Shakespeare Against Doctrine

Abstract

From the seventeenth century to the present, adapters and critics have done their best to discern what we might call Shakespeare’s political and religious tendencies: left-leaning, right-leaning, centrist; Anglican, anti-puritan, Erasmian; and so on. Recent, learned scholarship on Measure for Measure carries on this tradition, making Shakespeare out to be an advocate of one sort or another. We may, however, conceive of the plays in terms of analysis, not advocacy, as dramatic essays or staged inquiries. The point is not to celebrate Shakespeare’s “negative capability”– if anything, his ego seems to be always in evidence, taking pride in its relentless analytical competence. The plays do not so much sponsor doctrine as recommend ways to evaluate it; they pertain less to matter (or for that matter, spirit) than to method.