Fear and Loathing in Shakespeare Studies

In a 2021 essay for Shakespeare Survey 74, “Counterpublic Shakespeares in the American Education Marketplace,” Notre Dame’s Jillian Snyder raises questions about the state of Shakespeare studies, especially where religion and literature are concerned. Snyder paints with a broad brush, dividing backward Christians from secular progressives, so that I find myself cast into her special Gehenna along with my fellow Christians.

Snyder knows how to start with a good hook: “Imagine this scene: an American high school student picks up an edition of Macbeth.” Given the current state of public school curricula, one might breathe a sigh of relief. But something wicked this way comes and, lo and behold, this is a scary edition of Shakespeare. How scary is it? Gird your loins, because we’re talking about a fundamentalist Christian edition of Macbeth published in 2004 by Abeka publishers of Pensacola, Florida. Marketed to homeschooling parents for their twelfth graders, the Abeka Macbeth is not what it seems. Snyder reports:

It omits, for example, the moment Lady Macbeth describes dashing out an infant’s brains while nursing. It excludes the Porter’s drunken soliloquy as he pretends to stand watch at the gates of hell. It forgoes Malcolm’s fraudulent disclosure of his insatiable lust to Macduff. And when the student reaches the moment when the somnambulating Lady Macbeth scrubs Duncan’s blood from her hands, the line reads, “Out, foul spot!”

After capturing our attention, Snyder trains her sights on two religious publishing houses: Bob Jones University Press and Ignatius Press. In time we learn that the BJU Press Macbeth (2011) “bowdlerizes portions of the Porter’s speech”—that is the extent of the editorial laundering. The Ignatius Press Critical Edition of Macbeth (2010) does not bowdlerize a thing. In other words, Snyder starts with the bugbear of censorship, only to end with a bug.

To mount her argument about “counterpublic Shakespeares,” Snyder relies on a 2005 book by Michael Warner called Publics and Counter Publics. Warner’s thinking is shaped by Michel Foucault’s poststructuralist anthropology, and so it is really under the star of Foucault that Snyder lays out her analysis. Foucault is of course a hardcore materialist. For Foucault, there is no escape from the dominant ideology, there is no successful dissent, and power built on violence has its way with us all.

Writing in the counter-Enlightenment grip of Foucault, Snyder introduces us to her counterpublic Shakespeares. She scrutinizes the sales pitches and editorial philosophies that distinguish BJU Press and Ignatius Press in their “resistance” to “dominant” or mainstream scholarship, which is represented by the Folger Shakespeare Library Macbeth (2013). We learn that, at BJU Press, editor Ronald Horton touts a biblical worldview. According to Snyder, Horton seizes on biblical allusions in Macbeth to “ground characters’ actions in broader biblical principles.” Horton evidently holds the self-justifying belief “that the height of British literary achievement coincided with a period that embraced a biblical worldview.” We can make of this what we will, and Snyder says nothing in its defense. Horton’s biblical “presuppositionalism” is left to withstand the withering glare of the prejudices that Snyder has harnessed with her opening scare tactics, and with her subsequent reference linking Bob Jones University to the “Scopes Money Trial of 1925.”  The nightmare of history notwithstanding, I do not think that Horton is making an absurd contention when he connects the greatness of the Elizabethan (and Jacobean) stage to the wide and intense biblical reading that sustained Elizabethan thought, more generally. But where Horton takes the Bible literally and is confident in its clarity, I do not think that Shakespeare shared his confidence. I would argue that, for Shakespeare, literalism is called into question by biblical contradictions and ambiguities. And yet, one might to some extent appreciate Horton’s engagement with Shakespeare’s biblical mind while rejecting Horton’s religious principles. Shakespeare, after all, cannot be wholly prescinded from his time and place without suffering mutilation. Even if we think of Bob Jones University as a living fossil, it resembles the fossils of the Christian animal that walked the streets of old London.

At Ignatius Press, Macbeth editor Joseph Pearce argues for a Catholic Shakespeare. The general public has long been intrigued by this possibility, and not a few self-respecting scholars have made the case, going back to the pioneering work of Richard Simpson (1820-1876), and including such figures as J. O. Halliwell-Phillips, co-authors H. Mutschmann and K. Wentersdorf, and Jesuit Peter Milward. The “Catholic Shakespeare” has engaged the critical intelligence of Stephen Greenblatt, John Cox, David Kastan, Alison Shell, and other mainstream scholars participating in the recent “religious turn” in Shakespeare studies. In this respect, the career of Jesuit scholar Peter Milward is revealing. Greenblatt cites him on occasion, but mainstream scholars tend to ignore his large and uneven body of work. Or so it seems. My suspicion is that many more have read Milward than have acknowledged him. Though uncredited, he seems to have introduced the idea that Cordelia in Lear’s arms evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà—a commonplace now, but not fifty years ago. It is in some sense the fate of this turn to religion that is at stake in Snyder’s effort at containment.

Pearce is a Catholic apologist who insists he is right. He might be compared to Hotspur. But let us be fair: Hotspur was a gifted and charismatic warrior, and his case against Henry IV was not totally lacking in merit. Often (not always, for sure) the fiercest arguers, those who raise the best points for their side, are the most committed to their cause. So we stand to gain by engaging them. If we are to do justice to our own position, we must turn their argument into our counterargument. And Pearce is a tough fighter. Committed to constructing a persuasive argument on the basis of the available evidence, he has a logical mind and he wields a distinguished prose.

As regards Macbeth, we may not agree with Pearce’s elevating the “Gowrie Conspiracy” as a prime “source of Shakespeare’s inspiration.” In this murderous episode of Scots history, which occurred in 1600, the future James I may have played a sinister role in the death of the Earl of Gowrie and the seizure of the Gowrie estate. Pearce builds on the work of Greenblatt, but he parts from Greenblatt by identifying King James with the murderous Macbeth on account of James’s embrace of anti-Catholic measures, due in part to the “Machiavellian machinations of Robert Cecil.” It isn’t a stupid hypothesis. Shakespeare’s way of assimilating contemporary events is a legitimate concern. Snyder, though, does not judge Pearce’s case on its merits. For her, his argument rides on his investment in “the intense persecution of English Catholics,” and his counterpublic is necessarily sympathetic to an image of their own plight as conservatives “striving to retain the virtue of tradition amidst the hostility of secularism.” Snyder also attributes to Pearce the view that the “‘equivocator’ described by the Porter in Act 2” is “associated with conspirator Robert Catesby’s defense following the Gunpowder Plot.” Both in his Introduction to the Ignatius Critical Edition of Macbeth, and in his footnotes to the text, Pearce links the equivocator not to Catesby but to Jesuit Henry Garnet. So also, in their respective editions, do Greenblatt, David Bevington, and the editors of the Folger Macbeth, Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine. No editorial footnote I know of names Catesby in this connection.

If members of the Catholic counterpublic were capable of independently judging Pearce’s case (or Snyder’s), they would break the mold that Snyder fashions for them. But the mold cannot be broken—despite the fact that some of the essays collected in the Ignatius Macbeth “remain,” as Snyder says, “more discreet on the nature of Shakespeare’s faith.” This is not surprising. When Pearce commissioned my own essay, “The Vision of Evil in Macbeth,” there were no ideological purity tests. Snyder cites a passage from it: “real assent to quasi-religious convictions—such as the existence of the soul, the existence of the natural order, and the existence of evil—is not only necessary for the imaginative work of Shakespearean drama but is the actual sign of its artistic origins.” Immediately following her use of my remark, which draws on the widely respected epistemology of John Henry Newman for the idea of “real assent,” Snyder comments: “Such claims echo one of BJU’s primary assertions—that what makes Shakespeare ‘for all time’ is his adherence to orthodoxy, which, for Ignatius, is inseparable from his desire to create a powerful drama that tacitly resisted the state.” As I mentioned, Snyder paints with a broad brush. Sticky details do not impede her masterstrokes. It hardly matters that I have never endorsed a Catholic Shakespeare. Nor that, while I happen to think that Shakespeare was a Christian, I have never thought of him as “orthodox” in any sense. What matters is my association with Ignatius Press, which somehow ties me—“echo” that I am—to the good folks at Bob Jones University.

Snyder ends her essay with what may amount to a self-fulfilling prophecy: “the fractious and fractured interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays—and Shakespeare himself—found in these curricula demonstrate how, even as Shakespeare may contribute to the ‘lingua franca’ of American education—and, by extension, American culture—the language itself is increasingly devolving into a series of mutually unintelligible dialects, all vying for power.” No doubt if we assume that we have nothing to learn from each other, and that the study of Shakespeare is really about the struggle for institutional power, then things will continue unprogressively to “devolve.”

In contrast to Snyder’s broadly Foucauldian picture of the field, Charles Taylor’s understanding of our “secular age” is pluralistic in its conception of contemporary religion as “one option among others.” In a pluralistic open society, one might dip into the work of Ronald Horton or Joseph Pearce just to see how the other half lives. Certainly, the medicine we need is intelligence: the intelligence to recognize intelligence, whether we like it or not. In this respect, the editions of Horton and Pearce are worth a look. Both editors say smart things. You have to separate the wheat from the chaff.  On the other hand, the Folger Macbeth, for all its decent strengths, fails to engage the vexed question of Shakespeare’s relation to Christianity. In this respect, I consider it a rearguard action, a retreat from the difficult demands of intellectual responsibility. Marking a later stage of dissensus and defensiveness, Snyder’s scare tactics and her theological crudeness—the untroubled ease with which she links my minimalist contention that Shakespeare worked within the horizons of a Christian universe to “orthodoxy”—are not expressive of a demanding intellect. One might say that her pigeonholes are symptomatic of the current petrifaction of the humanities. We are too quick to blame this debacle on others. Rigid political conformity; a professoriate unconscious to the history and effects of its materialist premises; a permeating dread of Christian conservatives: all this is manifested in the pages of Snyder’s essay for Shakespeare Survey 74, published by Cambridge University Press, edited by Professor Emma Smith of Oxford University, and devoted to “Shakespeare and Education.”

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