Sinful Subjects: Shakespearean Sacramentality

Abstract

New Historicist and Cultural Materialist critics have subjected Shakespearean rituals to a process of Greenblattian evacuation over the past number of decades. Any spiritual significance in Shakespeare’s dramatisation of religious ceremony has been emptied out by a critical focus on the political imperative of ritual.¹ In part, of course, this is supported by the texts themselves: the marriages which close Measure for Measure, for example, suggest no prospect of a sacramental impartation of grace akin to that for which late medieval and early modern Catholics argue. Katherine Eisaman Maus has noted how marriage in Measure for Measure is “a form of discipline… an alternative to capital punishment” (179); in the words of Lucio, “marrying a punk…is pressing to death, whipping, and hanging” (V.i.515–16). Sacraments, according to this critical viewpoint, function in Shakespeare in non-spiritual ways.² Yet any reduction of sacramentality to a single function (the political rather than the spiritual, for example) loses sight of the plurality of sacramental functions in the late medieval and early modern period. This chapter, then, reasserts this plurality, analysing a trio of early seventeenthcentury Shakespearean plays — Macbeth, Othello and Measure for Measure — for evidence of the continuing significance of sacramental discourse on dramatic production as the sixteenth century turns to the seventeenth.

This is a subtle whore.

A closet, lock and key, of villainous secrets

(Othello IV.ii.21–2)

Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood Clean from my hands?

(Macbeth II.ii.57–61)