Year: 2003
Type: article
Abstract: Thanks to a chapter on tobacco in my first book, An Empire Nowhere," says Jeffrey Knapp, "I've often been asked whether I smoke.But no one who has read a portion of Shakespeare's Tribe has ever asked me whether I go to church."The reason for this lapse of scholarly or perhaps gossipy curiosity, he explains, is the embarassing self-evidence that only a "devout Christian would want to claim that Shakespeare was religious." 1 In the protocols of America's public sphere, religion, like smoking, is a private vice, possibly even less healthy; one's religion is certainly less mentionable than one's smoking habits in polite company.Knapp goes on to explore, in his marvellous book, some of the reasons for the discomfort felt by the prospect of a religious Shakespeare.In contemporary criticism, religion is apt to be seen as politics in another guise, and the task of a political criticism will be to deliver the medieval or early modern text from its own illusions, to complete the partial insights which it had not the language to say in its own time.Contemporary critics habitually exhibit what Quentin Skinner has called this "familiar but condescending form of interpretative charity." 2 Indeed, we are far more likely to see critics pondering the failures of a medieval or early modern text to address our concerns than we are to find engagement with the complex ways in which these texts conceive their own, often thoroughly different, concerns.But, to quote Skinner again, "to demand from the history of thought a solution to our own immediate problems is thus to commit not merely a methodological fallacy, but something like a moral error. . . .[T]o learn from the past -and we cannot otherwise learn at all -the distinction between what is necessary and what is the product merely of our own contingent arrangements, is to learn the key to self-awareness itself." 3 One product of our own contingent arrangements is precisely what
Authors: David Aers, Sarah Beckwith
Institution: Duke University
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2005490220