Godless Shakespeare, and: To Be or Not To Be, and: Shakespeare Thinking, and: Shakespeare Inside: The Bard behind Bars (review)

Small books have a long history, but the turn to shorter forms in academic writing is a new thing. The four volumes under review, all part of an innovative new series published by Continuum, exemplify this development. Series editors Simon Palfry and Ewan Fernie have rejected the notion of business as usual in order to pursue a distinctive strategy that aims to put “cutting-edge scholarship” in front of a broad audience (Mallin, ix). In the general editors’ preface, Palfry and Fernie have some acute things to say about the usual strictures on academic work, and they offer an eloquent justification for a new series of “‘minigraphs’” that will showcase “the genuine challenge and vigor of thinking” (Mallin, ix–x). The nimble minigraph is able to communicate energy and excitement, while the stolid monograph reifies thought and provokes boredom. While the intellectual justification for the series is plausible, it is hard to ignore the degree to which short forms are a response to economic pressures. Short books do not cost as much as long books to produce and therefore may represent a better return on investment. While academic publishers have become increasingly sensitive to production costs, they have pursued new marketing strategies. Shakespeare Now! with its insistent appeal to the contemporary— this is fresh Shakespeare for readers turned off by the prospect of dry-as-dust scholarship—aims to reach a general audience. The cover designs employ neutral colors, black, and a few discrete elements in a contrasting color to create a striking and uniform aesthetic that is congruent with the promise of new scholarship married to a new format.

Eric S. Mallin’s Godless Shakespeare is perhaps the most self-consciously iconoclastic of the group. Given recent work on Shakespeare and religion, much of which contests the specificity of Shakespeare’s religion while assuming that the fact of it is beyond question, it is refreshing to encounter an argument taking the notion of a godless Shakespeare seriously. Mallin does not, however, return to the once-familiar notion of a secular Shakespeare. In the first place, he refuses to make a biographical argument (Shakespeare as secret unbeliever). Instead, Mallin applies considerable interpretive pressure upon Shakespeare’s theatrical practice in a way that exposes the fault lines in orthodox Christianity. In the second place, Mallin’s godlessness is a spiritual, not a secular, state. At the outset, after acknowledging his suspicions “about Shakespeare’s lack of assurance in the God and entrenched myths of Judeo-Christian culture,” he expresses certainty about two things: as a popular writer, Shakespeare sought “to supply entertainment rather than offense” and he believed in “an occult world, one cheerfully or menacingly beyond rationality. . . . Specifically, he buys into the notion of the soul” (9–10). The first of these claims seems uncontroversial— whatever else he was, Shakespeare was a theater professional committed to gaining the approbation of variegated and paying audiences. The second claim is more difficult. If Shakespeare’s beliefs about God and the entrenched myths of Judeo-Christian culture are shrouded in obscurity, how is it that a belief in the occult and the soul assumes a robust clarity? This combination of soul and godless universe is, for Mallin, a powerful form of spirituality, and it resembles recent formulations of religion without religion, in which the personal God of monotheism is dispensed with but the possibility of some sort of transcendence is retained. Whatever else it is, this form of spirituality is deeply personal: it “imagines the self reaching beyond the world it knows . . . making a leap to otherness...