ABSTRACT
This chapter engages in a creative dialogue with literary scholarship on Shakespeare and religion; with philosophy, metaphysics and the academic area termed ‘theology and literature’. I suggest a move beyond literary criticism that looks on religion and language as entangled in an ontology of power and towards a metaphysical approach, which reads human access to the divine as always already mediated by the human, thus inevitably involving language, imagination and poesis. I suggest that a theological reading of Shakespeare entails a foregrounding of the interplay between word and gift, thus approaching language as praise, or ‘doxologically’.
