Outbraving Luther

We have for so long made too much of Shakespeare’s so-called “happy”^[1] comedies and the supposed romantic inspiration that it is only too easy to associate with his dazzling work in the genre that has always made him so popular, overlooking that Shakespeare was also at this time profoundly engaged in a broader course of development that was driving him into progressively less and less happy regions. He had always been critical, his romantic comedies themselves incorporating at every turn the sharpest critique of the “happy” world he was indulging, and that critique he was to unfold to the point where he would finally abandon writing comedies (there would be no more comedies written after Twelfth Night).^[2] He had continued strongly over this same period with his monumental project of depicting the long, dark history of England after Richard II, and that project had involved him in a progressively deeper study of the great fall in human nature that he saw represented in the will to power. His more recent productions―especially 1 Henry IV and Henry V―had brought this study to marvellous consummation: his psychological technique especially he had brought to a point of great refinement, so that we have no trouble imagining from here the further leap to Hamlet (see Granville-Barker). Here, indeed, is the great line of continuous development on which we should be insisting, in contradistinction to the usual romantic emphasis. What primarily absorbs Shakespeare in his long, ongoing career is a deeper and deeper study of the will to power, and Claudius would be his next major subject in Hamlet. The effects of this character’s deeds he could now submit to the intense scrutiny of his own highly developed and refined consciousness as reflected in the figure of Hamlet.^[3] In respect of this enterprise, Shakespeare’s comedies might be seen as a set of brightly lit candles hanging preciously over his work-desk, which might serve as a form of consolation in the face of the great darkness around him that he had now made his principal concern, but they had become in the meantime secondary, even adventitious accomplishments.

Something of the import of Shakespeare’s development at this point may be gleaned from what is dramatized over the course of the Sonnets experienced as a totality. Right up to Hamlet, Shakespeare maintains an especially resistant and rich connection with the universally beautifying capacities of his most intimate self, the ideal personalized daemon, if you will, who appears in the form of the immortalized young man of the Sonnets’ first section. It is well known that the many sonnets to this young man break off suddenly to make room for a short sequence of intensely problematic sonnets to a dark lady, which have baffled understanding. The labyrinthine efforts made over the years to seek to identify this dark lady have spelled nothing but futility, for the reason that she is an all-embracing, universal symbol and, unlike the young man, did not have biographical existence outside the scope of Shakespeare’s mythical imagination. Standing at the other extreme from the young man who concentrates Shakespeare’s idealized spiritual self, Shakespeare’s dark lady crystallizes all the length and breadth and abysmal depths of libidinal perversity. Shakespeare imagines himself enthralled to her as to a kind of universal whore from whom he knows only ill can come, though he remains wilfully hers.^[4] What can this import but that he was fated for a certain experience from which he could not extricate himself, even if he had wished to? This dark lady is the Muse to his now tragically beleaguered self―not being at all the kind of Muse popular imagination might have wished for its most celebrated author. It is as if Shakespeare had at a certain point, coincident with his turning to Hamlet, gathered up all the forces of his best spiritual self, only to be then bewitched and condemned to experience, in some sense for himself (in his mind), the very worst of which human nature could be thought capable. The Sonnets themselves speak of an absolute negation of any hope of redeeming himself in the terms Shakespeare had elaborated up to that point. The very power of self that the young man had inspired, as an eternal entity lying “beyond accident,” has had to succumb to the greater force of experience that now overwhelms our great author, as in Sonnet 134: “Him have I lost; thou hast both him and me; / He pays the whole, and yet I am not free.”^[5]

Shakespeare’s uncanny and rather disturbing mythical account of himself as associated with this Dark Muse would soon find expression in an entirely unexpected cultural association. One could well imagine Shakespeare pursuing his studies in the will to power in the histories quite on his own, without substantial recourse to any other major thinker of the time, unless that might be Machiavelli. However, in extending his growing understanding of the will to power into areas that now included (more fully than ever before) the whole psychology and metaphysics of lust, beginning with Hamlet, Shakespeare suddenly reflects a highly elaborate deference to Luther. The extent of Shakespeare’s reference to the dramatic details of Luther’s life and thought in Hamlet has been abundantly documented.^[6] This highly elaborate correspondence points, in fact, to the crucial place Luther continued to hold in the cultural heritage of post-Reformation England. This is in spite of what has been pointed out as the decline of Lutheranism, as a devotional church, in Shakespeare’s time.^[7] Luther remained, in spite of the quick decline of Lutheranism in sixteenth-century England, the great hero of the European Reformation to which England, as a Protestant nation, belonged. He continued to maintain, in spite of the strong independence of the English Church from its outset, a pre-eminent position as the central figure who binds together at every juncture the great effort of the Reformation as recounted by John Foxe in his Acts and Monuments, the book that, after the Bible, was the most widely read in Shakespeare’s England.^[8]

Precisely what religious affiliation Shakespeare personally stood by in his life I pass by here in keeping with my focus on the strictly imaginative nature of his engagement with Luther. Shakespeare may have been a confirmed Catholic or a devout High Anglican, or he may have been a purely indifferent conformist falling in with everyone else who was expected by law to attend a service of the English Church. He could have been any one of these in any degree of serious partisanship and, still, have suddenly become profoundly engaged by the direction of Luther’s thought, to the point, as I argue here, of suffering, in his mind, a great sea-change. He could personally have remained even enthusiastically committed to a devotional practice and, still, have undergone a transformation in mind such as would leave a permanent mark on him in his deeper nature. It does not follow that he fully comprehended what was taking place in him or understood what it committed him to as a religious position. One thing is clear, however, from what I shall present: because of the remarkable transformation he does go through, Shakespeare could not have remained a tragic skeptic, though he would certainly have come fully to appreciate the place that is served in the process of human evolution by the necessary experience of tragedy.

How far Shakespeare’s actual exposure to Luther extends is impossible to say, though numerous English translations of Luther’s work already existed in Shakespeare’s day.^[9] One does not have to imagine Shakespeare working directly from any of these translations, though he may have done so; he could easily have learned all that he wanted to know of and about Luther simply from what (many) others could tell. As a prominent critic on “The Elizabethans on Luther” concludes, at some point “[t]he spirit of Luther’s religion and theology began to settle on Elizabethan England like a London fog, hauntingly unspecifiable”; “an impressionistic portrait was there, largely created by Foxe, and it was influential.” Significantly, this critic also adds that “In the very imprecision of his influence, the Luther who affected the English Reformation . . . is not to be measured by the phrases of catechisms or articles or liturgies or hymns, but rather is to be found in attitudes and aspirations” that were readily available (Clebsch 116).^[10] Among these “attitudes” was Luther’s famous and specially dramatic emphasis on “the [radical] corruption of human nature,” which would appear to have been decisive for Shakespeare, beginning with Hamlet, which dramatizes the case in association with Luther with great insistence.^[11] All of Shakespeare’s dramatizations from Hamlet onwards it would appear bear witness to a profound intellectual association with the great Protestant leader’s appalling view of human nature, amid which one thought in particular would seem to have represented Shakespeare’s obsessive preoccupation at this time, namely the view that “nothing can cure libido” (Haydn 417).^[12]

I imagine Shakespeare taking up this thought in particular (from Luther’s commentary on Genesis) with appalled abandon. He does so, however, from a point of view that requires some elucidation, since at no point does he embrace this thought as a Lutheran―except, perhaps, in a highly qualified sense, initially with Hamlet.^[13] It was especially devastating for Shakespeare to think the thought of incurable libido through precisely because he was not Lutheran and so did not have to hand the further elaborate consolations that Lutherans can claim in the face of it. He seems to have come to this thought with the idea that it must be true, or at any rate ready to think it true,^[14] precisely with that full dramatic power of thinking thoughts through that, of course, belonged only to him. If this thought, which he seemed to have grasped as the worst of thoughts, did indeed account for human nature, then he would have to take hold of that thought in all its potential reality to see what could be made of it. If one were, in the meantime, inclined to thinking well of human nature, let alone idealizing it, one would have first to find a way of disposing of this thought. And so, at a certain point, it seemed all that Shakespeare was ready to think or could think of human nature, like the figure of Hamlet himself, with whom Shakespeare first undertakes his quest.^[15]

Over the course of the long tragic period that follows from Hamlet, Shakespeare would not be able to resolve the thought that “nothing can cure libido.” Some version of this thought seemed to him also, as it did to Luther, irreducible, and, at a certain point, he seems indeed to have suffered from it without consolation, via all of the tragic figures that now come from his hand, who seem progressively to add to this thought the sense of a broader and broader range of human perversity.^[16] So we may imagine Shakespeare carrying on as a great Lutheran would, though without the consolations of grace that also awaited the Lutheran faithful. These, in any event, Shakespeare was not ready to admit into his inquiry as to what might be thought to be the innate potential of humanity. Luther’s terrible injunction, which compelled the moral imagination to peer into the very depths of human depravity, and which we may see as driving Shakespeare, must have appeared all the more grandly and distressingly terrible to the author who was to penetrate more deeply into human nature than any writer before or since: “Come, accept. Be a sinner! “Esto peccator!” And don’t do the thing by halves; sin squarely and with gusto, “pecca fortiter!” Not just playful sins. No, but real, substantial, tremendous sins!” (Haydn 418).^[17]

Luther had enjoined our becoming sinners as a meditative practice, and Shakespeare would conduct this practice after his own fashion. It should not have been difficult to imagine how depraved humankind could be with the evidence of it around everywhere, except that, for Luther, one could live superficially, or hypocritically, or unconsciously, which for him meant disastrously, because one would then only be “go[ing] the primrose way to th’ everlasting bonfire” (Macbeth 2.3.18-19).^[18] It would be necessary in that case to imagine oneself in the power of humankind’s depravity in order to remind oneself of the fact that one faced judgment in every moment—not to despair about it but, as Luther thought, to set oneself up as best one could in relation to that reality and in the hope of being saved. It is easy to see, at the same time, how Luther’s emphasis on our ineradicable depravity would absorb a large part of the humanity of that era tragically, and, from Hamlet onwards, that view, it would seem, came to absorb Shakespeare tragically.

Hamlet, as I have said, marks that extraordinary juncture in Shakespeare’s career at which, having gathered up the best of his creative forces, he now plunges into a Luther-like confrontation with the very worst of human nature. Something of those best forces are projected in the figure of Hamlet, who is described in terms that compare directly with those ascribed to the young man of the Sonnets: “Th’ expectancy and rose of the fair state, / The glass of fashion and the mould of form, / Th’observ’d of all observers . . .” (3.1.153-55). However, these forces are now overwhelmingly referred to the depravity that is supposed to dwell at the heart of human nature as its fundamental condition. This is a new direction in vision that we may see as the effect of the commanding action of the Dark Muse to whom Shakespeare has been made accountable. Hamlet’s meeting with the Ghost of his dead father is in this respect a first initiation. He learns of the profound corruptive force of lust at work not only in his mother and in his uncle Claudius but also in his father, who, because of it, has already submitted to the universal judgment that awaits everyone—and Hamlet himself (and Ophelia): “Why, she would hang on him / As if increase of appetite had grown / By what it fed on” (1.2.143-45).

Originally, Hamlet’s picture incorporates this intense sexuality of his parents into an idea of a proper love, but with the Ghost’s revelation about his condition in the afterlife, the lust separates out from that picture as its own force—“Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin” (1.5.76)—for which his father is now suffering punishment in the otherworld. What otherwise seemed like a legitimate love or “blossoming” between himself and his wife had its basis in fact in an “appetite” for which the father has been judged. For Luther, neither faithfulness nor marriage could ever ensure soundness in the sexual relationship (“Nothing can cure libido, not even marriage”^[19]), and it was not a matter of sexuality as such; sexuality was an aspect of the more universally based problem of our irreducible sensuality, of our condition of life in the flesh, which, of course, we cannot help till we die, and which we must reproduce ourselves in.^[20] Soon Hamlet is bitterly generalizing this guilty condition about everyone. If what his mother has made of herself with Claudius, or what Claudius himself represents of gross sensuality, so subverts Hamlet’s mind, it is because they have become the images of a universal human condition that Hamlet can now see also touches him, and he is now himself subverted: “for virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it . . . for the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness. This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof” (3.1.111-19).^[21]

Shakespeare’s working assumption in Hamlet was that all are steeped in lust at bottom, from the very fact that we are conceived in it (“it were better my mother had not borne me”—3.1.123-24).^[22] It is a matter in this play of an actual condition we all bear in us, even if Hamlet has much trouble thinking it. Something of this point of view is now carried over to Othello, with a similar application, if with a profounder irony. In a single passage in this new play (4.2), Shakespeare rehearses the material both of Hamlet’s confrontation with Ophelia (3.1) and his confrontation with Gertrude (3.4):

My superimposition of the vision from Hamlet onto Othello must make us pause over what Othello is actually alluding to and points to a deeper basis to his accusations. Here the thought of relations between Desdemona and Cassio functions like Hamlet’s thought of Gertrude’s relations with Claudius, to unveil a deeper awareness of human corruptibility.^[23] Thinking depravity of Desdemona, Othello is himself steeped in his own share in it, and in this way the thought of it in her profoundly taints him, as Hamlet himself was tainted. The further recourse to revenge shows Othello all the more corrupted by the degeneracy it pretends to judge. This is unlike Hamlet, who strives strenuously to keep free of that additional corruption in his own choice of revenge, though he does so only with an ambiguous success. Othello, what is more, in his further deliberate killing of Desdemona goes far beyond the kind of judgment Hamlet expresses about Ophelia and his mother, horrible as that is in itself (his revenge is finally taken on Claudius alone). For the first time in Shakespeare, in the fullest sense, we may say that a hero whom we had thought inherently and profoundly noble is exposed to us in the irreversible depravity of his action.

Othello is, at the same time, far from facing the actual depravity of which he has now become guilty. A large gap remains between the new degree of depravity Shakespeare suddenly represents here and any further self-perception in the hero that we might suppose would accompany it, which might persuade us that the depravity has in some way been dealt with. Until this moment, Shakespeare’s hero has for the most part been “merely” thinking depravity, immersed in that thinking in a way that is profoundly disturbing to everyone involved. Now he is plunged into an actual depravity with which he appears, superficially at least, to be unable to come to terms at all. Equally significant about Othello is the way in which Shakespeare for the first time foregrounds a character―in Desdemona―who comes right up to meet the thought about depravity head-on. Ophelia is given something of this function in Hamlet, but she herself falls prey psychologically to the impact this thought makes on her through Hamlet. Strangely, it is Hamlet who in an initial phase bears Desdemona’s function. He is Shakespeare’s idealized self (“That unmatch’d form and feature of blown youth”—3.1.160) who now submits to the prospect of depravity that yawns before him. Othello takes us into that abyss, relinquishing in doing so all that magnificent dignity for which he otherwise stands. In the figure of Desdemona, Shakespeare’s idealized self returns yet again, pretending to balance out this prospect from the other side, for, while her life may be defeated in the face of this prospect, not so, as she says, her love: “Unkindness may do much, / And his unkindness may defeat my life / But never taint my love (4.2.161-63). However, as we shall see, this love will itself be of no consequence in the face of the appalling violence with which Desdemona is finally done away with.

King Lear takes us one step further than Othello in the representation of actual depravity, which is now fully expressed, by now by quite a sizable assortment of characters. That representation is, also, accompanied now by a more or less conscious perception in the hero of what is involved both in the scope and import of that depravity. King Lear is, in this respect, the play of greatest Lutheran reach and impact, taking us about as far into violent depravity as we can imagine. Speaking of Lear’s daughters, Albany says: “Tigers, not daughters, what have you performed?” (4.2.41). And Lear, too, fully grasps the extent of their actions:

Of course, Lear himself partakes in this general human depravity. There is his initial rejection of Cordelia in which he is overwhelmingly hideous and through which all are plunged into the unstemmable chaos of depraved motives that ensue:

And at the end of all this, Cordelia lies horribly dead in Lear’s arms; he inherits what he has willed; and all that Cordelia might have offered of hope in the face of the general depravity is, in fact, crushed. She has become in her death herself the profoundest symbol of life defeated by the grossest elements of human nature that have prevailed.

It is the furthest point to which Shakespeare’s Dark Muse had led him. The further element of love, fitfully thrown up from the depths of Shakespeare’s idealized self, is also wiped away by the sheer force of accumulated violence and the impact this violence has when Cordelia is herself done away with. Shakespeare had been led this far in his imagination, further perhaps than Luther himself had gone; he had opened up what we must feel is the deepest hopelessness one could imagine. Ever since Johnson first declared the ending of King Lear a scene not to be “endured” (162), echoing with this comment his similar comment on the ending of Othello (200), critics have striven, in every manner and form, to circumvent the impression of all-leveling hopelessness on which the Lear-ending especially appears to insist. Only Nicholas Brooke in our time has sought strenuously to keep us to the way Shakespeare insists on our seeing it: “We are driven to see, not only the very human pain of Lear’s end with Cordelia in his arms, but also the absolute negation of all forms of hope . . . Her death kills all life” (86, 84).

Once again, love had been brought to bear on the tragic scene. We had been through the moment of Lear’s recovery, unquestionably the episode in Shakespeare in which there is the greatest promise of amendment and hopeful resolution, and we had been engrossed in the idea that love, Cordelia’s love, had come through to redeem. But we are then forced to give up that idea at the very point where we thought ourselves secure in it. We do not merely give it up; it is wiped out as an effective reality and as a power for dealing with the world’s evil. That evil has prevailed monumentally, and it has denied all possible further life to that love. And that is all that Lear sees. There is nothing for him but his love of her, but now she is dead as earth, and so horribly dead, unendurably so.

As for Desdemona, the appalling horror of her death overwhelms the scene. I speak here also of the way we are drawn into the excruciating physical horror of her death. We live at the end only with the terrible finality of that outcome, and any further expression of Othello’s love for her, which returns to him afterwards, appears to us the more horrible as it is now rendered null. We feel the same about her commendations to him when she dies. They have been rendered null, can no longer have any application to him, no matter how hard we want to believe it. This effect of horror in Othello is intensified still further, one might almost say perfected, in Lear in the death of Cordelia, which is insistently horrible in its own overwhelming way. This is because we don’t anticipate that death, even if we know it has been ordered. We forget about Edmund’s order because we cannot believe it will happen, and we also cannot believe it when it has happened. When Lear walks onto the stage at the end with Cordelia dead in his arms, we are utterly overwhelmed, the insistent evidence of her strangulated body making an impact that is especially unendurable and incomprehensible, leaving us with no possible way of mitigating the event.

This is not to deny that, in the case of Hamlet, Othello, and Lear, love continues, in its various forms, right up to the end, but there is no way through with it, no possibility with it of overturning evil or of redeeming it. Love simply ends there, tragically. And that is the experience we should come away with after watching these plays. We come away from these plays with the one question Shakespeare finally wanted to leave us with: if evil is our lot, what then of good? where does it find itself finally in relation to evil? Or is all lost? From here, Luther felt he had only one way to go, upwards through justification by faith alone. Shakespeare will forge his own way through the evil. We might see it as his extraordinary destiny: taking on the evil in order somehow to turn it into good. But if Shakespeare finally does see his way through, it is only by imagining that what there is of human good will be sacrificed to evil. The power to undo evil can only lie through that experience. Goodness cannot just stand over and against the evil. It must somehow have gotten beyond it by assimilating it, and this it does by being sacrificed to it.

By no obvious route at all, then, does Shakespeare imagine his way beyond this point of utter hopelessness. He had done all that Luther could expect in the way of an imagination of human depravity and its devastating consequences. He had also come to that point entirely on the strength of his own thinking, without further recourse to any faith that might either console him or allow him, by any mechanism of compensation, to come away from the spectacle of human depravity he had opened up. He had been brought to this by his Dark Muse and her commanding action which had suddenly momentously involved him in the will to see the Lutheran indictment of human nature through, to see what could be made of it. Could Shakespeare now show that he could plumb further than Luther ever supposed a human imagination could go? Could there be anything else or anything more than what Shakespeare himself was now maintaining about the irreclaimable hopelessness of human nature? He had been overwhelmed himself, as could only be the case, with the horrid deaths of Desdemona and Cordelia. From there, for many months it would appear, he lived with this form of the death of the beloved as a symbol of the extreme effect of human depravity—until, with Pericles, the light begins, ever so faintly at first, to shine through again, though not without a drastic re-living, a necessary re-surfacing, of the quintessential tragedy, as this takes shape, at first, in the death of Thaisa. We have the rest of Shakespeare’s progression from here by way of symbolical allegory. Remaining at the center of that progression is the experience of the death of the beloved that continually accompanies Shakespeare through the whole series of events that are now dramatized, right through to the end of The Tempest. That death Shakespeare can never leave sight of again, for it represents the outcome of human tragedy itself. Without the continued imagination of it, there could no longer be for him any further genuine progression. Hence, beyond the death of Thaisa in Pericles, there is the death of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale and the (much overlooked) death of Prospero’s wife, each of which symbolizes the fundamental experience of human tragedy that continues—that Shakespeare could no longer let go of.

This was a point of no return for him, beyond even where Luther’s injunction had directed his followers to go, and we now attend on what Shakespeare could make of himself from here. One has only to think of what the death of Thaisa in Pericles, the death of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, or the death of Prospero’s wife in The Tempest continue to represent in the way of an experience of human anguish. That experience of human tragedy continues in Shakespeare’s mind, and, when the light finally does break in on him again, it does so strictly within the terms of this experience. It breaks in on him for the first time when Thaisa recovers, or rather is recovered, from death—with all that that symbolically implies of a re-emergence for Shakespeare. There is an experience of being supported again from being through tragedy. We have with Pericles, in fact, moved far beyond an art that holds the mirror up to nature, where evil and death prevail. We are on firm ground with the action of Pericles when we see it rather as mirroring allegorically what evil and death have finally made and are still making of themselves in Shakespeare’s own mind. This would seem to be already evident from the obituary Pericles pronounces over Thaisa, who is dead before we have known her:

“Lying with simple shells” reflects back to us a kind of assimilation of a loved one’s death that is inconceivable to one who has just been through the tragedy. Already we are alerted to the fact that Pericles cannot be viewed as a character who is literally undergoing tragedy here, any more than we have a conception of Thaisa herself as a character. I do not want to claim that the literal death of the beloved is not still Shakespeare’s focus, but we are on firm ground with Pericles’ speech only when we see it as representing the effect that the death of the beloved has had over time. That death percolates down, as it were, to the bottom of the mind (represented here as the sea-floor) to become there the simple event it could never have been when it actually happened. It is from that point in the mind—Shakespeare’s own—that Thaisa is then “returned” from death, by no means as a literal personage. Approached in this way, Pericles is nothing in himself. He is everything when seen as echoing in himself the paradigmatic tragic experience that continues to reverberate in Shakespeare’s mind in the extreme and final form to which it had come. Addressing himself to the death that has occurred, Pericles remarks of his loved one, with a truth that fits the case literally: “th’ unfriendly elements / Forgot thee utterly” (3.1.57-58). Earlier he had said: “I do not fear the flaw; / It hath done to me the worst” (3.1.39-40). Awareness of the extremity of evil undergone is also reflected in the words Pericles pronounces over the “child” that is born with, and of, destruction and death: “For a more blusterous birth had never babe; . . . / Thou art the rudeliest welcome to this world / That e’er was prince’s child” (3.1.28-31). Focus is on the death that ends all life, or all corresponding attachments to life. It cannot, therefore, appear how any new or ongoing life can contain anything within itself to compensate for the destruction: “Even at the first thy loss is more than can / Thy portage quit” (3.1.35-36).

And yet, already a new life has appeared, though Pericles does not himself as yet bear any consciousness of this. That he does not testifies to the lingering power of the tragic experience in Shakespeare’s mind, though the circumstances in which Pericles finds himself, with the birth of his daughter, already imply an evolution out of that experience.

Fourteen years go by, a symbolic period of spiritual gestation, before re-integration can begin, during which time the human psyche would seem to be adapting to the tragedy still further, a time in which there is a further, one might say a complete, absorption of the tragedy. Finally the support comes through again. A daughter had sprung in the meantime between the hero and his beloved. Who is this daughter, who appears to us in time, but the image of Pericles’ own suffering—Shakespeare’s own suffering—somehow bearing fruit as a power that now lifts the tragic psyche beyond itself? She is the image of its suffering, but now made good: “she speaks, / My lord, that, may be, hath endur’d a grief / Might equal yours, if both were justly weigh’d” (5.1.87-89). How else shall we characterize this daughter but as the enduring self become a higher self through which transcendence has come? The tragic self in Pericles, which in enduring transcends itself, has made itself worthy of uniting with a now higher aspect of itself in Marina. At this stage of the “progress,” the suffering ego has recognized, and is uniting with, a higher aspect in itself that is itself perfectly sensitive to suffering yet insusceptible to despair. Pericles himself notes of Marina: “yet thou dost look / Like Patience gazing on kings’ graves, and smiling / Extremity out of act . . .” (5.1.138-40). What union with a higher power of self now opens up for Shakespeare is the prospect of a new “life” in which the self can be fully reconciled to tragedy. Accordingly, Shakespeare’s symbol of an extreme, destructive evil (the sea) converts in this context into the symbol of new joy:

Only after the union of elements within the self (at the meeting between Pericles and Marina) does the inspirational dream come to Pericles that exhorts him to visit Diana’s temple, a dream in which the Goddess Herself appears to him. At this temple, he is to rehearse the tragic story he has been through, as if to say that that has been the only way to come to this point and is to continue to be borne in mind. Only thus is Pericles further re-united with his beloved “Thaisa,” conjoined in a now wholly new bond. Thaisa is herself an other-than-literal personage. She is not the loved one who has been lost to death but, rather, allegorically, all that was lost as a consequence of that death: a “lost connection to the world” following on “lost faith” in all systems of life. A new connection and a new faith are what are now bestowed upon the self, the consequence of acts of preservation as well as of guidance (as in the case of the vision of Diana) that open out on still other mysteries that involved Shakespeare at this time, for the allegorical implications of the action in these last plays are extensive, indeed vast.

The self’s re-connection to the world, in faith and in love as well as to the senses, represents at this stage an altogether different experience from what connection to the world was before. The whole experience takes place now on a higher plane. Shakespeare’s experience in this regard is only partially reflected to us in that additional, ethereal soul-quality in the verse that every commentator on these last plays recognizes is new and is first sighted in this play. We understand Shakespeare’s experience primarily through an allegorical structure that he has built into the qualitative representation, from which we gather the greater development or progress that now engages him far beyond the confines of this (or any other) single play. It is a long process by which Shakespeare is brought back to himself. The whole range of tragic experience would have to be distributed over all of these last plays in order for that experience to be seen properly and dealt with. That effort involves Shakespeare in a production over years. Thus Pericles re-visits the effects of tragedy from the point of view of the self’s innocence of it, to the extent that the self reserves some innocence of it: The Winter’s Tale from the point of view of an almost complete guiltiness. Thus do these plays, through the fates of his tragic characters, combine to represent Shakespeare’s whole perception of how tragedy has impacted on him. Beyond these profound analytical ventures back into the heart of tragic experience, Shakespeare gives us, finally, the fully bodied drama of The Tempest. In this play, Shakespeare brings the many aspects of the resolution of tragedy to bear on the life of Prospero. It is thus Prospero who finally embodies the complete integration in mind and soul that Shakespeare ultimately inherits from the unique completeness of his progression through tragedy.

With The Winter’s Tale, we enter yet another stage of re-integration for Shakespeare, the essential tragedy being re-created again here, through the symbolic death of Hermione, but from the point of view of a predominating guilt. A correspondingly deeper suffering is thus enacted in Leontes, which calls for a complete penance, beyond endurance, as befits reckoning with guilt at this depth. As in Pericles, tragedy is again re-lived but with the birth of a daughter built into it. There is not the death of the beloved alone. Then follows the same reunion of the tragic self/Leontes with its higher aspect/Perdita and from this the still grander reunion with the beloved/Hermione that completes all. Between Pericles and the Winter’s Tale, the self/Shakespeare’s own is thus restored from tragedy—by the end of The Winter’s Tale to a complete integrity again, beyond all imagination of an incriminating guilt—all subjection to the inner dimension of tragedy as Shakespeare had lived this through having been, by then, effectively banished.

As Shakespeare is in progression, more and more of the evolutionary pattern is filled out, with every opportunity given along the way. Thus, there is less in The Winter’s Tale of the drama of reunion between the tragic and higher selves/Leontes and Perdita, because the drama of reunion in those terms has already been given in Pericles. We assume it and fill it out further for ourselves in this second stage. In The Winter’s Tale, the focus is more on the reunion with the beloved/mother/Hermione, which is only imperfectly given in Pericles. This is not to downplay Perdita’s own stupendous role, allegorically endowed as she is with a depth of self-renewing power that can remove guilt—a form of power, as it were, to the second degree; but it would overstretch the limits of this essay to go into this further. There is also in The Winter’s Tale more focus on the relationship to the higher power/Perdita of a suitor to that power/Florizel, a relationship that had yet to find any real development in Pericles in the relationship between Marina and Lysimachus. A more evolved culture is in the development between the daughter and this suitor, which suggests a kind of passing on of the inheritance from the tragic past, as if one might now come into the higher development directly, beyond the error-ridden ways of that past—a form of cultural life projected for the future. But there is the further danger that what is given as an immediate opportunity in the young lovers will founder without the connection in consciousness back to the tragic humanity through whose suffering it was brought into being. Hence Camillo’s role in this play, who dissuades the lovers from simply going their own way, directing them back towards Leontes and alerting Polixenes about it so that he follows after them. Camillo in this way brings the young couple back into the circuit of the whole human destiny of which they are the crowning expression or else nothing at all.

In light of what has been said, we will not be surprised to find The Tempest extending the representation of Shakespeare’s experience still further. Here, however, we have a momentous “return” to the literal level and well-rounded characterization of the tragedies, reflected in a dramatic foregrounding of the principal characters, Prospero and Miranda.^[24] Here, again, there is the case of a beloved “wife” who is lost to death, coinciding with the birth of a “daughter.” Miranda, we are told, is “not / Out three years old” (1.2.40-41) when she and Prospero are put out to sea. The mother is, thus, only recently dead, and not so long before that we cannot see her death as coinciding with Prospero’s renunciation of state and devotion to study or, for that matter, with Miranda’s birth. The whole action is an integrated one. Prospero’s decision to “neglect” all “worldly ends, all dedicated / To closeness and the bettering of my mind” (1.2.89-90) may be directly referred to Shakespeare’s own commitment since the “death” of a loved one became for him, his one, essential tragic preoccupation.

Prospero incurs further consequences for his commitment to his experience, being, along with Miranda, ambushed and driven out to “sea” in what presents itself as yet another marvelous transfiguration of the essential tragic sorrow:

It is the whole sorrow that comes to expression once again here, the death of a loved one being at the center of it. But the supporting power is, likewise, bestowed, by Miranda as higher power, according to the pattern already described. Unlike in the case of Pericles and that of Leontes, this power (Miranda) remains with Prospero from the first, is never separated from him. We may indeed take it as an implicit understanding that the whole evolution Shakespeare has reflected to us in these plays is here triumphantly embodied in Prospero and Miranda, as literal inheritors of that evolution (in time also along with Ferdinand who works his own way into this evolution). Among other reasons, that we have returned to the literal level in this play will explain why in this instance Prospero’s wife is not restored, for there can be no question of restoration at this level.

To recapitulate: as we have seen, it is with Pericles that a transcendent light first appears out of the tragic darkness in Shakespeare’s mind, as out of that “sea” of ultimate tragedy by which Shakespeare had been claimed, there emerges once again that whole basis of connection to life that was thought lost for good. Desdemona had gone down, as had Cordelia, and Shakespeare’s tragic heroes with them. No further life could be supposed in those terms. Shakespeare would not in the least deny the ultimate power of tragedy: for him, human tragedy finally focuses in the extremest form of violent death of the loved one. With that form of death, the love that, out of Shakespeare’s idealized self, goes out to meet tragedy is also wiped out. But beyond the extinction of Shakespeare’s self in these terms lies the enduring power of Shakespeare’s Muse, who has led him this far and who now transmutes in and through the death of the loved one. Structurally, the new developments are conveyed through the fact that the loved one (Thaisa in Pericles; Hermione in The Winter’s Tale) now “returns” from death, having in some sense then “borne” that death, while leaving behind her in her sacrificial “bearing” a new redeeming power in the form of her “daughter” (Marina in Pericles; Perdita in The Winter’s Tale). Pericles focuses around himself the impact human tragedy has made on Shakespeare in respect of the self’s innocence of it―given the way it develops at some level without regard to the self’s responsibility for it. It would take Shakespeare another two years to find a way of reconciling himself to his tragic imagination also in respect of all tragic guilt he had imagined being incurred from the impact human perversity could have―this in The Winter’s Tale. Between these two plays we read, allegorically, the sum total of tragic consequence as Shakespeare had imagined this over the course of his entire tragic period. He is, by the time of the ending of The Winter’s Tale, however, fully restored by the power of his own Muse, who has borne, as “wife” and “mother,” all of that tragedy with him, having bestowed upon him the power of an enduring self through which he has redeemed himself, with which we associate the “daughterly” force of Marina (in Pericles) and Perdita (in The Winter’s Tale).

The Tempest itself builds on the massive structure and content of the psychological experience I have just described, referring us to Shakespeare now more openly and fully than before. In the death of Prospero’s wife, we encounter once again the essential form of death as borne over the course of Shakespeare’s tragic period by Shakespeare’s Muse. In Prospero’s loss, we re-live the essential tragic burden Shakespeare has himself assumed over this long period. By then, however, the force of enduring self Shakespeare’s Muse has bestowed upon him has evolved, in the figure of Miranda, to the point of complete development―Miranda taking the power brought forth by Marina in a first stage and by Perdita in a second stage to the point of a third and final, fully formed achievement. She is the consummation of the self’s power to renew itself, which can, at this stage, begin to renew the world at large. How is that consummation of self-renewing power achieved? By the final “sacrifice,” Shakespeare’s Muse now performs, which seems to have taken the form of her actual “death” in his life. In Pericles and The Winter’s Tale both, wife and mother are returned from death―i.e., Shakespeare’s Muse continues to support him and to bear him up in his struggle to recover. In The Tempest, wife and mother are not returned―i.e., his Muse has passed beyond him. She has left him to fare for himself, though with the ultimate gift of self-renewing power as reflected in the figure of Miranda, who has been left behind. That ultimate gift Shakespeare’s Muse brings about by her own final “death” in his life. This further action of “sacrifice” corresponds to the difference between Shakespeare bearing the forces of self-recovery as a principle of integration in his mind and his finally bearing that integration in his very self as the possession of his own individual person. The difference may be summed up as a difference between the power of his creative thought and such thought becoming an actuating power in the world. It is the latter development that is reflected back to us in the figure and actions of Prospero, who now works out of a consummate power of self-renewal. Shakespeare’s experience of subjection to the inner dimension of tragedy has, by now, been left far behind (thus one notes “the unexampled priority of the catastrophic action” [Berryman 78] in this play^[25]). On the other hand, not everyone in the outside world will be amenable to the ongoing process of redemption, and some “thing of darkness” remains, in the constitution of human nature, for which Shakespeare feels he must continue to make himself responsible (“this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine”—The Tempest 5.1.276-77).

Whoever his Muse may have been, we must suppose that she had everything to do with driving Shakespeare along the whole strenuous route that I have traced—initially, at least, without either his will or his desire in the matter. From this creative destiny, we are finally compelled to deduce purposes that are generally unknown today, inasmuch as a higher evolution in the self is claimed on the basis of the fullest possible (Luther-like) engagement with the worst forces of our human nature. The challenge was laid down to Shakespeare to imagine the very worst of human nature, ultimately purely on behalf of our humanity and in an entirely experiential way. Thus “Know thyself” acquires, as the behest to Shakespeare of his Muse, the most terrible of implications. That the journey was worthwhile, if appallingly arduous, The Tempest will finally bear witness. Profoundly fitting it is that, when Prospero and Miranda finally do come forward, in their very first gesture they should be looking out towards that whole destructive “sea” of ultimate tragedy they themselves have successfully braved. We imagine Miranda, as she stands looking out with Prospero, literally gathered to his bosom, for in one function she stands there as the innermost power of his very self, the very fruit of the whole journey Shakespeare has taken. Shakespeare could not have imagined anything greater or imagined her by any other route than the one he was compelled to take, and she has become, via the self-sacrificing action of the Muse in which he has shared, the greatest gift he could bequeath to humankind.^[26]

Works Cited

Baker, Derek, ed. Reform and Reformation: England and the Continent c1500-c1750. Studies in Church History: Subsidia 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Berryman, John. “Shakespeare’s Last Word.” In The Freedom of the Poet. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1976.

Bloom, Edward A., ed. Shakespeare: 1564-1964. Providence: Brown University Press, 1964.

Brooke, Nicholas. “The Ending of King Lear.” In Shakespeare: 1564-1964. Ed. Edward A. Bloom. Providence: Brown University Press, 1964.

Clebsch, William A. “The Elizabethans on Luther.” In Interpreters of Luther: Essays in Honor of Wilhelm Pauck. Ed. Jaroslav Pelikan. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1968. 97-120.

Dau, W. T. A. Luther Examined and Re-examined. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1917.

Febvre, Lucien. Martin Luther: A Destiny. Trans. Roberts Tapley. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1929.

Foxe, John. The Acts and Monuments . . . Ed. George Townsend. 8 vols. New York: AMS Press, 1965.

———. Actes and Monumentes . . . , the fifth time newly imprinted. Anno 1596. At London Printed by Peter Short, dwelling on Breadstreete hill at the signe of the Starre, by the assigne of R. Day.

Granville-Barker, Harley. “From Henry V to Hamlet.” British Academy Annual Shakespeare Lecture, London, 1925.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004.

Hall, Basil. “The Early Rise and Gradual Decline of Lutheranism in England (1520-1600).” In Reform and Reformation: England and the Continent c1500-c1750. Ed. Derek Baker. Studies in Church History: Subsidia 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Johnson, Samuel. Johnson on Shakespeare [1908]. Ed. Walter Raleigh. London: Oxford University Press, 1959.

Luther, Martin. Luther’s Works. Ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut Lehmann. 55 vols. St. Louis and Philadelphia: Concordia Publishing and Fortress Press, 1958-1986.

Milward, Peter. Shakespeare’s Religious Background. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1973.

Murry, John Middleton.“Towards a Synthesis.” In Defending Romanticism. Ed. Malcolm Woodfield. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1989.

O’Meara, John. On Luther, “Measure for Measure,” Good and Evil in Shakespeare, Comedy, and the Evolution of Consciousness: A Reply to Tony Gash. Ottawa: HC Publications, 2009.

Pelikan, Jaroslav, ed. Interpreters of Luther: Essays in Honor of Wilhelm Pauck. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1968.

Proudfoot, Richard, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan, eds. The Complete Works. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Thomson Learning, 2006.

Raleigh, Walter, ed. Johnson on Shakespeare. London: Oxford University Press, 1959.

Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works. Ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Thomson Learning, 2006.

Waddington, Raymond. “Lutheran Hamlet.” English Language Notes 27.2 (1989): 27-42.

Wilson, J. Dover. Shakespeare’s Happy Comedies. London: Faber and Faber, 1962.

Woodfield, Malcolm, ed. Defending Romanticism. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1989.

Notes

My allusion here is to Dover Wilson.

This statement is technically accurate. However, the notion of comedies has been stretched to include the so-called “problem comedies,” which I see rather as serious problem plays with comedy also problematically thrown in, much as in the case of Shakespeare’s late “tragicomedies,” though these plays are obviously conceived as contending with tragic problems in a final spirit of triumph. The controversies will continue. For my own position, see my comments on these matters in On Luther.

I speak here of “consciousness” not in a narrow biographical sense that would evoke Shakespeare as a man in his outward, personal circumstances but rather in a technical artistic sense involving the development of his mind at the “mythical” level I invoke in my epigraph from Sen Gupta. I disclaim any attempt to relate this development more directly to Shakespeare’s personal life, as many have been inclined to do. Sen Gupta is himself consistently ironic about those biographical efforts, alluding to Hamlet as “[Shakespeare’s] greatest character in whom he had supposedly put most of himself” (20).

Below is a sampling of these Sonnets:

Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious,

Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine? . . .

The sea, all water, yet receives rain still,

And in abundance addeth to his store;

So thou, being rich in Will, add to thy Will

One will of mine, to make thy large Will more . . . (Sonnet 135)

Why should my heart think that a several plot

Which my heart knows the wide world’s common place?

Or mine eyes, seeing this, say this is not,

To put the fair truth upon so foul a face?

In things right true my heart and eyes have erred,

And to this false plague are they now transferred. (Sonnet 137)

My love is as a fever, longing still

For that which longer nurseth the disease,

Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,

Th’ uncertain sickly appetite to please: . . .

My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,

At random from the truth vainly expressed:

For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,

Who art as back as hell, as dark as night. (Sonnet 147)

Quotations from Shakespeare follow The Arden Shakespeare, ed. Proudfoot et al.

Waddington considers a full range of association between Hamlet and the details of Luther’s life and thought, arguing that the play builds on allusions to 1) Luther’s physical appearance (in black, on the basis of contemporary woodcuts and engravings of scenes at the Diet of Worms), 2) Luther’s pronounced melancholia, depressive tendencies, fits of madness, and contempt of the world, and 3) Luther’s radical critique of marriage (given Luther’s views on the devious power of human lust). Waddington argues also for allusions to the details of Luther’s abduction by the Elector of Saxony, which saved him from capture and almost certain death at the hands of the papal forces (this Waddington parallels with Hamlet’s abduction by the pirates, who likewise act as “thieves of mercy”). Waddington allows for intentional allusions to Luther’s Wittenberg and his role at the Diet of Worms, familiarity with Luther’s position about the real Presence in the Lord’s Supper, knowledge of the Edict that denounced Luther for his madness and possession by the devil, and knowledge of Luther’s language focused on corruption and the vermin-like existence he attributed to priests in his treatise “To the Christian Nobility.” In spite of this wealth of detail, Waddington’s purpose is not to “suggest any particularly recondite knowledge of Luther’s life and writings, both of which were reasonably accessible to an Englishman of Shakespeare’s time” (32). Waddington speaks directly of Luther as “a prototype in creating Hamlet” (35), and he even sees Hamlet at one point as casting himself as Luther (28).

The classic account of this situation is by Hall. Clebsch quotes Carl Meyer’s statement: “Lutheranism did not emerge during the Elizabethan Religious Settlement as it did during Henry’s break with Rome” (106). However, Clebsch adds that “That trend diminishes from a very meager base,” and “Nobody would doubt that Luther’s religious and theological ideas were available and, in varying degrees, understood wherever Christendom underwent Reformation during the sixteenth century” (106).

See Clebsch (109) for his own elaboration of this key point about Luther’s central place in Foxe’s epic masterpiece.

See the full list provided by Clebsch (100-101). Among these, most notably, was the anonymous translation of Luther’s Commentaries on Galatians. Of this translation, put out in 1575, Clebsch notes that it was “The most important translation known in Elizabethan England” (111) and, indeed, “of all Luther’s theological writings . . . the favorite of English readers down the centuries” (113). Ironically, in light of my presentation in this essay, Luther was viewed, especially in relation to this Commentary, as offering comfort as no one before him had (114)—Christ’s action would save us, and this in spite of Luther’s immoveable position about man’s ineradicable depravity. Witness Luther’s view, in this Commentary, that “my sins are so grave, so real, so great, so infinite, so horrible, and so invincible that my righteousness does me no good” and that “man . . . sees that he is such a great sinner that he cannot find any means to be delivered from his sin by his own strength, effort, or works” (Luther, Vol. 26, 36, 131). I say “ironically” only because Shakespeare did not take the direction in comfort but the direction in despair. It was Yeats who said that a man could show a reckless courage in entering the abyss of himself.

10.

For Clebsch’s final assessment in this regard, see the end part of note 7. See also Waddington’s final assessment in the end part of note 6.

11.

See Milward: “There is surely something Lutheran in [Hamlet’s] brooding emphasis on the [radical] corruption of human nature” (161). Waddington himself emphasizes, in the context of this despairing view, “Hamlet’s bleakly anti-spiritual mood” (29), and where the question of the essential spiritual inconsequence of marriage is broached, which in Luther’s view could serve no better than to keep the libidinal impulse in check, “[Hamlet’s] mind plays on the issues raised by Luther” (30).

12.

This is Haydn’s eloquent translation; in Pelikan, we read: “lust alone can be cured by no remedy” (Luther, Vol. 1, 168).

13.

Luther’s answer to ineradicable corruption was “justification by faith alone,” and one could make a case of Hamlet’s striving after an “otherworldly” validation for revenge as an expression of “justification by faith.” In Otherworldly Hamlet, I elaborate at length on the comparison with Luther’s extensive range of thought, citing a full degree of structural correspondence (see especially my “Preface on Hamlet and Luther”). However, the implied comparison with Luther’s concept of justification in Shakespeare’s play I present as ultimately ironic. Waddington, for his part, argues the opposite: that Hamlet does reach Lutheran justification in the end (38-39). However, I found Waddington’s presentation of this view forced and unconvincing: it is meant to complete his notion of a “Lutheran Hamlet,” although Hamlet’s association with Luther could in the end only be partial (Shakespeare not being either Luther or Lutheran) (see my last chapter “On Death” in Otherworldly).

14.

A dramatic contrast suggests itself here with Maritain’s appalled rejection of Luther’s thought.

15.

Many critics have seen in Shakespeare’s intellectual transformation, especially from Hamlet onwards, the sign of some tumultuous happenings in his own life: “Hamlet marks a sufficient enough break in Shakespeare’s career as to suggest some more personal cause”; a “linguistic explosion seems to come . . . from some shock or series of shocks to his whole life” (Greenblatt 307, 308), and “Suddenly, his whole experience of life is relevant . . . indeed Hamlet is often felt to be an all-accommodating, ‘personal’ expression of its author” (Honan 280). Here we need to remind ourselves that, in spite of these hopes in a biographically elaborated situation, “there is nothing in the recorded facts to show that Shakespeare suffered from any shocks in life that might account for the dominant mood of gloom and dejection we find in the tragedies” (Sen Gupta 27). The one great stumbling block in this biographical venture has always been the evidence in Shakespeare’s life of full adjustedness, which would seem to justify a rather different emphasis, on what has been called “Shakespeare’s double nature” (Sen Gupta 35). Thus, on the one hand, one can speak of “his observant, circumspect uprightness which won him success and prosperity” and, on the other, “his searching conscience which would always look inward” (Sen Gupta 35). These would appear to have been distinguished and divided worlds. Lee is duly quoted: that it is not for us “to underestimate and misapprehend the resistless might of his creative genius” (Sen Gupta 26). From the point of view of this essay, this genius of Shakespeare’s would drive him, as I also think, to “such depths in us that often a sensitive being can hardly bear to look at what is passing on the stage” (Rowse 185). In fact, he “relies . . . on the illuminations of extreme suffering” (Honan 311, emphasis added) of a kind that only his insistent imagination could bring into focus for us.

16.

A creative examination that extends over eight years or so. It deepens further with Macbeth and then broadens out with Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens.

17.

Haydn was here literally quoting, through his translator, Febvre’s free re-rendering of Luther’s actual text from the Letter of 1 August 1521, to Philip Melanchthon, where we read: “you must bear a true and not a fictitious sin . . . Be a sinner and sin boldly . . . ” (Luther, Vol. 48, 281-82). Luther’s words, wrenched from the context of his thought, were seized upon by many (including Maritain) as implying an appalling exhortation to sin. However, familiarity with the whole context of Luther’s thought will show that it was not his idea that people should make themselves into sinners but that they should see that they already were such sinners. In one of his many qualifying comments to that effect, Luther says, for example, in his Commentary on Romans, that “the way in which a man must spiritually become a sinner . . . is not a natural way. For that way every man does not become a sinner but is one” (Luther, Vol. 25, 217). One had to become conscious of being, ineradicably, a sinner in order to orient oneself the better towards Christ’s indispensable saving grace. Otherwise, one was naturally condemned, either knowingly or without knowing it. Nevertheless, I have, in spite of the distortion of Luther involved, chosen to work from Haydn’s transcription of Febvre because his worked-up re-rendering of Luther represents how I believe Luther’s thought was mediated to Shakespeare. In the hyped-up Catholic work-over of Luther (such as we also get in Maritain) or something like it that came across to Shakespeare, we find a more accurate reflection of what engaged his imagination, but for reasons quite other than those that motivated Febvre (or Maritain). Haydn claimed that “behind [Luther’s statement]—and here in conjunction with Calvin—lay [a] premise held in common with the animalists—that of man’s badness. A premise held only with a theological reservation, but one pointing in the same direction, nevertheless” (418). In contrast with both the animalists and the Catholic animus that falsely associated Luther directly with them, Shakespeare chose to think the badness through, not just because he saw it as a real aspect of our existence but because this badness was, in the end, an offense and a burden to his idealizing vision of human nature. There could not be a more faithful expression of Shakespeare’s purposes in this regard than what he has us willfully contemplating along with Edgar in his role as Poor Tom in the passage I quote in the body of my text. For an eloquent defense against the deliberate Catholic mis-reading of Luther’s advice to Melanchthon, see Dau’s explanation of what that advice was about (125ff).

18.

Cf. Hamlet: the “primrose path” (1.3.50)—consider “the blossoms of my sin” (1.5.76)—to “sulph’rous and tormenting flames” (1.5.3).

19.

Haydn’s version; in Pelikan: “lust alone can be cured by no remedy, not even by marriage” (Luther, Vol. 1, 168).

20.

Thus “the blossoms of my sin” is more than a simple metaphor, as if Hamlet’s father were merely indicating that his sin was at the time of his death at its most developed and untreated point. Rather are we drawn here into the disturbing view that nature itself, even in its most positive aspect, constitutes sub specie aeternitatis a condition of sin. “As long as we are here [in this world],” Luther says, “we have to sin” (Luther, Vol. 48, 282). Elsewhere, the Ghost speaks more accurately of “foul crimes done in [his] days of nature” (1.5.12). Much has been made, moreover, especially more recently (by Greenblatt 320-21), of the fact that the Ghost would have been spared judgment if he had taken any or all of the intercessionary sacraments offered by the Catholic Church. But in his account of how he might have been saved by some proper religious intercession, the Ghost is catching at straws. He wishes he could have reversed or at least attenuated his condition and so speaks in the same breath wishfully of his “imperfections” (1.5.79); these the intercessionary sacraments received might have compensated for, but they are obviously not the extent of implication in sin that has consigned the Ghost to “sulph’rous and tormenting flames” (1.5.3). Could a simple reception of the sacraments just before he died have served to wash away such “foul crimes” accumulating from a lifetime lived in nature? More of the Lutheran perspective of this play obtrudes itself in this incongruity. The Ghost’s appeal to the sacraments, “Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d” (1.5.77) is, even in poetic terms, overwhelmed by the power of the associations conveyed by the “blossoms of my sin,” suggesting that no such sacramental action could have been the equal of such a paradoxical extent of sin.

21.

With Hamlet, there is the additional horror of learning about all this only through the murder of his father and his extraordinary re-appearance to Hamlet in death, without which he would have remained free of the knowledge. This murder is brought on by the lust between Claudius and Gertrude, but, at the same time, Hamlet’s hands are bound by the very murder that must horrify him. The elder Hamlet’s murder by the lust-driven Claudius presents itself as a mirror-image of the former’s self-abuse and a judgment upon him in those terms. That point is spectacularly conveyed where the effects of the poison are described. The details of that poison’s progress through the elder Hamlet’s body are given in a form that graphically suggests how lust would feel and what effects it would have on the body if one were to trace those effects through to their logical conclusion (see 1.5.59-73). In Hamlet’s father’s case, those effects are identical with his death. The Ghost’s account climaxes in the reference to his body grown “lazar-like” in death. In his Commentary on Genesis, Luther speaks of a “leprosy of lust” extending itself progressively through the whole body (Luther, Vol. 1, 168).

22.

Cf. Luther: “it [sin] was born in me; as soon as I was formed in the womb, I was a sinner. For the flesh and blood of which I was made, were sin . . . That which father and mother contribute is itself already sin” (Luther, Vol. 36, 354-55).

23.

There is an extensive textual basis for this view inasmuch as what takes Othello over and clinches Iago’s effect on him (all this in 3.3) is not, in fact, the thought that Cassio and Desdemona are engaged with each other so much as that Desdemona’s sexual will has that overwhelming character that Iago ascribes to her. If not “the maiden never bold,” then, in fact, one who already had her “will,” which she would surely also have needed to satisfy and did with Othello, at the time denying her many other, more passionless suitors, though now (Iago pretends) the need for “satisfaction” has driven her elsewhere. Iago builds his fiction about Cassio around an impulse to sexual will in Desdemona that is undeniable and that has manifested in a strangely overwhelming way (leaving Brabantio, her father, utterly distraught from the strangeness of it). In a later scene, Desdemona, by then overwhelmed by the influence of the profound suggestion at work in this play, will apply to herself the thought of her own depravity in a way that we must see functions also apart from the force of Othello’s imposition:

Desdemona. Am I that name, Iago?

Iago. What name, fair lady?

Desdemona. Such as she said my lord did say I was.

Emilia. He called her whore . . .

Iago. Why did he so?

Desdemona. I do not know; I am sure I am none such. (4.2.119-25)

This last statement especially should be seen as spoken in a tone that reveals Desdemona desperately wondering that it may somehow, or at some level, be true. Significantly, we are returned at just this point to the ambiguous circumstances of her initial choice of Othello, on which Iago had harped so strategically:

Emilia. Hath she forsook so many noble matches,

Her father, and her country, and her friends,

To be called whore? . . .

Desdemona. It is my wretched fortune. (4.2.127-30)

(See my monograph On Luther for a more detailed discussion of these matters.)

24.

There is still more to the foregrounding of these characters. They seem to step out of their, dramatically, literal situation directly into our presence in the theater, in keeping with the additional masque-like qualities of this play.

25.

Unexampled, that is, for Shakespeare.

26.

Middleton Murry saw in The Tempest “the most perfect prophetic achievement of the Western mind” (142), the play in which Shakespeare gives us the image of that “future synthesis,” for which he is acclaimed—“there will be no essential element in that synthesis that is not implied in Shakespeare” (198). Especially crucial to this synthesis, Murry argues, is a new completeness of subjective (197) experience such as the one I have been tracing in this essay; out of this experience a new objective (198) order will one day be forged. This was Shakespeare’s prophetic achievement. However, Murry restricts his attention to The Tempest and hardly gives attention to the two other plays I have treated here that lead up to that achievement by way of process. In fact, Murry sees Shakespeare, in the case of those two plays, as “playing [only] half-wistfully with the figures of his imagination” (142). As I have tried to show, one cannot think of what The Tempest finally achieves without considering all that has been worked out by Shakespeare prior to it, as these two plays outline this for us in consistently allegorical terms. The essential place these plays have in the representation of this achievement would, of course, require a book unto itself, and I have only been in the position here to give some bare intimation of their role in this regard. Needless to say, Shakespeare also wrote other plays over the course of his last phase, but these stand outside the developmental line that I have traced here. Apart from the process of inner development he was going through (with reference to Cymbeline) or had gone through (with reference to King Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen), Shakespeare, of course, carried on outwardly with other projects and tasks.

Outbraving Luther

Abstract

Works Cited

Notes