The Givenness of Things

GRACE

Among the most striking sentences in the English language is one spoken by Prospero to his treacherous brother, Antonio, in the fifth act of The Tempest. He says, “For you, most wicked sir, whom to call brother / Would even infect my mouth, I do forgive / Thy rankest fault — all of them.” The shock is in the language itself, the stark sequence of contempt and forgiveness. Prospero has already told his attendant spirit, Ariel, of his intentions toward Antonio and the others:

Though with their high wrongs I am struck to th’ quick,

Yet with my nobler reason ’gainst my fury

Do I take part. The rarer action is

In virtue than in vengeance. They being penitent,

The sole drift of my purpose doth extend

Not a frown further.

And again, while those subject to his magic stand “spell-stop’d,” unable to move, he says:

Flesh and blood,

You, brother mine, that entertain’d ambition,

Expelled remorse and nature …

I do forgive thee,

Unnatural though thou art.

So there is no suspense at all about what Prospero will do, how, powerful as he is, he will treat the brother who has slandered him and usurped his dukedom, and who must have assumed that he had caused Prospero’s death and his child’s death as well. He is at Prospero’s mercy, and the mercy he receives is perfect, insisted upon in these repetitions, qualified only by the fact that in no case does it forget, minimize, or extenuate his crimes.

I propose that Shakespeare is turning over a theological problem here. How do forgiveness and grace not deprive evil of its nature, its gravity? Granted, Prospero does subject the malefactors in his power to a minor purgatory of “inward pinches,” which presumably have the effect of conscience. But no one except the king Alonso actually acknowledges fault or asks to be forgiven, nor does Prospero require it or even pause for them to ask it of him. He has already chosen virtue over vengeance before he has restored their ability to speak and to ask his pardon, if they choose to.

Debates had raged throughout Europe, at least since the time of Luther, about how sin and grace were to be reconciled. The Reformist side rejected purgatory as unscriptural, and therefore rejected indulgences and prayers for the dead as well. It rejected the canonization of saints and the treasury of merit. It rejected auricular confession and absolution by priests. It rejected “salvation by works,” by which was meant pilgrimages and donations, vows, crusades, and anything else that was undertaken with the thought that it would mitigate sin in God’s eyes. In place of all this it insisted on faith alone, Scripture alone, Christ alone, grace alone. This was a very profound stirring in the deeps of Western civilization, having to do with the structure of society and even of individual consciousness.

Rather than recruiting Shakespeare to one side or another, as critics and biographers often do, or supposing that these questions that absorbed so many of the best minds in England and Europe had no place in his thoughts, as critics and biographers do characteristically, let us say that he took an intelligent interest in them, as he did in so many things. How is guilt in others, real or imagined, to be dealt with? How is one’s own sense of guilt to be borne or relieved? Histories and tragedies, and comedies, too, turn on these issues, and on one even larger. How is life to be lived in this fallen world, with all its dangers and temptations, if grace is taken to be the standard of a virtuous life? Who can rise to such a standard or be loyal to it? What response will it find where it is manifested? And what is the soul, the human essence for which all these questions are of infinite significance?

“Grace is grace, despite of all controversy.” These words are spoken by the character Lucio in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Lucio is a fool and a scoundrel, a fantastic, according to the dramatis personae. But he is also the loyal friend who takes steps to save a man from suffering death as a penalty for an offense that is only made punishable by an extremely rigid interpretation of law. These words are part of a half-serious exchange with two anonymous gentlemen in a house of ill repute, and Lucio ends his remark with a jibe, “as for example, thou art a wicked villain, despite of all grace.”

In this scene Lucio and the gentlemen are playing back and forth between two meanings of the word “grace,” as “the thanksgiving before meat,” and as a central concept of Christian theology, by which, in Lucio’s taunting instance, a villain might be rescued from his wicked proclivities in this life. Still, Lucio’s words are worth pausing over. “Grace is grace”—simply itself, not accessible to paraphrase. This would indeed put it beyond controversy, since there is no language in which it can be controverted, and it would give it a special character, most notably in the Shakespearean world, where associations among words, figures, similes, are constant and central. Lucio’s exchanges with the gentlemen mention that table grace is to be heard in any religion, with the further implication that one would be better for hearing it. In this sense also it is put beyond controversy, and every religion is, so to speak, graced by it. I propose that, in his later plays, Shakespeare gives grace a scale and aesthetic power, and a structural importance, that reach toward a greater sufficiency of expression — not a definition or a demonstration of grace or even an objective correlative for it, but the intimation of a great reality of another order, which pervades human experience, even manifests itself in human actions and relations, yet is always purely itself. Hamlet speaks of ideal virtues, calling them “pure as grace.” Prospero, after the scene of rather detached and unceremonious reconciliations, speaks his amazing epilogue to the audience, asking them to release him from his island, “As you from crimes would pardoned be.” He says, “My ending is despair, / Unless I be relieved by prayer, / Which pierces so that it assaults / Mercy itself and frees all faults.” Prayer opens on something purer and grander than mercy, something that puts aside the consciousness of fault, the residue of judgment that makes mercy a lesser thing than grace.

* * *

The word “Reformation” suggests that the primary source and effect of the controversy that fascinated Europe was a change in church polity. In fact, in this period people were pondering the deepest thoughts and traditions they shared as Christians. The powerful intervened and criminalized the expression of one or another theology, depending on the regime in power at the time, and this created a factionalism and repressiveness that perverted a rich conversation. Critics and historians have followed this precedent, often eager to identify the sympathies of any figure who did not, himself or herself, make them absolutely clear, as if a leaning were an identity, and might not change from year to year, depending on whom one had spoken with lately, or what one had read, or how an argument settled into individual thought or experience. In answer to the question, Which side are you on? “I’m still deciding,” or “I see merit in a number of positions,” would not have been more pleasing to the enforcers of any orthodoxy than outright heresy would have been. High-order thinking is not so readily forced into preexisting categories. If we step back from seeing the period as a political struggle first of all, the official view of it, we might see it as passionate and profoundly interesting, entirely consistent with the richness of its philosophic and literary achievements. What is grace, after all? What is the soul?

Again, I eschew any attempt to identify Shakespeare as the partisan of any side of the controversy, with a few provisos. First, to express any opinion or attitude that offended authority was extremely dangerous, to life and limb and also to the whole phenomenon of public theater. So tact must be assumed. I think it is appropriate to see Shakespeare as a theologian in his own right, though the perils that attended religious expression made his theology implicit rather than overt. Second, Shakespeare tests various and opposed ideas, giving each one extraordinarily just consideration. He appreciates a good idea.

My third point is a little more complex. Broadly speaking, English religious culture during this period was divided into three parts, Catholic, Anglican, and Protestant. Catholicism was traditional, and had major support from the Continent. Anglicanism was the British withdrawal from communion with Rome and from papal authority, with selected aspects of Catholicism and of Reformed teaching retained or absorbed. The Protestants, as I call them here, are elsewhere called Calvinists or Puritans. They were the faction that became strong enough by the beginning of the seventeenth century to carry out a successful revolution and to depose, try, and execute the king Charles I. This happened after Shakespeare’s death, but a movement of such strength would have to have been formidable for decades. This is only truer because it absorbed radical popular traditions, notably Lollardy. Calvinism was already well established in France and French Geneva, and in conflict with the French government. The name Puritan dissociates it from its Continental origins, and lends to the very fixed impression that it existed mainly to spread gloom and corrosive disapprobation, particularly with regard to the arts, poetry, and the theater, and, more generally, the Renaissance passion for pagan antiquity. In fact, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the most influential classical text in the English Renaissance, was translated by Arthur Golding, who also translated Calvin extensively, including his three-volume Commentary on Psalms. Calvin’s Institutes was translated by Thomas Norton, one of the writers of Gorboduc, the first tragedy written in English. The first sonnet cycle in English was written by Anne Vaughn Lok and published with her translation of a set of Calvin’s sermons. One of the popular plays of the period was Abraham’s Sacrifice, translated from the French by Arthur Golding, the first tragedy written in a modern European language. Its author was Théodore de Bèze of Geneva, the closest associate of John Calvin. This is to say that these so-called Puritans were literary people in the classic Renaissance mold. I have seen Golding’s authorship of the translation of Ovid disputed on the grounds that he was a Puritan (that is, a Calvinist) and Ovid is rather salacious. But this is in fact typical when seen in relation to France. Marguerite de Navarre, the French patroness of the Renaissance and Reformation, whose court produced Anne Boleyn, wrote rapturous religious poetry and also the Heptameron, which can startle even the jaded modern reader. Clément Marot, who made the translations of the Psalms that, set to music, were the joy and ornament of Protestant France, wrote many secular poems, also startling. Geneva itself scandalized Europe by printing ancient literature elsewhere banned, including other and more salacious works of Ovid. The historical characterization of so-called Puritanism precludes our looking to neighboring France for context, though Calvin was French and was widely read in England. English Protestants went to France and French Protestants came to England during periods of persecution. Shakespeare would have been following a familiar pattern in writing Venus and Adonis, which was published in a famously beautiful edition by a French Huguenot émigré printer in London. So the Puritans were not puritanical. Nor were they anti-intellectual or obscurantist. And they drew directly on the Continental Renaissance.

All this is to make the point that there were three highly distinctive, theologically articulate religious cultures in Elizabethan England, not the usual triad of Catholics, Protestants, and misanthropes. When the Acts of Uniformity were passed under Elizabeth, they criminalized both Catholic and Protestant forms of worship in that they departed from Anglican practice. Both Catholics and Protestants lost most of their civil rights, which were restored to both in the nineteenth century. Both suffered persecution and martyrdom. So, if Shakespeare seems cautious and elusive, it could mean that he was Catholic, or that he was Protestant, or that he did not want to align himself with or against any faction. His younger contemporary, René Descartes, was similarly elusive, probably on these same grounds. He described himself as masked, like an actor. It was the nature of the times.

But if Shakespeare did take seriously the great questions bruited in his civilization during the whole of his lifetime, then he might have reflected on the meaning behind, or beyond, it all — not the geopolitics of it, but the essential, shared truth that underlay these aggravated differences. Grace is grace. How would this be staged?

* * *

I wrote my doctoral thesis on Shakespeare, and I am very glad I did, even though, in retrospect, I think I was wrong about a great many things. I suppose there is enough money in the world to induce me to read it again sometime, foreign currencies being taken into account. Still, the research that went into the writing of it did acquaint me with the times a little, and also with critical and historical approaches to them. I have been a truant these many years, so I am not abreast of new work in the field. I have glanced now and then at a historicism that does not seem to me to be particularly attentive to history. I have diverted myself with arguments in support of the Earl of Oxford’s authorship of the works conventionally attributed to Shakespeare. And I can only say that if Oxford was secretly their author, the perfection of his disguise is the fact that poetry the earl is known to have written is strikingly inferior to the work he published pseudonymously, under the name Shakespeare. It would have required phenomenal effort in a great poet to have written work so undistinguished.

As a student I was mystified though not interested by the elaborate concluding acts of so many of the later plays, thoroughgoing reconciliations, sometimes among a great many characters. Critics and professors excused these endings, and dismissed them, as the sort of thing the audience would have wanted. Old Will was a canny businessman. Our groundlings seem to prefer concluding mayhem of some kind, a shootout or an act of war, merciless and mindless retaliation for unforgivable crimes. So it might be interesting to consider what sort of crowd it was that could be pandered to with these long scenes of gratuitous pardon. The use of the word “gratuitous” is considered. Grace is gratuitous. Etymologies are lovely things.

I think it is probably an error to suppose that any serious artist allows considerations like these — i.e., what will bring in the crowds, and what will appeal to their presumedly unrefined tastes — to govern important choices, certainly not with the frequency they would have done in Shakespeare’s case. Cymbeline, Antony and Cleopatra, Measure for Measure, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, all end with elaborate scenes of reconciliation that all of them are designed from the first act to bring about. This is to say, reconciliation is their subject. If this is conventional in comedy, it is odd in plays as grave as these are. And what happens in these scenes is no sorting out of grievances, no putting of things right. Justice as that word is normally understood has no part in them. They are about forgiveness that is unmerited, unexpected, unasked, unconditional. In other words, they are about grace.

There are perils in attempting a distinction between characteristics of a particular writer’s work and the conventions that prevailed among writers active when he was. Christopher Marlowe is as close to being Shakespeare’s peer as any of his contemporaries, and he died young, leaving just a few plays, so the value of comparisons between the two is limited. Still, Dr. Faustus goes to hell, Tamburlaine brutalizes the eastern world without compunction, Aeneas abandons Dido without a backward glance, and Edward II dies onstage, a wretched victim, leaving the child king Edward III to avenge him by sending his own mother to the Tower. Nowhere is there a glimpse of anything that might be called grace, divine or human.

Shakespeare could imagine a world without grace as well, as he did in Macbeth, Timon of Athens, Coriolanus, and the appalling Titus Andronicus. These plays are all set in pagan antiquity, but so, for example, is Pericles, Prince of Tyre, in which Diana of Ephesus emerges as the giver of grace, felt among its characters as profoundest human love. If reconciliation scenes pleased the crowd, then Marlowe might have tried his hand at one. But he had a formula of his own for pleasing them, one that seems to have appealed to unembarrassed resentment and a taste for violence. He anticipates the relentless dramas of the Jacobean theater, as Shakespeare does also in the plays I have just named. It is the movement toward reconciliation, toward act 5, that makes many of Shakespeare’s plays exemplify the kind of drama we call Elizabethan, and might as well call Shakespearean, since I at least am not aware of any other playwright who shaped his plays in this way.

Let us consider a hard case: Hamlet. Hamlet raises a great many questions. Why has Horatio been at the Danish court since old Hamlet’s funeral, for months, that is, without encountering Hamlet until he feels he must speak to him, having seen the king’s ghost? He is on familiar terms with the castle guards, who defer to him as a “scholar.” And he seems impressively informed about state affairs. Yet he seems to have stayed below stairs, as it were. By comparison with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he is never greeted by Claudius or Gertrude or addressed by them otherwise than as a servant, though Hamlet calls him “fellow student” and mentions his “philosophy.” Clearly he has been at Wittenberg with Hamlet. Poor students often paid their way by acting as servants to wealthy students, and this might explain Horatio’s ambiguous status.

The title of the play, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, is also ambiguous. The word “prince” could mean the son of a king, or it could mean a ruler, as in Machiavelli’s use of it. Putting aside the fact that Hamlet is male and adult, the obvious successor to his dead father, there is the fact that old Hamlet has been murdered. These are the makings of a tragedy of revenge, Prince Hamlet being the “avenger of blood,” the one singled out by ancient tradition to “set things right.” This is only truer because Claudius’s crime is beyond the reach of any other authority. And the legitimacy of a king had everything to do with the health of a kingdom, so Hamlet would have had an obligation to act even weightier than revenge.

Hamlet is a Renaissance man captive to a medieval world, and, as Laertes says, he is subject to his birth. He is a learned prince of the Renaissance type. He longs to go back to school at Wittenberg and is forbidden to. Kings kept those who might challenge them at court close at hand, where they could be watched, and Claudius has very good grounds for suspecting Hamlet, having at the least “popp’d in between the election and [his] hopes.” He is intensely aware of his nephew’s demeanor, reading in his mourning and melancholy not merely grief and disillusionment but also sinister intent.

But Hamlet does not want his traditional roles, as king or as avenger. He really does want to return to his life as a student. This is apparent in the eagerness with which he greets Horatio, who at first deflects Hamlet’s shows of friendship by insisting on his own subordinate place. Hamlet is a classic Shakespearean character, a king who is and is not a king. His rank makes his intentions toward Ophelia presumptively dishonorable, deprives him of freedom to go where he wishes and live as he wishes, and deprives him of friendship as well, which in Horatio is at first reduced to self-protective deference, and in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to feigning and informing. Granting the endless complexities of the play, the drift of it brings Hamlet back to himself, so to speak. From the first he is in some ways remarkably innocent. His father has died under doubtful circumstances, the crown has been usurped. Yet he seems to entertain no suspicions until a ghost comes from the grave to lay things out for him. He is appalled by his mother’s disloyalty to his father, but does not reflect at all on her marriage to Claudius as having been meant to help legitimize him as king. He chooses to doubt the ghost, setting a snare for Claudius with a play that enacts the murder as described by the ghost, and Claudius is terrified, losing composure altogether, so suspicion is confirmed and Hamlet tells himself he is resolved to act. Then he comes upon Claudius praying and bethinks him that if his uncle dies at his prayers he will go to heaven — an interesting assumption, considering the theological weightiness of usurpation, incest, and the murder of a king. Claudius himself remarks on the ineffectuality of repentance when the penitent intends to go on enjoying the benefits of his sins.

It is not that Hamlet cannot make up his mind, but that he refuses proof that would persuade anyone else, then, finally convinced, talks himself out of an opportunity to be avenged. In a sense the prince descends for a while into the roles that are expected of him, treating Ophelia with vicious contempt, using royal authority, both feigned and real, to have Rosencrantz and Guildenstern killed. But a strange innocence in Hamlet, recovered or never really lost, allows the ending to unfold as it does. When he receives the challenge to duel with Laertes, he takes it in good faith, seeming to anticipate nothing worse than “taking the odd hit” from his opponent’s foil. At the same time he tells Horatio, “Thou wouldst not think how ill all’s here, about my heart.” He has just recounted to Horatio Claudius’s plot to have him killed in England, which he thwarted in obedience to “a kind of fighting” in his heart. He has recounted his uncle’s crimes and asks, “Is’t not perfect conscience, / To quit him with this arm? and is’t not to be damn’d, / To let this canker of our nature come / In further evil?” And now he has accepted Claudius’s request that he engage in a sword fight with a man who holds him responsible for the deaths of his father and sister. He feels again an intuitive dread, which Horatio encourages. Yet, even after Gertrude is poisoned and Hamlet is wounded by Laertes’s unbated sword, he reacts as if the plot could have come from anywhere. He shouts, “O villainy! Ho! Let the door be lock’d: Treachery! Seek it out.” Laertes is obliged to tell him that treachery “is here,” and murderous old Claudius is to blame.

In the first scene of the play we hear about Fortinbras, the Norwegian prince who means to make Denmark answer for his father’s death. Claudius, his judgment perhaps wassail-impaired, sees good news in the fact that the king of Norway is pleased with Fortinbras for saying he has given over his plan to invade, and has rewarded him with a great deal of money and an invading army — bound for Poland, the ambassadors are told. And could they please pass through Denmark on their way. So Fortinbras is spared the trouble of invading, and all the great labor of defense described in the first scene is for nothing. The play does not allow any certain judgment about Fortinbras’s intentions, whether his low estimate of Claudius and of the state of things in Denmark is being acted on in this very transparent ruse, if ruse it is. Hamlet’s one act as king is to give his endorsement to things as they are, to Fortinbras, who has brought armed men into the Danish court. The endorsement hardly seems necessary, in the circumstances. But it does mean that Hamlet sees the presence of Fortinbras as fortuitous, and him as someone to be trusted with the welfare of a country toward which his intentions not long before had been vengeful. When Claudius lays out his plot for the murder of Hamlet to Laertes, he says Hamlet will suspect nothing, “being remiss, / Most generous and free from all contriving.” Not himself deceptive, Hamlet does not look for deception in others — even after he has fallen victim to another flagrant deception. Through it all, his mind is not tainted. This seems to be what we are seeing in the matter of Fortinbras.

Hamlet’s madness is both feigned and real, and it consists in his descent into the reality of his circumstances. He cannot naturalize himself to this reality, and, consciously, at least, he cannot see his way beyond it — except, perhaps, in the thought of death. As prince, and as madman, he is flattered, manipulated, spied on. His world would compel him to an act of homicide that, thoroughly as he can rationalize it in the world’s terms, and despite continuing provocations of the darkest sort, he finally seems to have put out of mind. And when he does this, he is restored to himself. He will die because he is a generous, uncontriving man in a world where these virtues are fatal vulnerabilities. Since he seems to have forgotten to despise Claudius and to condemn Gertrude, his mother, toward whom he acts with great courtesy and tenderness, he should also be called a gracious man. He would seem to have freed all faults.

If death seems a poor reward for his having stepped almost free of this corrupting and entangling reality, among the things that were true in Shakespeare’s time was the fact that to die for one’s faith or one’s conscience was not altogether unusual. Many heroes of the age went calmly to the stake when capitulation would have spared them. And their ends crowned their lives. In Shakespeare’s plays there tends to be a strong awareness of life after death. Both life and death are appraised differently than we moderns appraise them, for this reason. The dying Laertes says, “Exchange forgiveness with me, noble Hamlet: / Mine and my father’s death come not upon thee, / Nor thine on me.” Hamlet replies, “Heaven make thee free of it! I follow thee.” The efficacy implied here for simple human forgiveness is to be noted. These two right noble youths pass into eternity together, as if the madness of earth had never contrived to make them enemies.

Still, death is grave and terrible here and in all the plays, graver because the state of the soul at death is crucial to its immortal fate. What does Hamlet fear will be remembered of him if Horatio does not live after him to tell the tale aright? That the final scene will be interpreted by its appearance, and he will be thought to have carried out a brutal revenge intentionally, as his world would have expected, rather than as the agent of a destiny he could not evade. He might have said, “At least I have avenged the crimes against my father.” Instead he reacts to the catastrophe as a potential slander on his memory. Misinterpretation would be the final snare the world could deploy to make Hamlet less than Hamlet.

It is a part of my argument for Shakespeare’s theological seriousness to point out that this consciousness of the heavens is quite particular to him among the playwrights, at least so far as I know. I may rely too heavily on Marlowe in making this comparison. But there is a tendency among critics, in my experience, to relegate striking elements in Shakespeare’s work to cultural backdrop — Elizabethans simply assumed certain things, so (the reasoning here is not really clear to me) these things should not be taken to be especially important to Shakespeare. The further I look into the period, the more inclined I am to doubt that we have equipped ourselves to make such generalizations about worldview. More to the point, no great statement about reality, for example, that the heavens are attentive to our thoughts and actions and will determine the fate of our souls, can be static, like simple information. It implies a profound relationship that unfolds continuously and compels, among other things, extraordinary self-awareness. Then in this way Shakespeare’s theological seriousness is simultaneous with his greatness as a dramatist.

* * *

Antony and Cleopatra are two fabulous, aging reprobates who toy with the fate of the world as few people in history have had the power to do. Power is prominent among Shakespeare’s fascinations, and in this ancient moment it is so hypertrophic that the influence of individual men can be reckoned at half the known world, or the whole of it. Preposterous and true. Shakespeare studies power in its waning, its dissolution. What does it consist of? So long as it retains its integrity it seems simply to define itself, to be self-evident. When it disintegrates it is revealed to be compounded of will, custom, kinship, loyalty, and opportunism, together with a magnetism of its own, which in some part always inheres even in fallen greatness. Its ebbing exposes the fact that it has always depended on the acquiescence of people in general, as well as of its servants and lieutenants and its potential competitors.

Granting all this, why does power center itself in certain individual figures, all of whom eat bread, need friends? How does this web of dependencies manifest itself in society and history as a force not to be resisted? Monarchy in Shakespeare’s time and place claimed to take legitimacy from royal descent. But his history plays are studies in the difficulties that beset hereditary kingship, including, in its worst moments, the violent removal of some cousin claimants to the advantage of others. Still, volatile as it was, violent as it often was, it provided a theoretical basis, at least, for deference and acknowledged right. Antony, Octavius, Lepidus, and Pompey are all aristocrats, but none of them can make a claim to a dynastic right of succession, since the disaster that has elevated them to the power they hold, share, and contend for is the collapse of a republic. From the first we are shown a cold Octavius, a doting Antony, a foolish Lepidus, all of them drunkards except Octavius. The soldiers who attend them regard them with discreet contempt. Yet they are all powerful still, commanders of immense fleets and armies, and of the obedience of the familiars who see them at their worst and nevertheless are prepared to give their lives for them. When warfare among them leaves only Antony and Octavius as competitors, in battle between them great Antony disgraces himself, his fleet following Cleopatra’s in uncompelled retreat. He tries to recover in a second battle, is betrayed by Cleopatra’s forces, and fails. Cleopatra is then so fearful of him that she sends a messenger to tell him she is dead, and in his grief at this message he wounds himself fatally, botching his suicide. Hearing of this, she stages her own death.

On its face, this is not an especially attractive story. It is remarkably uncomplicated by Shakespeare’s standards, though its movement is familiar — the waning of power and status in characters for whom status and power are so habitual and defining that the loss of them confounds identity itself. There is, however, a remarkable countermovement. Even as Antony and Cleopatra decline, as the world measures such things, the play affirms them by casting a golden, one might say celestial, light over their very human failings. This is an effect of the great irony that embraces the events the play embodies. This Octavius Caesar, in defeating Antony, or rather in enjoying the consequences of his self-defeat, will become Caesar Augustus the unrivaled emperor, mighty enough to decree that all the world should be enrolled. Antony’s defeat, which is his utter though not honorable, virtuous, or politic love for the disreputable queen of Egypt, fulfills a great cosmic intent. Augustus brings the peace that was the prophesied condition for the coming of the Messiah. If anyone, in all Shakespeare’s plays, is the chosen of the Lord, it is this unlikable Octavius, who is entirely overshadowed by those he has conquered.

What might Shakespeare the theologian be pondering here? The acceptance by the Renaissance and Reformation of material we might find morally doubtful has been noted. Clearly the much mooted question of destiny, of divine determination, arises with singular clarity at the moment of this break in historic time, when the engrossing turmoil of earth is preparing the occasion for a consummate act of divine grace. Antony is destined to lose, brought down by what pagans and Christians would agree were license, vice, and folly, but destined to lose in any case so that order-imposing Caesar Augustus can establish his great peace. Then, since divine intent unfolded as it did, must it be true that God willed the transgressions of this grandly decadent pair? Or does the vast graciousness of divine intent not only forgive but even transform — therefore free — all faults? If this were to happen, what would it look like? How could it be staged?

Almost from its beginnings Christianity has attempted to reconcile the indubitable virtue of many great pagans with the fact that they seemed to fall outside the scheme of salvation. But these particular pagans were not virtuous, so Shakespeare has set himself an interesting variant of the problem. Let us say that he was exploring another thought, controversial in his time, that the Greek agape, traditionally translated into Latin as caritas, or charity, actually meant love. This change is reflected in the Geneva Bible, which Shakespeare knew well. However close caritas may have been to agape when Jerome flourished, “charity” had drifted a very long way from “love” in early modern English, a distance still marked in our own usage. And what we learn at the end of this play is that Antony and Cleopatra really do love each other. This might seem trivial. But Thomas More pointed out that the word “love” could refer to a commonplace, even base, human emotion and relationship. Granting his point, then Scripture would seem intentional in its permitting this association to be made. The note on 1 Corinthians, chapter 13, in the Geneva Bible says that in “the life to come … there at length shall we truly and perfectly love both God, and one another.” And perhaps Antony and Cleopatra participate in this greatest of the theological virtues, the one that makes conditional all the others, even faith. Certainly this understanding would resolve the anomaly of the implied exclusion of every kind of pagan and infidel from the divine love and grace Christians call salvation.

I feel justified in this speculation by the importance of love in Shakespeare. The great acts of grace at the end of many of his plays are the restoration of lost loved ones. Human love in the purest forms we can know it, wife and husband, parent and child, has the aura and the immutability of the sacred. And it is surely to be noted that the settings of these plays are typically non-Christian.

In act 1, in his first appearance and his second sentence, Antony tells Cleopatra that, to find a limit to his love, “Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth,” alluding to a text he would not have known, the book of the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah is, for the New Testament, the great prophet of the world transformed. Aside from allusions to Herod of Jewry, another important contemporary, there are ironies in the speeches of both of them. Chiding him for faithlessness, Cleopatra reminds Antony that once “Eternity was in our lips and eyes, / Bliss in our brows’ bent; none our parts so poor, / But was a race of heaven.” When he hears of her (supposed) death, Antony says, “I will o’ertake thee, Cleopatra, and / Weep for my pardon.” And he says, “Where souls do couch on flowers, we’ll hand in hand, / And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze”—his imagination of a life to come continuous with all the particular luxurious and whimsical charm of the life they have lived together. And his perfect forgiveness of Cleopatra, who has not only destroyed his greatness but has now caused his death, is striking against the false promise of Caesar’s grace, ending with the aside “You see how easily she may be surprised,” that is, captured. And Cleopatra has her “dream” of an Antony “past the size of dreaming.” She says, “Methinks I hear Antony call … husband, I come: / Now to that name my courage prove my title.”

These immortal longings have the authority beautiful language and beautiful thought can give them. The Renaissance and the Reformation loved these great souls who, in their way, haunted pagan antiquity uniquely, offering instances of the unquestionable power of human love, with all this might imply about their having a place in divine love. Nothing is asserted in this play. They die, and the rest is silence. Shakespeare, my theologian, never asserts but often proposes that we participate in grace, in the largest sense of the word, as we experience love, in the largest sense of that word. Beauty masses around the moments in which these thoughts are spoken and enacted. In the words of the Geneva Bible, love “is not provoked to anger; it thinketh no evil.” Finally both Antony and Hamlet are gracious after unthinkable, then fatal, provocations. In this they are at last fully themselves, purely the souls God gave them.