I received this e-mail from a friend about the apparent lack of God in Shakespeare. The text of the e-mail is given here in italics. My response follows.

 

Was watching King Lear the other night and it hit me as wondrous how little there is of God in Shakespeare….. Certainly ,  He is lurking in the background in the guise of death, life, joy , tragedy, despair , mystery, etc …but…. it is not overt. I thought “I’ll run this by Joseph. He’ll know.” But then I thought … better think this through …. might be a stupid question . Then…. I pick up Flowers From Heaven:A Thousand Years of Christian Verse by the venerable Pearce and …. mirabile dictu …. not one entry by Shakespeare. So…. what gives?

My reply:

 

Shakespeare’s work is profoundly Catholic, though not overtly so, and King Lear is one of the most Catholic of his plays. The problem is two-fold. First, it was illegal in Jacobean England to present contemporary religious or political issues on the stage, and doubly illegal to say anything positive about Catholicism. Not wishing to have his plays banned and himself thrown in prison, Shakespeare was constrained to be circumspect and ingeniously subtle. Imagine someone in Stalin’s Soviet Union trying to praise the West and you’ll have some idea of Shakespeare’s challenge to present the truth in tyrannical times. Second, most modern productions of Lear, including presumably the one that you watched recently, are poisoned by the nihilistic spin that modern producers and directors place upon it.

 

I have written extensively on the Catholic dimension in Lear: There are four chapters on Lear (chapters 22-25) in my book Through Shakespeare’s Eyes: Seeing the Catholic Presence in the Plays. I edited the Ignatius Critical Edition of King Lear, which includes an excellent introduction by R. V. Young and six contemporary critical essays, including one by yours truly (“King Lear: Seeing the Comedy in the Tragedy”). I also lecture on Lear in the series of lectures on Shakespeare’s Catholicism that I did for Catholic Courses and devote a couple of episodes to Lear in the second of The Quest for Shakespeare series that I did for EWTN. Finally, I’ve just finished a course on Lear for Homeschool Connections, the recording of which is available.  

 

Why is there nothing by Shakespeare in my anthology, Flowers of Heaven: One Thousand Years of Christian Verse? Well, first I decided that I would not include extracts from plays and would stick resolutely to verse written as verse; second, Shakespeare’s sonnets and other poems are either not religious at all or else, as is the case with “The Phoenix and the Turtle” and several of the sonnets, the religious element is subsumed (and Catholic), not obvious to modern readers without appropriate critical exposition. Since the anthology did not include such exposition, I decided (reluctantly) to omit them from the final selection.

 

I hope this helps.