This study seeks to negotiate the porous boundaries of the interdisciplinary terrain called ‘theology and literature’. Its orientation is theological, in the sense that it is concerned with unravelling some of the metaphysical and poetical implications of the paradox of the incarnation, ‘the Word made flesh’, through looking in detail at two of Shakespeare’s plays.¹ Thus, this book begins not with a claim, but with a venture: that emanating from a deep grammar of the incarnation, something of the divine can be encountered in the words we say—to ourselves, to one another, to things as well as to beings and ultimately to God. But ‘the Word made flesh’ also means, in a certain participatory sense, that flesh is made word, and thus my venture will probe how something of the material as such, things as well as beings, can also be encountered in speech. This elusive relationship between Word, words and flesh will be the hermeneutical key of my approach. Yet, since this relationship can only remain elusive, this study will not attempt conclusively to discern confessional or theological positions in Shakespeare. It will rather seek to distinguish in what way Shakespeare can be read in the light of this relationship between Word, words and flesh—and, equally importantly, how Shakespeare’s plays can bring their own distinct light to such relationships.

This chapter explores critical debates that surround this venture, by focusing on the thematic interplay between Shakespeare, religion and the phenomenon of language. As the figure around which my argument is built traditionally has been the focus of literary studies, the exploration below begins with how these themes have been negotiated within this tradition. In transiting to a theological approach, I supplement the insights and limitations emanating from such literary studies with a metaphysical account of language that can benefit from literary scholarship while attempting to remain faithful to my initial venture. From this, I turn to theological readings of Shakespeare, focusing particularly on the twinned themes of language and gift. This discussion offers the scholarly background to what will be my ‘doxological’ approach, a reading of Shakespeare concerned with language as, fundamentally, a gift or praise to God. I conclude the chapter with a consideration of some helpful hints gleaned from scholarship in the emerging scholarly category called ‘theology and literature’.

It should be noted that, despite much recent interest, the study of a meaningful, mutually illuminating relationship between literature and theology is not new to theologians: this study can be read, for example, as continuous with Austin Farrer’s project, as expressed in the Preface to his Bampton Lectures of 1948: ‘to think about the relation borne to one another by three things—the sense of metaphysical philosophy, the sense of scriptural revelation, and the sense of poetry’.² But while Farrer’s work went somewhat neglected by theologians, it certainly jars with recent literary scholarship which often sets theology and literature in conflict, seeing it as essential to the autonomy of literary studies that it remain liberated from any religious ideology.

Shakespeare scholarship, while seeing it as necessary to approach religion because of contextual issues, has vacillated over where exactly Shakespeare’s poetics and the allusive religious contexts that surround and inform his work fit with one another. This has been further complicated by the fact that literary criticism is itself an interdisciplinary study and is often used as a testing ground for theoretical apparatus.³ In recent years, approaches to Shakespeare, language and religion have been both extraordinarily nourished and extraordinarily determined by their relationship to theory. It may be useful to briefly outline changing trends and paradigms in 20th- and early 21st-century Shakespeare scholarship with respect to religion and to delineate a broad narrative: one beginning from the work of George Wilson Knight, who approached Shakespeare’s work as spiritual writings, a kind of ‘second scripture’, transiting to a more detached or even hostile approach to religion coeval with the rising influence of critical theory, and concluding in an early 21st-century post-critical ‘turn to religion’.

Already from his early work Myth and Miracle (1929), Knight proclaimed the vision at the heart of his manifesto: ‘art is an extroverted expression of the creative imagination which, when introverted, becomes religion’.⁴ Like Farrer, Knight worked across the senses of metaphysics, poetry and scriptural allusions, seeking to light upon the plays in terms of deep, symbolic spiritual patterns which, to him, articulated a cosmology common to Shakespeare and the Gospels.⁵ Echoing the universalist tendencies of his day, Knight read Shakespeare as a writer of unusual genius rather than a mere product of his time—a sophisticated Christian humanist who poetically illuminates a religious universe without being restrained by mere didactic concerns and confessional issues. Nowhere in Shakespeare do we find moral platitudes or simplistic nods to doctrine: dramatic resolution comes about ‘not through repentance but by recognition and acceptance; and in these there lies a spiritual achievement’.⁶ It is such broadly conceived spiritual achievement that allows religion and literature to throw light upon one another while remaining separate, since ‘religion exists in the order of being and immediate action, drama and literature in the order of imaginative experience’.⁷

Considered by many an exceptional teacher and lecturer, Knight was undoubtedly a brilliant, highly idiosyncratic reader of Shakespeare. Nevertheless, his eclectic interests and ambitious readings have caused him to be affectionately dismissed by some as a ‘classic inter-war autodidact’⁸ and repudiated by others as representative of a conservative ‘hegemonic Anglicanism’ that stifled Shakespearean criticism.⁹ To be sure, his influential work attracted fierce response. In his Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine (1963), Roland Frye lambasted Knight and his followers for relentlessly unearthing ‘Christ-figures’ in the plays and wilfully obscuring their true purpose: Shakespeare’s mirror, argued Frye, was held up to nature, not to God.¹⁰ As literary studies took an increasingly suspicious stance towards religion, Shakespeare was gradually re-imagined from a Knightean universalist to an enlightened, highly skeptical classicist—more in line with a Montaigne or a Bacon than a Sidney or a Spenser.¹¹ This optimistic classical-humanist portrayal, however, faded in the last decades of the 20th century, making way for the rise of the postmodern imaginary. Once seen as a transhistorical figure, a mystic-poet with universal insight, Shakespeare was gradually turning into a mere product of history—a literary figure not for all time, but for an age. A brief survey of scholarship regarding King Lear, a play around which much of this study will be built, might serve to further illustrate this change of mood, coincident, perhaps, with the cultural assimilation of the large-scale atrocities witnessed by the 20th century.¹²

The great Shakespearean scholar A. C. Bradley had portrayed Lear as a tale of spiritual suffering leading to redemption and, following him, readers such as R.W. Chambers (1940) and John Lothian (1949) argued that the play’s central narrative patterns were constructed around Lear’s own spiritual journey, a death-to-resurrection dramatic arc.¹³ Perhaps justifying his later detractors, Knight (1930) had seen Cordelia as representing nothing less than ‘the Principle of Love’,¹⁴ a view also espoused by scholars of a similar epoch such as S. L. Bethell (1944) and John Danby (1949).¹⁵ But post-WW2 scholarship began to affect the change of mood already alluded to above. Eminent critics such as Maynard Mack (1965) and William Elton (1966) now openly argued against ‘optimistic’ readings of the play, seeing it instead as bearing witness to a breakdown of order audiences were witnessing both on the stage and in their own lives.¹⁶ Jan Kott’s seminal Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1967) saw Lear as darkly confounding eschatological hopes, ‘a play about the disintegration of the world’, a world which eventually is shown, through Lear and Gloucester’s downfall, simply to ‘cease to exist’.¹⁷ To Kott, the ‘theatre of the absurd’ was the most convincing approach to the play, for it powerfully revealed the fathomlessness of the human condition already mediated by his time’s political disillusionment: hence in order to make sense of Lear, ‘it sufficed to discover Beckett in Shakespeare’.¹⁸ Kott’s politicised readings and Peter Brook’s 1962 staging of the play signalled the genesis of the ‘postmodern’ Shakespeare, their approach becoming thereafter ‘transmuted into metaphysical terms’ by numerous directors and literary critics, as R. A. Foakes notes, ‘with Lear progressing towards despair rather than towards redemption’.¹⁹ This strand of radical skepticism extended into the deconstructionist readings of Malcolm Evans (1986) and Jonathan Goldberg (1988), who saw the play as loosening the biases of unitive ‘logocentric’ readings in favour of irreducibly primal ambiguities and duplicities.²⁰

The 1980s also saw the advent of a more politically engaged Shakespeare criticism, and concerns with the play’s metaphysical messages were left behind in favour of analyses bolstered by the conceptual apparatus of critical theory and post-structuralism. Jonathan Dollimore’s highly influential Radical Tragedy (1984) portrayed the play as an all-out attack on any form of power-ideology, whether political or religious, and thus fundamentally suspicious of Christianity’s ideals of charity or providence.²¹ Perceptive, interdisciplinary feminist analyses such as those of Coppélia Kahn and Janet Adelman set the play’s attitude to gender front and centre, shifting reading foci from a foolish and fond old father to an absent or suffocating mother.²² The text itself, too—a notoriously composite artefact—became problematised and politicised.²³ Preoccupations with grand spiritual visions such as Knight’s all but disappeared, pierced by the hermeneutics of suspicion and the influence of the various Althusser, Lacan and Foucault.²⁴ The first decade of the 21st century witnessed King Lear criticism caught between circular historicist retrospection and an escape from it in ‘presentist’ readings, as Kiernan Ryan (2002) diagnosed...