*Article* **The Undiscovered Countries: Shakespeare and the Afterlife †**

#### **Cyndia Susan Clegg**

Humanities Division, Pepperdine University, 24255 Pacific Coast Hwy, Malibu, CA 90263-4225, USA; Cyndia.Clegg@pepperdine.edu

† Editor's Note: This article was written before the author and I were aware of the recently published book, John S. Garrison, *Shakespeare and the Afterlife* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

Received: 19 November 2018; Accepted: 6 March 2019; Published: 10 March 2019

**Abstract:** The multiple uses of religion in Shakespeare's plays seem to counter each other at every turn. In one respect, though, I have found a surprising consistency. Moments when Shakespeare's drama imagines the afterlife are moments that lend significant insights into the play's action or characterization, even though the image of one undiscovered country may differ drastically from another. Across the canon, the afterlife may appear as a place of religious judgment, as in *Othello*, *Hamlet*, *Merchant of Venice*; as a classical Elysium or Hades where the spirit or shadow removes elsewhere (*Antony and Cleopatra*, *Titus Andronicus*); as Abraham's Bosom—a place of rest between death and the Last Judgment (*Henry V*, *Richard III*, *Hamlet*); or an unidentifiable life to come (*Measure for Measure*, *Macbeth*, *King Lear*).

**Keywords:** afterlife; *Antony and Cleopatra*; *Hamlet*; *Henry V*; *King Lear*; *Macbeth*; *Measure for Measure, Merchant of Venice*; *Othello*; *Richard III*; *Titus Andronicus*

In *Hamlet in Purgatory*, Stephen Greenblatt explores post-Reformation England's relationship with the afterlife once the Church of England declared Purgatory and its associated practices as "a fond thing, vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God" (Greenblatt 2001, p. 235).1 A "mingling of folk beliefs, classical mythology, and Catholic doctrine"—a "whole, weird, tangled cultural inheritance"—filled the void (Greenblatt 2001, p. 199). Greenblatt explores the persistence of Purgatory in the popular imagination, but stops short of suggesting that in his plays Shakespeare theologically engages the question of Purgatory, even in *Hamlet* (Greenblatt's focus). Greenblatt proposes that the problem of the play's "network of allusions" to Purgatory might not be noticeable to *Hamlet'*s audience except that "Hamlet notices it and broods about it," and "a young man from Wittenberg, with a distinctly Protestant temperament, is haunted by a distinctly Catholic ghost" (Greenblatt 2001, pp. 237, 240). In this, the play enacts England's "tangled cultural inheritance" in complex and compelling ways which, in Protestant England's "attack on the 'middle state of souls," sustains "a cult of the dead," and transforms "the space of Purgatory" into "the space of the stage" (Greenblatt 2001, pp. 256–57).

Purgatory in both *Hamlet* and the popular imagination, then, is akin to any overt expression of religion on the stage: both transgress Tudor-Stuart religio-political hegemony. The theater, Greenblatt reminds us, "was censored," and "it would have been highly risky to represent in a favorable light any specifically Roman Catholic doctrines or practices" (Greenblatt 2001, p. 236). Shakespeare's

<sup>1</sup> Quoted from Edgar C.S. Gibson, *The Thirty-Nine* Articles *of the Church of England* (London, 1897) quoted in (Greenblatt 2001, p. 235). The Elizabethan articles were passed by Convocation in 1562 but not published until 1571. Its article on purgatory was taken directly from the Edwardian Articles, published in 1543, although there were other differences among the forty-one Edwardian articles and the thirty-nine Elizabethan articles.

achievement in *Hamlet* derives from "his remarkable gift for knowing exactly how far he could go without getting into serious trouble" (Greenblatt 2001, p. 237). Shakespeare's art becomes both ameliorative and transgressive, and, with regard to religion, ambiguous.

Ken Jackson and Arthur F. Marotti find the interest in religion in Shakespeare studies less problematic. In 2004, Jackson and Marotti noted a shift in early modern English literary studies, which they referred to as a "turn to religion" (Jackson and Marotti 2004, pp. 167–90). As any Shakespearean would readily admit, religion is not new to Shakespeare studies. Generations of scholars have scoured the plays in efforts to reconstruct religion as part of the bard's intellectual milieu, to discover both spiritual meanings and authorial theological leanings, and even to repudiate altogether any and all claims for religion in Shakespeare's plays. What has changed? In their introduction to *Shakespeare and Religion: Early Modern and Postmodern Perspectives*, Jackson and Marotti observe that in a modern secular society, especially among "intellectual elites," a sufficient discomfort with religion has meant that the subject either has met with outright antagonism or has been relegated to an old historicist position of Shakespearean drama "mirroring" its cultural contexts (Jackson and Marotti 2011, p. 1). Jackson and Marotti observe that of late "Shakespeare scholars have been more sympathetically responsive to the presence of the religious in that author's work," and they have "used it to think through perennial philosophical and religious issues of which we have become more aware" (Jackson and Marotti 2011, p. 20). Such engagement with the religious in Shakespeare often points to ways in which the playwright both incorporates and resists his own religious culture: he "dismantles religious practice only to end in a position, paradoxically, that still can be termed 'religious'" (Jackson and Marotti 2011, p. 3). Matthew J. Smith's "At War 'Twixt Will and Will Not': On Shakespeare's Idea of Religious Experience in *Measure for Measure"* in this special issue offers an excellent illustration of such an approach. According to Smith, *Measure for Measure* presents multiple religious perspectives that "through their dramatic contact" with each other not only "reveal one another's limitations," but create a dialectic "Between the world and the self that many have located at the heart of religious experience" (Smith 2018, pp. 9–11).

Despite the fact, then, that studies of religion or the religious in Shakespeare have attained a new legitimacy, notions of ambiguity persist. The playwright's multiple uses of religion seem to counter each other at every turn—within a play as Greenblatt has demonstrated in his study of *Hamlet*, or across plays, as Julia Reinhard Lupton's richly allusive essay, "The Wizards of Uz: Shakespeare and the Book of Job," suggests (Lupton 2011, pp. 163–87 in Jackson and Marotti 2011). In one respect, though, I have found a surprising consistency. Moments when Shakespeare's drama imagines the afterlife are moments that lend significant insights into the play's action or characterization, even though the image of one undiscovered country may differ drastically from another. To illustrate this, I will take the liberty of returning to my work on *Othello* and Islam. (But first, it needs to be said that in this study I am considering only references to the afterlife that do not appear as ghosts, dreams, or other aspects of the supernatural considered with such nuance in *Hamlet in Purgatory*.)

By considering how Renaissance books on Africa and the Islamic world represented categories of religion, ethnicity, and national origins, I have suggested how Shakespeare's audience might have responded to the Moor of Venice as a tragic figure driven more by law than lust, and more by justice than passion.<sup>2</sup> In early modern accounts of Islamic and Middle-Eastern culture, accusations of adultery were grave. According to *Purchas his Pilgrimage*, a man who failed to prove by four witnesses that his accusation of his wife's adultery was true would receive eighty lashes. A "jealous husband" had to swear "four times" to the truth of his accusation, which if the case were otherwise, had to "curse himselfe" (Purchas 1613, p. 210). Shakespeare's contemporary audiences, though, would not even have needed to read books about Islam, because they learned at church of the Islamic world's contempt for adultery. The Church of England required that at any religious service where no licensed preacher was available to preach a sermon, a homily should be read from the Book of Homilies. The homilies

<sup>2</sup> My initial work on this appears in (Clegg 2006, 2009, 2017).

were to be read in sequence, and when the sequence was completed, they would start again at the beginning.3 The first Book of Homilies lays out English Protestant teaching on salvation by faith and election, but also expresses the certainty that good works arise from sanctification. One homily stands out as an exception to this theological exposition: the homily against whoredome and adultery, which begins by apologizing for this departure, and then pronounces, "the greatnes of thys synne, and howe odious; hateful, and abhominable it is, and hathe alwaye bene reputed before God and all good men" (Cranmer 1547, sig. K3). The homily relates to *Othello* in two ways—first it praises the foreign laws ("godlie statutes") that punish adultery with death; and second, it specifically mentions Islamic law, which would have been part of Othello the Moor's experience: "Among the Turkes even at this day, they that be taken in adulterie, both men & woman are stoned straight way to death without mercie" (Cranmer 1547, sig. L4).

Othello's tragedy looks quite different in light of such views, and the play's denouement comes at the moment Othello envisions the afterlife. In the fifth act, just after Desdemona's death, Emilia accuses Othello of being "rash as fire" for saying that Desdemona was false. "O," proclaims Emilia, "she was heavenly true!" (5.2.134–35). Othello replies,

Cassio did top her; ask thy husband else. O, I were damn'd beneath all depth in hell But that I did proceed upon just grounds To this extremity. (5.2.136–39)4

Given Othello's Islamic origins and the "Homily Against Adultery's" praise for the zealous punishment of adulterers, for Othello to believe that Desdemona's death was on "just grounds" (rather than an act of self-deception or self-justification as many critics see it) lays the ground for his tragedy. Othello's words clearly reveal that if he had not acted "upon just grounds," he deserved damnation. This, of course, is precisely the afterlife he sees for himself when he grasps the enormity both of Iago's lies and of his error. Looking upon Desdemona's body, he says,

O ill-starr'd wench, Pale as thy smock! When we shall meet at compt, This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven, And fiends will snatch at it. Cold, cold, my girl? Even like thy chastity. O cursed, cursed slave! Whip me, ye devils, From the possession of this heavenly sight! Blow me about in winds! Roast me in sulphur! Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire! (5.2.272–80)

What began in Othello's mind as an act of justice—capital punishment for a "proven" crime—is now murder, the murder of a chaste wife—a crime for which Othello understands he deserves damnation and for which he believes he must kill himself: "No way but this, / Killing myself, to die upon a kiss" (5.2.358–59).

This vivid conception of the afterlife defines both Othello's character and his tragedy. From the Islamic perspective, Othello may be regarded as doing the right thing for the right reasons, but from the play's perspective, Othello is damnably wrong—not because he descends to some base instincts but because he acts on false evidence, albeit evidence fed to him by a demi-devil who "ensnared" his soul and body (5.2.307–8). In destroying what he loved best, he loses his soul.

In a very different tragedy, a very different vision of the afterlife likewise amplifies the play's tragic effect, but in their vision of the afterlife, Antony and Cleopatra transcend death. In Act 4, scene

<sup>3</sup> Actually there were two books, one written during the reign of Edward VI, the other Elizabethan, and both were used in sequence during Elizabeth's reign.

<sup>4</sup> Shakespeare (1997). All citations are from this edition.

14, learning of Cleopatra's (supposed) death, Antony commits to die as a noble Roman by his own hand—an act he will later describe as "valour" that has "triumph'd on itself" (4.15.15). For him the afterlife will be a place to reconcile with Cleopatra: "I will o'ertake thee, Cleopatra, and / Weep for my pardon" (4.14.44–45). As he calls out to his servant Eros to help him enact his suicide, he says,

I come, my queen ... Stay for me: Where souls do couch on flowers, we'll hand in hand, And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze: Dido and her Aeneas shall want troops, And all the haunt be ours. (4.14.50–54)

This, of course, is a Roman afterlife, Elysium, where the shades of the valiant live on in honor. In the underworld of Virgil's *Aeneid*, however, Dido and Aeneas were not reconciled. Dido spends eternity with her husband, whose death preceded the epic's action, rather than her lover. Joining Dido to Aeneas, as Antony does, allows him to envision an epic afterlife in Cleopatra's favor. That they have spirits that transcend earthly life is made clear both in Cleopatra's acceptance of Antony's death in Act V and in her own suicide. After Antony has died, Cleopatra remarks on his earthly body's insignificance; it is merely a "case" for "that huge spirit." That this spirit lives on appears in Cleopatra's language before her death as she dons her royal robes:

Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have Immortal longings in me: now no more The juice of Egypt's grape shall moist this lip: Yare, yare, good Iras; quick. Methinks I hear Antony call; I see him rouse himself To praise my noble act; I hear him mock The luck of Caesar, which the gods give men To excuse their after wrath: husband, I come: Now to that name my courage prove my title! I am fire and air; my other elements I give to baser life. (5.2.280–90)

As fire and air, Cleopatra is a spirit escaping the base coils of mortality where "there is nothing left remarkable / Beneath the visiting moon" (4.14.67–68). For her, as for Antony, the afterlife is a place where their great spirits will live together forever. There is tragic loss in *Antony and Cleopatra*, but the loss derives less from their deaths than from their stature that emerges in part from their epic visions of the afterlife.

*Henry V* uses its image of the afterlife to reflect on one of the play's central problems—Henry's character and the legitimacy of England's war in France. On the night before the battle of Agincourt, King Henry appears among his troops in disguise. Three of his soldiers come in reflecting on what happens to men who die in battle. They speculate that the king faces battles with fears like their own and that, like them, he would rather be anywhere else. Henry intervenes and says that he "could not die anywhere so contented as in the King's company, his cause being just and his quarrel being honorable" (4.1.126–28). The soldiers question the degree to which they are accountable if the cause is not just and honorable. Bates says, "If his cause be wrong, our obedience to the King wipes the crime of it out of us." Williams replies, "But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs, and arms, and heads, chopp'd off in a battle shall join together at the latter day and cry all, 'We died at such a place'" (4.1.134–38). The afterlife envisioned here is not simply heaven or hell but the day of final judgment—the end of days—when, according to Christian dogma, the resurrection of the body will occur. The proposition that Williams makes is that "few die well that die in battle" and because they cannot disobey the king, the king that led them to battle should be accountable for the "black matter" (4.1.144–45). The disguised Henry replies that "the King is not bound to answer the particular endings of his soldiers" since "they purpose not their death when they purpose their services" (4.1.155–58). If men die in war unprepared for death, "they have not wings to fly from God" (4.1 168–69). Each man is accountable for his own soul. The soldier's remedy described by Henry is perhaps the most direct and conventional statement of Christian religion in all of Shakespeare's plays:

Therefore should every soldier in the wars do as every sick man in his bed, wash every mote out of his conscience; and dying so, death is to him advantage, or not dying the time was blessedly lost wherein such preparation was gain'd; and in him that escapes it were not sin to think that making God so free an offer, He let him outlive that day to see His greatness and to teach others how they should prepare. (4.1.178–85)

This statement speaks directly to Christian doctrine as presented in the first Book of Homilies. "An exhortation against the feare of death" considers that "It is not to bee marveiled, that worldlie menne dooe feare to die" (Li). The homily considers the fear of the pain arising from sickness or death and gives comfort to the faithful Christian who is truly penitent for his offenses, that "bodailie death" is "a slepe, wherein mannes senses be as it were taken from him for a season, and yet when he awaketh he is more fresh, then hee was when hee went to bedde" (Lv). According to this homily, souls are "separated from oure bodies, for a Season, yet at the generalle resurrection, we shall be more freshe, beautiful & perfecte then we be now" (Cranmer 1547, sig. Lv). The place of separation between death and the end of days, according to the homily, is "Abraham's bosome: a place of rest, pleasure and consolation" (Cranmer 1547, sig. Liiiv). *Henry V*'s image of the gathering of soldiers' scattered bones at the bodily Resurrection of the dead, grotesque as it is, elicits Henry's reassurance that the man prepared for death need not fear. The idea of Abraham's bosom also appears in Act II. Bardolph expresses his wish to be with Falstaff "wheresome'er he is, either in heaven or in hell," to which Mistress Quickly, the hostess, replies, "Nay sure, he's not in hell; he's in Arthur's bosom, if ever man went to Arthur's bosom. 'A made a finer end, and went away an it had been any christom child" (2.3.7–12). It seems, thus, that readiness in the face of death is all. The parallels between Henry's theology on the eve before the battle and the hostess's account of Falstaff's death offers some resolution to two of the play's problems: war's moral precariousness and Henry's abandonment of Falstaff. While Falstaff's good death does not fully vindicate Henry turning away from his old friend, it offers some comic consolation that is comparable to the reassurance that Henry offered his soldiers: that his cause is just and for those prepared for death, death will bring peace.

Not all visions of the afterlife in Shakespeare's plays are as fully realized as they are in *Othello*, *Antony and Cleopatra*, and *Henry V.* Indeed, some are mere glimpses, but glimpses that help us to understand central issues in the plays. In *Richard III*, for example, Queen Elizabeth envisions her dead sons in a middle state that is very like Abraham's bosom in *Henry V*—a place between death and judgment:

Ah, my young princes! ah, my tender babes! My unblown flowers, new-appearing sweets! If yet your gentle souls fly in the air And be not fix'd in doom perpetual, Hover about me with your airy wings And hear your mother's lamentation! (4.4.9–14)

Unlike the comfort of Abraham's bosom implied in *Henry V*, Elizabeth's "yet" suggests only a brief moment between life and everlasting judgment. This allusion to divine judgment occurs just moments before Queen Margaret asks how she can "thank" an "upright, just, and true-disposing God" for "A hell-hound that doth hunt us all to death" (4.4.55, 48). Elizabeth's "doom," together with Margaret's questioning, suggests a deep skepticism about moral order in the play, making the Tudor providentialism of Richmond's defeat of Richard all the more welcome.

Glimpses of divine judgment in some plays are not deferred to the end of days. Such is the case in *The Merchant of Venice.* In the trial scene, the Duke asks Shylock, "How shall you hope for mercy, rend'ring none?" (4.1.88). Shylock's reply—"What judgment shall I dread, doing no wrong?"(4.1.89)—merely alludes to mercy and the afterlife, while Portia's speech on the nature of mercy explicitly speaks of judgment and heavenly reward. Here Shylock asks, "on what compulsion" must he be merciful; and Portia, after an encomium to mercy, answers, "That in the course of justice, none of us / Should see salvation" (4.1.199–200). This Christian promise of heaven (salvation) is unavailable to the Jew, whose sense of judgment and consequences is impossibly opposite. Even when he is offered three times the money he is owed, he declaims why he must insist on the bond: "An oath, an oath, I have an oath in heaven!" (4.1.228). He swore his oath in God's name. To deny his oath is to perjure himself, and implicitly, to deny God. The importance of an oath and its relationship to the afterlife is complex. The Hebrew scripture (as opposed to the King James Bible) does not actually envision hell. It refers to *sheol*, a place holding the bodily remains where the soul awaits the just man's final reconciliation with God. The Hebrew scripture's language of punishment and reward is that of separation and reconciliation. To be reconciled with God requires righteousness, and God commands the righteous person to honor his oath:

And Moses spake unto the heads of the tribes concerning the children of Israel, saying, This is the thing which the Lord hath commanded.

If a man vow a vow unto the Lord, or swear an oath to bind his soul with a bond; he shall not break his word, he shall do according to all that proceedeth out of his mouth. (Numbers 30:1–2, KJV)

From Shylock's Jewish perspective, if Shylock breaks his oath, he loses his hope of Heaven. In this courtroom scene, which began with Portia's question "Which is the merchant here? and which the Jew?" (4.1.174), Shylock's religious dilemma renders strangely cruel the mercy Antonio finally extends to him on the condition he become a Christian.

*The Merchant of Venice's* use of the afterlife highlights the play's moral ambiguity by creating some sympathy for Shylock as a man of conscience. Linking conscience to judgment and the afterlife in two other plays, *Richard III* and *Macbeth*, shows their protagonists' flaws. On the day of the battle with Richmond in *Richard III*, Richard awakens disconcerted after his night of troubling dreams. In shaking off his dreams' effect, he dismisses conscience even as he recognizes that hell may be his afterlife:

Let not our babbling dreams affright our souls; Conscience is but a word that cowards use, Devis'd at first to keep the strong in awe: Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law! March on, join bravely, let us to it pell-mell; If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell. (5.3.308–13)

Richard envisions himself outside of the moral universe, but to the audience the end rhyme of "mell" and "hell" emphasizes the total unlikelihood of the "if" proposition of heaven. For Macbeth, the moral universe is far more viable.

Macbeth's conscience may be seen as one of his redeeming traits, but in his Act I soliloquy where he wrestles with judgment and the afterlife, he reveals his lack of moral compass. He is less concerned about enacting murder than about being discovered. The soliloquy opens with Macbeth imagining Duncan's successful murder as a means to his own ends. These ends are so all-consuming that he envisions himself escaping judgment in the afterlife:

If th' assassination Could trammel up the consequence, and catch With his surcease, success; that but this blow Might be the be-all and end-all—here, But here, upon this bank and [shoal] of time, We'ld jump the life to come. (1.7.2–7)

While Macbeth thinks he can escape consequences in the life to come, the reality of earthly judgment is more pressing: "But in these cases / We still have judgment here" (1.7.7–8). What Macbeth

fears most is that the heavenly host, spurred by Duncan's virtue and the "deep damnation of his taking-off," "Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye" (1.7.20, 24). The glimpse of the afterlife that appears here is not Macbeth's but Duncan's. Strangely, Macbeth sees himself outside this divine economy. It is the "judgment here" that he must face. That this judgment cannot be escaped motivates *Macbeth*'s tragic action: Macbeth's ruthless and ultimately unsuccessful efforts to conceal his crimes.

In *Richard III* and *Macbeth*, then, the protagonists give little more than lip service to Christian ideas of judgment and the afterlife, which points to the nature of their characters. In many respects this is fine: the world of both plays is steeped in evil. What happens to the afterlife, though, in plays immersed in religion? Among these, images of the afterlife evoke a kind of religious skepticism. In "Decorum and the Politics of Ceremony in Shakespeare's *Titus Andronicus*," Gary Kuchar reminds us that Tamora's cry of "irreligious piety" in response to Titus's ritual sacrifice of her son calls attention to Rome's decline into barbarity that is displayed throughout the play (Kuchar 2011, p. 50). (Human sacrifice was not part of Roman religion.) The afterlife in *Titus Andronicus* is the classical underworld, to which in both the *Odyssey* and the *Aeneid* souls without proper burial rites are not admitted. Titus asks himself, "Why suffer'st they sons, unburied yet, / To hover on the dreadful shore of Styx?" (1.1.87–88). Burial, not human sacrifice, was the required rite. The unravelling of Titus's (Roman) world in the play derives directly from his "irreligious piety."

Another play in which the charge of irreligious piety might be raised is *Measure for Measure*, where to save her brother, who is condemned to death for fornication, the nun Isabella meets with a moral dilemma. The only way to save her brother's life Angelo tells Isabella is for her to sleep with him. In presenting his proposition, Angelo asks, "Might there not be a charity in sin / To save this brother's life" (2.4.63–64). Isabella's refusal is resolute: "Better it were a brother died at once, / Than that a sister, by redeeming him, / Should die for ever" (2.5.106–8). The afterlife here is but a mere glimpse of heaven and hell. In the next scene where Isabella reports Antonio's proposition to her brother, Claudio, his vision of the afterlife is horrific. He tells Isabella that death is "a fearful thing," to which she answers, "And shamed life a hateful." He replies,

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit To bathe in fiery floods.... (3.1.115–21)

At the end of this account, Claudio pleads to his "sweet sister" to let him live and assures her that such mercy would not be reckoned sin. Isabella is so incensed by this that she will "pray a thousand prayers" for his death (3.1.145). What is strikingly absent is Isabella's ability to envision hell or heaven in anything but the most general terms. Furthermore, her piety is less invested in the life of the world to come than in the prospect of a "hateful" and "shamed life" in this one. *Measure for Measure's* problematic ethos is usually attributed to the Duke's manipulation of all the characters, but Isabella may have some culpability. Not only does she assent to the bed trick, but perhaps the Duke's claim of her hand in marriage is more of a meet end for her concern about her worldly fame than some readings of the play allow.

The last two images of the afterlife—in *King Lear* as a mere passing of the spirit out of this world and in *Hamlet* as place of purification between this life and heaven—receive Greenblatt's astute consideration in *Hamlet in Purgatory*. The passing of the spirit appears at the end of *King Lear* when, after realizing that Cordelia is dead, Lear loses consciousness. When Edgar tries to revive him, Kent says,

Vex not his ghost. O, let him pass. He hates him That would upon the rack of this tough world Stretch him out longer. (5.3.287–89)

According to Greenblatt, the words "Vex not his Ghost" both "pick up the strange sense that Lear's existence is purgatorial and underscore the bleak humanism that locates his terrible suffering in this tough world" (Greenblatt 2001, p. 187). I would add that this ending highlights Lear's profound and tragic suffering. As indicated at this study's beginning, Greenblatt says that Purgatory is one of the many alternative views of the afterlife in *Hamlet*, a play whose "pervasive pattern" is "a deliberate forcing together of radically incompatible ideas":

What is at stake is more than a multiplicity of answers. The opposing positions challenge each other, clashing and sending shock waves throughout the play (Greenblatt 2001, p. 240).

In a play so theologically engaged, its final glimpse of the afterlife I find to be remarkably irresolute. It epitomizes the play's pattern of forcing together incompatibilities. At Hamlet's death, Horatio's words evoking Heaven—"And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest" (5.2.302)—echo the final prayers of a requiem Mass. This, however, follows Hamlet's last words, which seem to deny an afterlife: "The rest is silence" (5.2.301).

As I observed at the beginning of this study, Greenblatt suggests that *Hamlet* reflects the complex and often contradictory belief system in post-Reformation England—the "whole, weird, tangled cultural inheritance." The multiplicity of conceptions of the afterlife I have found in Shakespeare's plays would seem to substantiate his understanding—except that, as I have argued, in representing afterlives Shakespeare's religions serve their plays' particular ends. I am untroubled by the variety in the forms the afterlife takes. Yes, some uses point to a Catholic world, some to one that is Protestant, one to Judaism, some to a classical pagan world, and some to religious skepticism. What seems to me more significant than the multiplicity of representations is how consistent Shakespeare's plays are in using the undiscovered country as an aesthetic and interpretative marker.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

#### **References**

Clegg, Cyndia Susan. 2006. English Renaissance Books on Islam and Shakespeare's *Othello*. *Pacific Coast Philology* 41: 1–12. Clegg, Cyndia Susan. 2009. Shakespeare and the Uncommon Law. *Ben Jonson Journal* 16: 216–47.

Clegg, Cyndia Susan. 2017. *Shakespeare's Reading Audiences*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cranmer, William. 1547. *Certayne Sermons, or Homelies, Appoynted by the Kynges Maiestie, to Bee Declared and Redde, by all Persones, Vicares, or Curates, Euery Sondaye in Their Churches, Where They Haue Cure*. London: Richard Grafton. Greenblatt, Stephen. 2001. *Hamlet in Purgatory*. Princeton: Princeton University Press.


© 2019 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

## *Article* **Paganism and Reform in Shakespeare's Plays**

#### **Grace Tiffany**

Department of English, Western Michigan University, 1903 W Michigan Ave, Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5331, USA; tiffany@wmich.edu

Received: 21 May 2018; Accepted: 18 June 2018; Published: 11 July 2018

**Abstract:** Shakespeare's plays mix references to pagan and Christian symbols and ideas in ways which are only superficially contradictory. While the sometimes uneasy juxtaposition of classical and Christian religious thought is characteristic of Renaissance literature, there is, in Shakespeare's use of paganism, a method to the madness. Shakespeare's comedies and romances associate the worship of Diana with the Catholic ideal of religious celibacy, and ultimately repudiate the Diana figure or transform her into a "Christian" spokeswoman who encourages and facilitates marriage and child-bearing. In a late romance, *The Winter's Tale*, the turn from Diana to self-sacrificial marriage is also made symbolic of a key character's turn from Catholic-like works of ritual penitence to inward transformation by faith. Thus, Shakespeare's plays represent pagan ritual in a way which supports the Calvinist religious tendencies of early-modern England.

**Keywords:** Diana; Calvinism; paganism; romances; *The Winter's Tale*; Catholic; marriage

In 1606, the English Parliament passed an Act "to Restraine Abuses of Players," instituting a 10-pound fine for any "prophan[e]" utterance of "the holy name of God or of Christ Iesus, or of the Holy Ghoste or of the Trinitie." Although Hugh Gazzard has argued persuasively that this law was only laxly enforced, still, as notable a theater historian as Andrew Gurr cites the 10-pound penalty as "one reason why the pagan gods begin to be called on with more frequency in the drama" after 1606 (Gazzard 2010, p. 493; Gurr 1994, p. 76). For Shakespeare's part, seven of the nine plays he wrote or co-wrote after the Act's passage1 are set in pre-Christian worlds where vexed characters do not, like Hamlet, exclaim, "O God, God!" (1.2.132), but instead call on the "blessed breeding sun" (*Timon of Athens* 4.3.1) or the "Thunder-master" (*Pericles* 5.4.30) in moments of emotional stress.<sup>2</sup> For the players, praying to Nature or Jupiter was a cost-controlling measure.

Yet Shakespeare's marked post-1606 turn to what were at least superficially pagan worlds should not obscure the fact that he expressed Christian ideas through pagan situations throughout his entire career. Maurice Hunt has written eloquently of Shakespeare's consistent "syncretistic" mode, whereby "Judeo-Christian ideas and allusions" are made to "compete with the details of pagan religion" (Hunt 2011, p. 29). Hunt's discussion ranges over more than two decades' worth of Shakespeare's work, beginning with the 1593 *The Comedy of Errors*, which may have been his first play. In that comedy, and in *A Midsummer Night's Dream*, *Titus Andronicus*, *Julius Caesar*, *King Lear*, and many other pre-1606 plays, Shakespeare accommodates references to pagan practices and beliefs to a dominant Christian perspective which is always powerfully present, if at times, only subtly alluded to.

In what follows, I will explore how Shakespeare's career-long pattern of allusions to pre-Christian deities and devotional practices put forth, for his English audience, a nationally self-congratulatory religious argument. In many of his plays, the displacement of paganism by Christianity—whether imminent or accomplished—is likened to the banishment of Catholic thought and practices by

<sup>1</sup> *Timon of Athens, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Cymbeline, Pericles, The Winter's Tale*, and *The Two Noble Kinsmen*, co-written with John Fletcher.

<sup>2</sup> All quotations of Shakespeare come from (Shakespeare 1974).

Protestantism. To say this another way, the paganism whose deficiency the plays expose, evokes some aspects of England's Old Religion, and the Christian ideas the plays champion are of a Reformed variety. Specifically, the comedies and romances lay stress on godly marriage, the celebration of which reached "rhapsodic rhetorical heights" in early modern England, to use Catherine Belsey's phrase (Belsey 1996, pp. 5–6). Shakespeare's plays associate devotion to the goddess Diana with monastic celibacy, a Catholic ideal, and repudiate or reinterpret this devotion in order to honor fruitful matrimony. In two romances, Shakespeare also connects pre-Christian religious practices to what early-modern Protestants regarded as superstitious Catholic modes of worship, by which salvation is assisted by works. In *Pericles* and *The Winter's Tale*, it is not human rituals but God's grace, working through Providential time, that effects resolutions and miracles. Human participation in God's comedy requires characters to turn from "pagan" works to Christian faith.

#### **1. From Diana to Abbess to Wife**

In his *Institutes*, John Calvin justifies the choice of marriage over single life in terms of spiritual warfare. Our fight against wayward sexual desires should lead us to "set that remedy against them, which the Lord hath given us for our defense. Therefore, they do rashly which renounce matrimony: as though they had made a league with God concerning their perpetual strength" (Calvin 1599, *Institution* STC 4423, K3r). A markedly Calvinist feature of Shakespeare's comedies is their powerful and obvious argument for marriage over virginal chastity, in rejection of the Catholic monastic ideal of the renunciation of the flesh. Young women's veneration of Diana, goddess of virgins, is in Shakespeare not a permanent but a liminal condition, preparatory for their entrance into matrimony and motherhood. This is true whether Diana worship is a real religious activity, as in *A Midsummer Night's Dream, Pericles*, and *The Two Noble Kinsmen*, or a mere metaphor for the virginal state, as in *Much Ado about Nothing* and *All's Well that Ends Well*, as well as in casual comparisons made throughout the plays between eligible maids and Diana. ("O, be thou Dian ... and Dian sportful!" is the burden of Petruchio's wooing dance [*The Taming of the Shrew* 2.1.200–1].) Finally, in the romances, the figure of Diana herself is transformed from patroness of virgins to Christian matron, even dispensing advice on how to be a good wife, in Biblical terms.

In *A Midsummer Night's Dream* Theseus presents a grim picture of celibacy as suffered by the female. If Hermia refuses an arranged marriage, she must "endure the livery of a nun" in "shady cloister mew'd," living "a barren sister all [her] life," / Chaunting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon" (1.1.70–73). Two words in Theseus' warning, "barren" and "fruitless," evoke the sterility of the monastic life, implying, by their contrary, child-bearing as a chief blessing of marriage. As the Puritan Robert Crofts would write in the 1640s, marriage, the "blessed union," may become "an occasion of sweet and lovely children, who in after times may be a great felicity and joy" (Crofts 1638). In contrast to the bliss of fruitful marriage, the condition of Diana and her followers is dark and chill. This stark view of Diana is echoed in young Emilia's appeal to the goddess in the late play *The Two Noble Kinsmen*, which begins, "O sacred, shadowy, cold, and constant queen, / Abandoner of revels, mute, contemplative, / Sweet, solitary, white as chaste, and pure / As wind-fann'd snow, who to thy female knights / Allow'st no more blood than will make a blush ... " (5.1.137–45). Diana is here a diminished goddess, whose mythic qualities as energetic huntress and, alongside her devotees, woodland merry-maker have died into marble stillness. Rather than Hesiod's "lover of woods and the wild chase over the mountains" (Hamilton 1969), she is a static image: an enshrined saint's statue, like those forbidden in England since the mid-sixteenth century by the Church's Articles of Religion ("The Romish doctrine concerning ... Worshipping and Adoration ... of images ... and also Invocation of Saints, is a fond thing vainly invented").<sup>3</sup> Indeed, the prayer to the "cold" goddess

<sup>3</sup> Article 22, p. 274. Articles of Religion of the English Church. In *Creeds of the Churches: A Reader in Christian Doctrine from the Bible to the Present*. 3rd ed. Ed. John Leith. Atlanta: John Knox, 1982.

suggests the unhealthy attitude of the supplicant, who prefers the bloodless isolation virginal Diana is here made to symbolize, to the intimacy of marriage. Emilia's language signals, if we hadn't guessed it already, that she, a living woman, is destined not to remain, unnaturally, a bloodless "female knight."

In this she is like *Much Ado about Nothing*'s Hero, another "virgin knight" only temporarily consecrated to Diana, "goddess of the night" (5.3.13, 12). Hero's plot's comic trajectory will also maneuver her into marriage since, as her friend Benedick says, "The world must be peopled" (*Much Ado about Nothing* 2.3.242). Her situation is reflected in a later Shakespeare character, one actually called Diana, the Florentine maid of *All's Well that Ends Well*. This Diana bears the virgin goddess's name only symbolically to hint that she has not slept with the lustful Bertram—that dubious honor went to Helena, his lawful wife, who scored by means of a bed-trick—and that at play's end she, Diana, is still a decent maid eligible for a husband. "If thou beest yet a fresh uncropped flower," the French king tells her, "Choose thou thy husband, and I'll pay thy dower" (5.3.327–28). Diana's likely future is at this moment made visible in the pregnant Helena, with whom she shares a stage. Like that of the earlier Helena in *A Midsummer Night's Dream*, *All's Well*'s Helena's marriage will breed "blessed ... issue" (*Dream* 5.1.404–05), and has already begun to do so. The marriage will be, in Crofts' words, "an occasion of sweet and lovely children" (if all goes well) (Crofts, A7v-A8r). For all that Helena was played by a bewigged boy with a pillow strapped to his stomach, her manifestly pregnant condition was a reminder to Shakespeare's Jacobean audience that the good Christian couple was to "bring forth fruit, and multiply" (Gen. 1:28).4

Yet fruitfulness, however Biblically approved, was not the only marital blessing recognized and celebrated in these comic endings. The English Church's "Homily of the State of Matrimony," published in 1623 among other official marriage sermons, places children as only the second benefit of marriage, a state "instituted by God, to the intent that man and woman should live lawfully in a perpetual friendship, to bring forth fruit."5 "Art thou gone so, love, lord, ay, husband, *friend*!," Juliet complains at Romeo's departure, after their wedding night (*Romeo and Juliet* 3.5.43, my emphasis). The friendship ideal was paramount, and the greater part of the famous marriage homily is devoted to the means of achieving it rather than to matters of child-bearing and child-raising. Likewise, Robert Snawsel's widely read 1610 "A Looking Glass for Married Folks" produces an argument, made in dialogue form, regarding the ways wives might be friends with their husbands while remaining in obedience to them as the Apostle Paul instructs. "Paul ... teacheth, that wives should be in subjection to their husbands," says one wife. "But the same Paul, I trow, teacheth, that husbands should love their wives," replies a second. "Well, let him first do his duty, and then I will do mine," says a third (Snawsel 1610, p. 184).

These popular writings' intense concern with the creation of marital harmony reflects the idea expressed in Thomas Middleton's *The Changeling* (1622), that marriage is a kind of Eden, "the place blest, / And is [man's] right home back, if he achieve it" (1.1.8–9). Catherine Belsey has written of the headboards carved with images of Adam and Eve in the garden which were popular among seventeenth-century English couples who could afford them (Belsey 1996, pp. 7–9). These carvings tended to include the snake, emblem of the "Sour-ey'd disdain, and discord" that might, without prayer and humility, come to "bestrew / The union of [a couple's] bed," to quote *The Tempest*'s Prospero (4.1.19–20). Yet the Eden headboard images, like the lines from Middleton, Snawsel, and the Homily, suggest the degree to which marriage, despite its challenges, was celebrated by the early modern English as "man's" (and woman's) "right home back, if he [or she] achieve it"—a relationship promising a likelier path to godliness than Catholic sexual self-denial.

In Shakespeare, resistance to marriage is not godly self-control, but social pathology. We see this clearly in *Measure for Measure*, a play set in a Catholic Vienna, wherein the young novice Isabella

<sup>4</sup> All Biblical quotations come from *The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1599 Edition*.

<sup>5</sup> *A Homily of the State of Matrimony*. In *The Second Tome of Homilies.* London, 1623. In William Shakespeare, *The Taming of the Shrew: Texts and Contexts*, ed. Frances E. Dolan (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1996), p. 172.

knows nothing about Christ's plan for salvation (at least, she says nothing about it when she bids her condemned brother to prepare for death [3.1]). Isabella seeks the religious life not for devotional purposes but in quest of "strict restraint" on her passions (1.4.4). The famous Biblical justification of a life of sexual abstinence, found in First Corinthians, makes clear that restraint is a spiritual gift, not an effect to be achieved through personal efforts, nor something to be imposed by the Church. "For I would that all men were even as I myself am, but every man hath his proper gift of God, one after this manner, and another after that," Paul writes to the Corinthians. "Therefore I say unto the unmarried, and even unto the widows, it is good for them to abide even as I do. But if they cannot abstain, let them marry, for it is better to marry than to burn" (I Cor. 7:7–9). Isabella has no spiritual gift of restraint, and seeks its imposition by institutional authority and a physical cloistering which her play's arch-plotter, Duke Vincentio, eventually tries to deny her. Of course, audiences are understandably skeptical about the marriages arranged and proposed by Vincentio. These unions, including, possibly, his own with Isabella, are mismatches, patched together against the wills of one half of each couple. Daniel Gates may be right that in Vincentio, Shakespeare mocks Calvin's argument that since the gift of restraint is so rare, "marriage should be the solution for almost everyone" (Gates 2013, p. 529). Yet resistance to marriage is not virtuous in the cold, uncharitable Isabella, any more than it is in the sanctimonious bachelor Angelo, a man "whose blood / Is very snow broth" (1.4.57–58), but who nurses hot passions on which he illicitly acts. Huston Diehl quotes Calvin to describe Isabella and Angelo, aptly noting the "isolation of their counterfeit righteousness" (Diehl 1998, p. 409).6 The conditions of both these characters present single life as a grim, self-serving, loveless alternative even to an imperfect marriage. Even in this unhappy comedy, Shakespeare leads us to the Calvinist association of celibacy with spiritual error, and matrimony with the opportunity for spiritual growth.

In a brighter comedy, *Much Ado about Nothing*, male marriage-resister Benedick, though he lacks Angelo's treachery, is, like him, not impelled by virtue or godliness. Instead, he nurses a self-protective fear of cuckoldry that signals his immaturity, and is in fact, as R. Chris Hassel observes, a mark of his self-love (Hassel 1980, p. 91). His final declaration, on the eve of his marriage, that "There is no staff more reverent than one tipped with horn" (5.4.123–24), registers his brave advance into a realm of emotional risk and self-sacrifice. ("[S]o is the forehead of a married man more honorable than the bare brow of a bachelor," as Touchstone says in *As You Like It* [3.3.60–1].). In Shakespeare, the dangers of intimacy are to be risked. Vulnerability to a spouse is a step on the path to our necessary vulnerability to God. It's no wonder that C. S. Lewis thought of Benedick when, in his famous sermon, "The Weight of Glory," he associated the sinner's isolation with a failure to join with and be recognized by God. In such a condition, "Nobody marks us" (Lewis 1980, p. 40). ("Nobody marks you," Beatrice says of bachelor Benedick [1.1.117]—though, clearly, *she* does.) Lewis finds love's willingness to risk being wounded by a friend or lover a spiritual necessity, taking issue with St. Augustine's neo-Stoic argument that one should not give one's heart to a fallible human. "To love at all is to be vulnerable," Lewis elsewhere writes (Lewis 2012, p. 121). Benedick comes to agree, and, by play's end, not only risks the cuckold's horn, but encourages others to join the dance ("Prince, thou art sad, get thee a wife, get thee a wife" [5.4.122]).<sup>7</sup> This is the general early-modern view. Spiritual trials are to be met in conjugal relationships, triumphed over through humility and prayer—"Serve God, love me," Benedick tells Beatrice (5.2.93)—and crowned with friendship, in a community of married couples.8 Paradoxically, such success is most clearly envisioned in plays which contain "pagan" scenes that directly or indirectly invoke the figure of Diana. These scenes—which

<sup>6</sup> Calvin's passage, quoted more fully by (Diehl 1998, p. 404) reads, "But so soon as [man] is compelled to try his life by the balance of the law, then leaving the presumption of that counterfeit righteousness, he seeth himself to be an infinite space distant from holiness."

<sup>7</sup> (Tiffany 1995) discusses at length Shakespeare's male comic characters' morally healthful choices to risk cuckoldry.

<sup>8</sup> (Cox 2007) invokes the Protestant ideal of marriage as a forum for Christian virtue in his eloquent account of Hermione's embrace of her husband at the close of *The Winter's Tale*. He writes, Hermione's "decision to move toward Leontes and embrace him enacts her forgiveness, with its root in charity" (p. 215).

include the procession to the shrine of Hero, "virgin knight," that succeeds Benedick's instruction to Beatrice in *Much Ado—*associate Diana with Catholic saints and Catholic celibacy, and ultimately rechannel her worship into marital devotion.

Shakespeare's plays' most spectacular rejections of celibate Diana involve Diana's own transformation into a virtuous wife, like the Biblical helpmeet whose price is above rubies (Prov. 31:10). In *The Comedy of Errors*, Shakespeare has changed the pagan city described in Paul's Ephesians to a Christian town, and the famous shrine of Diana at Ephesus (Baugh 1999, pp. 50–51) to a convent ruled by an abbess who, by play's end, throws off her veil to embrace a long-lost husband. Paul's challenge to the idolatrous cult of Diana is described in the Acts of the Apostles as a confrontation between Paul and the local silversmiths who made "great gains" by fashioning and selling "silver temples to Diana" (Acts 19:24). Thus, Shakespeare has comically translated Paul's religious attack on those supporting the commercially profitable rites of Diana, to a Protestant attack on the celibate religious life, using Paul's comments on marriage in Ephesians as his Biblical justification.

Ephesus is, of course, no accidental choice of setting for a play which deals substantially with the trials of marriage, and with the husband's and wife's mutual obligations. Elizabethans were familiar with Paul's instructions to the married couples of that town in Ephesians five:

Wives, submit yourselves unto your husbands, as unto the Lord.

For the husband is the wive's head, even as Christ is the head of the

Church, and the same is the Saviour of his body.

Therefore as the church is in subjection to Christ, even so let the

wives be to their husbands in every thing.

Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the Church . . .

So ought men to love their wives, as their own bodies; he that

loveth his wife, loveth himself . . .

For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall

cleave to his wife, and they twain shall be one flesh.

#### Ephesians 5:22–31

Antipholus of Ephesus's estranged wife Adriana's aggrieved complaint against her husband9 refers to the obligations and the relation described in Paul's letter.

How comes it now, my husband, O, how comes it,

That thou are then estranged from thyself?

Thyself I call it, being strange to me,

That, undividable incorporate,

Am better than thy dear self's better part.

Ah, do not tear thyself away from me;

For know, my love, as easy mayst thou fall

A drop of water in the breaking gulf,

And take unmingled thence that drop again,

Without addition or diminishing,

As take from me thyself and not me too.

2.2.119–129

<sup>9</sup> More accurately, her husband's twin brother, who she thinks is her husband in this scene.

Yet in the play's fifth act, the town abbess turns Paul's words against Adriana, admonishing her for her failure to submit to her husband in allowing her unruly, jealous outbursts to disturb his peace. The Abbess chides, "The venom clamors of a jealous woman / Poisons more deadly than a mad dog's tooth. / It seems his sleeps were hindered by thy railing" (5.1.69–71). Adriana herself, it seems, has driven her husband away. Adriana—who humbly agrees with the Abbess' criticism ("She did betray me to my own reproof" [5.1.90])—has failed to live up to the ideal of the Christian helpmeet described in the *Homily of the State of Matrimony*, which counsels women to "seek [their husbands'] contentation," and warns that men "are compelled ... to abhor and flee from their own houses" when wives are "forward."<sup>10</sup> Here the Abbess plays an authoritative Pauline role in chastening and counseling these modern-day Ephesians in marital wisdom and virtue, refusing to release Antipholus (who is hiding in the abbey, and is the wrong twin anyway) to his wife until her lessons have sunk in.

Yet, the Abbess herself is made subject, or is self-subjected, to the Calvinist preference for marriage over Paul's celibacy. Later in the scene, revealing herself as the long-lost wife of the long-lost Egeon, she re-embraces her identity as mother (of the two Antipholi) and wife. She speaks "to gain a husband," identifying herself as the lost "wife, once call'd Aemilia," who "bore [Egeon] ... two fair sons" (5.1.343–4). Her joyful disclosure, by which she abandons the religious life, makes possible the comic revelations of mistaken identity that restore harmony to Adriana's and Antipholus E.'s marriage, and facilitates another marriage, that of his twin and Adriana's sister. Paul's ancient displacement of Diana's Ephesian shrine by the (re)united Christian family is completed in Aemilia's rejection of religious vows for a renewed conjugal relation.

Shakespeare's romances furnish us with two more versions of Diana transformed to a wife or, at least, a spokeswoman for marriage.11 In *Pericles*, set in a pre-Christian Mediterranean world, the goddess Diana appears to the storm-tossed Pericles in a dream (which is visible to the audience) and directs him to visit her shrine at Ephesus. That location will be the setting of his revelation, to the "maiden priests," of how he "at sea did lose [his] wife." (5.2.239–44). In fact, the shrine visit results in the restoration to Pericles of Thaisa, his lost wife, who has been serving as Diana's priestess since she washed up on shore two decades before. "Noble sir, if you have told Diana's altar true, this is your wife," says Cerimon, her protector (5.3.16–18). Like the Abbess in *The Comedy of Errors*, Diana, traditional protector of virginity, is thus made an agent and Pauline priestess of marriage. As in the earlier comedy, a wife's celibate devotions give way to reverent marriage, this time at a divine behest. As for the pagan sacrifice Diana requested, it never happens—or, rather, becomes, retrospectively, simply a metaphorical reference to Pericles' confessional testimony in Diana's temple. "Hail, Dian!" he begins, and launches into his tale, only to be interrupted by priestess Thaisa's naming of him as her husband (after she faints and revives, as is her custom [5.3.21ff]). The temple of the sainted virgin goddess becomes, in quick succession, the place of marital reunion and then the site of marriage banns. To "Pure Dian" and his wife, Pericles announces, "This prince, the fair-betrothed of your daughter, / shall marry her." He concludes by barbering himself (in the temple!) "[t]o grace thy marriage-day" (5.3.70–6). The scene uses a pagan religious setting to turn from the celibate ideal to a celebration of Christian marriage and the expanded family, achieved by the workings of "grace."

*The Winter's Tale*'s pagan shrine is that of Apollo, not Diana. Yet its scenes of Apollo's shrine and his oracle's declaration belong to the old, bad time of the first three acts. Although act five sees the fulfillment of Apollo's prophecy that King Leontes will die heirless if "that which is lost"—his daughter Perdita—"be not found" (3.2.135–6), still, this final act ushers in a new religious dispensation, and delivers us into the hands of a fresh authoritative voice: one that speaks and acts in the service of marriage. That is the voice of Paulina, named, not accidentally, for the apostle Paul. Paulina is

<sup>10</sup> *A Homily of the State of Matrimony*, p. 175.

<sup>11</sup> (Bicks 2000, pp. 211–12) has argued that even the original Diana was worshipped, paradoxically, both as a protector of virgins and a mother goddess, both at Ephesus and elsewhere in the ancient world. She was likewise known to some as "goddess of hunting and childbirth" (Wilson 2018, p. 538).

indeed Pauline in her bracing admonitions to Leontes to remain virtuous, repentant, and chaste after the death of Hermione.<sup>12</sup> Additionally, in the play's last scene we see reiterated through her the Apostle Paul's resistance to the cult of Diana. In an episode reminiscent of the shrine scene in *Pericles* (written shortly before *The Winter's Tale*), Paulina officiates at a quasi-religious ceremony in which what is either Hermione's statue or Hermione herself is brought down from her pedestal, to be rejoined with Leontes, her wonder-struck husband, after sixteen years of separation. The cold, still statue associated, like the Diana of *Two Noble Kinsmen*, with abstinence and contemplation becomes a living woman, enfolding her husband in an embrace. "She's warm," Leontes says, amazed (5.3.109). The shrine is empty, the family circle full. Like Aemilia, and like the Diana of *Pericles*, Paulina has replaced austere celibacy with marriage, proving the agent not only of Leontes' and Hermione's restored union, but of Florizel's now-permitted marriage to Perdita, and of her own remarriage to the servant Camillo. In their joy, Polixenes and Leontes approve all these matches.

#### **2. From Works to Faith**

In *The Winter's Tale*, harmonious marriage is the product of providential time rather than human effort. Hermione frequently speaks of God's grace (e.g., "Grace to boot!" [1.2.80]; "You gods ... pour your graces / Upon my daughter's head!" [5.3.121–2]). She is also the spokesman for gracious, God-fearing patience. "I must be patient, till the heavens look / With an aspect more favorable," she says, when arrested on false charges by her jealous husband (2.1.106–7). Calvin writes that God gives grace to our fallen souls through "the secret energy of the Spirit" (Calvin 1960, vol. 1, p. 537), and he affirms that the Creator, working through time, fulfills a mysterious plan and "sustains, nourishes, and cares for, everything he has made" (Calvin 1960, vol. 1, pp. 197–98). Calvin's description of God's grace in his *Institutes*reads like the plots of Shakespeare's "shipwreck" comedies and romances. "Suppose a man falls among thieves, or wild beasts; [or] is shipwrecked at sea by a sudden gale," he writes. "Suppose another man ... [,] having been tossed by the waves, reaches harbor; [and] miraculously escapes death by a finger's breadth ... anyone who has been taught ... that all the hairs of his head are numbered [Matt. 10:30] ... will consider that all events are governed by God's secret plan" (Calvin 1960, vol. 1, pp. 198–99). This description also applies well to *The Winter's Tale*, where the vast, slow work of God's grace is the powerful backdrop to Leontes' puny and finally vain efforts to effect quick cures for the injuries he's done himself and others.

It may sharpen our perception of Leontes' religious error if we note that in several earlier plays, Shakespeare likens the haste and impatience seen in characters' desires for instant cures and miracles to the Old Religious penchant for amulets, holy water, and efficacious prayer-formulae. Shakespeare had already (anachronistically) mocked such trinkets and rituals in two "pagan" plays of the 1590s, *Titus Andronicus* and *Julius Caesar*. In the first, Aaron the Moor speaks scornfully to Titus's son Lucius of the Romans' "popish tricks and ceremonies," and notes that "An idiot holds his bauble for a god" (*Titus Andronicus* 5.1.76–9). In Aaron's insult, the Ancient Roman worship of the Olympian gods is explicitly associated with contemporary "Romish" practices.<sup>13</sup> In *Julius Caesar*, that connection is made similarly plain. There the conspirator Decius strategically misinterprets Caesar's nightmare of his own assassination in terms which suggest popular reverence for relics and vials of sacred blood, staple items of show and profit in the Catholic shrines of the continent and pre-Reformation England—as well, of course, as in late-sixteenth-century Rome.14 "Your statue spouting blood in many pipes, / In which so many smiling Romans bath'd, / Signified that from you great Rome shall

<sup>12</sup> See (Tiffany 2000), where this observation first appears. See also the argument of (Lewalski 1978, pp. 131–44) regarding the Protestant vision of *The Winter's Tale*.

<sup>13</sup> Robert Miola thinks the fact that Aaron, a wicked fellow, is the one uttering this sneering insult invalidates the insult. He sees Aaron representing a "Tudor magistrate" who misunderstands the Christian religion (Miola 2001, p. 34). However, I see little resemblance between Aaron and a Tudor magistrate. Wicked he may be, yet Aaron functions as the play's satirist, skewering the hypocrisies of various Roman and Gothic characters.

<sup>14</sup> For a discussion of late-medieval English church reliquaries, see chapter 1 of (Tiffany 2006).

suck, / Reviving blood, and that great men shall press / For tinctures, stains, relics, and cognizance" (2.2.85–90). Caesar-worship is here recognizably associated with the "popish" idolatrous practices of the Old Faith. Of course, Caesar's death is caught up in a Providential scheme that none of its characters understands, one that makes saints' relics look superstitious and trivial, and turns readers and audiences instead toward the complete transformation of nature effected by Christ's awe-inspiring birth, death, and resurrection. *Julius Caesar* and, especially, its sequel, *Antony and Cleopatra*, are permeated with references to the coming "time of universal peace" (*Antony and Cleopatra* 4.6.4), the *pax romana* ushered in by the final victory of Caesar's heir, Octavius, in the wars pursuant to Caesar's death. This *pax romana* is the precursor to Christ's coming. Octavius will become Augustus, under whose reign the Christ will be born, an event that will lead, in the fullness of Providential time, to the "new heaven and new earth" (Rev. 21:1) which Antony falsely identifies with his erotic (and bigamous) love for Cleopatra (1.1.17).<sup>15</sup>

Thus, Shakespeare's earlier pagan plays prepare us for *The Winter's Tale*'s dismissal of instant, humanly wrought solutions to the evil caused by flawed human natures. Tinctures, tricks, and relics, thought by some to impart healing, are the products of magical thinking and haste. They are superficial. Leontes longs for such easy solutions at the end of act three of his play, when, confronted with the death of his son and the Delphic oracle's pronouncement of his wife's innocence and his own tyranny, he vows to put things to rights immediately by his own actions. As Stephen Orgel writes, for Leontes, "heaven is to be squared with an apology, and all past errors are assumed to be easily rectifiable" (Orgel 2005, p. 263). "Beseech you tenderly apply to her / Some remedies for life," Leontes directs his servants, believing his dying wife has merely fainted. He adds, "I'll reconcile me to Polixenes, / New woo my queen," and "recall the good Camillo," his maligned servant, as though these actions could speedily mend the breaches he's made in both the marriage friendship and the other friendships (3.2.152–6). He cannot, of course, perform these miracles – Hermione either dies or removes herself, and Polixenes and Camillo remain out of reach for sixteen years across an ocean. Yet equally unhelpful is Leontes' subsequent commitment to perpetual acts of devotion at a shrine he'll erect for Hermione and his son, Mamillius (also dead, of grief at his father's actions). "Once a day I'll visit / The chapel where they lie, and tears shed there / Shall be my recreation" (3.2.238–41). Though he performs his pledge, these acts of ritual penitence do not mitigate his grief and guilt. Indeed, his actions display what Sarah Beckwith calls the "abandoned sacrament of penance" (Beckwith 2011, p. 1). Like the prayers for Richard II's soul instituted by Henry V, son of Richard's slayer, and sung by "sad and solemn priests" in "chauntries," Leontes' prayers are "nothing worth" (*Henry V* 4.1.301). Sixteen years of them do not serve to restore his kingdom, which lacks an heir, and leave him smarting as sharply as ever at Paulina's reminder of the wife he "killed." "Kill'd? / She I kill'd? I did so; but thou strik'st me / Sorely, to say I did. It is as bitter / Upon thy tongue as in my thought" (5.1.15–19).

This interchange between Paulina and Leontes shows the insufficiency of pious works to restore him to God (whom Leontes has called Apollo), or his kingdom to political health. Early-modern Protestants associated works with the outward sacrifices of the Old Covenant which "could not make holy, concerning the conscience, him that did the service," according to Hebrews, a letter then attributed to Paul. Time dispenses with this Old Covenant, which, "disannulled and waxed old, is ready to vanish away." In its place comes a new promise, wrought from Christ's sacrifice and the Holy Spirit, which acts upon the penitent to achieve an inward purification (Heb. 9:9, 8:10–13). The view that only infusing spirit, not performed works, could rehabilitate sinners was strongly emphasized by Calvin, who writes, "All those things in [man] which are said to have pleased God he received from God's grace—so far is he from preparing himself to receive grace ... through his own effort" (Calvin 1960, vol. 1, p. 806). What Adrian Streete calls the "profoundly anti-volitional" character

<sup>15</sup> Two excellent discussions of references to Christian Providence in these Roman plays are found in (Hunt 2011), mentioned above, and in (Danby 1994).

of Protestant Christianity, and finds broadly expressed in early modern drama (Streete 2009, p. 15), was influenced by these words of Calvin, which expand upon Paul's statement in Ephesians: "For by grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of your selves; it is the gift of God" (Eph. 2:8). Thus, Paulina's affirmation of Leontes' inability to atone for his own sins echoes both Calvin and Paul.

It is indeed significant that despite Paulina's grief and anger at Leontes, his wife's tormentor, it is not she who imposes on him ritual penitent acts for destroying his family. Leontes devises these for himself. Leontes also uses a Catholic vocabulary to describe the dead Hermione, referring, when he speaks of her, to saints and incense. Were he to marry again, he says, "her sainted spirit" would appear and—in an odd replacement for "incite me"—"incense me" (5.1.57, 61). Leontes seeks peace from his pain, and imagines Hermione, his victim, as a saint with the power to give or withhold his cure depending on whether his actions are virtuous or treacherous. However, Paulina does not want Leontes healed by anything less than an intervening, Providential miracle. Rather than urging him to find reconciliation through rote acts of veneration at Hermione's chapel shrine, she strives to keep him ever mindful of his unassuaged guilt. In this, she expresses the same distrust of penitent works seen in Calvin, who writes that "men having made confession to a priest, think that they may wipe their mouth and say, I did it not. And not only they are made all the year long the bolder to sin: but all the rest of the year bearing themselves bold upon confession, they never sigh unto God, they never return to themselves" (Qtd. in [Diehl 1998, p. 408]). Companioned by Paulina, Leontes cannot "wipe [his] mouth and say, I did it not." She keeps his wife's death bitter in his thought and on both of their tongues (5.1.17–19). He runs no danger of not "return[ing] to [himself": of failing to revisit his own sin. Her reminders of "she you kill'd" (5.1.15) guard him against any presumption of what Calvin called "counterfeit righteousness," keeping him aware that, as Calvin writes of sinners, he is an "infinite space distant from holiness" (Qtd. in [Diehl 1998, p. 408]). Paulina is Pauline in her vigorous exhortations to virtuous behavior (preached almost exclusively to the longsuffering Leontes); and she is both Pauline and Calvinist in her implicit repudiation of penitent works—and, finally, in her explicit call for faith.

To prepare for the miracle made possible by faith, after the reunion of Leontes and Perdita and his reconciliation with Polixenes and Camillo, Paulina removes them all to a new "chapel," where stands the statue which will shortly become a wife. There she requires all participants in the imminent ceremony to "awake [their] faith" (5.3.94). Certainly, Leontes' penitence, deepened over time, enables him to receive the graceful gift here made available by Paulina, namely the resurrection of his marriage partner. But the miracle is accomplished through his humble acceptance of the resurrection—his faith that it will happen—as it could not have been through his pious acts. This surrender to faith is as important for Leontes as it is difficult. His sin in the play's first three acts has stemmed directly from his lack of faith, first in his wife's loyalty ("She's an adult'ress" [2.1.88]); second, in the virtue of his lifelong friend ("I have said with whom" [2.1.88]); third, in the honesty and judgment of his counselors ("You're liars all" [2.3.146]); and fourth in the Delphic oracle, which—characteristically for a Renaissance romance set in the classical world—is a mask of Providence.16 Leontes has claimed, "There is no truth at all in the oracle" (3.2.140). Now, his profession of faith in the miracle Paulina offers, completes the healing begun by his statement, after his son's death, "I have too much believ'd mine own suspicion" (3.2.151). Yet nowhere does Leontes, or anyone else in the play's last scene, suggest that Paulina is the author of the miracle. She is "assisted," though not by "wicked powers" (5.3.90–91). She presides, but her language attributes the life-restoring power to a being outside herself. She tells Hermione, "Bequeath to death your numbness; for from him / Dear life redeems you" [5.3.103–04]). Paulina's "dear life," like Hermione's "grace," suggests the salvific power of God's unearned love and forgiveness.

<sup>16</sup> In Clifford Davidson's words, Apollo's oracle is here "a pagan source of truth which may be interpreted as a source of divine revelation" (Davidson 2006, p. 121). The oracle may be interpreted this way because the play proves its prophecies accurate in every detail.

The suggestion is, again, eminently Calvinist, and characteristic of official early modern English religious thought and discourse. We might consider, for example, *Certain Sermons*, a book of state-prescribed homilies read in churches throughout England after its 1547 publication, which lays a Calvinist stress on man's inability to act freely without the impetus of grace. "We cannot think a good thought of our selves, much less can we say well, or do well of our selves ... There is none good but God, and ... we can do nothing that is good without him" (Bond 1987, pp. 72–74). So in *The Winter's Tale.* Leontes' awakening of his faith leads to a secular redemption for himself and his kingdom, emblematic of the larger redemption available to sinners through grace. In the final scene of this play, Shakespeare affirms both the spiritual value of human marriage and the superiority of simple belief to ritual acts.

I have elsewhere written extensively of how Shakespeare's use of "Catholic" miracles like moving "saint" statues shows the confidence with which an early-modern English Protestant playwright could claim Catholic practices and iconography for imaginative play, relegating them to the fairytale world of the playhouse.<sup>17</sup> Yet, Shakespeare could also "play" with Catholicism in ways which made serious suggestions about the practical yet mysterious operations of marital and divine love. The scene of Hermione changing—of her being changed—from a stone statue to a woman embracing her husband joins a pattern of similar Shakespearean championings of marriage against the celibacy prized and practiced in Catholic tradition. Other cold, celibate, and finally healthfully rejected or enlivened statues include not only the sterile Diana of *The Two Noble Kinsmen*, but the enshrined "dear saint" whom Juliet refuses to be when she returns Romeo's kiss (*Romeo and Juliet* 1.1.95-110). Tragically, they also include Othello's false image of Desdemona, the wife he kills for not being as pure as "Dian's visage" (*Othello* 3.3.387) and as motionless as "monumental alabaster" (5.2.5). In Leontes, it might be said, Othello gets a second chance at loving a wife, and that second chance is thematically associated with salvation. In *The Winter's Tale*, by means of its paradoxically pagan setting, Shakespeare deepens his celebration of Christian marriage by linking its trials and joys to the larger issue of the sinner's reconciliation to God through faith.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

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