The Gospel According to Shakespeare by Piero Boitani (review)

Originally published in Italian in 2009 and awarded the prestigious De Sanctis prize the following year, Piero Boitani’s The Gospel According to Shakespeare is consciously tailored to appeal to a general audience. Much of its slim 145-page length consists of comprehensive plot summaries, a useful feature for the average reader unlikely to be familiar with Shakespeare’s late romances. In addition, as the author himself notes in his Preface to this English translation, the book “has little in common with contemporary Shakespeare criticism” and foregoes engagement with recent literary scholarship in favor of an intuitive essayistic style reminiscent of Eric Auerbach and Frank Kermode, an approach Boitani likens to “a classroom step-by-step lectura” (xiii). However, the modest size of Boitani’s book should not belie the ambition of his argument, which is that Shakespeare’s late romances are not just “old fashioned tales” casually engrafted with sacred themes and tropes, but in toto they constitute Shakespeare’s own Gospel, which, like those of the New Testament, activate a sense of wonder and affirm the miraculous in a way that cultivates something like Paul’s definition of faith as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11.1).

Throughout his readings of Hamlet, King Lear, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, Boitani equates this Pauline faith (and state of grace that accompanies it) with attaining a providential view of human affairs. As he insists in his chapter on Hamlet, “to abandon oneself to Providence, being ready for death, which can come at any moment: this is the evangelical message” (21). Thus, in his overall argument Hamlet and King Lear function prophetically, “where Shakespeare’s New Testament is only announced and where faith, salvation, and peace are only glimpsed at from far away” (xi), as in Hamlet’s brief reflections on “the fall of a sparrow” and Lear’s fleeting joy at the prospect of reuniting with Cordelia to become “God’s spies.” In the final scenes of the romances, however, he finds “a plenitude—a grace—that is found only in the Gospels (and particularly in those of John and Luke) within the post-Resurrection scenes” (5). In Shakespeare it is this-worldly grace, marked by “repentance and forgiveness … [and] the hope of immanent transcendence” (73), made manifest through the plays’ scenes of familial restoration—in Pericles’s rediscovery of Marina and Thaisa, in Imogen’s return to Cymbeline and Posthumus, in Hermione’s resurrection, and in the realignment of affairs at the conclusion of The Tempest. “The Good News that Shakespeare’s last plays bring us,” Boitani claims, “is that we can reach happiness on earth,” by which he means “to be reunited with one’s loved ones, to rediscover them and recognize them, constitutes true happiness” (8).

Walking this tightrope between the sacred and secular, between the theological and dramatic elements of Shakespeare’s theater, generates Boitani’s most compelling readings and inspires useful insights on the interplay between art and faith. In his discussions of Hermione’s resurrection, he observes, “if we can believe, through the ‘suspension of disbelief’ that Coleridge says is necessary for the fruition of art … then Shakespeare would seem to suggest that we can also believe in the resurrection of the dead, the mystery and miracle preached by Christianity” (85–86). Throughout the book, Boitani pursues this interaction between dramatic art and faith by focusing on the concept of recognition, which can encompass both Aristotle’s notion of anagnorisis and the recognition of divinity in scriptural narratives—a subject that Boitani’s previous works, such as The Bible and its Rewritings, have dealt with extensively. His readings of Shakespeare’s recognition scenes—particularly between Pericles and Marina, and between the complex network of characters in the final scene of Cymbeline—are far and away the most breathtaking sections of the book, and through the act of recognition, Botani most convincingly connects...