Panel 4: Secular Shakespeares

Schedule / Horaire

Friday 25 April 2014, 9h-10h30.

Room: V106B.

Leader / Organisateur

Edward Simon (USA)

Participants

  1. Andrea F. Trocha-Van Nort, United States Air Force Academy (USA)
    Shakespeare’s Secular Man within Nature
  2. Camilla Caporicci, University of Perugia (Italy)
    “I Guess One Angel in Another’s Hell”: The “Heretical” Nature of the Dark Lady Sonnets and Their Reception
  3. Jean-Louis Claret, Aix-Marseille University (France)
    Shakespeare the Atheist
  4. Cristiano Ragni, University of Perugia (Italy)
    «Necessity will make us all forsworn»: French brawls and Machiavellian kings in Shakespeare’s plays

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Andrea F. Trocha-Van Nort, United States Air Force Academy (USA)
Shakespeare’s Secular Man within Nature

Although human endeavor — the subject of Shakespeare’s plays – often falls shy of greatness, the reassuring perennity of the non-human, of matter, of its irrepressible forces and transcendent qualities, surfaces in critical moments of peripeteia or anagnorisis. We will first explore gradients of Shakespeare’s Lucretian perspective regarding matter, substance, and humans within the larger realm of nature. We then pursue mimetic complexities created by analogies from the natural world, a world to which characters often turn to comprehend a crisis. Finally, we will consider characters’ embracing of the natural world in the face of death, when forfeiting earthly victory to Fortune.

2. Camilla Caporicci, University of Perugia (Italy)
“I Guess One Angel in Another’s Hell”: The “Heretical” Nature of the Dark Lady Sonnets and Their Reception

The strongly “anti-Christian” nature of the second part of Shakespeare’s Sonnets is especially notable, although critics have generally been little inclined to acknowledge its highly subversive philosophical message, more or less intentionally ignoring the Dark Lady section, summarily dismissed as an example of parodic inversion of the Petrarchan model. I will demonstrate that, in these sonnets, Shakespeare calls into question the very foundations of Christian thought in order to show their internal inconsistencies, and to propose instead a new ontological paradigm that, based on materialistic, Epicurean and Brunian principles, proclaims reality to be an indissoluble union of spirit and matter.

3. Jean-Louis Claret, Aix-Marseille University (France)
Shakespeare the Atheist

Shakespeare loved to position himself on top of the cliff that overlooked the sea of unbelief but never actually took the plunge. While critics are still currently endeavouring to determine whether Shakespeare was a Catholic or a Protestant, one may wonder if atheism could have been his response to the ongoing troubles the Reformation had actually brought about in early modern England. After all, atheism was a long tradition that, Alan Sinfield recalls, dates back to Epicurus and Lucretius, was revivified by Renaissance neoplatonism and spurred on by nascent empiricism. Moreover, “people do not necessarily believe what they are told…” (152)

4. Cristiano Ragni, University of Perugia (Italy)
«Necessity will make us all forsworn»: French brawls and Machiavellian kings in Shakespeare’s plays

In Elizabethan England, the outbreak of a possible war of religion was a critical issue, involving the most important exponents of politics and culture and Shakespeare’s 1590-plays were written within this particular background. By demonstrating their possible connection with the 1598 Edict of Nantes, the successful restaging of late Christopher Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris and the modern theories of Giordano Bruno and of Alberico Gentili, Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford, I would focus on the instrumental, Machiavellian use of religion seemingly proposed by Shakespeare to create a national – though fictional it could be — unity.