UC Irvine

Much recent Shakespeare scholarship has maintained the assumptions of New Historicism when considering questions of religion, with the result that religion continues to be treated as politics in disguise, and very little attention is given to the dimension of personal experience. This dissertation argues that though politics and religion often intertwine in early modernism, Shakespeare and his contemporaries regarded the possibility of authentic religious experience with credulous sobriety. Drawing upon the Protestant Reformed theology of figures like Martin Luther and John Calvin, and Elizabethan devotional texts like the Book of Common Prayer, Shakespeare's drama stages individual experiences of sin as authenticating marker for religious experience. Viewed through these sources, sin emerges as a phenomenon of despair, terror, and horror that can overwhelm individuals often characterized by self-deception. Sin exists and occurs not merely as a spiritual or moral event, but as a force capable of afflicting an individual, their community, and even their environment. Further, my investigation of sin in Shakespeare's plays to posit the idea of a moral ecology in order to account for the complicated interpolations of personal and communal guilt where sin results both from commission of wickedness and the neglect of moral responsibility. Shakespeare stages sin and its attending consequences as impediments human flourishing. With a view to his history plays in particular, the figure of King Henry V emerges as a portrait of human flourishing. Where villains like Richard III and Macbeth encounter the horror of their sin and experience despair or self-justification, Henry's acknowledgement of his troubled legacy instead leads to grace, victory, and peace.