outlook of such transcendental humanism, which Raspa terms the "street humanism of moral philosophy," is primarily concerned with the practical morality of how best to live one's life in light of a Christian morality that looks at once both to the life lived in this world and the life hoped for in the next. If the term "practical morality" may sound oxymoronic to those trained to think of classical virtue ethics with Bernard Williams or Alasdair MacIntyre, Raspa precisely seeks to show why the problem is uniquely ours today and was not shared by Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

According to Raspa, the Christian Neoplatonic vision of man and his God-given rationality permeates and animates Shakespeare's dramatic exploration of all human affairs in the plays (or at least a selection of plays submitted here for analysis) in ways that hitherto have not been rightly understood for how they impacted in Shakespeare's time on any individuals blundering through daily life with eternity on their minds. Oddly enough, the appeal of this claim rests with its unapologetic idealism: Shakespeare was never a skeptic, claims Raspa, and it is our mistake if we recognize in his searching and inquisitive genius the rupture of something like post-Nietzschean doubt and nihilism (nor even apparently Montaignian skepticism). There are, of course, immense difficulties with such a claim. While Raspa is certainly correct that one should be wary of taking metaphysics out of our understanding of renaissance moral philosophy, he too readily assumes that the resulting fusion of classical and Christian moral traditions always cohabited happily. The humanist vision of a moral world that Raspa paints as a very happy one was fraught with philosophical difficulty, and, in Protestant England, such moral perfectionism was certainly subject to countless [End Page 329] contradictory habits of thought that placed sin, not sublime reason, at the centre of man's psychic struggle for salvation. Moreover, if we can allow that Shakespeare had a mind of his own, we can equally allow that he had moods, and some of his moods could be quite dark at times. Even a deeply spiritual Christian humanist such as the one Raspa paints in Shakespeare could on occasion despair of life's darker ambiguities without losing his underlying faith in the hope that things might turn out well after all, one way or another. Such a point of view does not make Shakespeare a nihilist, or even a cynic, but it merely affirms the abiding humanity of his plays and the searching, deeply inquisitive mind that can be seen operating in them.

This overarching difficulty, however, does not in fact cripple Raspa's thesis, as such, but it merely qualifies it. In the end, there is much in this monograph to admire. Even if one chooses to reject Raspa's warm vision of Shakespeare's mind, there are many discrete analyses in this study that reward close attention. Raspa offers tantalizing and fresh discussions, most notably, of the humanist concept of "form" in King John, of soul and sight...

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