Birth Places: Shakespeare’s Beliefs / Believing in Shakespeare

Abstract

Hello. I am Julia Lupton and I am not a biographer. I speak to you today as a new observer of Shakespearean biography, which I've come to respect, both in preparing today's remarks, and in listening to these extraordinary proceedings, as playing a vital role in our field's scholarly ecology. I start with a text that Brian Cummings set up for us in his Anniversary Lecture, and that Larry Rhu returned to in the question period yesterday morning. (Great to be in such company!) Henry James' novella, The Birthplace, features an intellectually ambitious and financially stressed middle-aged couple, Mr. and Mrs. Morris Gedge, who receive an extraordinary offer to become caretakers of …. "The Birthplace." (Shakespeare is never mentioned by name, but the reference is clear.) Early in their adventure, Morris Gedge tells his wife, "'The more we know Him … the more we shall love Him. We don't as yet, you see, know Him so very tremendously'" (9). Every Shakespeare biography adjudicates among love, knowledge, and the limits of knowledge in different ways, and with different consequences. Too much love reduces biography to hagiography, while too much knowledge may drain our subject of its literary interest and affective charge. Finally, the limits of knowledge function as both spur to critical investigation and as invitation to imagine, interpret, and invent. If biography combines love and knowledge in the form of history and fiction, religion nominates that area of life writing where knowledge meets its limits, and where love has no bounds. My remarks fall into three short sections. I begin with a review of current scholarship on Shakespeare and religion; I turn to an example from Cymbeline of what I call Shakespeare's abounding secularism, and I end by returning to James' "The Birthplace" as a critical allegory of Shakespearean biography.