Marilynne Robinson - The Givenness of Things

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The word “Reformation” suggests that the primary source and effect of the controversy that fascinated Europe was a change in church polity. In fact, in this period people were pondering the deepest thoughts and traditions they shared as Christians. The powerful intervened and criminalized the expression of one or another theology, depending on the regime in power at the time, and this created a factionalism and repressiveness that perverted a rich conversation. Critics and historians have followed this precedent, often eager to identify the sympathies of any figure who did not, himself or herself, make them absolutely clear, as if a leaning were an identity, and might not change from year to year, depending on whom one had spoken with lately, or what one had read, or how an argument settled into individual thought or experience. In answer to the question, Which side are you on? “I’m still deciding,” or “I see merit in a number of positions,” would not have been more pleasing to the enforcers of any orthodoxy than outright heresy would have been. High-order thinking is not so readily forced into preexisting categories. If we step back from seeing the period as a political struggle first of all, the official view of it, we might see it as passionate and profoundly interesting, entirely consistent with the richness of its philosophic and literary achievements. What is grace, after all? What is the soul?

Again, I eschew any attempt to identify Shakespeare as the partisan of any side of the controversy, with a few provisos. First, to express any opinion or attitude that offended authority was extremely dangerous, to life and limb and also to the whole phenomenon of public theater. So tact must be assumed. I think it is appropriate to see Shakespeare as a theologian in his own right, though the perils that attended religious expression made his theology implicit rather than overt. Second, Shakespeare tests various and opposed ideas, giving each one extraordinarily just consideration. He appreciates a good idea.

My third point is a little more complex. Broadly speaking, English religious culture during this period was divided into three parts, Catholic, Anglican, and Protestant. Catholicism was traditional, and had major support from the Continent. Anglicanism was the British withdrawal from communion with Rome and from papal authority, with selected aspects of Catholicism and of Reformed teaching retained or absorbed. The Protestants, as I call them here, are elsewhere called Calvinists or Puritans. They were the faction that became strong enough by the beginning of the seventeenth century to carry out a successful revolution and to depose, try, and execute the king Charles I. This happened after Shakespeare’s death, but a movement of such strength would have to have been formidable for decades. This is only truer because it absorbed radical popular traditions, notably Lollardy. Calvinism was already well established in France and French Geneva, and in conflict with the French government. The name Puritan dissociates it from its Continental origins, and lends to the very fixed impression that it existed mainly to spread gloom and corrosive disapprobation, particularly with regard to the arts, poetry, and the theater, and, more generally, the Renaissance passion for pagan antiquity. In fact, Ovid’s Metamorphoses , the most influential classical text in the English Renaissance, was translated by Arthur Golding, who also translated Calvin extensively, including his three-volume Commentary on Psalms . Calvin’s Institutes was translated by Thomas Norton, one of the writers of Gorboduc , the first tragedy written in English. The first sonnet cycle in English was written by Anne Vaughn Lok and published with her translation of a set of Calvin’s sermons. One of the popular plays of the period was Abraham’s Sacrifice , translated from the French by Arthur Golding, the first tragedy written in a modern European language. Its author was Théodore de Bèze of Geneva, the closest associate of John Calvin. This is to say that these so-called Puritans were literary people in the classic Renaissance mold. I have seen Golding’s authorship of the translation of Ovid disputed on the grounds that he was a Puritan (that is, a Calvinist) and Ovid is rather salacious. But this is in fact typical when seen in relation to France. Marguerite de Navarre, the French patroness of the Renaissance and Reformation, whose court produced Anne Boleyn, wrote rapturous religious poetry and also the Heptameron , which can startle even the jaded modern reader. Clément Marot, who made the translations of the Psalms that, set to music, were the joy and ornament of Protestant France, wrote many secular poems, also startling. Geneva itself scandalized Europe by printing ancient literature elsewhere banned, including other and more salacious works of Ovid. The historical characterization of so-called Puritanism precludes our looking to neighboring France for context, though Calvin was French and was widely read in England. English Protestants went to France and French Protestants came to England during periods of persecution. Shakespeare would have been following a familiar pattern in writing Venus and Adonis , which was published in a famously beautiful edition by a French Huguenot émigré printer in London. So the Puritans were not puritanical. Nor were they anti-intellectual or obscurantist. And they drew directly on the Continental Renaissance.

All this is to make the point that there were three highly distinctive, theologically articulate religious cultures in Elizabethan England, not the usual triad of Catholics, Protestants, and misanthropes. When the Acts of Uniformity were passed under Elizabeth, they criminalized both Catholic and Protestant forms of worship in that they departed from Anglican practice. Both Catholics and Protestants lost most of their civil rights, which were restored to both in the nineteenth century. Both suffered persecution and martyrdom. So, if Shakespeare seems cautious and elusive, it could mean that he was Catholic, or that he was Protestant, or that he did not want to align himself with or against any faction. His younger contemporary, René Descartes, was similarly elusive, probably on these same grounds. He described himself as masked, like an actor. It was the nature of the times.

But if Shakespeare did take seriously the great questions bruited in his civilization during the whole of his lifetime, then he might have reflected on the meaning behind, or beyond, it all — not the geopolitics of it, but the essential, shared truth that underlay these aggravated differences. Grace is grace. How would this be staged?

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I wrote my doctoral thesis on Shakespeare, and I am very glad I did, even though, in retrospect, I think I was wrong about a great many things. I suppose there is enough money in the world to induce me to read it again sometime, foreign currencies being taken into account. Still, the research that went into the writing of it did acquaint me with the times a little, and also with critical and historical approaches to them. I have been a truant these many years, so I am not abreast of new work in the field. I have glanced now and then at a historicism that does not seem to me to be particularly attentive to history. I have diverted myself with arguments in support of the Earl of Oxford’s authorship of the works conventionally attributed to Shakespeare. And I can only say that if Oxford was secretly their author, the perfection of his disguise is the fact that poetry the earl is known to have written is strikingly inferior to the work he published pseudonymously, under the name Shakespeare. It would have required phenomenal effort in a great poet to have written work so undistinguished.