Afterword
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Wilson Richard
Abstract
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of the book. The book focuses on all new approaches to a familiar narrative, in which cultural form and religious reform were as closely identified as Shakespeare's constabulary suspects, and the aesthetic emerged as a placeholder for toleration when the Wars of Religion stalled, because, in the words of Hugh Grady, 'it began to appear that art, not any faith, would have to provide a cultural community'. 'Confession is a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship', Micheal Foucault had maintained, 'for one does not confess without the presence of the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile. The contributors to Forms of Faith have apparently taken a self-denying ordinance never to mention the term 'political theology' which so excites Shakespeareans.
Abstract
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of the book. The book focuses on all new approaches to a familiar narrative, in which cultural form and religious reform were as closely identified as Shakespeare's constabulary suspects, and the aesthetic emerged as a placeholder for toleration when the Wars of Religion stalled, because, in the words of Hugh Grady, 'it began to appear that art, not any faith, would have to provide a cultural community'. 'Confession is a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship', Micheal Foucault had maintained, 'for one does not confess without the presence of the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile. The contributors to Forms of Faith have apparently taken a self-denying ordinance never to mention the term 'political theology' which so excites Shakespeareans.
Chapters in this book
- Front matter i
- Dedication v
- Contents vii
- Notes on contributors ix
- Acknowledgments xii
- Introduction 1
-
Part I Religious ritual and literary form
- 1 Shylock celebrates Easter 21
- 2 Protestant faith and Catholic charity 39
- 3 Singing in the counter 56
- 4 Romancing the Eucharist 72
- 5 Edmund Spenser’s The Ruines of Time as a Protestant poetics of mourning and commemoration 90
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Part II Negotiating confessional conflict
- 6 Letters to a young prince 113
- 7 Tragic mediation in The White Devil 126
- 8 ‘A deed without a name’ 142
- 9 Henry V and the interrogative conscience as a space for the performative negotiation of confessional conflict 160
- 10 Formal experimentation and the question of Donne’s ecumenicalism 182
- 11 Foucault, confession, and Donne 196
- Afterword 216
- Index 239
Chapters in this book
- Front matter i
- Dedication v
- Contents vii
- Notes on contributors ix
- Acknowledgments xii
- Introduction 1
-
Part I Religious ritual and literary form
- 1 Shylock celebrates Easter 21
- 2 Protestant faith and Catholic charity 39
- 3 Singing in the counter 56
- 4 Romancing the Eucharist 72
- 5 Edmund Spenser’s The Ruines of Time as a Protestant poetics of mourning and commemoration 90
-
Part II Negotiating confessional conflict
- 6 Letters to a young prince 113
- 7 Tragic mediation in The White Devil 126
- 8 ‘A deed without a name’ 142
- 9 Henry V and the interrogative conscience as a space for the performative negotiation of confessional conflict 160
- 10 Formal experimentation and the question of Donne’s ecumenicalism 182
- 11 Foucault, confession, and Donne 196
- Afterword 216
- Index 239
