In his new book on Shakespeare's medieval and religious sources, Alfred Thomas expands on a claim medievalists have been making for some time. Against Stephen Greenblatt's (and earlier Jacob Burckhardt's) assertion that "something happened in the Renaissance," a "cultural shift" (The Swerve 2011, 9-10) medievalists have been emphasizing continuities over breaks and have sought to bring to the fore medieval influences on early modern literature and culture (e.g., Helen Cooper's Shakespeare and the Medieval World 2010). Thomas' central claim is that Shakespeare and his contemporaries, just like their medieval predecessors, employed the distant past to voice concerns about their present. But the project is more complex than that: In seven chapters, Thomas presents an account of the religious strives and in particular the fates of Catholic recusants during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James VI/I from a literary perspective. Whether he focuses on the texts' veiled references to the religious and political tensions, on the reception of such references by catholic theatre audiences, or contends that recusant women found models for resistance in medieval Virgin Saints' Lives, Thomas makes clear that literature makes history just as much as history makes literature. And it does so, of course, across the medieval-early modern divide.
In the first, introductory chapter, Thomas contends that Shakespeare and his contemporaries used the medieval past to voice careful criticism of Elizabeth I and James VI/I, exploiting "the political potential of the surviving modes of hagiography, elegy, romance, and morality plays to fit their own dissenting needs" (7). It becomes clear here that Thomas' project is not only concerned with medieval sources inspiring early modern authors, but also with what he calls "analogic modes of thought" and "shared political underpinnings" (13, 16). In both periods, he claims, authors employed representations of the past to voice concerns about their present and English playwrights turned to the medieval past not only for source materials but for "strategies of dissent" (17). Thomas also here establishes that "all the playwrights studied in this book ["atheistic Marlow" and "irenic Shakespeare" among others] shared a common desire to deploy medieval motifs and themes in order to critique the oppressively hegemonic order of Protestant England" (28).
In chapter 2, Thomas tackles the parallels between portrayals of rulers in medieval Arthurian Romance and Shakespeare's Richard II. Thomas posits that Shakespeare typically used displacement and reversal when he employed historical or fictional figures of the past to criticize rulers of his present, just as is the case in Hamlet's play-within-the-play Murder of Gonzago that shows a nephew rather than a brother as the murderer.This chapter exemplifies how complex Thomas' method is: He reads the representations of King Arthur in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Alliterative Morte Arthur, and Le Morte Darthur against the historical background of the unstable reigns of Henry I, Richard II, and Henry VI, outlining how the authors of these works "needed to proceed with caution" (32), and then proceeds to reading Richard II as a commentary on Queen Elizabeth's pride and her susceptibility to the flattery through "the allegorical lens of the past" (34, 68). Shakespeare, Thomas claims, used the medieval precedent of seemingly being invested in the distant history "for bringing politics onto the stage" (34-35). In addition to these modes of criticism adopted from medieval predecessors, the characters of the texts become multilayered, too; King Richard II, Thomas shows, is criticized through the literary figure of King Arthur and does himself later become the figure of the past through which Shakespeare exerts subtle criticism of Elizabeth (61).
Chapter 3 traces constructions of the stereotypical Jewish "Other" from the blood libel accusation to accusations of usury, from Chaucer's "Prioress' Tale" and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament to Marlowe's Jew of Malta and Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. Thomas argues that the texts were all written in response to religious crises, at the time of the Wycliffite and Hussite heresies and the protestant reformation respectively. According to Thomas, the negative representation of Jews provided an outlet for doubts: "Christians' doubts about their own faith are inverted and projected on the Jews" (82). Likewise, he claims, the Jews in Renaissance English drama might have stood in for other others, for example for migrant Huguenot workers (96), or for Catholics (105) who faced similar hatred and persecution. Rather than asking whether Chaucer and Shakespeare were anti-Semites or not, Thomas claims, we need to pay careful attention to moments in which the differentiation between Christians and Jews is rendered unstable or reversed. These moments point to a society that seeks "to construct its own stable identity" (104).
In chapter 4, Thomas further pursues such unstable boundaries when he tackles memory and revenge in Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Hamlet. He suggests that Beowulf and Grendel should not be seen as binary opposites but rather as "extensions of each other" (130), an argument he repeats for Sir Gawain and Green Knight to underline its "layered complexity" (132). In the green knight he sees an embodiment of the pagan past challenging medieval Christianity (136) and in his reading of Shakespeare's Hamlet he follows Greenblatt's suggestion that the purgatory mentioned references Catholic faith in opposition to Lutheran Protestantism. He concludes that "for English Catholics memory of the medieval past and its religious practices was crucial to their political defiance of state-sanctioned Protestantism" (137). In Thomas' reading of Hamlet, thus, "the father (Catholicism) comes back to haunt and take revenge on the son (Protestantism)" (143). Hamlet's madness, read alongside the medieval Amlet's forgetfulness, becomes a Protestant strategy to attain power (143), while Ophelia's authentic madness is described as a possibility for the playwright "to raise sensitive political and religious issues otherwise impossible or just too dangerous in Late Elizabethan England" (145).
In chapter 5, Thomas brings together medieval Virgin Saints' Lives, King Lear, The Duchess of Malfi, and the early modern play The Virgin Martyr. Thomas starts by pinpointing medieval (and hence Catholic) motifs in King Lear and suggests that they may help to re-construct Shakespeare's Catholic audiences, such as the one gathered in 1609 in the Yorkshire Catholic household of Sir John Yorke. Cordelia's hanging, Thomas claims, must have reminded such audiences of the Northern Rebellion's gruesome end when more than 600 Catholics were hanged; the last entrance of King Lear with Cordelia in his arms must have appeared to them as an inverted pieta motif popular in Catholic art but forbidden in Protestant England (176); Cordelia's response to her father's initial question "may have exemplified their own impossible situation in trying to reconcile loyalty to the Crown with their spiritual allegiance to the Pope of Rome" (154); Edmund's betrayal of Edgar may have reminded Catholics of denunciations among friends and family members (165), and Gloucester's torture "may have resonated with the interrogation of recusants" (171). Much of this is speculative, of course, but it offers a lot of food for thought for how texts would have worked differently for the different audiences in Early Modern England. Conjecture of this kind does also, of course, not devalue the argument that medieval (and hence catholic) motifs served to "comment on the religious politics of early Jacobean England" (151).
The portrayal of women in both King Lear and Winter's Tale, Thomas suggests next, recalls the defiance of recusant women who themselves reproduced the discourse of virgin martyrs when interrogated (162-165) while Webster's Duchess of Malfi references both Edward II's favoritism of his lover Piers Gaveston and the virgin martyrs' resistance to marry. Finally, Thomas argues that Dekker's and Massinger's early modern play The Virgin Martyr "aligns the persecution of the early Christians during the reign of Diocletian with the oppression of Catholics in early modern England" (187).
In his sixth chapter, Thomas argues that Marlowe and Shakespeare "consciously drew upon medieval theater for political reasons of their own" (192) and pursues this thought in Macbeth, and in particular the knocking on the gates in II.3 which he sees as an inverted Harrowing of Hell motif. While in the medieval tradition, this was the moment when Christ descended to the gates of hell to release Adam and Eve as well as Old Testament patriarchs and prophets, in Macbeth hell is created by Macbeth and his wife (200). The mystery plays' Herod, in turn, served as an inspiration for tyrannical Macbeth. As in the other chapters, Thomas does not only look back in time but also refers to Shakespeare's present and to the ways in which the Porter's speech alludes to the Gunpowder Plot (201-204). Finally, Thomas argues, Shakespeare used equivocation to produce multivalent allusions in his play. For example, while Protestants may have understood Macduff's description of the murdered king's body as the "Lord's anointed temple" as a reference to the attempted murder of King James during the Gunpowder plot, Catholics, Thomas suggests, may well have understood it as a reference to Henry Garnet who was executed for his connections to the plotters (212).
All in all, this book is highly readable and provides a wealth of fresh insights with the connections it draws between medieval and early modern texts, authors, and audiences. Some of these connections however seem to depend on an amalgamation of Thomas' concepts of inversion, resonance, and parallel. One such case is when Thomas argues that the vile Jewish Other could be a stand-in likewise for pursued Huguenots and Catholics to then claim that Shylock's "hard-heartedness was perhaps even intended to reflect the Calvinist leadership of England in the 1590s" (112). In addition, what to me seem cases of much wider cultural referentiality is at times strung together in a way that suggests more direct connections: The fact that the portrayal of Beowulf's monster Grendel as "kin of Cain" references a fratricide and a fratricide occurs in Hamlet, to my mind, is not so much a connection between the two texts but proof for the cultural significance of the Biblical motif in different ages (25). Lady Bertilak in her role of woman-as-teacher doesn't so directly connect to the prohibition of female preachers in Corinthian 11 (45), and, while there are many convincing points in Thomas' reading of Cordelia alongside medieval virgin martyrs, the conclusion that the King of France is aligned with the celestial bridegroom seems a bit forced. But these are minor flaws in comparison to the merits of this book. Medievalists will appreciate this book because it successfully adds to the counternarrative to the Renaissance as a new age. Scholars of literature will appreciate the fact that Thomas consistently seeks to invert the question of how historical conditions influenced literary works and instead shows how plays could have resonated with later audiences, while historians will be interested to explore how literature both takes up political problems of its present by looking at the past and at the same time provides inspiration for future writers and audiences.