British Shakespeare Association Biennial Conference 2005
Contacts | Community / Schools | Booking | Getting here | Accommodation
Programme : Panels - Seminars - Workshops
Panel - Shakespeare and the transition from Catholicism to
Protestantism
Saturday 3rd September 2005, 2.00-4.00pm,
Herschel Lecture Theatre 1
Participants
Chair - Jennifer Richards, Newcastle
University
Sarah Beckwith, Duke University
The Lover’s Confession: Cavell,
Shakespeare and Religion
Philip Schwyzer, Exeter University
Shakespeare and the Monasteries
Clare Griffiths, Liverpool University
“Tenderly apply…some
remedies for life”: Penitence and Equivalence in The Winter’s Tale
Iain McClure, Birkbeck College, London
Othello, the Medieval “Mumming
Play” and the Extinction of Memory
Abstracts
The Lover’s Confession: Cavell, Shakespeare and Religion
Sarah Beckwith, Duke University
If Cavell claims that Shakespearean theater is “in competition with religion” (Disowning Knowledge, p. 18), he is also unsatisfied with Frye’s notion of “secular scripture.” Indeed Cavell’s formulations on religion, on Christianity, and reformation theology, if almost tantalizingly gnomic, are also immensely suggestive and it is always worth trying to follow him through the paths he takes to arrive at them.
I’m thinking of Cavell’s pondering of the crucifixion of Jesus as “an event nearly 2,00O years ago” which might “relieve us of responsibility” or “nail us to it.” (Must We Mean What We Say, p. 162). Or his meditation on the inadequacies of a crudely allegorizing reading of Cordelia as Christ: in abjuring the imagination’s wish for complete and final solutions in God, we might come to a sense that “what is needed is at hand or nowhere.” “But isn’t this what Christ meant”, he asks? (Disowning Knowledge, p. 74.) Another instance is, of course his adaptation of Wittgenstein’s : :the human body is the best picture of the soul”: “the crucified human body is our best picture of the unacknowledged human soul.” Yet another instance is his brilliant reading of Cleopatra’s “immortal longings” in the introduction to Disowning Knowledge.
Cavell’s claim for a theater in competition with religion is importantly different, I want to argue, from that mixture of recent claims that Shakespeare’s theater appropriates, supercedes and compensates for a lost religion (Greenblatt, Montrose, Diehl). This has to do not merely with the functionalism of such perspectives, but with the sheerly”external” way in which theological questions such as grace and faith are addressed in such readings. For Cavell, these questions are never external, and this is why historicism has never held his imagination.
In this paper I want to explore some avenues in Cavell’s exploration
of Christianity in Shakespeare’s work, in particular taking up the question
of “unknowability from outside.” I’ve chosen Shakespeare’s
highly experimental romance Pericles to map out some questions of the relation
of the fidelity to tradition that Cavell sees as a hallmark of the modernist
text. So this will involve taking Shakespeare’s medievalism seriously
and it will also take Shakespeare seriously as a reader of Gower “Lover’s
Confession” and the extraordinarily rich meditation on confession, narrative,
story-telling and love in the Confessio Amantis..
Shakespeare and the Monasteries
Philip Schwyzer, Exeter University
The question of whether line 4 of sonnet 73, "Bare ruin’d choirs
where late the sweet birds sang," involves a reference to the ruins of
the dissolved monasteries has been long discussed, and is unlikely to yield
any answer other than "maybe." The oint, from a formalist perspective,
lies in the marvelousness of that "maybe" -- having initially compared
himself to Autumn, the poet goes on, with escalating ambiguity, to liken himself
in a single quatrain to a tree, a man shivering with cold, a ruin, and perhaps
his own pages (quires). Yet it is worth noting that this is not Shakespeare’s
first reference to the dissolution. In Titus Andronicus, a Goth pauses "to
gaze upon a ruined monastery"; inside, he discovers the Moor Aaron doting
over his child. As with the sonnet, the ruin’s revelation is irresolvably
ambiguous, requiring us to hold two apparently incompatible images in our minds
simultaneously (choirs which are also branches; a psychopathic killer who is
also a tender father). Both
passages stand in marked contrast to contemporary (Catholic as well as Protestant)
responses to monastic ruins, which are unambiguous in their revulsion from the
spectacle. The refusal to resolve the contradictions revealed in the ruins of
the monasteries is a mark of Shakespeare’s art, but also, perhaps, of
his response to the Reformation.
“Tenderly apply…some remedies for life”: Penitence and Equivalence
in The Winter’s Tale
Clare Griffiths, Liverpool University
Sacramental auricular confession was a ubiquitous and largely uniform practice
of pre-Reformation European Christianity. Evidence suggests that the culture
and practices of Catholicism survived in England to varying degrees, even after
the Reformation when formal occasions of sacramental confession were abolished.
The symmetrical structures that characterise William Shakespeare’s The
Winter’s Tale have often been critically recognised and a governing principle
of equivalence both participates in the symmetrical forms and propel its thematic
expression. Yet critics usually ignore the integral ways in which the doctrine,
discourse and modes of confession are vital to the play’s expression of
equivalence. Examination of the mirrored figures of Camillo and Paulina allows
an understanding of their confessorial roles from which they suggest the instability
of religious significations. Focusing on Leontes’ penance enables an appreciation
of just how conventionally this is presented on the one hand, whilst, on the
other, the conventions of religious confession elide into those more rightly
identified as judicial.
Othello, the Medieval “Mumming Play” and the Extinction of Memory
Iain McClure, Birkbeck College, London
Othello’s final soliloquy sees a catastrophic fissuring of identity. Othello famously imagines himself to be both a chivalric crusader and the Oriental enemy of Christendom. This conflict is resolved through suicide. Echoes of traditional drama heighten the force of this episode. The Christmas “mumming play” was a familiar feature of medieval popular culture. It enacts combat between St. George and his variously named, but Levatine, Islamic and belligerent, enemy. This figure is demonstrably the forerunner of all Turks and Moors on the English stage, the play itself the first rehearsal of Othello’s climax
The “mumming play” was suppressed in the Reformation; it was too
intimately connected with medieval Catholic religious practices to be tolerated.
Othello and the original audience are, consequently, in an analogous situation.
Othello is destroyed by his inability to unite conflicting identities; the original
audience is reminded, by allusion to now prohibited folk traditions, of the
fracturing of society that has taken place within living memory. The Catholic
past and Protestant present are as irreconcilable as Christian and Turk; these
confusions of identity in Elizabethan England are as painful as those endured
by Othello. The hero and his audience both know the pain of extinguished memory.
