Shakespeare and the Early Modern Self 177
Shakespeare’s Joan of Arc often comes off as a half- mad witch.
The clergymen who try her and eventually have her executed are
by and large sadistic demons. The prelates we encounter at the start
of Henry V goad the new king to war to augment their own fortunes.
Scrope the Archbishop appears in only one scene in Shakespeare,
where he is brought forth, accused as a traitor and sent to execu-
tion. The Doctor of Divinity in Hamlet churlishly refuses Ophelia
full burial honors. Shakespeare’s friars tend to be corrupt or readily
corrupted, as Friar Laurence is in Romeo and Juliet. (An exception
is Friar Francis, in Much Ado about Nothing, one of the saner indi-
viduals in the play. He concocts the useful scheme that gets the
lovers back together.) Granted, when Shakespeare wants to get rid
of a character in a more or less creditable way, he is inclined to send
him off to a monastery, as he does the Duke at the close of As You
Like It.
The overall point isn’t that Shakespeare is anticlerical, though he
does seem a bit more skeptical about the virtues of priests and
bishops than he is about the virtues of the laity. (Shakespeare tends
to be skeptical about everyone’s claim to virtue.) It’s rather that his
anointed religious fi gures enjoy no par tic u lar prominence as reli-
gious fi gures. He treats them the way he treats everyone else, though
he does seem to like them a bit less.
Overall, religion gets the silent treatment in the poet we imagine
takes the whole of human life as his fi eld of inquiry. How can a play-
wright be considered universal and have no consequential interest
in what is arguably the most im por tant of human commitments,
religion?
Leo Tolstoy’s essay on Shakespeare may be the most reviled piece
of critical writing committed by a major author. Yet at the heart of
the novelist’s indictment is a simple observation. Shakespeare is
not a Christian. Nor, one might add, is he anything else. Religious
values have no signifi cant place in his work. None of his characters