SUBVERSIVE FATHERS

The recent lack of interest in the religious significance of Shakespearean drama stems in part from a suspicion that it possessed no such significance. As R. M. Frye showed many years ago, the notion of religious literature is alien to the humanist poetics of the sixteenth century, which valued “poesie” for its ethical rather than redemptive force. The royal proclamations censoring plays that touched on matters of religion (issued under Henry, Mary, Elizabeth, and James) seem to corroborate Frye's argument: Protestant Englishmen did not seem very enthusiastic about staging the mysteries of faith.

But if it is not plausible to read Shakespeare's plays as Christian allegories, neither is it likely that the popular drama of a religiously saturated culture could, by a secular miracle, have extricated itself from the theocentric orientation informing the discourses of politics, gender, social order, and history. The issue which has been ignored is not whether Shakespeare teaches Christian doctrine – this is either a red herring or twice-cooked cabbage – but how religious ideology, understood not as a uniquely privileged “key” but as part of a cultural system, functions in these plays.