Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book treats Shakespeare as a ‘living thinker’, one whose dramatic explorations of spirituality can make a real contribution to contemporary debates and life. Distinctions between Catholicism and Protestantism, Christianity and Islam, and so on, will play their part in what follows, but the collection also has critical and theoretical claims to make about spirituality as such. Perhaps most controversially, Spiritual Shakespeares argues that a fresh consideration of spirituality might reinvigorate and strengthen politically progressive materialist criticism. The book focuses on the incarnational, paradoxically materialist temper of Spiritual Shakespeares. It establishes the interplay between the material and spiritual as the inherent dialectic of dramatic form. The book focuses on Hamlet, which takes a different line, arguing that any overriding preoccupation with mourning and the ghost fails to see that the play transcends them in favour of an ambiguous metaphysics of ‘rashness’.