Calvin, Shakespeare, and Suspense

2021 ◽  
pp. 182-199
Author(s):  
Claire McEachern
Keyword(s):  
King Lear ◽  
Statistical Probability ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
The Future ◽  
Narrative Function

Calvin and Shakespeare both share an interest in the work of suspense; in the former case, as a feature of anticipating salvation (or not); in the latter, as a narrative function of a play’s conclusion. The mediation of Calvinist soteriology in England through the experimentalist thought of William Perkins links Shakespeare to Calvin, in a shared project of anticipating the future, an anticipation informed both by older providentialist models of probability (in which an ending simply confirms a prior pattern) and emergent models of statistical probability (in which the possibility of reversal of prior patterns exists). After an exploration of the logic of ending in Puritan deathbed accounts of Katherine Stubbes, the chapter concludes with a survey of the interplay of urgency and assurance in some of Shakespeare’s endings, those of King Lear and The Tempest in particular.

End-songs: final vistas of Spenser and Shakespeare

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Lanier Reid
Keyword(s):  
King Lear ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
The Face ◽  
Holistic Design ◽  
The Faerie Queene

Does Spenser’s Mutabilitie Songcomplete his epic,or point to a more transcendent scope in its final half?It derogates the pagan gods; itreforms the titan Mutability (unlike the discarded demon-titans in books 1-6); and its grand pastoral pageantfalls short of the symbolic city toward which the poem moves. Spenser’s holistic design is more clearly implied in his ordering of deadly sins (FQ 1.4). Compared with Dante’s pattern of sins, of purgations, and of ascensions in the Commedia, it offers a vital clue to The Faerie Queene’s format–based on the Christian-Platonismthat informs all its figures and sequences. Much evidence suggests Elizabeth I would admire a mystic structuring of this epic that so honors her. As for Shakespeare’s attentiveness to last things, we explore the theme of ‘summoning’ in Hamlet and King Lear, both concerned–as in The Summoning of Everyman–with ‘readiness’ and ’ripeness’ in the face of death and judgment. In The Tempest’s deft collocation of all social levels and artistic genres, and its odd convergence with Spenserian allegory, we debate the insistence on Shakespeare’s secularism by examining the range of meaning in Prospero’s ‘Art’.

Show the Heavens More Just: Ordering Society in Utopia, King Lear, and The Tempest

Moreana ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 45 (Number 174) (2) ◽  
pp. 193-210
Author(s):  
Arthur Kincaid
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Community ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Active Participation ◽  
King Lear ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
Legal Problems ◽  
The Way

Using essentially dramatic methods, creating an imaginary country, and setting up moral tension by having characters interact in a realm of complex ideas, Thomas More in Utopia draws the reader into active participation. Later, Shakespeare carries forward some of the ideas introduced in Utopia. In King Lear he responds to similar social and legal problems, and in The Tempest, inspired like More by recent discoveries of new lands, invents a strange world. Using georgic or pastoral dimensions, both authors explore the nature/nurture theme. While implying Christian ideals, More sets his fictive world outside Christianity, introducing it explicitly as the work reaches its conclusion - a technique Shakespeare echoes. By stimulating imaginative sympathy in their audience, these works open the way to a sense of community which accords with natural law.

The Sound of Shakespeare Thinking

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Longenbach
Keyword(s):  
King Lear ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
Henry Vi ◽  
History Of ◽  
Conscious Activity ◽  
King John

Thinking, Freud argued, begins as a pre-conscious activity, although we paradoxically become aware of it only in consciousness: whatever we know about thinking is already a representation of thinking. This chapter argues that Shakespeare in this sense invented what we most commonly recognize as the verbal embodiment of thinking. Contrasting 3 Henry VI with King John, it shows how, in the latter play, Shakespeare first constructed his signature representation of interiority in the highly disjunctive, self-revising speech of the Bastard. Moving on to examine the more fully ripened version of this kind of speech in King Lear and The Tempest, this chapter then shows how Shakespeare’s representations of thinking have inflected not only the history of the lyric poem in English (from Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ to Louise Gluck’s ‘Before the Storm’) but also the novel (Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway).

Shakespeare’s Prayers

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (5) ◽  
pp. 577-597
Author(s):  
David Beauregard
Keyword(s):  
Religious Affiliation ◽  
King Lear ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
Impossible Task ◽  
Altered Form

Abstract The various prayers in King Lear, Hamlet, Henry V, Cymbeline, and The Tempest are complex. If Shakespeare inherited medieval Catholic forms of prayer he preserved them in altered form, with considerable ambiguity. They provided useful dramatic forms, although any explicit appeal to Catholics in the audience seems unlikely. Since the English Reformation was still in the process of transition, Shakespeare’s prayers would have appealed to his “Protestant” as well as Catholic audience. Against the overstated claim that to look for Shakespeare’s religious affiliation is an impossible task and finally futile, I argue that the various inadvertent allusions to Catholic forms of prayer, and their sometimes ambiguous expression, are precisely what we would expect of a Catholic working under the Elizabethan and Jacobean regimes.

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