‘Loves Best Habit’: Eros, Agape, and the Psychotheology of Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Abstract

The turn to religion in Shakespeare studies has been described, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, as a return to critical theory. In Julia R. Lupton’s formulation, the ‘“religious turn” in Renaissance studies represents the chance for a return to theory, to concepts, concerns, and modes of reading that found worlds and cross contexts, born out of specific historical situations, traumas, and debates, but not reducible to them’.¹ This characterization of the religious turn reflects a desire to move beyond the limits of thematically oriented historicisms — a desire Philip Lorenz expresses when he asserts that ‘To really “re-turn” to religion … would be to turn to the turns themselves: the tropes of theology that screen and animate… Renaissance [literature].’² I would like to take up Lorenz’s challenge by showing how Shakespeare’s use of a particular Pauline figure in the sonnets reveals that the experience of love in the poems constitutes a distinctly post-Reformation species of psychotheology — a mode of subjectivity that emerges from the contradictions between Neoplatonic Eros and reformist agape.³ In short, I want to suggest that individual poems in the sequence are often structured by converging and diverging relations between the mutuality of Neoplatonic love as theorized in the Florentine school and the asymmetry of Reformation agape as envisioned in the Protestant tradition. My hypothesis, quite simply, is that the voice in the sonnets and the non-religious wit that animates it are shaped by the speaker’s variously conflicting allusions to Neoplatonic and Reformation ideas on love. The result is a poetics that remains irreducible to either context.