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Shakespeare and Orthodox Christianity - Vladimir Moss
Shakespeare and Orthodox Christianity - Vladimir Moss
The title of this article may seem paradoxical. Shakespeare was not, of
course, an Orthodox Christian; nor, as far as we know, did he ever meet an
Orthodox Christian or read an Orthodox book except for the Bible (which,
however, he clearly knew well). So however transcendent his genius, and
however vast his influence, we cannot take him as a teacher of Orthodoxy.
Nevertheless, it has been recognized by generations of good judges that many
great and important truths have been expressed by him with incomparable
beauty, depth and power. So insofar as it is good to honour truth exalted by
beauty wherever it comes from, it will be good to pay our debt of honour to
the great Bard – especially on this, the 400th anniversary of his death.
“For centuries, the staple of English drama had been the cycles of ‘miracle’
plays, dramatizations of biblical stories organized by the gilds of tradesmen in
the major towns and cities around the country. They were destroyed by the
Protestant Reformation… By the time he began writing plays himself, the old
religious drama was dead and buried…
Thus in Hamlet (1600), perhaps the most famous literary work in history,
Shakespeare found a new technique – the device of the soliloquy – to express
1
Bolt, Soul of the Age, London: Penguin, 2008, p. 18.
2
Bolt, op. cit., p. 18.
3
Bolt, op. cit., pp. 18, 19, 20.
the interior conflicts and confusions, not only of his hero, but of the new,
secularized humanity that was coming into existence.
Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida continue the themes of loyalty and betrayal,
both political and personal, that are so central to the whole of Shakespeare’s
oeuvre. We may suppose that Shakespeare was fairly conservative, even
4
Shapiro, 1599. A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, London: Faber and Faber, 2005, pp.
337-338.
monarchist in his political views. Thus in Troilus and Cressida we find the
famous speech on “degree”, i.e. hierarchy:
“Religion and politics were joined seamlessly together. The Bible said that
rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft: if the monarch was God’s representative
upon earth, then to conspire against him was to make a pact with the
instrument of darkness – in the Gunpowder trials, Jesuits such as Father
Garnet were described as male witches. Treason was regarded as more than a
political act: it was, as one modern scholar puts it, ‘a form of possession, an
action contrary to and destructive of the very order of nature itself. The forces
of the netherworld seek for their own uncreating purposes the killing of the
legitimate king in order to restore the realm of tyranny and chaos.’
“In this world, killing the king is the ultimate crime against nature. ‘O
horror, horror, horror’, says Macduff as he returns on stage having stared into
the heart of darkness, seen how the gashed stabs on the king’s body look like
a breach in nature. ‘Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee’: the
language here alludes to the famous passage in St. Paul about the
inexpressible wonders that God has prepared in the kingdom of heaven for
those who love Him. Macduff, by contrast, has momentarily entered the
kingdom of hell, where a drunken porter keeps the gate. ‘Confusion’ now
hath replication of the order of divine creation. But the art here is that of
confusion and death: ‘Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope / The Lord’s
anointed temple and stole thence / The life o’ th’ building.’ The
understanding of the play requires close attention to be paid to such words as
5
Harold Nicolson, Monarchy, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962, p. 201.
‘sacrilegious’, in which political violence is bound inextricably to articles of
religious faith. ‘Treason has done his worst,’ says Macbeth in one of those
moments when his conscience is pricked. His worst, not its: Treason is not a
concept but a living thing. The devil’s disciple, he stalks the stage of politics
and brings sleepless nights through which the guilty man shakes and sweats
with fear and terrible dreams, while the guilty woman descends into
insanity…”6
But while great art can mirror great tensions, it cannot disperse them: from
this time English society became increasingly polarized. The unity obtained
between Catholics and Protestants, loyalists and revolutionaries, through the
cult of the Virgin Queen Elizabeth had been largely a clever theatrical stunt,
but it had worked. James I, however, had a more difficult time of it, having to
unify not only Catholics and Protestants, but also English and Scots. On the
one hand, he had to keep his Catholic-at-heart English subjects, the
“recusants”, in line by spying on them, chasing up secret Jesuits and
compelling all Englishmen to swear the Oath of Allegiance and receive
communion in the Anglican church at least three times a year. On the other
hand, as a Scot, he had to persuade his radical Protestant fellow-countrymen
north of the border that he had not only a Divine right to rule, but could play
a part in the life of the official church and even appoint bishops: as he
famously put it, “no king, no bishop”.
James’ plan to unite England and Scotland into one country failed. But the
superb language of his other beloved project, the King James Version of the
Bible (1604-11), translated by a committee of Anglicans and moderate
Puritans, has had a profoundly unifying effect on the English-speaking
peoples to this day. As Bill Bryson writes, “It was the one literary production
of the age that rivaled Shakespeare’s for lasting glory – and, not incidentally,
played a more influential role in encouraging a conformity of spelling and
usage throughout Britain and its infant overseas dominions.” 7 Nevertheless,
there was no unity taking place within the political nation as the seventeenth
century progressed: the Stuart kings increasingly gravitated towards the
“right”, while their subjects on the whole became more “leftist”.
An early sign of the latter’s increasing power was the ban placed by
Puritan censors on any reference to God or Christ in the theatre, which meant
that the word “God” appears no longer in Shakespeare from Antony and
Cleopatra onwards.8 Shakespeare took the hint and “retired” a few years later
– he was not alive to witness the final closing down of the theatre by the
Puritans in 1642. And so the scene was set for the English revolution - “that
grand crisis of morals, religion and government”, as Coleridge called it 9, or, as
Charles George calls it, “the first major breech in Absolute Monarchy and the
6
Bate, op. cit., pp. 346-347.
7
Bryson, Shakespeare, London: William Collins, 2016, p. 133.
8
James Shapiro, 1606. William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear, London: Faber and Faber, 2015,
p. 252.
9
Coleridge, Table Talk, 9 November, 1833.
spawning of the first major, secular, egalitarian and liberal culture in the
modern world”.10
Great tensions produce great art: 1606, the year after the Gunpowder Plot
produced, besides Macbeth, also King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra, a trilogy
unequalled in the history of literature with the possible exception of
Dostoyevsky’s trilogy of The Idiot, The Devils and The Brothers Karamazov.
King Lear is Shakespeare’s Great Friday allegory, and the imagery reflects
the theme: Lear is racked on a wheel; wood, earth, blood and instruments of
torture abound. But the real victim is Lear’s Christ-like daughter Cordelia.
The scene of her sacrificial, all-forgiving death, and Lear’s repentance as a
result of it, is perhaps the most unbearably poignant in English literature.
As for Antony and Cleopatra, however, its imagery is full of light and fire, as
befits an allegory of the Resurrection. For this play is much more than a love
story. It is also a story about how a fallen woman sheds her corrupt past and
rises incorruptible in a kind of literary Resurrection of the body, her illicit
lover Antony becoming after his death an honourable husband in her
imagination, even a type of Christ the Bridegroom:
The spiritual struggle between good and evil, angels and demons, is well
known to Shakespeare. Thus in Sonnet 144, we read:
Again, in the midst of the great, superficially pagan and sensuous drama of
Antony and Cleopatra we are given a good spiritual tip: that our prayers are not
always answered because it would not be good for us:
whate'er I be,
Nor I, nor any man that but man is,
With nothing shall be pleased till he be eas'd
With being nothing.
Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honor’s at stake…
Similar in its imagery, but still more powerful, and hardly less theological,
is this passage from Macbeth:
I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions,
senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same
weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed
and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us
do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not
die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest,
we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his
humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be
by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute,
and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
At the same time, Shylock’s greed and vengefulness is not spared, and
mercy, the crown of Christian virtues, is portrayed with consummate grace:
The main character of the play, who controls the whole action, is Prospero.
He is a sorcerer, which is, of course, an evil occupation for a Christian. And
yet if we judge by the fruits of his actions, he is more like God Himself than a
servant of demons. In fact, he is a type both of God and of Shakespeare. And
when he has finally brought everything to a happy conclusion through a truly
divine providence, reuniting lovers, correcting injustice and putting evil
spirits in their place, he renounces everything:
I have bedimm'd
The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,
And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake and by the spurs pluck'd up
The pine and cedar: graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth
By my so potent art. But this rough magic
I here abjure, and, when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book.
Like Prospero, Shakespeare now renounces his “so potent art” and drowns
his book. What he needs now is “heavenly music” – not human talent, but
Divine Grace. For he does not over-estimate the reality or value of his
creations, whose “fabric” is “baseless”. Only God is truly creative. And so in
true humility he hands back the gift he received to the true Creator Who gave
it him. But he goes further. Not only will his art now come to an end, but the
theatre itself and the whole of present-day reality outside the theatre will
come to an end. The whole of this solid globe will disappear (Shakespeare’s
theatre was called the Globe, but the globe in the sense of the whole world is
also meant), and in retrospect will seem like mere stagecraft and stage-props
and play-acting in comparison with the incomparably greater and more
substantial new creation that we will wake up to on the other side of the
“sleep” that is death. Indeed, compared to what God has in store for us in the
next life, our present temporal life is but an “insubstantial pageant”, a dream:
Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.
“For centuries, the staple of English drama had been the cycles of ‘miracle’
plays, dramatizations of biblical stories organized by the gilds of tradesmen in
the major towns and cities around the country. They were destroyed by the
Protestant Reformation… By the time he began writing plays himself, the old
religious drama was dead and buried…
11
Bolt, Soul of the Age, London: Penguin, 2008, p. 18.
12
Bolt, op. cit., p. 18.
13
Bolt, op. cit., pp. 18, 19, 20.
Thus in Hamlet (1600), perhaps the most famous literary work in history,
Shakespeare found a new technique – the device of the soliloquy – to express
the interior conflicts and confusions, not only of his hero, but of the new,
secularized humanity that was coming into existence.
14
Shapiro, 1599. A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, London: Faber and Faber, 2005, pp.
337-338.
Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida continue the themes of loyalty and betrayal,
both political and personal, that are so central to the whole of Shakespeare’s
oeuvre. We may suppose that Shakespeare was fairly conservative, even
monarchist in his political views. Thus in Troilus and Cressida we find the
famous speech on “degree”, i.e. hierarchy:
But this was dangerous territory in Jacobean England, where the monarchy
so jealously guarded its privileges. In any case, even if he sympathized to
some extent with the rebels against the monarchists, Shakespeare was
perfectly well aware where revolution ended – in hell, where the ghost of his
father came from. Thus Hamlet exposes the false king - but at the same time
destroys both himself and all those whom he loves.
“Religion and politics were joined seamlessly together. The Bible said that
rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft: if the monarch was God’s representative
upon earth, then to conspire against him was to make a pact with the
instrument of darkness – in the Gunpowder trials, Jesuits such as Father
Garnet were described as male witches. Treason was regarded as more than a
political act: it was, as one modern scholar puts it, ‘a form of possession, an
action contrary to and destructive of the very order of nature itself. The forces
of the netherworld seek for their own uncreating purposes the killing of the
legitimate king in order to restore the realm of tyranny and chaos.’
“In this world, killing the king is the ultimate crime against nature. ‘O
horror, horror, horror’, says Macduff as he returns on stage having stared into
the heart of darkness, seen how the gashed stabs on the king’s body look like
a breach in nature. ‘Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee’: the
language here alludes to the famous passage in St. Paul about the
inexpressible wonders that God has prepared in the kingdom of heaven for
those who love Him. Macduff, by contrast, has momentarily entered the
kingdom of hell, where a drunken porter keeps the gate. ‘Confusion’ now
hath replication of the order of divine creation. But the art here is that of
confusion and death: ‘Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope / The Lord’s
15
Harold Nicolson, Monarchy, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962, p. 201.
16
Nicolson, op. cit., p. 200. (V.M.)
anointed temple and stole thence / The life o’ th’ building.’ The
understanding of the play requires close attention to be paid to such words as
‘sacrilegious’, in which political violence is bound inextricably to articles of
religious faith. ‘Treason has done his worst,’ says Macbeth in one of those
moments when his conscience is pricked. His worst, not its: Treason is not a
concept but a living thing. The devil’s disciple, he stalks the stage of politics
and brings sleepless nights through which the guilty man shakes and sweats
with fear and terrible dreams, while the guilty woman descends into
insanity…”17
But while great art can mirror great tensions, it cannot disperse them: from
this time English society became increasingly polarized. The unity obtained
between Catholics and Protestants, loyalists and revolutionaries, through the
cult of the Virgin Queen Elizabeth had been largely a clever theatrical stunt,
but it had worked. James I, however, had a more difficult time of it, having to
unify not only Catholics and Protestants, but also English and Scots. On the
one hand, he had to keep his Catholic-at-heart English subjects, the
“recusants”, in line by spying on them, chasing up secret Jesuits and
compelling all Englishmen to swear the Oath of Allegiance and receive
communion in the Anglican church at least three times a year. On the other
hand, as a Scot, he had to persuade his radical Protestant fellow-countrymen
north of the border that he had not only a Divine right to rule, but could play
a part in the life of the official church and even appoint bishops: as he
famously put it, “no king, no bishop”.
James’ plan to unite England and Scotland into one country failed; but the
superb language of his other beloved project, the King James version of the
Bible, translated by a committee of Anglicans and moderate Puritans, has had
a profoundly unifying effect on the English-speaking peoples to this day.
Nevertheless, there was no unity taking place within the political nation as
the seventeenth century progressed: the Stuart kings increasingly gravitated
towards the “right”, while their subjects on the whole became more “leftist”.
An early sign of the latter’s increasing power was the ban placed by Puritan
censors on any reference to God or Christ in the theatre, which meant that the
word “God” appears no longer in Shakespeare from Antony and Cleopatra
onwards.18 Shakespeare took the hint and “retired” a few years later – he was
not alive to witness the final closing down of the theatre by the Puritans in
1642. And so the scene was set for the English revolution - “that grand crisis
of morals, religion and government”, as Coleridge called it19, or “the first
major breech in Absolute Monarchy and the spawning of the first major,
secular, egalitarian and liberal culture in the modern world”.20
17
Bate, op. cit., pp. 346-347.
18
James Shapiro, 1606. William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear, London: Faber and Faber, 2015,
p. 252.
19
Coleridge, Table Talk, 9 November, 1833.
20
Charles George, 500 Years of Revolution: European Radicals from Hus to Lenin, Chicago, 1998,
p. viii.
*
Great tensions produce great art: 1606, the year after the Gunpowder Plot
produced, besides Macbeth, also King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra, a trilogy
unequalled in the history of literature with the possible exception of
Dostoyevsky’s trilogy of The Idiot, The Devils and The Brothers Karamazov.
King Lear is Shakespeare’s Great Friday allegory, and the imagery reflects
the theme: Lear is racked on a wheel, wood and crosses and blood abound.
But the real victim is Lear’s Christlike daughter Cordelia. The scene of her
sacrificial, all-forgiving death, and Lear’s conversion and repentance in and
through it is perhaps the most unbearably poignant in English literature.
As for Antony and Cleopatra, its imagery is full of light and fire, as befits an
allegory of the Resurrection. For this play is much more than a love story. It is
also a story about how a fallen woman sheds her corrupt past and rises
incorruptible in a kind of literary Resurrection of the body, her illicit lover
Antony becoming after is death an honourable husband in her imagination,
even a type of Christ the Bridegroom:
The spiritual struggle between good and evil, angels and demons, is well
known to Shakespeare. Thus in Sonnet 144, we read:
whate'er I be,
Nor I, nor any man that but man is,
With nothing shall be pleased till he be eas'd
With being nothing.
Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honor’s at stake…
Similar in its imagery, but still more powerful, and hardly less theological,
is this passage from Macbeth:
I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions,
senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same
weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed
and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us
do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not
die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest,
we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his
humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be
by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute,
and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
At the same time, Shylock’s greed and vengefulness is not spared, and
mercy, the crown of Christian virtues, is portrayed with consummate grace:
The main character of the play, who controls the whole action, is Prospero.
He is a sorcerer, which is, of course, an evil occupation for a Christian. And
yet if we judge by the fruits of his actions, he is more like God Himself than a
servant of demons. And when he has finally brought everything to a happy
conclusion through a truly divine providence, reuniting lovers, correcting
injustice and putting evil spirits in their place, he renounces everything:
I have bedimm'd
The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,
And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake and by the spurs pluck'd up
The pine and cedar: graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth
By my so potent art. But this rough magic
I here abjure, and, when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book.
Like Prospero, Shakespeare now renounces his “so potent art”. For he does
not over-estimate the reality or value of his creations. Only God is truly
creative; and so in true humility he hands back the gift he received to the true
Creator Who gave it him. But he goes further. Not only will his art now come
to an end, but the theatre itself and the whole of present-day reality outside
the theatre will come to an end. The whole of this solid globe will disappear
(Shakespeare’s theatre was called the Globe, but the globe in the sense of the
whole world is also meant), and in retrospect will seem like mere stagecraft
and stage-props and play-acting in comparison with the incomparably greater
and more substantial new creation on the other side of the “sleep” that is
death. Indeed, compared to what God has in store for us in the next life, our
present temporal life is but an “insubstantial pageant”, a dream:
Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.