Review "Aimed especially at an undergraduate audience, Kastan combines deep historical learning, careful close reading, and a fast-paced prose style. The book also contains a steady stream of critical wisdom that I think scholars at any level could benefit from." --Kevin Curran, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900"One of the book's achievements is that it shows the reader how to acknowledge the importance of religion in the plays without being ruffled by crosswinds of fashionable doctrine...Kastan's virtue lies in showing us how to recognize "Shakespeare's imaginative engagement" with religion, and its way of "inviting our own."... is a journey of discovery and recollection with a witty and learned companion." --Graeme Hunter, Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity"A Will to Believe illustrates exactly the qualities it finds in Shakespeare: it is inclusive, open-minded, and sociable it offer[s] another careful consideration of Shakespeare's relation to Catholicism, a thoughtful meditation on his relation to non-Christian others, and a fresh take on the (in)significance of religion in Hamlet." --Kenneth J.E. Graham, University of Waterloo, Modern Philology "[T]opics . . . are handled with an incisive intelligence and adroitly deployed contextual scholarship which stimulate us into seeing these problems afresh. As a result, we finish the book understanding more acutely the complexities of religious life in Shakespeare's England, and appreciating more subtly the richly troubled religious world of his plays." --Paul Hammond, The Seventeenth Century "This is something that is long overdue in Shakespearian circles.... Kastan succeeds in transforming the debate over religion into something worth reading." --David J. Davis, The New Criterion"Kastan's short, accessible, and brilliantly readable book asks why the question of Shakespeare's belief is so important to us, and surveys the treatment of religion in the plays themselves. Its author successfully avoids both the recent tendency to read religion as merely a metaphor for power, and the equally unhelpful determination to interpret the plays as religious allegories." --Alison Shell, The Church Times"A Will to Believe is a substantial work by one of the major Shakespeareans of our time. It matches deft critical ability with proper scholarship, wide and deep learning with acute judgment." --Andrew Hadfield, Irish Times"Kastan's thoughtful, learned, and judicious readings leave us with genuinely new evaluations of what Shakespeare does and does not render visible, and make possible, in his extraordinary plays. A Will to Believe leaves us with a will to think, learn, and live more." --Julia Rienhard Lupton, Literature and History"Kastan writes compellingly of Hamlet, Measure for Measure, King John, Othello and The Merchant of Venice in agnostic terms while insisting on their numinous essence" --Tiffany Taylor, The Times Higher Education"...I give a hearty salute to a brilliantly graceful book that everyone interested in religion and in Shakespeare (i.e., just about all of us) should read and recommend to students and friends." --Renaissance Quarterly Read more About the Author David Scott Kastan is the George M. Bodman Professor of English at Yale University. Among his books are Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time (1982), Shakespeare after Theory (1999), and Shakespeare and the Book (2001). He has produced important scholarly editions of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part One, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Marlowe's Dr. Faustus and he edited the five-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature (2006). He currently serves as one of the general editors of the Arden Shakespeare. Read more
J**N
Religion in the plays
David Scott Kastan’s A Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion (not, emphatically not, “Shakespeare’s Religion’) is yet another well-informed, imperceptive riff on the Rorschach Shakespeare. I read only his pages on King John and The Merchant of Venice (he treats only four plays at any length; the others are Othello and Hamlet), but they are enough to demonstrate his unsubtle eye. KJ is examined in light of Bales’s play rather than the Troublesome Reign and, as is usual with solely verbal analysis, extracts only a few passages to make its case, with no sense that the plot is the argument or that structure makes its own comment. Rather, Kastan looks to Colley Cibber’s adaptation and to the interesting but irrelevant fact of an expurgated text for Catholic seminarians to guide his reading. “The frustrating ambivalence of Shakespeare’s play” is the take-away here, as it is in so many recent critical evasions. And in Merchant too he sees only the surface topics—Jewishness, usury, genre—and does not see the nexus of money and flesh or the existential issue of identity. These kinds of readings demonstrate, by their very blinkers, by how much they miss, how subtle Shakespeare actually is, how crucial it is to have an understanding of the overall design of a play, a meaningful context for the extracted passages, and a sense of the changes in the characters as the play progresses. (Kastan gives no hint that King John changes in the course of the play and that his early defiance of Pandulph is a point of departure rather than a terminus ad quem.) Consequently, Kastan’s stated aim—“to engage the question of what religion is doing in these plays”—is only superficially fulfilled, because he has a priori decided that although “[t]he plays…clearly assume a world in which God is immanent…that immanence is not their subject.”
S**A
I loved this book
I loved this book: it was smart, sensitive, sensible, and often surprising. Instead of some form of special pleading about Shakespeare, claiming him as a fellow traveler, this gives you a sense of how religion actually matters in the plays, without losing the sense that they are plays rather than polemics. The readings of Shakespeare are subtle and compelling; the information about religion and politics in the period is scrupulously scholarly. The book is wonderfully readable (and occasionally funny). This is an important book that appropriately has received wonderful reviews in the British newspapers. The cranky review on Amazon admits it only read about 25 pages. Read it all. It is terrific.
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