Abstract
The conclusion of the book places Shakespeare’s religious politics in the context of contemporary geopolitics both in Europe and in the United States. In particular, the Trumpian notion of “Fortress America” finds a precedent in the isolationist policies of Protestant England in Shakespeare’s time. I argue that Shakespeare’s plays resist that mentality through his sympathy for the plight of English Catholics and that his appeal to religious tolerance in his time reflects our best hope for a peaceful future in the twenty-first century.
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- 1.
Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 128.
- 2.
Scott Oldenburg, Alien Albion: Literature and Immigration in Early Modern England (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2014).
- 3.
New York Times, August 16, 2017.
- 4.
See Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare’s Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 3.
- 5.
See Alison Shell, Shakespeare and Religion (London: Methuen, 2010), 89ff.
- 6.
See Thomas M. McCoog, “‘Playing the Champion’: The Role of Disputation in the Jesuit Mission.” In The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits, edited by Thomas M. McCoog, S. J. (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1996), 119–139 (128).
- 7.
See Alfred Thomas, Shakespeare, Dissent, and the Cold War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), chapter 2.
- 8.
Boris Pasternak, The Poems of Doctor Zhivago, translated by Eugene M. Kayden (Kansas: Hall Mark, 1967), 7.
- 9.
See William Shakespeare, Tragedii (Moscow, 2003), 231. My translation from the Russian.
- 10.
Annabel Patterson, “’All Is True’: Negotiating the Past in Henry VIII.” In Elizabethan Theater: Essays in Honor of S. Schoenbaum, edited by R. B. Parker and S. P. Zitner (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), 147–166.
- 11.
Perhaps the most important book in recent years to explore Shakespeare’s alleged ties to Catholicism was E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: The Lost Years (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985). According to Honigmann, the young Shakespeare may have spent his “lost years” as a tutor in a Catholic household in Lancashire named Hoghton Tower.
- 12.
It should be added that Milton drew the line at religious tolerance of Catholics, whom he regarded as a threat to the security of the English nation: Shakespeare by contrast evinces no such sense of Protestant paranoia.
- 13.
Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, translated by Boleslaw Taborski (New York: W.W. Norton, 1964).
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Thomas, A. (2018). Conclusion: Shakespeare “Our Contemporary”. In: Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90218-0_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90218-0_7
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