Robert G. Hunter maintains that the impact of the Protestant Reformation on the Elizabethan mind was in great part responsible for the emergence of the outstanding tragedies of the age. Luther and Calvin caused men to ask how God can be just if man is not free, and Shakespeare's greatest tragedies confront the vexing problems posed by these altered conceptions of man's freedom of will and God's providential control of natural circumstance. Shakespeare's audiences were not single-minded. He wrote for semi-Pelagians, Augustinians, Calvinists, and men and women who did not know what to think. Confl icting certainties, doubts, and uncertainties were his raw material, both within his mind and the minds of the audience. Hunter shows how Shakespeare uses the major attitudes toward God's judgment in creating Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear. He notes that Shakespeare's different viewpoints are the heart of the tragedies themselves. Even after Shakespeare's imaginative considerations of the mysteries, the tragedies seem to consistently provide questions rather than answers, and what they inspire in their beholders is more likely to be doubt than faith.

Every reader is an actor according to Rosenberg. To prepare the actor-reader for insights, Rosenberg draws on major intepretations of the play worldwide, in theatre and in criticism, wherever possible from the first known performances to the present day. The book is rich and provocative on every question about the play.

This book is the first to examine the influence of Shakespeare—particularly Hamlet—on D. H. Lawrence. Using the Bloomian theory of the “anxiety of influence” to probe the startling depths of Lawrence’s agon with his towering precursor Shakespeare, it closely examines Lawrence’s crypto-Jewish identity, as well as that of many of his highly individual characters, who embody the characteristics of Old Testament figures, and in so doing infuse a patriarchal strength and divine “religious” sublimity into civilized life. Lawrence’s claims about the self-sacrificing influence of Christianity on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, on the other hand, demonstrate how this influence carries over into the submission of the subject and the decline of Western Civilization. The book extrapolates this decline into a critique of the modern-day left-wing ideology that appropriates the self-abnegating individual to its collectivist ends. In responding agonistically to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Lawrence claims a far more complete, vital, and salubrious “consciousness” and a Weltanschauung that makes for greater, more fulfilling “life” thanks to the inner strength, psychic and sexual power of the Lawrentian “Self Supreme.” The book will appeal to Lawrence and Shakespeare scholars and enthusiasts who wish to appreciate Lawrence and Shakespeare as supremely profound writers and thinkers. Its unique demonstration of Bloomian literary theory makes it come poignantly alive for both graduate students and college professors.

First published in 1972. Shakespeare's God investigates whether a religious interpretation of Shakespeare's tragedies is possible. The study places Christianity's commentary on the human condition side by side with what tragedy reveals about it. This pattern is identified using the writings of Christian thinkers from Augustine to the present day. The pattern in the chief phenomena of literary tragedy is also traced

A.C. Bradley put Shakespeare on the map for generations of readers and students for whom the plays might not otherwise have become "real" at all' writes John Bayley in his foreword to this edition of Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. Approaching the tragedies as drama, wondering about their characters as he might have wondered about people in novels or in life, Bradley is one of the most liberating in the line of distinguished Shakespeare critics. His acute yet undogmatic and almost conversational critical method has—despite fluctuations in fashion—remained enduringly popular and influential. For, as John Bayley observes, these lectures give us a true and exhilarating sense of 'the tragedies joining up with life, with all our lives; leading us into a perspective of possibilities that stretch forward and back in time, and in our total awareness of things.

By connecting Shakespeare's language to the stunning artwork that depicted the end of the world, this study provides not only provides a new reading of Shakespeare but illustrates how apocalyptic art continues to influence popular culture today. Drawing on extant examples of medieval imagery, Roger Christofides uses poststructuralist and psychoanalytic accounts of how language works to shed new light on our understanding of Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear. He then links Shakespeare's dependence on his audience to appreciate the allusions made to the religious paintings to the present day. For instance, popular television series like Battlestar Galactica, seminal horror movies such as An American Werewolf in London and Carrie and recent novels like Cormac McCarthy's The Road. All draw on imagery that can be traced directly back to the depictions of the Doom, an indication of the cultural power these vivid imaginings of the end of the world have in Shakespeare's day and now.

Religious issues and discourse are key to an understanding of Shakespeare's plays and poems. This dictionary discusses over 1000 words and names in Shakespeare's works that have a religious connotation. Its unique word-by-word approach allows equal consideration of the full nuance of each of these words, from 'abbess' to 'zeal'. It also gradually reveals the persistence, the variety, and the sophistication of Shakespeare's religious usage. Frequent attention is given to the prominence of Reformation controversy in these words, and to Shakespeare's often ingenious and playful metaphoric usage of them. Theological commonplaces assume a major place in the dictionary, as do overt references to biblical figures, biblical stories and biblical place-names; biblical allusions; church figures and saints.