Shakespeare on Salvation

Shakespeare on Salvation PDF Author: David Anonby
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Get Book

Book Description
This cutting-edge book explores Shakespeare’s negotiation of Reformation controversy about theories of salvation. While twentieth century literary criticism tended to regard Shakespeare as a harbinger of secularism, the so-called “turn to religion” in early modern studies has given renewed attention to the religious elements in Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Nevertheless, there remains an aura of uncertainty regarding some of the doctrinal and liturgical specificities of the period. This historical gap is especially felt with respect to theories of salvation, or soteriology. Such ambiguity, however, calls for further inquiry into historical theology. The author explores how the language and concepts of faith, grace, charity, the sacraments, election, free will, justification, sanctification, and atonement find expression in Shakespeare’s plays. In doing so, this book contributes to the recovery of a greater understanding of the relationship between early modern religion and Shakespearean drama. While the author shares David Scott Kastan’s reluctance to attribute particular religious convictions to Shakespeare, in some cases such critical guardedness has diverted attention from the religious topography of Shakespeare’s plays. Throughout this study, the author’s hermeneutic is to read Shakespeare through the lens of early modern theological controversy and to read early modern theology through the lens of Shakespeare.

Shakespeare on Salvation

Shakespeare on Salvation PDF Author: David Anonby
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Get Book

Book Description
This cutting-edge book explores Shakespeare’s negotiation of Reformation controversy about theories of salvation. While twentieth century literary criticism tended to regard Shakespeare as a harbinger of secularism, the so-called “turn to religion” in early modern studies has given renewed attention to the religious elements in Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Nevertheless, there remains an aura of uncertainty regarding some of the doctrinal and liturgical specificities of the period. This historical gap is especially felt with respect to theories of salvation, or soteriology. Such ambiguity, however, calls for further inquiry into historical theology. The author explores how the language and concepts of faith, grace, charity, the sacraments, election, free will, justification, sanctification, and atonement find expression in Shakespeare’s plays. In doing so, this book contributes to the recovery of a greater understanding of the relationship between early modern religion and Shakespearean drama. While the author shares David Scott Kastan’s reluctance to attribute particular religious convictions to Shakespeare, in some cases such critical guardedness has diverted attention from the religious topography of Shakespeare’s plays. Throughout this study, the author’s hermeneutic is to read Shakespeare through the lens of early modern theological controversy and to read early modern theology through the lens of Shakespeare.

The Faith of William Shakespeare

The Faith of William Shakespeare PDF Author: Graham Holderness
Publisher: Lion Books
ISBN: 0745968929
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book

Book Description
William Shakespeare stills stands head and shoulders above any other author in the English language, a position that is unlikely ever to change. Yet it is often said that we know very little about him - and that applies as much to what he believed as it does to the rest of his biography. Or does it? In this authoritative new study, Graham Holderness takes us through the context of Shakespeare's life, times of religious and political turmoil, and looks at what we do know of Shakespeare the Anglican. But then he goes beyond that, and mines the plays themselves, not just for the words of the characters, but for the concepts, themes and language which Shakespeare was himself steeped in - the language of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. Considering particularly such plays as Richard ll, Henry V, The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, Hamlet, Othello, The Tempest and The Winter's Tale, Holderness shows how the ideas of Catholicism come up against those of Luther and Calvin; how Christianity was woven deep into Shakespeare's psyche, and how he brought it again and again to his art.

Faith in Shakespeare

Faith in Shakespeare PDF Author: Richard C. McCoy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190218657
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 213

Get Book

Book Description
Speculation about Shakespeare's own religious beliefs and responses to the Reformation have dominated discussions of faith in the playwright's work for decades. As a result, we often lose sight of what's truly important-the plays themselves. By focusing on those plays in several succinct, fluently written chapters, Richard McCoy reminds us of the spell-binding power inherent in works like Othello, As You Like It, and The Winter's Tale and shows why they continue to cause audiences to gladly exercise what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called the "willing suspension of disbelief." Faith in Shakespeare ruminates on what it means to believe in the Bard's plays, exploring how their plots can be both preposterous and gripping, and how their characters seem more substantial and enduring than the people surrounding us in the theater. Informed by Coleridge's "poetic faith," the book discusses what this concept shares with religious faith and how it departs from recent historicist approaches to the dramatist's work. Faith in Shakespeare concentrates more on text than context, finding the afterlife of Shakespeare's language more vivid and engaging than theological controversies. The book confirms its convictions in literature's intrinsic powers by exploring the causes for our paradoxical belief in theater's potent but manifest illusions. Plays that ask their audience to "awake your faith" or "believe then, if you please" ultimately enable us to "mind true things by what their mockeries be." Rather than faith in God or the supernatural, McCoy argues that faith in Shakespeare is sustained and explained only by the complex, subtle, and entirely human power of poetic eloquence and dramatic performance.

Shakespeare's Hybrid Faith

Shakespeare's Hybrid Faith PDF Author: J. Mayer
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230595898
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235

Get Book

Book Description
This book throws new light on the issue of the dramatist's religious orientation by dismissing sectarian and one-sided theories, tackling the problem from the angle of the variegated Elizabethan context recently uncovered by modern historians and theatre scholars. It is argued that faith was a quest rather than a quiet certainty for the playwright.

Faith and Folly in Shakespeare's Romantic Comedies

Faith and Folly in Shakespeare's Romantic Comedies PDF Author: R. Chris Hassel, Jr.
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820338532
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Get Book

Book Description
An enduring debate among scholars has focused on the degree to which Shakespeare's plays are indebted to the Christian culture in which they were created and the manner of demonstrating that indebtedness. R. Chris Hassel, Jr. points out informed allusions to familiar Pauline and Erasmian Christian passages and themes present in Love's Labor's Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and The Merchant of Venice. He argues that not only did Shakespeare's audience understand these allusions but also that these allusions led the audience to recognize their pertinence to the playwright's uniquely Christian comic vision. Furthermore, Hassel feels this understanding of the relationship between Shakespeare's comic artistry and Christianity leads to a greater appreciation of the plays.

Shakespeare's Religious Language

Shakespeare's Religious Language PDF Author: R. Chris Hassel Jr.
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 0826458904
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 480

Get Book

Book Description
An A to Z reference guide to religious terms, concepts and references in Shakespeare.

Shakespeare and Hospitality

Shakespeare and Hospitality PDF Author: Julia Reinhard Lupton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317632885
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313

Get Book

Book Description
This volume focuses on hospitality as a theoretically and historically crucial phenomenon in Shakespeare's work with ramifications for contemporary thought and practice. Drawing a multifaceted picture of Shakespeare's scenes of hospitality—with their numerous scenes of greeting, feeding, entertaining, and sheltering—the collection demonstrates how hospitality provides a compelling frame for the core ethical, political, theological, and ecological questions of Shakespeare's time and our own. By reading Shakespeare's plays in conjunction with contemporary theory as well as early modern texts and objects—including almanacs, recipe books, husbandry manuals, and religious tracts — this book reimagines Shakespeare's playworld as one charged with the risks of hosting (rape and seduction, war and betrayal, enchantment and disenchantment) and the limits of generosity (how much can or should one give the guest, with what attitude or comportment, and under what circumstances?). This substantial volume maps the terrain of Shakespearean hospitality in its rich complexity, demonstrating the importance of historical, rhetorical, and phenomenological approaches to this diverse subject.

Shakespeare and religio mentis

Shakespeare and religio mentis PDF Author: Jane Everingham Nelson
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004520600
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Get Book

Book Description
This landmark interdisciplinary study shines the light of religious Hermetism on Love’s Labour’s Lost, King Lear, Othello and The Tempest and reveals the ‘religion of the mind’ found in the Corpus Hermeticum to be a source of Shakespeare’s understanding of human psychology.

Shakespeare's Religious Allusiveness

Shakespeare's Religious Allusiveness PDF Author: Maurice Hunt
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351149229
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255

Get Book

Book Description
Shakespeare's Religious Allusiveness complicates debates about whether Shakespeare's plays are fundamentally Protestant or Catholic in sympathy, challenging analyses that either find Protestant elements consistently undercutting Catholic motifs or, less often, discover evidence of the playwright's endorsement of Catholic doctrine and customs. Rather, Maurice Hunt argues that Shakespeare's syncretistic method of incorporating both Protestant and Catholic elements into his plays was singular among early modern English playwrights at a time when governmental and social tolerance of Protestantism in the theatre was high and criticism of stereotyped Catholicism was correspondingly rampant in drama. In-depth discussions of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the Second Henriad, All's Well That Ends Well, Twelfth Night, and Othello reveal how Shakespeare allusively integrates Reformation Protestant and Roman Catholic motifs and systems of thought. This book sheds new light on the playwright's knowledge of and interest in Elizabethan and Jacobean religious debates over the nature of spiritual reformation, the efficacy of merit for redemption, and the operation of Providence. It will appeal not only to Shakespeare scholars but to those interested in the cultural history of the Reformation.

The Heart of His Mystery

The Heart of His Mystery PDF Author: John Waterfield
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1440143412
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 682

Get Book

Book Description
Shakespeare has traditionally been viewed as Queen Elizabeth's 'poet laureate', and as the official mouthpiece of the Elizabethan age. But the Elizabethan world was torn apart by the religious divisions initiated by the Reformation, and vitiated by the government's merciless persecution of Catholics. As it was the victors who wrote the history, the English Reformation has been portrayed as a peaceful transition enjoying majority support, when in fact it was nothing of the kind. Elizabeth's regime was a police state which sanctioned the use of torture, where Catholic priests and those who harboured them were liable to summary and bloody execution. The persecution of Catholics was continued by James I, evoking the violent response of the Gunpowder Plot. The Heart of His Mystery examines Shakespeare's life and work against this background. There is strong biographical evidence that he was himself a Catholic, and a detailed survey of his plays and poems shows that his imagination was intimately bound up with his religious faith. When we realise that his human compassion grew from his membership in a persecuted community, we can glimpse the mystery he has encrypted in his works and we come closer to understanding the hidden heart of Shakespeare the man.