SHAKESPEARE'S HYBRID FAITH. History, religion and the stage. By Jean-Christophe Mayer. 248pp. Palgrave Macmillan. Pounds 45 (US $65) - 978 0 230 00525 9.
In the past two decades or so, the whirligig of time has circled back to old debates about whether Shakespeare's religious convictions can be ascertained.
Insofar as these bring the issue of his possible Catholic sympathies to the attention of readers outside the world of confessional scholarship, they have even gained a new spin. Within and beyond Shakespeare studies there is a high level of interest in the question, testified to by several exchanges in the TLS itself - most recently, an article by Peter Davidson and Thomas McCoog, SJ, "Unreconciled: What evidence links Shakespeare and the Jesuits?" (March 16,
2007, and the subsequent correspondence). Feelings sometimes run high; as Jean-Christophe Mayer tactfully puts it in the introduction to his study, Shakespeare's Hybrid Faith, "wanting to prove a point almost purely by the force of one's personal convictions remains to this day attached to the delicate task of pinning down the dramatist's religious beliefs".
This wide interest in Shakespeare's faith has a symbiotic relationship with the growing need to make Shakespeare understandable to those without a Christian inheritance, which has helped draw attention to just how much religious matter he uses. Though the notion of Shakespeare as a secular dramatist has a lot of life left in it, there is now a consensus that he was a virtuoso exploiter of Christian cultural currency, drawing on everything from vernacular bibles and the Prayer Book to the residue of pre-Reformation Catholicism which retained so potent an imaginative charge in England at the time he was writing. Many recent studies have productively drawn on this, two of the most distinguished being Shakespeare's Tribe by Jeffrey Knapp and Beatrice Groves's Texts and Traditions.
Yet this in itself does not prove anything more than that Shakespeare was keenly sensitive to his historical locatedness and the issues of his day; to go further could be rather like deducing from the high level of Christian reference in Ulysses that James Joyce was an orthodox Catholic. Rather, if Shakespeare's plays tell us anything, it is that their author rose to the challenge of reflecting Elizabethan and Jacobean England's religious complexity and multivocality, while deliberately evading most labels. He was, after all, a practical dramatist who must have known about the high degree of religious diversity in the average London audience.
Though a book with the title Mayer has chosen could deal with any number of Shakespeare's plays, it focuses on a group of the Histories: King John, Richard
II, Henry VI Part I and Part II, Richard III, Henry VIII. Those set in medieval, Catholic England are an obvious point of entry into the debate, as is Henry VIII, given its dramatization of events surrounding England's break with Rome. King John has been an equally obvious hunting ground for those who have sought clues about Shakespeare's attitude to Catholicism.
Despite his obvious weaknesses as a ruler, the King could be seen as a proto-Protestant hero for his defiance of Pope Innocent III over such matters as the control of ecclesiastical appointments. Despite his later submission to the papacy, this is how he is represented in the play Kyng Johan, written by the reformer and propagandist John Bale around 1538.
But it is the still disputed relationship of Shakespeare's text to a later, anonymous dramatization of the story, The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England (1591), which has figured more prominently in the attempt to detect Shakespeare's confessional leanings. The fact that anti Catholic rhetoric in The Troublesome Reign is more extreme than in Shakespeare's play has been read as denoting Shakespeare's relative religious tolerance, or even as signalling a pro-Catholic position. Other critics have countered this by remarking how episodes such as John's alleged poisoning by a monk, played up by anti-Catholic historians, do still feature in Shakespeare's drama; others still have read it as missing a theatrical trick by its minimization of religious issues.
But for Mayer, the play is above all an exercise in deploying conflicting rhetorics with detachment. His controlling image is of the dramatist as anatomist, handling "the sometimes unsavoury matters of his time -acrimonious sectarian debate, opportunistic propaganda, nationalism and xenophobia". It surely tells us something about Shakespeare himself that he felt conscientiously able to write with this kind of disinterestedness, on a topic where most of his contemporaries would have taken sides; and Mayer's convincing picture of Shakespeare as someone for whom "religion . . . was not so much a matter of systematic allegiance as one of constant debating and questioning" perhaps invites a more detailed biographical exegesis than it receives here.
Arguments making a case for complexity and hybridity, usually formulated in response to previous over-simplifications, are by definition hard to refute -but they can also be hard to get excited about. Compared to much that has recently been written on the subject, Jean- Christophe Mayer's book may seem unsensational; but it is also very welcome, as a well-written, responsible, refreshingly sane contribution to a debate where overstatement on both sides has been so prevalent and sometimes so damaging.
