Profane Shakespeare: Perfection, Pollution, and the Truth of Performance

Abstract

The focus in the present collection of articles was born from a double sense of urgency, one prompted by a global context marked by the resurgence of religious discourses on purity and condemnations of alleged impurity, and, on a smaller scale, by a critical context which has led to the polarization of the debate around Shakespeare’s religious beliefs. This collection argues that the playwright and poet situates his own truth elsewhere, in his art of poetry and drama, and in the time and act of performance, rather than in any sort of religious affiliation or eschatological horizon, which imply the notions of completion and perfection as well as a belief in unchanging truth. If Shakespeare so broadly and keenly “speaks to us” to this day, it is perhaps because of how profane his art is.