Critical Survey

This special issue aims to participate in the ‘turn to religion’ experienced by Shakespearean scholarship in the last few decades by delving into an undeveloped field of research within the area of Shakespeare studies: the author's religious afterlives.¹ By focusing on specific case studies, we propose to analyse how the author and his work have been used to illustrate and support theological and educational concepts; translated considering the implications of biblical intertextuality; variously recreated in religious terms and in different religious contexts; and taught from religious and spiritual standpoints.

This article argues that three Swedish translators of Shakespeare, Olof Bjurbäck (1750–1829), Johan Henrik Thomander (1798–1865) and Carl August Hagberg (1810–1864), understood their tasks in relation to what they saw as fundamental religious, specifically Protestant, precepts. All three were either bishops in the state church or came from a family of clerics (Hagberg). While Bjurbäck's prose translation of Hamlet (1820) owes its religious background to Rousseau and Luther, the later Thomander insisted on faithfulness to the original yet also emphasising the centrality of secular works in Christian instruction, and Hagberg owes a debt to the Protestant notion of going ad fontes. In short, rather than constructing a narrative of secularisation around the three translators, this article concludes that Protestant ideology, while itself changing, remained important to understand their work.

Intertextuality is paramount in literary translation. This article studies the biblical composite permeating the second scene of the third act of Shakespeare's Richard II. It focuses on how Shakespeare's use of the scriptural concepts of kingship is transposed into Spanish by the most widely read translators of these plays. Special attention is paid to the way Shakespeare represents kingship in Richard II by quoting from the Bible. The methodology employed in this intertextual comparison involves a comparative analysis of the transposition component in both the source and the receiving intertext (the Spanish version of the text). The conclusions aim to encourage greater attention to be paid to intertextuality in the practice of translation, particularly after comparing the strengths and weaknesses of the five Spanish translations compared in this article.

This article examines how S. Ansky's 1918 play The Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds and its subsequent adaptations on stage and screen appropriate Romeo and Juliet, transforming Shakespeare's tragedy, through Kabbalah and Jewish folklore, into one that ‘repairs’ the story of star-crossed lovers and the material world that they seek to escape. The Dybbuk is a ‘reparative tragedy’, one that intersects multiple levels of restoration, healing and repair. Generically, the play and its later stage and screen adaptations recuperate and refigure Shakespeare's tragedy; materially, it calls for the repair of past and impending trauma, suffering and severed human relationships. These levels, as well as others, culminate in the play's overriding spiritual one: the play follows the ‘reparative’ narrative of Kabbalah itself, with its goal of tikkun olam – to repair the world.

This article focuses on the omnipresent religiosity that permeates Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996). The film creates an unconventional combination of a dystopian world – where violence, love, wealth and Catholicism are closely intertwined – and keenly focuses on the Capulets’ and the Montagues’ troubling relationship with religion. Drawing on previous studies by critics such as Christopher Baker, James N. Loehlin and Alan Hager, this article deals, first, with the various ways in which Luhrmann shows transgressions of Catholic faith and practices; second, how his film transgresses the original source text in religious terms; and third, how these transgressions also relate to a spiritual journey towards reconciliation.

Justin Kurzel's Macbeth (2015) reflects the religious intertextuality that permeates cultural debates about gender underlying Shakespeare's text. The aim of this article is to determine the extent to which Kurzel's cinematic text challenges or conforms to medieval and early modern gender construals in its attempt to allegedly rewrite and redeem Lady Macbeth by articulating hegemonic Christian and Pagan discourses on womanhood, femininity and (dis)embodiment. In this context, Julian of Norwich's theology, especially her conception of ‘divine motherhood’ and sin, is key to assess the film's concern with atoning Lady Macbeth for her transgressions through its depiction of her haunting motherhood, which is presented as the origin of her grief and guilt as well as her road to penitence and redemption.

What can Buddhism offer contemporary religious understandings of King Lear? Shakespeare's great wisdom play has been viewed, more often than not, as pessimistic, even nihilistic, in its tragic rendering of the human condition. A Buddhist perspective challenges the premises of such a bleak reading by offering profound insight into how suffering gives rise to compassion, empathy and wisdom, rather than despair. Focusing particularly on the enigmatic spirituality and moral function of Edgar, this article illuminates his character through the revered teachings of a classic Indian text of Mahāyāna Buddhism, Shāntideva's Way of the Bodhisattva. Edgar appears in the heroic light of a bodhisattva, an enlightened being who seeks to alleviate the suffering of others. His journey exemplifies the human potential for moral transformation, selflessness and universal love in his responsiveness to the suffering of others who wander in a saṃsāric world of ignorance, attachment and aversion.

Shakespeare's King Lear offers later writers a scaffolding on which to construct do-it-yourself religions that emerge when intentional and unintentional pilgrims venture, abdicate, or are expelled from existing institutional orders and discover the covenantal core of religion when they encounter Other dispossessed people. Shakespeare's play, in dialogue with the Book of Job, develops the idea of a suffering God that is latent in the Hebrew Bible. When students at the University of Michigan-Flint adapted the play to their contemporary environment, they began their own pilgrimages into a wounded city and family traumas. Without biblical literacy, they instinctively reached for John Keats’ Lear-inspired ‘Vale of Suffering’ letter and the Bible-belt inflected stories of Flannery O'Connor to reassemble Lear as a religious play for today.

SETTING: We are in a classroom at UM-Flint. The teacher is lecturing about Shakespeare and the discussion turns to the current economic situation and living conditions in Flint, MI.