More on Shakespeare

The context of modern and postmodern Shakespeare criticism is modernistic worldview which, as Russell puts it, is built on the foundations of “unyielding despair.” Reading religion with sages rather than exoteric authorities, it can be shown that we can affirm meanings in a trans-theistic and even so-called secular context and thus our reading of Shakespeare can be quite contemporary.

We can read Shakespeare illuminating the problem of meaning of life even in secularized landscape. We find almost everywhere references to the next world, to our eternal vocation, to higher world of spirit that ultimately vivifies all great art. One may recount here major works of influential Shakespeare scholars on the particular theme of metaphysical meaning of Shakespeare that have focused on the question of immortality in Shakespeare. These include Harry Morris’s titled The Last Things in Shakespeare, Marshall’s Last Things and Last Plays: Shakespeare’s Eschatology, Martin Ling’s Shakespeare in the Light of Sacred Art and Shakespeare’s Window into the Soul: Mystical Wisdom in Shakespeare’s Characters and Shakespeare and the Afterlife by John Garrison.

Bloom’s magisterial works that have much influenced Shakespeare reception in America at least have a sustained engagement with the question of meaning and how art as such has salvific function in the work of Shakespeare.

There are large number of works that develop the spiritual aspect of Shakespeare’s work that bears on the point of salvific function of Shakespearean art underscored here. One can find almost every major critical voice from classical through Romantic to modern and postmodern period making reference to spiritual or transcendental life affirming vision in Shakespeare. One can bring evidence from Ben Jonson to Keats to Coleridge to Carlyle to Eliot to Wilson Knight to Harold Bloom all noting saving function of art for all kinds of people.

Shakespeare is said to have given us a secular religion and in an age when religion has been increasingly questioned and its space given to art, one must consider the problem of being human or what Bloom called inventing human in terms that we have largely forgotten – I mean the terms of Sacred that inform and grounds the art or vision of Shakespeare. Nutall in A New Mimesis asserts that Shakespeare, like Chaucer, contested transcendentalist view of reality. Bloom’s overall approach is to emphasize the immanent transcendence in Shakespeare and thus show that modern skeptical view of transcendence may still find him a resource in engaging with its nihilism. We need to see how his characters wrestle with the problem that is lived or felt rather than merely believed or disbelieved.

Shakespeare has been projected or read as secular scripture but it has not been asked how far does he help us fight nihilism that is contemporary. Developing Wilson Knight’s point that literature is akin to religion in function, one can read Shakespeare as an ally to the quest for immortality. Shakespeare secures salvation for the secular people who don’t know any formal universe of rituals and beliefs. This means relevance of large number of works that treat the theme of art and the sacred in traditionalist school and elsewhere. Livingstone’s key work A Traditional Theory of Literature is especially important in this context.

One can point to a number of works on and around Shakespeare and on contemporary nihilism that seek to argue for salvific function of art and one finds supreme exemplification of this theme not in abusrdists but Shakespeare as the later is grounded in intact universe of symbols as pointed out by Martin Lings, an influential name in traditionalist circles who has also been a lifetime scholar of Shakespeare. Despite all-pervasive presence of the other of life lived on a merely profane plane in Shakespeare, one finds attempt that secularize him dominating the literary-critical scene.

The whole of Shakespeare lends itself to Sacred centric reading that puts everything temporal in the shadow of eternity and wins immortality in different senses or overcomes nihilistic mood by turning to wellsprings of art as spiritual practice and this means we can treat Shakespeare’s whole work as primary source. Illuminating treatment of the problem of the tragic in major contributors to the debate on the tragic such as Simon Critchley, Desmond, Hamilton and Eagleton needs to be put in perspective from the current point of view where Shakespeare is highlighted as a central figure in Renaissance and post-Renaissance understanding of the tragic.

It would be valuable to approach Wilson Knight, Harold Bloom and Martin Lings who are representatives of three different approaches to literature and criticism as converging on emphasizing the all-pervasive presence of the otherworld in supposedly this-worldly man of Renaissance, Shakespeare. One may revisit the thesis of what has been called “integrity of Shakespeare” to further substantiate the position taken here. The brilliant work of Goddard The Meaning of Shakespeare contributes battery of insights that have a bearing on the theme under discussion.

While surveying major voices in Shakespeare criticism, it appears that Bloom and others who project more of a pagan than a Christian Shakespeare or Shakespeare for the pagan audience at least need to be approached from the perspective that gives Christian or traditional religious sources and inspiration of Shakespeare due recognition. One may take note of a variety of works dealing with religious appropriation of art with particular emphasis in Wilson Knight’s The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy. Knight’s following quote serves to introduce our vantage point particular emphasis on Shakespeare “Art is given us to redeem us. All we are in the habit of asking or expecting of it today is that it should please or teach-whereas it ought to captivate us, carry us out of ourselves, make us over into something more nearly in its own image. This transubstantiating power of art is confirmed by all its greatest masters and masterpieces.”

One strain that we find much repeated in Bloom concerns Shakespeare’s significance for facilitating the key move in overcoming nihilism – converting life into a work of art. One may build on Bloom’s masterly sketches of important characters in his full length works to argue that the questions of meaning of life and salvation are illuminated and broached by taking art seriously, by taking leave of the self that imposes itself in life’s routine humdrum, by making one receptive to experience in every hue and synthesizing the divergent discordant notes in the all embracing aesthetic vision in which alone, as Nietzsche noted, existence is justified.

Given we have bungled in secularizing badly as Alan de Bottom notes, there remains an important task of appreciating ruins of merely secular plane of living and Shakespeare here shows what it means to be human. And one could well say, human as imagio die,a human about whose glory Hamlet sings.

We need to note Greenbalt’s Hamlet in Purgatory and related works that read Shakespeare in a way that bypasses his challenge to complacent secular humanist project. If Knight and Lings are to be taken seriously, every approach that at least dilutes if not totally writes off transcendence and afterlife doctrine in understanding the work of Shakespeare as we find in much of Marxist criticism as illustrated in Eagleton needs to be scrutinized.