Shakespeare on the Theological Origins of Modernity

I have claimed that Shakespeare’s histories are concerned with modernity and its symptoms but that the literary critics who have pointed this out have incorrectly identified the origin of modernity. Rather than projecting our own contemporary projects of disenchantment and social critique onto Shakespeare’s plays, as many Shakespearean critics have done, I think that his plays can be more fruitfully understood by attending to the theological origins of modernity.

With scholars such as Louis Dupré, Michael Allen Gillespie, Brad Gregory, and Hans Blumenberg, I attribute modernity’s advent to the theological and philosophical shifts in the Nominalist revolution in the 1400s. In short, the attempt in the fifteenth century to translate Christian theology from a Platonic to an Aristotelian framework ruptured the “ontotheological synthesis,” or sacramental ontology, that had structured Western Christendom for a millennium. The Eucharist became the ultimate test subject for the new ontological formations, because if Realism had any legitimacy as a metaphysical system, it certainly had to explain what was going on in Christianity’s quintessential sacrament. What was at stake was nothing less than the foundational assumptions of Western philosophical and religious thought, which had enormous ramifications for communal structures, cultural formations, semiotics, and ecclesiastical governance.

Shakespeare’s histories address this shift in two ways. First, they connect social atomization and the fall of language into nominalistic signification—which theorists usually identify as symptoms of modernity—to the shift from literal to symbolic models of the Eucharist. To see this, one must take as their assumption the notion that, properly enacted, Communion reconstitutes Christian community. Christ clarifies this Old Testament precedent when he instructs his followers that if they are at odds with one another, they should leave their gift at the altar, be reconciled with their brother, and then return to offer their gifts. The Communion ritual borrows this same logic: one cannot be right with God without being at peace with one’s neighbor.

When Richard II assassinates his brother, he breaks communion, and he doubles down on that sin by banishing those who know about the conspiracy. Not only that, through his lies, he compromises the validity of performative, speech-act language by forcing the assassin Thomas Mowbray and Henry Bolingbroke (later Henry IV) to swear an oath never to return to England and never to meet up on the continent. (He doesn’t want them getting any ideas and ganging up on him.) This moment is ritualized atomization, ex-communication, permanent prohibition of reconciliation, an inversion of Eucharist. He tells them,

You never shall, so help you truth and God,
Embrace each other’s love in banishment,
Nor never look upon each other’s face,
Nor never write, regreet, nor reconcile
This louring tempest of your home-bred hate . . .

To put this in liturgical language, he forbids them to pass the peace—the precondition of approaching the eucharistic table. Thus it is, in my view, appropriate that Shakespeare loads the histories with image after image of profane blood consumption, a parodic desecration of Eucharist. For example, John of Gaunt accuses Richard II of becoming a pelican that drinks its own lifeblood instead of offering it to its chicks; in medieval iconography, the pelican in her piety was constantly linked to Christ’s sacrifice, in bestiaries and on liturgical furniture. In another animal analogy, Richmond calls the tyrant Richard III a boar (which was his symbol on his coat-of-arms) that “swills [his subjects’] warm blood like wash [i.e., pig slop].” The recent BBC version of Richard II in The Hollow Crown series picks up on this. It includes a scene where the abbot of Westminster conspires to assassinate Bolingbroke as he offers the eucharistic elements to Aumerle.

The degradation of Communion fractures both community and language, and it leaves atomized individuals anxiously trying to recreate communion around lesser tables and through lesser rituals. Henry V famously attempts communal fraternity around the tavern table and on the field of Agincourt, but these attempts are insincere, abortive, and impermanent. Furthermore, since the Eucharist was the speech-act par excellence in pre-Reformation Catholic England, its desecration breaks the integrity from which subordinate speech-acts draw their vitality. As James Calderwood and John Kerrigan have shown, the histories are full of oath-breaking. Characters struggle to find an untainted holy object to ground their oaths. This crisis metastasizes in Richard III 4.4, when Elizabeth demands of Richard III, “Swear by something thou hast not wronged,” and everything he tries to swear by (the world, his father’s death, his own person, and even by God himself) she shoots down because he has already desecrated it. Without an inviolate Eucharist to ground other speech-acts, England descends into a nominalist crisis, where words are just words, neither substantially transformative nor even reflective of objective truth. During his deposition, Richard II realizes this and experiences an existential crisis. Who am I if I am not the king of England, he wonders. He vacillates between hubristic delusion—where he rhetorically boasts, “Is not the king’s name twenty thousand names?”—and despair, as he realizes that his name and the power it affords are, like his crown, hollow.

Second, the histories support the intuition that the prospect of modernity is both endlessly alluring and hopelessly doomed to failure, as Paul de Man and Friedrich Nietzsche, among others, have argued. De Man writes that the “authentic spirit” of modernity entails “a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at last a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure.” There is, of course, no shortage of reasons that would drive someone to seek escape from a sordid past. So long as there are sons trying to outrun the sins of their fathers, there will be incentive to declare that a new age has dawned. Genealogical anxiety drives them to proclaim a new dispensation and to invent histories to legitimate their place in it. Nervously, they tell stories that they have struck out on some new path untrammeled by tradition, precedent, or familial obligations. It’s easier to tolerate the cognitive dissonance that the past is dead than it is to make restitution for generational sin. But the past is neither dead nor past, as Faulkner told us, because the historical continuum cannot be ruptured, save by One who could rupture time itself and declare audaciously, “Behold, I am making all things new.” I think this explains the misanthropic tendencies of those who try to inaugurate a modernity by divorcing the present from the past. Nietzsche writes,

The past is judged critically, attacked at its very roots with a sharp knife, and brutally cut down, regardless of established pieties. This is always a dangerous process, dangerous for life itself. Men and eras that serve life in this manner, by judging and destroying the past, are always dangerous and endangered. For we are inevitably the result of earlier generations and thus the result of their mistakes, their passions and aberrations, even of their crimes; it is not possible to loosen oneself entirely from this chain.

None can control the massive force required to destroy the past and maintain the fiction that it is no longer relevant. This is why revolutions are bloody; compulsion is needed to make men assent to histories they know are false. De Man points out the irony of revolution: “The more radical the rejection of anything that came before, the greater the dependence on the past.” I have come to think the inverse is also true. The past works like a Chinese finger trap: the harder you try to extricate yourself from its constraints, the more tightly it constricts, and only by leaning into and toward the constraints can you escape its clutch. In other words, those most insistent that a new day has dawned are likeliest to rule by hook and crook.

Shakespeare explores this paradox in his depictions of the Hundred Years War between the Lancastrians and the Yorkists. Bolingbroke is tortured by guilt as he realizes that revolutions conceived in blood must be sustained by it. To his chagrin, he discovers that usurpers provide both the justification and model for future revolutionaries. He pledges to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to “wash this blood off from my guilty hand.” 1 Henry IV opens with his hope that a ceasefire in civil hostilities will permit him space and time to begin that crusade, but that turns out to be a fanciful dream. He spends the remainder of his life stamping out revolts in Northern England and Wales; he begs God’s forgiveness in his dying speech; he ironically expires in the “Jerusalem Chamber” of the palace. His son Prince Hal’s frantic prayers the night before the battle at Agincourt demonstrate that he believes he is accountable for his father’s sins. So nothing really changes. No new order emerges. The Lancastrians can make all the promises they want that they will start fresh, that a new order has taken hold, but their might derives solely from brute force, the political guarantor of all illegitimate despots. The Yorkists, who eventually overthrow them, match their brutality stride for stride.

Elevation of the Eucharist, detail from the Della Rovere Missal, Italy, Rome, ca. 1485–90 at the Morgan Library

When Henry Tudor, the Earl of Richmond (Henry VII), announces a new age of peace in his victory speech at the end of Richard III, he strikes an entirely different chord. He pledges to undo evils, not to sweep them under the rug. The slain were to be buried in class-appropriate graves, a marked departure from all the corpse defilement and mass burials that the Lancastrians perpetrated. Richmond pardons those who swear allegiance to him—again, an about-face from the serial extermination of political rivals. In contrast to Richard III’s serial political marriages and Henry V’s boorish courtship of Catharine, he marries the woman with an unquestionable claim to the English crown, and their marital union embodies the communal reunification they represent. Most importantly, all of these restorations are contingent upon the reinstatement of sincere eucharistic participation—Holy Communion. To reconcile “divided York and Lancaster – / Divided, in their dire division,” he restores the means and symbol of their communion, the precondition of all subsequent remedies. He summarizes, “And then, as we have ta’en the sacrament, / We will unite the white rose and the red.” The readings with which I take objection celebrate the modern sensibilities of Shakespeare’s second history tetralogy but ignore how they lead to internecine bloodshed, decimated communities, betrayal, and isolation. Nor do they take the plays up on their invitation to compare the failed Lancastrian and Yorkist modernities to the one Richmond proposes, where wrongs are remedied, where rituals are revivified, and where communion—real Communion—can materialize.