Marilynne Robinson - The Givenness of Things

On its face, this is not an especially attractive story. It is remarkably uncomplicated by Shakespeare’s standards, though its movement is familiar — the waning of power and status in characters for whom status and power are so habitual and defining that the loss of them confounds identity itself. There is, however, a remarkable countermovement. Even as Antony and Cleopatra decline, as the world measures such things, the play affirms them by casting a golden, one might say celestial, light over their very human failings. This is an effect of the great irony that embraces the events the play embodies. This Octavius Caesar, in defeating Antony, or rather in enjoying the consequences of his self-defeat, will become Caesar Augustus the unrivaled emperor, mighty enough to decree that all the world should be enrolled. Antony’s defeat, which is his utter though not honorable, virtuous, or politic love for the disreputable queen of Egypt, fulfills a great cosmic intent. Augustus brings the peace that was the prophesied condition for the coming of the Messiah. If anyone, in all Shakespeare’s plays, is the chosen of the Lord, it is this unlikable Octavius, who is entirely overshadowed by those he has conquered.

What might Shakespeare the theologian be pondering here? The acceptance by the Renaissance and Reformation of material we might find morally doubtful has been noted. Clearly the much mooted question of destiny, of divine determination, arises with singular clarity at the moment of this break in historic time, when the engrossing turmoil of earth is preparing the occasion for a consummate act of divine grace. Antony is destined to lose, brought down by what pagans and Christians would agree were license, vice, and folly, but destined to lose in any case so that order-imposing Caesar Augustus can establish his great peace. Then, since divine intent unfolded as it did, must it be true that God willed the transgressions of this grandly decadent pair? Or does the vast graciousness of divine intent not only forgive but even transform — therefore free — all faults? If this were to happen, what would it look like? How could it be staged?

Almost from its beginnings Christianity has attempted to reconcile the indubitable virtue of many great pagans with the fact that they seemed to fall outside the scheme of salvation. But these particular pagans were not virtuous, so Shakespeare has set himself an interesting variant of the problem. Let us say that he was exploring another thought, controversial in his time, that the Greek agape , traditionally translated into Latin as caritas , or charity, actually meant love. This change is reflected in the Geneva Bible, which Shakespeare knew well. However close caritas may have been to agape when Jerome flourished, “charity” had drifted a very long way from “love” in early modern English, a distance still marked in our own usage. And what we learn at the end of this play is that Antony and Cleopatra really do love each other. This might seem trivial. But Thomas More pointed out that the word “love” could refer to a commonplace, even base, human emotion and relationship. Granting his point, then Scripture would seem intentional in its permitting this association to be made. The note on 1 Corinthians, chapter 13, in the Geneva Bible says that in “the life to come … there at length shall we truly and perfectly love both God, and one another.” And perhaps Antony and Cleopatra participate in this greatest of the theological virtues, the one that makes conditional all the others, even faith. Certainly this understanding would resolve the anomaly of the implied exclusion of every kind of pagan and infidel from the divine love and grace Christians call salvation.

I feel justified in this speculation by the importance of love in Shakespeare. The great acts of grace at the end of many of his plays are the restoration of lost loved ones. Human love in the purest forms we can know it, wife and husband, parent and child, has the aura and the immutability of the sacred. And it is surely to be noted that the settings of these plays are typically non-Christian.

In act 1, in his first appearance and his second sentence, Antony tells Cleopatra that, to find a limit to his love, “Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth,” alluding to a text he would not have known, the book of the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah is, for the New Testament, the great prophet of the world transformed. Aside from allusions to Herod of Jewry, another important contemporary, there are ironies in the speeches of both of them. Chiding him for faithlessness, Cleopatra reminds Antony that once “Eternity was in our lips and eyes, / Bliss in our brows’ bent; none our parts so poor, / But was a race of heaven.” When he hears of her (supposed) death, Antony says, “I will o’ertake thee, Cleopatra, and / Weep for my pardon.” And he says, “Where souls do couch on flowers, we’ll hand in hand, / And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze”—his imagination of a life to come continuous with all the particular luxurious and whimsical charm of the life they have lived together. And his perfect forgiveness of Cleopatra, who has not only destroyed his greatness but has now caused his death, is striking against the false promise of Caesar’s grace, ending with the aside “You see how easily she may be surprised,” that is, captured. And Cleopatra has her “dream” of an Antony “past the size of dreaming.” She says, “Methinks I hear Antony call … husband, I come: / Now to that name my courage prove my title.”

These immortal longings have the authority beautiful language and beautiful thought can give them. The Renaissance and the Reformation loved these great souls who, in their way, haunted pagan antiquity uniquely, offering instances of the unquestionable power of human love, with all this might imply about their having a place in divine love. Nothing is asserted in this play. They die, and the rest is silence. Shakespeare, my theologian, never asserts but often proposes that we participate in grace, in the largest sense of the word, as we experience love, in the largest sense of that word. Beauty masses around the moments in which these thoughts are spoken and enacted. In the words of the Geneva Bible, love “is not provoked to anger; it thinketh no evil.” Finally both Antony and Hamlet are gracious after unthinkable, then fatal, provocations. In this they are at last fully themselves, purely the souls God gave them.

So late in my life I have learned that theological writings of John Wycliffe survive in significant numbers, a substantial part of them never to this day translated from his Latin. My interests being what they are, I have done more than most people to put myself in the way of knowing this, but the discovery came as a complete surprise to me. I was aware of Wycliffe’s influence on Hus and Luther, assuming that the example of the fourteenth-century vernacular Bible associated with him was the reason for his importance to them and to the Reformation in general. Now I have a collection of Wycliffe’s and his followers’ writings published in the valuable Masters of Western Spirituality series, and I find that there is much more to be surprised about. Despite its obvious importance, the treatment of religion by historians and critics as an element in the English Renaissance is odd and unsatisfactory.

The influence of earlier Reformation and Renaissance on the Continent, especially in France, tends to go unmentioned before the massacres of St. Bartholomew’s Day in 1572. This is true despite the fact that the French Reform was indisputably the greatest contemporary influence on religious thought and literary culture in Renaissance England. Given the importance of French literature for Chaucer, Gower, and the writer of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , and for the later Morte d’Arthur of Thomas Malory, this influence might be assumed to be established and continuous, and absorbed into the English vernacular tradition.