Book Review: The Gospel According to Shakespeare

Abstract

The Gospel According to Shakespeare. By Piero Boitani. Trans. Vittorio Montemaggi and Rachel Jacoff. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-268-02235-8. Pp. xiii + 156. $27.00. Piero Boitani's study of Hamlet, King Lear, and four late romances is a beautiful work of literary criticism. The learning is prodigious, prose elegant, and insights thought-provoking and memorable. Boitani focuses on Shakespeare's Christian themes as developed in these plays; on characters who seem to modeled on biblical figures, including Job, Christ, and God; and on biblical echoes in wording and in idea. The study leaves reader with new insights regarding Shakespeare's works, and, with its focus on Gospel, or Good News that incarnation brought, should of major interest not only to readers of Christianity and Literature but also to readers in general. Boitani, an eminent Italian scholar and literary critic specializing in medieval literature, is Professor of Comparative Literature at Sapienza University of Rome. Among his numerous books on Medieval literature and classics are Cambridge Chaucer Companion (1986), original essays by European and American scholars intended to introduce reader to Chaucer's work, a collection which he edited with Jill Mann; and Medieval and Pseudo-Medieval Literature (1984), another series of essays by medieval scholars, though subject matter is broader in including medieval European culture--this series edited with Anna Torti. In The Bible and its Rewritings (in Italian, 1997; trans. Anita Weston, 1999), Boitani anticipates The Gospel According to Shakespeare as he finds in Pericles' recognition of his daughter Marina a retelling of Mary Magdalene's recognition of resurrected Jesus near tomb in Gospel of John. The Genius to Improve an Invention: Literary Transitions (1999 in Italian; 2002 in English) complements previous Rewritings, continuing theme of recognition in Shakespeare as it discusses Hamlet and King Lear. In 2002, Boitani was awarded Feltrinelli Prize for Literary Criticism. Published in Italian in 2009, Il Vangelo Secondo Shakespeare was awarded 2010 De Sanctis Prize for literature. In this study, Boitani shows an incredible grasp of classical literature, medieval literature, Renaissance literature, and Bible as well as literary criticism, both major works of past and contemporary theory. He argues that in Hamlet and King Lear Christian message of faith, salvation, and peace is presented as if from a distance but that in romances the themes of transcendence, immanence, role of deity, resurrection, and epiphany are openly, if often obliquely, staged (xi). He relates plays to Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, Parmenides, Gorgias, Virgil, Lucian, Marcus Aurelius, Dante, Appollonius, John Gower, and Christopher Marlowe (especially Doctor Faustus). The chapter on Hamlet focuses on change in Hamlet after his return from aborted voyage to England with pirates. Before that voyage, he was melancholy and indecisive, pretended to mad, and failed to act; after Hamlet's return, reader finds Shakespeare meditating on providence, on forgiveness, and on goodness and happiness, and ... doing so in Christian terms (2). Boitani points out that Hamlets pivotal speech in Act 5, Scene 2, when he tells Horatio that God is concerned with fall of a sparrow, is an allusion to Jesus' statement, Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to ground unperceived by your Father. When Hamlet continues that the is all, he is referring to Christian's trusting Providence as there's a divinity that shapes our ends. Boitani also notes that Let be with which Hamlet ends readiness speech means amen (20-21). The chapter on King Lear focuses on sacrifice, suffering, and purification--themes developed further in romances. …