This is the latest in a series I am cross-posting from my Substack entitled Think Shakespeare. More details here.
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It could only be of interest to those who follow the latest intellectual fashions, but in the last few decades there has been a so-called “religious turn” in contemporary scholarship on Shakespeare. A number of scholars have claimed that biblical allusions and Christian concepts sit at the heart of the Bard’s works. Books have been written on the subject. Conferences held. Reputations established.
All of this must be understood against the longstanding default position that Shakespeare’s works are inherently secular in nature. However, both positions belong to the dichotomy between “literature” and “myth” that was created in the early 19th century. Two centuries later, that dichotomy is still being trotted out to shed “new light” on the works of the Bard. No doubt there will soon be a secular reactionary movement against the current religious one. Books will be written on the subject. Conferences held. Reputations established.
These scholarly squabbles would normally not be worth mentioning except that they sit across a fault line that still impedes our understanding of Shakespeare in particular and stories more generally. Since this Substack is all about understanding Shakespeare, we need to address the problem, and, in order to do that, we need to know where it came from. That will require a short history lesson.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the modern scholarly discipline called “literature” came into existence. It was predicated on a secular approach to its subject matter. Even if the text under study was religious in nature, literature would examine it using non-religious categories. For those who believed in Enlightenment ideals, this was perfectly in order. For those who didn’t, the increasing dominance of this secular way of thinking was a major threat.
It was thus that the concept of “myth” and the domain “mythology” were born, neither of which existed prior to the 19th century. Mythology allowed religious themes to be addressed directly. Later on, it incorporated proxy concepts for traditional religious understanding, e.g., psychoanalysis. The concept of myth also proved useful in comparative studies. Globalisation had led to a vast array of stories from different cultures becoming known. Since each of these was tied to a particular society, “myth” eventually came to refer to the stories that communicate the fundamental beliefs of a culture.
Here’s the problem. If a myth is a story that contains the fundamental beliefs of a culture, and if Shakespeare contains the fundamental beliefs of modern Western culture, then Shakespeare’s works are myths. But Shakespeare has always been considered a secular writer. This is a classic reductio ad absurdum that shows that the concepts of myth and literature are not properly defined.
What had happened was that myth came to refer to stories from any culture or any time period other than the modern West. Why? Because the modern West was assumed to be secular. One of the things that meant was that we don’t “believe in myths” anymore. A more extreme version is that we don’t believe in anything anymore (i.e., nihilism).
The first thing to say about that is that we absolutely do believe in stories. That is just an everyday fact of life. Moreover, once you learn to read Shakespeare properly, you realise to what extent his works contain the core beliefs of the modern West. I would argue that Shakespeare’s works are just as important to us as the works of Homer were to the ancient Greeks. Shakespeare’s works should be counted as “myth”. Yet, nobody would accept that. To untangle this conceptual mess, we need to go back further in Western history. In fact, we need to go back to the ancient world.
The modern concept of myth is actually somewhat useful in that it captures the fact that every culture does have a number of stories that are considered more profound and important than others. It is just a fact that everybody knows Shakespeare’s stories, and therefore they are important to us. But it’s even deeper than that. The English language has countless stock phrases that the Bard wrote into existence. Trust me, we’re not on a wild goose chase here. Sometimes, you’ve got to be cruel to be kind in order to break the ice.
Different cultures account for the influence of exceptional writers in different ways. We call Shakespeare a genius, by which we mean that his talent arises from himself. Few people nowadays would say that the Bard was divinely blessed. However, the word “genius” in Latin referred to a guardian spirit. Similarly, the ancient Greeks believed Homer was divinely inspired by the muses. Even Plato acknowledged that poets could receive messages directly from the gods.
From there, it is a very short step to believe that poetry and stories are written by the gods themselves. The Abrahamic religions believe that the prophets are vehicles for the literal word of God. There is, however, one major difference between the Greeks and the Abrahamic religions. The latter pronounced the texts “sacred”, meaning they could not be modified. By contrast, the Greeks had no official restrictions or prohibitions on texts, leaving them open to commentary, adaptation, and even satirisation. It turns out that different religions have different amounts of tolerance in this respect. Hinduism is more similar to the Abrahamic religions. Buddhism is more similar to the Greeks.
Most religions allow for good-faith questioning of the central texts because it is acknowledged that questioning leads to better understanding. However, it is also true that, for most of history, religious authorities simply didn’t have the ability to rigorously enforce censorship even if they wanted to. Therefore, a certain amount of freedom of interpretation was guaranteed to the general public. That was the big change that occurred in Western history with the rise of the Roman Empire.
If we go back prior to the Romans, we find that the ancient Greeks had an especially laissez-faire attitude to their myths. Aristophanes was free to mercilessly ridicule and parody both the myths themselves and contemporary Athenian society. On the face of it, the Romans had a similarly tolerant attitude, but that was only because they were unconcerned with text. By contrast, they rigorously enforced adherence to religious rites and ceremonies.
This much less tolerant attitude found new expression with the formation of the empire under Augustus. Not only were the rites and ceremonies monitored, but strict censorship around texts and myths began to be practised. All of that went into overdrive when Christianity became the state religion. The combination of Roman state power and Abrahamic religious beliefs around sacred texts created a new dynamic where there was zero tolerance for the questioning of myth.
This same dynamic was then taken to a new level when the Catholic Church united Europe after the Dark Ages. The Church’s extensive bureaucracy enabled far greater restrictions than had been possible even in late Rome. One of the outcomes of this was that numerous “heretics” were put to death for questioning the holy texts.
A unique obsession with “sacred” text came about since everyday people, who didn’t understand the religious debates and couldn’t read the texts even if they wanted to, nevertheless saw that men were prepared to die over the contents of a book. Books became synonymous with magical power. The word “spell” still has this dual connotation. You learn to spell a word. You also cast a magic spell.
Against this backdrop, the appearance of the Renaissance is all the more extraordinary. All of a sudden, in the middle of the 15th century, there began about a hundred years of intellectual freedom. Even the popes in Rome fell over themselves to support the rediscovery of the classical texts. It was as if a ray of Athenian sunshine broke through the grey Puritan fog. Comedy reappeared on the scene. Rabelais was seemingly the reincarnation of Aristophanes. Erasmus brutally satirised the crusty old church authorities.
As quickly as it appeared, this wave of freedom was snuffed out by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. The Protestants were more rabidly obsessed with the sacred texts than even the Catholic Church had been. There followed an even more repressive intellectual atmosphere that snuffed out all debate in the 17th and most of the 18th centuries. We should also remember the astonishing death rate that came with the wars of religion during this time.
How fortunate, then, that Shakespeare was born in the relative backwater of England where the Renaissance spirit lived on longer than elsewhere due to the religious and economic reforms of Henry VIII which led to a boom time during the reign of Elizabeth I. The Puritans were already marshalling their forces, but they only got the upper hand in the years after Shakespeare died. In 1642, they closed down every theatre in the country. The Bard’s works were heavily edited in order to comply with Puritan dogmas. That is why the true genius of Shakespeare was not recognised for another hundred and fifty years when the first wave of cheap printing made his works available to the reading public in the middle of the 18th century.
Against the backdrop of centuries of obsession with sacred texts enforced by powerful and secretive religious authorities, there broke forth a new paradigm. Ironically, it was the Reformation that facilitated it because it had placed the power in the hands of the people by allowing them to read the Bible for the first time. Literacy rates skyrocketed as it became a religious duty to read the sacred text. Those same literacy rates then created conditions in which neo-capitalism could make large profits by selling other kinds of books. This was the beginnings of the mass market for literature. Among other things, it created a golden age of autodidacts who taught themselves via the written word.
The stories of Shakespeare were uniquely suited to this mass market dynamic because the Bard had created plays that appealed to all social classes in his own time. Cheap print editions of his works became popular among the newly emerging middle class, whereas previously only expensive bound editions were available and only the rich could afford them. Because the emerging middle class was a major political threat to the old aristocracy, Shakespeare’s name got tied up in the class struggles of the time. “Sacred” was whatever was old and noble. “Secular” was new, uncultured, and cheap.
But the secular realm was also represented by materialist science, which, by this time, had made enormous inroads into the explanation of natural phenomena, a domain religion previously controlled by the religious authorities. The sacred-secular became part class struggle, part political and economic battle, part theological crisis.
The recent “religious turn” in Shakespeare scholarship is a dim and dreary echo of a religico-political dynamic that began in the late Roman Empire, escalated during the Middle Ages, and then reached a hysterical peak in the 17th and 18th centuries. According to that dynamic, the concept of a “sacred text” is one whose veracity cannot be seriously questioned on pain of death.
By contrast, Shakespeare belongs to the tail end of the Renaissance, and the Renaissance was a rediscovery of antiquity not just in content but in spirit. The ancient Greeks fully acknowledged the genius of Homer while also allowing his works to be discussed and even satirised. What is denied by this attitude is that there is some specific form of words that is eternally true. It is a way of thinking that allows for growth and adaptation.
Every Shakespeare story is an adaptation of earlier stories. Many of those came from antiquity. Many came from modern European history. Because of that, we must view Shakespeare’s works as part of an ongoing conversation. To understand the conversation, we need to know what came before. That is why we must factor in historical understanding when we are interpreting the works of the Bard.
The reason why this approach is called “secular” is because of the extreme version of the “sacred” that has dominated the religious tradition of the West ever since late Roman times. Accordingly to that tradition, what is “sacred” must be what is eternal and unchanging as determined by a secretive priestly caste who gets to decide the truth and then enforce it on the rest of us. The modern university system is still predicated on this underlying belief, and that is why it is congenitally incapable of understanding the Bard.
Shakespeare never went to university. He didn’t even finish high school. He was born in a nondescript country town, then moved to London and earned his living in the disreputable domain of theatre. That is the environment which produced the greatest writer in the English language. That should be our real model of the “sacred”.
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Think Shakespeare launches on November 2. It will be an ongoing series of courses that teach practical skills in how to interpret the works of The Bard. More details on how the courses will run can be found here. Subscription options can be found here.
Our first course will a ten-week deep-dive into Henry IV Part 1. For the rest of the first year, we will read Henry IV Part 2, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra.