Shakespeare and Religion: Early Modern and Postmodern Perspectives ed. by Ken Jackson and Arthur Marotti (review)

Jackson and Marotti's Shakespeare and Religion offers a welcome look at where the "turn to religion" has taken Shakespeare studies over the past decade. Since their 2004 article on the subject ("The Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Studies"), much ink has been spilled on Shakespeare's late Reformation England, making panels and seminars on religion—like the two from which the present volume is culled—a now-standard feature of literary conferences. This research, however, has been fueled by two very different lines of influence: by a surge of innovative work in Reformation historiography, on the one hand, and by the theopolitical themes of late poststructuralist theory, on the other. Jackson and Marotti's new collection aims to bring those two strands together through a series of close readings by leading scholars that spotlight both the "local" and "transhistorical" (3) significance of religion in Shakespeare's plays. The result is a suggestive, if still indirect, dialogue between critical voices that have often been kept separate.

According to the editors, this "dialectic" (9) in method and theme best characterizes the cumulative effort of the various religious "turns" in early modern literary studies. Shakespeare and Religion is designed to stage that dialectic by devoting one section to "historical analyses" of the plays and a second to "postmodern theological, ethical, and philosophical" perspectives (2). In part, this approach enacts a re-staging of the debate between historicism and theory, a debate that has driven two of the more prominent areas of religious-minded Shakespeare scholarship— Catholicism and presentism—in their competing attempts to rectify what is usually seen as the ideological reduction of the sacred in New Historicist criticism of the 1980s and 90s. At the same time, Jackson and Marotti seek to point beyond that debate by questioning a persistent fixation with the "otherness" or "alterity" (4) of Shakespearean faith common to both contextual and speculative approaches. They prefer the other religion of the late Derrida, whose "religion without religion" (6) preserves both the thematic aporia of Shakespeare's own thinking as well as the methodological tension between materialist histories of institutional religion and contemporary theories of "heart and inspiration" (9).

For comparatists and Shakespeareans alike, this retrospective tone may signal a useful pause in the critical conversation about religion and literature. Shakespeare and Religion urges at once a more systematic accounting of the category of "religion" in literary history (in contrast to fashionable categories like "spirituality" or the "sacred") while displaying its interdisciplinary diversity. Together, the volume's essays nicely reflect that diversity by placing topics in Reformation history, medieval drama, and biblical studies in conversation with Buddhism, political theology, and gift ethics. Individually, however, the dialogue between "early modern" and "postmodern" perspectives ranges across the essays themselves, from the truly dialectic to the more gestural sense of the aporetic.

Part One showcases recent lines of historical scholarship on the Christian confessional context of Shakespeare's plays. Robert Miola, Gary Kuchar, and Richard McCoy introduce familiar issues of Protestant-Catholic debate, covering Shakespeare's Jesuit affiliations, the "politics of ceremony" in the Elizabethan Church, and Protestant eucharistic theology, respectively. Newer forms of historicist inquiry are found in Sarah Beckwith and Hannibal Hamlin, whose readings of auricular confession in Cymbeline and the biblical allusions to Job in King Lear probe the subterranean grounds of Judeo-Christian discourse in the play-texts. Beckwith, who continues to extend her venerable work on English medieval drama to Shakespeare, argues that Cymbeline resists the privatization of the English penitential rite prescribed in the Book of Common Prayer by portraying "a different pathway from the 'I' to the 'we'" (110) modeled on medieval notions of confession as communal speech act or gift (119). Hamlin's study of Job as the "pattern of patience" (140) for Shakespeare's Lear is encyclopedic in scope. His careful triangulation of the play's biblical references with medieval biblical plays and sixteenth...