Graceful Symmetry: The Politics of Grace in Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton

Graceful Symmetry explores the relationship between grace and political agency in the work of William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton. These writers were part of a Protestant culture that understood grace through the slogan sola gratia, or “grace alone,” which means that God has the prerogative to save or condemn human beings freely. Protestants inherited this vision of salvation from St. Paul, who imagines grace as a form of liberation within submission to God—so that liberty is, paradoxically, the experience of being bound. Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton explore the political ramifications of these scriptural paradoxes. They suggest that, by magnifying the freedom of God, and by redefining the believer’s agency as a form of submission to the divine, grace challenges existing political obligations between subjects and their human sovereign. Shakespeare and Spenser deploy the rhetoric of religious grace to explore the degree to which monarchical power is compatible with active political participation from Protestant citizens. Taking this approach to a radical extreme, Milton argues that grace regenerates ordinary Christians to the extent that that they become capable of wielding sovereignty as citizens of a free republic, thus making monarchy unnecessary. Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton ultimately coopt the religious language of grace to reimagine a wide range of political concepts—such as imperialism, absolutism, nationalism, and republicanism—during political crises such as Tyrone’s rebellion in Ireland and the English Civil Wars. I argue that grace is central not only for Protestant theology but also for the political ideals of Renaissance humanism, such as republicanism. The interdisciplinary resonance of grace was ultimately due to the tendency among a wide variety of early modern writers—including the literary writers I explore—to use Paul as an authority on legal and political questions as well as religious ones. By demonstrating how Paul’s writing on grace influenced early modern culture and religion, I argue that politics is inseparable from theology in post-Reformation English literature.Ph.D.2020-01-09 00:00:0