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Literary Review
Saints on their hooks
ALISON SHELL
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The dictionary charts Shakespeare's oscillations between Catholic, Protestant, sacred and secular discourses. Shakespeare's Religious Language: A Dictionary, R. Chris Hassel, JR., Continuum, p.456, £150. 0 8264 5890 4
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CLAIMS about Shakespeare and religion, derived from the religious language in his works, are a time-honoured means of appropriating Shakespeare for one's own cause. Everyone can agree that Shakespeare's use of religious language is pervasive and well informed, but tempers run higher whenever it is used to illuminate Shakespeare's metaphysics. These have been seen as Catholic by some, Protestant or proto-secularist by others, or as propitiating the gods of imaginative illusion. This critical division, more pronounced than for any other imaginative writer, may give us some idea of how his first audiences would have responded to his work. Any mainstream dramatist of Shakespeare's time had to be cautious about evoking religion in the theatre, but this in itself had aesthetic benefits. Sixteenth- and 17th-century England was a culture in which religion was productive of exceptionally high emotion, and any religious utterance would have been scrutinised for soundness. The evocation of religious matter was as good a device as any to keep audience members on the edge of their seats as they listened out for clues — not just to a character's denominational allegiance and morality, but to an author's. Thus, there may be good dramatic reasons why Shakespeare's religious language should make them laugh, make them cry and make them wait.
Some playwrights of this period did use drama as a straightforward vehicle for confessional statement. But the highly metaphorical character of Shakespeare's religious language, interweaving sacred and profane registers, means that taking it as evidence for Shakespeare's faith has always been a backhanded way of proceeding, and has lent itself to simplistic styles of argument. As R. Chris Hassel comments in the introduction to Shakespeare's Religious Language, "various readers have tried to argue Shakespeare's faith as well as his position on Reformation controversies. Yet... most readers, myself included, still reserve judgement on just what and how Shakespeare believed". This is partly to do with the evidential gaps in his life, but is also an acknowledgement of the twists and evasions in his dramatic language. Cases for Shakespeare's denominational allegiance, in particular, can often come down to little more than word-lists — how many nuns, how many friars, how many references to grace? — and as with any vocabulary analysed independently of context, this can generate ghastly pitfalls. The great strength of Hassel's dictionary is that it is more than a dictionary, stepping past vocabulary into context, and scrupulous in explaining what words need not mean.
Hassel's definitions of "saint" illustrate how the dictionary charts Shakespeare's oscillations between Catholic, Protestant, sacred and secular discourses. After the Reformation, veneration and petitioning of saints remained central to Catholic faith and worship; the better-documented saints were respected by Protestants, but no longer officially invoked; while Puritans appropriated the title to designate members of the Christian elect. Love poets, on the other hand, continued the Petrarchan tradition of referring to their mistresses as saints: a potentially sacrilegious comparison, but one which could reassume something of its original religious significance when the love-object was virtuous as well as beautiful. Thus in Act Two of "Measure for Measure", the puritan Angelo is being imprecise in more than one sense when he acknowledges his amatory weakness with the words, "O cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint, / With saints dost bait thy hook!". The lines are simultaneously parodying Christ's description of the Apostles as fishers of men and picking up on the frequent Protestant distrust of saints as conducive to the sin of idolatry; Angelo is admitting how far he is tempted to depart from his puritanical public persona, acknowledging Isabella's conscious virtue but also her attractiveness.
Inevitably, perhaps, the dictionary displays a heavy weighting towards Christianity, though proper attention is given to Shakespeare's imaginative use of Judaism and Islam. Hassel approaches religious polemic, especially that relating to ethnic and religious branding, with palpable unease: "We have had since September 11 too many fresh experiences... of the explosive effect of such language and such thinking to include it lightly, but of course it has to be included". As regards Shakespeare in the classroom, the problem is a real one, and longer-standing than this comment might imply — at my own school in the late 1970s, the presence of "The Merchant of Venice" on the curriculum prompted walkouts from Jewish classmates whose parents had escaped the Holocaust. One wonders how necessary the warning is for the dictionary's implied readers, further along the academic road, though it may be a sign that religious language is succeeding gender issues as the prime area for academic hypersensitivity.
How are people going to use this dictionary? It is undoubtedly quicker and handier than an online concordance — though less flexible — and goes well beyond a dictionary's basic briefs; the helpfully selective bibliography is particularly strong on recent criticism. Given its inordinately high price, it is unlikely to find its way onto many private bookshelves; but it should retain long-term value as a reference work, both for those in search of proof texts and those fascinated by the sinuous operations of Shakespearean religious metaphor.
© The Times Literary Supplement
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