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Introduction
- University of Notre Dame Press
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1 Introduction yet thou dost look Like Patience gazing on kings’ graves, and smiling Extremity out of act. v Shakespeare’s romances bring good news, and they do so in a most immediate sense, as they all have a happy ending.these late plays constitute his good news, his Gospel. although Shakespeare has constantly in mind the Christian Gospels, he composes, as the supreme and free playwright that he is, a testament (these are his last works)1 that is truly his: the new testament of William Shakespeare. one must take into account the complexity and variety of the themes and forms that inspire Shakespeare (from pastoral drama to the Commedia dell’arte, from late antique romance to the dumb show and the masque), as well as the unique and ingenious inclusiveness and the mixture displayed in his works: the syncretic juxtaposition of pagan deities and the biblical God, the combination of magic and religion, the intertwining of politics and passion, and the contrast and complementariness of nature and culture, of nature and art. But it is striking that the sequence examined in this book—from Hamlet to The Tempest— opens with a citation from the Gospels and ends with another. For 2 The Gospel according to Shakespeare hamlet declares to horatio, echoing Matthew and Luke, that “there is special providence in the fall of a sparrow”; and prospero, at the end of The Tempest, takes leave from his audience (and so from us) with words that rewrite the Lord’s prayer: “and my ending is despair, / Unless i be relieved by prayer, / Which pierces so that it assaults / Mercy itself and frees all faults. / As you from crimes would pardoned be, / Let your indulgence set me free” (emphasis mine). From the second part of Hamlet onwards,2 Shakespeare is meditating on providence, on forgiveness, and on goodness and happiness, and is doing so in Christian terms. i am not interested in trying to determine —as in fact many critics today are legitimately doing—whether Shakespeare was, either in his last years or at any other point in his life, protestant or Catholic (he certainly was not puritan, for he derides puritans on more than one occasion); whether he believed in purgatory and transubstantiation; or whether he regarded himself as faithful to the Church of rome or to that of england.there is contradictory evidence in favor of either hypothesis. For instance, hamlet’s “special” providence seems to derive from the ideas of John Calvin; but no trace of this appears in The Tempest, which has the action of providence at its heart. Moreover, it is generally held that Shakespeare uses the Geneva Bible,the great english protestant translation of 1560; but it seems that he sometimes looks to the Douai-rheims version (1582–1610), that is, the Catholic translation, and sometimes to the anglican one, namely, the king James Bible, published in its entirety in 1611. For a protestant, for an anglican, purgatory does not exist, and yet the ghost of hamlet’s father declares to his son that he is “Doomed for a certain term to walk the night / and for the day confined to fast in fires / till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / are burnt and purged away” (emphasis mine). however, there is no sign of such possible purgatory in The Tempest, where there is only talk of hell and (earthly) paradise. it is possible to entertain the hypothesis that in the years following the succession to the throne of the Stuart king, James i, Shakespeare was thinking about a rapprochement between London and rome. the final scene of Cymbeline—where the soothsayer announces the fulfillment of the prophecy according to which “our princely eagle, / th’ imperial Caesar, should again unite / his favour with the radiant [44.208.25.215] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 13:44 GMT) Introduction 3 Cymbeline,” and in which the english king has his own troops and the roman troops march together under flanking banners—could be an allusion to the translatio imperii from rome to england, but it could also be seen as the veiled hope of a meeting between the papacy and the Crown (that is, the Church) of england. these are intriguing questions that, however, i leave to historians, and to historians of culture and of ideas in particular. For i find it just as fascinating to note that that speech by hamlet, and indeed his life, ends with an amen, and that the performance...