Texts and Traditions: Religion in Shakespeare 1592–1604 (review)

This is a useful and often engaging book. It seeks to give equal emphasis "both to the intensely visual aspects of (Shakespeare's) Catholic cultural heritage and to the rich verbal texture of Protestantism" (6). The opening two chapters explore this twofold foundation of Shakespearean drama. Subsequent chapters seek new "interpretive possibilities" (vii) in a selection of plays drawn from the first half of Shakespeare's career. Individual chapters explore Romeo and Juliet, King John, the second tetralogy (especially 1 Henry IV), and Measure for Measure.

Chapter 1, "Drama and the Word: The Bible on the Early Modern Stage," does a fine job of establishing how remarkably well versed in the language of the English Bible Shakespeare's audiences could be. It presents illuminating examples of how authors could rely on those audiences to catch significant, often amusing, and frequently inconspicuous allusions to biblical texts. Groves's scholarship in this chapter is impressive, offering information drawn from historical studies old and new and providing striking quotations from her own extensive examination of primary sources.

That is also true of chapter 2, "Shakespeare's Incarnational Aesthetic: The Mystery Plays and Catholicism." Here, Groves argues that the grand narrative and staging of the mystery cycles, with Christianity's carpenter God at their center, taught Shakespeare and his generation to violate the desire of classicizing contemporaries to keep violence offstage and to observe the unities of time, space, and action: "The Incarnation was the subject of the cycle plays and it enforced and enabled a new form of drama" (50). This claim, although supported by the work of other scholars whom Groves scrupulously credits, seems overly ambitious. I doubt that we should see so simple a causal relation between the theology of incarnation and the dominant characteristics of early modern drama. A similar difficulty attends the assertion that antitheatrical writers of the early modern era opposed not just the representation of religious materials on stage, but that "the real stumbling block is the idolatry inherent in all physical enactment" (55). This comment immediately follows evidence quoted to support it—Dean Hutton's 1576 order that "'No Pageant be vsed or set furthe wherein the Maiestye of god the father god the sonne or god the holie ghoste or the administration of either the sacramentes of Baptisme or of the lordes Supper be counterfeyted or represented; or anythinge plaied which tende to the maintenaunce of superstition and idolatrie'" (55). Hutton's order, which carefully itemizes central religious topics and refers vaguely to others that tend to maintain "superstition and idolatry," seems more limited in its reach than the inference Groves draws from it.

Similar problems appear in the interpretive chapters. Groves argues, for instance, that a "paschal motif . . . runs through Romeo and Juliet" (61) and that it makes its presence felt as early as the Nurse's delightfully harebrained account of Juliet's weaning: "The scene by the dovehouse wall is a Crucifixion in innocent miniature" (63). The evidence for this perception is that the Nurse refers to an earthquake. "There was an earthquake too when Christ was thirsty on the cross" (63). Christ was given gall instead of water; Juliet was given "wormwood" (63) on the Nurse's breast. "Shortly afterwards, as with Juliet, 'the earth did quake, & the stones were clouen' (Matt. 27: 51)" (63–64). But the earthquake in Matthew comes seventeen weighty verses after the administration of the tormenting drink, and it marks Christ's death, not his moment of thirst. More importantly, the allusion Groves finds indubitably present in the scene seems difficult to extract from the Nurse's disorderly memories, in which the earthquake appears as one among a welter of amusing mnemonics.

Groves also finds biblical and mystery-play influence in the final scene. "In John 20: 3–4 [the apostles] Peter and John race to the sepulchre, but John outstrips Peter" (65). The Easter liturgy and subsequently the mystery plays tended to cast an...