"Thy Speech Serves for Authority": From Personal Fantasy to Personal Encounter in Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night"
In this essay, I argue that Twelfth Night addresses Reformation controversy by dramatizing the struggle between internal and external modes of interpretive authority as that conflict was represented in the anti-Puritan discourse of English conformist writers. Whereas influential defenders of the Est...
| Published in: | Religion & literature |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Dep.
2018
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| In: |
Religion & literature
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| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Shakespeare, William 1564-1616, Twelfth night
/ Puritanism
/ Controversy
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| RelBib Classification: | CD Christianity and Culture KBF British Isles |
| Further subjects: | B
Epiphany
B Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | In this essay, I argue that Twelfth Night addresses Reformation controversy by dramatizing the struggle between internal and external modes of interpretive authority as that conflict was represented in the anti-Puritan discourse of English conformist writers. Whereas influential defenders of the Established Church such as Richard Bancroft and Richard Hooker characterized their own authority for biblical interpretation as founded in a shared history of oral understanding and a belief in the spirit's abiding presence in the episcopacy's communal decisions, they cast "Puritan" exegetical authority as grounded in individualist claims of exegetical expertise and personal experience of the spirit. Reading Twelfth Night against this religious backdrop, I argue that in contrast to Malvolio, who prefers a private paradigm of interpretation that ultimately leads him into error, Viola proves to be the play's more perceptive reader by looking to the oral testimony of others for verification of her own hopes. Shakespeare, I claim, shapes Twelfth Night's comic resolution by means of a communal hermeneutic espousing attributes of humility, shared memory, and self-sacrifice that conformist writers were calling their opponents to embrace if they are to read the Scriptures rightly. |
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| ISSN: | 2328-6911 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Religion & literature
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1353/rel.2018.0022 |