Overview

The most influential treatments of Shakespeare's Sonnets have ignored the impact of theology on his poetics, examining instead the poet's ""secular"" emphasis on psychology and subjectivity. Reading Shakespeare's Will offers the first systematic account of the theology behind the poetry. Investigating the poetic stakes of Christianity's efforts to assimilate Jewish scripture, the book reads Shakespeare through the history of Christian allegory. To ""read Shakespeare's will,"" Freinkel argues, is to read his bequest to and from a literary history saturated by religious doctrine. Freinkel thus challenges the common equation of subjectivity with secularity, and defines Shakespeare's poetic voice in theological rather than psychoanalytic terms. Tracing from Augustine to Luther the religious legacy that informs Shakespeare's work, Freinkel suggests that we cannot properly understand his poetry without recognizing it as a response to Luther's Reformation. Delving into the valences and repercussions of this response, Reading Shakespeare's Will charts the notion of a ""theology of figure"" that helped to shape the themes, tropes, and formal structures of Renaissance literature and thought.

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9780231123259

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Reviews

""Reading Shakespeare's Will is an exhilarating ride... an important and timely book that includes simply the best, most poetically and historically intelligent reading of the sonnets since Shakespeare's Perjured Eye."" - Marshall Grossman, University of Maryland

Freinkel brilliantly reorganizes our understanding of modern subjectivity as expressed in Shakespeare's supposedly Petrarchan poetry... what this book accomplishes is a major shift in out understanding of Renaissance lyric. -- Studies in English Literature Engaging, provocative, impressively learned, and heavily annotated... [Lisa Freinkel's] book does much relocate Shakespeare in relation to a theological tradition extending from St. Paul to Luther. -- Shakespeare Bulletin By dislodging our ways of thinking about conventions of allegory and our status as readers generally, Reading Shakespeare's Will does the field of Renaissance studies a tremendous service. We will be reading -- and discussing -- Freinkel's book for a long time. -- Christopher Martin, Sixteenth Century Journal Freinkel's style is artful and original, her research is comprehensive, and her assertions are intriguing... her detailed observations and commentary read and reread Shakespeare's figurative language from multiple perspectives, which illustrate her postmodern celebration of the undying ambiguity of figural interpretation. -- Gayle Gaskill, Renaissance Quarterly The writing is always dramatic and the argument presented with an eagerness. -- John Roe, MLR

Author Information

Lisa Freinkel is assistant professor of English at the University of Oregon.

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