Building on previous speculations on the theological meaning Shakespeare intends with Falstaff, this essay argues that the character dramatizes the apprehension that tends to accompany a Protestant soteriology. Falstaff’s teasing Bardolph about his spiritual destiny bespeaks fright about himself, with the invoked memento mori calling attention to the unavailability of comforting ideas such as purgatory and self-determined repentance. Similarly, Falstaff’s forays into military impressment figure the incomprehensible nature of divine election, from a Protestant view. Through Falstaff, Shakespeare is not offering (...) a theological argument, so much as expressing sympathy for those afflicted with the anxieties to which Protestantism might leave them vulnerable. (shrink)

This essay, following an existing train of scholarship working to make sense of the Platonic connection to Utopia, argues for nomos as a useful angle in furthering this understanding. Raphael's approach to politics combines with the Utopian social system to suggest a highly Platonic vision of nomos, whereby social norms are absorbed into an essentialized nature, stripped of all arbitrariness and therefore, ostensibly, perfectly rational. The result is a sterile regime that fails to acknowledge the whimsical elements necessary to the (...) human soul and therefore also necessary to actual human societies. (shrink)

Factoring in the paradoxical relationship between faith and empiricism in Protestant epistemology, this essay attributes Othello’s disaster to his inability to take the leap of faith a Protestant sensibility demands. Protestantism inherits from Luther a rigid compartmentalization of the knowable and the mysterious. Othello, innately inclined and further conditioned to think in terms of “tangible evidence,” cannot imagine alternative possibilities. His handling of Cassio’s brawl shows how Othello requires that facts speak for themselves, and how he has no access to (...) the “imaginative effort” necessary for charity. Additionally, Iago’s manipulation renders imagination intolerable for Othello, and reinforces his tendency to literalism, doctrinal purity, and a need for certainty. (shrink)