I think your points are good ones, Jon, & was thinking also that quiet
often Christian metaphors, Christian ideas, play about the characters
speeches, even when there are no Chrsitian figures in the plays -- think of
Othello's recognition that he is damned...
>
> Shakespeare's audience (as Gillian remarks) didn't have to go to the
>theater for their Christianity; they got that in church.
>
> But surely it goes too far to say that Christian elements are
>"rigorously excluded." Just off hand I can think of the friar in Romeo
>and Juliet, the dour dogmatic priest who reluctantly presides over
>Ophelia's burial, also in Hamlet Claudius praying futilely for
>repentance, the fake monk in Measure for Measure (a title taken
>incidentally from the New Testament)...
>
> Many of the plays are set in pre-Christian eras. Shakespeare was
>never bothered by anachronisms of various kinds, but even he knew
>enough not to have a Christian priest show up in ancient Athens.
>
> Christianity may not be prevalent in the plays exactly because it was
>so deeply ingrained into society. It can be assumed as part of the
>cultural environment, and so doesn't need any special treatment.
>
> The Renaissance artistic world in general seems more pagan than
>Christian.
Yup, which is why it's named so. And perhaps a certain range in art is not
really possible under a 'purely' Christian attitude. Which is why I found
Lewis Hyde's _Trickster Makes This World_ such an intriguing study: it
slyly insinuates that art & culture are much more likely to thrive under
polytheism than under monotheism. All that chaos, at work...
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5
(h) [780] 436 3320 (b) [780] 492 0521
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
Shakespeare
Drag yr mouldy old bones
Up these stairs & tell me
What you died of,
I think
I've got it
Too.
Sharon Thesen
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