Shakespeare’s Religious Language: A Dictionary by R. Chris Hassel, Jr. (review)

What a treasure this book is.

R. Chris Hassel, Jr., Professor Emeritus of English at Vanderbilt, has gathered, defined, and illustrated all the religious words in Shakespeare for readers who may or may not know what they actually mean. We should be grateful to him for many of the dictionary’s features, but it is worth slowing down to appreciate the time of life he must have spent simply gathering these words. His Faith and Folly in Shakespeare’s Romantic Comedies (2011) is a smart, learned, and eloquent study, but the dictionary must have entailed greater energy, breadth, and magpie ingenuity just to collect the “over 1000 keywords which have some religious denotation or connotation” (xix). The dictionary comes at a good time. The Christian tradition Shakespeare inherited is, more and more, a foreign country for students and playgoers—surprisingly even those who self-identify as “Christian.” While Shakespeare and religion is a hot topic in Shakespeare studies, many of our students do not have the basic vocabulary to decode characters’ lines. Even so, the dictionary will attract experts, as well, since, while we might be interested in one part of Shakespeare’s engagement in religious subjects, we might very well not know as much as Hassel about other parts.

What’s here? Hassel’s words fall into several categories, almost all of them influenced, of course, by the English Reformation of Shakespeare’s world: biblical references and characters, theological ideas, church history and controversies, moral theology (sins and virtues), liturgy, sacred space and time (architecture and holidays), saints, and so on. He defines each word, explores Shakespeare’s use of it in his works (extensively, but not exhaustively), and gives a mini-bibliography of both primary and secondary sources for it. His entries are a delight—precise, detailed, and ranging—and he is especially good at providing where appropriate more than one definition for a term and apt cross-references. Reviewing a dictionary requires selection, so let us look at just one entry to get a taste of our lexicographer’s art.

Suppose I am reading Cymbeline and encounter Jupiter’s lines in Posthumus’s “dream”—“Whom best I love, I cross, to make my gift, / The more delayed, delighted” (5.3.195–96, my emphasis)—and I notice “cross” and check our dictionary. It provides four different definitions with cross-references bolded:

1. 1. “The structure which Christ bore on his back to Golgotha and on which he was crucified” (76);

2. 2. “To make the sign of the cross for blessing or protection; this is associated during the Reformation with Catholic (and Anglican) superstition” (76) [the entry on “superstition” is especially good];

3. 3. “Representations of the cross for religious devotion and ceremonial display” (77); and

4. 4. “A metaphor for human misfortune” (78).

Shakespeare may have his Jupiter use “cross” as a verb to mean “trouble,” but I think he wants Jupiter’s diction here to be suggestively Christian. In Hassel’s fourth entry, he illustrates the metaphoric sense with a passage from Richard II: “Richard II says metaphorically of his own deposition by Bolingbroke, ‘[Y]ou Pilates / Have here delivered me to my sour cross’ (R2 4.1.240–1).” And in his bibliographic section, he cites John Donne, whose sermons are go-to resources for Hassel throughout to provide context-specific definitions and explanations. Donne’s passage illuminates Cymbeline’s:

Donne speaks of “a feare of God too narrow, when we thinke every natural crosse, every worldy accident to be a judgment of God, and a testimony of his indignation” (3:279), and of “a purgatory too in this life, Crosses, Afflictions, and Tribulations”

(7:184). (77)

This entry confirms Hassel’s statement that “[s]ome of Shakespeare’s most informed and imaginative religious usage is figurative, and such usage is a prominent part of the dictionary” (xxii). He is uniquely perceptive in discerning the way religious language colors or refigures so many non-religious subjects...